Rimelion: The Exploiter

Katherine's greatsword swept in a massive arc, and the first rank of miners went flying.

Literally flying, squat metal bodies tumbling end over end, crashing into equipment, bouncing off the ore crusher’s housing with hollow clangs. Katherine didn’t stop. She bulled forward, each swing clearing a swathe through the miners like a farmer harvesting wheat, if the farmer was six feet tall and the wheat was made of hostile metal.

And Lucy was having the time of her life.

Her hammer came down on the first miner with a crack that echoed off the cavern walls, and the golem didn’t just fall; it launched. The impact sent it skidding across the stone floor into three of its companions, all four of them toppling in a cascade of flailing limbs and sparking tools.

Lucy watched them fall with undisguised delight.

“Oh ho HO!” She wound up and swung low, catching a miner mid-stride. The golem cartwheeled through the air, struck a support pillar, and collapsed in a shower of components. Two more miners tripped over its remains.

“Strike!” Lucy howled, cackling. She brought the hammer around in a sweeping uppercut that launched a miner straight up. It hit the ceiling, bounced, and crashed down onto a group of its fellows like a metal cannonball.

“SPARE!” She was laughing so hard tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Barnacle Pete, if ye could see me now!”

Katherine caught a miner on the flat of her blade and batted it sideways into a cluster of five. They went down like pins. “Ha! I do too!”

“That was only five! I got seven with one swing!”

“Was not seven!”

“Was SO seven! Charlie, count!”

“I’m not counting!” I threw up ice walls to channel the flood, trying to keep the miners from surrounding us entirely. The frost was thick and fast, thanks Dominion, but the sheer number of bodies pressing against it made the walls groan.

Frozna’s wolf was a grey blur weaving through the chaos, attacking miners, darting between legs, creating pileups wherever it went.

Lizzie dove from above, talons raking sensor strips, and the disoriented miners she blinded stumbled into their neighbors, adding to the beautiful chain reactions.

Lucas rose above the melee, wind swirling, and his Heartstorm Field erupted across the cavern. The miners staggered as if they’d walked into a gale, their movements degrading into clumsy lurches. Frozna’s arrows punched through the chaos with amplified force, each shot threading between friendly bodies.

Then the crossbows fired.

The first bolt hissed past Lucas’s shoulder, close enough to clip a ribbon. The second struck Frozna’s wolf in the haunch, and Wolfie yelped, stumbling sideways.

“Crossbows!” I shouted. “Two tunnels, elevated positions!”

The crossbow warriors had set up just inside the tunnel mouths, using the miners as cover, picking shots at anyone who rose above the melee. Smart. The overseer, wherever it was hiding, was directing this like a chess game.

Another volley.

A bolt sparked off Lucy’s shoulder plate.

Another whizzed past my ear.

Lucas banked hard, petals scattering, and a bolt passed through the space he’d occupied a second before. “They’re targeting anyone elevated!” He dropped lower, using the ore crusher as cover, and his wind blade lashed out toward the tunnel mouths. “Kiss of the wind!”

The crossbow warriors raised shields, blocking the strike.

“I can’t reach them through the miners!” Frozna called, already kneeling beside Wolfie. The bolt had punched through fur and muscle but missed bone. I threw a heal across the distance, golden light splashing over the wolf’s flank, and the bleeding stopped.

“Katherine! Lucy! We need those crossbows down!”

Katherine didn’t hesitate.

She threw herself into the miner horde, not fighting through them so much as through them. Miners bounced off her armored shoulders, tripped over her boots, got shoved aside by the flat of her blade. She wasn’t killing them; she was simply moving, an unstoppable force parting a sea of metal.

Lucy went the other way, hammer clearing a corridor of flattened miners in her wake. “Gangway! Rimebreak Navy, coming through!” A miner swung its pick at her; she caught it on the hammer’s haft and flipped the entire golem over her shoulder without breaking stride. It crashed into three more behind her.

She didn’t even look back.

A crossbow bolt hit Katherine’s pauldron and ricocheted. She didn’t flinch. Another grazed Lucy’s thigh; she swore, stumbled, and kept moving. I sent healing to both of them; the light stretching across the cavern in twin threads.

Katherine reached the first crossbow nest. Her greatsword erupted with fury’s flames, red light flooding the tunnel mouth, and the two crossbow warriors inside didn’t last three seconds. Metal screamed, sparks showered, and the crossbows went silent.

Lucy hit the second nest at almost the same time.

Her hammer struck the tunnel wall hard enough to crack stone, and the shockwave sent the crossbow warriors staggering. Her follow-up crushed one flat.

The second one raised its shield, so Lucy stepped on it, shoved it down, and brought her hammer down.

Silence from that tunnel too.

But the miners were still coming, and without the crossbow pressure, the warriors advanced.

Twelve of them, spreading into the cavern, shields locked.

“Regroup!” I shouted. “Funnel formation, same as before!”

We collapsed toward the ore crusher, using the massive machine as a natural chokepoint. Katherine and Lucy anchored the front. Frozna shot from behind the crusher’s housing, Wolfie guarding her flank. Lucas’s wind turned the approach into a nightmare for the warriors, their shield wall breaking apart under the constant pressure.

The melee was brutal and grinding. Warriors came in pairs, took hits, dealt hits, fell.

Lucy’s hammer rang like a bell with every impact.

Katherine’s fury painted the cavern in red light, flames licking across the stone floor, forcing warriors to choose between advancing and burning.

My ice walls funneled the remaining miners into kill zones where Frozna’s arrows dropped them three per shot.

I healed. Constantly.

Lucy took a blade across the ribs, heal.

Katherine caught a shield edge to the chin, heal.

Wolfie got too close to a warrior’s backswing, heal.

My mana dipped and recovered and dipped again in a rhythm I was getting uncomfortably familiar with.

The last warrior fell to a combined strike: Katherine’s greatsword from the left, Lucy’s hammer from the right, meeting in the middle with a crunch that folded the golem in half.

The miners, without warriors to protect and no overseer to direct them, milled about in confused circles. We picked them off at our leisure, which is to say Katherine and Lucy turned it into a competition.

“Twelve!” Katherine announced, batting one into the wall.

“Fourteen!” Lucy countered, launching one into the ceiling.

“Counted that little twice!”

“Did NOT! He bounced, that counts as two!”

I ignored them both and started searching.

The overseer wasn’t in the cavern. But it had been directing from somewhere, and the magic controlling miners was still active.

I followed the signal, a faint magical thread I could feel through my frost, the Dominion passive picking up resonances I would have missed before, and traced it to a sealed maintenance shaft behind the platform.

“Katherine.”

She appeared beside me, sword ready, grinning.

“Door.”

She kicked it in.

The overseer was inside.

A narrow service room, barely more than a closet, packed with backup equipment. The overseer had wedged itself inside, manipulator arms folded tight against its body, its amber eye blazing at us from the confined space.

It had nowhere to run, so it tried to fight.

One arm lashed out, fingers grasping.

Katherine caught the arm on her blade, pinned it to the wall, and looked at me. “Legs?”

I froze them. Thick, layered, the ice climbing fast and holding firm. Then the other arm. The overseer thrashed against the frost, its eye burning.

“Hold still,” I told it, and began the surgery.

The chest plate parted under my frost-work, ice finding seams, expanding gently. The shard sat in its cradle, pulsing, intact.

Click. Click. Click. Click.

The shard came free.

I held it up. Pale blue light danced across the walls of the tiny room.

Katherine pumped her fist. “Two!”

“Two,” I agreed.

The fourth overseer was already dead when we found it.

The passage down from the extraction cavern led through a short corridor that opened into what looked like a diagnostic bay. Clean, with tool racks on the walls and a wide metal table at the center. Cables hung from the ceiling in neat coils. Monitoring crystals, dark now, lined the walls at regular intervals.

The overseer lay on the table, chest plate removed, internal mechanisms exposed to the stale air. Its manipulator arms hung limp over the table’s edge. Its “eye” was dark. Not dimmed, dark. Completely, permanently off.

No ambient hum of active machinery, just silence and dust and the faint smell of cold metal. We stood in the doorway, weapons drawn, staring at nothing.

Katherine blinked. “Where is everyone?”

Frozna walked to the table, examined the overseer’s inert form, then turned to us. “This is why the last fight was so large. The previous overseer was commanding this section’s forces as well as its own. Two sections combined.”

Hundreds of miners, a lot of warriors, the crossbow units… it had been too many for a single overseer’s command. Because it hadn’t been a single overseer’s forces.

It had been two.

“So this one’s been down for a while,” Lucas said, drifting closer to the table. “Before us. Before the reactivation, even?”

I moved to the overseer’s open chest cavity and looked inside. The shard housing was intact, the mechanical cradle undisturbed, but the clamps were already open. Disconnected. Someone had begun the extraction process and then... stopped. Left the shard sitting in its cradle, unconnected to the overseer’s systems but never removed.

I reached in and lifted it out.

I didn’t need surgery, or frost-work. Just my hands and a crystal that practically fell into them.

The shard glowed pale blue, perfect and whole.

Katherine stared at me. Then at the shard. Then at the deactivated overseer on the table.

“Ez pz tis one,” she declared.

“Don’t jinx the next ones.”

“Pff! No jinx. Is facts. Ez. Pz.” She crossed her arms, greatly satisfied.

Lucy tapped the overseer’s inert head with one finger. “Kia must’ve gotten this far. Shut it down proper before things went sideways.”

I nodded slowly, looking at the clean, careful work. The chest plate was removed carefully. The cables disconnected in the right order. The systems powered down methodically. This was a professional’s work.

“She did her job,” I mumbled. “At least one of them.”

Three shards, safe in my inventory. Four overseers down, one broken, three recovered. Three left: two regular overseers and the Foreman. I needed two more shards.

The margin was still razor-thin. But we were ahead.

I was about to suggest moving on when Frozna’s voice came from the far wall. “Charlie. There is another log.”

The crystal sat in its alcove, waiting. I crossed the room and touched it.

Kia materialized.

She looked different.

Not disheveled. Her uniform was still pressed, her tools still organized in their loops and slots, her posture still straight. But there was something behind her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Not fear. Resolution. The kind that settles into a person when they’ve stopped hoping for the easy outcome and started planning for the hard one.

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

She didn’t pause for formality this time.

“I have successfully deactivated one overseer unit on the mid-level through manual shutdown. The process required physical disconnection of three separate systems and took approximately four hours of continuous work. The unit is confirmed non-functional. Its temporal shard has been disconnected but left in housing for transport, pending extraction by recovery team or by myself on the return.”

She looked down at her hands. They were steady.

“The remaining five overseer units and the Foreman continue to resist all remote shutdown commands. The corruption from River Kingdom magitech has embedded itself deeper than initial analysis suggested. It is not merely redirecting command architecture. It is rewriting core directives in real-time. The units are learning to reject my authority faster than I can reassert it.”

A breath. Controlled.

“I am proceeding to the lower levels. The Foreman must be addressed directly. It is the command nexus for the entire complex. If I can shut it down manually, all subordinate units will enter standby within minutes.”

She straightened, and something in her expression hardened. Not anger. Something quieter and heavier.

“I will not be leaving this complex until the Foreman is deactivated or I am dead. Those are the only two outcomes I find acceptable. There is no scenario in which I ascend to the surface and report partial failure. These machines are my responsibility. I built their command architecture. I certified their operation. If they are malfunctioning, it is my duty to correct it. If the correction requires my life, that is a cost within acceptable parameters.”

The professional mask held. Perfectly. Except that she said the next part a little faster.

“In the event of my death, I request that any recovery team deliver one message to my sister, Tira, last resident of the Altandai Eastern Quarter. The message is as follows.”

Kia looked directly at the crystal. Directly at us, across a hundred and sixty years.

“I forgive you for the spoon.” She held the gaze for a moment. “That’s all.”

The light faded.

I stood in the diagnostic bay with my hand still on the dead crystal and something burning behind my eyes that I refused to call tears in front of my team.

I always ignored these crystals in my previous runs in the future, but… damn.

I forgive you for the spoon. A hundred and sixty years. A woman walking into the dark knowing she wouldn’t come back, and her last message to her sister was about a spoon. A stupid, petty, human argument that had probably seemed so important once and now was just... the thing she wanted to fix. The one loose thread she couldn’t leave untied.

Nobody spoke.

“She didn’t make it back,” Frozna said.

“No.”

“The Foreman killed her.”

I looked at the log crystal. At the perfect, careful work on the deactivated overseer. At the shard left in its housing, waiting for a recovery team that never came.

“We don’t know that,” I said.

I straightened. “Three shards. Two more to go. The Foreman has one, and there’s an overseer between us and it.”

I looked at my team.

“Let’s finish what Kia started.”