During the run, still at a mere 25 mph (40 kph) towards what appeared to be a road, it was difficult to tell with the sand and neglect, he let his mind drift towards his next goal. So far Aegis had more than proven its worth, that one moment after opening the door was what he worried endlessly about. An attack too fast to react to, an instant lethal strike. Everything else Aegis provided was well expected, he had explicitly planned for the suit to be able to do these things. Even if the suit provided nothing else the protection was enough, of course he wouldn’t be satisfied with just a walking suit of armor, but it was a damn good start.
The situation had changed. No longer confined in the city, and with the hope of getting somewhere that wasn’t a frozen, barren, monster filled hell hole. He needed to stack the deck. It should go without saying, but the addition of Aegis would cause a fundamental change in how he operated, he would need to adapt, get rid of some habits and develop new ones. The change in environment, and the threats he faced out here would likely be different.
More arial scouts. More ground scouts. Both to identify threats and places to investigate. Maybe they would see something he would miss from his current location. That took his primary focus, aside from training with his new setup. Follow a road and find where it led in the hopes that it went somewhere, a road would connect to something, and a major road should go somewhere important. That the place it led to wasn’t filled with monsters, and if it was then that the direction alone was more beneficial than wandering around without any guide, or even general knowledge of the territory he was in.
~ * ~
The dangers of the wastes showed themselves not long after. A scorpion, not large for a monster. Its body ‘only’ the size of a person’s forearm before counting the tail, had attacked from under a slight ledge. The stinger not long enough to do damage had still penetrated the steel of Aegis’ leg, while its claws scabbled to hold the foot in place. The venom running impotently out of the small hole, barely able to penetrate the several millimeters of plate steel and supporting structures surrounding the limb, but it was only stopped by the bulb on the end of the tail and the stingers length. Then Aegis stepped on it crushing flat. Other things became obvious, from oversized antlion pits that were easy to avoid to the harder to spot camouflaged lizards and snakes. Both big and small. Obviously, the concept of cold-blooded creatures became flexible when it came to monsters. These were in addition to a wider variety of insects and flying creatures that he really didn’t get a good look at even with arial drones.
Over the next few days of travel Alex had mostly learned to stick to the road; the solid ground was nice. He had challenged these monsters when he saw them, they like everything else he ran into here were hostile almost mindlessly so. Animals might be cautious of engaging a group or even another animal, these monsters seemed to lack that quality.
He wasn’t bloodthirsty, but he needed to know how to defeat them, which threats he could fight, and which needed to be avoided. The only choice he had was on when to engage. If he spotted the enemy first, he exploited it to the extreme. If he got into a fight what was the best method for victory? What made the monsters dangerous? The cores he could harvest were a nice bonus. He avoided the pit like creatures due to the difficulty of dealing with an underground ambush predator, he would have to fight it in its kill zone. That was always a terrible idea, and they were static and obvious. Only a threat if he got complacent and wandered too close.
Three drones now hovered overhead, one just high enough to give him a high-resolution view of his surroundings, and two much higher and circling so he could see where he was going slowly building up a mini-map and driving back the fog of war.
So far, the wasteland had proven to be as empty as one could imagine, still stretching from horizon to horizon, sparsely populated even by monsters. At least compared to the overwhelming numbers in the city. Aside from the monsters and the increasing cold he began to worry about the lack of weather. No rain or snow, it felt unnatural considering the constant and frequently heavy cloud cover. There was nothing to indicate that it ever rained, not even telltale marks on the ground, no hardened or clumped dirt or streaks on the rare rocks and forget trying to determine rainfall based on vegetation. The same thing had happened in the city, but out in the open away from shelter the weather or lack thereof became more obvious and a more serious and direct threat. At least in the city he could find a room and slap down some improvised space heaters, out here that wasn’t an option. Even though the city had static weather he still noticed it more when out in the wild, he didn’t really have the time to consider it before.
Alex had changed some of his magic focus to direct earth shaping/ manipulation using the magic to carve out shelter for when he stopped, afterwards returning the ground to its original condition. He didn’t want to leave even more traces of his passing. He refused to try that in the city for fear of collapsing a building, shaping earth in there was best done in small doses saved for carefully considered and special occasions when in an urban environment.
Day after day he kept moving, comfortable inside Aegis. When he needed to exit the suit, regardless of reason he got extremely paranoid over his position. Layering defenses, summoning guards and scouts. So much so that he began to create a spare for Aegis, not as complex, more of a light version definitely a temporary replacement, so that he would only be vulnerable during the swap if it was necessary.
If given the chance he might have considered building a tank or some other mobile shelter, but he discarded that as soon as the amount of work required came up. It had taken several years to build Aegis, even if he now had the resources just the idea of sitting around to build what amounted to a mobile wagon capable of protecting him in the dangerous environment. If he was out here long enough to get that skilled and powerful… then maybe. He would probably die or go legitimately insane before that happened, that was going to take years of dedicated effort to figure out much less implement. Until then he would just focus on improving Aegis and escaping the wastes. That the creation might be useless also crossed his mind, forget making everything work or the actual construction, his luck so far would have it become pointless not long after. At least with Aegis anywhere a human could go the suit could as well. Just the idea of all that time and effort put into something, then finding that he needed to cross an ocean or ice that was too thin, mountains that didn’t have paths or rocky areas filled with ravines. A mobile shelter that he may have to either leave behind or store away for so long that it might as well be useless…. That thought made him want to cry in sympathy, for the imaginary him.
Walking over a rise Alex encountered the first signs of civilization since leaving the city, crouching down he observed the small town, putting eyes on the settlement he had seen from his drones. He knew he had been traveling slowly, by any modern standard, less than a third of the speed of country roads back home. Taking breaks, planning and fighting with local wildlife, still it surprised him that it had taken so long to reach the next settlement. Whatever this place was it was sparsely populated by the standards he was used to, or the change in the travel times he remembered was throwing him off. He had yet to figure out how the infrastructure worked as well, transport and supply costs/time had to be insane. Or he was missing something, which was probably the answer.
Leary of walking into another urban environment, he almost bypassed the place. It was a small town, with a population of maybe one thousand or so before the events that ruined this place. Three hundred or so homes plus small businesses, centered around a main street that contained most of the apparent businesses. All visible from the top of the rise he was on. Not quite the small western towns of cowboy movies, but a seriously rural town nonetheless. Falling apart more than the city had been, the weathering had been far harsher here, many buildings open and exposed, collapsed roofs and walls. Likely due to the different construction materials, this place favoring wood and plaster instead of the brick and concrete. If he had stuck around longer or spent more time in a suburb, he might have a better comparison.
What stopped him was a combination of need and fear. He was afraid of cities in this wasteland, but at the same time letting that fear force him to make poor choices wasn’t acceptable. He would weigh the risks, be more cautious even paranoid, but he refused to allow the fear to make him just walk away. That was as long as it was only fear, and not some entirely rational reason for avoiding the place.
The need was for a map, one of those things that he really should have found. Everyone had maps, at least a travel guide or something, yet the only maps he found were for the city or specific building, others showed absolutely nothing he could use. A few of the books he found were utterly unusable as they didn’t have any point of reference. The few things he had didn’t tell him where he was, even lacking names. He was also wary of the maps being something fictional, this place was a fantasy world, so he had no real way of discerning fantasy from reality. His personal theory was that time was to blame. A map wasn’t particularly valuable, it was unlikely to be protected therefore the maps he should have found had instead rotted into nothing. Two additional possibilities seemed plausible. One, that these people used something like his crystals for mapping or had no use entirely for a map, basically the possibility that he was missing something rather fundamental. The second had to do with “national security” or the disaster itself, that something about the disaster wiped maps from existence (currently an unexplainable bunch of magical bullshit, but since magic was a thing…) or that whatever nation he was in had done it. Paper outside of places with preservation was rare between exposure to the elements, the passage of time or the monsters the low value maps being destroyed seemed more likely as they wouldn’t be treated the same as most books or the like. Not that books had fared well outside of the enchantments…
Even if the chance of finding one was low he really couldn’t think of a place where he might find one outside of a city. He needed road maps, a national map, and a world map if they had it. He would personally settle for any of the above. Hell even a globe would be good. As it stood right now he needed to know more. In the city it was a low priority and with the mapping functions he had available at some point he would get what he needed, he didn’t want to wait for that though. Not when he already needed to figure out where he was on any map with such a lack of reference points. Luckily according to a book on map reading in Alessa’s library the basic layout was the same as Earth the top of the map was north and the like. Until then he really wanted to know where the hell he was and how to get out of the wastes. This town should have several obvious places for finding such a thing between schools, stores, travel areas and the town hall, a place he fully expected to have civil information stored.
Some massive magical event had created the wasteland he currently inhabited. It created or unleashed the monsters. Add in a long period of time and some evolution, and viola magical wasteland populated by monsters. However, it seemed unlikely that such a thing could or would be apocalyptic on a planetary scale. At least not in the sense it killed everything, the monsters still lived and although they had changed from what the books described they were still recognizable. The event might have changed the planet but it didn’t kill it. Now what he needed was to find where it had more subdued effects. Places where this event might have had little to no effect or where it created a more favorable environment.
Would a map tell him this, no. It might however tell him where to start looking beyond randomly wandering around. He was getting too numb inside for that, endlessly wandering the wastes. A goal, any goal at this point, something smaller and achievable was all he needed. A set of goals that were in front of him a “do this, then that” towards his larger goal of getting to civilization. What would he do once he got there? No. Fucking. Idea. That was a problem for future Alex to figure out.
Weeks of crossing a frozen desert hellscape, fighting monsters by day and hiding in a manmade cave at night. Avoiding flying monsters, and nocturnal predators. Living in a suit of armor, even with the cleaning enchantments and a belt buckle that removed the need to pass waste. None of this was what one could call comfortable. Now a town, populated by yet another horrible bunch of intelligent monsters. Something of a cross between Fable’s Hobs and the goblins from the animated Hobbit movie. Short, stubby, and round. With stubby arms and legs, four fingered hands tipped with claws. Oversized mouths that seemed to take up most of the upper portion of their body. Small horns, and reptilian skin.
They were also tool users, he put them on the same level as Beastlings technologically. They didn’t make things so much as use what they had. Tying a sharp piece of metal to a pole to make a spear rather than investing the time to properly craft one.
Alex was taking his time, letting the arial drones map the city and mark the hostiles. He had spent a lot of time practicing with his mapping and surveillance enchantments during his travels. He wanted his drones to be equivalent to the US military. While that was unlikely to ever happen, he had found out ways for them to map topography as well as map and highlight threats. Making them jump out on the map and his small video screen inside Aegis’ helmet.
He was stalling, the information was useful and even necessary, but continuing to delay while waiting for more intelligence to update sporadically was unhelpful. His excuse to stay out of the city was wearing thin. With nothing left to do he began to move into the town. As he moved he called the full complement of his golems into formation. Seven humanoid golems, what he began to refer to as “Numbers” three steel golems and four bone. The three arial recon drones, and a small hunting pack of four “wolves” that made up his ground scouts. The squad of fifteen counting Aegis stalked towards their goal. He was pretty certain that a hard cap of twenty existed, the human mind could only stretch so far even with the help of magic, and that numbers might actually be hurting him in the long run. A smaller number of better constructs might be vastly superior to spreading his mind to control so many at once, of course he didn’t have those superior golems on hand so quantity was the name of the game for now.
He hit the town hard, the wolves tore through the outer “patrols” of the horned lizard things. Mentally he called them Dregs as he was saving the names of goblins and hobgoblins for other types should he find them. He almost called them kobolds, but they didn’t match that either, too froglike with their mouths and body shape that didn’t conform to lizard biology. In any case the wolves tore the nearest group to pieces, before they could react.
Coming over the small rise they had hidden behind like a lightning bolt. The wolves were both larger and tougher than the creatures, claws that rent flesh and bone. Jaws crushing skulls, the fight never even happened. One moment the creatures were alive then the low-slung wolves were moving past. Only the dead and quietly dying left behind.
Alex and the Numbers reached the edge of town without being spotted. The corpses were stored, and the group moved on. Wolves splitting up and looking for prey that had overhead cover from the drones. The next group that was encountered was sitting around a fire eating one of their own, apparently cannibalism was a thing for the Dregs.
Eins and the bone golems (Vier, Fünf, Sechs, and Sieben) engaged, leaving Zwei and Drei to guard Aegis. Alex was not letting his guard down, and unless he missed his guess they would end up clearing the town anyways, it was too small to move freely without engagements while looting and searching. Better to secure the place then sweep through for the search.
The fight was short as the blade arms of his golems cut through the Dregs who had yet again been caught off guard. As another dozen bodies were added to his necklace, the wolves began to break into the houses driving more of the creatures into the open for the slaughter. A bone golem would then follow up if needed to retrieve the corpses left in the building. Alex probably could have begun looting at this point. Sending his golems out to do the killing but he felt that was a very bad habit to get into, he had both gaming and real-world experience in picking off stragglers that separated from support. He refused to be one of them, the overconfident jackass that died due to stupidity and greed. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Unfortunately, his minions were too good, he and they had gotten so proficient at quick and silent killing that they still appeared to be undetected. Even with the wolves flushing monsters into kill zones. He rotated out the three steel golems to give them experience in the fights, maybe it was all in his head, but he ‘felt’ that new golems felt “sticky” or less responsive than the others. The cores learned by fighting and being controlled/commanded, they needed fights to learn, to become smoothly operating machines.
Originally, he was going to rotate them out when damaged, but they weren’t taking any. So he began to do so every few fights. The bone golems even managed to avoid damage that didn’t fix itself by the next encounter. After flushing a building, a bone golem would sweep through and then the group would move on. He kept Eins, Zwei, and Drei on the street usually with a pair of wolves in reserve, then sent the bone golems to comb through the nearest houses. The golems cleared one side of the town avoiding crossing Main Street.
On the other side of the road looked to be a fortified area, around the town hall and its forward parking lot. Likely chosen as a fortress for its size and position rather than the functions of the building.
In any case here was where he kind of began to lose it. The creatures had fortified the place with garbage, scrap and debris. Up to this point Alex and his golems had avoided anything that looked like it was a fortified position, that had applied during this entire nightmare of an ‘adventure’. The risk was never going to be worth the reward in his opinion. Hit a hard target for what? Not for an unspecified objective that was for damned sure.
Now even with Aegis he was hesitant. Assaulting across the road was bad enough, the lack of fire support making him feel like he had an itch he couldn’t scratch. Also even with the lack of effective opposition he didn’t have a good force structure for said assault. The requirement for him to join was a problem, the golems didn’t require line of sight to function or carry out his commands, they did however lose a lot of efficiency and would be out of range to support him if he got jumped.
His numbers were too few to envelope the ‘fort’ and attack from multiple sides like he would prefer. Crossing the road at another point risked getting ambushed in the enemy controlled streets on the other side within support range of the fort, which was the whole point of a fort as a weapon system. The entire point of a fort beyond being a defensive structure was area denial. This left him with the unfavorable option of a shattering full frontal attack across the open, thru or over the gates and walls.
For all the lack of opposition on this side it was apparent that the fort was alert. The Dregs were haphazardly patrolling the walls, little more than steep piles of debris and garbage. Some were clustered near the openings. They had better looking equipment than the ones he killed on this side including something that resembled armor. Mostly roughly tanned thick hide and many with crudely shaped debris strapped to themselves.
He could wait for nightfall or spend the time to recon the place properly, look for a chink in the defenses. Follow that up with a nighttime raid, he would use this option against human opponents, relying on the individual local superiority of his troops. Or he could just get it over with.
Assault the fort balls to the wall and do what he could to keep a retreat path open. Maybe use the main road itself as that path, he was confident he could outfight and outrun the Dregs. Alex came to a decision, he still had some semblance of surprise. The Dregs didn’t appear to have the means to stop him.
Keeping his golems concentrated rather than spreading them out, he sent the wolves ahead to take out the guards at the weakest point he saw, a barrier just in front of the main entrance and parking lot of city hall, gates were always weak points in defenses. That was why proper military forces put so much effort into guarding them.
The wolves were spotted immediately sparking a panic in the Dregs, most of whom reacted in a slightly unnerving manner. They were clearly startled and several outright hurled themselves back into the fort. Others got ready to receive the charge of the wolves, with ‘pikes’ ready to drive them back and the doors slamming shut. Throaty and gargling shouts began inside.
Then the wolves hit, tearing down the defenders despite taking hits themselves. If the wolves had been living creatures the Dregs might have stood a chance, diving them off or using the caution an animal might have to being injured, or attacking a concentrated group. As it stood the weapons did little damage to the metallic constructs, they scratched or even dented the relatively thin frames. Then the claws and jaws got to work, crushing bone and tearing flesh. Sheer mass scattering the add-hoc but clearly intentional, and incomplete formation.
This allowed Alex and the Numbers to be largely ignored on their crossing. The four bone golems tore into the survivors upon their arrival into the fight, finishing off the maimed but still living survivors. The wolves having completed their disruption tactic leapt and climbed to the top of the defenses clawing their way over to distract those on the walls from organizing. The metal golems formed an armored battering ram at the gate having been able to get up to full speed on the run, impacting like a bomb on the poorly made gate. First shattering the cross bar then momentum tore the whole thing completely free from the rest of the wall. Alex followed a few steps behind, and the bone golems collapsed back in to protect his rear, Vier remained at the gate to hold it while the rest rampaged through the primitive settlement that formed behind the wall.
It was a massacre the Dregs charged fearlessly against the six humanoid golems, encountering an impromptu wedge formation with Alex in the rear. Despite the ferocity of the attack, it broke harmlessly on the golems. Even the bone golems out massed the Dregs by about four to one, and after digging their talons in and the low wide stances they took to engage the shorter foes they would have no luck in bulling them over.
Swarming with numbers or wearing their opposition down was equally futile against the tireless machines. The solid construction and coatings made the crude poorly wielded weapons utterly ineffective.
Add this to the arial observation that let Alex move his forces to counter attacks, a massacre was what happened. The metal golems at the front waded into the opposition lashing out with blade arms, smoothly transitioning into clawed hands to that wrecked any Dreg lucky enough to slip in close. Twice the golems simply grabbed and hurled the now dying creature into others. Alex commanded his forces from within Aegis letting the larger bulkier suit walk backwards defending the rear without getting too far from Vier guarding the breach. The wolves plucked outliers off dragging them away and savaging their prey while the group slowly pressed forward.
It appeared that the Dregs in the fort were attacking with little thought. They were hurling themselves at the invaders without thoughts of the consequences, and what little leadership and organized resistance was present fell apart after a few seconds.
It didn’t matter.
First dozens then hundreds of the creatures were swarming over the golems. The wolves were the first to be driven back, the tents and crude dwellings leaving them little option to remain out of the melee as they became choked with Dregs. The hits began to cause real damage so Alex pulled them back. They were fighting in the walled off parking lot before the town hall, his golems had only managed to press in about 30-40 feet (9-12m) from the gate before they got bogged down by overwhelming numbers. Larger more dangerous versions of the normal Dreg had also begun to show up wielding large crushing weapons that actually did appreciable damage to his golems.
He was being driven back, ground was lost for the inability to press forward, each step back made by the golems to avoid damage was harder to regain than before. More and more Dregs boiled out of the buildings to meet his forces. The whole fight had only lasted about 3 minutes at this point. They had killed maybe one hundred of the creatures and mauled many more because the golems couldn’t close in to finish the wounded off.
Alex tsked to himself as he gave the orders to withdraw, Aegis now leading the charge out of the settlement. Vier rejoined the group as the point when they reached the gate, the wolves charged down the road before turning and attacking any Dreg that dared to follow the golems out.
After leaving the settlement the golems changed from a tight formation to a loose one. Letting them move as they needed to avoid being surrounded and to disperse their attackers, spread them out. Aegis, Zwei, and Drei were the only group that stayed together. Eins and the others were eliminating enemies as fast as possible. It didn’t take long for the Dregs to stop following, he had taken position on the road for an open battle. Alex hoped to be able to kite his opponents then hit and run on any outliers with the wolves. Whittling the groups down before ganging up on them with multiple golems.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
The golems didn’t get tired, running around wouldn’t cause problems. Nor did they feel morale was irrelevant, and ultimately, they were expendable resources. The issue in the settlement was one of numbers, Alex had gotten his force bogged down, in a slugging match that his golems couldn’t win. Almost all the Dregs stopped at the gate, no others sallied out from any other entrances. The lack of ranged weaponry prevented them from maximally using the walls.
He and his golems after finishing off the few stragglers that chased them out fell back across the road to the opposite side. This resulted in a staring contest as he waited for his golems to repair themselves. He was glad he hadn’t tried to take the other side of the road as a good number of the creatures he had faced had come out of the ruins surrounding the fort. It was the lack of pursuit that worried him now.
The vicious creatures were hostile they attacked on sight, but they were also more intelligent or at least controlled than the Beastlings he was used to dealing with. For the moment he withdrew out of sight putting a building between himself and the fort, but he had his golems monitoring the main road. Tasking his arial drones to monitor not just the Dregs but the outskirts of town. Alex at this point was determined to take the town hall, and clear/ loot the town. How… was a good question.
The frontal assault had failed. That didn’t bother him, nor did he mind losing the element of surprise. He never expected to truly succeed with the numbers he had, something was inevitably going to go wrong. If he had stealthy golems he would try picking the defenders off or sneaking in for some throat cutting like that first camp of beastlings so long ago. He did up the priority of getting ranged options for his golems, but that would not help him in this fight, it would take too long to design and implement. He also didn’t hold out hope that the Dregs would be stupid enough to let him whittle them down, not in the way he wanted at least. For now, he had roughly cleared this side of town, and he didn’t want to remain static.
He began looting, while he came up with a plan. Part of Alex wanted to use continued assaults to just break the Dregs down. The intelligence of the creatures made him hesitant to do so as they might find a way to kill his golems off if he gave them the time and combat experience. He didn’t want to give them the time and experience to find ways to defeat him.
He wanted no more than two maybe three more battles, like the last one. Short though it was, it revealed the dangers of a drawn-out engagement while surrounded. He could circle the town and pick them off from the outside in, swap his humanoids for more wolves and let them hunt through the other side to kill off the numbers.
Currently his favorite thought right now was basically a run and gun battle in the other side of town. Run through the street kill anything in his way without stopping to get bogged down, rapid maneuver warfare. He didn’t need any traditional battle lines or supply posts and lacked entirely the numbers to do so. The last fight had proven pretty conclusively that his golems were deadly enough to handle these creatures in anything but a true pitched battle. It also showed that they knew to avoid a fight once he was outside of their fort. This meant that he might be running up and down the streets on their side of town with nothing to engage, it was not out of the realm of possibility that the Dregs would deny him the easy engagements he was seeking to thin out the numbers.
He had managed to snatch up most of the corpses during the last engagement. Maybe he could siege them out if he killed enough and denied the others the remains as a food source.
Alex let his thoughts kind of drift, nothing he had was an optimal solution, so he continued to scavenge his side of the city. He was filled with a sense of unease the longer he spent thinking. How exactly did such a large population feed itself out here?
The Beastlings were cannibalistic and on numerous occasions brought down other monsters, plus the scavengers in a far more biodiverse environment like the big city. Here however, what were the thousands of Dregs using as a food source? Why were they so militaristic and competent? Nothing he had seen so far indicated crops or herding. Birth and growth rates had to be insane if they were eating each other. That included the idea that they didn’t need to eat as often as some other species. Thousands of hungry mouths meant that they needed thousands of meals for each meal cycle regardless of the length between feedings. He wasn’t seeing signs of other engagements with invaders, or even patrols or hunting parties….
The clearing of this side of town had revealed a large number of the Dregs eating, and he hadn’t seen an alternate food source. The Dregs there had appeared to be outcastes and not really opposition.
The clearing of Alex’s side of town meant combing through the houses and stores, he was finding remarkably little valuable loot. The Dregs had been pretty thorough, he also hadn’t found anything that looked like a food source.
Not even remains from some other creatures. So far the only things he encountered were the Dregs, a terrifyingly homogenous town. Cannibalism as a food source seemed unlikely, the cost was too high for anything that might be sustainable, and this place had a settled feel to its monster population.
As the sun began to set he left town, finding a good place to observe that was near the road and an elevated position. He had intended to stay in the town, but his gut was telling him that the situation didn’t add up. His golems were tough and he was certain that he could defend against the Dregs. He could easily create a fort of his own with the materials he had. If they could do it, he could do it better, and if theirs worked there was no reason his wouldn’t, unless it was reliant on the numbers.
Alex nixed that idea based on his instinct, the Dregs had numbers he couldn’t compete with. Outside it was unlikely he would get pinned down, or surprised, in a town maybe the Dregs could sneak up on his position, surround him and bring about a decisive engagement that was unlikely to end well for him.
He wanted whatever was in that fort, he considered knowledge to be more important as the materials would do little to change anything. So, he shaped the earth around his new position to provide overhead cover in the case of fliers and narrow entrances to fight from allowing a rotation of golems, and an easy escape route to the road and the slow car speeds his golems could run at on such a surface.
Then he settled in to watch the feed from his arial drones, while he worked away at building another steel golem frame. He had spent so much time shaping metal at this point that until it came time for enchantments, or working on the core it became mindless labor.
The sun set covering the land in near pitch-black darkness, clouds prevented the moon or moons if they existed from bringing light, and the town itself had something like a mixture of glowing moss and fire illuminating it. For Alex he was looking at four separate ways to peel back that darkness, his helmet provided the cool green illumination of night vision he had become accustomed to and comfortable with this in his time in the military. The drones had a lowlight illumination of greyscale. The thermal vision of white hot black cold, the same you might see on an IR drone. The last was plain old optical observation of the lighted areas enhanced, of course it had been designed for low light, and the ability to light said areas.
No dwellers popped up out of the sewers to attack during the night, the Dregs and Alex both suffered from the occasional attack by nocturnal predators. Alex mostly thought he got the worst of that in comparison even though he didn’t take losses or even significant damage. Although the Dregs lost numbers they didn’t seem significant, just life in the wasteland.
No massive hordes of flyers assaulted the illuminated town visible for dozens of miles in every direction even if it was as a very small dot of light in the distance.
What drew his attention was the goings on in the fort, the creatures were feasting. Some on the bodies of their own, remnants of the battle that morning. However there were not enough to in Alex’s mind feed the population. Throughout the night he watched and waited observing his new enemies.
A small part of him felt bad for the attack as the creatures were clearly intelligent, to some degree. Regardless of how hostile or territorial they were he still chose to engage in a battle he could have avoided. That small part didn’t last long as the activities in the camp convinced him that intelligent or not the Dregs remained monsters.
They ate their own, skinned them and used them for clothing and shelter. They were brutal, and vicious towards even the young in the camp. More than once he had seen a larger adult simply pick up and swallow a child, this included some of the females. The only consolation there was that the females avoided eating their own brood. Murders and fights were common, the less said about mating habits the better suffice to say that consent was optional and surviving the encounter was far from guaranteed.
These actions convinced Alex that the small part of him had a point about an avoidable engagement and that he needed to be careful not to antagonize potentially intelligent beings. However, these he had no problem removing, they were in his way and killing them off was beneficial to the world.
With the breaking of dawn he took one of the corpses out of his necklace and got to dissecting as he really was worried he was missing something important when it came to the life cycle of monsters. A somewhat conservative estimate put the Dregs numbers in the very low thousands probably between 3-4 all told. Nothing he had seen would allow that kind of population in terms of just food. Forget water if they even needed it.
Taking direct control of Aegis he began flaying and pulling the meat from the relatively intact Dreg corpse in front of him. He had long grown desensitized to the blood and viscera, and the helmet meant that the smell was a thing of the past. He didn’t find anything too out of the ordinary in the body, until he got to the core. That had him trying in vain to bang his head against the helmet’s interior.
“Of course, these things are monsters… They are capable of living off of the ambient mana in an area, food just helps the growth process and may prevent them from becoming hungry insane beasts. I’ve been thinking of these things like they are animals and not the product of magical fuckery.” He sighed heavily in exasperation.
The Dreg core was twice the size he was used to from the Beastlings and the creature it came from didn’t reflect that in terms of capability. The population was starving, in many ways. As long as the mana in the area was dense enough they would continue to live, until the natural end of their lifespan, but remain hungry for biological material to consume. To grow in strength, monsters used the energy they gained from feeding to enhance their own core.
Retrieving the body and its parts sans the blood on the ground Alex doused his golem with water to clean it as he didn’t want the scent of blood giving him away. Then exited and disassembled the shelter. Ignoring the crackling of ice as it formed and fell off.
He relocated to the road proper now having to reassess his plans. Killing the creatures off was still the goal he had convinced himself that there was valuable information in the town hall. Even if there wasn’t the experience of digging monsters from a fortified position had value as well. More importantly he needed to change his way of thinking when it came to dealing with monsters. Ranged options were now a must for his golems, that included an in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of the Dregs on his golems. Right now he had a perfect training opportunity before him. Alex used his earth shaping to form a large blister on the road as his new shelter and workshop. It was time to actually do what he said in the tower, adapt and craft his way to victory.
He was going to raid the town everyday and pick off as many of these things as possible, then follow that up with refining his golems including a ranged option for the humanoid ones. The scouts while capable fighters had lagged behind as the melee grew, not surprising as that was not their function. Still for the first time since the city he had control over the engagements, while having a “safe” base to operate out of including the ability for him to stay here and practice long distance golem combat. That was something he had totally failed to consider.
He had currently found a good farming area. The cores he could harvest were an added bonus, if he had enough he could potentially upgrade the golems that used Beastling cores. Beyond that, this was one of the safer areas he had encountered. Using the Dregs to grind out subtle improvements to his creations. Until just now the thought of truly grinding had been just that, a thought or convenient explanation of his activities and not really put into practice. Alex intended to change that.
First off, he began by turning his position on the road into a true bunker, he picked here mostly because it provided some solid, truly solid, ground to work with. He didn’t trust his crafting to build long term hard to penetrate flooring, if his amateur earth shaping had made it anything that moved or attacked from underground would likely be barely slowed by anything he could do. In contrast the road system here was extremely robust thick enchanted stone, like the concrete roads of his old world. Short of making something himself or breaking out the metals he had in storage to make something more permanent it was the best he could do. It also allowed him to just fuck off if things got too hairy.
The broad dome covered the three-lane road, providing overhead cover and several escape paths, with offsets to prevent a single attack from going straight thru. Once inside he finalized his decision to grind skills during the day and experiment at night. Almost every threat he knew of was significantly easier to spot in daylight, so he could let his attention wander a bit more. Specifically, his focus was on the golems and the remote combat operations.
Then at night he could pull back and work specifically on the golems and his newest project of adding ranged options to his party. At least until he got the hang of remote golem control. He hadn’t had much experience with it at any other time, his golems were rarely out of his line of sight. In the city the tight confining space left him little need or desire to have his golems far from where he stood. Controlling them using only their own senses while doing light practice so that he might be able to fight multiple battles at a time.
This outweighed any need for haste Alex currently felt. The usefulness was too great to pass up, and the opportunity… well he never knew when another might arise. For now, he ordered his humanoid golems to guard the position including outside guards in the form of the bone golems. His metal bodyguards remained at his side. He did release another arial drone, it pushed his limits of control but that was the whole point. This one would observe his location while the other low flying drone accompanied the wolves he was sending on a hunt. Four wolves as a pack shouldn’t strain him too much in terms of control and with the drone he could get a better idea of the surroundings. A small handicap until he removed it or added more training was meant to be hard after all, that was how you knew it was working.
The range of golems was based on the controller and his ability to maintain the link. Commands were instantaneous as far as he could tell. The link itself didn’t seem to have a perception of distance, as long as it was intact there was no difference if the golem was right next to him or on the other side of a continent. That was only the link however and had nothing to do with his ability to use it.
Alex focused on the four wolves and all his drones, the feedback from his other units faded until he could barely perceive them. This more than anything told him he was doing the right thing regardless of whatever excuses he came up with. He slowed the wolves in their loping run to give him a better chance to maintain the entirety of his perception. He needed to try and increase his ability to multi-task, it was more important than the killing of Dregs. Alex didn’t want to get into more bad habits and while he was fine with being distracted for now, the whole point was training. It didn’t look like he would make it to the town today.
In the end he spent all day controlling his hunting party around the camp, getting a splitting headache for his trouble and the “joy” of knowing he had encountered another chasm that needed to bridged then crossed. This would take a while.
~ * ~
To give his creations a ranged option was next on the list, Alex favored a jack of all trades golem currently. He did not want to take the time to design and build a ranged variant of his golems from scratch. Nor did he want to have them inevitably be niche, he could probably justify it with the number of golems he could control, and more importantly store, it just seemed wasteful. He still could not produce golems capable enough to justify specialization to that degree. He wanted to save that for single entity specialists not mass produced.
“Jack of all trades and master of none, often better than a master one.” He mumbled to himself, an explanation for his thoughts.
The other problem was the specifics of the weaponry he could conceivably make. A longbow, crossbow or some sort of miniature siege weapon if he could build it into the frame. All had their own problems, and since he couldn’t think of a way to make them work well… he just put those more advanced options to the side. Engineering and ammo concerned him in those cases, this was followed by what he wanted to have ranged units do.
Were his ranged forces there to harass or to kill? Depending on what he was dealing with it was possible that any ranged weapon he could build with his lack of knowledge on the enchantments for these weapons that they would achieve nothing. He didn’t have enchantments or the expertise to build what this world considered proper ranged weapons. So far he had used basic structural enchantments to enhance his golems, hardening, strengthening, and sharpening.
Some of that applied to projectiles, but he felt that spending too much time making ammo one unit at a time was also a waste. He didn’t want to leave them lying around nor did he want to waste materials, despite the surplus he was sitting on. He settled on the atlatl as the easiest thing he could add to the golems. Basically a javelin with longer range and more force, in a lighter projectile. A storage area in the back for the relatively short projectiles, he could link that area to the golems power to keep the half assed enchantments he was going to add to the projectiles active. If he made the ammo using earth shaping, say stone with a hardening and sharpening enchant, he might have something easy and cost effective. It also wouldn’t be a waste if he left them behind, the quick and dirty enchantments would fade in a few hours, and he would always have more material to resupply with unless he wandered his happy ass onto a ship or something. It was also better than what he currently had which was basically having his golems throw rocks.
The attachment to one of the golems arms wasn’t any more complicated than the blade arms his golems already had, and the increased range and force from an additional extension might make it able to kill. Alex despised the thought of a purely harassment weapon, if his ranged weapons lacked the force to penetrate and kill the target then for the moment they were useless. Or at best too niche for him to spend time on.
To make this work he put a double folded attachment on one arm of his golems and tied it and its control into the frame like he had for the blade arms. That gave him two times the golems forearm in extra length for the throw, add some notches and supports and he had a very rough working model. He would work on refining it when he recalled the wolves each night.
For storage he put a quiver for the projectiles on the golems back so that it could reach back and reload with its other arm. A simple rune scheme and a separate core for power would prevent degradation of the runes he put on the ammo while stored. The reloads would be fine in his storage item. The quiver was not large holding only eight shots a piece. It also didn’t interfere with the golems normal operation or balance.
All that done he settled in for the night, taking some time to chip away at the still massively backlogged updates to his inventory and information systems instead of studying. While he was burning through a number of crystals to keep the info updated Alex knew that knowledge was power. He wanted to know everything he had and what he was using it for. Probably useless in the short term but such tedious administrative tasks might save him a shitload of time in the future. Even just being able to glace at a ‘spreadsheet’ to see the materials he had available and the quantity. Basically, he could plan ahead more effectively. He had been doing this periodically since he left the city, he hadn’t bothered when building Aegis as it just took too much time from making progress. It seemed he had hit another slow period in his journey and this time his tasks were of a more mental nature than physical or engineering. Therefore, updating his lists suddenly became practical… Yay… Right?
The next morning Alex began training himself. He had clearly underestimated how difficult it would be to command his creations separately. As shown by the massive headache he currently had, and the fumbling attempts to get the wolves moving without any of his physical senses directly involved.
That was unacceptable. He also recognized that his mental health and stability had clearly taken a number of hits since his arrival on this planet. To the point where he couldn’t see goals clearly. Or perhaps he had become too focused on a goal, losing valuable flexibility. He needed to be able to adapt, not just to the immediate situation but to the long term one.
He had been here at least a decade already, between Alessa’s tower and his fumbling around in the city, the creation of Aegis. During that time he had only grown, previous aches and pains had faded he wasn’t getting weaker he was getting stronger, both directly in raw physical capacity and far more importantly in his skills, knowledge, and experience. The twenty-six-year-old him that first arrived here, hadn’t even begun to deteriorate. Although since he was pretty sure his body had been ‘made’ upon his arrival, that age might be misleading. His body remained unchanged in any meaningful way by the ravages of time. Some of the accumulated damage from his military service had been pushed back, it appeared that his body had shown up much as he remembered it. Between the magical fuckary of his arrival and healing spells, he physically felt better than he had in his teens, when it came to his health and energy.
At the same time he had been losing that mentality he needed out here, he was starting to think that time was not actually an enemy in the technical sense. He needed to start looking at the situation from a different angle, one that netted him the most gain. Not just material, but mental and practical as well. Not being satisfied with just doing the bare minimum to survive but to thrive. If he had practiced the remote use of golems sooner he might have literally no need to physically risk himself in combat, at all. He could have commanded his golems from outside of the town, and while he hadn’t been in danger during the battle, the thought of staying out of the fight never crossed his mind.
After his failed assault on the town hall and the revelation of how the monsters with cores functioned in barren environments he was forced to step back and again reevaluate what was going on, and what he intended to do.
Until just now he hadn’t thought, for lack of a better term about his ‘character build’. In the city he had been a squishy mage with golem bodyguards. Then he built Aegis and had different options, but he hadn’t changed his play style, the only difference was that he was now armored.
It was time to change that up. He was a pet/ support build. He created and commanded minions to do the tasks he needed. While doing that he used his personal abilities to support from the back lines and creating items for the next encounter. He was not a battle mage, nor was he a fighter in his role. It likely would have been obvious to an outsider and he was even exhibiting some of the expected behavior of that build. He was not, however, actually optimizing his build, or playing to his strengths.
Really, he needed to put the resources he had to work, he needed to develop himself into a commander not a fighter archetype. He had most of the tools already, he just hadn’t been using them, at least he hadn’t been using them to their full potential.
The whole point of Aegis was to keep him safe if he got in a fight. The golem wasn’t there so he could continually throw himself into battle. Sighing at this obvious oversight he set about creating a shooting range to test his ranged options and the complications it might have for his control of the golems. Then he got down to the nitty gritty of refining the design of his golems more. All while controlling a bunch of apparently drunk wolves nearby and out of sight.
~ * ~
The wolves were slinking along approaching a group of Dregs trying and failing to patrol an area in ‘their’ side of town. Failing because they completely missed the two wolves that jumped them from behind. When the creatures turned to engage, they got hit by the rest of the pack once again in the rear. The patrol did the best they could, but it wasn’t enough the road they were on didn’t have avenues to flee so the twenty Dregs died quick horrible and largely silent deaths. Seven wolves began dragging the bodies down a predetermined path out of town they would return for the rest before moving on to the next position.
After leaving the bodies in a heap outside of town two bone golems would drain the bodies of blood, remove the cores and the excess meat. Then pile them high waiting for Alex to make a trip out to collect them. Those trips had become less rare over time as he got the hang of mentally controlling his forces.
In the now much longer bunker on the road Alex was looking at another project. With a more “adapt and overcome” mentality he had revisited the idea of shelter. Not a mobile shelter, that was still far too complicated to pull off. Even a trailer variation where he was pulled along by golems didn’t do anything for him.
No, he was working on a modular shelter that he could place down, it wasn’t any more complicated than a tent, much like the one he first made and had still never used. Made of better materials and having more functionality, Alex needed a secure place to stay for any long-term operations. He needed a place to do the crafting he required to adapt to the changing circumstances. In the city that place could be a building, but even there he hesitated to settle anywhere even semi-permanently. Alessa’s tower, and the facility he built Aegis in had defenses that other places lacked. Both had been beyond vital to his survival.
He needed something similar for when he was on the road and in the open. He intended to turn basically metal and stone into cohesive enchantments allowing him to store whole rooms in his necklace. That meant he could place it down, expand if needed by placing other modules onto the central portion. They couldn’t be too large or complicated for practical reasons, and the enchantments were the sticking point. He needed to tie them together like the items he looted from the tower.
Alex couldn’t do anything too complex, or it failed to be stored as a cohesive whole, the incorrect and incomplete enchantments breaking down. Smallish rooms with different wall configurations would let him drop a base down anywhere. Space might be a problem, and he would have to place down furniture separately. He needed to sacrifice several cores to power the portable base, that was a small price to pay. The experience of building the base and of building the ‘appliances’ he would add, plus the flexibility it gave him was more than worth it. The saved time when it came to setting up the required tools and the equipment he needed was tremendous. The security to work on his golems and other projects let him kind of cut loose.
As for the town, well it needed cleansing. He admitted to himself that his reasons were rather shallow, still dead monsters are good monsters. Unless their deaths brought about something worse, hopefully this wasn’t a flag. The wolves and bone golem detachments had largely reached the limits of what could be done without an all-out attack of some form.
Any time his constructs moved beyond the outskirts of the town they drew the attention of an overwhelming number of the Dregs. Those Dregs didn’t pursue his golems they formed up to block without letting him draw them into ambushes.
On the positive side he had gotten the chance to test out the throwing weapons his golems now carried. They were… underwhelming to say the least. The effective range was short, despite the darts ability to go far they lost sooo much energy that they weren’t effective beyond a few dozen feet (Roughly 6m). The weapons did kill, and where they didn’t, they left horrible wounds or bogged the creatures down due to the awkwardness of sticking out and generally being a nuisance. While not impressive it was a start.
The training he got out of it was actually far more important. Controlling and commanding his golems to use the new ranged weapons had been frustrating to say the least.
Just a little longer and he would clear the place, if the Dregs weren’t going to come to him and get ambushed then he would set his golems out of range and pick them off. He had been making ammo anytime he had the mana and wasn’t using it for other things. Hundreds of shots were sitting in his necklace for easy access.
In any case it was time to move on, Alex having finished two blocks for his ‘portable’ base just to make sure he had it right, began to pack up the area. His idea of totally remote operating his golems was optimistic. There was a dramatic increase in efficiency when he was present and commanding. He also really needed time to smooth it out, he had gotten over the first major hurdle. He could command from a distance effectively, only using his golems senses.
Alex had a simple plan, a sustained and controlled attack on the fort. Nothing complex, just his golems against the monsters. He would be controlling his golems from the back line kill off any that stood to fight and when they tried to back off and form up he would shower them with projectiles followed by a charge. Cycle out his golems for repairs, take any ground the Dregs gave up and keep pushing. He would crush his enemies with the inexorable weight of metal and bone.
Packed up and with his bunker destroyed and returned to the flat landscape, he moved forward.