Caesar continued to talk, but Stew couldn't focus on what he was saying. "Raek, Garrik, take notes. I have to go have a look at something. Don't make any deals while I'm away."
"Are you sure?" Raek's confusion and irritation was thick and palpable. "I would think this negotiation would be your first priority right now."
"I'll be right back." Stew swapped his attention to Beryl, who was tidying up some unidentifiable tools and items. Stew ignored them. He locked Beryl's eyes on the bizarre new creature that he could feel in his mind waiting for direction.
It was like the diagram in general outline, but instead of the goofy muppet cannon he had been afraid he would find, it was a dark, sinister thing with sturdy legs, a bulbous body, and an extremely long barrel snout. It felt like an all-terrain crocodile. Everything, that is, except the eyes.
The eyes were brilliant yellow and staring, fixated on Beryl. They were bird-of-prey eyes, far-seeing, dedicated to one purpose. Stew looked at its stats.
10:17
Unnamed
Unnamed Hybrid Species - Level 1
This is a living artillery unit that combines organic resilience with mechanical precision. This creature has a symbiotic relationship with a Thermal Slime. A Thermal Slime may reside within the beast's internal cavity. When the beast is ready to fire, the Thermal Slime rapidly heats up, creating pressurized steam that propels the cannon's projectiles at blistering speeds. The higher the level of the Thermal Slime, the more powerful the cannon's blasts become.
Mana Cost - 1 / day
Water Cost - 1 / day
Health 5/5
Agility 3
Strength 4
Constitution 18
Actions: 1/1
Action Recharge: 1 / day
Combat Skills:
Suppressive Fire - Level 1
Precision Fire - Level 1
Special attack:
Cannonade - Fire continuously until all ammunition is spent.
Special abilities:
Produces Cannon Shot - May produce ten reinforced stone cannonballs per day.
How much is 1 water, and where am I going to get that? I guess I'll need that aqueduct too.
Stew swapped into the creature's mind and felt directly what he had sensed before. Even though this creature was made of stone, it was no golem. It was more like the panthers or the wolves but colder, more single-minded. He had been considering naming it something punny like "Arty," but there was just no way he could bring himself to do it.
Everything he had done up until this point, every creature he had summoned could do different things and could be thought of in different ways. A cow, kittens, Cecil was just a funny skeleton. Even Lorelei was more than just a hungry ghost haunting the swamp and stalking her victims. The revenants, well, they were just for the atmosphere. At least he could tell himself those things.
He had crossed a line with this creature. This was a living weapon, and he wasn't sure if he wanted to be the kind of person who created living weapons.
He felt Raek over their mental link. He was concerned, frustrated, even anxious. It was a strange feeling to sense in the seasoned rogue who was seemingly afraid of nothing.
"What is it?" Stew swapped back to Garrik's mind in a tent filled with uncomfortable silence. Ceasar was looking straight into Garrik's eyes with a look somewhere between disgust and amusement. Garrik was terrified but kept it together.
Instead of answering, Garrik said out loud. "The dungeon's attention is back. Please continue."
Caesar spoke slowly and firmly as if he was correcting a child. "I have seen what I came to see. You are an Incarnate, but also a very young dungeon, too weak to defend yourself. If you swear allegiance to Rome I will see that you are protected. Deny me, and my legion will sit behind our fortifications and wait for the five legions that are approaching now to reinforce this position. Meanwhile, I will watch the Helvetii strip you to the walls. Maybe you will put up a better fight than I expect. You claim to have a few surprises. That is all well and good. There will simply be fewer Helvetii for me to defeat. If you somehow win, then I will conquer you instead. Rome has no tolerance for wild dungeons."
The other Romans looked grim and sure. It seemed Caesar wasn't the only one who thought Stew was weak. The only exception was Spartacus, whose expression was as stern as the rest but whose hand rubbed the pommel of his sword. It was a nervous tick from the arena, maybe, but it made Stew think that this hardline approach didn't fill the seasoned fighter with confidence. Or he was just itching for a fight. Stew had to admit that he was no great judge of character.
They were all waiting for an answer, and another delay was only making them more certain he was weak and afraid. Maybe they were right. "It's an interesting offer." All he could do was bluff and play for time. To do what? He wasn't sure. Think. Come up with something to convince Caesar to hold off. "I will give you an answer at sunrise."
"Sunset." Caesar said. "I won't have my time wasted while you make whatever preparations you think will change my mind."
Feeling like a kid caught cheating on a test. Stew withdrew from Garrik. He could feel the dismay in the young Roman and echos of calculation in Raek's thoughts. They were worried that they had thrown in with the wrong side. Why shouldn't they be?
He hadn't broadcast this conversation to the rest of the dungeon this time, and he was glad he hadn't. But it meant no one else knew how much he had on his mind, so when Ba'Rush reached out, it was with some urgency.
"You will want to hear this. Send Raek, too." Ba'Rush was in the tent with the surviving Helvetian assassins. When Stew swapped to his mind he saw the two prisoners staring up from the ground still unbound, with pleading expressions on their faces. "Tell me again. The dungeon is listening," Ba'Rush said.
The two assassins lowered their eyes, and the older of the two spoke, "Great, um, Dungeon. We regret our crimes against you, but we had no choice." He glanced up, then back at that ground. "We were compelled, and now we have failed. Our families." There was a catch in his voice. "Our families will pay the price. We ask…" He looked at his compatriot, who nodded. "We ask not for forgiveness or mercy. We ask, no beg, for." He looked up. There was a deep and burning rage in his eyes. "We ask for vengeance. We could not stand against this tyrant, but we ask that you make him pay."
Stunned, Stew forgot his own concerns for a moment. This wasn't what he expected to hear. He nodded. "Go on."
"There is very little time. Magic hides the main force. They must be at the pass by now. You must warn the Romans and ready yourself. There's nothing more he can do to us, but don't let Merlin have his victory." The man shuddered hard like he was shaking off a fever. "He'll do things that can't be undone."
Stew had seen the Roman surveillance maps. The Helvetian force was far away and camped. Maybe the assassins had been fed false information in case they were caught? "How many–"
Stew didn't get the words out with Ba'Rush's voice before both assassins began to shake violently, foaming at the lips and bending backward until their backs snapped and were still.
"Poison," Ba'Rush said to one of the Legion guards. "Didn't you search them?"
The guard rushed forward, by Ba'Rush waved him back. "There's nothing to do for them now, and if the toxin is meant for assassins, it might make them deadly to touch."
Stew's mind reeled. He felt like the world was closing in on him. Maybe Caesar was right. He was too weak. He didn't belong here. He left Ba'Rush's mind, remembering that Ba'Rush wanted Raek but was too overwhelmed to talk to the rogue right now.
He heard Bossy's calm voice in his mind then. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. You seem to come from a kinder world. This is a harsh place, a broken place. I could tell from the beginning that you were different. Your System is so unusual. The things an Incarnate creates are not random. They are all attuned to you and come from your deepest self. Every name you choose becomes a destiny for your creations. It's not a bad thing to be different from these people. Though the gladiator rebellion forced Rome to free her gladiators, they still keep slaves in their fields and in their cities under one pretext or another. Carthaginians keep slaves and and sacrifice children to their gods. The Halevetians are no different. You are too gentle for this world. I think I would have liked to have seen the world you come from."
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Stew could feel that she meant to comfort him, but it only confirmed his fear that he was just what Caesar suspected. A delivery driver dropped in the middle of a magical war.
He needed time to think.
The warning from the assassins gnawed at him. He swapped his attention to the controller golem leading the ten other golems up the mountain. The sky was a brilliant blue here, and the golems walked along a snow-dusted ridge, each carrying a glowing blue cube with sure steps, unbothered by the cold and wind.
The far end of the pass was just visible past an outcropping.
With golem sight, he could see a subtle flickering in a long line along the middle of the pass. It disappeared around the mountain at the bend. It was a little like seeing the bandits through the trees in the forest, but there were no trees here or anything to block the golem's line of site. This was something else. He turned the golems toward the outcropping. It was a wide wedge of stone that jutted out over empty air. It would give him an unobstructed view of the entire pass.
When the golems arrived, there was something already there. A small creature the size of a golem's fist. As the line of Golem's drew closer, he could see that it was a massive toad with brilliant green eyes. It shuffled around to face the golems.
"This is your plan, Ceasar?" A young man's voice came from the toad. "Gifts? I was hoping for something a little more entertaining. When I heard you only brought one legion, I thought you might be planning to at least pull some '300' stuff or maybe build some fortifications. You Romans, you're all about fortifications, but here we are marching right through the pass, and my scouts say you're still sitting down there playing sitter with the baby dungeon." The toad turned back to look out over the pass. "Just drop those and leave."
Stew stopped the golems. "Bossy, Merlin is from my world, or one just like it." The casual movie reference wouldn't have meant anything to Ceasar, or maybe Merlin was toying with him.
Bossy snorted. "That sounds just like Bob, the old con. He likes to bring incarnates and their Nemesis from the same world to make things interesting." The scorn ran deep in Bossy's mind. Stew would have to ask her about "Bob" later.
"I need some help on the pass," Stew sent to the panthers. He swapped briefly to Fluff's mind and was starting to apologize for what he was about to suggest when Fluff, Socks, and Boo attacked each other without hesitation, cutting open their throats with perfectly aimed swipes of razor-sharp claws. They were dead in seconds.
Using the false core, he respawned them around the golems. It stung a little, but the core held together.
Now, through Fluff's eyes, he could see a massive army traveling through the pass. Some were walking. Some were on horseback or in wagons. Surrounding the golems on the cliff were more than a hundred more Helvetian fighters that he hadn't been able to sense at all. Fluff glanced to the sky, and there was a Roman ship. Apparently the stealth ship from before or one like it, watching the pass.
He didn't know if Merlin was aware of the ship or if the ship was aware of the Helvetians. But whatever he did next. He had a big audience.
The toad bounded forward as soon as the Spectral Panthers appeared. It began to belch some sort of glowing bile, which singed Fluff slightly before the panther vanished into a shadow under a small rock and reappeared in the midst of the Helveitan's guarding the pass, catching them by surprise and taking down five before stepping through another shadow to attack others from behind.
Meanwhile, Socks and Boo did the same, distracting the fighters, but the surprise only worked once. After that, the cats were dodging attacks as often as making them, and the guards were closing on the golems.
The golems, meanwhile, were completely unaffected by the huge gouts of bile the toad unleashed on them. They drew around the controller and began stacking the mana blocks in a two by two square, then another two by two square on top of that.
Stew watched the cubes' mana production climb.
The toad stopped spewing acid and started hopping even closer. A Helvetian spear drove through the chest of one of the golems, shattering it. With that one success, more spears began to rain down, and one after another, the golems began to fall.
The last two remaining golems, besides the controller, placed their cubes just before falling themselves.
12:10
Mana Reactor Unlocked!
Reaction Efficiency: 0.8
And nothing else happened.
Boo took a sword through the chest and fell, while Socks was covered in minor wounds but still fighting. Fluff was wrestling with a high-level Helvetian, who seemed impervious to the big cat's claws and bites. The fighter seemed to have some sort of light-based skill. His armor glowed, and he held Fluff out in the bright sunlight, where Fluff couldn't find a shadow to escape.
"Cecil smash the golems. All of them!" Kicking himself for not using higher-level golems in the first place, Stew swapped to the controller golem and reached out with the false core. He could spawn in dozens of higher-level golems, regardless of the pain and damage that might cause the false core and his own core sustaining it. He could show them what he was capable of.
Something long, ropey, and wet wrapped around the false core and yanked it from his hands. The toad's tongue retracted faster than his eyes could follow. It swallowed the false core.
The core wasn't destroyed. Stew could still see through the golem's eyes, but he found he couldn't spawn anything without directly touching the core.
He felt Socks and Fluff die.
"Hold!" The toad called out, and the Helvetians stopped their charge. They held their weapons ready. A dozen spears targetted the last remaining golem.
Stew looked at them, thinking of what the prisoners had said. He looked down at the thousands walking through the pass.
The toad looked the golem in the eye. "This is tasty, and these gifts are something special. I'm inclined to show Rome some mercy if you can give me a few more of those." The Toad cocked its head. "Oh." Merlin laughed. "It's you, isn't it? You're the dungeon, here to try to make a deal. I didn't recognize you at first, but I can feel you through this crystal thing. Sneaky, betraying Ceasar like this."
Stew became very aware of the stealth Roman ship above, even if he couldn't see it now. They were certainly watching and listening. Now, Caesar would think his plan had been to betray Rome all along.
Stew looked at the stack of cubes. Like everything else he made, at least everything before the living cannons, it was something that could build, somthing that could do good. He remembered what Bossy said about things being attuned to his deepest self, his memories.
In a moment of clarity, he realized the stack of cubes looked just like the stack of 10 standard 1B boxes that had been in the back of his van on the last day of his old life. The ones he had failed to deliver because he swerved to dodge some idiot who couldn't be bothered to watch where he was going.
Almost the same.
He nodded. Knowing it would convince Merlin and his toad that he was doing just what was expected.
But to Bossy, he sent. "You were wrong."
"About what?" She said.
"About coming from a kinder place." He reached up to push the two top cubes to the center of the stack, where each of them would touch two other cubes. Where if they had been boxes, he could have secured the whole stack with a single strap, just like they had been secured in his van. The stack of meaningless boxes he had died for. "We had this idea where I come from. It was how we handled people like Caesar and Merlin. A way to balance overwhelming powers."
12:28
Reactor Criticality Unlocked
Reaction Efficiency: 1.2
"What was that?" Bossy asked.
"We called it 'Mutually Assured Destruction'."
Back in Garrik's mind in the Roman command tent, Stew watched a brilliant light erupt in the mountain pass above them. The light grew brighter, washing out the world in silent emptiness.
Then, a massive wind ripped the tent away.
Garrik lay on the ground. "What was that?" A jolt and shudder came through the ground a few seconds later.
"Get up," was all Stew said. His vision returned slowly. He used Garrik's eyes to confirm what he suspected: The blast wave had knocked around the Roman fleet above them, but they seemed to be recovering. Back at the pass, the stealth ship was sure to be destroyed, maybe vaporized.
Over the pass, superheated air did what superheated air does. It rose and drew moisture along with it, full of vaporized snow, higher and higher until it condensed into a rolling cloud that rose, leaving a central column behind. A mushroom cloud like a banner stood tall over the destruction. Even from here, stew could see avalanches tumbling down the slopes on both sides. There was no telling what damage had happened closer to the ground.
Just outside the remains of the tent, he saw one of the giant golems that had been working on fortifications was missing its massive head. It continued working but its head lay behind it with a tree branch through the forehead.
The forest around was nothing but bare branches. Every leaf had been blown off. Farther up the slope the trees lay flat.
Stew turned Garrik around to face Caesar. Ceasar was just rising from the ground behind his desk. Stew felt cold inside and angry. He was angry at Caesar and Merlin both for forcing him into this position, forcing him to become what he would have to become now.
He started spawning golems 100 at a time on the steps of his dungeon, marching them through the town's wreckage toward the Roman camp. He started with his highest-level fighting golems and controllers.
As Caesar calmly gave orders to assemble his Legion, Stew walked Garrik closer until they faced each other across the darkened planning table.
Guards rushed to seize Garrik, but Ceasar gestured for them to wait.
"Sunrise," Stew said, with Garrik's voice. "Now we can talk.
Ceasar said nothing. He looked up at the rising mushroom cloud.
"As equals," Stew said.
Caesar looked Garrik in the eye.
He nodded.
To bossy, Stew said, "We can mark 'Make myself too tough to kill, even if they try.' off the list."
"I underestimated you," Bossy replied.
"Tell me more about Bob."