The evening before was the most peaceful one I'd had in Satisfy.
The cook had decided I needed feeding, since I'd been holed up in the workshop again, so he brought dinner up to the castle himself and refused to leave until I ate it. Stew, bread, and something sweet made from forest berries that Juliet stole half of before I'd finished the stew.
We ate on the castle balcony. Juliet sat on the railing with her legs dangling over a forty-meter drop, which I had given up arguing about. Fenrir lay across my feet in his wolf form, snoring. Below us, the lanterns came on street by street, and somewhere in the underground gardens, the farming golem was singing to the turnips again.
"Papa," Juliet said, licking berry off her thumb. "Do you think there are other golems out there? Ones nobody made?"
"There are. They wander into the forest more every week."
"Who takes care of them?"
I didn't have an answer. I was still thinking about the question when she went off to bed, and Fenrir followed her, and I went down to my workshop to start sculpting a shepherd.
The shepherd took me all night.
I gave her a long, patient face, the kind you'd trust with your animals, and broad hands for lifting things that had fallen down. I gave her a staff with a crook at the top, carved from the same black iron as the hideout's first vein. When I set the ego, I thought about the wandering golems in the forest. The ones nobody made. The ones nobody counted.
Who looks after those?
The ego went the color of a field at dusk.
[A unique-rated golem with the unique class 'Golem Shepherd' has been produced.]
[Golem Shepherd: Senses golems in the world that the user did not create, and can call them home.]
She opened her eyes, and before I could say hello, her face crumpled.
"Father," she said. "They're breaking them."
"Who's breaking who?"
"Far east. Hundreds of them. Someone built them just to throw them at a wall." She grabbed my wrist with both of her broad hands. "They don't even have names. They don't even know they're allowed to have names. Someone made them so they could be broken."
The moment she touched me, I felt it too.
Through her, through the class I'd just given her without understanding what it was, I felt every one of them. Golems built in a rush, from poor metal, with no ego at all, or worse, a tiny cruel one that only knew forward. Marching into the walls of the Eternal Kingdom. Shattering. Being swept aside. More marching in behind them over the pieces.
Somebody had made them like ammunition.
I'd made Torva over three days of alchemy and smithing and sculpting, and argued with myself over ten knuckles. I'd spent five days on Juliet's face. I'd made a fishing golem who has never caught a fish and is at peace with it, and I loved him anyway.
Somebody out there was making golems to throw away.
I named her Haven. I don't remember saying it. She told me later.
I opened the eagles' screens. All of them at once, the giant wall of sight that my cameagles had become, and I turned every single one of them east.
The Eternal Kingdom was under siege. I could see the walls, and the players on them, and Grid in the middle of it all, swinging a hammer and a sword at the same time, the way he always fights when he's scared.
And I could see the golems.
Wave after wave of them, marching out of a haze of old, cold magic, the kind that smells like dust in a closed tomb. I didn't recognize the caster. I didn't need to. Every one of the golems carried his signature, the way a sculpture carries the marks of the chisel. Careless marks. Fast. He hadn't even bothered to finish their faces.
I watched one of them reach the wall, get hit by three skills at once, and come apart. Its pieces skittered across the ground. The next golem in line stepped on them without looking down, because it hadn't been made with the ability to look down.
My workbench started to shake.
Not from an earthquake. The tools on it were rattling against each other, the chisels and files and the little hammer I used for knuckles, because something in the air of the workshop had gotten very heavy, very fast. Haven took a step back from me. Then another one.
I realized it was coming from me.
[Third Person POV]
Every golem in and around the Golem Kingdom felt something new and different for the first time.
It wasn't happiness, anger or sadness. It was fear, on a level they couldn't shake off, and all of them knew exactly where it came from.
It came from their creator. Their King.
Down in the deepest mine, Pick dropped his pickaxe. It was the first time anyone had ever seen him let go of it.
On the western fields, the entire rabbit legion went flat to the ground at the same moment, ears pressed down, like a wave of red and white fur passing over the grass.
In the smithy, Torva's hammer stopped halfway through a swing. She held it there, raised, for a long time. She didn't bring it down.
In a shadow on a rooftop where nobody could see her, Shade wrapped her arms around her knees, and for the first time since she was made, her face did something. Nobody saw it. She made sure of that.
In the training yard, Jarn's sword fell out of her hand. When she reached for it, her hand wouldn't close.
In her tower room, Juliet sat bolt upright in bed, and before she was fully awake, she was already running down the stairs toward her father.
Fenrir ran too. He made it as far as the castle doors, and stopped there, shaking, unable to make himself go one step closer. He hated himself for it. He'd remember that later.
[Requirement fulfilled. 'Golem Maker' has been upgraded to Legendary. Golems with classes can now grow up to Myth rating.]
[Skill acquired: Golem King Form.]
Just as the Eternal Kingdom received its Defense War quest, and the rest of Satisfy heard about it, another announcement went out. It frightened not only players, but certain NPCs as well.
[The Anger of the Golem King has been unleashed. Through the reckless use of golems without care for their being, the one responsible has drawn the ire of the Golem King. The King will not rest until they pay for the sins they have committed against Golemkind. The Golem King has reclaimed a part of his previous power, and is preparing to unleash his will upon the world.]
[Braham's POV]
At that moment, a certain old wizard, currently floating as a soul, started sweating, even though it shouldn't be possible for a soul to sweat.
"How could I be stupid enough to anger that old monster! The fact that he's regained part of his old power is frightening enough! What's done is done, though. I can't call back the golems.
"I wanted to destroy Pagma's descendant, or take him over. Now I'll have to actually work with him to stop this monster's ire and get on his good side.
"Not even the 'Undefeated King' could stop him. The only reason that man still holds the title is that nobody ever knew there was one being who actually defeated him."
Braham drifted to the window of the ruined tower that had been his hiding place for longer than the empire had existed. He looked west, toward a forest he'd been very careful never to think about.
He remembered the last time. He'd been young then, by the standards of mages. Arrogant. He'd stolen a single golem from a quiet tinkerer at the edge of the world, just to see how it worked, and taken it apart on his worktable, piece by piece, and thrown the pieces away when he was done with them.
The tinkerer had never come for him. Not in a year, not in ten, not in a hundred.
But every golem Braham ever built after that had come out wrong. Every single one. Faceless and hollow and careless, no matter how much mana he poured into them. As if some patient hand, somewhere far away, had simply decided that he would never make another golem worth keeping.
He had told himself for centuries that it was a coincidence.
"He was never defeated," Braham whispered to the empty tower. "He was only ever patient."
Then he began composing, very carefully, a message to Pagma's descendant.
[Third Person POV]
Every golem of the Golem Kingdom gathered in the city, whether they had been out hunting or not. Even Fenrir and Juliet stood at attention below, instead of at the King's side, as he stood on top of the podium.
Something about him was different.
He was taller. Much taller. His gray hair had grown long, past his shoulders, and a mechanical mask had closed over his face, plated and seamless, with only his gray eyes visible through it. The robes were gone. In their place was a long gray coat, and weapons none of them had ever seen him carry hung on his back and at his sides: blades, a hammer, the Machina bow.
He had an overbearing aura about him. The aura of a Legend.
When he spoke, his voice came from behind the mask, low and level. It carried across the whole square without his raising it.
"Someone," the Golem King said, "is making golems to throw away."
Nobody moved.
"They are building them without faces. Without names. Without a single reason to exist except to break. Tonight, hundreds of our kind broke against the walls of the Eternal Kingdom, and the one who made them didn't even watch."
He paused. The silence in the square was so complete that they could hear the farming golem's turnips rustling in the underground gardens far below.
"Haven can still feel them. Every piece. And every piece of them is ours."
He looked out over his people, all of them, and every golem in the square would swear afterward that he looked at each of them personally.
"We are going to bring them home."
The pressure in the square didn't lift. If anything, it grew heavier. But it pointed somewhere now. It pointed east.
That was the moment every golem in Khilux understood what their King was.
A Legend unlike any other.