Ch 2.26: Retreat


    <span style="font-weight:400">ina was up on her feet and readying herself to fight again, cursing herself for having trusted the golem as it screamed out. But when the cry stopped and she expected an attack, expected therger golem to charge as the little ones distracted Tira and Flora, all of the stone monsters began to sink away into the ground.


    <i><span style="font-weight:400">Should you go back on your word, we will not hesitate to defend this, Administrator.</i>


    <span style="font-weight:400">ina rxed, shoulders hunching forward as thest remnants of the golems disappeared into the cavern floor, right at the same moment Tira fell to the ground. “Tira!” ina shouted as she ran over.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“I’m fine, I’m fine.” The girl was halfughing, half crying as she spoke up, covering her face with her hands. “It hurts, but I’m okay.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">Flora walked over to Tira, arriving just before ina and as Carline ran up from behind,ying herself on shimmering stones next to her. “I really thought we were fucked when the pieces of the arm started moving. How do you even fight something like that?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“It is meant to be difficult,” Temmie said as Carline ced a hand each on both Flora and Tira. “That is why it would have been chosen as the guardian of this ce.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Guarding what though? The crystals?” Tira asked, ncing to the end of the chamber, the path leading further down.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“The subcore that was stolen would be the primary thing. Excess energy from the subcore is what likely drove the cavern to produce this many crystals though, and as a result the golem would potentially be driven to protect those as well due to its programming.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">ina wanted to help Carline somehow, but she knew that she couldn’t, so she settled for going back over and picking Temmie up off the ground. “It didn’t seem like it was acting based on orders though… It seemed to care. It knew what the crystal farming is doing to the.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“A very real possibility. Golems are not like the mindless automatons at your school; they have minds and souls of their own. They cannot directly disobey their programming, but they are able to disy some level of free will”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“So,” Flora said, standing up and walking away from Carline. “What do we do now?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Flora, I’m not done with your arm yet!”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“I know, but Tira’s the one with internal bleeding. Focus on her, get me after.” Carline frowned, but didn’t protest anymore.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“We can’t go in any further, I don’t think so anyway,” ina said. “I made a deal with the golem. The deal was to not take any crystals, but I don’t want to tempt things. I don’t have enough mana to do that again.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“What <i><span style="font-weight:400">did</i><span style="font-weight:400"> you do?” Tira asked. “I thought we were dead for sure when you fell off and it screamed.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“I just… I mean, I could have shut it down, but that didn’t seem right. It just wanted to protect the, to stop the poachers. It thought we were with them, I exined that we weren’t, and it agreed to let us go.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“How do you shut something like that down though?” Flora asked. “Is that an ‘administrator’ thing?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Negative,” Temmie said. “It could easily be done with administrator privileges through the security subsystem since the golem was created through such means, but we do not have ess to that as of yet.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“I used my aspect.” ina thought back to the feeling, reaching inside the creature’s very being with [Restraint]. It wasn’t something she’d experienced before. “I don’t know how. I didn’t think I could do it on something that was living.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Crystals are both alive and not at the same time,” Temmie said. “There is a soul inside of them, the soul of the, but it is the container of the soul that you can interact with. I would not have guessed you could do such things honestly, not without having witnessed it myself before.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">ina stared down at the orb in her hands, the swirling, glowing blue mist inside. Temmie had always seemed a little less than alive to her, but after what she just experienced she felt bad for thinking that. Temmie was certainly more of a person than the golem, of course, and if it was “alive” she wasn’t sure what that meant for Temmie.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“I’m just d we’re all making it out,” Tira said. “Don’t really care about the golems, honestly.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“It was just doing what it was supposed to,” ina said, stroking the crystal with her fingertips.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“And if we don’t want it to finish the job, we have to leave?” Flora asked, sitting on a rock, staring up at the ceiling. “Guess we have mostlypleted the mission, but what do we tell the school?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">ina frowned, realizing she didn’t know. She’d been telling the truth when she said that their party didn’t want to farm crystals, but the kingdom very much did. “Temmie, how hard is it to defeat a golem like that for people without sses? Like, could the kingdom do it easily?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Hmmm. It is a guardian for a reason. It would be difficult, but given enoughmitted resources I cannot imagine it would hold up to a concentrated effort from a powerful nation.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“It’ll be okay,” Tira said, finally standing up. It seemed Carline was done healing her, since she didn’t try to keep her down. “For a while, anyway. The poachers have damaged the cave’s crystal ecosystem enough. I’ll tell them we ran into a golem, had to retreat, and hopefully that’ll buy us enough time.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Time?” ina asked.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Yeah? We’re in this for the long haul. We are going to try and stop the aggressive crystal farming, right?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">ina nodded. She had been the one most in favor of opposing the kingdom after all, but she still had fears about it. Fears for her turned into other emotions too though, distracting her even further.


    <span style="font-weight:400">Carline’s outfit erupted into a shimmer of blue sparks. “Change back, someone’sing. A human.”