After rushing back to the caravan and getting beaten up by the panicked women and children with frying pans or rolling pins when he had appeared out of nowhere, then barely convincing the bruised merchant which was leading the whole gathering that he had indeed “removed the threat” of the bandits, Yi Gore finally found himself accepted as the “saviour” of the travelers when he had dragged all of the members of the assailing gang out of the woods with gags, blindfolds, and bindings wrapped all around them via donkey-power.
Most of the bandits looked terrible, as half of them were still unconscious, and the other half looked as if something had spooked away their soul while they kept shivering and crying out from their beaten up pepper-sprayed swollen faces.
Their fate was also sealed the moment Yi Gore suddenly decided to produce out of his ring a few iron-barred cages that were usually meant for containing feral specimens in the former Lab 25, but were now just taking up his ring’s inventory space for no real purpose.
After making sure that all of the swollen-faced bandits had been placed securely into the cages he had just produced, and that the caravan had started heading back towards the “safe zone” once more, Yi Gore finally returned to our group on top of his Donkey with a prideful smile of victory smeared across his twisted little face.
Since the caravan members had been heading in the opposite direction from us even before the attack had begun, as the caravan's goal had been donkey-town in the first place, they had agreed to deliver the incapacitated bandits to the authorities when they got to the border.
Yi Gore had told the caravaners that they could even keep the bounty-rewards for the capture of the bandit group, as long as they did not mention anything about him, since he wanted to “keep a low profile” as a Mysterious Cultivator.
Of course, before delivering the bandits away, Yi Gore had performed a little bit of “righteous” torturing on the Bandit Leaders, forcing them to spill out all of the hiding places where they had stashed former stolen loot over the years, so he now had a couple of bloodied maps with the usual badly-illustrated trails and “X marks the spot” in his hands which showed certain locations in our proximity that probably contained valuables.
I wasn’t about to ruin his mood and tell him that “robbing the robbers” is already an overused trope that you can find in every story nowadays, so I let him finish performing his little midget-dance routine that he was acting out on top of his Donkey.
In truth, I had to applaud the little man for how exceptionally dangerous and sneaky he had been during the whole invisible-midget vs thieves encounter, as he had played superbly on his strengths, and had undermined the morale and cohesiveness of the bandit group until they were wetting their underwear in utter fear at the unknown assailant that kept picking them off.
"Why the hell did you have those cage-things with you to begin with? How big is that ring of yours anyway?" I asked the midget.
"Is it so surprising that a Clone Master and Minion-Handler would have cages at hand? My ring is large enough to have quite a few of those, since they stack together in the first place."
"Yi Gore, you would make a terrifying Predator. We should get you a shoulder-laser addon for that prosthetic arm of yours to go with the look."
"I do not know what that is, but it sounds nice! What’s a “Laser”?"
"A beam of highly focused light particles. Like taking all of the light from the Sun, and then focusing it on a single spot to burn a hole through any material."
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
"Like burning ants alive while using a magnifying glass? I used to love to do that back at the Sect in my downtime!"
"Well, something like that, but even more intense. A magnifying glass can only do so much, but a proper Laser can melt through almost anything. Hmm...actually...maybe there's still some pieces of an object like that. Hey, Will-E Love, come here for a second."
After poking through the Golem’s inventory for a while, I finally found what I was looking for, which was the damaged remains of one of the Librarian Golemn’s shoulder-lasers.
*Thunk*
"Ok, this piece is pretty wrecked, and all of the focusing lenses have shattered or melted, but maybe you can get a general idea about how this thing was supposed to work in the first place."
"OH! WOW! INCREDIBLE! This is a superbly-preserved antique! Where did you get it? Such detailed craftsmanship! The runes and arrays on this thing are astounding!"
"Ugh...it’s not as much of an “antique” as the remains of a Dwemmer Golem we were forced to unfortunately blow up during a Quest for Jin. This is one of the leftovers. Some of the other spare parts and remaining components then simply got transformed into little Will-E here. There's barely anything else left, as most of the old golem got turned into molten slag when it blew up."
"May I have a look at the remains though? Maybe I can figure more things out than your average layman. I DO have a rather advanced expertise in dwemmer constructs after all!"
"Sure, help yourself."
*THUNK*KLONG*THUD*SCRAP*PLOINGGG*
"OOOH! A Harmonic Aligner! A 50-phased Actuator! A Glophinged Quastet and a Malticore Artion! AH! And is that a Bernon Depurposer? FASCINATING! Can I keep these? I would love to research them more!"
"Sure...help yourse...What’s wrong, Will-E?" The little robot interrupted me by tugging at my robes and pointing at some of the former Golem pieces. "Aw...you want that metal chunk? Sure, little guy, go ahead! You don’t mind if I give this to Will-E first, don’t you? When he was made, the description said that he would be able to upgrade himself if he ever encountered any “compatible” materials with his “dwemmer architecture”, whatever that means."
"Go ahead, that’s just some of the external plating, it has nothing important on it. You say he can swallow dwemmer materials and upgrade? That’s unheard of! Actually...here...have him see if he likes these." Yi Gore suddenly produced a couple of weird ore-pieces from his ring. As soon as they came into existence, the Dwemmer Baby instantly forgot all about the old plating he was chewing on, and then rushed straight to the ore-pieces while sporting glowing camera-eyes filled with desire.
"Can he eat those?"
"Yeah, that’s why I took them out!"
Immediately, the golem tossed the ores into his mouth, and then began crunching on them with horrible industrial hydraulic-press noises.
"Wow...I was right then...You really like those, dontcha?" Yi Gore patted the golem baby on the head as it was nodding in approval.
"What did you feed him?"
"They are the basic ores that go into the crafting of most of the dwemmer metal-works. They are the precursor of this metal." Yi showed me some of the golden slag that had now lost all of its defensive properties, as it got bent into a golden ball by Yi’s mechanical arm."The crafting process is weird, and you get only one chance to get it right, because otherwise, the process is non-reversible. You cannot just pick up this gold slag, melt it back up, then re-forge it into a dwemmer piece once more. It’s already permanently compromised. It’s also why not even this little guy is eating the slag, because it’s basically useless to him, but the precursors I gave him are considered valuable, because they can be still processed into the “real” form of the metal from now on."
"Yi, there is zero chance that what you said is ACTUALLY true, take my word for it! There is no such thing as a “permanently compromised” metal in nature. Sure, I can understand if the current metal got altered somehow due to the thermal reaction, as it lost something that held it together, but there is no way in Heavens or Hells that the process which created the old metal in the first place cannot be reproduced or reversed with proper substances and supervision within a controlled Lab setting. Tell me, my dear midget Progenitor, have you ever heard of something called the periodic table of elements, and CHEMISTRY? Let me introduce you to our Lord and Chemist, Dmitri Mendeleev!"