Ch 2.26: Retreat

Elaina 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 the larger golem to charge as the little ones distracted Tira and Flora, all of the stone monsters began to sink away into the ground.

Should you go back on your word, we will not hesitate to defend this planet, Administrator.

Elaina relaxed, shoulders hunching forward as the last remnants of the golems disappeared into the cavern floor, right at the same moment Tira fell to the ground. “Tira!” Elaina shouted as she ran over.

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” The girl was half laughing, half crying as she spoke up, covering her face with her hands. “It hurts, but I’m okay.”

Flora walked over to Tira, arriving just before Elaina and as Carline ran up from behind, laying 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?”

“It is meant to be difficult,” Temmie said as Carline placed a hand each on both Flora and Tira. “That is why it would have been chosen as the guardian of this place.”

“Guarding what though? The crystals?” Tira asked, glancing to the end of the chamber, the path leading further down.

“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.”

Elaina 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 planet.”

“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 display some level of free will”

“So,” Flora said, standing up and walking away from Carline. “What do we do now?”

“Flora, I’m not done with your arm yet!”

“I know, but Tira’s the one with internal bleeding. Focus on her, get me after.” Carline frowned, but didn’t protest anymore.

“We can’t go in any further, I don’t think so anyway,” Elaina 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.”

“What did you do?” Tira asked. “I thought we were dead for sure when you fell off and it screamed.”

“I just… I mean, I could have shut it down, but that didn’t seem right. It just wanted to protect the planet, to stop the poachers. It thought we were with them, I explained that we weren’t, and it agreed to let us go.”

“How do you shut something like that down though?” Flora asked. “Is that an ‘administrator’ thing?”

“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 access to that as of yet.”

“I used my aspect.” Elaina 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.”

“Crystals are both alive and not at the same time,” Temmie said. “There is a soul inside of them, the soul of the planet, 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.”

Elaina 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.

“I’m just glad we’re all making it out,” Tira said. “Don’t really care about the golems, honestly.”

“It was just doing what it was supposed to,” Elaina said, stroking the crystal with her fingertips.

“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 mostly completed the mission, but what do we tell the school?”

Elaina 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 classes? Like, could the kingdom do it easily?”

“Hmmm. It is a guardian for a reason. It would be difficult, but given enough committed resources I cannot imagine it would hold up to a concentrated effort from a powerful nation.”

“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.”

“Time?” Elaina asked.

“Yeah? We’re in this for the long haul. We are going to try and stop the aggressive crystal farming, right?”

Elaina 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.

Carline’s outfit erupted into a shimmer of blue sparks. “Change back, someone’s coming. A human.”