"Well played, kid," Garrick muttered, clapping Orion on the shoulder as the audience with the Matriarch ended and they were permitted to leave the chamber.
"I had assistance," Orion noted, glancing at Esmeralda.
The vampire offered a small smile, waving him off as if her contribution weren’t worth mentioning. "A negotiation is merely a dance of pressure and release. You lead beautifully.”
"We need to move," Daelin interrupted, already walking down a side passage. "My aunt agreed to the terms, but the clan elders will try to interfere the moment they hear that a royal transport is ferrying you to the King. We have to leave before they catch up to us.”
Nobody had anything to say to that. Having one high-stakes meeting with a powerful dwarf was more than enough for their tastes, especially since they still had to prepare to face the king.
At least we’ll have some time. The deep roads aren’t traversed quickly, especially in times like these.
The descent into the lower transit hubs took twenty minutes. The air grew cooler as they moved away from the magma aqueducts, and the stone walls gave way to rough-hewn granite. Vault three was a vast chamber, and the transport rested on a set of wide steel tracks.
It was a beast of dwarven engineering, a far cry from the utilitarian cart Orion had ridden on his first visit to the subterranean kingdom. This carriage was a sleek, segmented cylinder of enchanted steel armor, sitting low on sturdy metal wheels. Runic crystals glowed with pale green light along the chassis, and [Holographic Containment] told him they were there as extra assurance in case of attack.
Between them, there is enough mana to power a tier-four spell. I guess that’s to be expected, given that this belongs to the royal family, but I didn’t even know it was possible to trap that much mana.
The sight gave him a few ideas for the next iteration of the CC; however, he had to forcibly pull his attention away when a squad of six dwarves was revealed to be waiting by the boarding ramp. They wore enclosed helms and carried spiked warhammers.
The Ironbreakers, I suppose. All of them high tier three.
Two of them stepped forward, pushing their visors up, and Orion was surprised to recognize them.
"Voidwalker," Dromow grunted, his beard braided with even more steel rings than before. He looked Orion up and down, his eyes lingering on the silver coat before meeting his eyes. “I see that you grew into your power. I suppose it should be expected of a kid who faced a Lithic Leviathan.”
“Hopefully he won’t have to give us a repeat performance,” Vora added, her tone dry. She tapped the edge of her shield in greeting. "Good to see you again, mage. Though you bring a strange assortment of fellows into our tunnels.”
She surveyed the team carefully, nodding respectfully at Garrick, recognizing him as the leader. Her gaze then shifted to Erethemor, her eyes slightly widening at the sight of the dragonkin's dark red scales, materials that a dwarven blacksmith would fiercely desire to use. Finally, her eyes settled on Esmeralda, and her grip on her hammer tightened. Vampires were rarely seen in the Forgelands, and the undead were generally despised in a culture that revered the living stone.
Esmeralda met the dwarf’s glare with a cool, unblinking stare, her eyes flaring crimson for a moment.
“Odd or not, they are our allies and Cyril’s representatives,” Daelin said sharply, stepping onto the ramp to keep anyone from getting ideas. "And they travel under my seal. Get the engines hot, Dromow. We are making for the Sunken Hold.”
Dromow slammed a fist against his breastplate, then turned to the squad. "Seal the doors! Prime the launch arrays!”
When Orion boarded the carriage, he found the interior surprisingly spacious, lit by the pale glow of runes etched into the ceiling. Bolted iron benches lined the walls, padded with thick leather. At the rear of the compartment sat a compact, functional workspace with a runic kiln and a steel anvil, and behind it, a door that likely led to a small sleeping area.
A low rumble shook the hull as the Ironbreakers activated the core. The runic engines roared to life with a growl, and soon the carriage lurched forward, its iron wheels biting into the tracks. They left the First Forge behind, plunging into the pitch-black abyss of the Deep Roads.
As Vora explained, the journey would take a full day, but it would be a comfortable one. Despite the speed they were traveling at, the carriage accelerated smoothly, the suspension absorbing the worst of the uneven tracks.
As soon as they left the First Forge behind, and with it any chance the elders would stop them, Orion wasted no time. He walked to the rear of the carriage and set his adamantine frames on the anvil. Daelin joined him, pulling a set of precision tongs and a jeweler’s hammer from a wall-mounted rack.
"The hinges are indeed microfractured," Daelin observed again, holding the glasses up to the light. "And the arcane focal point on the bridge is misaligned. You’ve been pushing too much mana through a Tier Two conduit.”
“It happened when I crossed the threshold into the third tier," Orion explained. "The interface struggles to parse the raw data my Trait feeds it. I’m afraid that means I need to restructure the visual overlay and reinforce the physical housing.”
"I can re-forge the adamantine," Daelin said, sparking the small kiln. "I will blend a trace of mithril into the hinges to give them flexibility against such shocks. But the runes are your domain. Dwarven enchantments give life to stone, but we do not manipulate the System's interface.”
“I’ll take care of that,” Orion reassured him, having already completed the bulk of the work.
With a nod, Daelin set to work, the rhythmic tink-tink-tink of his small hammer blending with the hum of the carriage wheels. Orion sat on a stool beside the anvil, projecting the data he received from [Holographic Containment] into the air.
He needed to rewrite the formula behind the System Detecting Glasses. The original enchantment relied on simple observations from the system. While the core principles would stay the same, he needed the formula to handle a flood of high-density data and incorporate his traits—[Holographic Containment] and [Falsifiability Criterion]—to detect altered or hidden metadata. This was how Verner concealed his true status, and he had no intention of letting it happen again.
Glowing blue text materialized in the hologram as lines of logic gates, modeled after Earth's programming languages, scrolled by.
The first time I did this, I made up an entirely new language because I was afraid of being found out. That is no longer a problem. Would it be better to avoid the hassle and just use what I know works?
After some more thought, he decided that yes, there was no need to be so worried about discovery. He was already known as a very eccentric caster, and at tier three, it wouldn’t be too strange for him to have developed unique enchantments.
Thus, he established a primary loop, assigning variables to ambient mana density.
def parse_entity_data(target_aura):
base_data = system.extract_status(target_aura)
if falsifiability_check(target_aura) == True:
return reveal_masked_layer(target_aura)
else:
return base_data
The syntax might have seemed simple, but it was merely a framework, a way for his mind to structure the chaotic flow of the Field into executable commands. He linked the falsifiability_check function directly to [Falsifiability Criterion], ensuring the glasses would actively counter illusion magic and forged statuses.
To handle the sheer volume of data without cluttering his mind, he introduced an array-sorting algorithm that forced the glasses to prioritize immediate combat threats—weapons, active spells, and stats—while relegating secondary information, such as titles and affiliations, to a minimized peripheral display.
He compiled the code, translating the rigid syntax into multidimensional geometry with various runes when English lacked suitable words. The blue text shifted, folding into complex geometric shapes that spun slowly in the air.
An hour later, Daelin finished the physical repairs, dunking the steaming frames into a vat of alchemical cooling oil. He wiped them clean, then set them on the anvil, where the adamantine gleamed, reinforced with silver veins of mithril.
"The shell is ready," Daelin grunted, wiping sweat from his brow.
Orion reached out, taking the floating code from the hologram and pressing it directly into the lenses with more than a bit of light mana.
It would have saved him a lot of time during his previous forays, but the level of control required had simply been impossible back then.
The glass hissed as it absorbed the spell formula, and the coding runes flared before sinking seamlessly into the material.
Once Daelin had inspected the finished product and deemed it ready, Orion slid the frames onto his face.
The Arcane Overlay booted up instantly, and he was glad to see the static was gone. The interface was crisp, sharp, and highly responsive. He looked at Daelin, and a clean text box appeared next to the Prince.
[Daelin Lazuli]
Class: [Runesmith] [B-rank]
Level: 92
Status: Clear.
If he so much as focused on the window, a dozen more pop-ups appeared, showing everything from the dwarf’s stats, which had grown a bit since their last meeting, to everything he’d ever observed about him, including his eating preferences.
When he glanced around the carriage, the overlay seamlessly tracked the Ironbreakers, confirming their levels hovered in the low hundreds. It highlighted the sensory skill around Garrick and the swirling blood-red mana pooling in Esmeralda’s veins.
The Falsifiability protocol ran in the background all along, a silent sentinel ensuring the data was empirical and accurate.
System Notification!
You have adapted and crafted a new version of the System Detecting Glasses!
+710,100 Exp
“They have perfect conductivity," Orion noted, adjusting the bridge of his glasses.
“You bet your ass they do,” Daelin laughed. “With that much adamantite and mithril, you could sell them for raw materials and never have to work a day in your life.”
The Prince leaned against the workbench, arms crossed. "So, the traitor hid his level. A neat trick. But this Silence-alloy concerns me more if it completely nullifies magic. How did you fight it?”
"With physics," Orion answered with a smirk. "The alloy cancels most magic but not mass, velocity, or friction. A boulder dropped from a high enough cliff will still crush a Mage-Killer. The army is adapting its doctrines to rely on structural traps and raw force against them and has been having success with it.”
Of course, all of that would be useless for a tier-four powerhouse. They could simply overwhelm the hounds’ adaptation rate and crush them with their regular spells. But for all that those people were mighty, they weren’t invincible.
Orion hadn’t forgotten his mother’s offhand comment that an Archmage had recently fallen to an ambush. The loss of a single Archmage might not have been devastating, but it was still a big deal, and it showed that the Iron State wasn’t quite done yet.
No, they aren’t ready to give up, especially since Uther is still lurking around, not to mention the being that took control of Behenien and now Archmage Ulysses.
"Which is why you need our cannons," Daelin concluded, drawing his attention back to him. “Good old-fashioned kinetic strikes. No enchantments for the alloy to eat.”
“Exactly."
The carriage rattled as it crossed a track junction. Orion looked out through the reinforced iron grate covering the window. The tunnel was pitch black, lit only by the brief flashes of the carriage’s pale headlights.
Over the next twelve hours, the journey settled into a monotonous rhythm. The team took turns sleeping on the cots in the back room, though not everyone slept. Esmeralda read a small, leather-bound book she had obtained from Asteria's quartermaster. Jordan oiled his sword, the repetitive motion grounding his nerves.
Three times, the carriage ground to a halt at fortified dwarven checkpoints. Massive iron portcullises blocked the tracks, manned by dozens of soldiers and flanked by magma projectors embedded in the cavern walls.
At each stop, Daelin stepped onto the platform, flashing his royal signet to the checkpoint commanders. The interactions were tense. The commanders were paranoid, their scouts reporting increased monster activity as the creatures dug through the upper crust. The sight of human envoys and a vampire drew hostile mutters from the garrisons, but the Prince’s authority forced the gates open.
Eventually, they go there.