Sweat streamed from his brow in rivulets as Kaius clenched his jaw. The level was nice, but it was only a reflection of the inordinate effort he had undergone for closing in on two weeks now.

  After the mess of stripping his first worker drone, he and his team had shifted most of the remains to a room that adjoined the main workshop that they had holed up in. It was covered in scrap — mania had nearly overtaken him, leaving precise gears, wires, and metal bones strewn across the room. If these creatures had been flesh and blood, he would have been a psychopathic butcher of the worst degree, reveling in their entrails as shining madness burned in his eyes.

  He had learned so much. He was so close!

  Sweat stung as it ran into his eye; Kaius blinked away the distraction, racing over to a fresh worker drone. It was one of his last, and amongst the most well-preserved — having been dropped precisely by a thin beam of solar heat through its core.

  Brandishing Kenva’s knife, he all but dove to its midsection, tearing apart armor plates with practiced precision. Such a task was easy for him now; while the layered carapace was sealed tight, he’d figured out the mechanism that allowed the plates to slide smoothly over one another — a small section of runework that dotted the corners of each section of armour, sandwiched between the layers. He discovered it by accident. Hells, he didn’t even know what it looked like.

  He didn’t need to; driving the point of the knife through alchemically treated steel, the plates released each other with a subtle snap. Tossing them to the side like a useless scrap they were, Kaius dove for the core. Conduits and wires were cut in a few solid movements; there was an order to it. He’d ruined his first four before he’d realized the pipes, made of a softer, oddly flexible material, had to be severed first to release the alchemical wine within them; a thin amber sludge had drained free. Next, he slashed the solid connections quickly—too slow, and it would create some sort of strange imbalance in the core, slagging any remnants of runework. And then a heartbeat.

  His arm as steady as an Arch Surgeon’s, Kaius lifted his prize free.

  It was a dodecahedron of stacked wafers, with a glistening hole of slagged steel through its centre. He could feel his friends watching, part curious and part concerned, but he ignored them.

  He was so damned close. Peeling back the first layer, Kaius grinned at the runes that waited for him, at the mystery that lay within them.

  That niggling familiarity that had gnawed at the back of his mind had escaped him for so long, but no longer. Whatever runework the Eternal Empire had used was maddening and impossibly similar, in many ways, to his least favourite of the runic scripts, Vhaxanish.

  His eyes traced the impossible quagmire in front of him. The core of these automata, even ones as lowly as these worker drones, was a thing of unfathomable complexity. Of course the script was like Vhaxanish; what else could be so broad and all-encompassing in its precision and so mind-bending in its construction?

  It wasn’t the individual runes. This script had ones that were utterly different — and, somehow, hundreds more than even the overly verbose nightmare that was Vhaxanish. Even their syntaxes were different. But the core of them, the foundational philosophy, the way the runes were arrayed and used to build clauses and arguments? He could see it in the structure, in the complexity. Nothing else was so similar.

  He’d always wondered about Vhaxanish. It was so utterly different at its fundamental core to any other modern script or antique that he’d seen. But this? This made sense. He still had no clue how the Imperial script worked; he lacked the Skills and the time to piece together the foundations of it. But it seemed, at least to him, that at some point someone else had. It was like it had been recreated from the same fundamentals, without the support of the body of knowledge of runecraft that the Empire must have had. Both were too unwieldy, too unusable, too complicated.

  He hadn’t been the first to break through the runic obfuscation. It was the only way the similarities made sense. If that was the case, it wasn’t all that surprising that it wasn’t widely known — far too many things were hidden and hoarded in the world.

  Regardless of how It gnawed at him incessantly, his revelations hadn’t ended there.

  The Imperial script was brushing up on the basis of glyphbinding.

  Taking the very finest point of Kenva’s blade, Kaius teased apart another layer of the automata’s core. He could see it: the connection points where one layer wove into the next in a seamless pattern of script, arcing around conduits. The runes, the very foundation of the script might have still existed on a flat plane of inscription, but the automata core wasn’t just layered, independent formations. It was a single whole.

  Kaius couldn’t stop himself from grinning, feeling a shiver of awe rise up his spine. The sheer ingenuity, the magnitude of achievement, was astounding. This wasn’t the work of some far-flung genius from another plane of existence like Vezryn — it was here, on Vaastivar.

  It was astounding, honestly, that they’d gotten this far and only just managed to miss that final step towards true glyphic inscription using three-dimensional runes. If Vhaxanish truly had come from the Imperial script at some point in the distant past — a derivation from pure fundamentals — it was no wonder it had been simplified.

  Kaius couldn’t help but snort. Woe upon the day where he called Vhaxanish simple.

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  Yet it was the only phrase that fit when he considered the technical marvel in front of him: the missing link between traditional rune arts and his own glyphbinding.

  Setting down the core, Kaius snatched up a notebook and quill that he had set aside earlier, the edges of its pages smudged with alchemical oil. As quickly as he could, he filled in the blanks of his drawings of the first two layers of the core, sketched during his earlier attempts. He had three notebooks detailing its construction, layer by layer — the pages of a book proved perfect for representing how each interconnected into a single whole.

  The wealth he’d transcribed within those volumes was astounding. Priceless, truly. Not only did these notebooks hold insights that a grandmaster runewright would kill for, but they held the secrets that he could use to better understand his own runes, at least on the basis of irreducible principles.

  Oh, how he would love to pull apart the core of a centurion. Who knew what he would find there? Would it simply be the same construction to a larger scale, or would there be a qualitative difference?

  Hells, maybe he would find true glyphs there. It was obvious that greater care had gone into their construction, compared to the simple worker drones.

  Layer by layer, Kaius pulled back the core, continuing his work and finishing his drawings. An hour later, with his head pounding, he was done.

  At this point, he was sure that he had learned all he could from dissecting the slain bodies of worker drones. He knew the fundamental make-up of their construction like the back of his hand, and he had gathered enough examples to transcribe the nature of their runework into notebooks. He himself was poorly suited to cracking the actual function of those runes, but still, with the right runewright, those books could mean the rebirth of the Imperial script. Of course, even if somebody learnt the skill, he doubted they would be able to recreate an automata just from his drawings. He was almost certain that much of their function was as mechanical and alchemical as it was runic.

  If Vhaxanish really was inspired by the Imperial script, it made sense that it had been simplified. Judging by what he had seen everywhere throughout the ruin, the original seemed specialised at linking disparate formations into a network. Even for him, with his glyphic expertise, it was inordinately complex — almost useless for traditional work.

  Regardless, if he wanted to make more progress, be more sure of their ability to break free of this bunker without triggering more alarms, he needed to see the magic in action.

  It was time for him to move on to live specimens.

  Rising to his feet, Kaius stored away his notebooks.

  No doubt there would be resistance as he mapped out the interiors of the automaton’s mana circuits. He would have to use his manipulation skills and, no doubt, since the automaton was technically a creature under the eyes of the system, he would have to contest it for control. He doubted it would be as strong as a living creature, and with his monstrous mental stats he was confident — but still, it would no doubt be a challenge.

  Kaius entered their home base, the door clanking as it shut behind him.

  They’d cleaned it up immensely since they’d started their stay. Benches had been pushed aside, while rugs that they’d had in their storage rings had been spread across the floor to cushion them from the cold hardness of the shaped stone. In one corner their tent was pitched, while simple creature comforts scattered the rest of their impromptu living room: cushions, books, and more.

  Kaius had eyes for none of it, not even for his team, all their stares on him as he entered the room. His concern was only for the limbless bodies of half a dozen worker drones that were roughly stacked in one corner of the workshop.

  They waggled their stumps at him — jagged metal undulating in an ineffective threat display. They had at least confirmed that the creatures had self-repair enchantments.

  They’d had to shear back the metal every day or so to cut back on the growth. It was only a finger length or so, but with how jagged their metallic limbs were, they didn’t want to give the creatures any chance to stab someone.

  Kaius stalked forward.

  “Not on the carpet,” Porkchop growled.

  Kaius froze, looking down at his boot that was hovering half astride over a plush-ridden black rug. Alchemical oils had stained his soles, nearly dripping.

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly, backing away, hovering half a stride above the weave of a red and black rug.

  “What did you discover?” Ianmus asked, looking at him with a curious raise to his brow. “You’ve been in there for eight hours — you look like a man possessed, and you didn’t even stop to say hello.”

  Kaius only grinned, summoning his notebooks, for he tossed them to the mage. “I dismantled their cores. The Imperial script looks like an older, more complex version of another I know. It seems I’m not the first to find and access a sample.”

  Ianmus frowned before he flicked through the pages. He stopped, pointing to an access point at the corner of the page. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “A connection axis. Each layer is part of a single whole. The formation is three dimensional.”

  Ianmus stared at him incredulously, but Kaius was already moving.

  He had to see how the mana flowed through the working. Would it be like his glyphs? Where would it be fragile? Where could they break and safely destabilise a formation? Such knowledge would be vital for future ruins with the automata. Hopefully, it would also give him the insight needed to disable the locks keeping them barricaded in this armoury.

  Squatting down, Kaius laid his hands on the front of the closest automaton. Mustering his will, he surged his mana through the armour plates, right into the connections that he knew lay just beneath them — conduits that would run towards its core.

  The automata fought back, an iron mountain that stood in his path.

  It wouldn’t stop him. No climb ever had before. Gritting his teeth, Kaius threw his will behind his mana, surging into the creature’s body bit by bit.

  It was delicate work. Every handspan of wire he coursed his mana through, there were thousands of runes. He felt his mana flood each one, and he had to be careful not to overload them before he reached the core—a difficult prospect, considering the automata fought him for control at every turn.

  **Ding! Spellblade’s Harmonic Control has reached level 211**

  Kaius grit his teeth. Just a little more.

  Mana within a single wire warbled, pulsing erratically, as a sudden surge of resistance threw off his concentration. The resonance coursed deeper within, and then Kaius saw a glow deep within the automata’s chest.

  **Ding! You have slain Imperial Worker-drone — level 150 Living Tool! — Experience Gained! Reduced Experience for slaying a foe of significantly lower level!**

  “Fuck,” he muttered.

  He’d slagged the core.

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