Blacksmith of the Apocalypse

However, she had never seen or heard it, making her attempt to find something like searching for a needle in a haystack, with a slightly see-through blindfold. She kind of knew how a hard drive was supposed to look, but who was to tell how a hard drive looked in this goopy mess? Still, she wanted to try.

“Lydia, we don’t have that much time! We will have to fight if someone from Morranto pursues us.” Ray reminded her, after five minutes without a result. Depressed, and covered in grime, Lydia got away from the corpse.

“Why don’t you just loot it? You know what you are looking for. If you are lucky, you will get it,” Mike suddenly commented. He earned a sharp hit on his shoulder from Lydia.

“You should have said that earlier before I crawled through that thing's brain!” she exclaimed incensed. It was common sense for the dweller of a system world to use loot on a creature they couldn’t dismantle, to get at least something out of it. To a certain degree, this had also become the norm on Urth, however, subconsciously this only counted for otherworldly monsters. Lydia had not thought of using this system feature on a product of technology.

“Loot!”, she announced and touched the cadaver of the biomechanical bird. It quickly turned to nothing, only leaving three items in her inventory. It actually worked.

<Ding! You have gained:

1x Damaged Core Reactor

1x Blackbox

1x Nightmare Owl-Wing bone!>

A Blackbox?! She actually managed to get this thing’s Blackbox. She didn’t even know it had one, she just thought that it would need to have storage somewhere and that the data on it would be helpful later on, but a Blackbox?

“What is that?” Mike asked her when she brought out the Blackbox.

“Apparently it’s a Blackbox?” she answered questioningly.

The “black box” was a huge seed-shaped object. Bigger than a head, with a polished black surface. She would have mistaken it for a crystal or a core, if she found it in the beast, but not a high-tech data storage device. The only reason she was ready to believe it, was that the system said ti was a black box...

“Will that be helpful?” “How would I know?” she answered. There was no telling whether they would be able to read out information from this thing. She couldn’t even spot a convenient data port.

“Anyway, I will take it back with me and I can try getting into it when I’m back in Minas Mar,” she said and stood up. She put the seed in her inventory, and they set off.

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---Former Gamma---

Holding a dark grimoire in his hand, he commanded the dead to fortify their position at the teleportation formation. With a wave of his hand, the low-grade undead of his opponents, became his troops, shifting the front line with ease.

His time had come. Now that Arget Nore in their hubris and greed, had sent more than half of their high-ranking troops on their vain hunt for more humans to trade for Golems, With most intelligent commanders stationed on Urth having left for the hunt, most of what was left was just riffraff.

It was crazy how easily he was able to wrestle the control of the mindless undead from even the highest caste of the undead. As long as he had the divine book the stranger had given him and time, he might be able to take control of all of the undead.

Whether it was these vermin, who were looking forward to their “freedom” after doing nothing but waste away in hopelessness, or the undead of Arget Nore with their vein belief in their god-king, he would take down all of them and make them his. None of them deserved a way out.

Drawing power from the book, made of black, polished stone slates, he converted another death knight his troops had managed to subdue. Bit by bit, he would steal them away or kill them, until there was no one left protecting the council of Arget Nore on Urth, and then he would take control of them, strengthening his undead army even further.

He had already taken control of the teleport formation. Next, he would kill all the slaves they tried to free and add them to his underlings. Without the formations, or the slaves, they would not be able to buy their precious golems.

And without the golems, they would not be able to stop him from absorbing their undead forces and kill their living henchmen. All the while he would simply continue growing stronger and stronger with the help of the divine artifact.

However, as he bathed in the glory of his power, he suddenly felt his connection to the undead in the rear being cut. No, not cut, they vanished! Was it reinforcements? But who? It couldn't be the undead empire's main forces. He had made preparations to stop interference from the Pathworks.

Had they managed to sneak behind him? Looking back to where the teleport hub was, he was suddenly faced with a shocking scene. Sharp blades dicing undead. Severed skulls, heads, limbs and bones were flying through the air.

Knights in shining armor were rushing out from the building of the Teleport Hub, cutting through the hordes of undead, like a hot knife through butter. None of the undead in the rear stood a chance against the merciless strikes.

“Shit, who are they?”, he cursed and sent a mental command to the higher-ranking undead he managed to convert to get back and defend the rear line. Hundreds of Warrior Ghouls, Revenants, and some Death Knights fell back from the fortifications to stop the knights from rushing out from behind.

He wouldn't allow them to turn the situation around, even if it meant slowing down his advance and sacrificing his progress. When the reinforcements arrived, the knights came finally to a halt. Still, their prowess was frightening.

A single knight was able to go one-on-one with a death knight, although the high-ranking undead knight had a slight edge. Warrior Ghouls and Wights could barely match them, intermediate undead like armored Zombies could only group up to face them.

The leader of the rebellion couldn't help but acknowledge the terrifying strength of these new participants. However, he had an advantage that no living being could match. No matter how strong a warrior was, the fatigue would get to them, their muscles would burn and their movements slow down, but the undead? The Undead would never tire!

Once the knights became tired, they would fall like dominoes.

Once they got tired...

Any time now...

The moment they... tired?

Why weren't they getting tired?! It had been two hours and these monstrous knights kept moving like in the first minute. Like machines, they simply hacked and slashed, fighting an endless duel against his troops. The only thing that changed was the number of his undead.

There were 60 knights, he didn't have as many high-ranking undead to face them. The intermediary undead were not enough to face them, even if he threw all he could spare at them, they slowly burned through his forces...

Finally! When he threw in another death knight he just converted, it successfully launched a surprise attack and dealt a fatal blow to one of the knights. Its martial, darkened longsword covered in black aura pierced through the knight's torso. With a mighty slash, he freed his weapon and almost cleaved the opponent in half.

This was the moment the situation rapidly changed.

… to the worse.

The knight armor, completely hollow inside was almost unperturbed by the damage to its cuirass. On the contrary, it used the chance when both death knights celebrated their victory, to behead its original opponent and in the same crescent slash, it turned with an inhumane range of motion and managed to the other's arm, too.

It would have almost ended both of them if the second had not stumbled back in surprise. For a moment the leader's mind was empty. He tried to process what just happened as he watched the one-armed death knight struggle to fight the damaged armor.

Living Armors? No, he would have recognized such high-ranking undead. Empty armors, moving like machines...armor golem! It took him just a second to come to the conclusion. These were the Golem Knights of Minas Mar! Minas Mar had decided to interfere.

He had heard that Minas Mar managed to unlock spatial travel, but he didn't expect them to intervene here. In the meantime, the damaged golem managed to slay the second death knight. With one of the golem knight to move freely, the situation would quickly domino into the worst case.

Before he could give the command to retreat, he had already lost five more of his high-ranking troops. After he ordered the undead to flee, they entered the underground of Gamma. It was a place he knew well, as one of the survivors of the time when Zarkists hunted the people of Gamma.

To his surprise and relief, the golems did not follow. They surrounded the Teleport Hub and simply guarded it as they watched the hostile undead flee into the sewers. Putting the grimoire into his inventory, he also left the scene using blink.

If he wished to face these creatures, he would need to prepare better. Back in his citadel, he canceled the illusion of himself and sat down in his chair at the window as if nothing happened. Nobody of Arget Nore would ever suspect him