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1127 Words
She took the shove with good grace and started moving, which made it easier for Matt to block and attack the legs.
The next [Bolt] hit the underside of the golem, and the monster glowed brighter. Still, the golem shook so badly that Matt had to tank a second leg hit to protect Camilla.
She was casting every second, and the golem started to lock up and twitch. They didn’t need to discuss getting out from under the soon-to-fall heap of metal.
As it collided with the wall, it fell back and started spasming. Camilla kept the shocks coming, and Matt watched something inside the golem try and glow brighter, but it seemed to short out.
The rush of essence gave everyone a pause.
“Well, then…’let’s leave.”
Matt fully agreed with Malcolm. But first, he pried open the golem, and pulled out what seemed to be its core.
Maybe I can do something with this. I should have grabbed one from everything we killed.
The core of overlapping plates was arranged in a circle, and it was still glowing and shooting off small sparks. But the small sputters were unable to stress his armor at all.
They reached the elevator and saw a hall that they hadn’t seen before. At the end of it was clearly a door to some kind of vault.
As they slowly made their way toward it, they were careful to check for traps. But Malcolm lagged behind, pleading with them to just leave now.
The others agreed to at least check it out. Vaults usually held valuables, after all.
As they approached the door, Matt and the others readied themselves for another fight or trap. All of a sudden, Matt felt a small amount of heat building in his off hand. He looked down to see that the core of the giant golem was glowing with intense blue light. The closer they got to the vault, the more intense the light emanating from the core became, and after a few more steps, it violently shook. A few feet in front of the vault, it radiated such intense light and heat, the core stressed [Cracked Phantom Armor] to the point of draining more mana.
Liz became concerned, and yelled to Matt, “Drop that damn thing! It’s going to blow your arm off!”
Not needing to be told the obvious, with a flick of his wrist he tossed the core as far away from them as he could. Still, it was too late. The core was already too unstable, and it immediately exploded in a giant burst of mana on impact.
The hall lit up, and the darkness was filled with the light of runes that covered the floors and walls.
The intersection where they had branched off from the elevator lit up, and the mana barriers that they had seen on the floor above appeared on each tunnel entrance. They were trapped.
Malcolm pounded on the light from the hall and shouted, “What happened!? I heard an explosion!”
Matt cursed himself. He had done this by wanting to play with some new toy.
If he had even put the core away, this wouldn’t have happened. But he wanted to use it as a light source. He hadn’t even thought that the core was full of mana, let alone that it would have some reaction to whatever was hidden in the vault.
Matt inspected the hall entrance. It was locked up tight by the mana barrier.
Malcolm seemed to be panicking and asked, “What do I do?”
Matt thought as fast as he could.
There were no satellites yet, so the man’s AI couldn’t do anything. If they wanted help, they would need to either wait out the mana, or let him travel the multi-day hike on his own to get help.
It wasn’t like they couldn’t do both.
“Go get back to the settlement. You can’t break this any more than we can, and you can’t defend yourself if more golems come.”
Malcolm looked aghast at the idea “I won’t survive out there.”
Liz shrugged and said, “Run fast. If you wait here, you’ll get trapped as soon as a patrol comes through that hall. You can’t even fight a small golem on your own. Take the elevator up by activating it with your mana. Just run quickly.”
As the man appeared to have a mental breakdown, Camilla called out, “If you don’t make it and end up dead, I’ll find your corpse and replace your eyeballs with rocks. You have a Talent based on finding whatever you want. Want to be safe stupid!”
That actually seemed to calm the man down. As he turned to run, he called out, “I’ll come back with help!”
Once he was in the elevator shaft, they heard the soft whoosh of air indicating that the platform had worked.
Liz looked at the cage they were stuck in.
“This is less than ideal.”
Matt wanted to pound his head against the wall.
“I am so sorry this happened. I’ve been complaining about Malcolm, and then I do something even dumber than all of these shenanigans put together.”
Camilla was looking at the glowing wall and shrugged at Matt.
“It’s just bad luck and wasted time. I doubt this will last forever. The energy was draining somewhere, right?”
Liz jolted up like she had been shocked and sent Matt a message while looking at the vault. ‘What happens if we fill this place with mana? These barriers are only up because they’re reacting to the mana. Nothing is controlling them. If we fill it up, we could get out a lot faster. And we might even open the vault… Find out what caused the reaction…’
Using his AI, Matt did some quick calculations. With the amount of mana, the core had released, it could take weeks for enough mana to drain for them to be able to leave. Besides, with this method, they had a shot at the rewards for getting into the vault.
Without Malcolm there, they could fight quite a lot of golems, too. And that would lead to more essence.
And again, there was the vault. It had to have more than one goodie in it. Especially with how the core reacted as they approached. There was something powerful hidden in there.
Matt looked at the wall and smiled. He wouldn’t have done this if Malcolm was still here, but he trusted Camilla at least this much.
His Talent wouldn’t remain a secret forever.
A growing part of him was interested to see what this place was really meant for.
- Writer
