Chapter 89 - Steel Golems

  The journey to the Guard base was, thankfully, quick and passed without further incident. The avians watched us from a distance, but they never came anywhere near to spell range. They were curious, not aggressive. I could deal with that.

  I wondered if I was burning some of the goodwill I might have earned from handing back their child by going straight to Turner’s growing fortress. There wasn’t much else I could do. I knew of nowhere else even relatively safe for Jess and her kids, and as foolish as they’d been, I still couldn’t leave them to their own devices.

  My gut said if we’d left the family to cross the open runway area alone, the avians might not have been so hesitant about attacking.

  The Guard didn’t send out a quick reaction force, this time. They waited behind their walls for us to come to them. I wondered about that; did that indicate their battle with the avians had taken a turn for the worse? I hoped not. Getting their help was a key part of my plan to deal with the mall issue, so I hoped that would be possible.

  As we rode up to the gate, it rumbled open. Farnsworth stood there, although his ‘uniform’ had changed some.

  “I’m impressed!” I called out to him. “You’re even shinier than the last time I saw you.”

  He’d always had some armor, even the first time we met. But now he was dressed almost head to toe in metal armor, most of it even fairly polished. It was a good look, I had to admit. That level of protection clearly hadn’t trickled all the way down to all their troops, because the other four guards at the gate wore metal breastplates, greaves, and forearm guards, but little beyond that.

  I wondered, seeing all of this, what we were going to look like in a year or two. The more time went on, the closer my world was going to resemble something out of Tolkien, I supposed. I just hoped that eventually we’d reach the point where things calmed, and there was some level of peace, too. The whole magipocalypse thing was exciting and all, but running for your life at all hours of each day wasn’t as much fun in real life as it seemed in the movies.

  Farnsworth strutted, displaying his armor with a pleased look on his face. “Linda’s work. She’s getting crazy good at armor production now that she hit tier three in it.”

  “That’s tier three? I can’t wait to see what tier five looks like. I’ll earmark any armor crafting crystals I see for her,” I replied. Linda, hmm? Last time I saw those two together, she was teasing him, and he was still calling her ‘Sergeant Bear.’ Seemed like some good was coming out of all of this, maybe. I was glad for them both, if so.

  “She’ll appreciate that. But I am assuming this isn’t a social call.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not, no. I picked up Jess here and her three kids. They were under attack by avians. We drove off the attackers and offered to escort them here. I figured you might be able to take in a few more?”

  I left out the part about them capturing a baby avian. If she wanted to tell that story, she could, but I figured it would only embarrass her, and it wasn’t especially pertinent.

  “Sure, we can take in more. Tier three, if I read that right?” Farnsworth asked.

  Jess nodded. “You can tell by looking at me?”

  Farnsworth nodded. “Once you hit tier five, you can. You willing to work for your survival, and your kids’?”

  “Absolutely,” Jess replied. “It’s all I want.”

  “Then you’re more than welcome here.” He turned back to me. “Selena, I know we allow one pet to follow someone when they come to the base, but…”

  I broke out laughing at the look on his face. “But not Sue, right? Yeah, I get it. Hope can come with me. Listen, I need to chat strategy with your boss. Is Colonel Turner available? Some shit is going down out there that we should probably chat about.”

  “He’s busy as hell. The avians have been raiding our scouting and scavenging parties, making it harder for us to secure the supplies we’ll need for the winter. But I guarantee he’ll make an exception for you.”

  Farnsworth had a pair of armored former-airmen take Jess and her kids to the medical center. From there, they’d be guided through the inprocessing to make them part of the community on the base. I left Sue by the gate, with orders to leave everyone alone unless attacked. If someone was dumb enough to attack the T.rex skeleton, they deserved the Fireball they were gonna eat.

  Kara, Hope and I set off, trailing behind Farnsworth as he escorted us toward the command center.

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  A lot had changed in the three days I’d been gone. Shit, were we really only like ten days since all of this started? The base was full of new development. Off to my right, whole sections of walled-in area had been converted over to housing, with a combination of old military tents and new wood and stone structures popping up. From where we stood I could see some of the lower land east of the base, toward the river. It was outside their wall, but they were already setting up to cultivate a lot of land out there.

  Even the walls were different. When I first got to this place, they were just fences with some reinforcement. Now, the foundations of actual stone walls were growing around those fences. They were using the tall chain-link fences as scaffolding to help support the growing walls. When they finished, the old fences would be invisible, buried inside the medieval-style stonework slowly rising around the base.

  Towers were already roughed out, wooden structures twenty feet tall, each with two or more soldiers on guard. The place was bristling. With good reason, if their local enemy was making life hard for them.

  “You guys are really moving here,” I said. “Lot of changes.”

  “You’re one to talk. Tier six now, huh?” Farnsworth replied.

  “Yeah. It’s part of what I want to talk to Turner about. We’ve got a major problem out there, and it’s growing.”

  “Undead problem, so I’m guessing you’re talking about the mall monster.”

  I quirked an eyebrow at him. “You’re pretty well informed.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Instead of taking us into the sub-level where I’d been last time, Farnsworth escorted me into a ground floor room that had copious windows, letting in tons of light. Given the absence of artificial light, that was a smart move on their part. Everything from the basement room had been brought up to this space: the maps and charts, the big table showing the surrounding area in detail, all of it.

  Turner stood next to that table, looking much as he had the last time I saw him—with a couple of major changes. For one, he was now tier seven. Was that his Charisma? Or some other spell? I had no way to tell, but even at tier seven his Charisma shouldn’t influence me much, with my Will as high as it was.

  The other change was his control stone. I could literally feel the power flowing off him. I sensed his connection to the base, to this land. He had power over this place in an absolute sense.

  As I entered the room with Farnsworth, two massive metal statues, one on either side of the door, came to life. Each of them was at least eight feet high, armed with a sword as long as I was tall. They reached for those blades, but before things could get ugly, Turner barked out an order.

  “That’s enough. They’re allies.”

  The things went back to being statues. I stared at them another moment. Each was full of mana, and the ‘vibe’ of the power flowing through them matched that of the control stone Turner had used. These were his special troops, like the goblin mage had gained apprentice mages. Turner had these things.

  “Like them?” Turner asked. “They’re golems. We’re a Domain now, Selena, and that comes with a few perks. This is one of them.”

  I decided to play dumb about the control stones for the time being. The only way I could know anything about them was if I had one myself. Him laying that information out there like he did was a trick, a fishing expedition.

  If I answered with more information than I ought to have, he’d know I had one of the control stones, too. He’d want mine, for certain, and I was disinclined to part with it. Better to play dumb for now.

  “What’s a Domain?” I asked, hoping Kara would catch on and play along.

  “Some sort of new magic. A different sort of stone spawned soon after you left. Using it made the base into a ‘Domain,’ and made me the local leader in official, magical terms,” Turner explained. Was he disappointed I’d reacted as I did? Did he believe me? I wasn’t sure. “I see you’ve already grown stronger. Tier six, and more than one, unless I miss my guess.”

  That, I was willing to give him. “Two crystals at tier six, so far. Working on a third.”

  “Excellent! The more strong allies we have, the better,” Turner said. “But I suspect you’re not here to compare notes on advancement. What’s up?”

  I quickly explained rescuing Jess and her kids, again skipping details that would only make life harder for her, like the baby bird. Then I went on to explain what was happening at the mall. “They destroyed the goblin fort. Tore it completely down, leaving the logs like a pile of rubble. There’s a horde of zombies, maybe close to a thousand—although we’ve killed over a hundred in the past couple of days.”

  “Thus the advancement,” Turner said.

  I nodded. “Yup. If it was just zombies, I could handle it.”

  “A thousand of them?” Turner looked skeptical.

  “With Sue? Sure. I just blast them, ride a ways away as they chase me, repeat until all zombies are dead. It would take a while, but I could do it,” I told him. He seemed to accept this, so I went on. “But whatever is running the show in there, it’s stronger than me. Stronger than you, too. It’s high enough I couldn’t sense just what tier it was. I don’t know how many tiers above me I can discern, but I could sense you were tier seven, so it’s got to be higher than that.”

  “Come with me,” Turner said, leading the way to the model table. Kara and I joined him there, Hope following along silently behind me. Turner gestured at the map table. He’d made changes there, too.

  “This is us. This, here, is the mall. I’ve had scouts checking it and the surrounding area every day for the past few days. Our man watched your showdown in the parking lot. Sounds like you hammered them, which was excellent work.”

  “Not good enough, though. They came at us in serious numbers that night. And whatever’s leading them, it came at us, too. We had to flee,” Kara said.

  Turner grimaced. “That leader there is going to be a problem. You see, it activated a Domain, too. We believe it’s just a monster, not a human, but somehow it was also able to acquire and use one of the control stones to capture a Domain of its own. But these grey areas over here? Those are neighborhoods the horde has swept through, the past couple of nights. Anyone still hiding there was killed and absorbed into the horde.”

  “It’s going to just keep growing, if we don’t stop it,” I said. For the first time, I wished I had Charisma slotted. I was willing to bet that Turner hadn’t built up his Will—he didn’t need it. And I did need him to take the mall situation seriously.

  It was too big for me to tackle with just Kara and I. Even the addition of a few dozen ratkin wouldn’t be close to enough to even the odds. We needed Turner’s help. The trick was how best to convince him?