Date: Þórri 15th, 598 AD. (Alt: 27th January, 599 AD.) Location: Götaland (Ancient Sweden.)
Leif sets himself down onto the nearby table closest to his Uni-pod, tiredness marred his expression in a way one would see from a war far beyond what he would be capable of.
He sees those who had been killed within the simulation alive and well, yet their deaths kept itself strong within his mind, he knows they are not dvergar or the malevolent, but his old religion and beliefs warred with his conscious mind, yet, he kept himself strong for them.
Leif sips the cold brew in his hand, the frothiness a new development through an automated brewery process that he has come to wish for every drink with its bubbliness. Still, only a momentary distraction to what he is thinking on asking the great scientist God next. "Heath." He waves him over, who then sees the giant of a man come over again in the form they saw him return to. "Is everything alright?" Heath asks him, experiencing his emotions through the wafting emotions that psionically back against his soul.
"What sort of powers did this 'Malgosha' have from that realm?" While Faustino was a great help, there are still too many what-ifs from his stories, and with Heath memorising every lie and part of lore known from Legends, he further compounds it with believability.
"Mainly ergokinesis, the ability to alter any form of energy around itself, and the powers of zombification." Heath chews a little bit of ice in his mouth after speaking, letting it stew a little for Leif to understand how the Piglins get turned. "Had she cursed their entire species for power?" The Völsung Clan's Heir thinks of that incredibly farfetched possibility, but Heath nods, seeing it as a matter of fact for the worldbuilding for this game. "A bit like my eternal phylactery idea, not to keep them undying, but to be a leaded cage."
Heath saw Leif's eyes widen a fraction, and he could feel his questioning of how one could be so cruel to their own. "When one dies or becomes zombified through escapage, their souls are tugged back, brought into the soul sand in storage." . . .
"And as you may gather, she can expend these souls like the concept of a modern philosopher's stone, gaining Creative powers that make her essentially a Goddess." He saw him smirk slightly under his gloom. Leif smiles in reactive pros and cons. 'Could I destroy this soul sand?' He wonders, thoughts of running through enough of these pockets to weaken her sounding as a plausible option. "There are millions of souls to free if you were to do that. No, find the links within her." Heath reminds him of his battle against the Spiritual Queen.
"Snip all tangles of her servants' lines connected to her, destroy the web of power she spins around herself and remove the effects of this connective cocoon from the Nether. I believe you can do it." Heath sits down, content and happy of his improv explanation.
"How had you done it, brother?" Leif asks him in the hope of a hint, but he only gains the response of a knowing characteristic smile. Earning Heath a punch to the shoulder before they get up and stretch in unison. Leif looks towards the screen where their bodies are asleep within that virtual world, yet the golem was nowhere to be seen. "I can see you are wondering where he is." Heath wistfully states before making the camera refocus in a cinematic shot within one of the larger apartment complexes.
He is by the second floor of the individual housing, gathering supplies and food for those of flesh and blood. Yet he also carries a body in a fireman shoulder grab, not greyed or with a malicious countenance, it was a 'Villager' that was layed gently over the satchel's handle.
He carefully travels down the stairs and walks back to their defense for safeguarding, dropping the food in a new pile. He reorients this corpse to be in a princess carry, the golem's brow holding the feelings of longing and regret. By the area where the previous warriors had been sanctified in a pyre within the farm, a hole has been dug by the golem's hands, dozens of them have been brought and buried shoulder to shoulder upon the stone bottom. Each had two long curtains that are layed under and over them, ready.
The golem travels towards the old steel mill, steps heavy yet silent with intention. He sets himself by the charging bucket where the metal would be purified and poured for moulding. He drops the contents of the satchel, ready to be melted.
It was halfway full through with a mixture of 70% lysol-based soaps and 30% baking soda and soda ashes. The golem then went out again to collect papers, liquid aerosols, acetones, alcohols, and frayed firewood to then be burned below the bucket. He sets it alight from the strength and friction of his palms from turning a phosphorus firestarter, setting it alight and creating a heavy carbonous smog that blanketed the floor due to the poor filtration. From the available platform, it is mixed by slowly prodding a metal ladle manually over the open flame.
After enough spins, he travels above the bucket to use the available crucible stirring rod to mix it in thoroughly. And once he saw it was consistent, the golem jumped down, leaving a crack on the surface before turning around and putting out the fire with a fire blanket.
The bucket kept enough heat to keep it melted, so what does he do now? He picks up the entire container over his head, multiple times his size and the difficulty of a strident overhead press. He takes it out through the vehicle door and through to the burial site, now pouring in the saponified wax in equal measure. Trapping them in an antibacterial layer that will keep them preserved, mummified. Once all have been covered in the composition, he takes the dug up soil beside the hole and covers it, creating a respectful mass burial.
From the outside, all of this appeared to have taken a few minutes, but to the golem, it was a few clouds' passing of time. Which they all could tell with the feature that it was accelerated. It turns back to normal speed, the golem keeping watch over the communal site.
He looks down towards his hands, the oils and putrescent blood that now stain its form showing the toil they had been through. He looks towards the location of the park where the lake had been, soon travelling there at the same time as he passed the view of a theater to its left. He washes himself thoroughly through its joints and metallic creases, where it next takes its time to find an instrument within the nearby building. A cracked door is there where it leads to the instrument closet near the employee's area, where he perceives a mark.
He finds a bowed lyre with sinewed string. Untended, the wood on its exterior was slightly cracked and stained with water damage. Its accompanying bow still ready for preparation. He tweaks the pegs to turn it to a better tune. Now, he takes it out by the grave, ready for playing.
(A King's Lament by William Ross)[1]
The golem plucks the strings in a slow rhythm, a trill first starting from the base of the instrument that slowly rises before repeating through a diminuendo. Sounding close to a mix between a slow Flamenco and medieval British, the twiddling of his thrumming skill in display.
He reaches a higher point in the song, reminiscent of the old Greensleeves Tudor music. The golem's emotions break a peak, its nose rising and showing its heatsinks before using its inner fold to recreate the sound of a deep pan pipe. Its nose vibrates with the lyre in dual instrumentation, a deep serenade to soothe its own soul and of those whom it could not save. The filter begins tightening and its hollow internal chambers creak themselves to shift slowly to the sound closest to a piano. Up and down, his mood shifted, before he went quiet himself.
The lyre continued playing, his six-fingered hands wringing all the strength from the string through its reverberant bowing in form. The cover of rain came, yet no clouds blocked the orange moon in view, the golem's cries, it was, closer to a storm than a natural sound.
Its slowly grinding shell made an inclementing static, and every booming shift of its nose crashing as the sound of thunder. Never stopping his play in respect for those lost. The strings gave out with his strength, but he knew it was not done. The golem puts down the lyre without stopping his hand in reforming, using his fingers as harmonic bells to create a carol in the sound of a music box, its high pitch reminding many who stood still in the room of cries. For that was what it was, newly born, with a failed purpose to protect.
The song repeats with both hands in unison, juxtaposing the golem's towering form, it leaned low, knees kissing the salted farmland with its head low. He creates a lasting, echoic arpeggyic run. Leaving only the sound of his own mournings through its environment.
The camera showed itself behind the golem, a backdrop with the baleful moon making them appear a post made to guard its spot, permanently. Every viewer of its screen paid its respect to the reborn custodian of an empire long destroyed. And Leif now stared at Heath, eyes mixed with a slight annoyance in making a 'living' creature in their eyes for it to only know failure and pain. The tall God leans low, voicing a canard that would be believable if not for the treatment of a 'soulless' creation.
'I should've made a friendlier environment, huh?' Heath thinks to himself in English, there were only the dead, the evil and the greedy existing within. Too grimdark for many whose own world was from a deadly show.
He should have recognised as well that these people would quickly treat the creation as a lifeline, and his original plan to use the golem as a catalyst to push the story forward may be too harsh. 'I'll introduce a few things to their next simulation.' He secretly alters the server's internal runnings to change the 'controlled fate' of a few characters to assuage their anger, their stares already scaring him enough. '*Eugh*' He convulses slightly at how Gorm was looking into him at his treatment of the steel giant. "A word?" Leif commands, rather than ask.
It was funny the way he had stared towards him, but he knew this was serious. "Oh, come on." Heath groaned slightly in response, though that just earned him a strong rivalric squint from Leif. "Bring him to our realm, give him a soul." He leads, hand raised up high in a point.
Well, that shut up Heath real quick. "Okay." He agrees with hands up in surrender, in hopes of having this staredown stopped. Leif looks almost disappointed in him. 'I felt bad for him too, yet I could never've predicted this.' He sees the rustling of a few of their bodies awakening within the screen, as the deer that were resting had suddenly sprung from within the room. Heath huffs out in mild frustration with them not using this time for themselves, but Leif felt their eagerness before, shaking his head understandably in turn before returning to his Uni-pod.
Faustino, being the one who feels the closest to him for saving him, stands beside the golem, still sniffling the sound of galling steel and rasping hoots. Their presence closed upon him before Agostino patted the golem's satchel-strapped shoulder.
They now stood in file, each paying their respects to the fallen. Where even if they were 'false,' they deserved greater. Over the internally simulated Model hour or so, they stored the supplies collected and thanked the golem with the treatment of a provider. The golem itself knew not what to do, so its best choice was to walk off for a moment, leaving everyone confounded. It then returned and brought in its hand a red poppy flower, larger and more beautiful than the average. It came close to Aleke and placed it behind a groove of the helmet.
Its head turned as one would a Labrador, adjusting it to better fit into the contour of her small ventilation ducts. His nose and monobrow rose softly in happiness that it worked better than hoped. Just that expression alone had won the hearts of the people here even more.
Its head jittered slightly, turning quickly after hearing a noise coming from the same direction as the pile of Pillager bodies that had been left from the raid. It prepared a boxing stance and slowly set its rightfully paranoid view onto any scannable objects nearby. A bolt soon hit his head, its steel hull causing it to bounce off and clatter onto the floor behind him. And with a quick reaction time, those behind him fired with raging gun hilts in the direction of the potential crossbowman, leaving nothing there but a crater.
". . . Overkill much." Heath mumbled in English, expecting nobody to hear him, but he heard a "*Tut tut*" noise of disapproval behind him. It was Hervor, and she did not look happy, giving a meaningful glance that showed the realm HE had made was the reason for their reaction.
"Ey, at least you are providing them with good training." Agnarr comments, though with a more forced smile, there seems to be a sore spot with many of his friends falling into the lava. "Was this environment you had been in as deadly compared to where they are currently?" Adal asks, scanning with his own magic towards the simulated creation, wondering how something so personalised, so lifelike, would have no soul of its own. "It was worse." Heath remembered the difficulty and many deaths from a few respective mod choices.
The face of absolute trauma that came from remembering Journey Beyond the Abyss showed them the horrors he had experienced that had partially tempered who he was when playing the game. They remembered how he had once exclaimed that his personality used to be its opposite.
"Even this tweak may be too hard for any mortal, Heath." Agnarr's face portrayed comfort to help him destress, also asking over an Auto server to bring over Heath's favourite citrus cordial with ice. "Then how about if any can land the final blow upon The Seer, I can grant my power from that realm?" Heath's question was met with a resounding no, worried that he would give up a portion of his own soul for it. "That is not what I mean~. It will not be real, per se. It is within the confines that I could program a simulacrum of it for a Chosen One."
That very title spared little to no food for thought on the power brought to what has been shown. A title that is earned with bloodshed ever greater. "I call dibs on our Heir." Agnarr stared competitively towards his wife. "I say Agostino." Hervor smirked smugly.
"I will choose Faustino. He may appear afraid, but he is hiding strength." All now keep these provisions to themselves. Now watching their journey within the Nether again, reaching the edge of the natural basalt funnel where they sit in wait, in direct view of the incredible city-state ahead. Plumes of white and yellows dotting its surface in a richened goldpunk style. "None can scout ahead, for Malgosha will see our view." Leif laments from the tellings of Faustino and Heath. "Then we must seal all entrances." Agostino steels their resolve.
Through planned entrapment, they cave in the three major entrances to The Great Hog's capital. The only remaining exits are the emptied lava ducts and smaller caves where they lie silent in wait. A sneeze was released into the air by Ezio, muffling himself by forcing his hands over his muzzle.
(Another thing, edited parts of text that say whisper to add superscript for all previous pages.) "ˢᴼᴿᴿY." He accidentally gleats out the last of his sentence to a normal volume. Yufren's open palm forces it down again by covering his hands together with his own. "ˢᴼ, ᵂᴴᴱᴿᴱ ᵀᴼ?" Their whispering was overwatched by the golem behind them, keeping an eye out in case any part included him within the plan. Leif points to another ledge with no connecting tunnel, a good area for sniping, yet traditionally unavailable.
From their break, they bring out the flight suit, its thinned edge proportional for a zipped-up skydiver. "ᴵ ᴴᴬⱽᴱ ᴺᴱⱽᴱᴿ ꟳᴸᴼᵂᴺ ᴮᴱꟳᴼᴿᴱ." Leif says with a hand gliding over its smooth, aerodynamic surface. From the armour's increased size, Leif detaches himself from its internal functions.
He pulls it through a double-entred latch by the back of his armour, now sitting within the hollowed cavity, he pulls it over his nudist form before zipping it closed on itself automatically from behind, creating an invisible seal that is skin-tight, yet comfortable all the same. 'Fly up.' He wills himself to use the suit in the manner he saw his father use the hoverboard. Now, he levitates off the ground, yet still working through a gravitational pressure upon his feet, standing on what feels like solid ground.
"*ᵂᴼᴬᴴ*"Leif smiles wide enough that his teeth show under his bushy moustache. He tries moving forward, as one would fly without moving oneself in a dream, drifting through the air in form. He now sits down upon the air, comfortable with the nice cushioned padding.
He glides down, landing comfortably upon his feet with ease that would seem practised if not for it being his first time. He checks the pluggable modem that also sees its status, which shows that the small flying gander had not used even a point of its battery life, its efficient recharging evident even within he harsh confines of the underworld. By using the atmosphere's low visibility, he sets himself invisibly without wasting any grenade covers, now in the other side and camouflaged against a black stone backdrop.
Their patience as warriors was an epitome that most could never hope to achieve. Time accelerates again, Model hours passing by the telling of the thinning fog from the lava tides' decrease. Once it lowered by more than a Model meter, the armies marched.
The Great Hog himself was leading by the front on foot. The Seer sat upon one of her living creations, a crimson shroomling, while behind him and keeping chants ready for any unknown visitors. The great prosthetic stride of the piglin boss enough to cover multiple spans of the bipedal fungus. The military itself appeared sophisticated, deliberate placement of the inner ranks being obsidian crossbowmen and fungus throwers that use atlatl-esque tools to propel them farther distances. And in the back, there they are.
Ghast-blimps, using multiple fungus vines to hold a meshed hard-fenced platform, there the two tamed ghasts hold its structure to keep 10 small swivelling steel cannons embroidered with gold with 5 on each chassis' bilateral side. An ammunition of 50 flammable cartridges ready for firing.
It was a squadron of 4, showing they expected their intervention. But they have no idea what is in store for them. "GRENADE!" Leif rasped, throwing them at maximum strength setting.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4wuyAcHwf4&list=LL&index=1