Type: Consumable Trinket-Class Cursed Relic, Common-9
Attribute Addition: +2 Base Swiftness, +10 Base Clarity, +10 Mana, +2 Mana Regeneration
Ability Description: When ingested, gives the holder the title ability ‘Eye of Belara’, which will allow the holder to see basic information related to all living beings and relics. Furthermore, the holder can open a portal to Belara whenever they clap their hands.
However, the holder can only equip cursed relics once the Title Tag is ingested.
***
... It was no use.
No matter how hard Dain racked his head, he just couldn’t recall ever seeing the Title of ‘Collector’ in any book he’d ever read.
But of course the actual ability description of the Title Tag made him blink a few more times.
A Common-9 Title. The strongest a One-Title could be. Two-Titles are all Uncommon grade, so at least it makes sense why I’d get so many attributes if I eat it.
An additional two levels in base swiftness, ten in base clarity, ten in mana, and two in mana regeneration rivalled even the additions given by ‘Mage’, but the real crooked nail in the plank was the title ability.
‘Eye of Belara’.
So I can see Tags without using a Tag relic?
And what’s up with that secondary ability?
I can just… open portals to Belara whenever I want?
“What kind of Title are you?” he muttered.
Outside, the gargoyle golem answered by cleaving through another building.
No time to argue with a Curator God’s sense of humor. No time to flip through the guidebook just to double check and triple check. No time at all.
He snatched the black Tag from Belara’s hands, crushed it into a ball, and swallowed it whole.
Pain immediately hit him like a falling bell.
Of course, he’d feel the same pain downing more Manabrew Potions than his body could handle in a short span of time. Swiftness and mana aside, he was instantly gaining ten levels in base clarity, which sliced through his skull and expanded his senses in a way that wasn’t completely… helpful. It wasn’t just that he could suddenly see better. It was that he could see more, hear more, feel more—the downside was that he was now twice as sensitive to the aches and bruises across his body.
Still he knifed a breath in, hissed it out, and forced his one good eye open.
Because the upside was that he could now see the golem’s giant Tag hovering in the corner of his eye.
***
Name: Rarity Model Gargoyle-Type War Golem
Type: Passive Armament-Class Relic, Uncommon-9
Might: 184
Swiftness: 66
Resilience: 127
Clarity: 147
Mana: 36/350 (+84/hr)
General Description: A gargoyle-type war golem capable of flight. The golem can automatically absorb mana from its environment through its mana mechanical core and follow simple directives from its original owner. Its passive drain is 60 mana regeneration per hour. Its main abilities are as follows:
- Core Spear Drive: Wields a bronze spear connected to its mechanical core, capable of releasing powerful wind shockwaves upon impact.
- Reactive Barrier: Generates a reactive lightning barrier across its plating whenever a hostile presence attempts to climb it. The barrier can only be bypassed by overwhelming physical force or negated by lightning-based attacks of equal or greater grade.
- Gyro-Waist Overcharge: Builds rotational energy in its waist coil to fuel both its mobility and lightning output. The waist coil is significantly less reinforced by metal plates and unguarded by the reactive barrier, making it vulnerable to precision strikes.
- Wing Gale: Unfurling its wings releases compressed gales of wind, capable of clearing debris and knocking hostile presences back in a wide radius.
***
His brow ticked.
... Exhibit me damned.
The Eye of Belara was no mere parlor trick. It was a full inventory sheet on his enemy, and already, it’d put two weaknesses in his hands.
One, the golem was severely weakened already. Molkhara golems were typically at least Rare grade, but this one was so damaged that it was only Uncommon-9 with severely weakened might, swiftness, and resilience. Granted, it was still an Uncommon grade golem that he had absolutely no chance of taking down—mostly because of its sheer size—but it would’ve been a lot, lot more destructive if it were functioning at its full capacity.
Two, its reactive lightning barrier could be smashed through with sheer power or negated by another lightning-type attack.
Now, he didn’t have a single relic that spat lightning—no man in Obric, the land of metal, would have a lightning-type relic symbolic of the Kingdom of Auraline—but there was a relic in Granamere that wasn’t of Obric origin at all.
His eye trailed north. The Seeker’s Guild building still sat at the northern end of town, its windows still intact, its golden gilding miraculously untouched by the destruction the rest of the town was facing.
“... Alright,” he breathed. “Chase me.”
He planted both hands, pushed off the floor, and rose. His thigh shrieked; his back snarled; his empty eye socket throbbed, but the new mana in him ran like a river, and the swiftness slicked his joints like oil. He could stand. He could move, and he could try again.
Just as the golem was about to cleave through another building, he raised his right hand and opened his Bloodlight Eye.
It flared awake on command, pulsing like a heartbeat. It’d always worked as an emergency light source and a repellent for weaker monsters, but against stronger monsters who didn’t feel the terror, it was bait. It was a taunt.
The golem paused mid-swing, rotating slowly around its waist to narrow its eyes at him.
That was his cue to run.
He scooped up his cane, slung his Altar over his back, and hurled himself out through the broken wall. The drop was a floor and a half, but his wings took half of the impact, softening to catch wind as he hit the ground running—and he ran for his life, flapping his wings in awkward beats to steal whatever speed he could.
An additional two levels in base swiftness wasn’t much on paper, but to a body held together by pure stubbornness, it was a divine blessing.
The golem lumbered after him immediately, shaking the ground with every step. Unfortunately, because of its pure size advantage, six of his steps meant one step for it, and with sixty-six in swiftness, the golem was fast. He made it no more than fifty steps away from his building when the golem reached him, swinging its spear at him.
Dodge!
He didn’t so much dodge as his wings yanked him up, making him do a stuttering leap that cleared the speartip by a whisper. Shock-wind punched his legs in midair and tumbled him, but he landed, rolled, and came up still moving.
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“Keep up, you bastard!” he shouted, and threw a glance over his shoulder to confirm: four red eyes, zero mercy.
Warehouse, cooper’s, alley choke. He took the choke, hugging the walls so the spear couldn’t swing clean, and popped out onto the next lane that opened towards the Guild. The gargoyle shouldered and bashed through every chokepoint like a bull, shrugging ash and debris off with its wings.
Sparks rained. Wind pressure slapped his back. Right after dodging its fifth spear swing, he recalled another detail he’d read in the golem’s Tag: its waist coil was significantly less reinforced because it was key to the golem’s movement.
As he rounded a corner, he whirled, threw his prosthetic up, and snapped off several windspheres. The cutting balls leapt from his palm, thunking dull and inaccurate against the golem’s waist. One, two, and three of them missed, but the fourth windsphere ripped through the seams between its metal plates and cut into something.
The gargoyle shuddered mid-stride as its movements suddenly slowed overall.
He grinned despite himself.
Worth—He swooned and almost tripped as he suddenly felt light-headed—it.
He turned back around and ran, now putting more distance between him and the golem. The town blurred by in bursts: a fallen sign painted with pies, a cart with its wheels ripped off, a child’s wooden horse orphaned in the street—all gone, gone, gone. He dove around a caved awning, cut across the baked-goods stall that’d exploded earlier, and slid under a ragged web of laundry lines before—finally—the Seeker’s Guild loomed in front of him.
The Guild’s doors gave way under his shoulder with a hollow boom, and he half-stumbled, half-sprinted into the pristine hall.
Of course, the Guild was absurdly untouched. Gilded bannisters, polished floorboards… and behind the counter—upright, calm, and dustless as a sanctified saint—stood the Guild automaton.
“Good evening,” it said in that mild bell-tone voice. “How may I—”
“Fight,” Dain rasped, pointing behind him with his cane. “You are an automaton of the Seeker’s Guild, founded by Seeker Orland who once brought the Molkhara Empire to its knees without even settling foot on its shores even once, and Orland spent two decades wandering the Land of Storms, which means he has a keen fondness for lightning-type relics. Thus, all automatons in every Guild building under his command are also lightning-type automatons, so do what you do best. Fight.”
The automaton tilted its head. “Correction: I am configured for reception, registration, and bounty disbursement. I do not interfere unless a hostile entity attacks Guild property.”
Dain thumbed behind him. “Will this suffice for a ‘hostile entity’, then?”
The front of the Seeker’s Guild ripped off as the gargoyle golem tore through it with a blast of dust and splinters, spears already driving forward to skewer Dain where he stood.
The shock of pressure blew his wings forward, but he didn’t move.
He didn’t have to.
One heartbeat, the automaton was behind the counter. The next heartbeat, it was past Dain in a gold streak. It jumped and landed on the speartip with both feet like a dancer, driving the spear into the ground, and then twirled both its arms into two lightning-crackling blades.
“Hostile entity detected,” the automaton announced.
Then it sprinted up the spear, lightning crawling from its shoulders to the tip of its arm-blades. The golem barely even seemed to register its presence before the automaton vaulted, spun in the air—once, twice, thrice—and then decapitated the golem in a clean ring, shredding off most of its metal chestplates, shoulderplates, and backplates in the process.
Dain raised a brow.
The golem’s head came free in a shower of sparks and flew backwards, smashing into a bench as it landed. The body itself stood stupidly headless for a heartbeat like it was still trying to remember what heads were for, and then it staggered, crashing into a building on its way back.
It’d lost its eyesight, at the very least, as well as its reactive lightning barrier.
The automaton landed beside Dain on two sharp feet and returned its arm-blades into normal arms, cocking its head at him. “Hostile entity neutralized. Resuming standard operations.”
As the automaton walked back behind its counter as if it hadn’t just bisected a war machine, Dain reached out, clapped its shoulder, and muttered a dry "Thanks.”
Then his gaze dragged back to the staggering hulk outside—the headless golem still lumbering blind, smashing into walls like it meant to erase the rest of Granamere out of sheer spite.
His jaw tightened.
He pulled a breath into his ribs and leapt. His wings snapped open, angling him toward the golem’s exposed chestplate where the glow of its mechanical core pulsed, and he came down boots-first on its bronze chest as he drove his cane into the core.
It wasn’t even in its oreblade form—his Cursed Title had locked him out of using normal relics—but rage and adrenaline made a powerful substitute. He gritted his teeth, cracked his neck, and pushed. Pushed.
Then the cane itself cracked the core hard enough to make sparks jump, and the golem lurched, toppling backwards.
The ground trembled as it struck the ground, its limbs twitching with delayed spasms before stiffening. Piece by piece, its movements failed—first one arm, then the other, and then even its wing mechanisms juddered to a halt.
Panting, shoulders heaving, Dain stayed standing on its chest. He wanted—no, needed—that final word.
Something felt off about these golems in particular.
“... Why now?” he growled. “Why are so many beasts moving down from the mountains? Why are old Molkhara golems crawling again? What woke you up? Who woke you up?"
Sparks rasped through the chest cavity beneath his boots. Then, broken words came out in a fading mechanical register.
“Query invalid,” it rasped. “Authorization... absent. You are not... a recognized Molkharan Golem Operator. Tactical disclosure... denied.”
Dain exhaled through his teeth and forced his breathing to slow.
It won't tell me because I'm not its boss, huh?
But he'd read all about Molkhara golems as a boy. After the war, countless books and articles were written on their mechanical builds, modes of battle, and operational structures. As a boy, nothing was cooler to read about than golems and Dragons, and between the two of them, he'd always been more of a fan of metallic constructs.
There were tricks he could try on the golem.
“But how do you know, precisely, that I am not a recognized Molkharan Golem Operator?” he said slowly, tapping its exposed inner gears with his cane. “Your superior nodes are destroyed. Your long-range mana receivers are severed from the Molkhara Empire. Your identity authentication functions are inactive. You cannot verify with a hundred percent certainty that I am not a Molkhara Golem Operator, correct?"
The golem’s chest shuddered. Internal mechanisms whined, recalculating.
“Correct,” it said after a pause. “Long-range mana receivers are… severed. This unit cannot verify your identity with a hundred percent certainty.”
“Then you are an orphaned golem,” he continued, "and according to the Molkhara Continuance Doctrine, an orphaned golem must provide clearance to the first sentient Molkharan encountered after combat termination. Is that correct?"
"Correct."
"And I am a Molkharan," he said, switching to the Molkhara tongue abruptly. That got another jolt out of the golem. It clearly hadn't expected him to speak its empire's tongue, but unfortunately for it, he was a relic merchant, and he wouldn't be able to do business on the Brastel Continent if he didn't at least speak fluent Auralinese, Obrican, and Molkharan.
But the golem was a relic from the old war, an age when no Auralinese or Obrican would dare to learn Molkharan for fear of being seen as a traitor or a spy. No doubt this was its first time hearing its mother tongue outside of its homeland, and normal Molkharans didn't typically leave the empire, so there was only one assumption it could possibly make about him.
It was an assumption that, in the old age of war, would be one hundred percent correct.
"If I were not a Molkharan Golem Operator sent to Obric to reclaim you, would I be able to speak your tongue this fluently?" he finished, putting the final nail in the coffin.
And now silence stretched.
Steam hissed from ruptured seams as the golem’s logic engines ground against one another, ancient rules colliding with present reality.
“... Molkhara Continuance Doctrine… confirmed,” it finally rasped. “Molkharan status confirmed. Primary clearance... obtained. Queries will now be answered."
He couldn't help but grin. "Good. Now tell me everything. What led up to your reawakening?"
The golem was about to answer, but then a sharp mechanical crack made its entire body jolt, and he knew it didn't have much time left.
"Quickly!" he hissed. "What woke you up? What did you see when you woke up?"
"This unit observed... a one-eyed shadow... destroying the boulders and letting this unit absorb fresh mana from the ground," it rasped. "The one-eyed shadow immediately headed... north... and left this unit to resume its primary directive... to destroy the Autonomous Land of..."
And the golem’s voice finally guttered out as its mechanical core went dark.
It was hot and stifling standing atop the golem for a second, but then the first, cool drops of rain struck his hair, before a torrent began spilling down his face.
Rain flew in from the north, hissing over the flames of Granamere and dousing what embers remained. Smoke thinned into steam. He stood there in it, soaked and bleeding and breathing like each lungful had to be wrestled for.
… One-eyed shadow, huh?
His lip curled, but as his mind grew heavy with the weight of the one-eyed, the sound of voices suddenly pricked his ear.
Commotion.
He turned, still balanced atop the golem’s dead chest, and found the sight waiting for him: townsfolk edging back into the town square in hesitant clusters, dozens of them, every face fixed on the destruction.
Anisa limped at the front, one arm bracing a bloodied, barely-standing Yasmin. Wenna trailed not far behind, both her hands clasped around two children’s smaller ones, guiding them like she was afraid to let go.
All of them froze when their eyes found him—one-eyed, rain-slicked, and standing atop the golem.
And all of them stared.
Oh shit.
His stomach flipped. He was still wearing his prosthetic plain as day, and he had no clever words to explain just what that rectangular slab of wood slung over his back was.
But before he could even try to shape an excuse—before he could even decide if he should grin or bluff—his legs buckled.
The ground beneath him rushed away. Blood loss both internal and external had the final word, and his last, wry thought as he tipped sideways off the golem, was one of irritated resignation.
… If I wake up, it’s gonna be in a cell or something, isn’t it?
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