Harlan and Brig were overlooking the newly established Engineering Corp of the Ragne military as they constructed and tested the long cannons.

“I ain’t never thought I’d be here again.”

Brig took a swig from his flask.

“Guess you got me to care ‘bout these fuckin’ pricks.”

“I’m glad you came with me.”

“You’ll make an old man blush.”

“Lir doesn’t have an issue with you doing this?”

“Fuck her.”

They went down the stairs from the walkway they had been leaning over the railing on and down to the floor.

Brig would pick up parts with no clear defects, turn them over a few times, and put them in his pocket, leaving a note that the part must be remade, and it would take just a few minutes for the new parts to arrive.

These were not mass produced weapons, each needed to be absolutely perfect in form and function

Lily came into the room alongside Dagda and spoke with Brig about each of the pieces he had taken, her noticing the flaws just as he had impressed him.

Harlan meanwhile slipped away, not exactly being a fan of the girl.

He walked the halls for a time, wearing his armor openly with his badge on his chest.

He slipped into one of the rooms once he was sure nobody was around.

“Hey Relly, you called?”

She ran over and hugged him.

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“I should’ve seen you after your uncle died.”

“Hey, why don’t we talk about something else.”

“Like what?”

“Do you plan to go to the academy?”

“I don’t know anymore. I’m fine with what I’ve been taught, but I don’t know if I want to be some master of anything.”

“Anyone bothering you? Anything I can do?”

“No, everyone has been fine to me.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“You don’t need to do anything. But I can read your mind, you are… you're better than I thought you would be.”

She twiddled her thumbs.

“Why are we friends?”

“Why wouldn’t we be?”

“We don’t really have much in common.”

“You can read my mind, and I can read your emotions, so why don’t we just be open?”

“I can see… more than your mind. I saw the future.”

“You saw a future, not even The Darkness can say for sure what exactly will happen. But what has you so worried?”

“Just… make sure that your friends are your friends, figure out who will really stay by your side.”

“That’s so ominous that I’d almost think I said it. Did you see anything specific?”

“Stop brushing this aside, I’m really worried.”

“What did you see?”

“You were laughing and talking with some people, but I couldn’t make out their faces, and then you looked away for a moment and they started stabbing you and you were crying and confused about why.”

Harlan’s face turned dour.

“I still want to be friends, I just wanted you to think about things. Since I became a Princess, I have heard a lot of things I don’t like, and I haven’t got many friends, because I can see what they really think.”

“You sure you don’t have anything you want me to deal with?”

She giggled wryly.

“Yeah, but thank you. I think we should find time to do something. Oh, how about horse riding?

I took classes for it.”

“I dislike riding anything that has its own mind. It isn’t like I could get hurt by a mundane horse, but I’d rather ride a golem of my own creation anyway.”

“Archery?”

“I’ve rarely ever used a bow, maybe never actually. That could be fun.”

“Great. I’ll find time for it.”

Almost as que, Harlan’s amulet went off.

“Hello?”

“The hell you run off ta? Get back here.”

“I had to use the bathroom.”

“Likely.”

Brig hung up.

“Well, I guess that is it then. And if you ever need anything, really, just call.”

“Have you ever thought that you offer help to people too readily? What if I asked you to do something and I tricked you?”

“Then we’d have a problem, but we don’t, so I’ll burn that bridge if we ever get there.”

“You mean cross that bridge?”

He just shrugged as he walked out.

Harlan returned to the workshop to find out what he needed to do.

“Look inside the barrel, make sure the rifling is right.”

“Alright.”

He became something akin to a ferret with many eyes and slipped inside of the barrel, finding everything was up to standard.

“We’re good.”

“Godsdamned right we’re good. Now get out of there so we can put everything together. Today’s the day.”

Once the 20 long cannons were ready Brig cracked open a barrel of water.

Mist filled the room and then Harlan felt a sudden pull.

When it cleared, they were near one of the fortresses and a light snowfall was just starting.

“What was that?”

“Mist gate, so far’s I know, ya can’t use it, and I can’t use that void gate.”

“I wonder if Sepul has some kind of radiant gate and if the other champions have their own as well.”

“Probably, but I ain’t met the current fire and earth ones.”

Safira stepped forward.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“Enough talk, we have five minutes before they notice we are here, get these things loaded and fired and then get us in there.”

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

Brig muttered under his breath things that Harlan hoped Safira hadn’t heard.

Each cannon was a golem, and had no operators.

Once the shell was in range, they could lift it themselves with an arm attached to it and finish the rest of the process by themselves.

“COVER YOUR EARS.”

Harlan yelled out once he saw the cannons stop adjusting themselves for wind and distance.

All 20 fired perfectly one after the other, and then they loaded another round before the first had hit.

Unseen had managed to slip past the spells that hung in the air and gave a basic layout of the base’s likely weak points, which was then programmed into these long cannon golems.

If all went as planned, and there wasn’t extra plating added since the report came in, then the facade should crumble and a significant amount of damage will be done to the base.

Harlan silently raised his hand and counted down from five.

The enchanted shells hit the mountain with rapturous sounds and Harlan raised his fist into the air, waiting before he counted down from five again.

The second wave hit, causing an avalanche and a rockslide from the cracked mountain.

Harlan could see, aided by one of the magical eyes he gained from looking at Adina’s boon, through the smoke and kicked up snow, that it had worked.

“ALRIGHT, LET’S GO.”

Brig used the mist gate again to move the long cannons back into the workshop, this wasn’t his war to fight, but designing things was fine by him.

The fortress should’ve had at least 8,000, and the kingdom would retaliate with 2,000 human soldiers, 4,000 military golems, 2,000 special golems Harlan made that would be better suited for close quarters combat in the right halls of the base, and then 1 Harlan.

Roughly 1,300 units would go into each of the 6 points which had been blown open, Harlan was to lead one team, while Joan and four other royal guards led the others.

Calling it leading was a little presumptuous however, it was more that they were to act as pointmen, taking the brunt of the interior defenses so the weaker units could move forward without being cubed or turned to stone or whatever other nasty tricks would be inside.

Even as they waited for their gate to open, each of the royal guards couldn’t help but marvel at their new bodies and their golem armors which could give them up to date information on each golem unit under their command. It took them only a few days to get used to the new bodies, but the flood of information and learning when to ignore it was harder for them.

With the last gate Harlan jumped through, getting a blast launched at him.

Yet he had been expecting it, the other five had also been hit with similar attacks when they entered.

It was more intended to collapse the tunnel than to kill them, but one of the royal guards had to be subbed out due to the damage caused by it.

Harlan had a stillness spell ready, which slowed the local time and gave him enough to send some pillars to hold up the tunnel.

His eardrums burst and his vision blurred when the wave of force hit him, but no organs suffered serious damage, so he kept on going.

Harlan took a form like that of a scaled gorilla with tusks designed to fill the hall and simply plow through human targets without stopping.

He ran down the halls, setting off tripwires and other traps that had been set up in the time it took for Harlan to get the rest of the army there.

His men weren't supposed to cross the threshold into a hallway until he gave a signal to the golem in the front, but they mostly knew it was safe once the blood flowed back to them.

These were all hardened men, but it never got easy to see people torn in half, their guts spread across 15 feet of a hallway and them still gurgling on their own blood.

The soldiers didn’t slow down, they just moved forward, putting down men who survived Harlan’s initial onslaught before they opened the doors in the hall and cleared the rooms, arresting those that could still surrender.

A small golem, barely bigger than a house cat crawled along the ceiling and had the job of relaying the information on cleared sections so each team didn’t end up wasting their time.

In one hall, they didn’t receive the all clear, and instead received a retreat order, just before Harlan tumbled back towards them and into the wall.

It took them a moment to realize which one of the monsters was Harlan, but it was generally whichever one was more monstrous, with extra limbs and soaked in blood.

Here the men had no idea, and Harlan figured that they wouldn’t.

How they had managed to hire a Fenrir to guard the base Harlan didn’t know, but perhaps the beast just wanted somewhere to live in the winter.

The wolf gripped Harlan between its oversized jaws and he bellowed as they crushed his armor inward and began to pierce.

He slashed his claws at its eyes but it was something that had experience fighting shapeshifting creatures, other Fenrir.

It simply shifted its entire head around to dodge the swipe and then returned the favor, but Harlan’s armor was enough to deflect the hastily made stingers of the beast.

Harlan called in back up, a Black Sentinel, of which all teams were given two, fired its arm cannon.

The shell blew a sizable hole in the side of the Fenrir and made it drop Harlan.

He was not going to allow this chance to be wasted, and he used his large fists to pound the beast.

The sounds of crunching and dogish yelping filled the halls until it was reduced to a pile of bones and meat.

Harlan couldn’t help but fall to a baser instinct, pounding his chest and letting out a roar that carried through the base.

Then the men returned to their original position and saw Harlan shoveling fistfuls of meat into his mouth.

He didn’t say a word, just turning back down the path and continuing to run on his knuckles.

Those who dropped their weapons and fled back into the rooms were not pursued by Harlan, and they would sometimes be arrested, sometimes not, it wasn’t his problem.

With the roar that they weren't entirely sure of the source of, morale on the enemy side was low, and the fact that their noble masters seemed to have fled into a safe room instead of fighting by their side only made it worse.

When Harlan turned the corner leading to the room the nobles had fled to, the men who should’ve stood guard instead dropped their weapons.

He slowly stepped forward, his four eyes moving independently from each other and watching for signs of any impending attack.

Yet very few men would go against the eight foot tall monster that dripped crimson from his onyx scales that let off steam due to his use of fire and earth imbibing.

When he reached the man nearest the door, he snorted and the man fell back.

“Open the door.”

He had been reduced to a gibbering mess.

Harlan slammed his fist down, cracking the stone and causing the man to be shocked back to at least a functional state.

“I can’t. Th-they have the keys, the nobles have it.”

Harlan walked past the man and knocked on the door to test its strength.

He was not a master of enchantments or anything of the like, but he had the gut feeling that it would be easier to break the entire mountain than this door.

He paced back and forth, waiting for the royal guards to finish clearing their sections and group up didn’t take more than another 15 minutes, but it felt like hours.

“You are sure they are in here?”

“20 minds, a lot of magic. It’s making my hair stand on end. Could dragonfire break through?”

One of the other guards however was a master of enchantments and just about any other ‘permanent’ magic.

“I’ll have an answer in just a few minutes.”

Harlan could barely keep himself calm, staring at the door like it had wronged him.

“What if I brought a long cannon in? I could dig out the-”

“Sir Fomoria, wait for Sir Baldwin to finish his work.”

He kept at his pacing until the man was done.

“Dragonfire wouldn’t do it, this thing resists fire, shock, acids, anything else you could think of. And since the enchantments were carved on the other side of the door we can’t break them. We’ll post golems outside and starve them out.”

“Not a chance, nobles wouldn’t put themselves in a safe room without a way out. This place has spells set up to interfere with seismographic magic. Could you bring in the Unseen who managed to get partial mappings before? See if they can find an escape route?”

“General Safira, I agree with Sir Fomoria’s assessment. Though we have little reason to believe there is another way out, he is right that there are spells inside of the walls, and we are mostly going in blind here.

We got through the outside like we wanted, but the damage was far less than expected, and we shouldn’t trust what information we currently have.”

“I will call over those Unseen, but they have been on reserve taking a break as a reward for being the first to get us real information of the inside of this place and they will be delayed somewhat as a result.

Sir Baldwin, Sir Fomoria, continue to analyze the doorway for any other ways inside so long as it takes for you to be satisfied that there are none.”

Harlan returned to his human form and stood in front of the door.

“Are you using some spell I don’t recognize to check for a way in?”

“Telekinesis, and I am trying to feel out any flaws in the design, a place to inject alchemical acids on a potentially weaker inner component.”

“I see, but I highly doubt it.”

“Do you know anything about a door like this?”

“It is a rather standard design, 10 pins are locking it in place, and when made properly there wouldn’t be any air gaps by which you would damage it. It isn’t complex, once the wheel on the inside is turned the pins retract and it swings inward on a set of hinges.”

“So simple that it has no oddities to exploit.”

“Exactly. You should just go home, it wouldn’t take more than a minute for you to come back through a gate anyway.”

Harlan got an idea, but reality smacked it down in an instant.

Baldwin had seen the air shimmer for a moment.

“What was that?”

“I was hoping I could open a gate right inside. This is the first time I’ve seen any defenses that can keep me out.”

“They’ve had months if not years to get this all set up. Chances are they layered dozens of anti-gate wards on top of one another instead of trying to make any individual one able to stop someone from doing what you just tried.”

“What if I set up siphons around the area?”

“If they are smart they are going to have used mana gems, if they have a big one and they precharged all of their wards it could last for months or even years. Soulsmithing has done wonders for setting up nearly permanent arrays.”

“If they are smart.”

“Don’t look down on them just because they are traitors. I’ve seen smart men make the wrong choice many times in the past.”

“If this turns into a speech, I’m leaving.”

“Go home, you’re young enough that you haven’t wasted that chance just yet.“

He took off his full face helm and brushed his white hair with his hand.

Harlan left through a gate, but he was not going home.