After catching his breath for a bit, Alex took the time to rebuild his forces to a decent level. A sniper with dog support, Eins thru Vier and his drones. Then made the time to fix up Aegis, he did all of this manually not using any of his built-up infrastructure. He had been in contact with the enemy, that they had some means of tracking him or spying was an uncomfortable possibility. No way was the ambush an accident or some shit. The pursuit also showed some signs of knowing where he was, whether that meant they knew his general location or that they bugged him was more up for debate.
Since he hadn’t encountered such opposition before he was unsure of what precise methods they had at their disposal. Were they just good hunters? Was there some sort of magical fuckary where they could track anything that they had encountered before? Was he magically or physically bugged? These questions bothered him, so he avoided wanting to give up any information about himself. Until he was certain he had eliminated the chance he avoided revealing his capabilities.
With that done he began a thorough process of seeding the city and its surroundings with counter measures for miasma. Those monsters seemed to use it to massively increase their combat capabilities, taking that away was now a priority. Then he sat down to have a long bit of thinking.
The conclusion was to focus on scaling his golems up to more advanced models. That was in terms of materials and enchantments. He was still going off of what worked and if ‘it wasn’t broken don’t fix it’ as a mental model. It was a good process. Now that his golems were ‘broken’ or unsuited to the new environment that no longer applied.
How to do it though? First up he needed to drop the idea that he could leave any time soon. A few drones were dispatched to get high level surveillance of the areas he needed to travel. Also, to get eyes on The Maw itself. He hadn’t wanted to do so when he was just probing, he needed all his recon to avoid issues. Now he needed to know if there was any point in continuing down that path.
Stealth still seemed the only option if he did. That meant he needed forms of magical and optical camouflage, including whatever freaky vision types such creatures might have and any other bullshit senses. He had read about a few crazy creatures that were able to hunt using total nonsense, like just being able to know what they were after like some crazy ESP.
Then, he absolutely needed to both put on the special forces hat and be ready to take out opposition when he was spotted. He pulled up the maps from his gauntlet, as well as the information his non-biologist ass had on his enemies.
Alex had been dissecting the corpses of his enemies since his arrival. While he wasn’t a biologist, he still believed knowledge was power. Even if it was useless now it might pay off later. Now he began the same process for the newly encountered enemies. Mostly such dissections were used to identify organs and blood vessels for more efficient combat.
Paying attention to the sensory organs, for the moment he was recording and making observations. Ultimately, he was going to need to scour this city for the information he needed. Find libraries and schools that contained the biological data he needed to interpret what he was seeing. While he was at it, he needed to also find the places that used the fantasy materials he had collected. He might even want to look into the ‘crude’ stone and wood golem designs. What many might consider a ‘normal’ fantasy golem, and what the people here called primitive. Big, blocky and rough around the edges more a copy of an elemental than the machines these people, and by extension Alex, used. Maybe they might be a good option.
Steel was at best ‘ok’ as a building material, on some occasions he had found iron and less durable materials to be superior. Mostly for the same reasons that other materials were always used. Steel was tough, durable, and easy to make and use with consistent properties throughout the material if it was homogenous.
Highly enchanted bronze was better than plain steel as an example, the enchantments making the material better in every way than normal steel. Steel, when enchanted, was a more inefficient conductor of mana but he didn’t need as much reinforcement. The issue was that he had literally no real or studied knowledge of material science. Alex also expected that the field would be as complicated as it was in his old world. Including things like tensile and shear strength, properties like conductivity and heat thresholds, the ratio of impurities could also change how a particular material would function. There had been dozens of different types of steel in his old world based solely on the carbon content, high carbon steel was brittle but held a superior edge, while low carbon steel had more flexibility but deformed rather than breaking. Other materials had properties based on the arrangement of atoms and whether or not the structure was crystalline.
A period of experimentation was required, he now needed to use everything he had to improve his golems efficiency. To maximize the killing potential and staying power, the use of cores to supply the enchantments he was using. He needed to do some serious optimization and run everything through the scientific method and create his own material database. By the time this was over he fully expected to be able to write a book about the use of most materials in golem crafting as well as enchanting. It was guaranteed to be highly annoying and frustrating; his major hope was that he could find intact books that already had this information. Maybe find the research papers that had completed experiments to use.
***
Alex had holed up and began the long process of ‘cleansing’ everything he owned from tracking and spying magic. This mostly consisted of altering many recognizable features for the sympathetic magic as well as removing any mana leaks. He didn’t want to be tracked because he was releasing magical radiation, it also doubled as a way to improve his stealth.
His biggest worry was the gems he had been stealing and their release of miasma/energy signature. These he placed in a box enchanted to disrupt the remaining elements before it was placed in a separate storage item inside a new golem he called Daisy.
Daisy was a hulking Dire Wolf and the pack leader of his ground scouts. She was fast and remarkably dangerous. That she could and would move far away from him to prevent tracking and was nearly impossible to pin down was the goal. He had spent a good amount of time after he secured the gems just watching.
He had initially hidden them away from where he set up his base, burying them in a location he was observing yet far enough away that they shouldn’t lead an enemy right to him. This was after he did everything he could to prevent tracking. They were inside a storage item that was specifically enchanted to be hard to find, then inside a box that ran on latent miasma lined with his cleaning enchantments. Inside another box that was even harder to find. That was going to go into a golem (Daisy). That golem also had all of these processes installed around the storage area, and was fast, agile, and mostly away from his location.
After this he worked to get his golems better shielding on the assumption that they might be radiating power or something that let his opponents know where they were. Due to the lack of intelligent resistance since his arrival Alex was not expecting sophisticated tracking techniques.
He had gotten to the point where his golems looked and felt like an ordinary rock in the magical sense. They were just there, even when one saw them moving, they had no more impact on the environment than a moving boulder.
Trenton on the other hand hadn’t changed much. It was still overrun by beastlings and other monsters, on moonless nights the creatures from the underground boiled up to reap a bloody harvest.
The super predators still did their own things, flyers still covered the sky and infested taller buildings though like normal they rarely came down to the lower levels of the city preferring to hunt in the buildings upper floors and preying on other flyers. Mostly the flying monsters hunted in the wide-open areas if they ever came down.
The feeling of much more stealthy and dangerous hunters was new, little more than shadows. Though he admitted that it was more a matter of him finally being able to sense them rather than a feeling of newness. The city had a feel to it, one Alex had gotten used to while he was here scrambling to survive. It was an overall sixth sense, and Trenton felt much as it did when he had left so long ago.
Home sweet home.
Once Alex felt that he had done everything he could to prevent tracking, including staying in place and observing his surroundings, then moving to another location and observing. He was looking for anything that was out of place or if the same things changed when he moved, it was counter stalking, a method of waiting for his opponent to make a mistake while hunting him by forcing it to reposition.
He made his way over to an RV sales lot one that bordered an in-town junkyard. After clearing out some locals including a nest of spiders, he began his plans to camouflage himself. His golems rearranged the lot and buried his base under junk leaving the opening to look like an office. As for the junkyard itself he tore through the scrap metal for resources.
His next plan was to fortify up. Mostly a concealed fortress, for this he built special observation drones that monitored the area. Placed all around his location. In his base several modules combined to create a large command center, all he did was remove some walls and widen the doors. He placed down magical wards used to warn of approaching threats all over his perimeter in a layered manner.
Here his work automating his golems paid off massively. More and more drones covered the city, expanding his information network and searching for the things he needed. This included small, bird eating tarantula sized spider-like drones that crawled all over and under the city.
While Alex found himself updating the maps of Trenton for a good portion of each day it was worth it. He was gaining a tremendous amount of information on places to loot as well as monster activity.
Then he settled in and took a bit of a break.
Aside from the pause being necessary to figure out if his actions were working and if he really was concealed, he needed to take time to examine what might be the most important decision since the tower when he choose to make Eins and focus on a crafting hybrid build rather than a more combat focused one.
The Maw was something of a guaranteed escape from this frozen hellscape. Therefore, he was actually far closer to his goal than he had ever been. The Maw itself was something of a final puzzle piece.
As near as Alex could tell he now had four paths before him, this assumed he was considering all possible options. From least desirable to most they were.
One. Stop, just give up on escape and live to the best of his ability in the current environment. Nowhere near ideal and not something he was ready for, of course this didn’t necessarily mean anything as he could still continue other goals, but it needed to mentioned.
Two. Forget the Maw and continue looking for an alternate way out. If he had the time and resources magic such as teleportation/ portal was a possibility, and he could make the place he was standing on an exit once he figured that out. Of course, he didn’t have the knowledge, experience, or tools to make that happen and it wasn’t a guarantee that they existed here. Follow this up with the possibility of other exits and the difficulty in finding them or that they may be just as difficult to get to and… Less than ideal but still an option.
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The final two options were the ones he knew he would pick from. There was both a smart and a stupid option on the table.
The smart plan was to wait. Play 4D chess with the opposition. He knew where the exit was and now, he had the time to settle in, buckle down and make it work. Take a decade or so to build up his forces, fuck with his enemies, draw them out of position. Chip away and continue improving his craft. At this point he could even take the time to truly master spells like a “real” mage. As he was no longer on the countdown from Alessa’s tower. He could survive here, and his unique body meant that taking as long as he needed to make his escape guaranteed was viable.
He could target specific places for materials, craft his golems to perfection, and generally just spend time improving his abilities until he was fully prepared to leave. He was the prisoner who had all the time in the world to make his plans for a breakout.
The downside was an uncomfortable number of assumptions. Would he even be able to survive? Despite the relative safety he had enjoyed after making Aegis, he had nearly died. This was still a very dangerous place. All it would take is another slipup like at the ruins and it might just be game over. His search for perfect materials, knowledge and the like meant more danger over a longer period of time, more chance to roll a critical failure and die off. It was also not a guarantee that this place would remain survivable with the cultist guys fucking with the mana balance for a likely large-scale plan.
While this was a smart idea for his escape it did rely on too many unknowns for him to be comfortable. That completely ignored the shit that was just out of his control entirely.
He had seen the Maw and well it looked more like a natural “portal” than a mountain pass or tunnel. When he looked at his surroundings with that in mind, he began to think that this place was more of a hidden realm or pocket dimension rather than a place on the continent.
The mountains, sky, mana ecosystem, the negative energy wave, the collapse, the cultists, the monsters, even the lack of weather patterns, and his arrival. All seemed to point to this being somewhere slightly more removed from reality than a full-on world.
While the smart option was to wait and become as perfectly prepared as possible, he had the stupid option.
In that case he would still take some time, fully equip his golems for a stealth mission to get to and through the Maw. Alex already knew that this was the option he was going to take. The idea of just taking his time when he saw an exit in front of him was kind of ridiculous. He just needed to be able to get to it. That meant he needed a few highly capable golems and a working stealth system. Focusing on these things rather than some nebulous in the future plan seemed the most feasible and in line with his own desire to get out of here.
He was going with the stupid option in this case. It was risky to try and leave through the Maw without total preparation, but he just couldn’t. Couldn’t stay here any longer than necessary.
With a goal in mind Alex set about trying to figure out how to make it happen.
***
His planning, patience and recon had paid off.
Alex had redesigned Aegis and his other golems. Before he had made the mistake of assuming that fighting was necessary. At this point it wasn’t. To get to the Maw he needed to slip past, at the same time his safety was a high priority.
For all that this was a stupid plan, one that he was rushing and had almost no contingencies for, he still felt better about it than the others. Even the long-term plan that would normally have been his preferred method had too many unknowns for any sane person’s comfort.
To start he had taken the still incomplete ‘spare’ Aegis and used that to make his stealth suit. The original was undergoing a number of refits but was more in line with a heavy combat model, and going back to alter it to his new needs was a bit too much. Especially when he considered that it might be needed when the shit hit the fan.
This new suit was slender, much more like a set of stupidly thick plate armor than the hulking monstrosity of a stompy suit that was its brother. He kept the independent feet and hands just to ensure it had options he didn’t as a human.
It was here that his work stalled for a good long while. Alex really wanted to use the materials he had grabbed and while steel, even enchanted steel was cool, the options provided by these until-now -space-wasting materials might just change the equation. This meant Alex spent most of his time in his base going through the just ridiculous amount of reading material he had collected.
It also fueled the few hunts and excursions he made into the city. He left his base in place while doing this with a few refurbished bone golems as guards. On top of that he did something taboo, he did make the primitive Golems but aside from making sure he registered as a friend he set them loose. Entirely autonomous golems stalked the city around his base now. Smashing every monster they came across the crude near solid stone bodies having if anything more durability, but they were slow lumbering and stupid.
He only did this because they were annoyingly easy to make. Some stones, magic, and powerful cores and you had a golem. Not a very good one mind you but a golem, nonetheless. Taking the time to set up passive defense like this just made sense and these were different enough to his golems that he wasn’t worried about being linked to him, they still had a self-destruct if they got too injured, but they also culled the monster population.
For a while he considered doing this with his more dangerous bone golems but the whole point was to protect his base and give him a place to retreat to since he left it alone. Time requirements aside he wasn’t trying to clear the city or even hunt down monsters, simple orders like kill anything not tagged as friendly were easy creating killer robots not so much. It also seemed like a bad idea if taken to excess. The autonomous defenses were also designed to fail after a few years, he hadn’t been at all concerned with the sustainability of these golems, at a certain point they would wear down and destroy themselves, for now it was enough.
It was a risk. He might find himself in a situation where he couldn’t get back or even have to abandon his home. Likely not for ever as he could return afterwards but even loosing access for a time would hurt. However, it was a risk reward problem. If he took his base with him, he would lose the monitoring that was going on and would have to set up again. Alex wasn’t as worried as he would have been in the past, it was hard to isolate him to that degree.
While he was here, he used the swarms of scouts he created to focus his efforts on places that had the material and literary resources he wanted. His forays into the city became targeted.
In order to test his designs he also set personal challenges for the excursions. Like not getting into engagements. It was a matter of testing how well his theories played out in the real world.
It also led to some irritating missions. Like testing Whisper.
Whisper, his new stealth version of Aegis, was just two feet taller than Alex and a bit bulkier, the extra height mostly coming from the clawed feet, with slender multijointed arms that were almost as long as the suit was tall when fully deployed. When stored most of the arms became beefy forearms comprised not only of claws and blade arms but also the ability to detach the hand and extend said hand out on a flexible platform.
Alex shuddered at the remembered memory of his stealth mission to a library.
He spent ten days sneaking into a library just to avoid the spiders that infested it. He stayed close to the ground and once the library was in sight he stopped. Whisper remaining perfectly still. Only to inch forward as the spiders around him went about their tasks. Moving carefully from cover to cover and spending long hours observing the movements with painstaking attention.
He couldn’t even work on anything as that would defeat the purpose of his mission. These spiders were not really a threat, that was why he was using them as test subjects. The optical and magical camouflage worked perfectly. At the same time, he was learning about these creatures in a way that he never thought possible. He was hunting them, why did they move? How do they perceive threats? What do they consider food? How do they react to the inevitable invasions by other creatures?
Alex was learning a great deal out of boredom. He had too, he needed to be able to predict his targets movements. Plan and time his own so that he made it where he needed. It was an unfortunate exercise in patience and staying awake/ operating on a diminished sleep schedule.
The first issues came when he encountered the webs. They weren’t just spider silk they had mana running through them, so delicately that he would never have noticed if he hadn’t spent a full day staring at the few in front of him unable to move because of his mental restrictions on the mission. The reality was he could go around but that defeated the purpose. What if in the future or inside the building he didn’t have that option?
After realizing that the webs had mana supporting them and signaling the spiders he spent even more time studying their behavior. Then he began testing, only to find that his mana control was absolutely pathetic compared to what he was seeing. He spent days attempting to manipulate the webs in an unobservable manner. Mostly he just convinced them to not register his presence, as well as starching the webs then shaping them crudely back into position using his mana. That was once he managed to avoid destroying the webs and waiting for the spiders to reset and move on.
That last bit was helpful actually as Whisper became slightly cocooned in the webbing giving him more to work with as well as an up-close look at what the spiders were doing, how they manipulated both their own mana and the webs and how they avoided triggering the system. That was quite helpful.
Having become just another part of the landscape and able to avoid triggering the Spidey-senses of his enemies he continued his slow move towards the broken window that would get him inside the building.
Once inside the next headache became apparent. The overwhelming number of spiders and webs in the building. His slow crawl got even worse, although a sadistic part of his mind thought that this was such good training… he should do this again as he benefited from the improved mana control and focus… Not. Happening. Inside he also found a great number of preserved books and storage crystals, the problem was getting them.
Alex spent five long days painstakingly guiding modified spider drones to loot the books. A tedious process that required him to remotely manipulate the spider-golems mana to avoid the webs as well as loot the books he required into the storage devices he gave them. That had nearly broken him, but he persevered reminding himself that ultimately this particular library wasn’t the point. This was a skill and one that may be important in order to slip past enemy lines.
He avoided the egg sacks and looted everything he could with the goal of not making a fuss, no collapsing a bookcase or destroying the webs if he could avoid it. This was a puzzle game that wasn’t fun but required hours of methodical work to grind through. He did succeed but mentally he was done.
Extracting was actually the easiest part as he avoided making it more difficult than necessary. It still took three long boring days as he wasn’t going to fail the challenge of avoiding combat. Usually moving at the speed of a racing snail on downers going a few feet in several hours. Just to get out of the rather large, webbed zone around the library.
Becoming one with the environment to the point that numerous times spiders once again walked right on top of him. Carefully clearing out the webbing with a brutally exhausting mix of magic and patience to avoid them swarming and going berserk.
All this when he could have just used a couple of flame spells and sent Eins in to clear the place out on his own. These spiders didn’t notice him, or if they did, they didn’t care about attacking him. He had succeeded in reducing his apparent threat to the point where he could mostly move unimpeded through their territory. Once he was out of the webbing, he could even walk around without being attacked most of the time. The times he was attacked it was pure reflex as far as he could tell, the spiders never truly registered him as a threat.
His challenge system was frustrating, but it was good training. He had even gone back just to train his mana control.
It had been a tremendous success of Whisper, the suit was rapidly becoming his favorite for everyday use.
Alex had no intention of being an idiot, it was more than possible that he would have to do more than hide on his way through enemy lines. Looting, assassinating, and sneaking are all highly probable situations.
Next Alex left various items for creatures to find just so he could steal them back.
He spent an ungodly amount of time tracking enemies through the city following his own magical tracker at first then only using the tracker when he was confirming the result.
The arm thing was useless in combat when fully extended, but for getting around and reaching through tight spaces it was quite handy. Good for assassinations as well, if the target was unprepared, he could just strike fast and hard from safety. Whisper for all that was not designed for combat, beyond the basic need to defend itself if was entirely designed to slip by unnoticed. With optical and magical camouflage, the most advanced detection measures he could create, and a decent command suite. Several gadgets in the arms and body for traversing terrain and using verticality.
The problem was in testing the functionality and an experimental device he came up with.
That led to him standing in an alley waiting for some obliging beastlings to wander by these at least had the cognitive intelligence to recognize a humanoid threat if they saw it. The animals in the city hunted based off of instinct, beastlings and the like hunted based on sight.
Luckily, the city was swarming with the fuckers, and he knew more or less their patrol routes it was just a matter of time. He was alone for this test, not other golems to get involved in the fight only a sniper as support, the rest of his back up was on the exfil path.