The portal to my workshop pulsed with a soft, white light, a beacon to a home that no longer truly existed. To step through was to enter a sanctuary; to destroy it felt like a sacrilege, another piece of myself I had to kill to survive. But there was no hesitation. The boy who built this place for discovery and wonder was gone. The man who remained needed a weapon.

  The three Mark III automata were the first things I brought out, their metallic feet clanking on the cavern floor. Then, my entire arsenal: the combat Power Armor, the racks of Plasma Katanas, the raw materials. The automata worked with silent, ruthless efficiency, stripping the dimension bare.

  The last item to be moved was the Mark V. It stood in its display case, the silly duck bandage a stark, colorful wound against its dark blue alloy. My automata carefully lifted it, and I draped a simple canvas tarp over its frame, covering it completely. It felt like laying a shroud over a coffin, a memorial covered before the mourners depart.

  With everything evacuated, I stood before the empty, glowing gateway one last time. Tes, I commanded in the silence of my mind, collapse it.

  The portal did not wink out; it imploded. The perfect white rectangle folded in on itself with a sound like tearing reality. The dimensional space behind it collapsed in a silent, violent un-birthing. Crimson mana pathways, visible for a fleeting moment, snapped and retracted into a central point. Then, with a final, visceral lurch, the dungeon core was expelled. It shot out of the collapsing void and hovered in the air before me, a dark, malevolent heart torn from a dying dimension, its red light pulsing angrily.

  The four-bar frame clattered to the ground, now just a collection of inert, mundane metal. My sanctuary was gone.

  The true work began, but our greatest asset soon became our greatest liability. One by one, the blue lights in the automata’s optical sensors flickered and died. The hum of their servos faded into silence. Their internal power cores, designed for missions and combat, not for months of continuous, heavy industrial labor, were completely depleted.

  Silence descended on the cavern, broken only by the crackle of the forge. My army of tireless workers was now a collection of lifeless metal statues. I was alone.

  For a long moment, I simply stood there, surrounded by the metal corpses of my army. The sheer scale of the task ahead to single-handedly complete the complex nerve center of a warship threatened to drown me in its impossibility. It was a task for a national shipyard, not one boy. But there was no room for despair, no time for the crushing weight to settle. There was only the work. With a grim resolve that pushed the exhaustion back into a cage, I picked up a plasma welder and began.

  For two weeks, I worked manually. My hands, once accustomed to the precise work of runic engraving, became raw and calloused from hauling steel and operating the forge. Sleep was a luxury I couldn't afford. The schematics for the primary power distribution network and the charging stations became my obsession. Every wire, every conduit, every crystal capacitor had to be perfect. Tes’s calculations guided me, a stream of cold data in my mind, but the labor was all mine. Finally, with the last of my physical strength, I dragged the dungeon core from its temporary stand and heaved it into the partially constructed reactor housing.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  The moment I connected the final conduit, the ship didn't roar to life; it sighed. A low, powerful hum vibrated through the hull, and the charging stations I had painstakingly built began to glow with a steady, crimson light. My automata, now connected to this new, limitless power source, reactivated. Their blue eyes blinked back to life, and the silent ballet of creation resumed, now faster and more efficient than ever before.

  With a sustainable power source, the frantic sprint became a marathon. Day and night, the automata and I worked within the Leviathan’s steel skeleton. We laid down kilometers of wiring and inscribed tens of thousands of runes, each one a vital component in a system of unprecedented power. Luminous veins of mana conduits were installed alongside pressurized hydraulic lines. It was a perfect, terrifying fusion: a body of science, a nervous system of engineering, and a soul of pure magic.

  I stood on a catwalk, looking down at our creation. In my old world, a nuclear submarine of this complexity would have taken five to seven years and the resources of a nation to build. Here, thanks to the impossible efficiency of magic, my automata, and Tes’s guidance, we had done it in five months. Even in the sci-fi movies I used to love, a super-AI might have been able to coordinate a build in seven months. The thought was a fleeting, bitter flicker of my old self.

  That night, under the cover of a moonless sky and a churning high tide, we prepared for the launch. My Plasma Katana hummed to life, and I carved a wide channel from our cavern to the waiting sea, a wound cut deep into the stone of the Dwarven coast.

  Kaelus, now in his full, majestic form, did the rest. He didn't need to push or pull. He simply stood in the shallows, his starlit eyes focused on the sixty-meter steel behemoth. The sea itself answered his call. A massive, controlled wave surged into the cavern, lifting the Leviathan from its cradle with impossible gentleness. It slid down the newly-cut channel and settled into the dark water, its black hull already rendering it nearly invisible against the waves.

  We boarded through a topside hatch. The interior was dark, silent, and smelled of ozone and fresh metal. I walked to the command chair on the bridge, the crimson glow of the standby consoles casting long shadows.

  “Tes, bring all systems online,” I commanded.

  The ship awoke. Screens flickered to life, displaying sonar readings, power levels, and tactical data from the external sensor network. The low hum of the core deepened into the steady, predatory thrum of a contained star.

  “All systems green, Master,” Tes reported. “Project Leviathan is fully operational.”

  And so our journey began. Kaelus shrank back to his cat-sized form and settled on the console next to me. With a soft groan of stressed metal, the Leviathan sealed its hatches and began its descent. On the main viewscreen, the stormy surface of the sea was replaced by the silent, crushing blackness of the abyss.

  A normal ship, battered by the storms of the Maelstrom Sea and navigating by the stars, would take months, perhaps even years, to make the treacherous journey to the Obsidian Dominion.

  The Leviathan, silent and unseen, would be there in two weeks. This was not a voyage of escape. It was the beginning of a hunt.