Leaning into the full capabilities of his supernatural Dexterity, Tilly tore through the room, slicing through anything that moved. The Corrupted growth attempted to pull itself free of the intricate system that had empowered the Golem Prefect’s creation and several roots even attempted to spear him from behind, but he had come a long way since his first week on Nephesh and the spear-like attacks met the same end as the rest of the writhing appendages in the chamber.
A handful of breaths later, Tilly found himself standing before the now empty fantasy-sci-fi sarcophagus, the room around him smoked and hissed as severed root nubs shivered on the ground in pain. Every tangle of growth that had been siphoning off power had been ruined in a whirlwind of slash-and-burn agriculture. The eerie screaming continued, but none of the more technological components in the room seemed too disturbed by the destruction. In fact, some of the lines of power leading to the center of the chamber flickered and began to glow brighter.
Fighting down a smile at how deliciously satisfying it had been to decimate his old nemesis, Tilly took another careful scan of the room, attempting to Identify anything that might be valuable.
Epic Quality Enchantment Array
Legendary Quality Refinement foci
Epic Quality Mythril Vacuum Tubes
As Identify slowly added tags to things in the room, Tilly found himself more and more disappointed. It was all really cool, but he doubted the Commerce Guide recognized any of it as currency… Then his gaze fell to the sarcophagus, whose base was lined with glowing gems the size of Tilly’s head. Each one was set in its own complicated nests of wires, and they practically throbbed with power.
Mythic Quality Mana Condenser Crystals.
“That seems promising,” He muttered to himself, wedging the edge of the ax head into the nearest nest and popping free one of the crystals.
“Error! Error! Genesis Chamber malfunction alert!” Another tinny voice whined, before repeating the phrase over and over in a sort of alarm.
Tilly’s triumphant smile fell as he remembered just how deep in the shit he was. Thankfully, as soon as he sent a sliver of his will into the world ring, the Crystal vanished… so his guess had been right. He tried to reach out to the next crystal, but the ring refused to work unless the object was completely free of the wires.
To make matters worse, the hanger doors leading to the open air began to hiss open. Tilly urgently started hacking at the rest of the wire nests, attempting to free as many of the crystals as possible. The hanger door opened enough for the aerial defense automatons to come into view. They froze there momentarily, processing the sight of the chamber in smoking ruins and a figure at its center hacking away at the base of the Genesis Pod.
“Intruder Alert, all able defenders to the Genesis Chamber.” The tinny alarm voice shifted, changing its tone to something deeper and more foreboding.
More of the automatons glided through the yawning opening while Tilly pulled the last of the crystals free. The final one disappeared with a tiny pop and Tilly turned to face the various models of flight-capable automatons, now completely cutting off his exit.
Tilly nervously spun his hatchets in his hands as he watched more crowd into the chamber. Now that he wasn’t being yanked through the air like a three-year-old’s favorite toy, Tilly was able to examine the golem automatons more closely. They moved forward in formation, an almost solid wall of metal. Tilly would have expected a cookie-cutter design, iterated thousands of times from the Faction, but no one of these was alike, instead, they formed a cloud of diverse shapes and sizes. Identify started to populate all kinds of name variations, their levels ranging from twenty to sixty-five.
But, despite their diversity, they all had two things in common. First, all of them were infested with tangles of Corrupted growth which twisted in and out of their clockwork bodies. Counterintuitively, its presence gave Tilly hope. He doubted his attacks would normally be very effective against metal enemies, but with his huge bonus against Corruption and its clear integration with their systems, he hoped to get out of there without having to use his recently regained title abilities. The second was the presence of a glowing gem set prominently in the features of each automaton, which Tilly now recognized as personal Condenser Crystals. Most likely these served as the power source for the creatures.
They seemed content to continue to choke the only exit to the chamber, slowly filing in, making space for more golems to arrive behind them. There were already over fifty of the things filling the first third of the chamber, and Tilly was rapidly losing count as more shapes blotted out the light from outside, pushing in behind the rest of the formation. A pained roar sounded in the distance, followed by a meaty thud that shook the whole spire.
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His Mana was down below twenty percent after tearing through the room… it was time to pull out one of his contingencies.
Tilly reached down to grab his low mana solution from his belt, its description running through his head in a flash as he slowly drew it up to his face, avoiding any sudden motions in an attempt to maintain the balance of the moment.
Saga’s Smelling Salts Legendary Quality item.
Mined from the mineral deposits of Saga’s holy mount and refined over a ten thousand-year distillation process, these salts provide the user access to their full potential connection to the living threads of power woven around and through them. +200% to Mana Regen for 5 min.
Unfortunately, the variable this new item represented was too much for the automatons, and with his movement, the front-rank automatons lifted or charged a projectile weapon of every kind. Tilly winced as he popped the top and took a deep sniff of the vial’s contents. Whatever was contained in the opaque container instantly vaporized as it touched the air, and followed the pathway of least resistance up Tilly’s nasal passageway.
The Legendary substance set his senses ablaze as he felt every blood vessel in his nose, and then head expand. His Mana Pathways mirrored his physical vessels, relaxing then expanding to an incredible degree as a flood of energy crashed into his system, refilling his Mana bar at a prodigious rate. He took a deep breath in, feeling as if he was absorbing the very fabric of reality around him. His pupils dilated to dark orbs and the hair all over his body stood on end, as if taking on an electrical charge.
Whatever he had been expecting, the heady rush of the sensation was too overwhelming and he completely missed it as the front ranks of automatons began to fire upon him. A cloud of energy blasts and projectiles smashed into him all at once, knocking him back to reality with a vengeance. His Endurance reduced the damage by an incredible amount but that didn’t stop the sheer weight of the attacks from knocking him back against the sarcophagus and expelling the breath from his lungs. Bullets and bolts lodged shallowly all throughout his body, and searing energy burns covered him in an instant. In a bleary moment of inspiration, he rolled and dived behind it, now bleeding from countless burns and wounds.
In that instant, his Health had gone from one hundred to forty-five percent.
Tilly allowed himself another bloody, painful grin, as his Mana reversed that trend, ticking back up into the thirties. Projectile weapons hammered the barrier as the formation advanced on his position.
‘This seems like one of those opportunities you spoke of!’ Kindle sent to Tilly along with a flash of an image of her diving at the opening choked with automatons from above. A moment later he heard the roar of a huge amount of flame being released. Hundreds of aerial defense constructs were suddenly ablaze as the whole front half of the chamber was flooded with a river of blue fire.
Tilly jumped up from behind the barrier, rushing for the center of the formation, trying to take full advantage of the distraction. Many of the automatons closest to Tilly had only endured superficial fire damage and they zeroed in on his charge, a second too late. He crashed into their line, unleashing Wrath’s Shroud just before impact, causing maximum damage as he dove into the midst of their formation, shooting for an almost nonexistent gap, between the two automatons at the center.
His paltry Strength struggled to make any progress as piston-empowered strikes landed on him from every angle and the blue flames pouring from his center did their best to consume the Corruption twisting throughout the combatants. Tilly wriggled and shoved through the front of the group, taking all kinds of damage as the automatons attempted to pin him down. Ironically, blood from a dozen fresh wounds made him even harder to grapple, as an emphasis on flight made most of the golems unable to grapple with the slippery human. Then their numbers began to work against them as many of their attacks and projectiles aimed at him from more distant fighters instead hit the golems closest to him, causing them to crumble under the same onslaught that was whittling percentage points off his Health every second.
Finally, he made it through the majority of the front ranks, entering into the epicenter of Kindle’s awesome attack. The flames themselves did no damage to Tilly, essentially being extensions of his own Mana. But the cherry red melting metal and superheated air was another thing entirely, and most of Tilly’s wounds were seared shut by the oven-like environment in seconds.
Then thankfully, his armor shifted, gliding over his form in layers of yellow leather and assuming its fully insulated sun salamander form. Like metallic zombies on the surface of the sun, many of the collapsing clockwork constructs reached for him drunkenly, attempting to bog him down, but he forged on, holding his breath and screwing his eyes shut as he pushed through their scattered ranks until, finally, his foot met empty air.
Tilly experienced a brief moment of vertigo, as the cool wind buffeted his face, and his body tipped out into the open air. He could feel Kindle's presence as she attempted to evade a group of automatons giving her chase, and he even had time to notice that the area immediately surrounding the spire was a pockmarked ruin of smoking craters and demolished buildings.
Then gravity interrupted his out-of-body observations and he began falling. He didn’t know what he had been expecting to happen when he made it through the barricade of attackers, and he shoved down a childish fantasy of jumping on one of the automatons mid-flight and riding it like a bull. Instead, he fought down panic as one second grew to two then three, and the ground raced toward him with terrifying speed. There was a good chance that if he had been at full health this fall would not have been fatal, but after his most recent stunt, he was down to 15 percent.
So instead he gritted his teeth and mentally readied [Resolute]. Then a split second before he could activate the protection the Title ability offered, he was slammed into the side of the spire so hard that he lost consciousness for a second.
When he came to, he was hanging by a vice-like grip around his neck, back against the wall as the Golem Prefect scanned his body with some sort of ability.
“Where have you put them, Meat bag?” It asked emotionless as it effortlessly pinned him against the base of the spire, just above where the main body of the smoking Corrupted tree had grown. Some part of Tilly was gratified to see that the Golem Prefect had lost an arm and half a leg in its fight with Brokenridge, but the damage did not seem to be impeding the Prefect at all. Tilly’s diaphragm spasmed ineffectually as he tried to take in a breath past the closure enforced on his throat by the Prefect’s impossibly strong hand.