I should have been thankful that the Necro-System had been trying to protect me in its own way. Leaving the floating green skull with white and green lines around it I found myself inside the metal shell that formed the rough pilot frame of the modified Mining Drone I had first found myself inside.
The sensation of turning entirely incorporeal from a physical form was close to meaningless, I simply transitioned from one state of energy into another. I didn’t have a physical form, a body or even the need to breath but there were strict limits.
If I was forced out of here then my soul would have a chance at being devoured by one of the two Immortals or one of their multitude of legions. Failing that, the group of adventurers would likely have a priest or priestess with them or even a paladin who would banish my soul and trap it for harvesting. The fact that I was aware of the twin afterlife’s controlled which both powered and trapped this backwards world didn’t mean that others did not, it simply meant that they accepted the state of affairs and believed the two immortals were gods.
Thankfully, I didn’t need a physical form to interact with the prototype self-bonding machine which formed the core operating system and support for the Necro-Mecha and Necro-System.
I would find the skeleton pilot form of my dead Master or Mistress and blend with it once more to take a larger degree of control of the Mining Drone. I did consider how physical damage to the form would be experienced by myself but I had long grown used to pain, gruelling labour and effort.
The basic galactic education gave me a rough idea of how to operate and request, part of it was based on popular forms of media in which humans piloted giant robots which flew through the air and even fought with both swords and longer-range tools called projectile weapons. They came in a variety of forms including plasma and lasers but I doubted that this roughly hewn Mining Drone came with standard advanced weaponry.
‘Necro-System, provide me with an update of damage received and immediately available tools. There should be a repair unit included with you, it should be standard. I know you have more potential in the Necro-Mecha even with the flawed designs of necromancy twisted with your base core technology. I will not resort to trying to fight off a band of seasoned adventurers with draconic claws and brute strength and force. First run a systems diagnostic, give me an update of both online and offline tools available at my disposal and then I need to see through the eyes of the Necro-Mecha to see what we need to deal with. Are there any immediate threats in the vicinity? Leave the autonomous combat routine online for the present, actually, leave autonomous movement on but allow for my manual control of activated tools.’
…. …..Campos System not located….Necro-Mecha Administrator Highest Level of Authority… …..Mind Palace Designate: Castle of the Damned active….minimal power drain... ….Autonomous Movement Active…. …..Partial-Autonomous Combat Routine Running at 92% efficiency…. ….Power Reserves Available at 89%….. …..Additional Boost to Power Reserves through Blood Ritual Confirmed… ….Activating Inactive Systems…. ….Warning: Redundant Flame Thrower Located...Advise immediate disposal due to lack of correct integration and low-efficiency of weapon. Warning: Redundant Flame Thrower Fuel Reserves Empty...Warning: Advise immediate dumping of redundant bio-magic fuel tanks…. ….. …..Checking Memory Capacity and Consumption for Mind Palace… ….Direct Overmind Override Statutory Limited Capacity Increased… ….Scanning Memories of Absorbed Hosts….scanning….complete... The space around me was boring to say the least. I flew down inside the enclosed metal space to the skeleton sitting there in the pilots seat. The blue helmet on top of it enclosing the skull remained much the same except for gold and red lines running down the sides. As I watched they flowed with energy and spread across parts of the skeleton, the self-improvement bonding machine had obviously been supplied with more power as the legs of the skeleton were now covered with the same deep blue material. The resemblance to the dead pilot of the crashed spacecraft was close enough now that I realised that I had never actually seen the physical form of the pilot. Perhaps the reason that the vehicle that moved between planets had crashed was down to the prototype bonding machine consuming the flesh and blood of the pilot and then attempting to hijack the guidance controls, forcing it to slam into the mountain near the ruined castle. The theory fed back into my heightened awareness that there was a consciousness or a remnant of one which had hid itself, deep, deep within the software of the proto-type bonding machine and even into the essential structures of the Mining Drone as it was being constructed. There was something there which held awareness but held little interest in my own actions beyond vague corrupted messages. I could have gone back and learnt how to read the series of numbers which had been sent to me but I didn’t expect to find much now was it a good use of time. Reading through the stream of information coming from the Necro-System which formed the bond between myself, the Mining Drone, the proto-type bonding system and myself as Necro-Mecha I did struggle a little to understand the context fully. A basic level of awareness didn’t turn me into a genius regarding autonomous systems and much of the backload had been taken up on my behalf. I simply provided the will and the intent for the system to follow in the complete absence of any artificial intelligence or perhaps the entire thing simply ran on a human soul. ‘Necro-System, I want you to maintain the current virtual reality construct. They’re my Ladies and Gentleman of former bone and I’m going to keep them safe. We need staff, resources and more workers. Even management but I have a much better idea where I’m going to draw those from. Dump the flame throwing device and fuel, we can do much better than that. Tell me, before you give me a list of available tools did my old Master or Mistress develop a proto-type version of the Mining Drone? I’m quite sure they never threw anything away that could be useful. We’re going to need a distraction for those adventurers and most of the undead under control are either dead or turned to ashes from the flames.’ Granted that I saw that my power reserves were presently at 89% and I gained power through essentially eating the souls and blood of sentient and non-sentient creatures it wasn’t going to be an issue to gain more. ‘Priority command, put construct into stasis mode. Reduce outgoing power flow for Mind Palace. I repeat I need a list of available tools for me to view. As far as I know the Necro-Mech has taken damage and we’re standing a short distance from an immediate objective while a band of adventurers are presently on their way. We need a strategy to kill or incapacitate them before even more arrive. There’s a reason that I grew up on an isolated village high in the mountains, the world is at war and continues to be so. Tools. Give a list of inactive and active tools. This Mining Drone is capable of so much more and you keep holding back on me. Thank you for your assistance with the Castle though, the name was a bit strong but my appearance and the companionship. Truly, thank you for saving them. My Ladies and Gentleman of Bone appreciated it.’ The Necro-System gave me a list but I was less than impressed. This was meant to be a Mining Drone and there was deep untouched potential inside the prototype bonded self-improvement device. The ownership was strange though, there was facets of the text which I understood but were also close to alien in my mind. A Queen owned her Kingdom and the two Immortals had divided the planet between themselves except for several isolated regions or those neutral areas which acted as trading or recruitment centres. I knew little of them. A corporation was an artificial law which owned things. In that sense I was the same. I read through the list in further detail to see what I had missed. [Standard Mining Drone – Property of Overmind Corporation. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Company dissolved due to Galactic Standard Trading Laws. -Power Supply/Blood Sacrifice Rune Array (Battery Pack 86% Charged – Fully Functioning) -Drill Unit (Fully Functioning -Temporarily Offline) -3D Scanner/Detector Lenses (Screen Fully Functioning -Temporarily Offline) -Mechanised Shovel (Fully Functioning -Temporarily Offline) -Nanobot Self-Repair Unit (Fully Functioning -Temporarily Offline -Drone Arms/Legs/Body (9% Damage, Fully Functional) -Internal Ore Processing Unit (Fully Functioning -Temporarily Offline -External Mechanical Tool Set (Currently Deactivated. – No Present power drain.) -Weapon Systems: Campos System Permission Only (16% – Locked/Disabled.) -Prototype Hologram Projection - (Currently Deactivated. – No Present power drain.) -Attached Base Incendiary Weapon (In Progress of Removal) ….Please report immediate database corruption to nearest Overmind Facility for latest update and guidance…. …..Unable to connect….trying….unable to connect….trying….unable to connect….trying… ‘Stop that. I grow tired of this and that with Overmind. You can stop it, frankly I’m truly not impressed with the lack of capabilities. There must be other aspects that are hidden but...wait. Useful. Perhaps. Weapons are for the weak and desperate. Thank you for the list. I need to see through the eyes of the Necro-Mecha once more to see that caused that minor damage to the physical form we both need to inhabit.’ Once more lines of numbers rose up and spilled outwards as though a wave of energy pulsed outwards. I still had little interest in learning how to read the numbers but I understood an intent from it. Simply, that there was something that supported my effort and applauded my actions. 01001111 01110110 01100101 01110010 01101101 01101001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01101000 01101001 01100010 01101001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01100101 01101110 01100001 01100010 01101100 01100101 01100100 00101110 00100000 01000100 01100101 01100110 01100001 01110101 01101100 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01000001 01100100 01101101 01101001 01101110 01101001 01110011 01110100 01110010 01100001 01110100 01101111 01110010 00100000 01000011 01101111 01101110 01110100 01110010 01101111 01101100 00101110 00100000 01010100 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01101001 01110010 00100000 01110000 01101111 01110111 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01001100 01100001 01100100 01111001 00101110 I chose to enter the blue helmet and immediately damage notifications popped up in my field of vision as I looked out through a red tinted screen. Then I remembered that I had never changed the order to alter the data flow and my outside vision remained limited. A small window of the red tinted lenses showed me a narrow scope of the room we were inside. A shift in my view occurred when the arms of the Necro-Mecha reached up and literally ripped off a draconic style mouth and jaw along with several tubes which were dropped out of my line of sight. ‘Goodbye fire thrower. You did a decent job but keeping liquid flammable fuel aboard this Mining Drone is a hard no, especially if the adventurers either have a magic caster or a rogue with a talent using a bow or crossbow.’ The walls of the room were barren and old and covered in written language forms which were entirely unknown to me but I recognised my old Master or Mistress using previously. The fact that I couldn’t read it wasn’t surprising as it had been drawn on with specially treated blood which I had been forced to collect in buckets but had never seemed to dry up. Directly at the back was an altar with a statue on the top and torchlight illuminating the body and face of the figure. If my mind hadn’t been suitably educated I might even have felt fear in the familiar visage of one of the two Immortals who controlled the planet and who we chose to either serve or defy. In in my isolated mountain village we had small shrines for both, not because we wanted to worship either, we wanted isolation and peace even with a hard life but because it was the best way to avoid unnecessary conflict until it finally came for us. The Dark Emperor, an Immortal whose origins were related in a hundred different stories. He wanted freedom without restriction, guidance without law and the rule of the strong, the monstrous and the insane. His way was absolute chaos according to some and those who gambled often whispered his name for good luck. His opposing counterpart the Light Empress believed in order and organisation to an extreme level, where people would live according to doctrine as puppets inside her ever-stagnant empire. In truth the stories behind both of them were sufficiently contradictory that I believed that they simply encouraged the growth of the tales to reinforce their own personal authority and their right to rule and control their own sides. The red tinted screen lit up and I was able to zoom in closer after noticing an object which held my exact attention, I would have instructed the Necro-System to turn the altar into fine fragments of stone and dust if not for it. A simple design, a bare stone tablet but with a colour that was oddly strange within this place. There had been large pillars in this room once which had been smashed apart, the altar itself was untouched but that could have been the blue covering which had spread across the tablet which had spread thin tendrils outwards. My old Master or Mistress either had managed to obtain a piece of the crashed ship and bonded with it or they had been implanted with a portion as a precaution when they had been busy building the Necro-Mecha. There were two large bodies, mostly flesh once but massive areas of it was melted fat and clearly blackened flesh. The shape was roughly human, if a human body had been cut into pieces and then stacked with a dozen more bodies into a rough bipedal shape to form a guardian of sorts. ‘Interesting. But something in here caused you damage. Ah, flesh golems. Of a type I don’t recognise and I had to clean down and wash a lot of them. The smell in the first week alone almost made me want to run away from this place. Strange, they’re half-melted. I can see why the fuel reserves for the flame thrower ran out. I venture that you burned more than I expected during your time here, little wonder that you suffered damage. I only focused on setting alight the main chambers, not the rest of the structure.’ I wanted more control than viewing through a red tinted screen. This wasn’t working. I had two choices, either inhabit the skeleton pilot form covered with blue armour or inhabit the Necro-Mecha. I chose the latter. ‘Necro-System, I want to fully inhabit the Mining Drone, give me full physical control and sensation biofeedback. I need to see the world through the real eyes, not this screen. To feel the body as it were my own. Enable partial-autonomous movement and combat sequences to assist me.’ Pain washed over me as my skin became metal and my eyes became hard crystal lenses with red filling them. My body ached but I knew strength. True physical strength far beyond anything I had experienced with my former life. Then I lost control and began to tip over to the side as I instinctively stuck out a clawed metal arm to break my controlled fall.