City of Fallen Souls: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 3) by Jez Cajiao (fb2 epub reader .txt) 📕

It wasn’t a hard choice. I told them to repair the first unit, then queued the subsequent orders up. Concentrating, I began by drawing a mental line to dip down deeper under the tunnels that surrounded the facility, then climbing up to emerge at a shallow angle into the river bed. Once that was complete, it was to move out, heading north-west towards the Tower with all speed, while the lucky Servitor being left behind would repair the third mining Golem, with the second being the most degraded. Once that was repaired, the third Golem would follow the first until they met up; then they’d work in tandem to make a tunnel to the edge of my territory.

Once there, they’d contact the nearest active facility for further orders. That way I’d get control of them again at some point in the future, I hoped. Once the Mining Golems were on their way, the Servitor that was left behind would begin to repair the Genesis Chamber that was damaged and buried by the collapsed area, I didn’t even have an estimate on that timescale, but I viewed it as worth the risk, before finally repairing the by-then gutted Mining Golem #2.

“Sir, what would you have us do?” Augustus asked, and I walked over to join them where they milled about.

“Okay, apologies for the delay there, guys. Augustus, I want the rooms around us searched. I know at least some might have active Golem Cores in them, as Oracle thought she sensed them before…”

“That one,” she interrupted, pointing to the second door on the right, next to the one the Servitor had torn open.

“Okay, check the rooms and get me a rough inventory. Same with the gear that the Golems are bringing down now. Separate the loot from upstairs into piles; these are going to be the order of importance for us getting them out of here. I want Skill and Spellbooks, first and foremost, then magical weapons, then potions, then artifacts, and last of all, armor. I know armor can be the best, fuck knows it keeps us alive, but given the choice between carrying a single goddamn suit of plate armor or dozens of books that could help us all? I know what I need us to choose.”

Augustus saluted me and separated everyone out, sending half to the storerooms and the other half to the loot pile. It was building remarkably quickly, as I’d ordered the Golems to go as fast as possible. I had to admit, it was making me grin as a huge War Golem came pounding out of the stairwell, its axe strapped to its back and hands full of dozens of clinking glass potion bottles.

I quickly diverted the Golem to open the doors to each of the rooms before sending him back to work, and as soon as the way was clear, I moved into the second storeroom. What I found made my grin wide enough to almost split the top off my head. Twenty perfect, fully intact Golem Cores sat there, glimmering gently as their residual charge purred along, the facility keeping them stable all this time. They looked like rubies the size of my fist, each encircled with bands of silver and bronze, faint humming rising from them as we stood there, admiring them.

“Is tha' them?” Lydia asked from beside me, and I nodded.

“They’re hugely valuable, Lydia,” I said. “I need you to keep them safe. They’re the key to protecting the Tower.” I glanced at her and saw the determination on her face as she moved forward and began picking them up, one at a time and slipping them into her Bag of Holding.

I quickly checked the rest of the room, finding hundreds of pounds of marble, granite, and other minerals and piles of stacked metals. Working my way around to the other rooms, I found much the same in two of them, while the third appeared to be a Golem Armory.

From one end of the room to the other, weapons stood in orderly rows: spears, giant swords, shields, axes, and maces seemed to make up the majority, but at the end, sitting on a pair of enormous racks, were crossbows. The four giant bows were closer to ballista than something a soldier could carry, and the dozen bolts for each one were as long as my leg. The damn things were huge, and affixed to a metallic woven cable, rather than rope or sinew.

“Hell, yes…” I muttered, turning to find Augustus standing behind me and grinning as well.

“Bet these cause the Airships some trouble…” he said, and I nodded at him.

“Oh, they will. I’ll make sure they bring these… I…” A sudden crash sounded from overhead, followed by shouting, and I grimaced, running back to the main room where I could hear better before pulling up the interface.

The vision of the building appeared slowly in my mind’s eye, with Golems running back to the stairwell, arms full of gear. Above them, on the main floor, the door was being forced by a dozen or more people, but that was all I could see. The attacking group were wire drawn figures in red, we were in green and the Golems were larger figures in blue. I scanned the schematic, grateful that the majority of us were downstairs, with two Golems up where they could be seen.

“What do we do?” Oracle asked, and I took a deep breath.

“We buy ourselves time,” I said. Changing the orders for the Golems, all the others immediately retreated down to where we were, the last sealing the entrance behind itself. The remaining two up above, on the other hand, split up. The first ran down and made sure the entrance to the lower levels was hidden, and the other, the one that had definitely been seen… prepared to make an impressive exit.

It backed up, dropping its armful of loot and hefted its massive shield,