Wizard: Building a Golem Legion From Zero

"It’s like going from a bicycle to a fighter jet."

—

The Emerald Abyss, a dense forest in the uninhabited zone.

Allen, Vera, Colin, and Lina hovered five hundred meters in the air.

Below, Rhine stood alone in a clearing. His dark silver body glinted coldly in the dim light of the jungle.

He was carefully testing out a punch, a stomp, and a turn. Every movement was restrained and cautious, like a middle-aged man with a new phone, afraid he might break something.

"He’s holding back," Colin commented from high above.

Allen could see it too.

Rhine was too afraid of damaging this body worth five million three hundred thousand.

[Golem Projection Skill]

"Wait, Boss, I’m not—"

Rhine’s voice cut off abruptly. A spatial rift tore open beneath his feet, swallowing his figure in an instant.

The next second, seventy kilometers away.

Rhine was flung out of the spatial rift. Before he could even get his footing, a foul, hot wind blasted him in the face.

Before him was a shelled centipede the size of a small mountain—a local specialty of the Emerald Abyss, the Iron-Armored Nether Centipede, a Quasi-Level 2 Magical Beast with a mature length of over forty meters.

It had been in the middle of a meal. Enraged by the sudden intruder, it dug its countless legs into the ground, arching its massive body high into the air as acid, hissing, dripped from its mandibles.

Rhine: "..."

"Boss, are you serious?!"

Over the comms channel, Allen’s voice was infuriatingly calm. "Stop thinking. Fight."

The Iron-Armored Nether Centipede gave him no time to hesitate. Its forty-meter-long body charged forward like an out-of-control train, ready to crush him.

Rhine instinctively stomped his feet—

BOOM!

The rocky ground beneath him spiderwebbed with cracks. His figure vanished, leaving an afterimage in the air that was almost too fast for the naked eye to follow.

The centipede’s head crushed the spot where he had just been standing, sending a cloud of shattered rock into the air.

’So fast...’

Rhine landed and looked down at the half-meter-deep crater he had made. His pupils contracted.

He had just instinctively "taken a single step."

The Iron-Armored Nether Centipede turned and charged again. This time, Rhine didn’t dodge.

He raised his right hand, palm facing forward.

A bluish-white beam of light blasted from his palm.

The beam struck the centipede’s head carapace with perfect accuracy, exploding in a ball of fire.

When the smoke cleared, a bowl-sized scorch mark was visible on the carapace, but it hadn’t been penetrated.

"Interesting." Rhine narrowed his eyes, the corners of his mouth curling up unconsciously.

His eyes focused.

Gaze locked. "Doomsday" Beam!

Two crimson beams shot from his eyes, striking the Iron-Armored Nether Centipede head-on.

HISS—!

The Magical Beast let out a piercing shriek. Its head carapace was instantly melted through, the searing wound glowing red.

It writhed madly, lashing out at Rhine with its countless legs.

"Don’t dodge," came Allen’s command.

Rhine didn’t flinch.

Three iron-hard legs slammed viciously into the composite armor on his chest.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

The sound of metal on metal exploded through the dense forest, startling flocks of birds into the sky. Rhine’s body didn’t move an inch. The ground beneath his feet cracked from the force of the impact, but he himself—he didn’t take a single step back.

"..."

Rhine looked down at his chest. The bionic skin had cracked, but the armor underneath was as smooth as new.

He chuckled.

"Exhilarating!"

He took a step forward, and the earth cracked beneath him.

His figure shot forward like a bolt of lightning, crashing straight into the Iron-Armored Nether Centipede’s body as he unleashed a barrage of alternating punches.

Carapace shattered, ichor splattered, and the massive body staggered back under the continuous assault.

The Iron-Armored Nether Centipede opened its mandibles, and a pillar of highly concentrated acid shot out.

Rhine took a deep breath—even though he no longer needed to breathe.

"Ice Age!"

A torrent of white, freezing gas erupted from his mouth, colliding head-on with the pillar of acid.

The acid solidified in mid-air, shattered, and fell as a flurry of innumerable ice crystals. The cold breath continued forward, freezing the upper half of the Iron-Armored Nether Centipede into an ice sculpture.

Rhine charged his right fist and unleashed a full-power punch.

The terrifying force displaced the air, the shockwave from his fist carving a nearly hundred-meter-wide vacuum tunnel through ancient trees and the very earth itself.

The frozen upper half of the centipede disintegrated on impact, its remains crashing to the ground.

The dense forest finally fell silent.

"One isn’t enough," Allen said lightly. "Jarvis, mark all Level 2 energy signatures in the vicinity. Have him fight them one by one."

The next hour became a "product performance demonstration" that Vera and the other two would never forget.

They watched with their own eyes as Rhine went from initial awkwardness to gradual adaptation.

He used the "Divine Punishment" palm beam cannon to blast a Void Predator, a creature skilled at spatial jumps, right out of subspace;

He used the "Absolute Zero" cold breath to instantly freeze an entire living forest of venomous vines into an ice sculpture;

He took a full-power blow from a Mountain Giant head-on, then crushed its skull in retaliation. The durability of his body made Colin question his own existence.

Finally, as if addicted to the fight, Rhine let out a long, utterly exhilarated roar and transformed into a streak of light. His wide Wizard Robe fluttered loudly as he weaved wantonly between the mountains at speeds far exceeding sound, leaving white sonic boom clouds in his wake.

He would soar into the heavens one moment and dive toward the earth the next, each landing smashing a massive, spiderweb-like crater into the ground.

That display of freedom, power, and liberation from all constraints made the eyes of the three spectators, a thousand meters up, turn red with envy.

Colin stared at the dark silver figure standing beside the remains of the giant beast below. His mouth hung open for a long moment before he managed to force out, "...Can I get one of those in the future?"

In Lina’s emotional spectrum, Rhine’s soul-light was visibly growing brighter and more incandescent—it was the glow of pure combat ecstasy.

Vera turned to Allen, her expression complicated. "Allen, if... I mean, if. If one day I also reach a point where I can’t break through anymore..."

She didn’t finish her sentence.

Allen withdrew his gaze and looked at the expressions on the faces of the three people before him—anticipation, desire, and a deep-seated fear hidden beneath their rationality.

"As long as your souls still exist," he said in a level tone, "in the worst-case scenario, I can at least get you to the threshold of a Second-level Wizard."

The breathing of all three hitched for a moment.

"But I don’t recommend it now," Allen continued. "A Puppet body will permanently lock away your potential for advancement. You all still have room to grow. Don’t be in a hurry to weld your ceiling shut. When you truly can’t go any further, then you can come find me."

Allen didn’t tell them that the solution to this very problem was hidden within Rhine’s soul.

This was to prevent them from losing their fear of death.

Colin nodded emphatically.

Lina said nothing, but her fingers tightened on her cuffs.

Vera just looked at Allen quietly for a long time before softly saying, "Okay."

Rhine’s voice suddenly cut into the comms channel, tinged with the unique devil-may-care attitude of someone who had just escaped death:

"Boss, thank you. I feel like dying once has made me much more motivated for work."

The corner of Allen’s mouth twitched.

Just then, Jarvis’s voice sounded on the comms channel, audible only to Allen—

[Commander, data collection for the first high-intensity combat post-soul-migration is complete. The prototype Will Rune within Rhine’s Soul Core has increased in maturity by 4.7% compared to pre-migration levels.]

A faint glimmer of light flashed deep in Allen’s eyes.

4.7%.

From just a single battle.

His gaze pierced through the clouds, landing on the figure below who was stretching his limbs.

’This seed is even more resilient than I expected.’