With great fanfare, Lord Mick led the Scouts across the bridge, and they got to pit themselves against the golum spawns there with great enthusiasm. The Scouts didn’t really have viable bludgeon damage, so it was mostly piercing and thrusting attacks against crystalline obsidian bodies and the force matrices animating them.
Spells went off, golums groaned and rumbled as they struck with startling speed for animated floating chunks of rock, and they crackled and decomposed loudly when they were defeated, collapsing into rapidly disintegrating mounds of dust as they came undone.
“You were at it for a few hours,” I noted to Kris as we watched them testing out their flanking tactics, hitting the respawn from all sides to maximize the Sneak Attack damage from their Cunning bonus. “Have a good time?”
“Yeah, I did, actually,” she confirmed, studying the Scouts as they worked, offering critiques between fights. We still weren’t in a hurry, and these were worthwhile enemies to face. “No particular problems. The golums couldn’t punch my Null, and the Dark Magus only had an outside chance, so I killed it first when it was time. It was basically straight combat, and while I had to do a lot of dancing and bouncing away boulder-fists on Stand here,” she patted the darkly-Slaked Buckler at her side, three Slots open and working on the fourth, “it was good practice.” She grinned slightly as she added, “I AM wondering how we’re supposed to make Baneskulls against these things if they disintegrate like that.”
“That’s a good point! Let me see if I can do something…” I trotted towards the knot of the last fight, where four Scouts were on the final obsidian golum. It had focused on one opponent as normal, and he was ducking and dodging and luring it into better positions for his fellows, who were jamming blades into the force-matrices supporting the lumps of material being moved around.
I wasn’t in any dangers as the golum adopted a Stance, and Jimwal dodged urgently, spinning to the side as the Silver Shockwave blasted past him, scarcely avoiding it.
His companions were on it instantly, and seconds later the golum crumbled, all its animating matrices hacked apart, and the obsidian lumps that had gathered to form it fell down into black sand.
They’d be recycled and re-used by the next golum to manifest.
I reached out with Shape Stone and found it was just normal sand once it broke apart, dirty glass that could be manipulated without much problem.
Like, say, into a miniature semi-conical golum head shape, which form seemed to resonate with the stuff as the much-reused grains fell into the pattern easily.
The Scouts were all watching with interest as I raised a small ‘skull’ from each mound once, and then the Mick, judging the situation, pointed them back at the beach spawn on the other side of the bridge.
The Scouts happily raced back in that direction to prove they were badasses, not even needing Heals this time with the speed of their kills.
“Baneskulls for Golums?” the Mick asked, trotting beside me as I rode the Disk Kris was towing.
“Constructs, which Golums are one of, and yes,” I nodded, correcting him gently. “Given the fixed nature of the spawns, I can probably only get one skull per Golum of the spawn points. So, do a sweep of each spawn point, I’ll get a Construct Baneskull for each of the Golums, and we can allocate one for most of your Scouts.”
“Ye’ll need metal t’ treat ‘em, remembering the other things.” He held out a hand with four bright motes of greenish metal* in them. “Will these work?”
“Aye, they’ll work fine,” I confirmed, taking the pyreal motes cheerfully. “Putting the swag to work on killing those who owned it since forever!”
“Aye, ‘tis a good tradition to get back to,” he agreed, and went to watch his people slaughter the unsuspecting guardian golums again.
------
The Dark Magus was indeed dangerous, throwing out Pyreal-class spells with ease and abandon. If they were Vulned without counter-Protections of equal power, one such spell was easily enough to instantly kill any of the Scouts, thus the reason that they killed it first.
The enclosure for the main spawn had been built larger and biased to one side, so that the Dark Magus could indeed be bombarded from a distance. Interestingly enough, just because it commanded the diamond and obsidian golums with it didn’t mean they’d react to attacks on it without those commands.
A full volley of fiery arrows lighting up in the distance was probably alarming, but he was in midcast when they all slammed into him and dropped him instantly.
None of the scouts felt secure with the Diamond there. The Pyreal spells it could get off were terrifyingly powerful, and even if I could treat any or all of them with Blunt Protection IV’s to partially offset them, two spells was death.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The Mick wasn’t so afraid, and took the lead in attacking the diamond, basically by pitching a rock at it and enticing it to charge his way. The obsidians seemed to be on a different control circuit with the Dark Magus lying dead there, and so the Scouts whooped and charged past Lord Mick while he soloed the diamond golum.
His confidence fairly oozed from him as he plied Bunita with skill and surety… and a terrible amount of killing power around her edge. He worked through its attack patterns without even having to think about it, obviously having faced similar creatures many times, and when it made to Cast, he was up in it even faster now, crushing and grinding the circuits of magical power as he smashed its crystalline lump of an arm aside. The Pyreal Shockwave smashed uselessly into the dirt and sprayed everywhere, and two stabbing thrusts to its core sent snapping disruptions all through it.
Hundreds of pounds of glittering crystal shivered and fell to the ground, breaking apart into gleaming piles of inert powder.
“Ho, Highness, ye get one o’ these last night?” the Mick asked, Bunita sweeping through the powder as he kept half an eye on his dancing students. The tip poked an object, an odd blue-white lump with crystalline sapphire tendrils extending from the corners. With an expert flip, he sent it off the ground and into Kris’ hands, while I concentrated on the glittering powdered carbon there (not true diamond, more like hardened glass than anything).
“No.” She turned it over in her fingers, tapping her black nails on the thing with interest. “It has a harder core than the outside. It… huh. Ryin, toss me one of those Crystal scarabs you have.”
I flipped one out and flicked it over to her. She nabbed it without really looking at it, catching it precisely between two of her nails. “They are made out of the same thing,” she pronounced, staring at the golum’s ‘heart’.
“Aye. All Crystal Scarabs be made from diamond golum Hearts, as far as I be knowing.”
I picked up the miniature diamond golum head I’d made and handed it over to him. He took it with a grin, rapidly morphing into a haughty artisan’s perusal of the object. “It looks like something a fool who didn’t know how to sculpt would make to inhabit the nightmares of children!” he sniffed in a bad upper-class accent, shaking the thing theatrically. “It has no artistic inspiration to it whatsoever!”
“We’ve found the weakness of the Empyreans. Lack of artistic inspiration! Must be why they leave all those damn heads over the place, and all their buildings look so damn much alike…” I concurred with a haughty sniff of disdain.
“Undead are not fans of change of any kind,” Kris noted, flicking my Scarab back to me and looking to the Mick. “How did you gain those Scarabs from these?” she asked him, shaking the heart.
His mouth opened, then closed after a moment. “Huh.” He looked away in a certain direction. “I were goin’ t’ say we carved them from them, but… I never did personally. I always gave them to a Stone Collector, an’ he gave me the Scarabs as a reward.”
I looked at Kris, she looked at me, and we both tossed up our hands. “An NPC? Someone without even a name, just took what you brought them and had unlimited amounts of compensation for you?” Kris verified in exasperation.
“Aye. Were tons of drops and quest rewards ye had to give t’ the Collectors t’ get yer due, sure enough. And no, I never knew their names. They were just... Collectors.” He looked rather uneasy as he said it.
“Sounds like there were more than one?” I asked him carefully, and if anything, his expression grew worse.
“Aye. Trophy Collectors, Wing Collectors, Ivory Collectors, Leather Collectors. All looking fer certain things, all capable of whipping yer rewards out o’ nowhere.” A look of consternation crossed his face. “Damn me. Fifteen, twenty years I delivered rocks t’ that man in Zaikhal. I can still picture his face. An’ I never once thought t’ ask his name, or introduce meself t’ him?”
I could tell he was plenty unnerved by the fact. “The same way you never questioned how those NPC’s could sit in their places, rain or shine, and give you all the rewards for your deeds, over and over again for doing the same things, and the way those same quests could be done over and over again. There was magic about the magic of it all, messing with your head, never letting you question how this was so, except ‘magic’, and you rolled on with it,” Kris shook her head.
“And when the Fall came, and that magic was disrupted, it had been with you so long that it became force of habit to think that way, and someone outside had to point out how utterly impossible and strange it was for you to realize that,” I added after Kris.
“Aye, that be all true, but…” he shook his head as he stared at his students, once again down to a last golum, “I did business with the man for years. He gave ye exactly what he said he would, every time, reliable as the sun rising. An’ I never even thought about him until this moment, an’ what happened to him? Did he die, alone, nameless, friendless, fore’er bound to the System what made him, or did he just vanish as if he never were?”
Kris and I were silent as he wrestled with the very idea of existence of the NPC’s who’d helped structure the strange magical world about him back then.
At last he raised his head and looked at me. “The magic ye have, ‘tis good for poking about an’ finding out things of the past, uncovering secrets and facts thought lost, lass?”
“Yes,” I conceded. “Divination magic Reads the Past, Sees the Now, and Prophesizes the Future.”
“I want t’ be finding out what happened t’ that man, an’ through him, the rest o’ those nameless NPC’s.” His knuckles cracked as the last obsidian golum here went down, and I started forward to make the ‘skulls’ from the remains they were sifting for pyreal. “’tis a horrifying level of slavery if he were alive. If he were just a thing that looked like a man, aye, I’d like to know that, too, for me own piece of mind.” At last, he blinked and looked to Kris with the diamond heart. “I’d be guessing ye have t’ carve the Scarabs from the Heart, Highness. But… the only thing I ever carved from one were keyrings…”
Kris and I looked at one another once again. “Keyrings?” Kris repeated slowly, and the Mick just gave another brittle smile again.
“Aye, the one thing most Golum Hearts were good fer…”
==========
*Asheron’s Call was inconsistent on the appearance of pyreal. It is described as greenish, and when Salvaged, the symbol was a green nugget. However, pyreal motes, nuggets, and bars were orange-gold. I am using light green as the basis for Air Gold/Pyreal for consistency.