Rimelion: The Exploiter

Frozna started it.

Her wolf darted to the chamber entrance and barked, a single, long sound. Then it bolted back to us.

Inside the chamber, amber lights flared. The overseer’s eye brightened, and its manipulator arm rose in a gesture I now recognized as command.

Warriors moved.

They came in pairs, shields up, blades ready. The tunnel compressed their formation, stripping away their tactical spacing. Two across, that was all they could manage, and they had to turn sideways to fit their shields through.

Frozna’s first arrow punched through the gap between shield and tunnel wall. It hit the lead warrior’s shoulder joint, spinning it sideways, and the warrior behind it stumbled over its companion’s staggered feet.

“Wind, favor me.”

Lucas’s Heartstorm erupted through the tunnel. In the confined space, the effect was amplified—wind screaming off stone walls, channeled and compressed. The warriors leaned into it like men walking against a gale.

Their shields wobbled.

Their strikes drifted off-center.

Frozna’s next arrow flew as if it had been fired from a cannon. The shaft hit center-mass, and the warrior folded backward, amber light flickering out before it hit the ground.

“Good,” Frozna said, and nocked another.

The second pair had to climb over the first. Frozna put an arrow into one while it was still stepping over wreckage. Lucas’s wind blade curved around the tunnel wall and sliced through the other’s knee. It collapsed, and Frozna finished it.

Four down, six to go.

But the overseer adapted. The next group didn’t charge blindly. They came shield-first, overlapping, creating a wall of metal that filled the tunnel from side to side. Frozna’s arrows struck shields and bounced. Lucas’s wind blades skittered off the armored surfaces.

“They’re learning,” Lucas muttered.

“Push them,” I said. “Don’t let them set up.”

Katherine didn’t need to be told twice.

She stepped into the tunnel mouth, greatsword leveled, and waited. The shield wall advanced.

Five feet away.

Four.

Three.

Two warriors thrust their blades through the gaps simultaneously.

Katherine sidestepped one and caught the other on her crossguard. Then she didn’t swing, she couldn’t, the ceiling was too low for a full arc. Instead, she drove the pommel of her sword forward like a battering ram, straight into the center shield.

The impact was brutal. Not the wide devastation she preferred, not the sweeping cleaves and fiery arcs, but still effective. The shield buckled inward, and the warrior behind it staggered, creating a gap in the wall.

Lucy’s hammer punched through the gap.

The blow caught the exposed warrior in the chest and caved its torso in.

It crashed backward into its companion, and Katherine was already moving, a tight horizontal cut that didn’t so much swing as thrust, the blade sliding between the low ceiling and the warrior’s guard to take its head.

Controlled.

Lucy crushed a warrior’s shield arm and glanced at Katherine. “Good hit.”

Katherine didn’t grin. She reset her stance, greatsword ready, and watched the tunnel for the next pair.

I slipped into the service passage.

The maintenance corridor was exactly as uncomfortable as it looked.

I had to turn sideways in places, stone pressing against my front and back, my frost-light dimmed to almost nothing to avoid giving myself away. The copper smell was stronger here.

Behind me, I could hear the fight.

Metal on metal, Lucy’s grunts of effort, the crack of Frozna’s arrows finding their marks. The Heartstorm’s constant whistle through the tunnel. Katherine’s measured strikes, each one landing with a precision that still surprised me.

I emerged at the back of the processing chamber.

The overseer was ten feet away, standing at its console, its back to me. Its amber eye swept the room, focused on the tunnel entrance where my team was slowly grinding through its defenders. One manipulator arm kept gesturing commands, adjustments, trying to coordinate warriors that were dying faster than it could redirect them.

Three warriors remained between us, positioned in a loose arc facing the main fight. They hadn’t noticed me.

Yet.

I pressed my palms against the stone floor and let the frost flow.

It spread silently, a thin sheet of ice creeping across the ground like morning frost on glass. The Dominion passive shaped it thinner where it needed to be quiet, thicker where it needed to grip. The ice crept past the first warrior’s feet, then the second’s, then the third’s.

Then up.

Frost climbed the overseer’s legs like ivy. Slow, steady, layering itself around joints and plating with the patience of winter itself. The overseer didn’t notice; it was too focused on the fight at the tunnel, too busy trying to save its remaining warriors.

By the time the ice reached its waist, I was ready.

I clenched my fist.

The frost erupted. The three warriors’ legs locked solid in an instant, ice encasing them from the knees down. They lurched, off-balance, arms pinwheeling. The overseer’s legs seized, its torso twisted against the sudden immobility, and its amber eye spun to find me.

I was already moving.

“Sovereign’s Rime.”

The armor wove itself around me.

The first warrior wrenched itself around, the blade swinging despite its frozen legs. I stepped inside the arc, feeling the wind of the strike across my frost-armored shoulders, and placed my palm against its chest.

Ice bloomed from the contact point. A web of crystalline frost that threaded through the gaps in its armor, found the joints, and seized.

The warrior locked up, amber light stuttering.

I’d already moved to the second. Its blade came down. Sovereign’s Rime caught the blow, dispersed it, and the warrior slowed. I ducked under its reach and froze its sword arm at the elbow, then its other arm at the shoulder.

The third had broken free of the floor ice; these things were strong, and was turning its full body toward me, shield raised.

But Katherine’s voice rang from the tunnel entrance, and the last two warriors from that fight were down, and suddenly Frozna had a clear sight line into the chamber.

An arrow took the third warrior through the neck joint. It dropped.

The overseer strained against its frozen legs. Its manipulator arms reached for me, not with weapons, but with those multi-jointed fingers, trying to push me away, trying to protect itself.

“Easy,” I whispered. “Hold still.”

I pressed both hands against its chest plate and felt the metal through my frost armor. The overseer’s amber eye was inches from my face, burning brightly, and I could feel the thrum of its core through my palms.

Frost gathered at my fingertips. Thin lines of ice, following the seams of the chest plate like surgical cuts. I didn’t force anything. I let the ice find the gaps, expand gently, pry the metal apart millimeter by millimeter.

The chest plate groaned.

Shifted.

Separated.

Inside, nested in a cradle of mechanical arms and crystal buffers, the temporal shard glowed. Pale blue, intact, pulsing with stored energy.

I reached in with both hands, and my fingers found the clamps holding the shard in place. Two on top, two on the bottom, each one a simple mechanical latch that clicked open under gentle pressure.

The shard came free.

It was warm. Warm and vibrating faintly, like holding a sleeping heartbeat. I cradled it against my chest and stepped back from the overseer.

Its amber eye dimmed. The light pulsed once, twice, and then faded to a dull glow. Without its core, the machine had nothing left to direct. Its manipulator arms dropped to its sides, and it stood there, frozen in place, an empty vessel.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

“Got it,” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. I held up the shard. It caught my frost-light and threw prismatic reflections across the close walls. “One down. Four to go.”

For a moment, the only sounds were dripping water and settling metal.

Then Katherine was there.

She crossed the room in three strides and slapped me on the back hard enough to make me stumble and nearly drop the shard. “See?” she said with a grin. “Careful.”

I clutched the shard to my chest, glaring at her. “Katherine, if you had made me drop this—”

“But I didn’t!” She held up her hands, palms out, grinning wider. “Was careful slap!”

“There’s no such thing as a careful slap from you!”

Lucy’s laugh echoed from the tunnel. “One shard! The sea provides!”

“Land!” three of us shouted simultaneously.

Lucas drifted into the chamber, ribbons trailing. He looked at the intact shard in my hands, then at the disabled overseer, then at Katherine’s carefully restrained grin.

“Huh,” he said. “That actually worked.”

“Try not to sound so surprised.”

“I’m not surprised it worked. I’m surprised she—” he nodded at Katherine, “—didn’t charge in.”

Katherine puffed out her chest. “Me team player! I hold tunnel! Nothing got past!”

“Nothing got past,” Lucy confirmed, leaning against the tunnel mouth. Her armor had collected fresh dents, but she was smiling. “She was a proper wall, she was. Disciplined-like.”

Katherine beamed at the praise, then caught herself and tried to look casual about it. She failed terribly. Frozna appeared silently, as she always did, her wolf padding ahead. She took one look at the shard, nodded once, and said: “Good.”

I stored the shard carefully in my inventory. One shard, safe. Five more overseers to go.

But we’d proven we could do it. More importantly, Katherine had proven she could hold back. And somehow, watching her fight smart and disciplined and controlled had been more impressive than any fury-fueled rampage.

I looked at my team in the dim, cramped processing chamber, surrounded by broken golems and dripping pipes, and felt something settle in my chest.

We could do this.

“Alright,” I said. “Deeper.”

The third overseer was smart enough not to be home when we arrived.

We’d followed the polished tracks down two more levels, past collapsed side tunnels and dead-end shafts where the mining operation had carved deep into the mountain’s bones. The air grew thicker with every descent, carrying the vibration of active mining like a second heartbeat layered over our own.

Frozna’s wolf led us into a wide extraction cavern.

Natural rock walls with tool marks scoring every surface, the ceiling lost somewhere in the shadows above. A massive ore crusher dominated the center, still functional, its magic gears buzzing with magic and grinding patience that set my teeth on edge. Rail tracks spiraled inward from six different tunnels, converging at the crusher like veins feeding a mechanical heart.

The overseer’s platform stood at the far end.

Empty.

The space where it should have stood was marked only by scuffed metal where heavy feet had paced back and forth.

“It left,” Frozna said.

“Ran away?” Katherine sounded personally offended.

“Repositioned.” I scanned the cavern, unease prickling down my spine. The overseer knew we were coming. It had watched us through its warriors, maybe even through the miners’ simple sensors, and it had decided.

It had decided not to fight on our terms.

“I don’t like this,” Lucas murmured, drifting higher. His Windprincess ribbons caught currents that shouldn’t exist this deep underground. “If it’s not here, where—”

The tunnels lit up.

All six of them. Amber lights, dozens upon dozens, flooded out of every passage simultaneously. Not the slow trickle of warriors we’d faced before.

A wave.

Miners poured into the cavern from every direction. Hundreds of them, squat and relentless, picks and drills raised.

They spilled across the floor like dark water, filling the space between equipment, climbing over each other where the tunnels bottlenecked, an endless tide of metal bodies driven by a single command.

Behind them, spread across multiple entrances were warriors. I counted six, eight, twelve… more than any single overseer should have commanded.

And behind the warriors, in two of the tunnels, the unmistakable glint of crossbow-armed units taking position.

“It pulled reinforcements,” I breathed. “From other sections. It’s throwing everything it has at us before we reach it.”

“GOOD!” Katherine roared, and she was already charging.