Demon continent Alsace in the year 237 in the 9-month Lilithum on the 7th day after the Shattering of the Empire

With the rising of the sun, she was on her way to inspect her found golem and if possible transport it to her current home. If not, she would have to see that she examined it on the spot. She still wasn't sure that it wasn't a trap or something else of the same nature and that the golem might be gone by the time she got back to it.

As she made her way to the spot where she had found the golem yesterday, she chewed on a strip of dried meat, lost in thought. How should I best proceed when examining the golem? What possibility do I have to examine him at all? I need to see it first to decide how to examine it before I need to worry about it at all. With that, she continued walking at a leisurely pace toward the Golem Lerna meandering beside her. She had not accompanied her into the city or on her explorations, which she had always done until now, only when she had told her about the golem she had found had she made any effort to follow her. Until then, she had been content to wait for her in the treehouse or to disappear for days at a time, where she probably went hunting. At least she suspected that was the reason for her constant disappearance.

It was not long before they arrived at the golem, first looking at it for a while, circling it. She wanted to have a complete picture of him before she did anything else. All the time she was thinking about how to proceed from here, what should be her next step? As she walked around the golem, she viewed it with her eyes and also with her senses within her domain. "Mhm, what am I going to do with you?" She didn't expect an answer, even though she had stopped expectantly, but no answer came. Looking at the golem still in her domain with her senses she sat down, at the beginning, she should probably first remove the plants and soil that overgrew the golem, after that she could still continue on what to do next.

While she slowly freed the golem from its protective layer of plants and earth, she looked at the mental image she had of it so far, still covered by earth and plants, she still got an image of the golem under all the garbage. She moved it from one side to the other and looked at it from all sides until exactly the golem she had seen under the whole layer lay before her in all its glory. Then she began to look at the individual runes on the still mostly intact armor, careful not to let any arcane energy flow into the runes, she wanted to avoid bringing the seemingly dead golem back to life. She also wanted to know what the runes were doing, so she traced them in the air with a little arcane energy on her fingertip. The rune did activate and she could feel the Arcane Energy she provided absorbing and doing whatever the rune was doing. These were runes which she had also found in the cores of dead demons, none of the ones she could find so far were even remotely like these runes though."It is possible that it only works or fulfills its function when it has been applied to a carrier. Which in this case would be the metal." She would deal with it later the problem was that she didn't have the right tools with her to paint off the runes so they wouldn't activate and she probably wouldn't find an anti-carrier in these woods anytime soon a fabric that wasn't affected by the runes to which she could safely transfer them. "Then I'll have to remember them all, and I haven't even looked at all of them yet." With that, she set about further examining the runes on the golem's armor and adding them to her mental image of the golem. Which gave her pause, she had done to the golem what she does to the world when she adds it to her mental map, and the runes had not activated. Still, she didn't know what the runes did yet, but she at least had a way to keep the runes in place, which might allow her to transfer them to another carrier later.

It took her the whole morning to really grasp all the runes and their place in the runic mandala of the armor, an exhausting work that challenged her mentally. An aspect of runes which no one could really explain, it was only known by all that after a certain amount of time the mind got difficulties to keep the seen runes and not to forget them again. "But that should only be seen if I also knew the meaning of the runes, which I don't, do I?" Lerna just looked at her as if she didn't know what she was talking about. "Without knowing the meaning of the runes, it should be easy for me to pick them all up without having any problems." Pondering this new question, she began chewing her lunch. With a little telekinesis, she had removed some bark from one of the trees and with a small pointed stone carved the whole runic mandala of the armor on the inside of the bark.

At the same moment she drew the last rune, she could feel the mandala absorbing the arcane energy of the surroundings. Already the runes lit up and the bark began to burn until the runes were burned black lines. After that, she could only feel a small flow of arcane energy which seemed to flow into the runes on the bark. She catapulted the stone against the bark with enough force that it should pass through it without any problem. However, the stone simply bounced off the bark without even making a scratch. She looked at the place where the stone had hit the bark without finding even a sign that the bark had been hit. The stone, on the other hand, lay at her feet in a small pile of several smaller stones. The stone had lost against the bark and she knew the meaning of a rune because this one had drawn a little more energy from the environment than the others and she had also seen to which rune this energy was directed.

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Peeling the bark from another tree, she set about transferring the mandala, without the initial rune, to this and bombarding it with another stone. The stone penetrated the bark without much resistance and came out on the other side, after which it banged against another tree after a few meters and fell to the ground. Similar to the first stone, she now carved the rune, which she had intentionally forgotten in this mandala, in the appropriate place. Again she could observe how the Mandala hardly that she was ready, burned itself into the bark. So she already knew what the rune for absorbing arcane energy from the environment looked like, the other one was probably one that reinforced the carrier material on which the mandala was painted. Even though she doubted that the bark of any tree could withstand the mandala for long, she could already see the runes eating into the wood while she had done her little experiment. This is why she immediately set to work on the next one, pelting her first rune-etched bark with another stone, but this time with a little more force, which would be enough to penetrate a soldier's armor and injure him considerably. This time, too, the stone bounced off and fell to the ground in much smaller pieces, but the bark had a small dent nonetheless, which was already in the process of repairing itself. She repeated her experiment with another piece of bark on which this time she omitted the rune that repaired the damage. It had a similar result, only this time the bark did not repair itself.

So she continued all through noon and early afternoon until she had every task of each rune figured out, costing several trees their bark. The barks usually only survived six experiments and she had eighty runes to test. Some of which didn't really seem to work because the bark was too weak. However, the runes protected the wearer, in this case, a golem, from any damage up to a certain force, after which even these runes would give way, so the support material needed to be strong enough not to consume itself. Even though the mandala had runes that accumulated arcane energy, the runes were too powerful and demanded too much from the bark. So she experimented with the mandala, changing the size and composition of the runes. Which blew bark around her ears several times as the mandala made the bark explode.

However, she thought better of it and focused on why she was actually here, she turned her attention back to the golem who was still in his armor in front of her. He too would reveal his secrets to her once she had freed him from his armor. Still, she was careful as she set about removing the armor from him, though it showed some damage that the mandala could not repair, as some of the connections were broken. So she set about breaking open the armor, as, after a few attempts in which she tried to free the golem from its armor without damaging the armor further, she had to give up and simply break this open. Before she did this, however, she had looked at the whole armor again, making sure that she had not missed anything and that her mental image reflected reality one-to-one.

It took her quite a bit of strength to even deform the armor, which showed what good metal the armor was made of. Only when she treated it with magically generated fire, from whose heat the forest floor caught fire, was she able to bend the metal open with telekinesis. After that, she separated herself from the forest with a barrier and herself and the golem with another one, so that she did not set the forest on fire.

The armor, which seemed to be made of a single piece, took her all the rest of the day's sun with enough interruptions to try to escape the hot air. She drank more water than she had in a long time, and yet she was always thirsty. Which was probably no surprise given the amounts she was sweating, and she would definitely need to wash up. Still, by the time the sunset, she had managed to strip the golem of its armor and reveal its simple body. Which, like the armor and the other golems without armor, was covered with another runic mandala that protected its body and core.

But since it was already getting dark and she didn't have the strength to deal with these runes anymore, she set about transporting the golem and what was left of its armor to her treehouse with her remaining strength.

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She had been watching her charge all day and had to wonder what she was trying to accomplish with her strange behavior? Why had she dug this thing up and why had she then robbed the trees around her of their protective bark. Only to destroy them with stones and other magic. But she couldn't care about that, as long as her protégé didn't do anything stupid, which had almost been her fire, and now she was also taking the thing home. She could really only shake her head at her titan's incomprehensible behavior.

But as long as it got stronger, and she could feel that it probably didn't matter, the big mother will already know what to do with this titan when the time came.