Mia only had a few moments to enjoy the moment, the feeling of that delicate yet unyielding arm wrapped around her waist and the soothing scent of pines and roses filling her nose made for a wonderful combination. But of course, it couldn’t last. They were still in the depths of a monster nest, even if there were no more greenskins around to ruin the moment, something else was more than happy to do so.
“So, uhm, what are we going to do about the big guy?” Lina asked, making Mia groan miserably. Right, there was that too. With great effort, she pried her eyelids open and stared at the distant colossus of stone as it just … stood there. Menacingly.
What were they going to do about that ‘Earth Titan’ indeed? That was the question of the day. It was a good question too, an excellent one … but not one Mia had even a clue on how to answer.
“Good question,” Mia mumbled, then scrunched her nose up as she sent a thoughtful gaze towards the largest exit of the chamber. “Well, it’s not getting out of here anytime soon-“ she started, then realisation hit and she groaned again, “it’s made of Earth Elementals, of course it’s getting out of here. I’d bet it could swim up to the surface through all that rock and dirt if it wanted to … buuuuut it’s a summon, so shouldn’t it disappear in time without the summoner being around to anchor and fuel its existence?”
The entire party turned to stare at the distant colossus of stone and earth.
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Carmilla said softly. When Mia followed her girlfriend’s thoughtful gaze, her own eyes landed on the withered husks of the robed greenskin casters that had brought the creature into existence. “They are hollowed out, not a lick of lifeforce remaining in them. That’s a lot of energy going into the ritual.”
“He’s a big guy, I bet he takes a whole bunch of it just to keep standing there instead of crumbling,” Lina piped in. “Plus most of that energy went into summoning it, right?”
“Why isn’t it doing anything?” Helene asked, her face crinkled into a worried frown.
“No orders from the summoner?” Brent speculated, and everyone ended up looking at Mia.
“What?” She blinked owlishly, slightly uncomfortable to suddenly be the center of attention.
“You’re the summoning expert,” Lina said with some amusement, hands on her hips as she gave Mia an expectant look. “Even got the fancy hat and everything. Would you grace us lowly peasants with your wizardly wisdom, your witchy highness?”
Mia grimaced a little at the stupid flowery speech delivered in the most obnoxiously haughty tone imaginable. If Lina wasn’t in the theatre club in high school, she’d eat her hat.
“What wisdom?” Mia snorted with wry amusement, her eyes flickering towards the Titan. “I have no clue what to do with that thing - So I’m going to cheat!”
‘Sparkle, help me out!’ Mia asked without shame. This was Plan A, with Plan B being ‘bug Gabe about it’. She doubted five years away made him any more resistant to Mia putting on her best pitiful puppy eyes, no matter how determined he was to let her handle things herself.
There was also Plan C which boiled down to ‘blast the thing with Arcane Missiles and alchemical bombs until it died’. After all, if a problem couldn’t be solved with explosions then you simply weren’t using enough explosives, or so the ancient wisdom went. Sooner or later, that approach would exhaust the thing and it would either break apart into its constituent Elementals or get banished as it ran out of the energy needed to maintain its presence in a Material Realm.
She really hoped Plan C wouldn’t have to be used. As much as her slowly growing Body stat did wonders to her stamina, she was still exhausted after running around all day and getting into so many fights. Just the thought of having to drink that final mana potion to give herself a dozen more spells’ worth of mana made her stomach churn. She could, and would do it, but she’d probably throw up right after the fight and then feel absolutely miserable for hours thereafter. Magical nausea caused by severe spiritual strain was almost as bad as mana deprivation.
Plan D followed behind, which called for a wait and see approach if all else failed. Basically ‘Run away and hope for the best’.
‘Maybe it has an anchor, could it be the staff?’ Sparkle mused. ‘Other than that, we should probably wait it out. Trying to fight an Earth Titan underground is the height of stupidity, even a small one like this. Earth Elementals are pretty subdued and just happy to be. They don’t like to move, or do anything at all, without a very good reason. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one just stood there until it ran out of energy and crumbled apart.’
‘Wouldn’t that small core of miasma you spoke about change that?’ Mia asked, then blinked as her thoughts nagged at one little detail she’d almost missed. ‘Wait. The hell you mean ‘small’!?’
‘There is no real size limit on Elemental Titans, especially Earth Titans which are some of the most solid,’ Sparkle replied with tangible amusement. ‘You know, Elementals are a bit like those pseudo-spirits of yours. They have no true ego, no real sense of self, not unless they can evolve into Elemental Lords. Two normal Elementals can merge and become one, or a single one can split apart. Neither act changes them on a fundamental level, it's just that they grow larger and their power melds together as they themselves do. We start to call them Elemental Titans once they tip over a certain size.’
That was a worrying thought, and Mia wondered whether the Spirit Realm was actually filled with a bunch of these Titans. Wandering mountains, semi-sentient storms, hive-mind forests, a mobile lake. All of it could be very much possible.
‘So this is a common thing?’
‘It’s not really rare, but no, I wouldn’t say it’s common, per se,’ Sparkle said. ‘There is an optimal size for Elemental. There are a whole bunch of academic theories and boring stuff written about it. What you need to know is that Elementals like to be roughly the size of the average mortal. Too small ones risk dissipating and growing too big, like Titans, has problems of its own. Not that I remember what those are, I wasn’t exactly a model student and this stuff is boring. What’s important is that they never last long, always breaking apart before long and rarely do they ever form naturally.’
As much as Mia disagreed with Sparkle on whether this topic was ‘boring’, she knew arguing about it would be pointless. She’d look into it on her own time later. There was surely something on the topic in one of her books, or maybe in the System books Zeigler kept in storage.
“So it seems our best bet is to do nothing, from what Sparkle’s telling me,” Mia mused, and the small sprite plopped himself down on the rim of her hat, legs hanging off the edge and swinging back and forth as he gave the group a cheerful thumbs-up. “Apparently Earth Elementals rarely do anything unless forced, provoked or something like that. That thing will probably stand there until it gets banished naturally when the summoning fades.”
“Well, if so, then that’s going to be an extremely anticlimactic end to our day,” Carmilla mused softly.
And it was. They stuck around for half an hour, camped out near the mouth of a tunnel leading up to the surface. Thirty long minutes watching a pile of rocks stand there and cosplay as some oversized modern art statue. It didn’t move an inch, not a single one. Ever. Not since the first few seconds after its summoning where it rose to its full height.
It quickly went from tense and stressful to boring, though the soldiers who tagged along weathered that change much better than the party whose members had all been civilians just weeks ago.
“Not falling asleep while bored out of our minds is like 90% of what we did in the army,” said Staff Sergeant Frederic with an easy shrug, never taking his eyes off the Titan even as he munched on some protein bars. “Hurry up and wait, it is the most common order we had to follow, even if they word it more fancily. Hell, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been told to watch a statue for any sign of it starting to move either.”
His tone took on a distinctly fond, nostalgic note as he mentioned that last part. That quickly devolved into a conversation about all the soldiers recounting their own silliest tasks. Sweeping the street in the rain. Relocating a ditch five meters to the left. Separating fifty bags of candies into different bowls based on colour. Stuff like that.
Inevitably, they decided to leave. Not all of them, roughly half the soldiers stayed behind under the Staff Sergeant’s command while the Corporal led the most exhausted to follow Mia’s party back to the surface. Of course Chris the Diviner came along, already dead on his feet from the exertion since he wasn’t the most fit specimen of the human species in the first place, but the constant rollercoaster of adrenaline highs and lows likely didn’t help either.
While the Staff Sergeant and his soldiers stuck behind to keep an eye on the Titan, the Corporal and Brent headed over to the castle to debrief the Mayor. To keep communications open, and to let the soldiers who stayed behind alert those on the surface if fecal matter hit the fan, Sparkle stuck with them for now, until a new army squad outfitted with a radio that could work that deep into the earth would relieve them hours later.
But all that was well out of Mia’s hands as she took the first opportunity to hand over all those nasty responsibilities to Brent. She was exhausted, famished, sweaty and her social battery was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Everyone from the initial party that first set off that morning followed her back to the apartment they had been staying in these last few days. Conversations were few and far between, even Lina’s seemingly endless stamina and willingness to chat having started to flag severely somewhere along the way as they hiked back to Graz. They went their separate ways once ‘home’, and Mia took her time filling up a nice bubbly bath for herself.
She then proceeded to spend the next hour letting the warm, soapy water drain the stress of the day from her exhausted body, along with the grime and sweat she’d gathered over hours of hiking and spelunking in a dusty cave system.
Once she felt a little more like herself again and less like a dirty, stinky zombie, she spent almost thirty minutes carefully washing her hair. It stunk, and somewhere along the way a part of it ended up splattered with goblin gunk. Whether it was guts, viscera, brain or just goblin blood, it stank to the high heavens and back all the same and resisted even her more persistent efforts to banish it from her hair. In the end, only by running her arcane energy-covered fingers through her tresses could she get the job done at last. She'd been terrified at the start, worrying whether she’d be giving herself an impromptu haircut with that stunt, but it worked out fine since it seemed her resistance to being harmed by her own arcane energy extended to her hair.
Mia was pretty sure she could have rocked a bob cut, but she adored having long hair that cascaded down her shoulders, even if it was an absolute pain in the butt to maintain. Case in point, she spent the next half an hour drying it properly, then styling it a bit in a way she liked. She’d always liked how her coal-black hair looked before, but she couldn’t help but love her new luscious pink mane accentuated by those lovely azure highlights even more. There was just something enthrallingly ethereal about it that she couldn’t quite put into words. Same with her new eyes.
It was still strange, looking into the mirror and seeing the New Her. There was no dissociation, but the face staring back at her from the mirror still felt novel and new. Smiling at her reflection, she felt nice. That bathtub might as well have been the Pool of Rebirth for all she knew, because she felt like she’d been reborn. Sure, she was still exhausted and her spiritual strain from casting so many damned spells throughout the day was still there, but her hour or two of relaxation took the edge off.
And they made fun of me for getting a ‘bath rock’ from the monthly reward pool. Humpf. Stupid savages.
As far as Mia was concerned, her ‘bath rock’ — which provided her with clear water on demand — was one of the best rewards the System has ever given her. Now if only there was something to solve the plumbing issue. Mia was pretty sure Zeigler’s ‘think tank’ of Crafting Classers would be able to handle it sooner or later, but she doubted they were prioritising it over handling the more immediate concerns like food, drinkable water and combat gear.
Maybe a simple enchantment? Hmmm. There are those spells that conjure fake-water that disappears after a while, but that would be enough to flush toilets. Then the pipes could funnel everything to a section where Chaos-aspected arcane energy atomised the waste? Hmmm. Could that work? Should I bother those overworked egg-heads about it? No, if I could come up with the idea while drying my hair they surely figured it out as well. The problem’s going to be manpower and implementation. Too few enchanters to do far too much work.
The enchanters had a lot on their plate after all, since they were essentially tasked with trying to make up for the fact that their society had essentially become a single isolated city-state that suddenly found itself with zero viable trade partners. Plus without electricity. Or anything else that had to be sourced from out of town, like water, gas, or other crucial stuff that kept the unforgiving cogs of the intricate machinery that was modern human society turning.
Mia remained lost in thought even as she wandered back out to the living room, then to the connected kitchen where she plopped herself down at the table next to a Mark, who was nose-deep into a book about … architectural engineering? Neat.
Most of the others were already gathered there and it looked like Helene had used the time Mia spent indulging her overly complicated haircare routine preparing dinner. Mia would have worried about her mother not getting her much deserved rest, but she knew that cooking was akin to meditative relaxation to Helene. It was one of her go-to methods to de-stress and relax along with gardening, the latter of which having sadly been much more challenging to practice lately.
Cooking had always been a bit of a chore for Mia, but she could understand why her mother liked it. There was something empowering and incredibly satisfying about turning a pile of raw ingredients into something delicious, doubly so when the result made people you liked happy. But she liked to help where she could, which in this case boiled down to using a bit of arcane mana to sap the thermal energy from a lukewarm jug of lemonade so it was nice and frosty again. It was pretty damned warm after all, so a cold drink would be welcome.
Camie returned from wherever she’d gone after having taken a quick bath of her own — probably another one of those enthusiastic walks of hers that the vampiress used to stretch her legs and be alone when the world got a bit too much — and Brent returned not long after, looking even more worn down than when he’d split from the group. He slumped down at the kitchen table, smiling tiredly when Helene placed a plate of warm food down in front of him.
“Dinner’s ready,” Helene said with a slightly raised voice, which prompted Gabe to reappear from one of the side rooms, followed by a rather queasy looking Nikki. “Mia dear, would you ask Lina whether she’ll be joining us?”
“She’s sleeping like a log,” Mia replied, taking a whiff of the plate that found its way in front of her. Some kind of bean goulash? No sign of any fresh meat though, just some token amounts of smoked sausage … which she should have expected. Fresh meats of any kind were an extreme luxury these days. “Want me to wake her?”
“No, I’ll set aside dinner for her so she can eat when she inevitably wakes up famished,” Helene said. “Well? Bon appetit.”
It tasted nice as always, nothing like a thick, flavourful soup to fill you up after a long day of exhausting yourself mentally, physically and spiritually.
“So, anything new with our big, rocky friend from down below?” Helene asked once everyone’s plates were closing in on being empty. She wasn’t as strict about never speaking while eating as grandma had been, but her upbringing under the stern Catholic woman still showed through at times. Respect the food and all that. Not every silence needed to be filled.
“Not much on my end,” Brent said, sighing in contentment as he downed the last of his cold lemonade. “A new squad took up watch over it and they put down a landline on their way down. From what I know, it never moved so much as an inch.”
“Same, Sparkle came back a while ago complaining about how boring it was,” Mia added. She noticed the curious look Nikki aimed their way, and how her gaze flickered warily over to Gabe. Whatever it was she was curious about, she smothered the urge to ask. Mia frowned. Would it be thoughtless to drag her into the conversation anyway? Maybe Nikki just didn’t feel like it was her place to ask? In which case, Mia had to be the one to pull her into the conversation. Social stuff could be so annoying. “I suppose someone was made to look up everything that could be found about Titans, and Earth Titans in specific? Did they find anything?”
“Nothing useful,” Brent grunted, much less verbose than usual, but Mia didn’t begrudge it to him. She always did her best to foist any responsibility that had to do with social stuff onto him, after all. His exhaustion was partially her fault then, if you squinted hard enough.
“You fought an Earth Titan?” Nikki asked carefully, seemingly before her wariness of Gabe could once more make her stick to silence. Or maybe her curiosity finally overwhelmed whatever misplaced wariness she felt.
“Not fought, just found one.” Mia perked up a bit, feeling proud of herself for pulling off that piece of social-fu. She managed to drag the reluctant girl into the conversation without taking the decision to actually speak up out of the runaway noble girl’s hands. “The Ettin that was leading the greenskins in that monster nest had a ritual going on that summoned one, but I blew its heads off before it could bind the thing. So it’s just been standing where it’s been summoned since.”
“So. What you are telling me is-” Nikki leveled a curious, but nonetheless serious stare at Mia, “-that there is an unbound Rank 1 Elemental Titan under our feet, just standing there as demanded by its base nature?”
“Well, the nest was a bit of a hike away from the city, so not exactly under our feet,” Mia said. Semantics, semantics. How she loved and hated them. “But yeah. It has a core of ‘dormant’ miasma around which it formed, but what you said seems accurate other than that.”
Nikki seemed to slip into her thoughts for a moment, then tilted her head slightly as she returned her focus to the present. Her eyes swept over those gathered around the table, most of them looking at her, curious what her thoughts were — or so Mia assumed, she wasn’t a mind reader — hastily jumping over Gabe before resting on Mia.
“So why don’t we bind it ourselves then?” Nikki suggested, slipping back into that prim and proper demeanor that Mia was starting to suspect was something of a defence mechanism for her. “It is not like the city is low on mana crystals to spend on its maintenance, and an Earth Titan would undoubtedly be useful both for construction work and defence.”
“You want to copy Imperial Titans?” Gabe asked, and Nikki’s expression stiffened even more. “You know how to do this, and are willing to go through with it?”
“Why wouldn’t I? It’s not complicated, just highly illegal to do,” Nikki said a bit testily. “And it’s not like there are any Imperial authorities here to arrest me for it.”
“Hey, I’m not complaining,” Gabe said, raising his hands in surrender, though there was a calculating glint in his pale blue eyes that looked so alien to Mia. The Gabe she knew was never cold and calculating, and yet … “However, this will make it significantly harder if you wish to rejoin Imperial high society in the future. I’m just surprised you’d throw that away so easily.”
“Gabe,” Mia said warningly, making him wince slightly and turn away with a huff. She sent an apologetic look at Nikki. “Why is it illegal to bind Titans?”
“Because it's easy, and they are strong,” Nikki said, some minute tension draining from her shoulders as she did. Though her tone and expressions remained neutral, a perfect picture of professionalism and politeness. “Summoning Elementals isn’t especially hard, and stuffing them together into a Titan is still something any reasonably well trained Mage, or even Elementalist would be able to do if they were willing to put in the work and had the costly resources the process requires. Titans are only allowed to be made by those sanctioned by the Empire’s bureaucracy, which is usually only the official militaries of its constituent nations. Starhaven is allowed to maintain any number of Rank 3 Titans of various elements, and a single Rank 4 one for emergencies.”
“Titans are Elite Monsters that anyone can make on demand, at any Rank they want if they have the astronomical resources required to make one at a higher Rank,” Gabe added severely. “They are engines of war, or viewed and used as such, at the very least. The one we saw was tiny and merely Rank 1. Some of the Dwarven nations field ‘Walking Mountains’ in their armies, that should tell you how dangerous they can get in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing. Which is exactly why I think it’s a good idea to bind this one, if we have the opportunity. She was right in that we don’t lack for mana crystals, which is the primary resource needed to keep a Titan fueled.”
“Tomorrow,” Mia said with steel in her voice, breaking the thoughtful silence that fell over the table following the pair’s info dump. When her mother looked at her questioningly, Mia scrunched up her nose in a petulant frown. “It can wait for tomorrow. The only thing any of us should be doing today is passing out in bed. It’s what I am going to do in-“ a dramatic yawn interrupted her words, “right now, actually. I’m going to bed. Good night everyone!”
She’d already done far too much overtime work today, there was no way she was going back for more, or doing anything at all that wasn’t with the purpose of getting her into the fluffy embrace of her bed. The moment her head hit the pillow, she was already asleep and off to the land of dreams.