As NIM fully refocused onto the world around itself, taking in the image of the Hold’s interior, it was met not with the darkness it expected… but unnatural sunlight. Sunlight, which it quickly realized was coming directly from runes on the walls, which it instantly took a picture of and made sure to keep saved. The hall it now found itself in was spacious, well-lit, and not even remotely the image of an abandoned structure that’s been deserted for who knows how long. It also spoke of a sophistication that told NIM just how far these Farmer-Folk had fallen.
Each ‘Light rune’, as it took to calling them, was nearly identical, aside from only minute differences that could be caused by human error and natural degradation both. Sure, the hallway was horribly dusty, and NIM could tell the Hold would need to have its door open for a few hours at least before the air would be tolerable to human sensibilities. Regardless, it was more well-preserved than NIM had anticipated, and that put it on edge, as it spoke of magical potential it couldn’t begin to guess about the limitations of.
Not having much time to waste, NIM began moving rapidly deeper into the Hold. At least as rapidly as a mass of nanomachines dragging itself across the floor could. As it reached the first split in the hallway, it noted with some unease what appeared to have once been a sign denoting what was located down that corridor. The unease was present, because the sign had been rendered impossible to actually understand, due to what looked like some sort of attack against it. That wasn’t what was causing NIM to feel uneasy, however, but rather the fact that the attack looked like some sort of claw slash, but from the way it looked, it appeared to come from within the very wall itself.
Seeing this, NIM was about to split off a SNIMC when it got interrupted by the ground beginning to shake. Its calculations rapidly telling it danger was nearby, it practically glued itself to the few cracks within a nearby wall, as something rounded a corner and entered the hallway it had just been looking at. What that something was, NIM wasn’t fully certain. It looked vaguely humanoid, with a body made of bronze, and with eyes that glowed like runes. However, that all wasn’t what had taken NIM’s attention, but the runes on the thing’s forehead. They were a complex grouping of smaller runes, forming what NIM decided to call a ‘Runic Sentence’, for lack of a better term. It didn’t know most of the runes, but it did recognize the Light rune present at the beginning of the sentence.
As NIM observed it closer, it noted that the thing didn’t have any joints, but rather, the bronze which made its arms simply bent, as if by some unseen force, allowing it to move, in spite of being basically one giant block of bronze. NIM considered what sort of hallucinogens Ziud and Kurkuiud were taking, to believe any of their warriors capable of taking these sorts of things on. However, it not long thereafter remembered the ‘Thadubsiki’, Zagimbri’s hammer.
If NIM’s theory that the singular rune on the thing’s forehead was what basically gave it life was right, then all one would need is a singular attack strong enough to break the fragile runic sentence, and the bronze automaton was dead. Something which, with a few calculations, NIM noted the Thadubsiki to likely be capable of, especially in the spacious halls of this Hold, against what appeared to be an imposing, but very slow, opponent.
A stray computation suddenly came to NIM.
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{What if I fill in the rune?}
NIM nearly discarded it instantly, on the fact that testing it could mean death, but then realized it very much so had room to experiment, as the Golem, thankfully, slowly trundled by it, not even sparing it a glance. NIM waited for the Golem to get some ways away, so that it would most likely not notice the change in light level, and then focused its full attention onto one of the light runes along the wall.
Moving along the wall, NIM slowly poured more and more Sub-NIMs into the rune until, suddenly, it turned off after NIM had made a barely-noticeable change to its structure with its own form. Just as suddenly, it began hearing thundering footsteps approaching more rapidly then it had thought possible, as it noticed the bronze automaton suddenly sprinting towards it at a ludicrously fast speed for its size. The Bronze Automaton’s limbs looked more like liquid bronze, with only its fists and feet maintaining solidity, as it approached. NIM quickly retracted its Sub-NIMs back into its form, as a result, only for the light to turn back on. But the Bronze Automaton was still charging towards it.
NIM steeled its resolve, as it did rapid last-minute calculations, checking trajectories before, finally, it found a good one. If this failed, it would likely lose a not-enjoyable amount of Sub-NIMs, but if it did succeed, then it wouldn’t need to be afraid of these Automatons while searching throughout the rest of this place.
A blob of Sub-NIMs suddenly rocketed out from NIM’s mass, and right towards the Golem’s forehead. It tried to shift its head to the side, but as NIM had calculated, it couldn’t outright shift its head in the same way it could its arms, lest it risk breaking its own rune. As its head shifted to the side on its shoulders, the blob of Sub-NIMs shifted through the air, stretching out in the air, as the Automaton’s eyes suddenly glowed even brighter, taken off-guard by an opponent that could shift its body around like it.
The blob of Sub-NIMs latched onto the side of its forehead, and quickly undulated into the Runic Sentence giving the Automaton life. A hand of liquid bronze suddenly shot up towards the mass of Sub-NIMs, grappling onto it, only to suddenly turn solid, as the Sub-NIMs filled enough of the Runic Sentence to turn it off.
Slowly, with a bit more than a little fear, NIM moved its main body further away from the Automaton, into the corridor it had originally come from. Once at a distance it considered safe enough, it had the Sub-NIM mass in the golem’s forehead slowly move out of its grasp. Looking at the dead automaton, NIM considered the current situation. If it moved the mass out from the Automaton’s forehead, it would begin working again, but if it didn’t, then it effectively permanently lost that Sub-NIM mass, something which was rather painful, seeing how tough it was to make new Sub-NIMs. And especially when it realized that, by accident, it had thrown a few of its quantum-dot coated Sub-NIMs when panicking and throwing the mass of Sub-NIMs at the automaton. A mistake it wouldn’t have ever made if it still had its old computational power, but one which it would need to own up to.
And, admittedly, NIM was relatively curious about what the Golem would do when it woke back up anyways, to see the limitations of these runes and runic sentences, and as such, better understand them. As such, it changed itself to be fully immobile once more, in order to maximize computational power, reaching back over 4 exaFLOPs, so that it could react as quickly as possible to any changes. And then, it ordered the Sub-NIM mass to slowly retract from the runic sentence on the Automaton’s forehead.
After a minute of slowly moving Sub-NIMs out from the Golem’s forehead, its eyes suddenly began to glow once more. NIM prepared itself to order the Sub-NIM mass to refill the Automaton’s forehead, only to relax as the Automaton’s arm, which had been previously poised to grasp the Sub-NIM mass, suddenly fell limply to its side, and the Automaton straightened up. It looked around for a few seconds, before its gaze suddenly fell upon NIM’s main body, as if drawn towards it.
For 10 minutes, NIM and the Automaton simply stared at each other, NIM’s mind going through multiple possible calculations of what was going on, trying to decipher whether the Automaton was playing some sort of game, to have it let its guard down, or was truly no longer hostile.