Lucifer closed his eyes and took a deep breath, this short moment being the first time he stopped busying himself for days.
Around Lucifers sitting form stood a vast array of carved stones, each three meters tall and one meter wide with barely an inch between them filling the room.
Every glyph on the stones weaved together to create a complex magic that Lucifer himself had to use his full attention to complete, this undertaking took Lucifer nearly a week to complete and the results are far from what Lucifer considers satisfactory.
Lucifer's original intention was to build an array that would essentially 3d print Golems, however, he stumbled at the first problem, "creation magic" was far more complex than he realized which made it practically impossible to enchant on such poor materials.
No matter what glyphs or how he wove them together he couldn't get an enchantment to successfully cast a creation spell, something that has become so familiar to him that he now does it without even thinking.
He spread his consciousness out in order to find Rick in hopes that a better material will prove more successful, however, Lucifer had forgotten that he sent Rick away in order to gather plants from his gardens, some of which he had been nurturing and combining for thousands of years.
So Lucifer is stuck with Rock or simple metals, he initially tried to use mithril for its mana conductivity, however, he found it significantly harder to will his enchantments onto, while this is not usually a problem for making a single piece of armor or a weapon, it is a problem when you have to create an entire array with hundreds of stones with close to a thousand runes each.
After thinking over the problem Lucifer thought of a few solutions.
1st. create the bodies for the spell array to use. This would work well and creation was not difficult for Lucifer, but this would mean the array wasn't fully automated and would require a significant input from Lucifer, he had too much work to be personally creating all of his creatures.
2nd. get something else to create his golem bodies. This would be difficult because he didn't have anyone in the dungeon proficient in metal shaping.
He briefly summoned some daemons as his only possible summonable creatures with some semblance of intelligence, but, he quickly found any demon worth summoning for such a task can't be summoned from a simple spell. Instead to bring them to the physical plane of existence you require advanced arrays and rituals that are as of yet out of Lucifers reach and timeframe.
3rd. Give up on this. This was the most unreasonable choice to Lucifer because he had quite a few plans that required Golems, and in mass.
So as a compromise he created a few golems with a small array on one of their arms, once the golem reached a rock wall it would activate the spell and the nearby ambient mana would be absorbed into the array, then the spell would activate cutting a section out of the wall. Some golems were set to cut a chest piece out of the rockface, others were set to make legs or joints.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Then another problem arose, The golems weren't smart enough to assemble the parts. So like the problem solver Lucifer was, he again summoned the demons, they weren't exactly smart by any stretch of the imagination but an assembly line wasn't out of the question.
Gutram the Destroyer wasn't very keen on the idea of becoming a simple worker, but by this point, Lucifer was Livid from the constant setbacks and compromises, so if Gutram the destroyer didn't become Gutram the worker, he would become Gutram the defiled. The example Lucifer set of the first uncooperative demon made the assembly line much more efficient. Lucifer even went so far as to establish a contract with his little workers so he could resummon them if they thought the demonic plane was safe.
The array was the next thing to prove troublesome, Lucifer truly wished he learned to programme in his past life because enchanting was a rather similar skillset, First weave the golem spell into a rock, then find there isn't enough room on said rock, so you connect two rocks and so on, then you find out that there is interference not only from the other rocks but the atmosphere itself.
Then explode because the spell was accidentally set in a loop for constant creation, but you forgot that it's not actually creating anything at that point, so the mana just builds up until the stones can't withstand it.
Find your array room destroyed when you return with a new body, resummon your demons, now grumpy demons, give them a less explosive room to work in.
Start the whole enchanting process again, this time enchant the whole room to absorb and counter any interference from the outside, then make rocks again connected with mana pulled directly from another room using mithril wiring, now interference is less of a problem.
Pound some fox
Begin enchanting the whole spell again, realize you need the spell to hold while another part gathers a spirit, create a memory for the spell to stay in and find out that the array can't keep the spell stable.
Create another two shells surrounding the array room to ward off any interference, then use mithril wires to connect each individual stone that requires joining before sealing each stone inside a metal casing.
Sigh with relief as you find the spell is stable then curse the old gods when you realize how complex the spirit part is going to be.
Pound some fox
Figure out how to manually create an "if" statement because there is no glyph for that.
Find out you require much more space.
Create new rooms with dampening shells and casings.
--------------------------------------------------------
Cast spell on placed empty golem body
hold spell while other parts perform their function
------
Search for Spirit
Cast capture magic on spirit
IF spirit struggles fiercely THEN pull spirit into body and have first section complete spell
ELSE Let go of spirit to find a more suitable battle golem spirit.
Loop
------
This was essentially the array he set out to make and after a few tests runs he was forced to make modifications, but the idea was still the same.
Lucifer looked at his strange creation with mixed feelings, first, he was happy that this frustrating task was over, second, he was frustrated that the end result was so poor and he couldn't do any better at the time.
The golems were made of stone instead of steel which significantly reduced their power, they were also solid stone from their manufacture method so they were also slow in comparison to Golem.
Lucifers program works incredibly slowly so input is signifcantly faster than output, this means that Lucifer has to either improve the efficency of the array or create more of them to keep up with production.
Pound some fox