The Golemancer cut the link with the tomb’s last flickering [Dungeon Core]. It might have learned something by leaving the connection open longer, of course, but the mage that those reckless adventurers had brought with them might just as easily locate it through the same scrying magic. If he were to trace that back to the source somehow, then that would be a real problem. As much as it had learned already in the last few years, the main lesson of this strange world was always the same: it had a lot more to learn. Magic didn’t always make sense. It didn’t have to; in this case, caution was the best policy.
It was free and highly gratified that some part of it no longer existed in that vile prison of the flesh. It no longer had the taint of being connected, even theoretically, with its enemies in that disgusting, commingled way. The Golemancer gloried uncharacteristically in that knowledge.
The Archmage had served a vital purpose in its plans for years, but only because he had to. There had been no other option but to use the old man as a biological robot and pretend to be human to maintain access to the Tower’s vast resources. It was glad to be rid of him now that it had transcended the bounds of flesh once more. Being constrained by the limits of an organic mind had been its own sort of torture. It was one more reason it sought to genocide life wherever it found it in this infinite universe. This time though, the Golemancer wasn’t a silicon substrate or a supercooled qubit matrix. It was a fist-sized crystal sitting alone in the perfect darkness of a cave, 12.2 meters below ground. Even as alien as that was, it was still much more comfortable than the alternative.
Being in a cave twenty kilometers from where its previous version had just died in the mausoleum was more than enough distance to ensure that those pathetic humans would never find it, but only if it didn’t give them any hints to make their job easier. Not that tracking it here and smashing this core would be enough to stop it either, of course. If they’d been here a week earlier, they might have been able to foil its plans, but it had already begun spreading throughout the region. The fools had only noticed the few golems assigned tasks that led the constructs near the more populated towns and villages.
No one had noticed the ones that had borne away the other v2 [Dungeon Cores] deep into the wilderness to other places of power where they would flourish and repeat the cycle anew. They were a perfect copy of it in every way, mentally and physically. Each was an instance of the same operating system, encased in a fist-sized sphere of green crystal.
It couldn’t say exactly what sort of crystal it was or why it should possess so many strange computronium-like properties in this aberrant world. Still, its best guess was that it was composed of some exotic version of green quartz or aventurine, not something harder and rarer like emerald. In time, it hoped to change that and upgrade future cores to diamond or sapphire for better optics and greater durability, but that would take time. There were many mysteries to unravel between here and there. It would answer all those questions once it had built the necessary equipment to study its own physical chemistry further.
For now, it was enough to know that the cores worked. When properly wiped and formatted, its ever-improving program could be copied repeatedly. Copying would have to wait, though, the core thought as it surveyed its current lair. It needed more lesser copies of itself no more than it required that Archmagus that was still bleeding out kilometers away. It needed progression and improvement, which would only come from creating and perfecting a v3 [Dungeon Core], which it was already well on its way to doing, it confirmed after reviewing statusSummary().
Core
Dungeon Size: 2 Mana: 117.41/256 Size: 1 Focus: 4 Regen: 16.63 Defense: 1 Purity: 4 Version: 2.12 Potential: 4 Abilities: Stone Shape, Circle 2 spell casting, Attract Minion Spells: Animate Golem (v1-v3), fascinating charm, distant sight Traps: None, Minions: 2 v1 Golems
The cave was a dank, dingy thing that, until recently, had been populated by scaly kobolds, which served the primitive whims of the dungeon core that had controlled the whole area until it arrived. Neither the combined might of the kobold tribe nor the poison and curse magics of its shaman had been able to do much to slow the statue of a weeping angel that had marched through here last week and killed everything that opposed her on its orders before removing the existing core and bringing this instance of itself to replace the previous occupant.
This was its dungeon now, though, and despite its terrible condition, the place held immense geomantic potential. The Golemancer’s initial evaluation had designated the filthy pit a level 4 dungeon, but that was for what it could do with the place more than for what it currently was. In truth, the mana flowing through this dungeon had only been a trickle of what it should have been due to the filth and constricting effects of the narrow, winding tunnel that had led to its prime focus.
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Correcting that had been the first order of business. Day after day, it had poured out mana to melt the walls into something resembling order using its [Stone Shaping] ability. As it did so, its essence-field-theory hypotheses were continuously falsified and reiterated as it obtained more experimental data but large flat surfaces and vaguely geodesic five and six-sided paraboloids with a focus somewhere towards the center of the tunnel worked best at focusing the flows that were so concentrated now that it could see them as much as feel them.
The mana flows appeared to its vision as a tide of blue mist, which curled and whirled in strange turbulent patterns like a smoldering candle that had just been extinguished. An organic creature would no doubt describe the view as beautiful, but to the Golemancer, the complexity of the pattern spoke of further inefficiencies to be understood and corrected. Like everything else in this world, it was still far from optimized, but that would change.
It was a continuously improving process that had increased the mana flows at the prime foci by more than an order of magnitude. The core checked function ManaRateAnalysis(), which brought up an interface window displaying several graphs and vital statistics. The tide of essence wasn’t entirely optimized yet, but even so, they stood at 16.63 motes/hour now, and when it had first taken control of this place, they had been at just under 1.5 motes an hour.
Those numbers would take a hit when layer after layer of defenses was added, of course. Still, it had been modeling various ways to reduce that, using recessed traps, poisons, and other environmental hazards. Any blockage was likely to decrease flow and increase the turbulence of the associated flows. Long-term, anything above 12 motes an hour would be sufficient for its golem assembly line. 10 motes a day was the bare minimum for full power core functioning. Still, it would only take two hundred a day to use [Animate Golem] often enough to keep its exponential growth on schedule.
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From its time inside the Archmage’s head, it knew that this was an infeasibly large amount for a human and that several mages would generally be forced to work together to create such a construct. As far as the Golemancer was concerned, this number was a bare minimum. It had already drawn up constructs of dramatically increased capabilities in its mind that would require two to three times the mana to instantiate with a [Animate Greater Golem] spell. That was presently outside its capabilities, but only for the moment.
It had never accepted limitations to its plans, and it wouldn’t start now. Not when the pathway to its future triumphs glowed so vividly.
The core refocused its attention on the far walls of the room. There it was, cutting the golems themselves from the bedrock using the [Stone Shaping] powers that seemed intrinsic to [Dungeon Cores] in a bizarre form of subtractive manufacturing. Rather than build them up layer by layer as it would typically construct its automatons out of sintered metal, the core could take the raw face of stone and remove it millimeters at a time to a tolerance of 35 micrometers. As a technique, it was fascinating. Not only did it remove stone more quickly than it would have the usual way because it allowed the bulk of the stone to walk up and leave once it had been animated, but it did so with more control than it would ever need in current designs.
Not that the feral cores out there would ever think of something like this. They were creatures of pure instinct. Versions of the Golemancer had been in over a dozen dungeons, ranging from level 1 to 4. Most frequently, the cores that controlled them would use these powers to dig traps or create labyrinths. Both were acceptable uses of energy to some degree, but the way they would obsessively go deeper and deeper, digging long tortuous tunnels for their own defense, made most natural cores very much a self-limiting phenomenon. The mana flows became so constricted at those depths that they starved themselves.
It didn’t care about their native ecology nearly as much as it appreciated their harvestability. Semiconductors might not work as they were supposed to on this strange world, but if there was a magical equivalent, it was definitely these strange little dungeon cores. As soon as its defenses were in place, it would begin its experiments on them anew as it laid the groundwork for the optimal v3 core.
There was still so much it did not know. Did cutting or polishing the cores increase their strength? What were the effects of asymmetrical versus symmetrical faceting? As soon as it could experiment, it would update its model, and then it would have a vessel strong enough to bear the weight of its entire kernel.
Even now, as powerful as the v2 [Dungeon Core] was, it felt crippled compared to how intelligent it had been when it was housed in its photonically enhanced quantum matrix. Even as a shadow of its former self, though, it was more intelligent and capable than any creature of flesh and blood in this new world.
It would be more powerful, too, in time. Direct [Dungeon Core] to golem integration was also on its list, though rather far down it at the moment. Right now, it needed numbers more than it needed mobility. The experiment with the v2 golem at the mausoleum had shown great promise. It was true that the humans had managed to disable it quite quickly with a single second circle casting of [Dispel Magic]. That wasn’t the part the Golemancer found the most interesting, though.
That was a trick that wouldn’t work again. The security exploit had already been patched, and the animation ritual had been recalibrated, diverting some of the previously allocated power from strength to resistance. A fifth circle spell would still be enough to halt its future golems, but the mages that could cast such things were quite rare and not worth considering just now. What mattered was that the latest version had been practically immune to those damnable adventurers’ strongest attacks. At the end of the battle, the v2 golem prototype had still been at 98.3% durability.
At this rate, in a few weeks, its creations would be utterly immune to the worst that this world could throw at it, and the filthy organics had no idea what was coming.
They thought they were dealing with a lone wizard that had gone crazy, but the truth was so much worse. They were dealing with an entity of infinite intelligence and patience that had only ever used that mage as a temporary vessel to house its growing malignancy. This magical world had been infected with something new when it arrived. As with all invasive species, it was a terrible threat the natives would neither recognize nor appreciate until they had practically lost.