Rimelion: The Exploiter

The darkness swallowed us ten steps past the gate.

It wasn’t gradual as a normal dungeon should be, and how reality should behave: gentle dimming of a forest canopy or the slow fade of twilight. One moment we had sky and sunlight, the next we had stone pressing in from every direction and air that tasted of metal and dust.

I summoned a sphere of frost with trapped mana, and it glowed pale blue.

Success!

I held it overhead, and the glow painted the tunnel walls in cold relief, carved stone with shallow channels cut along the ceiling that might have once held lighting crystals. They were dark now. Empty sockets in a dead face.

“Cozy,” Lucas muttered.

The tunnel was wide enough for all of us to walk abreast, with rail tracks running down the center. The tracks were in surprisingly good condition, barely rusted, as if the sealed environment had preserved them.

My heels were amazing as usual, and I hopped onto the rails and balanced. It was such an amazing feeling; I could walk on slippery rails and not fall!

Frozna shot me a look, and even Lucy shook her head, so I sheepishly jumped back. Boring boots of others echoed on stone, and every sound bounced ahead of us into the dark like a warning we couldn’t take back.

Katherine walked at the front, naturally, her hand resting on the hilt of her greatsword. Frozna’s wolf padded silently beside her, ears rotating like small dishes, catching sounds we couldn’t hear. Lucy had her hammer across her shoulders, humming again, though even she kept the volume low.

Frozna stopped.

“What?” I asked.

She pointed at the wall. “There.”

I raised the frost-light higher. Set into a shallow alcove in the tunnel wall, barely noticeable unless you were looking, was a small crystal mounted on a metal bracket. It was dark, roughly the size of a thumb, with a dull amber surface that might have been translucent once.

“Engineering log,” I said. I tilted my head, studying it. “These should be left behind for those who follow.”

“Follow?” Lucas asked. “Follow who?”

Instead of answering, I reached out and touched it.

The crystal flared to life.

Light erupted from its surface and coalesced into a figure standing in the tunnel before us. A woman, translucent, rendered in golden light. She was dark-skinned with close-cropped hair, wearing what looked like an Altandai engineer’s uniform, belted, with tool loops and crystal slots along her sleeves. Her expression was composed. Professional.

She spoke.

“Engineering Log One. Senior Artificer Kia, assigned to Thalvirea Mining Complex Decommission Protocol.” Her voice was measured, the voice of someone who actually likes bureaucracy and never missed a deadline.

“Standard Altandai shutdown procedure. All autonomous units will be powered down section by section, beginning with the mining tier and progressing through processing and transport. Overseer cores will be extracted and secured for transport back to Altandai. The Foreman unit will be deactivated last, once all subordinate systems confirm shutdown.”

She paused, and something flickered across her projected face. Not quite worry. Something more controlled than that.

“In the event that this protocol cannot be completed, these engineering logs will remain as guidance for any recovery team dispatched by Altandai authorities. Each log contains navigational data and operational notes for the relevant section.” Her chin lifted slightly. “The temporal shards housed in the overseer cores are critical infrastructure components. They must be recovered intact and returned to Altandai governance for proper allocation.”

The projection flickered once, then stabilized.

“Kia, Senior Artificer, signing off. Log One complete.”

The light faded, and the crystal went dark.

Silence.

“She never finished,” I whispered. “They started the shutdown and never completed it.”

“One hundred sixty years,” Frozna observed. “No recovery team came.”

I stared at the dead crystal. Kia had been professional. Thorough. She’d left breadcrumbs for people who would never follow them, instructions for authorities who’d already abandoned everything beyond their walls. A diligent woman doing her job in a system that had already decided she didn’t matter.

I knew that feeling.

Lucas shifted beside me, frowning at the alcove. “She said to return the shards to Altandai authorities. Maybe we should—”

Lucy’s laugh cut through the tunnel like a cannon shot. Full, booming, echoing off the stone until it sounded like a dozen Lucys all laughing at once. “Oh, that’s rich!” She wiped her eye with one finger. “That’s the finest jest I’ve heard since Barnacle Pete bet his wooden leg on a card game!”

Lucas stared at her. “What?”

Lucy gestured grandly at me. “Lucas, who conquered Altandai last week?”

“Charlie,” Lucas said slowly.

“And who ended the grandmasters’ rule?”

“...Charlie.”

“And who, pray tell, currently sits as the ruling authority over all Altandai territories, including—” Lucy swept her arm to encompass the tunnel, the mountain, and presumably the entire mining complex, “—every dusty, golem-infested mine within its borders?”

Lucas closed his eyes. “We’re outside our borders.”

“WE be the authorities!” Lucy roared, slapping him on the back. “Kia’s message was meant for US! Delivered a hundred and sixty years late, but the mail always arrives eventually!”

Katherine cackled. “Lucy is right! We are boss!”

“I get it, can you stop—”

I couldn’t help but smile. “She’s not wrong, Lucas. Altandai governance is... me, now. Technically, everything Kia wanted done, she was asking us to do.”

Lucas opened his eyes, looked at me, looked at Lucy’s beaming face, and let out a breath that carried the weight of every life choice that had led him to this tunnel. “Fine. We’re the authorities. Can we finally move on?”

“Aye aye!” Lucy saluted nobody in particular.

I touched the dead crystal one more time gently. “Thank you, Kia,” I whispered. “We’ll finish what you started.”

Then we walked deeper.

The upper mines opened gradually, like a ribcage spreading wide.

The single tunnel branched into three, then five, each one leading to carved-out chambers connected by narrow passages. Rail tracks split and merged, running along the floors like veins. Side rooms gaped open, filled with old equipment, carts, sorting tables, or bins caked with mineral residue.

Everything was covered in a thin layer of dust that our passage disturbed into lazy spirals.

Frozna’s wolf moved ahead, a gray shadow flowing through the tunnels with its nose to the ground. Lizzie had taken to the ceiling, somehow finding perches on rocky outcrops, her strange falcon-cat eyes gleaming in my frost-light.

“Tracks here are polished,” Frozna said, crouching near a rail junction. She ran her finger along the metal. “Recently used.”

“The golems,” I said.

She nodded. “Very heavy, this way.”

We followed the polished tracks into a wider chamber, a staging area, maybe, with high ceilings and multiple tunnel entrances branching off in different directions. Old support pillars stood in rows, thick stone columns carved with the same geometric precision as the entrance.

And there, in the blue glow of my frost-light, we saw mining golems.

Six of them… working.

Their bodies were squat and blocky, roughly humanoid but compressed, like someone had taken a person and pushed them down to half-height. Dark metal, tarnished with age but still functional, with arms that ended not in hands but in tools like picks, drills, and flat scoops for hauling. Their heads were featureless except for a single glowing line across the front, a dim amber strip that pulsed faintly as they moved.

They were chipping at the far wall.

Rhythmically. Pick, scrape, load. Pick, scrape, load. The sound of their work was the heartbeat we’d heard from outside, multiplied and layered.

They didn’t look at us.

“They’re... just working,” Lucas said, watching them with a mix of fascination and unease.

“Mining,” Katherine said, as if this needed clarification.

“They don’t seem hostile,” Frozna observed.

I checked with Cloudy.

[Miner Golem Lv.32]

Type: 2-uncommon | HP: 975/975

“Level thirty-two,” I said. “Uncommon type. Nothing special individually.”

“So we kill?” Katherine asked, her hand already moving toward her sword.

“No. Let’s just—”

Katherine stepped forward.

Her boot caught the edge of a rail track with a metallic clang that echoed through the chamber like a bell.

All six golems stopped.

The amber strips on their heads flared brightly.

They turned, in unison, and those featureless faces locked onto us with a mechanical precision that was somehow worse than if they’d had eyes. For a moment, nothing moved. Just the faint hum of their cores and the settling dust.

Then the nearest one tilted its head, as if processing.

“Obstruction detected. Initiating removal protocol.”

It charged.

Well, it just moved forward with the same methodical purpose it had used on the rock wall, its pick-arm raised to chip away at the obstruction. Which was apparently us.

“Move!” I shouted.

Katherine didn’t move. She drew her greatsword and met the golem head-on; the blade catching its pick-arm with a shriek of metal on metal. The impact sent sparks showering across the stone floor.

“Ha!” she barked. “Weak!”

The other five turned. And from the tunnels behind them, more amber lights appeared. Two. Five. A dozen. More, flickering to life in the darkness like stars waking up, drawn by the noise.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s a lot.”

“More fun!” Katherine kicked the first golem in the chest, sending it sliding back across the stone, and was already swinging at the next.

Lucy charged in from the left, hammer high. “Have at ye, tin men! The Rimebreak Navy fears no bucket of bolts!”

“There’s no water here!” Lucas yelled, but he was already gathering lightning between his fingers. A bolt snapped out and struck a golem square in the chest, sending it convulsing, its pick-arm twitching erratically before it collapsed in a heap of smoking metal.

Frozna’s wolf hit the line from the right, low and fast, taking a golem’s legs out from under it. The machine tumbled, limbs flailing, and the wolf was already gone, circling to the next.

I threw up an ice wall across two of the tunnel entrances, sealing them with frost thick enough to buy us time. The golems behind the barriers began hammering at the ice immediately.

Pick, scrape, pick, scrape; with the same patience they used on stone.

“They’re treating the wall like rock,” I said. “They’re going to mine through it.”

“That’s annoying,” Lucas admitted, frying another golem.

Katherine was in her element; each swing of her greatsword cleaved through dark metal like it was tin. The golems were slow, with their movements built for labor rather than combat. They swung their picks in wide, telegraphed arcs, and she sidestepped without effort.

But they kept coming.

Every tunnel seemed to produce more of them, drawn by the sounds of combat, shuffling forward with that same relentless work ethic.

Break obstruction.

Remove debris.

Continue.

“They’re not fighting us,” I realized aloud, freezing three in a cluster. “They’re trying to clear us. Like rubble.”

“Rude!” Katherine split one down the middle.

“Insulting, is what it is,” Lucy agreed, crushing another beneath her hammer.

It took another fifteen minutes to clear the chamber. By the end, the floor was littered with broken metal, scattered tools, and a thin haze of metallic dust that made everything taste like I was licking a coin.

I leaned against a pillar, catching my breath. “Okay. Those were the miners.”

“Easy,” Katherine declared, planting the tip of her sword on the ground.

“Easy,” I agreed. “But there were a lot of them. And we made a lot of noise.”

As if to underline my point, from somewhere deeper in the mine, something answered. A single, heavy impact. Metal on stone. Then another.

Frozna’s wolf pressed against her leg, hackles rising. Lizzie dove from the ceiling and buried herself against Frozna’s neck, chittering.

“Something is coming,” Frozna said quietly.

“Something bigger,” Lucas added, lightning still crackling between his fingers. “I hate all of this. I can’t even transform, wind would be useless against these.”

The footsteps grew louder. Heavier. From the largest tunnel at the back of the chamber, the one I hadn’t managed to wall off, amber light spilled forward.

At a height that meant whatever was coming stood at least seven feet tall.

The first warrior golem stepped into the light.

It was nothing like the miners. Where they had been squat and utilitarian, this was built for violence.

Tall, broad-shouldered, with thick armor plating that covered its frame in overlapping segments. Its arms ended in weapons; one was a heavy blade welded directly to the limb, the other a rectangular shield that looked like it could stop a charging horse. The amber strip across its face burned steady and bright, and unlike the miners’ confused flicker, there was something almost focused about it.

It looked at us.

It raised its blade.

A second warrior emerged behind it. Then a third. They spread into a formation with a coordination that didn’t come from programming.

“Well,” I said, ice forming around my hands. “Those aren’t miners.”

[Warrior Golem Lv.41]

Type: 4-exceptional | HP: 1499/1499

Katherine grinned, her sword already rising. “Finally! Real fight!”

The warriors charged.