The fourth-order golem’s arms howled through the air scant inches above my head as I frantically dove out of the way. The purple-tinted metal of its arms slammed into the mountainside with a thundering boom, shaking the ground beneath my feet and sending loose pebbles clattering down towards the valley far below.
The impact would have turned my head, and probably the rest of me, into a messy red smear. The golem looked completely unscathed, the mundane rock unable to so much as scuff its shining armor.
I wanted to scream in frustration, but that would only serve to attract more monsters. Wonderful. Just wonderful. Not only did it apparently have some sort of Skill that let it scramble up and down the sheer cliff face like a mountain goat, but it also had a defensive Skill. This was just getting better and better.
I rolled across the narrow pathway, mindful of the horrible plunge just inches from my shoulder, then sprang to my feet. My heart was racing a mile a minute and blood roared in my ears. I could feel my own Skills thrumming inside my spirit, flooding my body with unnatural strength as I ran for my life.
The golem rushed at me, each lumbering footstep coming deceptively fast as the eleven-foot-tall metal behemoth nimbly ran along a ledge that should not have been wide enough for it to move across at all. There was no way that I could outrun it. Even discounting its movement Skill, its longer legs and higher order gave it a nearly insurmountable advantage.
I took two long, leaping strides down the path, then spun around to face the approaching golem. The two long chains dangling from the manacles around my wrists whistled through the air as I moved, nearly four years of experience with the unusual weapons ensuring they didn’t tangle together or slam into anything despite my acrobatics.
Bellow me, embedded roughly six inches into the stone wall, I could feel my prize. I wasn’t quite sure what it was yet, but in all the years I’d worn them I’d never felt the [Sense Riches] skill my manacles granted me react to something so strongly.
Typically, the skill simply gave me a sense of direction and a dull warmth to represent value. Now however, ever since it had entered my range I’d felt like there was a tiny sun burning just out of sight, waves of scorching heat rolling off it like a bonfire.
The golem was almost on top of me now. It had its arms raised together in front of its chest as though for another powerful hammer blow, but faint lines of deception warned me that this was nothing but a feint. Not for the first time I was thankful for my third Skill, [Don’t Trust, Verify]. I had been disappointed at first when I unlocked it. It had taken three years of saving up to afford the Blue Orb of Enlightenment I’d used and the Skill I’d gained hadn’t immediately jumped out to me as being particularly powerful, but it had more than proven itself worth the investment in the years since.
The fact that a golem––typically one of the most straight forward and easily avoided monsters in these mountains––was smart enough to even think of trying to trick me was honestly terrifying. When I made it back to civilization I would need to report this golem’s existence to some of the older, higher-order adventurers.
It was rare for a monster to have one skill beyond its basic, racial abilities, much less two or more like this golem clearly did. Combined with its unusual intelligence and this creature had the potential to become a real terror in the coming years if it wasn’t hunted down soon.
Well, that wasn’t something I really needed to worry about right now. Escape first, treasure second, everything else way later. I certainly wasn’t going to be joining a hunter squad. Not now, not ever.
For one, I wasn’t nearly strong enough. I wasn’t even two-thirds of the way through Blue yet, and no hunter squad was going to accept anyone short of mid-Purple. More importantly, I refused to be tied down like that. Obligation could bind a woman just as tightly as chains and I would rather die than ever by bound again.
The golem’s arms came down and I dashed forward, slipping between its grasping arms as the blow turned into a grapple. A whip-like flick of my wrist sent one chain up into the air where it wrapped several times around the golem’s tree-trunk like arms.
I leapt into the air just in time to avoid an unreasonably fast kick. Space warped slightly as my second Skill triggered, giving me just a little bit more wiggle room as I shifted my body in mid air to avoid a follow up strike and just barely slipped through the gap between the rock wall and the golem’s arm to land on the monster’s wide shoulder.
A smooth flick and a gentle tug freed my chain. I had to time this just right or it wasn’t going to work. A second too early and nothing would happen. A second too late and I was dead. There was a broad smile on my face and I felt as light as a feather. There was nothing quite as exhilarating as facing down a superior foe, knowing that one slip up could mean the end. The fact that there was a priceless payoff at the end just made it that much better.
The golem shifted beneath me. Its blocky head turned slowly, its coal-like eyes gleaming like fiery gemstones. I could feel it judging me, calculating the perfect angle to block off my every route of escape.
I could see it immediately when it came to a decision. It may be an unusually smart golem, an unusually strong golem, and an entire order above the typical golems I fought, but at the end of the day a golem was still a golem. Its arms came up in a mathematically perfect yet utterly telegraphed blow and I moved.
I took a single quick step to the side, leaving one foot hanging in mid air and the other positioned precariously on the joint where its arm met its shoulder. A sharp kick gouged a small divot in the wall beside me and I braced my hand against the cold stone.
Moments before the golem’s blow connected, I slammed a powerful kick into the ascending arm and then pushed off downward. My foot throbbed painfully from the impact––my Skills and equipment enhanced my strength a lot more than it did my durability and that really showed when I decided to full-force kick a functionally indestructible metal pole––and I hadn’t so much as left a dent.
What I had done however was add just a tiny bit of extra force to its arms while they were extended up above its head. The metal golems that typically spawned in the Hiddleback Mountains tended to be horribly top heavy, with relatively thin, close-together legs, massive chests, and very wide shoulders. This was usually balanced out by their very long arms and wrecking ball sized hands, but here it had lifted them up above its shoulders in order to strike at me.
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That would prove to be its own undoing. Movement skill or no, there was only so much the golem could do about gravity.
The golem’s arm howled through the spot I’d just occupied and continued up and away from the mountainside. Still falling, I activated the other skill the shackles around my wrists gave me access to. [Summon Miner’s Tools] was another skill that had proven its worth countless times over the past few years. A heavy hammer made for smashing rock appeared in my hands and I spun around in mid air to deliver a powerful blow to the comparably delicate joint at the back of the golem’s leg.
Once more, my hit didn’t leave a visible mark on the golem, but the effect was no less obvious. The leg buckled slightly from the sudden impact and the already overbalanced golem’s fate was sealed.
I landed softly on the ledge, my hammer disappearing in a sparkling cloud of ona crystals that dispersed rapidly back into the air, and the golem let out a mechanic groan of anger as it tumbled over the edge. I hadn’t really beaten it––as a third-order adventurer I could probably survive the tumble without too much trouble and the golem was both stronger than me and made out of metal––but it was a long way down and I would be long gone before it could make it back up. That was more than enough for me.
I watched the monster bounce down the mountainside for several seconds, then hurriedly got to work. There was no time to waste. I may have driven off one monster, but there were thousands more in these mountains, some of the potentially even stronger than the golem had been.
I didn’t fancy my chances if I attracted the attention of a fourth- or fifth-order slaughterwolf. Normally I wouldn’t dare venture this deeply into a fourth-order territory, preferring to stick to the far less lucrative but much safer first- through third-order zones, but I simply couldn’t resist the promise of such a valuable prize.
Using [Summon Miner’s Tools] again I made a long length of rope with a metal fastener at the end. It only took a moment to find an appropriate crack where I could wedge it into place and soon I was shimmying down the rope along the sheer cliff face beneath the ledge I’d been following.
Even with my Skill’s help, it took an embarrassingly long time to find what I was looking for. There was a narrow crack in the wall, barely more than a hand-width across but deceptively deep and curving back and to the right towards where my prize lay waiting.
There was no way I could get my hand in that deep. I concluded that almost immediately. Particularly since if this was what I thought it might be, my prize wouldn’t even fit through the opening in the first place. In all honesty that was probably why it was still here––monsters and adventurers alike scoured this land for loot and riches rarely lay unclaimed for long.
If this had been a decade earlier, I may have balked at what I had to do next. Three years of slavery in the spirit-mines had given me a nearly debilitating aversion to certain things, to the point that I had spent years squandering most of my abilities. Today, nearing my fifteenth anniversary since I’d been reborn, I merely grit my teeth and got to work.
A few precise strikes cut several secure footholds into the cliff face and I carefully wedged my hand into the base of the crack to give me a third point of contact. Once I was ready, I let the rope dissipate and replaced it with a small pickaxe. I typically used the Skill to create makeshift weapons and adventuring tools, but sometimes I really did need mining equipment instead.
Calling on intentionally repressed memories, I carefully began to widen the crack. For obvious reasons it was much easier than I remembered. Not only was I exponentially stronger than the waif of a normal girl I had once been, but this was mundane stone in the face of a tool made from third-order materials. Compared to extracting spirit-diamonds from ghost infested caverns with nothing but a torch and an iron chisel this was practically a walk in the park.
I worked quickly but carefully, mindful of both my time and where I was. I needed to be fast, but quite. The skin beneath the metal collar locked tightly around my neck itched incessantly, but I did my best to ignore it. It was fine. Everything was fine. I just needed to––
A gentle rap cracked a fist-sized shard of stone loose and a moment later I nearly lost my balance as a tiny wave of hyper-concentrated ona slammed into me like a battering ram. My breath caught in my throat and my heart skipped a beat as I suddenly realized I’d been completely wrong about what exactly the treasure I’d been hunting was.
“Era and Verayn,” I swore softly, unable to quite believe what my eyes and ona-sense were telling me.
A faint golden glow shone from deep within the crack. Not red like I’d hoped, certainly not purple like I’d half expected. Gold. Sixth-order.
My mouth was suddenly very, very dry and I fearfully looked around, praying that I was still alone. A gold orb was… huge. Titanic. Words for extraordinarily big that I didn’t even know. Fifth- and sixth-order adventurers spent decades fruitlessly scouring the most remote, inhospitable places in the world for just a dream of finding one. It didn’t matter if it was an Orb of Artifice, Enlightenment, or Enhancement, sixth-order orbs were found so rarely that each was a literally incalculably valuable treasure.
What. The. Fuck.
My heart was racing faster than it had been while I was fighting the golem. If anyone or anything found me here, I was dead meat. Adventurers tended to have a tacit agreement not to actively murder each other––there were plenty of monsters out there that would happily do so and every adventurer dead was one less standing on the front lines of the next hoard––but that would be cheerfully thrown out the window for a prize like this.
I redoubled my efforts. Each strike carefully excavated more and more room around the opening. I didn’t need much space, just enough to reach in and grab it. Then I could get the hell out of here. I didn’t really know what I was going to do with the Orb yet. The options were honestly dizzying.
If I could reach a sufficiently large settlement with enough high-order adventurers that one of them couldn’t just murder me and take it without consequence, I could sell it for a literal queen’s ransom. Enough purple and red orbs to upgrade and unlocked most of my remaining Skills, equipment made by highly skilled craftsmen instead of randomly generated from pure ona, and so much more.
That of course came with its own risks. I could run into a powerful monster. Abyss, I could run into a powerful adventurer. It would be utterly heartbreaking (and probably very, very lethal) if I ran into a fifth-order adventurer with sufficiently well-honed senses to feel what I was carrying.
Fighting up one Order was doable––I’d only been an adventurer for about fifteen years but I was strong for a mid-Blue––but anything past that was practically impossible. Most fifth-order adventurers were well into their second century after all, with six or seven Skills unlocked and far further upgraded compared to my measly four.
A sliver of stone fell away and I finally laid eyes on the single most valuable thing I had ever heard of. It looked far too ordinary, far too mundane for what it was, a simple fist-sized sphere of solid, gently-glowing energy. Only the color and the denser aura it radiated separated it from a nearly-worthless Brown Orb.
My heart skipped another beat. A sphere. A perfect sphere. Not a dodecahedron or an icosahedron. A sphere. An Orb of Enlightenment. The rarest of the rare. Here. On a random fourth-order mountain barely two days travel from the regional capital. Not in the frozen wastes filled with sixth-order frost dragons and elementals. Not in the ruins of the former duchy of Blackrock. Not even in the blazing desert that dominated the south of the continent. Here.
And then something roared. Something very big and very close. I looked up, already dreading what I was about to see. My eyes met two very large, very purple eyes. Each one was bigger than my head, bigger than my entire torso. And that sure was a lot of teeth, huh? Fuuuuuuuuuuck.