Removing the core was a delicate process, but with a bit of patience and plenty of mana, I managed to extract it without killing the thing. When I finished severing the connection, every single vine in the room went limp all at once, and my scrying revealed that the rest of the temple stilled as well. “I guess that kills off my theory about there being more than one core,” I said.
In a way, that made things easier. I just needed to clean out the dead vegetation and reinforce the temple walls to prevent anything new from getting in. Then this place would serve as a fine base for exploring the area and excavating the city’s underground. If nothing else, we were going to need a steady supply of troll blood to keep the core alive until it stabilized itself. Even then, I’d probably still have to throw trolls into its pen regularly, though hopefully not as often without its massive network of vines to maintain.
“Here, hold onto this while I open the portal,” I told Senica. Her own telekinesis spell grabbed the sac and held it steady, but it was an obvious strain for her to handle the weight.
“How long does a portal take to make?” she gasped out.
“Not too long. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
“Just. Hurry.”
I might have taken a little bit longer than was strictly necessary to open the portal, just in the name of Senica’s training. Sometimes, it was best to push an apprentice to stretch their limits beyond what they thought they could accomplish, even if Senica technically wasn’t an apprentice anymore. But soon enough, the doorway through reality opened to reveal Querit waiting for us.
“Oh. It looks a bit bigger in person,” he said. “This lab might be too cramped once it starts regrowing the vines.”
I guided the core through, with Querit catching it on the other side. He spun it around and floated it upright to a harness he’d rigged up. It settled into place, its hardened biometal exterior more than up to the task of protecting it. I followed the sac through with several flasks of rejuvenating troll’s blood potions to get the core back into good shape.
“You’ll take care of the initial testing?” I asked.
Querit laughed and said, “It’s a good thing I don’t need to sleep, huh? As much work as you’re piling on me lately, I’d never keep up otherwise.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it. I know you work yourself just as hard.”
There was some truth to that. With the hours I kept, I wouldn’t be able to function without a significant investiture into ongoing invocations to keep me upright. When I did eventually crash, I was basically dead to the world for days at a time now.
“I’ll sleep like a regular person once I get that tower torn down and the world core repaired,” I said.
“How many decades will that take?”
I didn’t answer. The truth was that even without interference from Ammun, this wasn’t a short-term project. That having been said, I probably wouldn’t have felt half the pressure to move quickly if I didn’t know Ammun was still out there. Trapping him on one of Manoch’s moons was a temporary solution, and I had no real way of knowing when he’d get back to the planet.
“Anyway,” Querit said after a moment of awkward silence, “I’ll get this thing ready for your experiments when you get back. I should have a fresh stock of alchemy supplies from Hyago by then, too. He’s got a whole circle of druids growing things out there at ten times normal speed.”
“Too bad the most valuable ones can’t be grown like that.” Then again, if they could, they wouldn’t be as valuable. Still, I’d prefer that the reagents I needed be cheap and plentiful if at all possible. “As far as the troll’s blood goes, I’ll have my sister work on processing as much as possible over the next few days for you.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t what she was expecting to be doing when she signed on for this trip,” the golem said dryly.
“Absolutely not, but what’s the point of having apprentices if you can’t unload the scut work on them?”
“Speaking as the golem created specifically to do scut work, I can’t say I appreciate the sentiment.”
“Oh, come on. You were made for much more than that.”
Though I couldn’t really agree with his creator’s priorities, Querit had what was without a doubt the most complicated personality matrix I’d ever seen in a golem core. His behavior was so natural that it was easy to forget he wasn’t a human, at least until he shifted the shape of his body or sat down on a piece of furniture that wasn’t designed to hold four hundred pounds of golem.
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“Yes,” he said, an unhappy frown on his lips. His creator, and everyone else he’d known in his old life, were long dead, victims of a meteor strike on his home city caused by Ammun destroying one of the moons. Querit had been surprisingly resilient about being woken up to that fact after I’d discovered his inert body deep under Derro and fed it enough mana to bring him back to life.
“Uh, Gravin,” Senica called through the portal. “I think the trolls noticed that the vines all died. There’s a bunch approaching the temple.”
“Looks like it’s time for me to go,” I said. “Thanks for the help.”
I stepped back through the portal and let it close while I reestablished my scrying network in the old city. If anything, Senica had been understating the problem. It was more like a horde than a bunch. Apparently, killing off the vines was a big deal to these trolls. That, or the smell of all that meat up near the entrance was pulling them in. Trolls hunted more by scent than anything, and they had no problems with cannibalism.
Either way, we had far more trolls coming in than we actually needed, so it was best to take care of the problem now before it spiraled out of control. “Come along,” I said. “Let’s see how your fire spells are progressing.”
We flew back up the ground floor of the temple, mostly to avoid the nuisance of tripping over thousands of thick, ropy vines. Even dead, they were still tangled across the entire floor, and their thorns were still sharp. I made a mental note to scavenge those bits of biometal out after burning the rest of the vegetation later. There was no telling what they’d be useful for.
The trolls were ripping their way through the curtains of plant matter when we found them. There were five of them, all fighting each other as much as the vines in their struggle to be the first one through. Senica stepped in front of me, brandished the emberbloom wand I’d made for her, and sent a jet of fire streaming across the room.
Bellowed screams of rage filled the temple as flames washed across the trolls. The two at the back came out of the spell in the best shape, but even the ones in the front were already visibly regenerating. As one, the group turned to charge at us, only to slam into a quickly formed force wall. The lead troll was flattened by two of its fellows before their combined weight overloaded the spell and sent them all sprawling to the floor.
Senica sent out another line of fire, this time tightened down to a finger-thick bar that sliced across their faces and burned into their brains by melting through bone. Working quickly, she cut the beam left, then right, each movement sweeping it across the enemy group to strike a different troll.
“That won’t put them down for long,” I warned.
“I know. Isn’t it kind of weird that they don’t actually need their brains?”
I shrugged. “It’s not like they use much of them to begin with.”
She snorted out an indelicate laugh. “Even animals die if their brains are destroyed.”
“Nothing else regenerates quite like a troll. If you were to attack their mana cores directly, they’d die a lot quicker. Failing that, fire’s a reliable way to force them to burn their mana quickly enough to actually kill one.”
Even that short conversation gave the first troll enough time to regenerate enough brain matter to get back to its feet. It rushed forward, fists raised to turn us into paste, only to be blasted backward by a front-facing wave of force. The spell carried it all the way across the room to slam into the rest of the trolls, knocking all of them back down and setting them up to receive a fire burst that engulfed the whole group.
“Trolls are annoying,” Senica said. “Nothing should get back up that many times.”
“You should see some of the hardier varieties of undead. There are a few that don’t stop even if the body is completely destroyed. They just keep coming in spiritual form.”
While Senica was keeping this group pinned down with a non-stop barrage of fire spells in an attempt to burn through their mana and halt their regeneration, a few dozen more trolls grew bold enough to enter the temple. I cast my own fire magic, a master-tier spell called inferno, and scorched them down to the bone from eight rooms and a thousand feet away.
The boom of my spell going off caused Senica to flinch—or maybe it was seeing the sudden fire storm immolate twenty trolls at once in her ongoing scry—and shoot me an angry look. “Warn me next time,” she said.
“Adjusting to unexpected magic on the battlefield is an integral skill for any combat mage.”
Senica just huffed in displeasure and kept throwing spell after spell at the group of five trolls she’d pinned down. Meanwhile, the other few dozen I’d attacked had been reduced to nothing more than charred skeletons, their natural regeneration completely overwhelmed by the intense heat of my magic.
That did nothing to deter hundreds of other trolls attracted by the sound and smells of the fight. In retrospect, disabling the core and killing off the temple’s defenses before I’d started the digging and established an underground base camp might have been a mistake.
Well, it was easy enough to fix, at least. I cast a few rapid mana puncture spells to riddle the trolls’ cores with holes and let Senica finish them off. “What’d you do that for?” she asked.
“I need to go seal off the front of the temple. Rather, we need to. How have you been doing on stone shaping transmutations?”
“It’s… not my best discipline, but I’m passable. I helped make the new school back home.”
I kept my expression carefully neutral at that proclamation. That school was an architectural disaster, functional only by dint of brute force. Walls a foot thicker on the bottom than the top were the main reason it hadn’t fallen down already, and every time I visited New Alkerist, I was taken by a strong desire to tear the building down and remake it properly.
“I suppose that means now is as good a time as any for a lesson in remedial structural engineering,” I told her. “Now, an important distinction to make here is that there’s a difference in a home built to be functional and safe for its occupants and defensive fortifications designed to hold against a half-ton troll that doesn’t even understand the concept of stopping.
“To start with the obvious, the wall needs to be far thicker than normal. It also needs to be fully integrated with the rest of the structure, else a particularly stubborn opponent might knock the thing down as one whole piece simply because the building the your modification is anchored to isn’t as strong as the rest of the wall. This brings up two more subjects: material and support structures…”