The forges of the Dwarven city thundered like a living heartbeat. Sparks leapt through the air as nearly ten dwarven smiths sward around the tablet laid on a bronze table, their tools clanging and rune arrays flickering in the furnace light. Kain stood with his arms crossed, though the rigid tension in his shoulders betrayed his unease.
The chief artificer—the first-generation dark dwarf, who barely looked to have aged a day, with his beard braided in silver wire—wiped his forehead and scowled. "It’s not the device, Your Grace. The runes are stable, the conduits are fine. It appears as though the device was affected by an outside force rather than an internal issue. Its connection with the world and energy around it seed to be forcibly choked off."
Kain frowned. "You an it’s not broken?"
"Not exactly." The dwarf adjusted the magnification monocle he worse while inspecting the tablet, squinting at the dim sigils on the device. "It’s like trying to breathe underwater with your hands tied. No matter how good your lungs are, you’re not getting air."
’That relic’s barrier must be the issue. As expected.’ Kain thought.
Kain muttered under his breath, "So it’s not dead—that’s good."
The dwarf gave a sharp nod. "Aye. Unless we can test against what’s causing this issue directly, we can’t fix it."
Kain exhaled slowly, running a hand through his hair. That ant one thing—he had to face the relic again. His stomach twisted at the thought. "All right," he said. "Thanks for confirming."
He closed his eyes—and opened them to find himself staring into a nightmare.
A pair of molten-red eyes filled his vision.
Kain’s heart stopped.
The relic’s face was inches from his own, their noses practically touching. Its irises pulsed like red heated glass, reflecting his wide-eyed panic. For a mont his heart stopped, he swore he saw the gates of heaven...and not in the poetic sense.
"Gah!" Kain flailed back, gasping. "What the hell are you doing?!"
The relic’s voice was icy calm. "You took too long."
Kain wheezed, clutching his chest. "You—! I nearly died from shock!"
"I was considering whether to save you the trouble of dying later," it said coolly. "So? Have you fixed your toy?"
"Working on it," Kain said quickly. "The, uh, signal’s being blocked by the interference in your walls. I need to—ah—perform a full-spectrum resonance synthesis to re‑establish cross‑dinsional harmonic calibrations and re‑align the energy‑phase stabilizers." He didn’t even know what half those words ant together, but he said them with all the confidence of a man bluffing for his life.
Serena, standing off to the side, covered her mouth, eyes crinkled as if trying not to laugh at his pathetic attempt to seem knowledgeable about the device.
Unlike Kain, due to her father, Serena was at a beginner to interdiate level in blacksmithing, artificing, and sigil drawing. Hence, she was the one to first help Kain originally draw the array that later served as a bridge to awaken ordinary people using Pangea.
So naturally she knew that what Kain said was complete nonsense.
The relic tilted its head. "Replicate my barrier? Impossible."
Kain hesitated, choosing his words carefully. "Maybe not impossible, just difficult. If I could sohow—"
The relic lifted its hand, cutting him off before he could finish.
Its expression changed—less disdain, more thought. "But taking away a portion of it...Tedious, perhaps. But not impossible."
Then, to their shared horror, a glowing crystalline orb—the relic’s core—manifested in the air before it. Kain felt his skin crawl; the power radiating from it felt even stronger than when the relic attacked him. Beyond the Demigod level.
Before he could speak, the relic drove a sharp nail into its own core, prying off a fragnt the size of a fingernail. It plucked it out casually, like pulling a loose gemstone from dirt, and tossed it to him.
Kain barely caught it. The shard pulsed like a heartbeat, warm and heavy in his hands. "You—what the—doesn’t that damage you?!"
The relic didn’t answer. Instead, the gaping hole in its core simply sealed itself, the missing fragnt regenerating as molten light smoothed into solid crystal once again.
Kain stared, dumbstruck. "R-right. Of course. Self-healing cores. Because why wouldn’t you have that."
Serena also blinked in shock. More aware than ever of how special this relic was and also frightened by just how advanced the civilization that made it was. Far more advanced than their own world. A relic core regenerating without any help or resources, not to ntion the strength emanating off the core...definitely an impossibility in their world.
The relic waved lazily. "That shard will reproduce the interference field. Use it wisely. I will not be giving you another. And the next ti you co back better be with the finished project...otherwise, you can just not co back."
Kain swallowed. "Thank you, uh, Your Relicness."
Its eyes narrowed. "Leave."
----------------------
Kain blinked—and was suddenly back in the Dwarven city, the hot air of the forge they’d relocated to from the city’s center washing over him. The dwarves froze mid-hamr swing, their eyes widening before dropping instantly to their knees.
"Your Grace!" one of them cried.
"Enough with that!" Kain barked, already kneeling to place the relic shard on the floor. "We’re short on ti!"
The dwarves watched in reverent awe as he set the fragnt down in the center of the room. The crystal pulsed, sending waves of energy rippling through the tallic ground. Runes flared to life across the forge...then the building...then the neighbouring buildings. And soon the entire city was humming in resonance and coated in a barely visible field. The very air seed to thicken, as if reality itself grew heavier.
Kain crouched near the glowing fragnt as it seed to fuse into the flood and then disappear from view, his eyes half‑lidded as he extended his perception.
Instantly, as the maker of Pangea, his awareness expanded. Kain could feel every thread of energy forming the barrier. It wasn’t just like a simple barrier he normally used; it had tethered itself to the Source energy of his world, self‑sustaining like a living organism. In that mont, Kain sensed how it thickened the dwarves’ vitality, sharpened their minds, even tempered their forging flas. What had been a simple city now pulsed like the heart of civilization itself.
In ages to co, this very place would be considered a Holy Land, and countless intelligent races Kain would later create would shed blood to claim it, though Kain, blissfully unaware, simply thought, ’I really hope I can keep this thing.’ He scratched his cheek and decided that if the relic ever asked for it back, he’d just play dumb, or claim it was consud in testing.
Waiting for the dwarves to finish was nerve-wracking. For hours and then days, Kain lingered near the forges while the dwarves tinkered and cursed in their language, sparks flying like angry fireflies. He was anxious the whole ti. Although ti was definitely faster on Pangea, Kain wasn’t sure how long the relic had been waiting outside. For all he knew the relic had already decided to boot him back to Dark Moon.
Progress was slow due to the barrier emitting rhythmic bursts that warped magnetic flow and interfered with half their instrunts. Sotis the resonance would throw off their calibration arrays, making compasses spin or crystal gauges shatter from overload. The dwarves muttered about cascading flux, sigil harmonics, and polar inversion drift—things Kain pretended to understand while nodding sagely.
The more the dwarves studied, the more respect filled their eyes: even this sliver of barrier produced power fluctuations beyond anything they could stabilize.
’As one would expect of sothing brought by the Creator.’ They thought with twinkling eyes while looking at Kain.
At one point, their lightning coil lted itself, forcing a full system recalibration. Kain spent the downti pacing, hands behind his back, resisting the urge to appear nervous. Every clang of hamr and hiss of quenched tal echoed like a ticking clock in his skull until the chief artificer finally approached, wiping soot from his face.
Finally, the Dark Dwarf chief artificer wiped his palms, muttering sothing in Dwarvish that sounded a lot like a prayer. "Ready when you are, Your Grace."
Kain took a deep breath and powered up the tablet. For a long mont, nothing happened.
Then the runes brightened. Lines of light connected through the ground like veins of liquid gold. The tablet vibrated in his hands. The dwarves gasped as the device’s fra humd, the dark screen flickering, then suddenly bursting to life with faint color. The user interface.
Tap tap
Kain clicked arounf to a livestreaming app, one of the few installed. The screen went black, causing his heart to drop, before it was replaces with a blurry projection: the relic’s chamber.
Kain grinned, relief washing through him. "We’re back in business."
Seeing him grin, the dwarves imdiately burst into wild, thunderous cheers. Hamrs clanged against anvils in triumph, sparks leapt skyward like fireworks, and even the stoic Dark Dwarf chief blacksmith and artificer let out a booming laugh.
Reviews
All reviews (0)