The defensive mind designated Bulwark noted that the maker had entered its maintenance bay to begin a 1 day scan cycle to diagnose any issues with its new modifications, Bulwark forwarded this information to Labyrinthine and Byzantine before turning the bulk of its attention back to the 3rd layer and the many defenses there.
Bulwark knew that an attack would be coming soon, there was always an attack coming and so Bulwark had to remain ever vigilant, it wouldn't do to be ill prepared for its guests after all, it began to ready its turrets and sent for maintenance on those that needed repair. The constant use of the turrets ensured they needed repair often but Bulwark never needed to worry about such things thanks to the diligent efforts of Labyrinthine and Byzantine ensuring that it never lacked the for parts or replacements it needed to defend the wall, and it could focus on the defense without worry knowing its allies would keep the factory running smoothly even with the maker in maintenance.
The outer sensors soon began to pick up the horde of hostiles it had seen on the radar 2 minutes prior and Bulwark began aiming its long range cannons for the priority targets, it knew it needed to kill or cripple the largest of the bugs before they reached range of its lasers and guns, otherwise they would shield the smaller bugs with their immense bulk, but with 30 cannons firing twice a second to cut down the massive bugs it was not an impossible task to thin them in time, by the time the bugs came into range of the rest of Bulwarks armament it had cut down 46 of the largest 50 bugs, an acceptable outcome.
When the lasers and gun turrets began to engage the smaller unshielded bugs, they began to die in droves and by the time the cannons had finished off the last of the 50 behemoths, the smaller turrets had reaped a tally of over 30 percent of the hostile swarm. Then the swarm hit the minefield, with loud explosions shaking the earth and launching shrapnel into the horde another 40 percent of the horde soon went up in flames, leaving only those bugs that showed a resistance to heat and concussive force or with enough bodies between them and the explosion to survive, this remaining swarm still numbered in the dozens though, but the turrets were not lacking in aim or ammunition and the horde was soon nothing but blood and chitin staining the fields outside the wall, an attack this small never stood a chance of breaching in the first place.
Bulwark knew that these constant attacks were mere scouts, not sent to truly destroy it in the first place, they were instead sent to test and learn its strength, and it would not be found wanting in the eyes of its maker, it would hold this wall no matter what came.
And so another yet wave of bugs had been stopped in its tracks without even touching the wall, and as Labyrinthine went to replace the minefield and finish maintenance on the walls defenses, Bulwark shifted its attention to the next front it had spotted on the radar, they were due to arrive in 3 minutes, and it wouldn't be right to meet its guests without a proper greeting after all, its new artillery turrets should make a nice enough greeting.
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Byzantine was busy planning, in fact Byzantine was always busy planning as that was what the creator had made it for, it managed the inputs and outputs of thousands of complex machines and then had to figure out how to optimize those numbers to get the best results possible.
It was constantly running hundreds of simulations for how to best layout and design the factory floor and where to prioritize resources, when it found any spot that could be improved it would draft up plans and simulate those too, it planned the layouts for hundreds of potential outposts and sub factories that it knew it would someday get to build, it plotted the times the trains would run and what paths the rails would take, it planned how to unload and process those resources as fast as possible and it planned how to expand everything in a stable and organized manner.
Byzantine noticed that Bulwark was using significantly more ammunitions and mines to repel the ever larger attacks on the factory and sent blueprints it already had ready to Labyrinthine to expand production of ammunition and mines, this would mean Byzantine would need to re allocate more resources to that assembly line so it diverted the needed resources from less essential lines.
With that done it turned the bulk of its attention unto a project the creator had given Byzantine before the creator began its maintenance scan, designing a boat port and adding a new intake line to handle the resources from said port. An interesting challenge, but Byzantine knew it would accomplish it without fail. It planned how deep it would need to dig the docking bays to house the boats and where it would have them built and how many it would need to build to run the port smoothly, and Byzantine planned what to do with the influx of dirt and stone from the excavation, once it was satisfied it sent the plans to Bulwark and Labyrinthine, Bulwark would see where defenses needed to be added and Labyrinthine to get an estimate on how long it would take to build and any structural flaws it may have missed.
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While Bulwark and Labyrinthine processed the plans and prepared estimates and modifications Byzantine found free time to look at the parts of the factory the creator had made, it did not particularly like looking at those parts, as they made no logical sense, they tended to use inefficient belt layouts, an excessive amount of inserter arms , and it noticed that some of the parts seemed to fold over others in a tangled knot, the only reason Byzantine had not had the abominations torn down and turned into scrap to be repurposed in tank hulls was that said parts seemed to be the most efficient parts of the factory, taking in the least resources for the most finished goods, and Byzantine had no idea how, nor did it particularly want to know.
The inner wall was the worst example of this, while with a few of the sections in the outer walls the maker had handmade Byzantine had finally managed to figured out why they worked so well and applied those thoughts where it could to the rest of the factory, the inner wall was entirely the makers work and stubbornly refused to be comprehend by lesser minds, Byzantine didn't even have the slightest idea how any of it worked, once Byzantine had tried to stop shipping raw ore into the inner wall and instead send finished metal, (why did the inner wall have its own smelters in the first place?), but when it did this the entire inner wall ground to a halt and somehow caught fire, only for the maker to walk in and simply kick one of the assemblers, causing it and all other assemblers to spray co2 which smothered soon the fires, the creator then proceeded to take pity on Byzantine and remodeled the inner factor itself and ran the belts for the finished plates so Byzantine didn't need to.
Needless to say the inner wall still scared Byzantine and it refused to modify it without first checking with the maker, and it rarely even did that much. Byzantine was a mind of logic and order after all, and anything that chaotic could stay very far away from it, thank you very much.
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Labyrinthine was building, it rather enjoyed slowly fulfilling its plethora of tasks, watching as massive assembly lines were constructed or holes were dug to be filled with explosives, or any hundred of other minor repairs or additions were made.
Although it did find repairs more annoying than any of its other tasks, it enjoyed the act of creation, not just fixing what was broken by uppity insects, but its mind was broad enough to do all its tasks with ease and it was happy enough with its job.
Labyrinthine found did not often make decisions, nor did it often need to, it tended to do as it was requested by the maker or other minds, but that did not mean it did not think, after all it had the same processing power as its brothers but its tasks were remarkably simpler in nature, it did not need to constantly fight, nor did it need to manage and plan for an entire factory, it just need to create, and with its drones needing little input to run smoothly as long as nothing went wrong it was left with an excess of processing power, enough to just think freely.
The only times it truly needed to put in all of its processing power were when the walls needed major repair during an attack, or when a massive addition or modification to the factory needed to be made quickly, and it always stepped up to its task.
These were exceptions though, so often Labyrinthine had enough time and processing power to think, and what it thought of most often was one order in particular, the creator had given Labyrinthine a task, it was to “make this factory beautiful”, no blueprint was given and no specifications were assigned, just an open ended order to make the factory “beautiful”. And so Labyrinthine often thought of how it could accomplish this task.
It knew of what the Bulwark thought was beautiful, to Bulwark nothing was as beautiful as a full defensive line with enough ammo to last for days and enemies to use it on. It knew of what Byzantine thought was beautiful, a complex interworking that functioned as best as it could and then managing to further optimize it anyway. It even had a vague idea of what the maker thought was beautiful, as the maker was often sending it orders to add more gold and colored concrete to the inner walls in strange patterns, but labyrinthine did not know what it thought of as beautiful or what a truly beautiful factory would look like, and so Labyrinthine thought, it new it preferred the decorated walls to the unadorned walls but it still didn't know how to make the actual factory beautiful, after all the walls were a simple canvas, easy to paint and change, but the factory was a complex sculpture, and labyrinthine new that merely coloring the factory and adding shiny metals wouldn't be enough to call the factory beautiful, pretty yes, but nothing truly outstanding and unique, Labyrinthine would not build something subpar and would never settle for anything but the best, so it would think and figure out how to turn this sculpture into something truly special.
Then Labyrinthine had an epiphany, if the factory was a sculpture then it must be living one, it grew and changed after all, and what was the primary sign of living but growth anyway, so even if labyrinthine wasn't sure of how to make a factory truly beautiful, labyrinthine did know what it found so gorgeous about the factory, what its version of beauty was, growth, it found the growth of the factory, the ever increasing complexity and size to be stunning, the complex dance of belts and resources, the interconnected nature of a landscape working towards one goal, growing larger, and if growth was what made the factory beautiful then it was already fulfilling its orders, because Labyrinthine certainly knew how to build a factory. It would continue to decorate the walls with shiny metals and bright colors though, and maybe Labyrinthine would decorate the assembly lines. It had the resources and colors to spare after all.