Five weeks remained. Ammun’s army was broken and the civilians had been stashed away. My allies were as kitted out as I could make them. The Order hadn’t dared to show its face anywhere on Olpahun, at least not that the gestalt had seen. If they were back over here, they’d come some other way than their chain of island teleports.
And I’d wasted more time than I was comfortable with setting up my little honeypot to draw all these golems in. It had taken me a few days to work out the specifics, but once I’d figured out how the golems perceived the world around them, it wasn’t too hard to set up some mana shaped to trip their targeting systems and string it out as bait. A slow stream of them were steadily making their way to the portal I’d opened over the middle of the ocean and happily tipping themselves through it to sink down into the sea.
Incidentally, while studying the cores, I’d confirmed that they had been mass-produced by the tens of thousands at a conservative estimate. The design collected all sorts of matter—dust, dirt, loose rocks, whatever it could get that wasn’t alive—and transmuted it into a new body. It wasn’t efficient, but considering the amount of ambient heavy mana in the area they’d been assigned to guard, it didn’t need to be.
They weren’t so much digging themselves out as cycling through the process of making new bodies out of the surrounding ground, being crushed again as they tried to move, and then building another new body in a glacial effort to free themselves. If the mana levels didn’t drop, every one of them would likely eventually resurface, but I expected the cores to deactivate long before most of them got anywhere near open air.
Water was still flooding in and would probably someday turn the rubble-strewn chasm into a lake, but that would take several more months. At the moment, it was just a collection of waterfalls pouring into an unimaginably huge pile of loose stone, and it was nowhere near the level needed to even reach the top of the pile, let alone the top of the pit.
I did make a mental note to map out where the water might be spilling into below ground, just on the off chance that a number of those golem cores were swept away by the current. A few here and there weren’t a big deal, but I didn’t need a thousand of them showing up on a shore somewhere, having rebuilt themselves from sand and gravel and trudging across the bottom of the sea.
The ones walking through the portal wouldn’t be getting anywhere near the coastline, not any time in the next few decades, at least. In a century, I might be addressing the problem again, but hopefully at that point I’d have the time and resources to dispose of the cores properly. As long as they were out of Ammun’s reach for the next few months, I was happy with my current solution.
After getting everything set up and hanging around for a few hours to make sure it was working, I quickly teleported back across the continent to my demesne. The gestalt would keep an eye on things from here and let me know if I needed to take any further actions, but I was confident that wouldn’t be necessary.
The instant I arrived back home, I knew something was wrong. Someone had bypassed the wards, and the list of people who could do that was small enough to count on my fingers. Half the people keyed into the wards couldn’t even get here, people like my parents and Nailu. Senica could do it if she flew the whole way, but I wasn’t confident in her sense of direction to actually find this one specific valley hidden in the mountains.
The only person who could actually get here under their own power and wouldn’t be hindered by my wards was Querit. A quick sweep of my demesne confirmed my suspicions – the golem was standing in front of the combat frame I’d built for him, examining it carefully with a set of divinations.
I appeared next to him and said, “You’re back.”
“Yes,” he said absently. “When did you start working on this?”
“A month or so before you left.”
“This… is a lot of potential. Are you sure you trust someone else with this much power?”
“I wouldn’t have built it if I didn’t trust you with it,” I told him. It wasn’t nearly strong enough to threaten someone like me or Ammun, but from what I’d seen of the rest of the world’s powers, it would probably put Querit in a solid third place. Grandfather might give him a run for it today, but I was confident Querit could beat him if he had a few weeks to get used to everything the new frame could do first.
Standing upright next to Querit was a pedestal of what looked like quartz, three feet tall and a foot across. It had shielding enchantments woven into it, but it obviously contained a significant amount of mana. Even if I couldn’t get a read on exactly how much was in there, a storage crystal that massive was a rarity.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“What’s this?” I asked, gesturing to the pedestal.
“All the mana I could beg, borrow, or steal over the past few months. It should be enough to get you to stage nine.”
I blinked in surprise. Of all the things he could have been up to, I hadn’t expected him to be out campaigning for resources for me. Querit had a solid grasp of how quickly my demesne produced mana, so if he thought he’d gathered a significant enough amount to affect my advancement, there was even more mana trapped in that quartz than I’d thought.
It didn’t change anything, however. Even with perfect transference, it wouldn’t be enough to finish charging my ascension chamber. And even if by some miracle it was, I still needed to test the design before I actually took the plunge and tried to step across that final boundary. The time constraints alone prevented me from reaching stage nine before Ammun returned.
“I appreciate the thought, but it doesn’t work that way,” I said. “I’m sorry you wasted your time on—”
“No. It’s enough,” Querit said. “Examine it. You’ll see.”
“There isn’t enough time even if—”
“Yes, there is.”
“Querit, the process isn’t as easy as you seem to think it is.”
He shook his head. “I know it’s not easy, but the only thing stopping you from advancing is your own fear.”
I gave him a flat look. “I’m done discussing this. This changes nothing. You don’t know what goes into the last step if you think the lack of mana is the only problem to be overcome.”
“I do,” he said. “You need someone else to serve as your anchor to keep you from dissolving into the Astral Realm and a beacon for you to find your way back.”
“That’s a big part of it, yes,” I said in exasperation. “Even if I knew anyone strong enough to do it, it’s still complicated. The sheer amount of knowledge that’s been lost makes it impossible.”
“No. I can do it,” he argued. “And you know I can do it, but it would mean trusting me.”
“Yes. It would. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t trust you with my life after having only known you for a year or so.”
“Keiran, if we could afford to wait, that would be one thing. I’m sure you’ve had longer relationships end in blood, ones that you thought were far more solid than our friendship. I’m not offended that you’re having a hard time trusting me if even a quarter of the stories I’ve heard about your life are true.
“What upsets me is that we both know your advancement to stage nine is the best—maybe only—chance this whole planet has to avoid Ammun becoming its permanent ruler. Even if you don’t trust me to be altruistic, are you really so stupid that you can’t trust my desire to preserve my own life? I didn’t think you were, but every chance you get, you prove otherwise.”
“Enough,” I said, cutting him off before he could get going. “It’s easy to say from your perspective. ‘Just trust me with your life. Let me hold the knife to your throat. It’s fine. I won’t actually kill you.’ And no, I don’t think you’d do anything like that, but it’s a big risk for me and no risk for you, Querit. Worse, you’re a golem. Someone could literally alter your personality if they got access to your golem core. I have no idea who you’ve been in contact with lately. You might not even be the same person you were when you left.”
“So check.”
That brought me up short. I stared at Querit for a moment while I tried to think of what to say. “Your core?” I asked stupidly.
“You’re right. I’m asking for a whole lot of trust from you, so it’s only fair that I extend some of my own, right? Check my core. Make sure it hasn’t been tampered with. My life will literally be in your hands while you do it, the same as yours will be in mine when you advance to stage nine.”
The cynical part of my mind whispered that it was a trap, that he could be willing to risk his own life just for a chance at taking mine. I’d had ‘friends’ that had spent far more time with me, only to betray me in the end. At least twice, they’d been planning it all along. But on the other hand, Querit wasn’t wrong about checking his core. Unlike a living person, I could quite literally examine his stored memories and knowledge. It wasn’t foolproof, but it was a lot more assurance than I could get with anyone else.
I just hadn’t expected him to let me. That, more than anything else, convinced me that he might actually be sincere in his offer, that I might actually be safe in his care. And he wasn’t wrong. Defeating Ammun was by no means a certainty, despite everything I’d done to prepare. Advancing to stage nine would go a long, long way toward making sure I won that fight.
“Alright,” I said after a minute of deliberation. “You win. I am going to examine every inch of your core, every single enchantment, all the memories stored in them. If I am satisfied, we’ll begin practicing the magic I need you to be able to use. You’ll need to withstand heavy mana for an extended length of time, and we’ll have to stress test your body to ensure it can hold up.”
“I already know the spells,” he said, apparently unperturbed at the idea of having his entire life and identity laid bare before me.
“Good. A quick review and a demonstration of your capabilities will save us a few days.”
The whole thing would still take probably three weeks, although most of that would be the vetting process. Going over Querit’s entire life was not something I could do in a leisurely afternoon, but if we were doing this, I was going to do it right. I’d also need to prepare a new room for it, something separate from my hidden titan core. Nobody could ever know about that.
The new room would be equally disconnected from the world at large. If I died trying to reach stage nine, I wanted that place to become Querit’s tomb. I would be making that abundantly clear to him, as well. I didn’t care if that damaged our friendship afterwards, so long as we were both around to hate each other.
He hefted the chunk of quartz with telekinesis and gestured at me. “Lead the way. There’s no point in delaying, not if we’ve got so little time left.”
And so we started preparations for what would be the ultimate show of trust for both of us, and quite possibly the one thing that would tip the scales firmly in our favor during the upcoming battle.