“What did everyone find in the town?” Jim said as Louisa took Yun off the table and wrapped him up in the blankets that she had stored in her ring. Cleo went over to check on Law, but he waved her away pathetically before she dragged him over to the salamandrite in the middle of the room and propped him up on her bedding.
Huddling round the salamandrite for warmth, the group regaled each other with what they found. Jim told the group of the crucifixion that they found within the library, while Winoa regaled them with the discovery of the military documents and the story of the likely fall of the empire. Neither tales said by the two of them were happy ones, but they were the truth as they saw them.
“So in summary,” Cleo said, “the town we were in was the testing site for a crazy experiment to make array soldiers so that people wouldn't have to die in war anymore, and some arrayist got his flawed design stolen before he could fix it and it was marketed off as a complete work. Did I get that right?”
“Pretty much,” Jim said. “If that got spread around, and they made more than the ten or so soldiers that Yun and Louisa say they found, then no wonder the society collapsed. We had difficulty fighting just one. If there was an army of them, I don't know what I will do”.
“It's sad really,” said Law, looking up from his bedding pillow. “They are a new race of creatures that are doomed to die out. It will take a few centuries probably, but those golems were untenable, their flaw was a real oversight”.
Cleo frowned, “Okay, this has been bothering me for a while. Why do you keep calling them golems? Everywhere I have seen them described they were called stone soldiers. In the missive from the general even the primers were calling them that, so why not you?”
“Simple. They are a very basic version of one of the ninety-nine Myriad Manifestations, the golem. It's a pretty interesting item really, designed to give the owner a second, indestructible body. Or a third if you wanted. The original creator was supposed to have had a hundred golem bodies, but I assume that he was wiped out with the rest of the Hephaistia clan. Anyway, they are soldiers made of stone, mud or gems that one must inject a sliver of their soul and a chunk of their flesh to create and control. At which point the soldier morphs in shape to look exactly like their owner, with all of their owner's memories up to the point of their creation. The owner experiences everything that the golem experiences, but can let the golem live its own life with minimal interference”.
“Doesn't that meant that the golem is an easy way to make a person an immortal? If the body is indestructible then they won't die ever,” said Louisa.
“Sadly not. There are three things you have to remember with a normal golem. First, your golem is only alive for as long as your soul is intact. If you die, then your golems cease to be. Once you make a golem, it is so inexorably linked to you that the clone simply becomes dust when you die. The reverse isn’t true though, which is what makes the golem so powerful. It’s got an unkillable body, and only attacks that strike the spirit can harm it. The second point that you have to remember is that they are autonomous unless the master specifically takes control, which is the major point of whether anything is a golem or like a golem. If you have a creation that is humanoid and autonomous, but you can take it over if necessary, then it is a golem. The third thing you should know is that there is an upper limit of how many golems a person could have. The hundred golems seems to be an absolute hard limit. I don’t know why, but according to the Book it was simply impossible for the creator to split his soul and place them into more than a hundred golem, and in fact at the point that the hundredth golem was created, the original creator of the golem effectively became nothing more than a nexus for the hivemind that formed from the joining of all his memories. He became a legion rather than a singular man”.
“Okay, so what does this have to do with the stone soldiers?” Said Cleo, propping Law up slightly better so he could see them properly. It was not the first question that she wanted to ask, but it was certainly the most relevant for the time.
“The golems of this land, Biqiril’s stone soldiers, they are not complete in any sense. They were a flawed creation of an incredibly gifted arrayist, who knew that they were incomplete but were a good basis for his eventual aim, that of a true golem. These stone soldiers, they... In some ways they are much more than a golem, but in others they are so much less. They are not indestructible by any sense of the term. Hard to kill, yes, but if you destroy the array nexus, and ruin the array as a whole, the soldiers will collapse into mud, or whatever else they were made of. The second issue about them, the more pressing issue, is that they absorb mana. They feed on it. That means in your skills and attacks won’t actually do anything other than make it more powerful and more sturdy, however if you destroy its heart you will still kill it”. Laurence pulled a flask out of his bag and took a swig of the fluid held within. He sat up properly and smiled. “The biggest problem that I found while reading the diary of the creator of these golems was that they seem to be a hivemind. They all know what one knows, which means that they know we went this way. They will hunt for us, and they will find us eventually. It was why I took so long shoring up this place and making it safe. None of us are prepared to fight them, not yet”.
There was a heavy silence that permeated the group as they thought about the golems that were hunting them, the stone soldiers that had laid waste to the mana and the world around them. Finally, Cleo remembered something. “Why are they sad though?” She said.
“Oh, that’s simply because after a while their arrays will be unable to power themselves anymore. They will by necessity kill themselves because the mana of this floor cannot compete with their consumption. They will starve out eventually, but that’ does not really help us out now”.
“No... It doesn’t,” said Jim. “So what do we do now?”
“The only thing we can do really,” Winoa said. “We go on, we get to the door, and we move on to the next floor. This world, this floor, it’s not our place to fix. We just need to survive it and become more powerful”.
“Hear hear,” said Laurence, raising his flask and swigging from it before handing it to Cleo. “It’s reddin barley whiskey, for a special occasion. I think everyone should have a swig of it, to celebrate Yun surviving and us getting through the first challenge of the floor.”
Cleo took the flask and swallowed a mouthful, before grimacing and crying out. “Why does it burn so much? Oww!” Her eyes watered as she spoke, desperately wiping off the fluid from her lips that were visibly becoming more rosy. She thrust the glass blindly to her left, where it was grabbed by Jim. “How were you drinking that like it was water?” She cried, looking at Law with wide, watery eyes. Her chest was on fire as she spoke, as was her throat and face. She was beginning to enjoy the sensation, but it was so surprising that she could not help but cry out.
In comparison to her, Jim simply smacked his lips together after taking a swing and passing the flask on to Winoa.
“I just like the taste,” he replied as the flask continued to work its way round the circle, back to Law.
Cleo looked at Law oddly, before finally asking the question that had been plaguing her for almost as long as she had known the young man that lay less than a metre away from her. “Law, I have to ask. Are you really a member of the Absolution clan? I mean... I know you just did a massive amount of surgery on Yun, but you’re able to trueform and make this place to hide in? I don’t understand”.
“I don’t really know either. I’ve never got a proper explanation from my father, but I do know that I am a member of the Absolution clan, and would have probably become a practitioner of Life it had not been for mastering the Book of Creation first. Other than that... I have no real idea. I can tell you without a doubt though that I am of Absolution, but practice Creation”. He took another swig from the flask. “Now we should all get some sleep before we travel tomorrow. We’ll have a long journey ahead, and we may be chased the entire way”.
No comments:
Post a Comment