No one had anything to add to his words. They all knew how overwhelming the challenge facing them was. But this was their home, not mine. I kept my mouth shut, because no matter how strongly I felt, I didn’t have much skin in this game.

  Fara was the first to break the silence. “Good. For once, you’ll listen and take a nap. Those golems are going to be vital if we are to win, and you have to be in your best shape to make them.”

  He nodded. “Silas and I have a lot to discuss, but I promise, I’ll eat and take a nap.”

  That brought a smile to her lizard features, and she busied herself making preparations for him to sleep. It reminded me of all the people I had in my life who looked out for me in the same way.

  Samvek and Selena exchanged a look with me, and I sent them both a thank you with my eyes. Selena nodded toward the dungeon entrance. “We’ll take them in groups of four,” she said. “Let them stretch their new limits without drowning them. Fara was really starting to slow down when we finished up, and I had to push myself pretty hard to keep the XP coming in for her. The dungeon has apparently adapted again. It was throwing level 280 monsters at us, even when it was just the two of us.”

  Tad nodded and looked at me. “As long as you’re okay with that, I’d like to send in the four forest elves first. I have some things that I need Clay and Oliver to do for me. Fara needs rest, and Lexa wants to meet with Arbormaris.”

  “It’s fine with me.” I looked at Selena. “You sure you don’t need some rest after that last run? It looked like it was pretty rough.”

  She put her hands on her hips with what I’d come to recognize as mock outrage. “Are you saying I look bad?”

  I smiled at her. “I’m not suicidal. Besides, you’re gorgeous. Why would I ever lie? I just want to do for you what you do for me, and make sure you aren’t pushing yourself too hard.”

  She smiled back. “You’re good at this. Don’t worry, with Samvek there, I won’t have to push as hard. We might even do a run on level four first to see how they adapt to their new power.”

  “Makes sense. I’m gonna get busy setting up a forge here.”

  With that, she descended into the dungeon with Samvek and the four forest elves. Lexa had already disappeared, which was odd to realize. My senses usually caught everything.

  Clay and Oliver still stood near the worktables. Tad finally spoke again, his exhaustion worn openly now that the awakenings were finished. He didn’t waste time on preamble. He asked whether they could source 20,000 pounds of iron and move it to the warehouse without drawing attention. The question was blunt, not because Tad was being rude, but because he knew that it was going to be difficult, given the presence of the Order in Basetown.

  I imagined that in a more advanced world, 20,000 pounds of iron wouldn’t be all that difficult for a company to get their hands on, but it sure seemed like a lot for the level of technology they had here.

  I stepped in before either of them could answer. “Make it 25,000 pounds,” I said. “Forging something that big is going to involve mistakes, trimming, and losses. I’d rather have excess than realize halfway through that we’re short.” Tad nodded his agreement, already passing the adjustment on to Spot through whatever silent channel they shared.

  Clay grimaced, doing the mental math, while Oliver exhaled slowly and rubbed at his temple. “That much iron exists,” Oliver said, careful and precise even now. “The difficulty isn’t in finding it. It’s in moving it quietly. The Order has eyes everywhere, and iron in that quantity doesn’t get up and walk away.” He paused, then added, “We can do it, but it’ll take hours.”

  “That’s fine,” I replied. “We’re not racing the clock tonight. Tad needs to rest, and honestly, I thought it might end up taking a week. I apologize, but I have no real idea what is normal for your world. We just need to avoid announcing ourselves if we can help it.”

  Clay nodded, resolve firming his posture. He’d been a guild master long enough to understand logistics, and this was exactly the kind of problem he was good at solving. He exchanged a glance with Oliver as he shook his head. “Otherworlders.” There was a smile on his lips, so I knew he was playing.

  They left shortly after, already discussing routes, storage yards, and which merchants asked the fewest questions. Clay clearly had more knowledge of Basetown, as Oliver hadn’t been active here for twenty years. Still, he could move around pretty much at will, using his official position within the empire as Grand Mage to ensure that merchants stayed quiet. Watching them go reminded me again that not every contribution came from raw power. Some battles were won before a weapon was ever raised. Once they were gone, the warehouse felt emptier, the echo of their footsteps swallowed by the stone and wood.

  I turned back to Tad and gestured at the cleared space near the center of the warehouse. “I’m going to need a forge,” I said. “A real one, not a camp setup. I need space to lay out a twelve-foot body, overhead clearance, and a drafting table where I can work through the design before I touch any metal.” I hesitated, then added, “If Spot can manage controlled heat zones and stable airflow, that would help more than you know.”

  The Crembori had built my forge back on Earth. I had the blacksmithing and metallurgy skills on my status sheet, so as far as that went, I could do the job. But because I hadn’t learned those skills the old-fashioned way with a bunch of study and painstaking practice, I didn’t understand all the set-up necessary when it came to building a forge. I knew what I needed it to do, but not how to make it.

  Tad didn’t hesitate. He placed a hand against the dungeon’s core and closed his eyes, posture shifting as he relayed instructions. I felt the response almost immediately, a subtle change in pressure and temperature as the warehouse floor thrummed beneath our feet. Spot was listening, and he was eager.

  The dungeon expanded, upward this time instead of down. Stone flowed like wax along the far wall, reshaping itself into a massive furnace structure with vents, channels, and a hearth large enough to swallow a truck. The heat was present but contained, steady and even, nothing like the wild breath of dragonfire. There was something both old and new about the forge. Obviously, when I’d put part of myself into the core, it had stolen a look into some of my memories. This forge looked far too high-tech for Basetown, and I couldn’t wait to use it. But Spot wasn’t done.

  Nearby, a raised stone table formed, smooth and perfectly level, its surface etched faintly with geometric guidelines that made my fingers itch to start drawing. There were going to be many stages to this project, and I had to admit the visionary stage was my favorite. Some people were great at details, but that wasn’t really me. I was better at grand gestures and dramatic flourishes. I lived in a dream, and the world around me always seemed to struggle to catch up.

  I walked the perimeter slowly, taking it all in. The forge felt right, not just functional but intentional, like it had been built by something that understood its purpose. I asked for tools for my drafting table, and a moment later, charcoal, chalk, and measuring tools had appeared, laid out with meticulous care.

  Yes. This would work nicely.

  Chapter Forty-Two: Design Phase

  I leaned over the drafting table and started sketching, charcoal moving in confident strokes as the shape of the golem took form. Twelve feet tall meant proportions mattered more than simple mass. Too much weight in the torso and the joints would shear under motion, too little and the core would lack stability. My old DM would have been proud of how much nerd lore I’d retained from D&D, because I was definitely borrowing heavily.

  This was different from any design I’d come up with to this point. My past creations had all included internal space, and the structure had to be formed with that in mind. My armor was a matter of putting layers together in the shape of my body. When I drew a design for a building, I had to account for the internal space and optimize that while still making it strong enough on the outside.

  None of that mattered here. All that mattered was that I get a humanoid form with the right proportions so that the weight would be distributed properly. A golem didn’t wear armor to protect itself—its body was its protection. Obviously, I had to assume that the magic was going to do a lot of the heavy lifting, because as strong as iron was, it would come apart like warm butter before Wayfinder. If these golems were truly going to be legendary-tier creations, they would have to be stronger than that.

  As I worked, I kept one part of my mind tuned to the forge. Spot adjusted heat levels automatically as I made notes, the temperature shifting in precise increments that told me it was tracking my intent rather than waiting for explicit commands. That was impressive. I’d worked with automated forges before, but this felt closer to collaboration than tooling. The dungeon had provided the heat and space I needed. Now it was up to me to finish my vision.

  Frowning in concentration, I erased and redrew the same silhouette for the fifth time. Twelve feet was tall enough to be imposing without becoming unwieldy, but every inch mattered when you were dealing with that much iron.

  I wasn’t trying to engineer joints or clever mechanisms, though. The magic would handle movement.

  I had to force myself to stop thinking like a machinist. Iron in this context wasn’t steel beams and bolts—it was closer to the Play-Doh I remembered from my childhood. If I tried to design articulated knees or rotating shoulders, I’d only be giving stress points somewhere to form. A golem didn’t need efficiency of motion the way a mortal did. It needed balance, mass, and inevitability.

  I had an absent thought that I wished that I could design it out of liquid metal, sort of like a T2. But that was just a pipe dream. This was going to be a blunt instrument, and there was nothing wrong with that. Maybe if my ability ever evolved to utilize mithril, a morphing golem would become possible.

  I redrew the torso thicker, then thinner, testing how the weight would settle if it leaned forward or twisted at the waist. The balance had to be right, but not just for function. The golem needed presence, the kind of physical authority that made enemies hesitate before they struck. I caught myself smiling at that thought. Presence mattered, even for constructs.

  The arms were next, long and heavy, but not oversized. I wanted them to have reach without turning them into anchors that would inhibit movement. Hands stayed simple, broad palms with thick fingers, more suited to crushing and grappling than delicate work. I made sure to add as much extra mass to the hands as I felt would work. They were weapons, after all, and hitting harder required more mass. I just had to be careful not to throw the balance off. No matter what the magic made up for, it would still be limited by my design.

  I moved on to the legs, spending more time there than anywhere else. They needed to be pillars, able to absorb force without transmitting it upward into the torso. I widened the hips slightly and lowered the center of gravity until the stance felt grounded even on paper. When I imagined it moving, the image finally stopped wobbling in my mind. Finally, I added more mass to the feet. Like the hands, they, too, were weapons as much as a method of movement.

  From there, my thoughts drifted toward runes almost against my will. Rune Smithing wasn’t something I could ignore anymore. I didn’t want glowing symbols etched across the surface like decoration. That would be obvious and brittle. What I wanted were embedded strings, rune paths laid through the body like veins, reinforcing structure and giving power a place to flow. I knew that we were in Tad’s realm and that his type of enchanting was different from mine, but I wanted this golem to end up being a blend of both.

  I kept sketching, but the silhouette wasn’t the problem anymore. The body shape had settled into something that felt stable in my mind, and now the real work could begin. I started drawing rune chains over and through the form, envisioning them as conduits, similar to the way nerves and veins carried signals and strength through living bodies. Each line mattered, because each rune implied a behavior, a bias, and a cost.

  My first instinct was to lean into reinforcement. I drew a spine of linked runes down the back, then branched it into the shoulders and hips, imagining the magic distributing impacts the way force constructs did when they took a blow, bleeding it into harmless angles. That felt safe, but a little too passive. A golem that only endured would eventually be buried under enough pressure, especially if it had to stand against awakened enemies who knew how to break things. I needed something that could endure and still push back.

  I tried a second arrangement, focused on momentum and kinetic return. The concept was simple enough—take the force that hit the golem and feed part of it back into its next motion, turning defense into offense. On paper it looked elegant, but when I followed the rune flow in my mind, I could see the failure point. Too much feedback and it would become unstable, amplifying impacts until joints and structure tore themselves apart. The last thing I wanted was a twelve-foot iron bomb with legs.

  I erased the addition and went smaller. Instead of one grand network, I designed local chains, clusters of runes embedded in key mass points—hands, forearms, shins, chest, and the thick ridge of the back. Each cluster would reinforce its respective section and help it accept strain without spreading it in unpredictable ways. That approach felt more like how I designed things back home, modular and adaptable. There was still the question about how compatible the concepts would be. I didn’t know if runes here would end up just being etched tattoos, or if they could carry actual magical power.

  As I worked, I kept coming back to the same principle. The golem body was iron, but the thing that would make it legendary wasn’t the metal. It would be the interactions between the control disc, the dungeon’s animation process, Tad’s authority, and whatever rune framework I provided. If I designed runes that fought the disc’s logic, I’d create friction. If I designed runes that guided and supported, the golem might become something far more potent than a walking statue.

  I spent a long time testing chains that enhanced sensory input. Not perception in a living sense, but detection of force, heat, and magical pressure. A golem didn’t need to see. It needed to react when something struck it from behind, or when an aura tried to suppress it, or when a spell attempted to bind it. I sketched runes that would translate external pressure into internal instruction, the equivalent of reflex. That made me grin, because it was exactly the kind of solution I’d have mocked as overthinking a year ago.

  The next set of runes was about durability and endurance, but I pushed it beyond simple reinforcement. If the golem could evolve to mithril and eventually adamantium, then its internal framework needed to survive those transitions. I designed the rune chains with deliberate slack, leaving room for growth, as if the runes themselves could widen and settle into the new material. I wasn’t sure if that was possible, but the logic of it felt right. Growth was the theme of this entire world, after all, and fighting it would be foolish.

  I tore two sheets out of the notebook and started over when the design became too busy. That had always been my biggest weakness as a planner. I liked options, liked redundancy, liked covering every angle. In combat, that often saved me. In crafting, too many moving parts meant too many failure points, too many targets for an enemy spell.

  The third full draft was cleaner. A primary reinforcement chain ran through spine, hips, and shoulders, while secondary clusters in the limbs handled impact and load. A third layer, thinner and more conceptual, was built around stability, keeping the golem’s internal flow from becoming chaotic when magic pressure surged. Nothing flashy, but it felt right, like this was how it had always been meant to work.

  I sat back and stared at my design for a long moment, letting my mind run the pattern again and again. I imagined the golem moving, taking hits, pushing forward, retaliating, and I watched for places where the rune flow would snag or loop or amplify in the wrong direction. The design held in my head without wobbling. That was the first time it had felt that way.

  Once I was satisfied, I set the charcoal down and rubbed at my eyes. My hands were stained black, and my shoulders ached from being hunched over the table for so long. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I’d fought gods and ascendants and survived, but I still ended up exhausted by drawing lines on paper. But if we were going to do this, I wanted it done right.

  I let the charcoal rest and wiped my hands on a rag before reaching for one of the iron golem control discs. It felt heavier than it should have given its size, both in mass and implication. I turned it over slowly in my palm, half expecting to feel the familiar thrum of spiritual energy that so many artifacts carried. But there was nothing. No resonance, no warmth, and no sense of intent pressing back at me. I knew it worked on different principles of magic than I was accustomed to, but I still believed I could figure it out.

  Still, that absence made me slow down. I extended my senses carefully, the same way I did when examining an unfamiliar spell or system interface. Spirit Sight was no help. There was no glow, no tether, no nascent soul waiting to be shaped or awakened. That made it clear that this wasn’t an item enchanted under the rules of the Fey System. All the enchantments I’d encountered here so far had been anchored by spiritual energy, what Tad called sprites—those flashes of color I was always seeing.

  I shifted my focus away from spirit and toward structure, and that was when things began to click. The disc wasn’t empty. It was dense with complexity, but the complexity wasn’t magical. It was patterned, layered, and precise in a way that reminded me more of code than spellwork, logic folded into logic with contingencies waiting for the right conditions. I followed those internal pathways carefully, resisting the urge to push too hard, and realized they only made sense if the golem body itself was part of the equation.

  The disc wasn’t a power source at all. It was an operating system.

  With that realization came a notification. Skill increases, I assumed. I checked them quickly before getting back to work.