Chapter 62: Ch.57: Konni’chiwa, Sayonara

“Dungeons cores and dungeon shards come in many shapes and a motley of configurations. Its coin toss as to what shape or form you may encounter one. Until now, none have yet to peel away the secrets of these ancient constructions that are rumoured to be the hearts of a dungeon. However, we do know a couple of things about them, chief being that dungeon shards are simply nascent cores. When conditions are favourable, such as the availability of a dense concentration of mana or perhaps, a mana leyline, a dungeon shard will awaken, metamorphosing over time, to become a core. It is a long process that might take years or centuries even. Nonetheless, it is through this knowledge that we do know how far back the civilization that created them ceased to exist. That dungeons can be found almost everywhere on Eryth is testament to the reach of this ancient civilization”.-Excerpt from, The Legacy of Antecessors, Adventurers Guild Archives, Kingsfell.

---

Arthur’s mage lights bobbed, casting stark shadows in the workshop. The silhouettes of eleven other golems lying supine on their tables made for a disconcerting sight as though he was on the inside of a crypt. He was trapped on the other side of the workshop and the cool and dry air only exacerbated his inconvenience any favours as it compounded the metallic tang of his own blood.

The magical feedback that put the golem out of commission was large enough that he was looking at the equivalent of a circuit overload as the chromastones had gone out. There must have been a failsafe of some kind, else it might have been foolhardy to have the golem as a point of vulnerability. Which meant, there was also a back up somewhere as well but Arthur had neither the luxury nor the time to find out where it was.

‘You should have reminded me before I came into this,’ Arthur protested. He fiddled with the golem, a bit iffy of digging into its innards as though he was conducting an autopsy. His head was pounding, making it hard to focus. Though [Regeneration] had patched him up, he assumed the strain had been, mental, psychic? Only [Adroit Handicraft] kept his hands steady as he worked.

‘How would I have known Arthur?’ Nora grumbled. He could almost picture her rolling her eyes over the link.

The golem's visible rune tracery was a curlicue of workings that flowed around the outline of its torso. They resembled golden tattoos etched with the delicacy of a calligraphy. Arthur could not help but marvel at the dedication that went into it; but eleven other golems?That was the height of obsession.

While he was grateful that the other golems did not immediately awake after the first had gone down, he questioned whether they had been meant as redundancies. That or something else had gone fundamentally wrong with the workings of the golem number one.

‘ Hmph! Serves you rightly for going in by yourself,’ Nora snarked

‘What was that?’ Arthur asked.

‘I asked how close you were to fixing the house,’ Nora sent. ‘ The wards are down but the doors are locked. I would have shadow walked in to get you but with Margaery here―’

‘Gimme a moment,’ Arthur telecast back. Peeling back the golem’s chestplate and taking care not to touch any of the conduits was taking all his concentration. He was continuously running [Diagnostics] to see if there would be any change in the golem’s own internal mana source.

It was located right where a human would have had their heart but the chestplating had been sealed with a ceramic sealant akin to industrial level epoxy glue. The feel of it was familiar and Arthur knew it was resistant to high temperature and had high enough tensile strength to serve as a deterrent to internal intrusion. Luckily, Arthur had Overkill, which was, pretty much overkill for the job as it parted the glue―

‘ Like a scalpel through a spongecake,’ he mused.

‘Hmm, I need a suction cup to remove this breastplate―’ Arthur grumbled as he groped around the edges for purchase. ‘Ugh, that came out wrong,’

‘What’s that about spongecake?’ Nora asked. Cheeks burning, Arthur looked up from the golem and muttered unintelligible words to scatter his runaway thoughts before they could bleed over the telecast.

‘Nora!Busy…Unless you want to sleep outside you’ll let me be,’ Arthur groaned.

‘Ah, I wouldn’t worry about that, we have a tent and food and we’re camping in the garden,’ Nora snarked.

‘ Damn, rub in some, why won’t you?’ Arthur sniped back.

Arthur shook his head at the dhampir’s antics. It was so unlike her to be so needling. He finally managed to pop the chestplate out via a spring release by pressing the number that had been emplaced within a scarlet border. He’d overlooked the nondescript button as it had been part of the stamped symbol.

‘Number one,’ Arthur sighed. Then the golem’s innards lay bare before him. Emplaced within the chest was the golem’s pulsing mana source, a fist shaped heart with conduits extending from its clear shell. Gel-like liquid sloshed, twinkling blue like antifreeze as a monster core sat encapsulated in its containment .

‘Damn, that’s a large one but liquid mana conduits?’ Arthur gawked. ‘Makes much more sense for a flexible golem. The only ceramics are for the base of the feet, pads of the and face. The rest is wood and brass and argerum,’ he marvelled.

‘Right, lessee where the gremlins hit you―”

[Diagnostics] revealed the culprit―

‘Mana poisoning,’ Arthur thought. ‘ Monster core mana sources, like living entities, are susceptible to mana poisoning when flushed with more mana than they can reasonably assimilate…like from backfiring spell,’ Arthur recalled . He remembered that from Master Kolvar’s crash course; the old sylvani had stuffed him with his years of aposteriori knowledge until his [Eidetic Memory] had been close to bursting.

‘ This is no good to me if I can’t drain the mana, unless… I could induce a reverse mana gradient with [Null Field], aaaand gauging thaumaturgical oscillations with the thaumoflux counter… Ambient mana holding steady at one impulse . Resetting it should bring it to close to a hypothaumic gradient of slightly less than one…’

‘Aaaaarthur, you’re babbling in my head again,’ Nora butted in. Arthur ignored her as he created a mana dead field that rapidly drained the mana from the golem heart. The clear casing, was a kind of squishy resin that was magically conductive and allowed the mana conduit leads to be intruded into it without touching the monster core.

‘ 3 impulses, 1, 0.9 and holding,’ Arthur measured. ‘And here we go―’ he murmured, putting aside the Weisermann thaumoflux counter and moving back to the golem’s frame. Tenderly, he lay down the golem’s heart, as though he were a surgeon performing transplant and started reattaching the leads by way of prodding them into the squishy resin.

‘ That should do it, should take some time to boo―’ The conduit lead had barely been poked into place when the golem’s doll-like eyes snapped open. Arthur jerked back as a hand shot out and grabbed the lapel of his robe. The golem suddenly levered itself upright almost headbutting him in the process

“ Go-shujin-sa―master override accepted…” the golem droned voice changing modulation and falling an octave. Arthur put up his hands ready for anything. The golem’s voice degenerated into a series of stutters about an ojou-san or something other. Unfortunately, [Rosetta Stone], the skill that had helped Arthur with Erythrean language hadn’t parsed enough of the language to infer meaning to everything else.

In a breath, the chromastone lighting returned and the hum of magic in the workshop told Arthur that everything was working as it should. He was about to extricate himself from the golem when it blinked at him.

Eyes flashing, the golem’s voice changed cadence and the incessant babble became a series of disjointed statements. Arthur flinched and jerked his head to the side narrowly missing being struck by a beam emanating from its eyes. It was not an attack.

Arthur gawked as he saw what the light light had done. It was like someone had taken a video with a fish-eyed lens and slapped it into a holographic projector. The image hovered, its boundaries bleeding into the air―

“ [Prompt];[Chronicle]....” an eidolon of a man faded into view. The golem had not been spouting a babel of nonsense but rather trying to [Recall] the archive of memories it held within. The man had evidently oriental features and it was hard to guesstimate his age when the memory had been chronicled.

“ Konnichiwa,” the man in the floating image saluted with a subtle bow of their head.

“ Asaharu Konigi is my name. I was born and raised abroad, studied Robophysics and worked in Japan at Fukushima Robotics. Ardent hobbyist of the same as you can surmise from my golems,” he added, rubbing the back of his neck. A rune scriber sat on his ear and the enchanter's loupe goggles kept the silky bangs away from his eyes.

‘Arthur? The wards went back up…is the door open? Are you okay?’ Nora hailed. Arthur barely heard her as he stared at the spectacle as if entranced.

“Asaharu,” Arthur mouthed the name. From the looks of it, the man looked like he’d worked himself rugged. His black hair was unkempt and there were dark shadows under his eyes. There were evident calluses and etching ink stained on his fingers. He was a kindred spirit. However, none of the latter detracted from his youthful countenance. He must have been the same age at the time.

The man in the memory paused as he regarded the recording golem as if searching for something past the fourth wall.

“ Er, it's currently, “ he looked somewhere off scene, “ the sixty fifth day of Aestas, they call it the Trinaiad here, some sort of a syzygy for Eryth’s three moons. Three seems to hold a pretty significant aspect here, haha. I disgress,” he chuckled.

“ However long it's been, if this is reaching you, it means you are one of us,” he said. At that Arthur’s blood turned glacial at the implications.

“Us?!” Arthur blurted in disbelief. Ascal, no, Asaharu hadn’t been the only one. He unconsciously shuddered as he grit his teeth.

“ And it also means that I have gone missing and Elder Volemhir has tasked you with retrieving something I have been working on…” he sighed. A rueful smile played on the man's lips as he stared back with solemn hazel eyes.

“ Honestly, I do not know how to say this. Not good with articulation you see, but I won’t bore you with the intricacies, hehe,” he chuckled again. Somehow, hearing him laugh and talk with that pitching accent , though a stranger was cathartic.

For the second time that day, Arthur felt warmth blossom behind his eyes. He smiled, letting one roll down his cheeks as he savoured that moment alone. Asaharu’s countenance turned serious,

“ First things first,” Asaharu stressed. “ Absolutely, do not look for me, the people after me are not to be trifled with. As that knowledge is already dangerous, I won’t saddle you with the details…secondly, the magier core I made is complete. Well, almost….there were complications y’see. I had to use it for―”

The image suddenly froze, glitching as Asaharu’s voice became a warble.

“ Frag no!” Arthur found himself reaching out to grab at―nothing. The projection was gone as fast as it appeared. Transfixed and awash with myriad feelings, Arthur let his hand hang there feeling as though he had seen a cliffhanger to a mystery. He turned around to the golem and found its eyes closed. It had righted itself and was demurely sitting down in that unmistakably oriental posture; a seiza as if about to serve tea.

“ Okairi, goshujin-sama,” it droned from crescent lidded eyes. Arthur could not help but feel the golem was mocking him.

---

“Arthur!” Nora’s voice echoed through the workshop.

“ In here,” Arthur called out from the archiving vault. Thankfully having master privileges allowed him access to everything. Well, everything except for the location of the magier core.

And that was after some bit of finagling where he’d ordered, nay, almost threatened the golem with decommissioning just so it could keep the vault door open. It was a reasonable security measure but he had been on the short end of his fuse when his repeated attempts to [Recall] the memory archive yielded nothing.

He’d figured that the golem could only respond to command matrices if you preceded said commands with [Prompt] . Eerily, it was similar to how he’d interfaced with the dungeon shard; he wondered if they run off the same architecture.

The other command matrix he discovered was [Query]. It was like waking the search engine assistant on a phone; trust an eccentric robo-physicist to program that into its command matrices. With the said memory archives rendered inaccessible he had to do it the old fashioned way. Hence why he was rifling through drawers upon drawers of paper.

“ What are you doing?” Nora asked from the doorway. “Blight!” She suddenly jumped as a little automaton skittered past her legs and disappeared into a hatchway on the lowest shelf. She shuddered holding her arm close to her breast.

“Arthur! What in the Blighted Pits is going on? Wha—What was that?” Nora squeaked. It was so unlike her to be so flustered—Arthur had to look up from what he was doing to truly ascertain that the dhampir had not been switched with someone else.

‘Uh, flushed cheeks. She is inebriated. Margaery is an influence,’ Arthur left unspoken. She must have caught his quirked eyebrow though

“ What?” Nora intoned.

“Cleaning golems, pest exterminators,” Arthur said, going back to what he was doing.

“ Ri—right. Wait, is that blood?” Nora exclaimed, moving to fuss over him. Arthur felt a tingle of Nora's skill looking for an ingress past his aura.

“Aaarthur, let me in. The skill can't work if you don't give your consent…I can't overpower it you know. And what happened to your ring?” She asked, whirling at the red weal on Arthur's finger.

‘Yep, definitely the wine…’ Arthur realised. The fragrant scent of Vysinni wine clung to her like perfume.

“ Oh, ah? This and that happened,” Arthur flinched and shamelessly tried to hide it from her. Nora grabbed his hand with her extraordinary reflexes.

“C'mon,” Arthur groaned. “ If you continue fretting over every little thing I won't get anything done in here,” he protested, waving around a leather and wood binder. It was an index to the filing system inside the spatially expanded archiving vault. He wanted to find pertinent information on the man, Asaharu Konigi.

There had to be something he could follow. So far though, what he had encountered were piles upon piles of records about abstruse projects, experiment logs and a whole hidden compartment on a project Sakura or whatever whatever that meant. The latter’s binders were distinguishable by a cherry flower sigil.

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“ Just—stay still and let me work. Your aura is all over the place. And rein it in will you?” Nora muttered, passing her hand over his head like a scanner. Her brows were furrowed in concentration. Beneath her ministrations, Arthur felt [Insight] prod him like small pinpricks crawling over his skin.

“ So what happened?” Nora finally asked.

“A cherry flower,” Arthur muttered. [Rosetta Stone] had also been working full tilt to decipher the man’s scrawlings and mutterings. There had been a whole chestload of memory crystals documenting his experiments on one thing or another. Most of the experiment logs were in broken English. Though he caught a few curses in some sort of Slavic language and Japanese. He’d have to watch them some other time though.

With the number of memory crystals per chest, it was a kind of extravagance any other enchanter worth their coin would have baulked. But not Asaharu; nothing had been spared in his quest for magic.

There had been some interesting compilations, like one that read the thaumoconductive properties of crystal slime,’ He’d almost gone down a rabbit hole of why slimes would spontaneously occur in mana dense regions until he remembered what he was supposed to do.

Another interesting find was the Aetheric table of Materia and something on Diamagnetism and the relation between Mana and Magnetism. Who would have known Asaharu’s paper on the topic would accord him a [Sage]’s position at the Kingsfell’s Institute of Magic and Crafts? His paper had been peer reviewed by no less than Xzerion as well.

“ Arthur~ I am talking to you,” Nora protested, suddenly in his face, Arthur backed up, tripping over an errant scroll case and ended up sitting down on his rump―hard. He stayed there.

The lethargic feeling of wanting to just crawl somewhere and shut out the world and the sheer itch to find a scrap of information on the enchanter was maddening. Oh, and there was some fist shaking he wanted to do at a certain [Arbour Elder].

“ Arthur, talk to me…what’s all this? What has gotten into you?” Nora pleaded, almost softly. She cradled Arthur’s head between her palms.

‘She’s been a tad more touchy-feely lately,’ Arthur thought, his eyes darting askance. He could not pull his head away because she had him right where she wanted via charm and brute strength.

“ Mmrgh…”

“ What? I cannot understand what you’re saying…”

Arthur rolled his eyes, placed down the inventory list he’d been browsing and extricated his squished cheeks from Nora’s hands.

“Margaery?” Arthur questioned.

“ Oh, I let her help herself to the kitchen and told her I was gone to the privy. I mentioned that you were in the study upstairs.” Nora remarked. “ Now will you quit stonewalling? “

“ You told her about the telecry?!” Arthur sputtered.

“ She wouldn’t stop going on and on about how pretty my earrings were and wanted to know where I bought them so…I told them they were sylv―wait this is not what this is about,” Nora protested. Rubbernecking the golem, “ Now will you tell me what that…thing is and what in the nether pits happened to you? In a few pars as well? I need to grab supper and be out to the Guild infirmary by the quartz.”

“ Fine fine,” Arthur groaned. “ The long short, ugh, the short long of it is, that is a golem that functions as a housekeeper, like a sylvani hearth spirit? And it was made by a man called Asaharu Konigi,”

“ Asaharu Konigi? That sounds like an Oriendali name, but what―” Nora paused.

“ Hmm,” Arthur nodded.

“ He is someone from your world?” Nora said, eyes wide.

“Or was,” Arthur said. “ I don’t know if he is alive or not. When I was doing something about the wards, through the golem, it―” Arthur grimaced and corrected. “ They had a [Recall] of a memory archive and he said something about there being more of us.”

Nora’s surprise was writ large on her face.

“ You’ll swallow a fly,” Arthur said jokingly, tapping her under the chin. Levering himself up, Arthur dusted himself and sighed at the enormity of the material he had to browse ahead.

“ Speaking of blink flies and stone roaches,” Nora murmured from where she’d crouched.

“ Huh? Stone roaches…and blink flies?” Arthur muttered, dubious at the latter part of the statement.

“ Teleporting flies,” Nora supplied . “ Never mind, whatever had you bloodied sent a magic spike large enough to be felt outside.”

“ Frag,” Arthur cursed. “Think someone might have caught that? But what does that have to do with blink flies?”

“ Hmm,” Nora nodded. “ Quoting Margaery, she said that whoever had an interest will come out of the woodwork like stoneroaches and hound you like blink flies,”

Arthur grimaced,” I don’t know whether she meant to put it delicately but that sounds just as bad.” ‘ Once you remember she’s an Ahrakni,’ Arthur shuddered as he left that unsaid.

“ Then let’s go before she thinks something is amiss…” Nora said, reaching for his sleeve. Almost jerking away, Arthur protested―

“ But I haven’t even gotten around to looking for the magier core…it's probably the manor’s mana source but it has been warded too well…”

“ Later Arthur,” Nora said, advancing on him. “ You look ready to keel over…”

“ But the aership―” Arthur added backing away from the dhampir, brandishing the inventory list like a shield.

“ I know you either want to fawn over the enchanted artefacts or stew in despondence … healer’s orders Arthur. You need rest; let's go―” Nora insisted.

“Wait―” Arthur tried to stall but Nora had already grabbed him. Arthur felt the ground displaced as the duo shadow walked up the house.

---

Early dinner was a wondrous fare of reheated food, mostly soup and meat. Lots of meat. It didn’t help that there were two carnivorous maidens sharing the table with him. Behind him the golem stood sentinel and placid like a maid waiting on him. Margaery barely look fazed at that; if anything, she was still gawking at the house from between every savouring of her meal.

The Ahrakni was also making a point of taking as little of the non-meat dishes as she could. The closest she got to sampling one was a meat pie. He left that unspoken and minded his own food; [ Regeneration] always made him ravenous. It did not create stem cells out of thin air after all. At least that is what he thought.

“Oh to be a couple of lovebirds, young, rich and… to imagine you have a whole house of untold treasures! ” Margaery chimed. Nora shared a look; Arthur shrugged.

“ The golem does not disconcert you?” Nora asked, grimacing. “ Even with its likeness?”

“ Bah,” Margaery snorted, waving her fork. “ If I think of it as a summon it ceases to faze me. Me and the lads tried to get an elemental golem for a summon once―”

“ How’d it go?” Arthur enquired with pique.

Margaery hemmed and hawed, “ Well…I do have it stored in my grimoire, but…the cost of summoning is astronomical even for me…”

“ After seeing you summon a gigan?” Arthur remarked, quirking his brow. He recalled the hexapedal monstrosity that looked like a hexapedal rhino and a hammerhead shark had a baby.

“ Ah, that. If I summon while invoking a skill for a one time engagement it costs less mana. But even the gigan is pushing it,” she said, frowning. “ But, the mardugih was the best I’ve ever had,” she said, shaking her head wistfully.

Arthur did a double take at the name that sounded comically like a nasal butchering of ‘murder goat’. He almost went to pick at his ear to ascertain that he’d heard correctly.

“ Soooo,” Margaery drawled. “ What are you going to do with the house? Sell it? Own it? I imagine the offers coming your way might be large enough to buy you a whole demesne down at the Coastlands. Oh I know great places near Faerilight―hmm, no, that’s not a city you want to raise your brood in, may be Guernemyr and Kingsfell then?”

Arthur choked on his wine, coughing painfully. He didn’t even realise he was thanking the golem as it handed him a napkin to dab his front with. Margaery had frozen as she looked towards Nora.

“ Strina’s bosom pillows, “ she gasped. “ You don’t mean to tell me you already have a brood?” she added, practically standing up. Arthur kneaded the bridge of his brow with weariness. Nora was giggling silently.

“ Don’t you?” the Arakhni trailed off as she sat back down.

“ It didn’t come up with your ‘girl talk’ during the picnic?” Arthur air-quoted. His look of weariness was aimed towards Nora who was suddenly very interested in her wineglass.

“ No…it did not cross my mind. The whole time, ‘twas me tryin’ to keep Nora’s off things you know. She was worried sick,” Margaery said. “ Then came that mana spike that had her flying off, murgh―” the Arakhni was suddenly interrupted by a cob loaf to the mouth. She sputtered and threw a transient glower to a sheepish Nora. Arthur shook his head.

“ We’re not going anywhere…” Arthur said. “ And the less said about children the better…” he said as he stood to leave. Margaery’s face went through a litany of expressions, compounded by her large faerie-like eyes. She blinked, and blurted out―

“ You can? A runecrafter’s lair like Master Ascal’s is bound to attract big names…and that mana-spike? It is bound to attract them sooner rather than later.”

“ Let them come,” Arthur said, throwing a shrug her way. As if on cue―

“ Observation; four people have entered [Detection] range, “ the golem intonated as their head turned towards the window in the direction of the gate. Margaery whirled in surprise. She had seen golems, both elemental and not but never one that could talk.

“ Wha- what did it say?” the Arakhni quavered, half in shock and excitement.

“ Well, damn, luck is such a mistress,” Arthur groaned.

“ Arthur…” Nora gasped.

“ What?” Arthur interjected.

“ Oonaris is a Goddess…” Margaery whispered, a far away look in her eyes. Things had yet to sink in for her.

 

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