Kaius laid his hand flat on the slab of steel which had sealed them into the barracks that had been their home for several weeks now. Feeling the cool touch of the metal on his skin, he held his mana primed and ready, but did not inject it into the structure just yet.

  In some senses he found it funny that they had been imprisoned so quickly upon their return to Deadacre, yet the differences between this and their treatment at the hands of Old Yon and his men were incomparable.

  In reality, he found it hard to even consider their time in the barracks as confinement. For one, he was more than confident that they would have been able to blast their way out almost immediately.

  Between him and Ianmus, they had a truly scary amount of firepower to call upon, and he refused to believe that the barricades that sealed them in were designed to contain mages of their strength. Even if they had been, they had Porkchop’s raw physicality.

  No, they had stayed put because it benefited them. It gave them the time and freedom he needed to pursue an understanding of Imperial runic construction. That, and it was perhaps wise to try and avoid setting off every alarm in the damn ruin — for a second time.

  Mapping out the structures of the worker drones had been an immensely frustrating, gruelling endeavour, but he had done it to some degree at least. Inevitably, the grapple of wills between him and the automata over the mana within them led to an overload of their circuits, but he had learnt what he could and seen the Imperial runes in action.

  They were still utterly foreign to him, but he had made notes. There was a wealth of knowledge there, one he intended to share once he found a runewright of sufficient skill, ability, and moral fibre.

  As much as it pained him to acknowledge his own failings, he did have to admit that at his core he was a warrior and not a scholar. He could appreciate the artistry and technical mastery of the Imperial script, but he did not have the skills or experience to decode it for himself, let alone synthesise that understanding into creating the complex pieces of artifice it was capable of.

  Yet for all he lacked, there were some things he had gleaned: how the artifice was structured, how connections were formed and linked, how power flowed through them. He felt it with his own touch and mana, and he had seen it with his own eyes.

  The simple reality was that breaking things was much easier than creating them.

  The door under his hand was simplistic, rugged — a slab of steel absent of adornment or engraving. Whoever had made it had had one purpose in mind: a perfect barrier.

  Kaius would see that purity of purpose broken. Mustering his will, he pushed his mana out of his palm and into the alchemically infused steel.

  There was an attempt at rebuttal as the enhanced material resisted his influence, but his will was iron, and he made contact with the circuits within. They were charged, a flow of mana connecting them to the wider facility. That was fine. He didn’t need to serve as a power source for the runes themselves to map them out.

  Following the ley lines through the metal, Kaius gingerly sketched out a picture of it in his mind. An internal web connected to the greater whole at the upper right corner and middle of the left side — an outbound and an inbound connection. They were similar to, if far simpler, the ones he had observed in the vault door at the start of the Imperial bunker.

  There had been an array, small and tightly packed, that had been shattered in the entryway. If he had to guess, whatever the artifice did, that was what fed signals to the wider facility — the most important thing for them to destroy, so their escape would not set off an alarm.

  Kaius drew his mana back slowly, careful not to disrupt the door’s artifice, before he opened his eyes. They were ready.

  Jogging back to the workshop where they had made camp, Kaius found his team lounging on the spread-out carpets. As he entered, they looked up, eager expressions on their faces.

  “How did it go? Did you find what you were looking for? I’m more than ready to get out of this place,” Kenva said, keeping her hands busy by twirling a copper coin through her fingers.

  Kaius only grinned as he leaned back against the wall behind him. “I did. There’s a section of its formation we’ll want to sever before we break our way out.”

  Porkchop slumped to the ground. “Oh, thank the Matriarchs. I’ve been going mad. There’s nothing here but tools, rotted beds, and old bones. It’s so boring. I thought you guys said these places were supposed to be full of loot.”

  That was true, Kaius thought. Well, he wasn’t exactly an expert, but he did know the freshly uncovered Imperial ruins had a tendency to draw Silvers by the dozen. The riches that could be found within were too large of a temptor. Even if functioning artefacts were rare, those that were found were often priceless.

  “They are, in a sense,” Ianmus replied, starting to store away their spread out belongings in his storage ring.

  Kaius frowned, though he moved to do the same. “We haven’t seen too much evidence of that.”

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  He was, of course, discounting the simple value of the knowledge they had pulled from the wreckage of the automata.

  “From what I’ve heard and seen in the archives, most facilities found aren’t quite as active as this — not even close. In most cases, the vast majority of wealth pulled from Imperial ruins is in raw materials.”

  Ianmus nodded towards the metal workbenches and framed shells around them.

  “Scrap metal?” Kenva asked in disbelief. “Silvers are plundering these places for scrap?”

  Kaius blinked as Ianmus nodded, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense.

  “Of course they are,” he said. “Every bit of it is alchemically treated. Hells, it looks like it was forged yesterday despite being millennia old. Think about how long and how many resources it would take an alchemist and metallurgist to make something like that. Even if it’s not a unique material, it’s still worth its weight in gold, and there’s so much of it.”

  “Exactly,” Ianmus said as he packed away a stack of books. “And this is just the common material. Some of the components used to make automata and what’s been found in industrial facilities have been far higher quality.”

  Porkchop paused halfway through balling up a fur rug with his ghost-hand. “What does that mean for Deadacre once we’ve deactivated the mana engine of this place?”

  Kaius froze. That was a good question. An Imperial ruin like this might as well have been a gold mine. Normally they were found deep in the wilderness, outside of any one individual’s claim. But this? This was at the heart of the city’s sovereignty.

  “A mythril rush,” Kenva muttered, clearly thinking the same thing he was.

  Ianmus nodded. “I think that perhaps Deadacre will not be staying an inconsequential backwater for much longer. Even after we claim our rightful tithe, there’s simply too much here, and too much work to be done, for us alone to profit off.”

  Kaius didn’t even begin to know what to do with that. The implications of this find suddenly reeked of politics — something he had active disinterest in but knew he would be forced to confront all the same. Thank the gods the job of dealing with that fiasco would fall on the shoulders of the local governor and the Guild.

  Still, he knew raw material was not the only thing pulled from Imperial ruins. There had been too many reports from the Guild’s archives and far too many rumours for it to be coincidence. Swords of impossible make; prosthetic artefacts built like automata limbs; even curios and curiosities that sold for chests of platinum despite their function being unknown.

  Hells, there had even been hints that functional automata had been recovered, though he’d only ever seen that in footnotes of expedition logs. From the sounds of it, they were far less combat-capable than a Centurion or worker drone.

  That was what he truly hoped they could claim as their reward for disabling this ruin. Money and material were all well and good, but they were already wealthy, and more coin was only ever a delve away. Mechanical artifice like he had seen here was far harder to come by.

  Even if he doubted they would find something that would dramatically improve their combat capabilities, he would be happy even with an oddity — a keepsake to ponder the mysteries of lost history and remember their experience in this expedition.

  His thoughts filled with imaginations of artifice as Kaius finished packing up their camp alongside his team.

  “Come on, let’s get moving,” he said, leading them to the front door.

  Taking the lead, Kaius nodded for Ianmus to join him. “Push your mana into the steel here. Just be careful not to disrupt the flow of the inscription inside.”

  Ianmus nodded and laid his palm flat on the spot Kaius indicated in the upper corner of the door. He closed his eyes, a frown of concentration on his face as Kaius saw the rich glow of mana soak into the metal.

  “Do you feel that faceted nodule right at the end of the stream that exits to the wall?”

  “I do. What’s our plan?”

  “We need to destroy it utterly and instantly before our disruption can be detected. An overcharged ray would be perfect — the array is the same size as your normal beams. You don’t need to destroy the door — just punch out that section of the formation. While you do that, I’ll put a Vos-enhanced Nail through the inbound connection. A moment after, we can rest for a bit before taking out the door itself while we recover our mana.”

  “You’re not worried about setting off an alarm?” Porkchop asked from behind him.

  “No,” Kaius replied. “The inbound connection will just be powering the reinforcement and other functions of the door. I only need to disrupt it rather than remove it totally. Like what we saw with the automata. That should be enough for the fail-safe secrecy measures to kick in and slag its entire internal structure.”

  “Are you ready?” he asked Ianmus, switching his attention back to the mage.

  “I am. I’ll just need a few minutes to channel the spell.”

  Kaius signalled for the others to back up. A dense knot of solar mana coursed around the tip of Ianmus’ staff. Standing at the front of their formation next to the mage, Kaius clenched and unclenched his hand, taking aim at the exact spot where he knew his target lay.

  Solar brightness peaked, a condensed strength of magical might that looked ready to burst.

  “Ready,” Ianmus grunted.

  Kaius dove into the twisted knots of Vos within his mind, sinking deeper than he had ever dared since his first brushes with the skill. He wouldn’t leave this to chance.

  “Fire,” he croaked, embers pouring from his tongue in an outflow from his Muthryn.

  A heartbeat later, a scathing ray of boiling energy ripped out from the tip of Ianmus’ staff. It punched through steel, vaporising alchemically reinforced metal like simple ice. Rivulets of white-hot molten metal ran from the hole, and a screaming nail a stride and a half long tore its way from Kaius’ Drakthar glyph with a concussive boom.

  The spike slammed home with a roar, punching deep, perfectly on target. The cacophony was magnified, echoing through the hardened stone walls of the barracks. Kaius slumped to the side, his head pounding as he stared at their work.

  Two holes had been punched in the steel barrier, revealing the foyer of Redoubt D4 beyond. Within the bunker door, mana surged — a final scream of agony before that spike of power shorted out.

  Kaius soaked in the satisfaction of their success.

  Now they only had to remove a little scrap to escape

  so close to the end of LOTM that I can taste it. On an unrelated note, I went to bed a few hours late last night lol

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