CHAPTER 333 – A SPECIAL GOLEM
Everlyn looked genuinely confused at his abrupt rejection of her idea. “Tom, this has nothing to do with anything I said the other night. You don’t need to take this personally. Using a golem to stop the energy beams is the right choice for all of us.”
“No, you’re right. My decision had nothing to do with our history.” The heat was rising in his cheeks. “I’m just not going to create a golem designed for a single use. We’ve all discussed this.”
She looked exasperated. “I’m aware of that… and it’s not what I’m asking. I listen, I know your views on this.”
“Really, I thought the request is for me to build something constructed specifically to shield against these beams. That’s as niche as you can get.”
“Well, yes, but…”
“Then how is that not one use.” He pressed angrily.
Her cheeks went a little pink. “Because it’s not.”
“That’s easy to say.”
“Tom.” Michael interrupted. “Let her speak.”
“Thank you.” Everlyn paused her hands fiddling nervously with her hair. “Um, let’s restart the conversation. I didn’t explain the concept very well. I was hoping you could produce a golem that’s specialised in shielding, rather than shielding just this.” She pointed straight up at the tiny clouds that were threatened them. “Which, if done right should make it useful in future zones.”
“Traditionally, what you’re proposing is not really a golem’s strength.”
She bit her lip. “Is that true. I don’t see how this is so much different from a golem whose purpose is to just fire magic.”
“That’s not a traditional purpose either.”
“But it’s done isn’t it. Magic attack golems is a thing and as I understand it, they’re all over the place.”
“But we’re not talking about, an attack golem are we. You want me to make something that is capable of protecting us from that.” He pointed at the clouds that hovered across the sky. For the time being, they were no longer firing, having learnt the futility of attacking the flower’s shields. Despite the current ceasefire, Tom was sure if one of them put a finger outside the safe zone the barrage would start up again. “The problem, Everlyn, is that while I don’t know a lot about shields and stuff, I know that’s unrealistic. I’ve got a couple of tier two mana engines, and that’s not a lot of power. To be able to block these repeated blows from those clouds, the shield will need to be ultra specialised. More finally tuned than any shield I’ve ever heard of. Against a different type of magic attack, a shield tuned that specifically will be like tissue paper.”
She smiled like he had said something to support her case rather than tearing it to bits. “No, that won’t be a problem, because we’ll make it fully adjustable.”
“Everlyn I hate to break it to you, but an automatically adjusting shield is kind of in the realm of science fiction.”
She only grinned in response. For some reason she thought she had won. “You’re right. We couldn’t create anything advanced enough to be adjusted in real time, but it’s possible to construct a golem that can be customised at the start of each zone.”
“Counter point instead of making a golem why don’t we make a shield generator.”
“Because unless my understanding is flawed the shield is going to need to be repositioned continuously to stop beams from all the different angles.” She hesitated. “I also understand that angle of collision has a huge impact on efficiency.”
“Only with some of the shield designs.” Harry corrected. “For some, it doesn’t matter.”
Everlyn ignored the interjection. “My understanding is that a beam hitting perpendicular to a surface can sometimes be reflected almost perfectly, while a hit at forty-five degrees might even perform, so terribly, as to bleed mana from the shield on a one-to-one basis.”
“Wait that doesn’t make sense. Wouldn’t deflecting spells with an angled surface be more efficient?” Michael interrupted.
Harry snorted. “I get where you’re coming from, but magical shields don’t work on earth physics.”
“I appreciate the help, but for now I can handle this Harry,” Everlyn said. “You’re right, Michael, some of them work that way. It depends on the type of shield however, for most versions a dome around us won’t be as efficient as carefully positioned flat panes. Beyond the targeting the weight of a portal shield generator will be a problem. It’s going to be a hundred kilograms minimum and maybe as much as two hundred. Not to mention that it will be awkward to carry as well. But I’m sure we can get around that. The main issue will be directing the barriers on the right orientation.”
“And the golem wins there because the elemental can control the positioning.”
Everlyn nodded her grin blooming over her face. “Yes, or even the control orb could do a better job than a human. These beams, there’s about half a second warning before they hit full power. A human would struggle even with our attributes, but the control orb should have no problem.”
Tom could see the benefits of what she claimed. A golem would be excellent at shield positioning especially with an elemental correcting any systemic inefficiencies.
“There’s more,” she continued excitedly. “The beams are all the same. I’ve been monitoring them. They’re basically storm aligned. Wind, water, lightning, with the right setup, we could get a storm elemental to power it which supercharges the whole system…” she stopped talking for a moment. “Why do you look so confused?”
“I’ve never been big on the theory behind shields.”
Next to him Harry laughed. “Maybe I should answer this. Everlyn didn’t consult me on that, but as a ritualist I understand the concept of what she wants and the idea’s brilliant.”
Everlyn preened at the compliment.
“To understand why it might be genius you have to comprehend magical shielding. There are two methods to creating efficient shields. The first is one that reflects away all the energy that strikes it. Imagine a trampoline. Power comes in the shield, bends and flings it away. Apart from a small amount of wear and tear the trampoline is left undamaged. The second efficient type absorbs the incoming energy to fuel itself. Think of a fire beam fuelling a steam engine.”
Tom snorted at that description. “That’s a bad analogy. I know more about magic absorption and transference than steam engines.”
“Sorry.” Harry appeared genuinely apologetic. “I get carried away sometimes. The absorption shield that gets powered by attacks hitting it is hellishly complex behind the scenes. It needs to break apart the incoming weave, filter it to remove all the inherent command in the attacking beam and then eventually collect the magic once it has lost its initial purpose and then rebuild all those layers with the recycled power. It is what this flower’s doing, but I suspect it isn’t something we want to try to duplicate. Mostly because it’s too complicated for our skills to create and I wouldn’t trust anything with that mechanism that we could buy. Not with my life at least. Which brings us to the first idea, the reflective shield. The key is to produce a surface which is unreactive with the magic striking it. If you have a fire defence and you’re attacked by water, no matter how smooth you make the surface, the two elements are going to react with each other. The shield, at best, will only absorb energy coming in at a one-to-one ratio. We want our shields to do far more than that.
“You love getting a chance to be a lecturer don’t you.” Keikain interrupted.
“No, where near as much as you,” Harry shot back. “The best shields are made of magic that is unreactive and have a magic weave that is denser than the magic coming in. And if it’s not obvious already higher tiered spells have a denser weave, which is one of the reasons you always take the higher tiered spell even if there are combinations of lesser spells that theoretically outperform it for a cheaper purchase price. The moment magic shields are involved that investment pays off.”
“You’re getting off track.” Michael warned him.
“True, as I was saying a tight weave will be limited by our tools. But there are ways to cheat. Methods to get lower tiered shields to outperform higher level ones. We’ll investigate the feasibility but probably won’t pursue it. The method basically involves creating layered plates so when you at look at it in one direction it’s perfectly smooth but if you change angle, you’ll start to see all the gaps that are there. Setting it up like that creates a reflective surface that vastly outperforms expectations, providing the enemies’ magic strikes from within a certain range of angles. The problem is if the attack is outside tolerance the energy gets under the panels and does immense damage directly to the shield weave. You have a shield that performs like a tier eight in some circumstances and tier one in others. Under optimal conditions, it’s reflecting sixty times the energy invested and then the moment the angle changes and the enemy’s magic gets into the inner working that drops to ten percent! Which means ten units of offensive attack can take out a hundred units of shield mana. It’s a dangerous method to use, but if you get it right and you’re flexible in your placement and predict the enemy, it is a very efficient method.” He glanced pointedly at the sky. “A plate magic shield here could work because we know where the attacks are coming from and I don’t think the clouds are intelligent enough to adjust in any meaningful way.”
“But that’s not what we’re trying is it?” Keikain said. “You said you wouldn’t trust your life with it.”
“We might go down that path. If the option we can buy is good enough, especially if it’s not our primary shield. We’ll see what technology is available before deciding, but this is where Everlyn’s idea shines. The easiest way to create a shield is to have a material that doesn’t react to the incoming force. Then you just need for it to not be overwhelmed by sheer incoming power, which in the trampoline example is a weight so heavy that it blasts straight through the fibres. If you manage to create a shield that does not react at all to the impacting energy, you can theoretically reflect an unlimited number of attacks, but in practice most setups only achieve a low single digit percentage reaction level. To maintain the shield, you just top up whatever reacts with each strike. If your reaction percentage is five percent, then your shield is neutralising twenty times the power it takes to sustain it.”
“It’s why arcane magic is used for most mage shields.” Keikain interrupted. “They only have a five to ten percent reaction percentage against most things. It lets you make a shield that can almost always reflect ten to twenty time the amount of energy thrown at it.”
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Tom cleared his throat. “Got it. Let’s skip any further lectures and focus on the practicalities.” He made eye contact with Everlyn. “You’ve obviously got a plan. Let’s hear it.”
“There are lots of shield generators out there that use the mana type that you infuse into it.” She said carefully.
Thor who was listening in nodded. “Agreed. Or at least there was when you last had me check.”
“When?” Tom asked in surprise.
The big man shrugged. “We investigated it against the ghosts. Bao also did something similar when they were being slaughtered by the shadows. The shield generators were there, but they couldn’t find a way to adapt the components to be effective against the shadows.”
“A storm elemental plus a shield generator gives us an excellent base for blocking the clouds. But we can make it better by using funnel convertors.” Everlyn continued. “They change the profile of the mana that passes through it. Nothing outlandish, you can’t turn fire into something other than fire, but on the margin, you can influence it. Red fire can be refined into holy, infernal, blue or white fire and everything in between. It means if we can get the starting mana close enough to the final product we can then use a funnel convertor to take the performance from twenty times to a hundred times.”
Tom finally understood the plan that she had hatched. He found himself agreeing with Harry. It was certainly impressive. “So the elemental I summon to help is the key?”
Everlyn nodded. “Yep theoretically a storm elemental here lets us create a hyper efficient shield. Then next zone, when we’re facing fire attacks you switch to a fire elemental, and we’ve got another hyper efficient shield. Tom, this is going to work. I’m sure we can even adjust it so it can be useful against the dragon.”
Tom scoffed at that.
“Maybe not directly.” She acknowledged. “But it might be able to do something against the insects. If we’re immune to some of their attacks, it could save lives.”
“Tom looks like he agrees. So, do you have a list of what I’m investigating?” Thor asked.
“Shield generators that create shields out of supplied mana. They need to be rated as being effective against rank forty monsters. We also need funnel converts that work with multiple different mana input types.”
Thor shook his head. “That last is a stretch. Usually they’re restricted in their range. A fire convertor just does fire.”
Everlyn nodded. “Please do your best. I suspect you’ve got an idea of what we’re trying to build. Think out of the box. We’ll do the same.”
“I’ll help Thor with the core pricing of options.” Bao said immediately.
The two of them sat down. Their eyes went slack as they started investigating the products that were available.
Everlyn walked straight over to the elder until she stood right in front of him. “Largest one, Do you have any ideas.”
“Perceptive Everlyn, myself and the smallest have an in-depth understanding of shield theory. Once you have a proposed set up, we can help shape the final outcome.”
Harry also cleared his throat. “This is something I could potentially assist directly with. I have rituals that can act somewhat like a funnel convertor. We might want to make them part of the process to give greater flexibility in future zones. I do have a question and I hope this is a yes. Tom, will we be able to swap items in and out?”
“I won’t be able to just switch things instantly. It’ll take five or so minutes, but yeah I can do it..”
“Which is plenty fast enough for the use cases we’re targeting.” Everlyn said.
For the next hour, the more academic amongst them discussed the construction. Mana permitting and with Keikain’s help Tom constructed the wire and stone framework as they did so. In the downtimes Tom practiced his now pseudo earth domain control. He was careful to use next to no mana as he did so. When needed, he answered the occasional technical golem question. Pieces of rock spun around him with Earth Sense tracking all their movements. Each piece of stone was continually deformed as he moved the rock from one spot to another and then Throw Rock would accelerate the section that was moving. If he got the timing perfect, he could almost make it dance to any tune that he wanted.
The latest one was spinning around him, doing figures of eights, when he noticed that conversation from the planning team had stopped.
“We’ve finalised the design.” Harry announced.
They explained the details, and he was impressed by what they had put together. It reminded him of what the female in his mollusc dream from a couple of days earlier had done. The notes they had constructed were detailed and he could see the careful thought that had gone into the components selected and the overall blueprint.
The golem was always going to be a specialised unit. It was designed primarily to stop magical attacks, but they had extended the setup to have offensive potential. The core of the design created specific attributed mana that could then be fed into shielding, a missile or a beam attack. The last was interesting. Just like you could create a shield to counter homogeneous attacks the beam could be adjusted to negate specific types of shields.
“You arm the beam with ice,” Everlyn promised him. “And any fire monsters that use shields are going to have them burned through in seconds. Even if they don’t use magic defences, we can adjust the golem to target the monster’s vulnerabilities. The golem’s magic attacks are going to be so much more powerful than what you’ve experienced so far.”
Tom, studying the design could only agree with her.
They laid out the materials Thor had bought. An additional two million credits’ worth, which felt excessive until you factored in the consequences of the golem not doing the role. They could still complete the zone, but it would cost a million experience each for those in the active exploration team. That was the price of the skills and spells required to cope with the attacks from the clouds. An investment where seventy percent of the acquired abilities would be useless for the rest of their time in Existentia. Even though they were funding this golem, and he would get a hundred percent contribution for it, in real terms, they were getting a bargain.
Keikain and he had already created the main chassis of the golem while they had debated the design. It was an ugly spherical thing on six stubby legs. It was nothing like the previous spider form that had been deadly in close in combat. One look at this and you knew the danger lay in its magic and not elsewhere. It was a ball of stone covered with holes. Every twenty centimetres there were five-centimetre-wide spirals that looked like solidified whirlpools that led into the centre of the rock. It made the shell fragile and visually was terrible, but the shield and laser could be shot out of any of those little whirls. It could express magic in all directions without spinning to face a target.
The mana engines, prison, control crystal, shield generator, and funnel convertors were all laid out in order ready to be linked together.
“And you’re sure we don’t want to do any further tests.” Tom asked for the third or fourth time. “Like are you certain it wouldn’t be prudent to calibrate the shield before building it.”
Everlyn shrugged. “If it only takes you five minutes to tune I’m happy to wait. Mana engines are not easy and potentially dangerous to use without a supporting framework.”
With no further objections, he concentrated and started the build. His magic flared and then he began to painstaking layer up the components. Everyone, including the chosen were in his support team. There was a pool of magic far beyond his own available to draw on, and he greedily sucked the energy up to be packed into each of the lines of the spell to make them more intense than usual. The magical framework he created mimicked the wire that was threaded through the rock for the internals while externally there was a one centimetre wide grid that spread over the physical outer boundaries. It was a classic wire frame model that you might have seen in a graphics design project back on earth.
Tom focused on the detail, ensuring everything that he inserted was flawless. The entire construction hummed packed with more power than any of the previous ones he had made. The contribution from the chosen was massive their mana reserves were at least three times larger than his own.
Once the framework was perfect, he slowed down while carefully linking together the components in the inner sphere. The golem had a three-layer design all of which could move independently of each other. The central construction created the specifically aspected mana, the secondary layer how to output it and the final being the shell. Those inner ones would spin to select the output and general direction while the outer shell was responsible for the fine control being able to rotate up to five or six degrees to do the final piece of accurate aiming.
It was a clever and unique design, and Tom was blown away by the fact that the team had come up with it. Two shield options had been included. Both were the reflective type, but one would function with hits from any direction while the second needed the attacking beam to strike at a forty-five-degree angle for peak efficiency and anything more than ten away from that would cause it to shatter. Then there were a pair of offensive additions. A classic laser to overload shields and a more traditional missile setup for direct damage against opposing monsters. Despite his initial resistance to this concept, now that it was starting to take shape the excitement was building. Having a magical golem to support them would be fun.
The final weave came together. The spell framework formed and at least to his level of perception it was perfect. It was the best one he had ever created.
Then deep within the construction, a bright light formed.
Internal alarm bells went off.
Tom knew exactly how golems were supposed to behave and this…
It was out of his expectations.
He focused to try to understand what was happening. There was a lot of stone and the animation magic between him and the potential problem, so it was difficult to diagnose. It looked like energy was being sucked from the mana engines into one of the inner components, and then there was a blockage that stopped that power from flowing.
With a panic, he realised what was probably occurring. The raw mana was being dammed.
His mind raced and he rifled through his false memories to try to comprehend what was happening.
Successful animations did not do this!
In those false years in the golem factory, nothing he had created had done this. He focused on the wider group. Nothing on the construction floor… then he found it.
A custom golem that been deemed potentially dangerous because of the materials being used in its construction. That animation had been done in the reinforced containment room. The juniors had been allowed to watch and when the master had finished, the spell, it had gone wrong. Not deep inside but on the weapon arm. The same type of blockage, the same intensifying light and then when it had reached the peak amount of power that the part could contain… It had blown and almost gotten through the containment wards.
“Chosen shield it!” he yelled desperately. “It’s going to blow. Everyone get back.”
It was exactly the same as what happened in that containment room. The energy was building.
“What’s happening?” Everlyn demanded. They were on the flower and if they left it the clouds would target them so fleeing overland was not an option.
“Into the tunnel!” he ordered.
No one hesitated. Three months of life and death battles and relying on each other explicitly made them obey instantly.
He followed, waiting a moment to make sure everyone got into the tunnel before him.
What had gone wrong? It had felt like the weaves he had created had been perfect. He had checked it twice before finalising. Was he supposed to do three checks? The golem failing like this made no sense. This hadn’t been built with dangerous components.
But his magic senses weren’t telling lies. In the five seconds it had taken to reach the tunnel the intensity of the glowing energy had doubled.
To be honest, he was surprised it hadn’t blown up already. Maybe the plug, the energy flow issue was related to the prison. That could definitely survive an immense amount of power being packed into it for longer than the other components. But when the explosion occurred, it would be stronger as a result.
“He’s not joking.” Michael said. “Something is badly wrong with the golem. Don’t stop at the entrance head deeper.”
They were all in the tunnel.
“How deep do we need to go?” Toni asked worriedly. She had probably seen the problem, too.
“Keep going.” Tom ordered as he raised a defensive wall at the mouth of the cave to provide protection.
Keikain followed suit and formed another. Together they retreated eyes wide.
Minutes passed, and Tom expected an explosion at any moment. If it was still growing in power, then how big would the final blast be? Maybe they needed stronger walls and to head deeper.
The fuzzy connection to the golem changed.
It became sharper.
“Tom, what happened?” Michael demanded. “Did it blow?”
He shook his head. He didn’t know what was happening. Cautiously, he tested the bond he had to it.
It was functional?
He prompted it to create the shield, and it worked. “I don’t understand,” he whispered. “It’s working.”
Michael looked confused. He had seen the energy gathering like a bomb, too.
Via the link he made the golem moved to cycle around the tunnel they had gone down. It was functioning perfectly. “I’m going up.”
“No,” Michael grabbed his arm.
“It hasn’t blown.”
“But you saw it. It could go at any moment.”
With a shrug, Tom broke the healer’s hold on him. “I’ll be careful.”
Cautiously, Tom used his magic to pass through the blast walls they had created. Making sure he left the first fully intact to protect the others if it blew up when he was out here. Then, with only a single wall between him and the outside, he created an eye hole to look through. The golem was currently out of sight, but the connection was strong, so he made it come around so he could see it.
The squat legs brought it into view.
His brows furrowed.
The energy that had been building up so threateningly had vanished. The golem looked exactly like it was supposed to. “What happened?” he asked himself in confusion.