Chapter 343: Baby Sitting the Native God
"I am Goram," he said, gesturing to the surrounding warriors. "We guarded the sealed doors for generations. We waited for the Architect to return and claim his dues."
Iron-Scale sheathed his blade. "Show us."
Goram waved his arm to signal the dwellers to rise. They retrieved their fallen bone spears and parted to clear a wide path across the plaza. Goram led Iron-Scale and Syra toward the far end of the cavern, walking past the crumbling remnants of the destroyed constructs.
They reached a massive circular slab of stone set flush with the ground. Faded glyphs covered the surface, matching the markings from the sun artifact. Goram knelt and placed his palms flat against the stone.
"The Architect buried his greatest creations here," Goram explained. He pushed his weight into the seal. "He hid them from the surface wars."
The stone ground loudly against the foundation.
Goram shoved his weight against the circular stone seal. The rock ground against the foundational dirt, exposing a sprawling cavern buried beneath the plaza. Amber light flooded the dark tunnels.
Iron-Scale stepped past the dweller to inspect the chamber. Rows of massive, translucent cysts hung suspended from the ceiling by petrified roots. Dark silhouettes coiled inside the glowing sacs. Bone plating and multiple scythe-like appendages pressed against the amber membranes.
"Biological weapons," Syra whispered, stepping out of the shadow cast by the open doorway. She dragged a claw over the smooth surface of the nearest cyst. "Gorgoth locked his predators away. The sacs preserve the flesh."
Rubedo projected his voice through the neural tether. "They require sustenance to break incubation. Route the Bastion’s bio-reactor pipelines into this cavern. Flood the chamber with nutrient paste."
Iron-Scale tapped his chest plate. He turned his attention toward the center of the room. A towering hourglass rested on a cracked basalt pedestal. Polished obsidian framed the artifact. A tiny amount of luminescent silver fluid pooled at the very bottom of the glass chamber.
Rubedo focused his Omniscient Eye on the object through the primary monitor.
[ ITEM DETECTED: TEMPORAL ANCHOR. ]
[ CLASSIFICATION: MYTHIC-TIER CHRONO-ENGINE. ]
[ EFFECT: LOCALIZED TIMELINE ACCELERATION. CONSUMES COSMIC-FLUID TO MANIPULATE CHRONOLOGICAL VECTORS WITHIN A DESIGNATED RADIUS. ]
[ WARNING: COSMIC-FLUID DEPLETED. SINGLE BURST AVAILABLE. ]
Rubedo leaned back on his throne. The game engine had just handed him a temporal multiplier. He dragged the digital icon of the Temporal Anchor across his console and dropped it onto the map of the Fourth Continent. He highlighted the Morval Dynasty foundries.
"The fluid restricts the radius," Rubedo stated. "I will isolate the factory floors."
He initiated the command. The silver fluid inside the hourglass boiled into a blinding mist.
Down in the Morval foundries, Marcus dropped a crate of unrefined slag onto the moving conveyor belt. He wiped a streak of grease from his forehead. Krax racked the bolt of his star-iron rifle nearby to enforce the doubled production quota.
A dome of silver light crashed down over the entire industrial sector. The outside world froze instantly. The birds hanging in the sky stopped moving in mid-flight. The smoke billowing from the ash-forge chimneys locked in place.
Inside the dome, the conveyor belts accelerated.
The days blurred into years. Marcus hauled iron crates until the skin peeled from his palms. The blisters popped, healed over with thick scar tissue, and tore open again. The bio-gas engines roared continuously.
Elena fell to her knees beside the sorting track. Her fingers bled across the metal grating as she frantically separated the broken armor plates. The rations consisted of a few bites of alchemical paste every forty-eight hours. Their bodies withered. Their spines bowed under the continuous labor due to the brutal consequence of the Spiral’s demands.
Eight years marched across their bones. Eight years of inhaling black grease and ash. Eight years of staring at the exact same brick walls while waiting for a reprieve that never came.
The silver dome finally shattered into dissipating digital sparks.
For the rest of the world, absolutely zero time had passed.
Krax lowered his star-iron rifle and blinked.
Marcus collapsed face-first onto the concrete floor. His hair had turned completely gray. His hands resembled mangled claws of overlapping scar tissue and exposed joints.
He lay in the dirt, entirely devoid of independent thought, his fingers twitching in a phantom motion to sort the iron slag.
Elena slumped against the brick wall. Her cheeks were hollowed out, her eyes vacant and staring blankly at the ceiling. The twenty-four Earthlings littered the factory floor as broken, aged husks.
Rubedo watched the telemetry stabilize on his primary monitor. The production quotas for the Morval foundries had skyrocketed in the span of a single server second. Millions of tons of refined star-iron plating flooded his inventory.
"The inventory is full," Rubedo announced. "Have the medics scrape the workers off the floor."
Meanwhile, almost no time had passed outside the selected radius.
A few days later in the Gildreath empire.
Krug sat cross-legged on the polished marble floor of the Gildreath courtyard. He held a massive slab of basalt in his lap. The infant sat directly across from him, chewing on the edge of a shattered steel breastplate. Cosmic pools of shifting light swirled in the child’s eyes as it batted at a floating purple spark.
Krug tapped a claw against the carved stone.
"The first tenet dictates continuous growth. You must consume to evolve."
The infant dropped the chewed metal and reached for the basalt slab. Violet energy sparked across its tiny knuckles. The stone tablet began to dissolve into floating pixels upon contact. Krug pulled the tablet back just in time to save the sacred text from complete erasure.
"You confuse the boy with boring words." Gulag walked into the courtyard and dropped a canvas sack onto the tiles. She upended the bag to spill a collection of severed Aethelgard knight skulls and bloodstained daggers across the floor.
The child lost interest in the skulls and tossed it aside. It reached up toward Iron-Scale’s polished coat buttons.
Iron-Scale took a step back to avoid the grasping fingers. Denied its prize, the infant’s face contorted. The swirling cosmos in its eyes darkened into a violent shade of purple. The baby opened its mouth and let out a piercing shriek.
A miniature spatial rift tore open directly above the courtyard fountain. The marble basin violently imploded. Water and pulverized stone vanished into the swirling void. The dimensional tear expanded rapidly to swallow a row of ornamental pillars.
Krug dropped his basalt slab and scrambled forward. He grabbed a severed skull from the pile and shoved it into the child’s hands.
"Play with this." Krug pushed the bone closer.
The child ignored the skull and continued screaming. The spatial rift widened further, consuming the stone benches along the perimeter.
Gulag grabbed a polished silver shield from a fallen knight and held it up to reflect the sunlight. The bright glare caught the infant’s attention. The screaming stopped. The baby giggled and reached for the shiny silver surface.
The portal above the fountain snapped shut instantly to leave behind a perfectly smooth, spherical crater in the architecture.
Iron-Scale wiped a bead of sweat from his brow and stared at the missing pillars.
"We need to find shinier objects." Iron-Scale adjusted his coat. "Or this child will erase the entire palace before sundown."
Rubedo watched the scene unfold through the primary monitor inside his sanctuary. Glitch hopped onto the console and chirped at the screen. The six-legged anomaly swatted a paw at the digital image of the infant.
"They are learning." Rubedo scratched the silver fur behind Glitch’s ears. "A civilization must master its weapons."
A few weeks passed, and the commanders were still baby sitting the child.
Krug marched through the ruined corridors of Gildreath and tracked the sound of snapping steel directly to the central courtyard.
The child sat naked on the cracked marble floor. He held a warped star-iron gauntlet in both hands to gnaw aggressively on the reinforced knuckles. Violet sparks danced across his gums as the metal buckled under his bite.
Krug dropped to one knee and extended his hand to pry the ruined armor away. The child snapped his jaws shut and glared upward. Cosmic light swirled inside his dark eyes as he gripped the gauntlet tighter.
Krug grabbed the twisted steel and pulled it free with a swift tug.
The child opened his mouth and wailed. A tear in reality ripped open directly above a carved stone pillar. The spatial rift expanded instantly to swallow the massive support column and a section of the overlying balcony into a pitch-black void.
The portal snapped shut a second later, leaving a perfectly smooth crater in the architecture.
Krug stood up and tossed the ruined gauntlet onto the ground.
He accessed the communication terminal resting on a nearby stone table and activated the projection matrix.
It was a device developed by Vorathar and his royal mages, and it was impossible to reverse engineer.
The digital feed materialized over the glass surface to display Brass Construct inside its southern sanctuary. Brass Construct rotated its central ocular lens to focus on the incoming transmission.
"We require an immediate manufacturing priority," Krug stated, wiping a drop of violet saliva from his thumb. "He possesses a bite force capable of compromising star-iron. He ate an entire basalt tablet this morning, and his resulting tantrums compromise the physical geometry of this palace."
Brass Construct manipulated a holographic interface with two of its metallic appendages. "Biological maturation induces severe discomfort in the mandible structures. Standard solutions involve friction-based soothing implements."
"Design a custom implement," Krug ordered. He pointed a claw toward the massive crater in the courtyard wall. "Forge a dense tungsten-alloy ring. Layer the material with kinetic dispersers to absorb the spatial anomalies escaping his teeth. We need absolute structural integrity."
Brass Construct processed the parameters with a series of audible clicks. "Tungsten alloys provide maximum durability. Hmm, integrating a spatial baffling matrix will require an influx of mythic-tier catalysts to prevent reality destabilization."
"Pull whatever resources you need from the Bastion reserves," Krug commanded, watching the child crawl toward a severed statue head. "If you fail to engineer this correctly, his next outburst might teleport the entire Gildreath sewage system into a pocket dimension. I refuse to explain a sanitation collapse to the Spiral."
Brass Construct initiated a secondary data stream on its screen. "The initial prototypes will enter the blast furnaces within the hour. I will ship the completed assets through the teleportation grid by nightfall."
"Ensure they arrive before he finds the armory," Krug said.
He severed the connection and stepped into the path of the crawling child. He scooped him off the floor, pinning the writhing limbs against his chest plate. The child shrieked again, opening a minor rift that consumed a discarded spear lying in the dirt.
Krug ignored the vanishing weapon and carried him back toward the inner sanctum to wait for the delivery.