Rimelion: The Exploiter

I was on my knees before the overseer’s corpse hit the ground.

My hands shoved through the wreckage, metal edges biting into my palms, and I dug through broken plating and shattered mechanisms, despite I already knew what I’d find.

The temporal shard sat in its housing like a cracked egg.

A fracture ran from one end to the other, splitting the crystal’s pale blue surface into two uneven halves held together by nothing but geometry. Residual temporal energy leaked from the crack in faint wisps, dissipating into the air like steam from a teacup.

I touched it.

The shard crumbled.

Both halves separated, the light inside went dark, and what fell into my palm was just rock. Inert, grey, worthless. I stared at it for a long moment, listening to the last whisper of temporal energy fade into nothing.

Then I closed my fist around the fragments and stood up.

The chamber was quiet. Katherine stood on the platform where the overseer had fallen, her fury already fading, the red glow dimming from her blade and arms. She was looking at me. They all were.

“It’s broken,” I said. I kept my voice level. “We can’t use it.”

Katherine’s grin didn’t fade so much as collapse. It went through stages: confusion, understanding, and then something I’d rarely seen on her face.

Guilt.

She opened her mouth, nothing came out. Katherine, who always had something to say, who filled every silence with enthusiasm or challenge or laughter, said nothing.

She sheathed her greatsword. The motion was slow and wrong. Katherine didn’t sheath her sword gently. She threw it over her shoulder, or slammed it into the ground, or rested it against whatever surface was closest. She didn’t ease the blade into its scabbard like it was made of glass.

She stepped off the platform and walked to the far wall.

And stood there.

I let the shard fragments fall from my hand and they clattered against the stone

“How many overseers total?” Lucas asked. He’d landed, his Windprincess ribbons still drifting, and his voice was carefully neutral. No I-told-you-so.

“Seven,” I said. “Kia’s shutdown protocol listed seven overseer cores, not counting the Foreman.” I looked at the broken fragments on the ground. “Six left. I need five shards.”

The math hung in the air.

Lucy whistled low. “One margin. That’s... fiiine.”

“It is fine, yes.” I gave her a weak smile, crouched and pulled a piece of metal plating from the overseer’s chest, studying the housing where the shard had sat. “The housing is here. Center of the torso, behind a secondary layer of armor. When the chest gets caved in...” I gestured at the surrounding wreckage. “Everything inside gets crushed.”

“So how do we get them out?” Lucas asked.

“Disable the limbs first,” I said. “Legs, then arms. Once it can’t move or fight back, I open the chest housing with precise frost work. Thin cuts, controlled. Like surgery.” I looked at my hands. Ice crystals formed and dissolved across my fingertips, responding to thought faster than before. Dominion. “The passive should help. My frost is more… eh, better now.”

“And the warriors around them?” Frozna asked.

“Kill those however you want. Go wild. Just leave the overseer to me.”

Frozna nodded. Wolfie pressed against her leg, and she rested a hand on its head. I looked at the broken overseer one more time, then toward Katherine.

She was still at the far wall, arms crossed, staring at the stone. Her shoulders were tight. Not angry-tight. Ashamed-tight. “It’s okay,” I put my hand on her shoulder. “I’m not mad. We’ll have to be careful next time.”

She glanced back at me and nodded. “Me will.”

“I know.” I smiled at her. “Come on,” I said to everyone. “Deeper.”

The tunnels narrowed as we descended.

Where the upper sections had been wide enough for carts and crew, these passages were stripped down to function. Tighter corridors, lower ceilings, rougher walls. The grandmasters hadn’t bothered with aesthetics this far below the surface. The rock was darker here, veined with metallic deposits that caught my frost-light and threw it back in jagged reflections.

Lucy hummed her shanty.

Lucas floated, conserving effort, his ribbons trailing.

Frozna’s wolf padded ahead, nose down, tracking the polished rail marks that told us something heavy passed this way regularly.

Katherine walked bahind, still not being cheerful herself. “Hey Kath, what if we send Dmitry to Saevrin?” I asked her with a grin.

She blinked and glanced back at me. “Dmitry? Why?”

“You know…” I pointed at Lucas. “He was naughty.”

Katherine stared at me blankly, then she blushed and started laughing, he sword smashing a side of the tunnel. “Wanna see that!”

“Guys there’s something!” Frozna interupted us.

“I’ll check it,” I walked forward, prepared to ice-lance anything that moved.

Wolfie was waiting ahead as he found the second engineering log in a recessed alcove near a junction, the same amber crystal, the same metal bracket. I pet Wolfie absently, and touched it before anyone could object.

Kia materialized.

She looked the same: dark-skinned, close-cropped hair, engineer’s uniform, but something about her posture was subtly different. Stiffer, maybe. More composed in the way people get when they’re holding themselves together.

“Engineering Log Two. Senior Artificer Kia, Thalvirea Mining Complex.”

Her voice was still professional, but she spoke slightly faster than before.

“Shutdown protocol has encountered complications. Three overseer units on the mid-level are non-responsive to standard deactivation commands. Diagnostic analysis indicates external corruption of their core directives.” She paused, and her jaw tightened. “The corruption signature is inconsistent with natural degradation or system malfunction. Someone altered the command architecture.”

She touched something off-screen, and a faint diagram flickered beside her. Lines of magical architecture, most steady, a few pulsing with a different color.

“The corrupted code uses resonance patterns associated with River Kingdom magitech. Their signature encoding is distinctive: layered harmonics, redundant command loops. I’ve seen it in captured equipment during the border disputes.” Her expression remained neutral, but her next words carried the precise weight of someone choosing to put an accusation on record. “I cannot confirm intent without further evidence, but the complexity of the corruption suggests sabotage rather than incidental contamination.”

The diagram faded.

“All corrupted units have been flagged for manual override. I am proceeding to the lower levels to locate the Foreman unit directly. If the corruption has reached the Foreman’s core, standard shutdown protocols will be insufficient. Manual extraction of the command crystal will be required.”

She straightened, and for just a moment, her composure cracked, not much, barely a flicker, the barest tightening around her eyes, before the professionalism smoothed it over.

“In the event that I do not return, I recommend any recovery team approach the Foreman with extreme caution. It has autonomous decision-making capabilities that exceed standard overseer programming. It was designed to manage the entire complex independently if communications with Altandai were severed.”

She waiting a second, as if deciding to say more, but didn’t.

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

The light faded.

I stood in the dark passage, my frost-light painting everything blue and cold, and thought about a woman walking down into the dark to face a machine that wouldn’t listen to her anymore.

“River Kingdom,” Lucas said behind me. “Haven’t heard of that.”

“Oh yeah, it’s long gone. The border disputes she mentioned were probably the last ones before the kingdom collapsed,” I said. “Ancient history. There are now city-states instead of one kingdom.”

“But the sabotage worked.” Lucas’s voice was quiet. “Whatever they did to the golems is still active. A hundred and sixty years, and the corruption is still running. Kia probably shut them down and now they woke up.”

Frozna stepped past us, her wolf already moving down the passage. “She went to find the Foreman.”

“Yes.”

“She did not come back.”

I looked at the dead crystal. “No. She didn’t.”

“Let’s keep moving,” I said. “And let’s make sure we do better.”

The processing chamber announced itself by the change in acoustics before we ever saw it.

The tunnel’s echo shortened, flattened, the way sound dies when it hits close walls instead of open space. The air grew warmer, tinged with the copper-oil smell of active machinery. Frozna’s wolf stopped, ears flat, and Frozna held up a fist.

We stopped.

“Wolfie thinks something is close,” she whispered. “Many, but... contained. Small space.”

I crept forward, dimming my frost-light to a faint glow, and peered around the tunnel’s mouth.

The chamber was cramped. Half the size of the warrior staging area above, with a ceiling low enough that Katherine would have to watch her swings. Old processing equipment filled the space, sorting tables bolted to the floor, bins, conveyor mechanisms, all of it crowding the room into a maze of metal and stone.

The overseer stood at the back, its single amber eye scanning the room in slow sweeps. Around it, warriors.

Ten.

Packed into a space built for machinery, not combat. They stood in tight formation, shields overlapping, barely room to turn between them. No miners in sight, there was nowhere to put them.

I pulled back.

“Ten warriors,” I whispered. “One overseer. Room’s tight, ceiling’s low. It’s a processing station, not a combat arena.”

Katherine looked at the chamber entrance, then at her greatsword. I could see her doing the calculation, a meter and a half of black steel in a room where the ceiling would catch a full overhead swing.

“Bad room.” she said flatly. “Big sword.”

“Bad room for hammers too,” Lucy added, eyeing the space. “Can’t get a proper arc going in there. I’ll be poking the buggers instead of crushing them.”

Lucas drifted lower. His Windprincess form was compact, which helped, but— “That ceiling cuts off my vertical movement entirely. No rising above the melee. And the machinery will break up my wind field. Too many surfaces disrupting airflow.”

“So everyone’s disadvantaged,” I said.

“Except Frozna,” Lucas noted. “Arrows don’t care about ceiling height.”

Frozna unshouldered her bow. “Arrows care about sight lines. The equipment blocks most of them.”

Lucy’s pirate accent was no gone. “Wonderful. So everyone is disadvantaged, including the archer.”

“I have a plan,” I said.

They looked at me.

“We don’t go in. We make them come out.”

I laid it out. Frozna and Lucas hold the tunnel entrance. It was narrow enough that warriors could only come two abreast. Arrows and wind blades down a corridor was as close to a shooting gallery as we’d get, and Lucas’s Heartstorm Field would amplify Frozna’s shots while degrading the warriors’ coordination in the tight space.

Katherine and Lucy hold the chokepoint itself. Anything that survived the corridor of death met greatsword and hammer at the threshold, where the tunnel was just wide enough for Katherine’s horizontal cuts.

And me—I go around.

“Around?” Lucy raised an eyebrow.

“There’s a service passage.” I pointed. A narrow maintenance corridor ran along the chamber’s right side, barely wide enough for one person. I’d spotted it while scouting. “It connects to the back of the room. While you hold their attention at the front, I loop behind, freeze the overseer in place, and extract the shard before any warriors can peel back to stop me.”

“Alone,” Lucas said.

“The passage is too narrow for anyone else to be useful. And I have Sovereign’s Rime if something goes wrong.”

“If,” Lucas repeated.

“I’ll be fine. My ice is stronger now.” I flexed my fingers, and frost crackled across my knuckles, dense and sharp. “Trust me.”

Katherine stepped forward. “I hold tunnel,” she said. “Nothing go past.”

“That’s the plan.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Not plan. Promise. Nothing go past.”

I held her gaze for a moment. There it was, a correction. She’d broken the last shard by losing control, and now she was telling me, in the only language she had, that it wouldn’t happen again.

“I know,” I said. “That’s why you’re at the front.”

Something eased in her expression. Just a fraction. She drew her greatsword and rolled her shoulders.

“Okay. Let’s go.”