Page 35 of I Ran Away to Evil
The less shiny sentry returned quickly with an entire platoon of heavily armored guards to welcome me.
CHAPTER 22
A Long-Standing War About His Buttons
Keith
Keith slaved over another golem-style automaton, this one almost three stories tall and taking up the entirety of his inner sanctum workshop. He’d managed two alligator dogs before moving back to golems.
He ignored the sudden urge to move onto making small and easy constructs. That was just his rest-deprived brain being weak.
[Warning! You have the conditionExhaustion. You require base 1x3 mana for each working.]
[You have 01:15:38 until you Pass Out fromExhaustion.]
Keith was thankful once again for his huge mana pool, which let him work to his heart’s content.
The room was large and circular, and usually had a variety of global timepieces hanging from the ceiling to keep him on track of the sun, the planets, the moons, the day, the hours, the minutes, and the flow of mana in the Dark Enchanted Forest—but all of those had needed to be moved to fit his latest creation: Gerald.
Gerald was a part of Keith’s newest line of automatons. Ones that fought.
His previous creations had all been designed to defend, but since Ria had almost blown up the golem he’d been working on that first day, he had designed more and more active models.
Take Gerald, for example; he had a level forty Strength. He could rip siege weapons in half with his bare hands. What Gerald lacked for in beauty or refinement, he made up for by being a giant thick-as-a-brick marshmallow man-golem thing.
Keith activated a spell to bar the inner sanctum. It was a new spell he’d created just in case anyunannouncedguests decided to drop in uninvited.
Henrietta was out sightseeing today, so it should be fine, but he wasn’t going to take that chance.
Then he got to work animating Gerald.
[You have attempted to use the Skill:++Construct Creation: Large.
You have a 78% chance of success with a +10% modifier from Skill:Mastery 4.]
The loading screen in his activity log took an hour before it finished. He couldn’t wait until he was high-enough level that there were no more “chance of success” rates.
[You have succeeded. Please name yourAutomaton.]
“Gerald.”
[Automaton: Geraldis now able to understand basicCommands. Please give your first command.]
“Go to the clearing outside the West Gate and wait for my next [Command].”
[Geraldhas received yourCommand.]
Keith kept a mental note of the number of characters in his [Commands] to ensure he stayed under the limit. A hundred and forty seemed like such an arbitrary limit, but such were the rules of magic.
After the workshop was cleaned up, and his various magical paraphernalia returned to its rightful place, Keith summoned Tulith. She had letters for him.
The first was from the royal capital of Drendil.
Henri,
We have sent so many letters, and you haven’t replied even once. Theimproprietyto not reply to your own mother! I have raised you since you were a child, fed you, and provided every opportunity, and you don’t have the common decency to show proper respect.
You are naive Henri, and you never make the right choices. No one is going to listen to someone who isn’t able to complete basic tasks. Your father and I are incredibly disappointed in you. I feel like a failure as a mother. Youhaven’t even managed to kill Monfort in a month under the same roof. You could at least escape and come home. Don’t tell me that you can’t break the bars with that disgusting sixty Strength of yours.
