“Gods’ damn bastard of an artifact!” Kaius said, setting the cylinder down on the ground. He hurriedly drew a rag from his storage ring and wiped off a plastered layer of viscous oil that had covered his hands.

  “Shattered axles. You’d think the damn thing cut your purse.” Kenva teased, a hint of a smile crossing her mouth, though she wasn’t watching his work too closely. She was far more diligently focused on the collection of de-limbed, functional worker automata that they had stacked in the corner — who themselves waggled the stumps of metal limbs in useless fury.

  Kaius shot the ranger a scowl, not deigning to answer, before he refocused on the sprawled collection of metal segments that lined the ground in front of him.

  Dismantling the cylinder had been delicate, frustrating work that had taken hours. He still hadn’t even the faintest clue what it could possibly be for — only that it was made up of twelve different layers, the inner two-thirds of them separated by thick layers of grease that seemed to have a mind of its own.

  The sensation of it on his hands was hair-raising — simultaneously oily and tacky. He’d had to resort to using raw alchemists’ spirit to scrub it free from the plates.

  All that work, and only for a questionable gain.

  First, he’d hoped the damage he’d seen on the outer layers wouldn’t be as total further into the device. Yet to his displeasure, the damage had almost always been total. Half of the time he’d spent dismantling, he’d been identifying small segments where he thought there might have been lesser damage. It was hard to tell — the runes the Empire had scrawled had been inlaid with a substance almost identical to the surrounding metal. More than that, they were vanishingly small. Those two facts combined meant a proper inspection all but required Truesight.

  He consigned himself early to the fact that he wouldn’t be able to make much progress until he fully dismantled and cleaned the thing. Leaning so deep into his ocular skill would be draining, requiring much of his focus and will.

  Far easier to do it when he could flick between pieces of scrap without having to stop every few minutes to gather more.

  Kaius breathed slowly and reached for the first piece — a curved section of metal almost as long as his finger.

  “Let me know if you need anything,” Ianmus said, still perched close by, his eyes bright with naked fascination. Kaius nodded to his friend with a thankful smile before he dove in.

  Throwing his will and Authority behind his Truesight, Kaius’s eyes sharpened. Motes of dust spun through the air, yawning in his vision — each one visible, from the jagged fragments that had worn off the hard stone walls to the softer structures that had come from fabric that had decayed over millennia.

  He pushed the sudden distraction from his mind, focusing on the metal in his hands, every pore and bump revealed to him.

  Minute differences in colour grew distinct, like the runic inlay had been replaced with a material of the most vibrant red.

  Kaius frowned. The array inscribed on the metal was warped to the point of indecipherability. More than that, it was hazy — almost like he was looking at it under water. That was impossible. Sure, there’d been a little singeing that he’d been able to tell, but nothing that could have caused such total damage, while perfectly melting the inlay so that it melded with the surrounding metal.

  He didn’t understand — something was off. Most people wouldn’t be able to recognise it, but he had dealt with runework far more complex than this. As dense and tightly scrawled as the Empire’s work may have been, it was hard to defeat the complexity of his glyphs.

  Even with sudden and total destabilisation, some sections would have to be left relatively untouched. More than that, it didn’t make sense for damage so complete as to utterly warp each individual rune — ones where each individual line was as thin as a hair, at that. Something should have survived, even if only a single example.

  That wasn’t all. With such total damage, there should have been obvious signs. He would have expected some scorching on the surrounding metal plating at the very least, yet there was none!

  Hells, he couldn’t even work out what was simple runic geometry and what were lines of individual characters.

  It was like the whole thing had been smeared.

  Obfuscation. It had to be. One potent enough that even Truesight backed by his monstrous mental stats nearly missed it.

  Kaius frowned, resting his hand on his chin as he mulled over the mystery in front of him.

  Whatever was warping his senses had to be runic in nature — yet that in and of itself screamed a mastery of the art that was divergent from his own. The effects… He couldn’t even imagine how he would create such an effect strong enough that it would work on him. Especially not with a formation dismantled and lying in segments that were cut off from its power source. Still, if it was runic, it would need power from somewhere. The only thing he could imagine was that it was somehow feeding off the ambient mana in the air — even if he could see no flow of the energy with his mana sight.

  “Ianmus, can you use your manipulation to pull the mana away from this plate?”

  The mage would be far better at such a task than he. Their mana manipulation skills had almost opposite specialities — Ianmus was utterly focused on manipulating mana external to himself.

  The mage gave him a curious look. “I mean, I could. Not completely, of course. I don’t think it’s even possible to create a mana vacuum. But I can absolutely significantly lower the concentration. Why?”

  Kaius nodded. “That should be enough. I think there’s some sort of obfuscation effect preventing me from inspecting the runework. Considering it’s inside an automaton, reducing the surrounding mana should decrease the intensity of the effect. I’m confident I’ll be able to break through it with Truesight after that.”

  Ianmus looked at him in surprise, flicking to the shard he’d been examining a few times. “It’s a strong enough effect that you can’t punch through it already?”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Kaius winced. “Unfortunately, yes. The scale of it is minuscule. The structures I’m seeing look like they could be inscribed on a pinhead, almost. It wouldn’t take much to smudge such inscriptions to the point of being utterly unrecognisable.”

  Kaius shook his head. “Honestly, the fact that they used runework to such a fine degree is a miracle in and of itself. I’m not even sure if I have the dexterity to manage such a thing — not by physically inscribing like this, at least.”

  “Remarkable,” Ianmus replied. “Regardless, whenever you’re ready.”

  Kaius nodded, where he picked up the curved metal fragment once more. “Now,” he said, throwing the full weight of his being behind Truesight.

  As Ianmus frowned in concentration, mana swirled around the fragment — pushed out in streams until there was a strangely vacant bubble surrounding Kaius’s hands. The lack of mana against his skin made him feel naked, an absence he only recognised then — like the weight of a blanket that had been on him for so long it had been forgotten about until removed. The hairs on the backs of his palms rose, but Kaius pushed the sensation out of mind.

  As the mana vanished, he leveraged every scrap of Authority and intent that he had, forcing Truesight to peel away the falsity that he knew lay before him. At first, the thin web of lines on the metal plate stayed smudged. He wasn’t disheartened. Any moment now —

  The obfuscation failed at the same moment he heard a chime from the system.

  **Ding! Truesight has reached Level 201!**

  Clarity came like the frigid touch of a polar wind — sudden and sharp. Smudges resolved into slashing, jagged lines in an endless litany of fine runes. Kaius gasped. What he had initially assumed was runework curving its way over the plate was, in actuality, a tessellated pattern of sacred geometry alone.

  There were still traditional runes, lying underneath it — but the geometric formation atop them was distinct. It's its own entity. He didn’t even know what to call it.

  To non-practitioners, they might as well be one and the same. He’d long assumed that sacred geometry was basal. Vital, but incapable of producing magic without runes to guide, shape, and drive a process. Just like how a mathematician couldn’t build a cathedral with equations alone.

  Ianmus had proved that wrong with his keyseal, and now again he was shown how shallow his understanding of magic was.

  There was no equal to it in his glyphs or any of the traditional runework he had learnt. Sacred geometry, used in the manner of a traditional runic enchantment.

  The only purpose he could think of for the inscription was that it must have been the source of the obfuscation effect — but that was madness. People didn’t make use of sacred geometry alone for a reason; it was far more unstable. Hells, even Ianmus’s key seals required his intent, will, and a binding to his person.

  Anything connected to the array would have been ruined — decayed as the inherent instability wore away at connected structures.

  He paused, placing the strange geometric array out of mind to focus on the other inscriptions that had been revealed. Fine runes covered every scrap of available surface between the geometric array. Were his suspicions right?

  Ignoring the throbbing in his head, he searched the edges of the runes where they brushed up against the lines of sacred geometry.

  They were slagged — melted into an incomprehensible blob. Before his very eyes, the destruction spread. It was slow, almost completely static now that Ianmus had removed the atmospheric mana powering the effect.

  Yet it was still melting before his very eyes.

  Kaius sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. Such a flaw — it had to be by design. So insidious. So bloody genius. He didn’t know how, but he would bet his money that the geometric array’s function was suppressed somehow during normal function. When the automaton had been broken, or perhaps when he had cracked open the strange cylinder he had harvested the scrap from, it must have activated — hiding the work of its creators even while slowly erasing it.

  “What did you find?” Porkchop asked, perking up nearby from where he had been lying down and resting — a reaction to the shock bleeding through their bond, no doubt.

  “I think I’ve figured out why so few examples of Imperial runework have survived — at least, part of it,” Kaius explained.

  He focused on the sprawl of runes in front of him.

  “Loosen up. Ianmus, I want to see if I can keep breaching it as the mana returns to normal.”

  The mage simply nodded. The mana flooded back in. As it did so, Kaius knew he was right.

  He watched the sacred geometry on the metal suck deeply at the mana, even as the degradation to the surrounding runes accelerated. It was still slow — it would take weeks for even this simple fragment to fully decay — but it was inevitable. With the simplicity of the sacred geometry, the effect would continue to happen even if the surrounding inscription lines were broken.

  With the mana came the obfuscation. It tugged at his mind, wavering in his vision. But Kaius merely gritted his teeth. Now that he was aware of it, of its source, it would find him a far more difficult target.

  Leveraging his intent, Kaius set his Authority behind Truesight. The weight of his being — his dominion over all his Authority touched — was enough. The illusion shattered.

  Kaius shook his head, signalling to Ianmus that he could halt his work. What was the Empire, that it took a Unique Skill specialised in illusion-breaking and bloody Authority of all things just to beat a seemingly standard-issue secrecy inscription?

  “Can you tell us now?” Ianmus almost pleaded, dragging Kaius from his thoughts.

  He grinned at the mage’s desperate look.

  “Of course,” he replied, hurriedly running through what he had learned.

  “That’s… obscene. How paranoid do you have to be? If this is the reason that so few examples have survived, such an array wasn’t just limited to automata,” Kenva said with a shake of her head.

  “They might still have limited it to their more advanced artifice,” Ianmus said with a contemplative look on his face. “There are some examples that have survived. Mostly swords and armour found under stasis wards — simple things, at least in comparison to something like this. Any truly complex curiosity is far too valuable to risk.” He nodded his head towards the half-dismantled body of a worker drone in front of Kaius.

  Kenva nodded. “By my oaths, some of the clans would go to war for a couple of select rarities that sometimes crop up — no way anyone would ever get to pull one apart.”

  Value of rare artefacts aside, one thing was certain. He was now on a time limit to learn as much as he could on the slain automata before he moved on, dismantling the still-active ones that they had disabled.

  Finally seeing an example of Imperial runework had only confirmed something — it was definitely familiar in a way that he found hard to place.

  He couldn’t wait to dive back in. But first, he had to check out Truesight and see what it had gained.

  Kaius pulled up the skill.

  Truesight:

  General Skill - Tier II

  Affinity: Arcane, Revelation

  Type: Ocular, Insight, Body Enhancement

  Unique

  See to the heart of the matter, harness the burning light that reveals all.

  Tier I:

  Skill that reveals the true nature of reality. The user's vision becomes capable of detecting mana and essence. Acuity of both the physical and mind’s eye is increased. Allows scrying of basic system descriptions of integrated entities.

  Helps to counteract all natural and magical effects that seek to hinder objective observation, including illusion, darkness, and blinding.

  Higher mana density, skills, enchantments, and abilities can impede these effects. Potent sources of mana and aura may be blinding.

  Tier II

  Improves the scaling of penetration of magical obfuscating effects from moderate to significant.

  Each level significantly increases penetration of obfuscating effects.

  Each level moderately increases mental processing of visual stimuli.

  Each level slightly increases the overall efficacy of this skill's effects.

  Merged from: Low Light Vision, Mental Visualisation, Sense Illusion, Sense Mana, Identify, Eagle Eye

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