Garrelt’s gaze sharpened as the figures emerged.
“Are those… the golems from the ruins?” he asked, his voice edged with disbelief as half a dozen humanoid constructs stepped out from the opened wall panels in steady, synchronized motion.
Their forms were smooth and featureless, each movement controlled without being hurried.
“Oh?” Alpha replied, a trace of amusement threading through his voice. “You remember those?”
Garrelt didn’t respond, instead slowly turning his head to give the drone a flat, wordless stare.
Remember?
He doubted he would ever forget the sight of Kira Shadowclaw — a name spoken with equal parts fear and respect across half the continent — being toyed with by a cluster of those same constructs. Humbling didn’t even begin to cover it.
Alpha let out a quiet chuckle.
“To answer your question, yes… and no,” he continued. “These are… homegrown, I suppose you could say.”
Garrelt’s brow furrowed deeper.
“You copied the design?” he asked.
There was a hint of disbelief in his voice.
That Alpha had been able to activate and control the puppets in the vault had already been enough to raise alarms. That he could copy the concept himself was another matter entirely. Artifacts from the Old Ruins weren’t something people simply reproduced. Even powerful cultivators who specialized in crafting rarely did more than incorporate fragments of such relics into their work. The mechanisms behind them were too strange, too complex to replicate cleanly.
Alpha’s [Wasp] drifted down and settled lightly on the shoulder of the nearest construct as it passed.
The puppet paused and turned toward the group while the others continued on, moving toward the smoldering wreckage at the center of the room. Without instruction, they bent and began hauling away charred metal and shattered glass, clearing the space with mechanical efficiency.
“Even better,” Alpha said.
The construct beneath him turned and walked toward the group, stopping just in front of them, motionless.
“The vault we found under the mansion wasn’t just storage,” Alpha went on casually. “Turns out, it was a factory.”
For a moment, no one spoke.
Hugo’s head lifted slightly. Maria’s expression sharpened. Garrelt felt something tighten in his chest as the implication settled in.
Kailin glanced between them, clearly missing whatever weight the others were reacting to, so she said nothing.
“You’re telling me…” Garrelt started, then stopped, as if trying to measure the scale of what he was hearing. “…you can make more of these?”
“In short?” Alpha replied. “Yes.”
None of them missed the faint grin in his voice.
“Though they’re not nearly as powerful as the originals,” he added. “Even with my personal improvements. I’ve had to work with local materials, and that comes with… limitations.”
Garrelt’s eyes narrowed as he turned his full attention to the construct in front of him.
At a glance, it was nearly identical to the ones he remembered.
The same general shape. The same proportions. Even the same smooth, almost featureless exterior that made it difficult to tell where one plate ended and another began.
But the longer he looked, the more the differences stood out.
The color caught his eye first.
The constructs from the vault had been a deep, light-absorbing black, their surfaces broken by countless tiny hexagonal segments that shifted like scales.
These were different.
The one standing before him was lighter in tone. Duller. Its outer shell looked uniform, almost molded as a single piece rather than assembled from interlocking parts.
In a way, it reminded him of the armor Alpha’s goblins always wore. Not identical, but close enough that Garrelt suspected they were made from the same material.
Or something close to it.
Now that it stood this near, he could see the size difference as well.
These new constructs were smaller than the ones in the vault.
Not enough to notice at a glance, but there was something… refined about them. Sleeker. Not reduced so much as streamlined, as if Alpha had carved away excess bulk in ways Garrelt couldn’t begin to understand.
Finally, he noticed how the construct stood.
It was absolutely still, with none of the stiffness he remembered from the vault constructs, not even a faint hitch in their motion.
His gaze differed toward the ones cleaning the disaster site and confirmed what he saw. The older puppets had moved with a weight to them, the way an old soldier might after years of neglecting their training. The mind remembered how to move, but the body couldn’t quite keep up.
These new constructs had no such flaws.
Their movements were smooth. Precise.
And disturbingly human.
Garrelt’s gaze lingered on the construct as Alpha continued.
“The originals were roughly on par with a mid to peak Golden Spirit cultivator,” he said. “Mostly due to the quality of their materials. That said, they were also fairly outdated.” The [Wasp] shifted slightly on the construct’s shoulder. “After some testing, these newer models sit closer to peak Silver Spirit, but with a few personal tweaks that make them more responsive and flexible as individual units.”
Dr. Maria stepped closer, circling the construct slowly, her attention sharp and clinical. Her hand reached out to tap lightly against its surface, then pressed more firmly at a joint. She shifted position, testing a second point, then a third, as if mapping its structure through touch.
“Does the material really make that much of a difference?” she asked. “If the improvements are as substantial as you suggest, I would have expected the results to trend in the opposite direction.”
Alpha gave a soft chuckle.
“They’re very special materials,” he replied. “Most of which can’t even be produced on this planet.” The drone’s head tilted slightly. “There’s also the matter of design. Whoever built the originals was a monster.”
Maria paused mid-step, her hand hovering near the construct’s arm, but she said nothing.
“The entire system is a custom job,” Alpha went on. “Built from the ground up with a design philosophy much closer to the Second Federation than the First.”
He paused again, as if recalling something.
“Based on the surviving logs, I’m fairly certain most of the damage to the base occurred long before Icefinger’s men ever found it. Large portions of the facility were strategically dismantled and repurposed by someone who knew what they were doing. I suspect to build what we found.”
Hugo frowned.
“You’re saying someone cannibalized their own facility?” he asked. “To build what… an army?”
Alpha gave a small, almost pleased nod.
“Looks that way.”
Hugo’s frown deepened. “Why?”
Alpha let out a soft hum.
“That,” he said lightly, “is the question, isn’t it?”
For a moment, no one spoke.
Dr. Maria finished her circuit around the construct and stepped back, folding her arms as she returned to stand beside the others.
Her attention shifted from the construct to Alpha.
“How long does it take you to make one?” she asked.
Alpha considered for a moment.
“With most of the production lines still under repair, I’m managing about five or six a day.”
Maria nodded once, already doing the math—
“—but once the factory is fully operational,” Alpha added casually, “it’s configured for roughly two hundred units per day.”
Maria froze.
For a heartbeat, the words seemed to hang in the air. Then her eyes widened slightly, and for the first time since he’d met her, Alpha saw genuine shock cross her face.
Hugo went completely still.
Garrelt staggered a half-step, as if struck.
“…Two hundred,” Maria repeated.
Her voice came out quieter than she intended.
“Are you saying,” she asked slowly, “that you could field the equivalent of two hundred peak Silver Spirit cultivators… every day?”
“Yep!” Alpha replied cheerfully.
The room fell silent.
Garrelt’s gaze drifted back to the puppets working in the distance, their movements steady and unbothered as they cleared the wreckage. His chest tightened as he felt something well up from some deep, primal part of himself.
The feeling reminded him of a hunt from his youth.
The Verdentseeker Ape had been far smarter than the reports claimed. Garrelt’s trap had failed almost immediately, and what should have been a clean hunt had turned into a week-long nightmare. He had run, hidden, and doubled back through dense brush and broken terrain as the hunter became the hunted.
On the final night, Garrelt had wedged himself into a narrow crack along a cliffside, his lungs burning and limbs heavy after having narrowly escaped for the third time that day. He’d chosen the spot carefully. High enough that most beasts couldn’t reach it, tight enough that something the ape’s size could never follow.
For a moment, he’d believed he was safe.
Then the net dropped.
He was instantly tangled in a thick, primitive net woven of living vines, in an eerily similar design to the net he had tried to use only a few days earlier. He’d be dragged through an opening in the crevice above that he’d missed, too exhausted to resist.
When he had been pulled free, he found himself dangling in front of the Verdentseeker Ape crouched at the top of the cliff, peering down with bright, knowing eyes, its lips pulled back into a wide, almost human grin.
He had been certain, in that moment, that he was about to die.
Instead, the ape began to laugh.
It hooted and chattered, pointing down at him as though he were the most amusing thing it had ever seen. Then, it pulled him free of the net, slung it over one shoulder, and wandered back into the forest without a second glance.
Garrelt didn’t know how long he’d lain there atop that cliff, staring up at the dark sky. But as the sun broke over the horizon, he realized in that moment that the most harrowing week of his life, the one that would drive him to master traps and tracking, the one that forged the reputation he carried to this day—
Had meant nothing.
To the Verdentseeker Ape, it had all been nothing more than entertainment.
Garrelt forced himself to take several slow, steady breaths and turned his focus back to the present.
Silver Spirits might not have been considered elites by the great sects or clans, but outside of Halirosa, it was the kind of power that was respected no matter where you went.
It was the culmination of years, sometimes decades, of experience and hardship that only a few ever survived to reach. Every Silver Spirit cultivator was a veteran of a hundred battlefields who had earned that power with sweat and blood. It was often said that the power of a nation or kingdom was measured by the number of Silver Spirits they could call on.
Even here, in the Adventurer’s Capital, they formed the backbone of power.
The Guild had, at most, a few hundred Golden Spirits at any given time. Silver Spirits, on the other hand, numbered closer to twelve thousand, give or take, if one counted everyone from early to peak — the largest concentration of independent cultivators on the continent.
And even then…
Garrelt’s jaw tightened.
Alpha could match that strength in just over two months if his estimates held.
A cold weight settled deeper in his chest.
He glanced at Hugo.
The man stood rigid, his usual ease gone. In its place was something sharper, more guarded.
Maria, however, had already moved past the shock. She now studied Alpha with a quiet, calculating focus that sent a faint chill down Garrelt’s spine.
He didn’t need to hear her thoughts to know where they led.
Two months. Six months. It didn’t matter.
The outcome didn’t change.
For the first time since meeting the Core, Garrelt found himself wondering not what Alpha could do, but what would happen when everyone else realized it too.
Garrelt had to catch his own hand to stop it from shaking.
He had seen a great many impossible things since that fateful expedition into the Deep that first brought them to Alpha. Things that shouldn’t have existed. Things that had no place in the world as he understood it.
Alpha had always been dangerous. Garrelt had known that from the start.
The Core’s machines, his weapons, his command over the Deep, the way he treated impossible problems like minor inconveniences — all of it pointed to something far beyond a strange dungeon spirit with too much personality. Some part of Garrelt had accepted, almost casually, that Alpha would one day become a power on the level of the great clans or sects.
Or thought he had.
Only now did he begin to understand how badly he had underestimated the creature pretending to be a Dungeon Core.
Alpha wasn’t merely climbing the mountain.
He was looking to rebuild it entirely, right under everyone’s feet
The realization settled in Garrelt’s gut like cold iron.
He drew in a slow breath and let it out just as carefully, trying to keep his expression steady and unsure how well he succeeded.
His gaze drifted toward Hugo and the doctor, searching for something — anything — that might prove he was overthinking
That hope died quickly.
Hugo stood rigid, his usual ease gone. His jaw had tightened, and his eyes had gone distant in a way Garrelt recognized too well. Hugo had seen it too. Maybe not the full shape of it, but close enough.
Dr. Maria, meanwhile, wore a blank expression, stripped of the calm, knowing confidence that usually defined her. Garrelt had seen that look only once before — immediately after her trial, when she had been sentenced to Alpha’s servitude.
It was the look of someone who had already accepted what came next.
That, more than anything else, terrified him.
Beside them, Kailin let out a thin, nervous chuckle, her eyes darting between the others.
“It—it’s not that bad, right?” she asked.
No one answered.
Her smile tightened as she searched their faces, looking for any sign that she had misread the room. “I mean… you’d still need a lot of people to operate that many puppets… right?”
The silence stretched.
Kailin’s smile faltered. She swallowed hard.
“Anyway!” Alpha cut in, his tone suddenly bright.
All four of them flinched.
The [Wasp] perched atop the construct’s shoulder lifted one delicate leg, as if brushing the entire conversation aside. “We’re not here to discuss dusty old machines and everyone’s sudden existential dread.” His red optic turned toward Kailin. “Ms. Sharp, I believe you wanted to show the good doctor an example of your skill, yes?”
Kailin blinked rapidly, her thoughts scrambling to catch up with the abrupt shift.
“Ah—yes,” she said, her voice catching before she forced it steady. “Yes, I can. Well, I mean, I would, but…”
Her attention drifted toward the shrinking pile of debris at the center of the room.
The constructs had already cleared most of the wreckage while they spoke. Charred metal, cracked glass, and twisted tubing had been sorted into neat, orderly piles with unsettling efficiency. What remained of her field furnace looked less like a tool and more like something dragged out of a monster’s stomach.
“I only brought the one pill furnace,” Kailin said, grimacing. “And that was a field unit, meant for emergency work. Not really something you’d find in a proper lab.”
She glanced toward Maria, and some of her earlier focus returned.
“If I were going to show you properly, we’d need to go back to my shop.” She straightened slightly as she spoke, slipping back into familiar ground. “The dedicated furnace there would be better. And I’d need the rest of my tools. Measuring arrays, solvent stands, aspect separators, containment flasks—”
Alpha laughed.
The construct beneath the [Wasp] lifted one hand, and with a motion Kailin was certain was purely for theatrical effect, snapped its fingers.
The room rumbled as seams of white light traced themselves along the back wall. More followed, running from floor to ceiling in clean, vertical lines. Panels shifted with soft clicks, and the stone surface peeled away to reveal what could only be described as a fully realized alchemical laboratory.
Workbenches of polished black metal lined the space in layered rows, each fitted with clamps, burners, lenses, etched plates, and glassware as clear as the most delicate crystal. Slender arms hung folded along ceiling tracks. Racks of tools gleamed beneath steady white light. Copper-lined chambers, nested burners, containment hoods, reagent racks, and sealed cabinets stood arranged in neat order. Some of the equipment was familiar enough for Kailin to recognize its purpose. Much of it was not. Smooth, alien devices sat beside more traditional burners and array-marked stands, each linked by clean conduits that vanished beneath the floor.
Compared to the field setup she had destroyed, the lab made her previous bench look like a child’s toy.
She almost instinctively rushed forward, only for Hugo to catch her by the hem of her robe and drag her back.
With another low rumble, the entire laboratory began to move, sliding forward on hidden tracks, carrying benches, cabinets, stations, and equipment into the basement as a single, seamless unit. It extended into the room section by section until it claimed nearly half the basement’s original space, and settled into place with a final click.
Behind it, the wall sealed shut once more, the seams fading until no trace remained.
A heartbeat later, it looked as though the lab had always been there.
As soon as Hugo released her robe, Kailin made a sound that was not quite a squeal, then bolted forward.
She rushed past the construct and into the new workspace.
The three humans left behind exchanged glances.
No words passed between them, but Alpha recognized the look well enough.
They would be having private words later.
Alpha pretended he hadn’t noticed as they turned and followed Kailin into the lab.
Let them have their concerns.
For now, there was work to do.