Velik figured he knew what Jensen wanted long before he ever got back to the base camp. As it turned out, the golems he’d dismantled could repair themselves, and pretty quickly, too. Halfway there, he ran into one that was in the process of pulling its legs back into place, having already fixed up its arms. After breaking it apart again, he picked up the pace.

  The base was swarming with activity. A first aid station had been set up to help a half dozen injured workers, including two members of the assault team. Of everyone who was left, they were either frantically repairing a blockade that had been knocked down or else guarding seven golems that had been disabled while a pair of engineers rushed to tear them apart.

  Velik located Jensen immediately. He was standing near the engineers, his attention split between watching them work and keeping an eye on the golems they hadn’t gotten to yet. “Welcome back,” he said as Velik walked up.

  “Didn’t take long for things to go wrong,” Velik said. “Let me guess. The golems put themselves together while no one was watching.”

  “No. They waited until another force assaulted the barricades, then ambushed us from within. Somehow, they’re communicating with each other.”

  “Which they can’t fucking do!” one of the engineers snapped as he pried open an armor panel. The bar slipped when he leaned into it, popping out sideways and causing the engineer to sprawl out across the golem. It twitched, but its limbs had been pulled out of place already. Still, Velik grabbed the back of the guy’s shirt and hauled him back up, just to be safe. Then he reached down, slid his fingers into the gap where the pry bar had been, and ripped the armor panel free.

  “Thanks,” the engineer said. “Don’t need a hug from one of these bastards.”

  “So what’s the plan to put them down permanently?” Velik asked, his thoughts several miles away on the giant golem he’d taken out. While he could down it again, he’d rather not if he could avoid it.

  “Rip out the power core. As long as there are no secondary sources in there, that should do it. Once we’ve done that, we can take our time,” Jensen said. “That’s actually why I had Tempest call you back here. No point in doing circuits around the sky bridge if everything you dispatch just comes right back, right?”

  Good thing that was how I stopped the big golem, Velik thought to himself. Though if he’d known at the time, he would have stowed its massive power core into his traveler’s bracelet. He’d left it behind for the workers to collect whenever they got that far down, but now he was thinking having it so close to the golem he’d pried it out of might be a bad idea.

  “Alright, tell me how to remove the power core’s with the least amount of damage,” Velik said. “I’ll go on another loop and properly disable everything this time.”

  And he’d get a look at whatever the big one had been guarding before anyone else. It wasn’t that he wanted to loot the place first—Velik really didn’t care that much about money—it was just the thrill of being the first one in. Besides, places full of valuables often had traps, and there was no one better suited to finding and surviving those traps than him.

  “Honestly, I’m a bit worried about them coordinating against you,” Jensen said. “How many could you fight at once?”

  Velik snorted. “All of them, and it wouldn’t be close. I’m not sure how much the scrap will be worth if I have to get rough with them, but there’s no chance of something this slow overwhelming me.”

  He didn’t bother to mention that he’d already tangled with the golems’ bigger, faster, meaner cousin. Something with that kind of raw speed and power scaled down to the standard golem size coming at him with numbers would be a challenge, but on the other hand, it would by necessity have much thinner armor plating, so it still probably wouldn’t be that hard of a fight.

  Eventually, Velik managed to extract himself from the base camp. He did another sweep of the outer tunnels—properly dismantling a few dozen golems this time and stowing their power cores away—and made his way back to the giant guardian golem. It looked the exact same as he’d left it, thankfully, and Velik set about stripping off the armor plates that bore evidence of being mauled by a giant wolf.

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  The traveler’s bracelet couldn’t hold that much, and combined with the supplies he already had in there, stuffing that giant power core into spatial storage filled it up the rest of the way. That left no room for the armor plates he’d torn off, which meant that if he wanted to hide the evidence, he needed to dump some stuff. That meant another trip back to the base camp, which annoyed him right up until he found an empty supply closet to dump the cores into instead.

  That’ll do. Someone else can collect them later.

  Mission accomplished, Velik set about cleaning up the remnants of his battle in wolf form, including scrubbing away the now-dry golden blood that nobody was supposed to know about. That marked his [True Form] shape as a divine beast, decidedly a monster. His old team had collectively decided the best thing to do about that potential hazard was to keep their mouths shut so the Monster Hunters Guild didn’t find out.

  “Huh,” Velik said as he ran his foot across the stain. There was a scratch running through the middle of it, something he didn’t remember being there before. After glancing around, he decided that a piece of metal must have bounced off the floor in that spot before landing twenty feet farther down the hall.

  Shrugging, Velik proceeded to scour the blood away, then rubbed his hands together and stepped past the battered golem. There was sure to be some good stuff at the end of the hallway.

  * * *

  This is lame.

  There was no doubt in his mind that the raw materials the team pulled out of the room would be valuable. Everything was weird metals he’d never seen outside the sky bridge, or crystals or gems. He’d pried open a few cabinets and panels to reveal complex patterns made of what appeared to be inlaid gold, but couldn’t make heads or tails of what the designs meant.

  In the middle of the room, there was a huge circle carved into the floor. Velik paced around it, examining it from all sides, but whatever it did wasn’t obvious to him. He even consulted his mana compass, hoping it would shed some light on things. There was a flicker of mana running through the room, but not enough to do anything with. Even that faded away to nothing as he stared at the compass.

  In hindsight, it wasn’t clear why exactly he’d expected to find a treasure chamber. There were no statues, no jewelry or art, no weapons hung on display racks, no piles of gold or precious gems, and definitely no magical trinkets.

  Whatever. No levels, no gear. This trip is a bust. Once I’m sure this place is clear of any threats, I’ll go find something else to do while Jensen’s team salvages the place.

  With a disappointed sigh, Velik turned around and started trudging back to camp.

  * * *

  The little spider machine emerged from the sky bridge several thousand miles east of the one it had started at. Unlike the old wreck of a facility it had been assigned to hundreds of years ago, this one was still fully functioning. The automatons guarding the bridge platform turned their attention to it until it formed the security mana patterns that confirmed its authority. With that step completed, they returned to their posts, and the spider skittered out into the hallways.

  Sky bridges were by no means small or easy to navigate, especially to such a tiny machine with even tinier legs, but the spider was tireless. It wove through the heavy footfalls of patrolling golems and around the occasional flesh being there on some business or another. The spider didn’t stop to wonder what those creatures were doing; that wasn’t its prerogative.

  Eventually, it reached its destination: the communications hub. Though the magic was old, it was perfectly maintained by the custodians. Upon arriving, the spider ejected the golden blood sample into the collection tray, along with the recorded data of the intruder’s fight with the platform guardian.

  The spider didn’t know how the communications hub worked. It just did. All the spider knew was how to do what it had been built to do. Its mission now completed, the spider’s last directive was to rejoin the cluster of thousands of its brethren and wait for some higher power to come along and give it a new directive. And it did just that.

  * * *

  It wasn’t often that she received intelligence from an old sky bridge, of all things. But the mana signatures didn’t lie, and, curious, she walked over to the console to see what the message had to say. Slowly, the mana-charged dust settled onto the parchment, forming the words.

  Her eyes widened. “No,” she whispered as she scoured the message. “Impossible. He was right?!”

  Groaning, she clenched her eyes shut. Part of her wanted to destroy the message and pretend she’d never seen it. He’d be insufferable once he found out his crazy scheme had actually paid off. But she didn’t. Instead, she smoothed the parchment out and read it again. It had to be wrong. But the proof was there.

  Someone would need to go verify. This was too important to take some stupid, thousand-year outdated spy golem’s report. But if it was right, if he’d been right…

  After all this time, a new divine beast had entered the world. They could make more of them, as many as they wanted.

  Everything would change.