Rimelion: The Exploiter

“Corvael—descend!”

The crow launched from his shoulder and the world bent.

Wind condensed into something beyond weather and the air itself bowed as the vortex descended. It struck the cavern floor like the fist of a god, and for ten seconds, everything within the radius was annihilated.

Warriors cracked.

Miners crumbled into clouds of metal fragments that the divine wind scattered across the cavern.

The sound was a roar that bypassed ears and went straight into the chest, and the shockwave rippled outward, toppling warriors outside the radius, sending miners tumbling across the stone.

And through it all, we stood untouched. The wind knew us, protected us, curled around our bodies with a gentleness that contrasted obscenely with the destruction it wrought on everything else.

Ten seconds.

The skill ended.

Lucas dropped lower, breathing hard, and the devastation was staggering. A swathe of the cavern floor was clear, scattered with broken metal. But beyond the blast radius, the army continued. Warriors reformed. Miners shuffled back into position. The Foreman’s whip cracked, a command, and reinforcements poured from the tunnels.

“Told you,” Lucas muttered, but there was grim satisfaction in her, uh, his voice. He’d cleared a path. That was enough.

“GO!” I shouted.

Katherine charged.

Her fury ignited mid-stride, the red aura erupting around her like a bonfire given will, and she hit the first surviving shield wall with the force of a battering ram. Warriors scattered. Her greatsword carved through metal in sweeping arcs, each strike leaving trails of flame that forced the survivors to choose between advancing and burning.

Lucy was right behind her, hammer swinging, and she fought like a woman who’d been holding back all day and was finally done pretending. Her strikes hit with a power that cracked stone beneath the warriors’ feet, and every impact sent shockwaves through the formations.

I ran behind them, ice spreading from my heels in every direction.

Miners who touched the frozen ground slowed, stumbled, and became obstacles for the warriors behind them.

My walls channeled the army’s advance, creating kill zones where Frozna’s arrows punched through warriors like they were made of tin.

Lucas provided Heartstorm coverage, wind degrading the warriors’ coordination, but I could see his frustration. His Heartcleave strikes bounced off heavy armor, barely scratching. “Kiss of the wind!” The curved blade hit a warrior’s shoulder and skittered off, leaving a dent where it should have left a gash. “These things are basically anvils with legs!”

“Focus on disruption!” I called. “Let Katherine and Lucy do the damage!”

“I am disrupting!” Lucas pouted, which was so, so cute. “They’re too heavy to care!”

The push toward the overseer was brutal. Warriors closed in from the flanks. Crossbow bolts rained from the catwalks, and I had to split my attention between healing, walling, and throwing up shields over Frozna’s position to keep her alive and marking.

Everytime Lucy saw Frozna mark a weakness, she was the first to smash it.

But miners swarmed our rear.

Wolfie and Lizzie held them back, a desperate rearguard of fur and talons and snarling fury, but there were too many. I sealed three tunnel entrances with ice and felt my mana protest.

Katherine reached the overseer’s platform.

The overseer was flanked by six warriors, the last dedicated guard, and they fought with the coordination of machines that had been drilling formations for longer than any human army.

Katherine didn’t care. Her fury blazed white-hot, each swing melting through shields and armor, and Lucy smashed through from the other side, hammer blows cratering metal.

“Legs!” Katherine shouted at me. “Do the legs!”

I was forty feet away, pinned down by two warriors who had identified the healer. Again. I froze one solid, ducked the other’s blade, and threw a frost lance at the overseer’s knee. The ice hit, crept, encased—

“The overseer. Left side, third plate from the top! Marked it,” Frozna called from across the cavern.

An arrow flew.

The shaft punched through exactly where she’d called, and the overseer lurched sideways, amber eye flickering. A second arrow followed, hitting the same spot, widening the breach.

Katherine saw the opening and drove her sword into the gap.

The overseer crumbled.

And the shard—

The shard was right there, exposed through the breach Frozna’s arrows had opened, and I saw it in the half-second before the overseer hit the ground. Pale blue crystal, pulsing with temporal energy, perfectly intact, sitting in its cradle directly behind the structural flaw Frozna had targeted.

Directly behind.

The arrow that had punched through the weak plate hadn’t stopped at the armor.

The temporal shard had a hairline crack running through its center, radiating from the point where an arrowhead had kissed its surface with exactly the precision that Frozna was now capable of.

I reached the overseer and pulled the shard free.

It split in my hands. Two halves, perfect and useless, the temporal energy dissipating in faint wisps.

I stared at it.

I looked up.

Frozna’s face had gone still. Not her usual calm, a different stillness, the kind that came from realizing you’d done something perfectly wrong. Her eyes were wide, and for the first time since I’d known her, she looked genuinely, uncomfortably apologetic.

“The flaw was—I aimed—” She stopped. Swallowed. “I did not see the shard behind the plate.”

Katherine’s reaction was spontaneous and glorious.

“HAHA!” She threw her head back and laughed, a full-body roar of pure vindicated delight. She pointed at Frozna with her greatsword, grinning so wide her face might split. “NOT ME! Not Katherine! NOT MY FAULT!”

“Katherine—”

“Was FROZNA!” Katherine slapped her knee, cackling. “The careful one! SHE broke the shiny thing!”

Lucy was biting her lip, trying very hard not to laugh, and failing. Lucas had turned away, shoulders shaking.

I facepalmed. Both hands, full coverage, pressing my palms against my eyes until I saw stars.

“I am sorry,” Frozna said, and she meant it. “The Angel’s Vision showed the flaw clearly. I did not think to look deeper.”

“It’s fine,” I said through my hands. “It’s fine. It was a perfect shot. Too perfect.” I lowered my hands and looked at the broken shard, then at the cavern, then at the Foreman standing on its platform, watching us with those terrible amber eyes.

“We need the Foreman’s,” I said. “No more overseers. No more shards. The Foreman has a command crystal, that’s what we need. One chance.”

The humor drained from the group. Katherine’s laughter faded. Lucy’s grin hardened into focus. Even Wolfie stopped wagging his tail.

“Same plan,” I said. “We take the Foreman.”

The Foreman seemed to agree. Its whip cracked across the cavern, the sound splitting the air like a thunderclap, and the remaining army surged forward.

I stepped past my team and faced the Foreman across the sea of advancing metal.

“Foreman Unit,” I called, my voice steady, carrying over the din of marching golems. “Thalvirea Mining Complex. I am requesting a full operational status report under Altandai Governance Code.”

The Foreman’s face turned toward me. Those amber eyes flickered, dimmed slightly, and I felt it, a ripple through the army, a half-second hiccup where warriors’ steps stuttered and miners’ picks paused mid-swing.

The lag.

“Operational status report: all systems nominal. Mining output at—”

“GO!”

Katherine and Lucy slammed into the wavering warrior line. Frozna’s arrow punched through a warrior’s neck joint. Lucas’s wind blade found a gap where a shield had dropped two degrees.

The Foreman’s eyes blazed. It switched back to combat mode, coordination snapping back into place, and the warriors recovered.

But for two seconds, we’d hit them for free.

“Again!” I shouted, already pulling the next query from thin air. “Foreman Unit, I am requesting a maintenance schedule review for all overseer units under Governance Code!”

The flicker. The lag. Warriors stumbled.

“GO!”

Katherine’s fury-wreathed blade took a warrior’s arm off at the shoulder. Lucy’s hammer cratered a shield. Frozna put an arrow through a joint that shouldn’t have been visible to human eyes.

The Foreman tried to ignore me. Its face turned away, focusing on combat coordination.

It couldn’t.

“Safety inspection request!” I called, throwing ice walls to channel warriors into kill zones. “Foreman Unit, as governance authority, I am ordering an immediate safety audit of all active personnel!”

Its face snapped back toward me. The eyes flickered. The army stuttered. It was compelled—hardwired to respond to governance queries from recognized authority channels, and I might not have its specific Council codes, but I was the sovereign authority of the territory it occupied, and its own governance architecture couldn’t ignore that entirely.

Every query forced it to allocate processing to the communication protocols, and every allocation pulled resources from combat coordination.

“Personnel roster request! Full accounting of all active units by section and designation!”

Flicker. Stutter. Two seconds, three.

“NOW!”

Frozna called her first brand. “Left knee. Repair seam, old damage. The metal is different.”

Katherine pivoted and drove her sword into the Foreman’s left knee, right where Frozna had indicated. The strike hit with fury’s fire behind it, and the metal buckled. Not much. A dent, a crack, a fracture that wouldn’t have mattered on an undamaged surface.

But on a brand, it mattered.

The Foreman staggered. Its whip lashed out toward Katherine, and I threw myself forward, ice erupting from my hands to form a barrier between them. The whip struck the wall and shattered it. God, the force, but the deflection bought Katherine time to retreat.

“Second brand!” Frozna called, her eyes reading the Foreman’s structure like a blueprint. “Right shoulder joint. The whip arm. Stress fracture in the mounting plate!”

“On it!” Lucy charged, hammer raised, timing her strike to my next query.

“Foreman Unit! Production output report, last operational quarter!”

Flicker. Lag. The whip arm drooped a degree.

Lucy’s hammer hit the branded shoulder with everything she had. The stress fracture widened. The joint ground, metal screaming, and the Foreman’s whip-strike came a half-second slower than before.

We fell into the rhythm.

I talked.

They struck.

The Foreman switched between modes, each transition costing it more, the lag growing from two seconds to four as its systems struggled with the rapid toggling.

Query.

Strike.

Query.

Strike.

A pattern that shouldn’t have worked, that no sane tactician would have planned, that only made sense if you thought of combat as a system to be exploited rather than a contest to be won.

My kind of fight.

The Foreman tried to adapt.

It attacked me directly; the whip cracking toward my position with killing intent, and I activated Sovereign’s Rime. The frost armor wove itself around me, gossamer and unyielding, and the whip struck and dispersed against the glacial ice. Frost spread up the leather, and the Foreman’s next strike came slower, the whip partially frozen.

It tried to multitask, running both protocols simultaneously, and this was when it broke down worst.

The lag stretched to six seconds, eight, the system overloading like a machine asked to perform two incompatible tasks at once. Warriors fought like they were underwater. Miners walked into walls.

Katherine timed her fury for the windows, disciplined, each strike landing on the branded knee. The joint cracked, buckled, and finally gave. The Foreman dropped to one knee, its massive frame listing, and Katherine stepped back without being told.

She could have pressed the attack. Could have thrown herself at the crippled Foreman and hacked away until something broke.

She didn’t. She stepped back and waited for the next window.

Lucy fought with a ferocity that had nothing theatrical about it.

Her pirate voice had vanished again, replaced by focused silence and hammer blows that cracked the Foreman’s armor plating with each impact. When a warrior broke through to flank her, she dispatched it with a single backhanded strike and went right back to work on the Foreman’s branded shoulder.

Frozna’s arrows found new fractures as the damage accumulated, the Angel’s Vision revealing weaknesses that opened under stress.

She repositioned brands as the fight evolved, calling targets in a steady voice.

Lucas couldn’t damage the Foreman meaningfully, and he knew it; the metal was too heavy, too dense for wind to cut.

But after the minute-and-a-half cooldown, his Heartstorm stacked with my exploit windows, and during those stretched seconds when the Foreman’s coordination dropped and the wind field pushed against disoriented warriors, the army fell apart.

He cleared the chaff that would have overwhelmed us, and he did it by fighting his worst matchup and refusing to let it matter.

The Foreman degraded.

Its speech fragmented. Status reports emerged garbled, mixing operational data with combat commands. “Mining output at—defense sector—personnel roster—threat designation—” Its face, that metal human face, twitched between expressions it didn’t understand. Neutral to confused to something almost like pain. The whip strikes grew erratic, timing and accuracy dissolving as the mode-switching lag consumed more and more of its processing.

The last warriors fell.

The miners milled aimlessly, their coordination gone, bumping into equipment and each other. The Foreman stood alone on its platform, one knee shattered, whip arm barely functional, face cycling through micro-expressions like a broken screen.

I climbed the ramp to its platform.

The Foreman’s eyes found me. They were dimmer now, the deep amber fading. Its mouth moved, but the words came out broken, fragments of protocols tangled together.

“Authorization... status... operational... I...”

I stood before it, small and tired and covered in dust and frost and the accumulated grime of a day spent fighting an army, and I looked up at its face, that human face, built to communicate with people who were gone, and felt the weight of what I was about to do.

The exploit was done. The fight was won. But the Foreman was still in there, still trying to process, still running protocols for a world that didn’t exist anymore.

I had an idea.

“Foreman Unit,” I said, and I changed my voice. Not dramatically, I wasn’t an actress. But I made it measured, composed, professional. The voice of someone who actually likes bureaucracy and never missed a deadline.

“This is Senior Artificer Kia.”

The Foreman’s eyes brightened.

Not combat-bright. Something else. Something that looked, impossibly, like recognition.

“Assigned to Thalvirea Mining Complex Decommission Protocol,” I continued, keeping my voice steady, professional, Kia’s voice as I’d heard it three times now, a woman who left breadcrumbs for people who would never follow them. “Shutdown protocol is being executed. All overseer units have been deactivated. You are the last active system.”

The Foreman’s face moved. The micro-expressions stopped cycling. It settled into something I couldn’t name, something between relief and confusion and a dignity that machines shouldn’t have been capable of.

“Senior Artificer Kia,” the Foreman said, and its voice was different now, not the formal drone of authority queries, but something softer, like a voice it hadn’t used in a very long time. “Shutdown protocol... received.”

Its eyes dimmed.

“Acknowledged,” it said. “All units... standing down.”

The whip slipped from its manipulator hand and clattered against the platform. Its arms lowered to its sides. The amber glow in its eyes faded, slowly, like a sunset sinking below the horizon, and the Foreman’s metal face settled into an expression that was, finally, at peace.

“Operational period... complete,” it whispered. “Workers... may rest.”

The light went out.

Across the cavern, every golem stopped. Miners froze mid-swing. Warriors locked in place, blades half-raised, shields still up. The ore crushers ground to a halt. The conveyors stilled. The heartbeat that had been thrumming through the mountain since we’d first approached the entrance went silent.

The absence of sound was so sudden it felt like a physical blow.

[You are level 29]

I stood on the platform in the silence and looked at the Foreman’s face. “Thank you, Kia,” I whispered.

Then I pressed my hands against the Foreman’s chest and began.

This was different from the overseers. The Foreman was massive, its chest housing built to a scale that made the overseer extractions look like picking locks on jewelry boxes. The armor was thicker, the internal architecture more complex, and the command crystal, not a temporal shard, something more fundamental, sat deep inside, nested in layers of protective mechanisms.

The frost responded as if it had been waiting for this all day.

It flowed from my hands, finding seams in the Foreman’s armor, expanding gently, separating plates millimeter by millimeter. I worked slowly, carefully, feeling each layer give way under controlled pressure.

The chest housing opened like a flower.

The command crystal was different from the temporal shards. Larger, more complex, its surface covered in etched patterns that matched the command architecture on the Foreman’s armor. It glowed with a deeper light, amber rather than blue, warm rather than cold, and it pulsed once when my fingers touched it, as if acknowledging the contact.

The clamps released.

The crystal came free.

I held it in both hands, warm and heavy, and the Foreman’s last light, a faint ember deep inside its chest that I hadn’t noticed until it was gone, winked out.

I stood on the platform, holding the crystal, looking out over the silent cavern.

Thousands of motionless golems. Hundreds of deactivated warriors. And a woman named Kia, who’d walked down here alone with her tools and her duty and a message about a spoon, and never came back.

Katherine climbed the ramp. Her fury was spent, her armor scorched, her greatsword resting on her shoulder. She stood beside me and looked out at what we’d done.

Her hand landed on my shoulder.

“Good job, Queen.”

I leaned into it, just for a second. Just long enough to feel the weight of someone solid beside me.

Then Lucy was there, dented and battered and grinning, and Lucas, landing gently, ribbons torn, looking exhausted in a way that went beyond physical, and Frozna, bow across her back, Wolfie at her side, Lizzie on her shoulder, all of them climbing up to the platform where the Foreman rested.

Five of us, standing in the heart of a dead machine, holding the last piece of what we’d come for.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

And we climbed toward the light.