[Fenrir]
I am the menace of this world.
My power knows no bounds.
No limit can restrain me, nor chain me down.
I have seen the beginning, and can cause the end.
My howl has disrupted the balance of the world,
Breaking the chains of fate,
Destroying the boundaries of balance.
Ragnarok!
[Juliet]
I have been crafted to perfection,
Given limitless power with no end in sight.
Bound to a sacred wish,
My future set in stone.
Defying the laws of life and death,
Manifested by the secrets of the world,
Guided by the one true Golem King.
Everlasting Eden!
[Daz's POV]
Honestly, I didn't think they'd be able to manifest something like the noble phantasms from the Fate series. But lo and behold, Fenrir and Juliet pulled it off.
They were completely different from each other.
Juliet manifested an imaginary forest around herself. Huge silver-barked trees, blue flowers, a sky the color of late afternoon. Her aura grew until it felt like she could take on every one of my golems except Fenrir, all at once. Somewhere in the middle of it, I swear I saw a purple roof through the trees. I didn't ask.
Fenrir manifested something like the void. It felt like if any enemy attacked him, he would devour their entire being. He looked like a bottomless pit with no end to it.
For a few seconds, the whole training ground was silent.
Then it wasn't. Izarail was the first to break, with a roar of "THAT WAS AMAZING" so loud that two of the regenerating dummies fell over, followed immediately by "SORRY, SORRY." Martimer whooped. Joul grabbed her arm and shook it. The rabbit legion, who had been watching from the fence, stampeded in a joyful circle around the yard and had to be herded back by the dire wolves.
Torva didn't cheer. She was writing in her notebook so fast the pencil was smoking.
And off at the edge of the yard, Jarn stood with her hand pressed flat against her chest, staring at the place where the void had been. When Fenrir's eyes found hers across the yard, she looked away first.
Fenrir and Juliet quickly let their worlds fade, and sat down hard in the dirt, clearly drained from using their new abilities for the first time. From the looks on their faces, though, they were beaming.
[The quest 'To Go Even Further Beyond' has been completed.]
I congratulated them with head pats, then sat down in the dirt with them while the crowd broke up, since neither of them looked like they could stand yet.
"Papa," Juliet said, leaning against my arm. "Did you see the trees?"
"I saw them. They were beautiful."
"I didn't plan the trees. I wrote the chant, and then they just... came. And the flowers. And the house."
I went very still. "What house?"
"There's a house in the middle of it. Way in the back. You probably couldn't see it." She frowned, trying to remember. "It's small. It has a purple roof. I don't know why. It's just always been there, I think. Even before I made the forest."
I'd seen the roof through the trees. I'd told myself I hadn't.
In the real world, on the wall above a bed I'd only just been brave enough to sit on, there's a drawing in crayon of three people holding hands in front of a house with a purple roof.
"That's a good house," I said, when I could. "You should keep it."
"I will," Juliet said, satisfied, and fell asleep against my arm, right there in the training yard.
Fenrir had been quiet the whole time. He was in his kid form again, sitting cross-legged with his tail wrapped around his knees.
"Father," he said. "Mine doesn't have a house."
"No?"
"It doesn't have anything. It's just... hungry. It wants to eat everything that comes near it." He looked down at his hands. "Is that bad? Juliet made a forest. I made a hole."
I thought about that for a while.
"Fenrir. Who's inside the hole when you make it?"
He blinked. "...Me."
"And who's on the outside?"
He thought about it. Then he looked at his sleeping sister. Then at me. Then, very briefly, at the edge of the yard, where Jarn had been standing.
"Everyone I'm protecting," he said slowly.
"Then it isn't a hole. It's a wall that eats things. That's the best kind of wall there is."
Fenrir's tail started going. He climbed up onto my head, curled up, and went to sleep there, and I sat in the training yard for another hour with my whole family asleep on me, because I wasn't going to be the one to move first.
After that, I went back to work. I needed another 20 construction golems to help expand the city.
I planned to build a giant city covering most of the center of the forest, and the underground beneath it. So I made construction golems in batches of five, sent each batch to the foremen, and kept an eye on the ever-growing city as we prepared for future visitors.
One golem in the third batch caught my attention. When I finished him and he opened his eyes, the very first thing he did was take a measuring stick off my workbench and measure the workbench. Then he measured it again. Then he looked at me and said, very seriously, "It's two millimeters off level, Father."
It was. I'd never noticed. I sent him off with the others. I had a feeling I'd be seeing him again.
Torva came to give her report on Grid that evening, notebook in hand, and sat on the end of my workbench, since she's long since stopped asking.
"He's going on a pilgrimage, Praetor," she said. "He wants a blessing from every church in Satisfy."
"Every church?"
"Every church."
"Including the Yatan church."
Torva flipped a page. "He hasn't thought about that part yet."
I laughed. I genuinely couldn't picture how he was going to pull that one off. "What else?"
"He made a cloak." Her mouth twisted. "It attracts monsters."
"On purpose?"
"On purpose. He wears it to farm faster." She closed the notebook. "It's clever. I hate that it's clever. If he wears it too long, it'll get out of hand, and he'll be buried under a mountain of wyverns, and I'll have to watch."
"You'd watch?"
"I'd take notes," Torva said, with great dignity, and hopped off the workbench to go back to her smithy.
After that, it was time to try something I'd been sitting on since Grid broke Huroi out of prison. I was going to make a golem with more than one class.
It did not go well.
My first attempt was a knight-mage. I gave it a guardian knight's frame and a mage's ego core, and the moment it woke up, it tried to cast a fireball while raising a shield, and set its own arm on fire.
[Class conflict detected. Golem has defaulted to: Knight.]
The second was an archer-priest. It drew an arrow, then tried to heal the arrow.
[Class conflict detected. Golem has defaulted to: Priest.]
The third was an assassin-berserker. It went into stealth, then immediately came out of stealth, screaming.
[Class conflict detected. Golem has defaulted to: Berserker.]
Izarail thought that one was the greatest golem I'd ever made. He took it under his wing on the spot. They're very loud together.
The fourth attempt didn't even wake up.
[The creation has failed. A golem cannot hold more than one class at the user's current rating.]
That was the most information I'd gotten. 'At the user's current rating.' So it might be possible once my class reached legendary. Or it might never be possible at all, and the system was just being polite. Either way, I'm not giving up on it.
I'm not far from Legendary now. One more legendary being, and one new unique golem with a unique class. My luck seems to have run out on the second part, though. I've been trying for two weeks straight.
So I decided to just make golems without caring about their grade.
I also have to manage my city now, and attend meetings about the future. Most of them are for appearances, so I seem like an enigmatic king. I sit at the head of the table in my mask and say very little, while Martimer reads reports and everyone else nods. Juliet once asked why I go to meetings where I don't talk. I told her it's called 'leadership'. She told me it's called 'napping with your eyes open'.
She isn't entirely wrong.
The part of being king I actually enjoy is the library. The castle came with one when the hideout rose to the surface, and nobody had touched it. It's full of books I didn't put there. History books. Lore books. Books about me.
I'm apparently written into the game's lore as an old legend. Some of the books say the Golem King came out of the earth before the empires did. Some say he was a tinkerer who outlived his own masters. One very old book, bound in something that might have been leather and might have been very thin metal, only said one thing about him, over and over, on every page, in a handwriting that got shakier as it went:
He was never defeated. He was only ever patient.
I closed that one and put it back on the shelf, and didn't sleep well that night.
That's also how I found out there are quite a few old legends connected to Pagma, and even more from another place I couldn't get any information on yet. There was a whole shelf about that other place. Every single book on it was blank.
I was in the middle of reading when one of my cameagles sent me a distress signal.
I switched to it immediately. It was being chased by someone I'd been searching for for a long time.
Kraugel.
I quickly did something I hoped would work, and opened a window I'd never opened before.