The Runesmith

Roland looked at the cleansed golem core in his hand while grumbling. The item had been cleaned of any remains of the monster that it had belonged to. Normally this would be a moment to cheer but the number of shattered cores that ended up in the dumpster still made his head hurt.

Several weeks had passed ever since he received the basic books on golem creation from the cat Professor. They introduced him to some golem designs that he could use and explained the pros and cons of them.

As this was his very first iteration he would need to go for the most basic model. There were a few designs that he could go with but he chose a simple one.

The golem’s base would be shaped like a rectangle. From the sides of it, he would insert four legs that would be used to give it motion. The first basic quadruped design was a good starting point as he wouldn’t need to worry that much about the balance.

Getting a golem to have a human shape was not such an easy task. The biggest problem was the balance of parts. One badly fashioned part could make the whole creation be unable to move and stumble all over the place.

The human body went through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. It was not easy to just recreate the joints in metallic form. Even then, if the program that the golem was running on was buggy the whole thing would just not work.

Thus for his first try, he decided to make something that didn’t need as much attention to detail. Animals that run on four legs had less trouble with balancing themselves. He also had a good test subject to work with, his trusty ruby wolf, Agni.

While Roland did intend to try mimicking a wolves walking pattern this first prototype would be more similar to a small spider. Instead of eight legs, it would have four now as a similar basic golem model was presented in one of the books he received.

It was quite astonishing how these golems worked. At first, he thought they would be similar to robots but they weren’t quite as complex. At least not with their outer shell. While robots required complex joint design and a lot of movable parts to make them work it wasn’t the same for golems.

For instance, a knee joint could require a separate motor to be mounted on the side. It could also use pressure pumps, springs, and all sorts of other solutions. With runes, on the other hand, magic was the driving factor.

The magic could generate all the push and pull forces that joints needed. This also didn’t require separate small motors or valves of any kind. The golem just needed one power source on its body along with the golem core.

Thanks to this fact he didn’t need to worry as much about the design. For his first spider-type golem he would use simple joints with some constrained movement.

The first iteration would have legs composed of three parts. They would start out by being connected to the main body and to the main joint. This joint would have limited back and forth movement that wouldn’t allow it to bend downwards.

To it, he would attach the middle part of the leg which would have the reverse type of movement. This would allow it to somewhat be able to squat down to the ground. The last part would have the same movement joint as the previous one. This would be the foot portion that would actually be making contact with the ground.

With all four spider-like legs connected to the main body, the golem should be able to somewhat move itself around. By moving the joints that were connected to the main body part it should even be able to turn itself around.

The last important part of this golem would be the ‘head’. This would be the part with all the golem’s sensors that it required to see the world. This was a part that he had already worked on before and created his mapping device with.

Making his golem identify him as its master wouldn’t be hard. Just as he thought it over before he would create additional items that would be recognized by his golems. Luckily in the books, this was all discussed and the craftsman could imprint their magical signature onto their creations.

This was similar to a fingerprint and was hard to copy by others. Hard but not impossible, there of course were ways to take over golems that didn’t belong to the creator. This was not an easy task to perform while the golem was active and defending itself.

Thus the only real way of doing it was after it was disabled. An easy way to go around this would be when a person knew the creator's magical fingerprint or had access to the golem’s key.

These magical automatons could be given to other people. The craftsman just needed to imprint them as the true master. Even then, the person fashioning this golem mostly put a backdoor in for themselves. No one wanted their own creations to be used against them, even less when they were giant war machines.

“Here Boss, the last one, just like you wanted it… but are you sure this is what you wanted?”

Bernir was to the side bringing in the golem’s legs. With the help of his assistant, he could focus more on the runes than the basic skeleton for his new creation. With all of these parts here he would just need to ‘weld’ them together and then apply the runes.

With a good enough diagram and a splendid helper in Bernir it wasn’t much of an effort to get the golem’s body into place. The prototype wasn’t that big with its chassis being about the size of a modern laptop.

The golem’s main body had special attachments for the legs which were just screwed into place. With time these hastily produced joints would start to loosen up. When that time came any golem would need a varied amount of repairs. Only when using superior materials could a creation like this work for years and not fall apart.

When all the parts were put together the creation looked like some kind of four-legged creature with a silly square-shaped head. The main ‘camera’ in this golem was just a small square box with a brown matt gem.

This was not a mana stone, it was a crystallized mineral called the Levin crystal. It could be polished down to form a nice-looking orb and came in various shapes and sizes. It was one of many other various materials used for magic-related items.

A runesmith was able to inscribe light runic inscriptions in these types of crystals. The crystal was needed as a sort of lens that let light in. Through it, the golem would be able to see and distinguish between targets.

This was not the only way for his contraption to distinguish between targets but it was one that he was more familiar with. He could mimic his mapping device that he previously inscribed onto a ball of metal.

This type of sensor was more of an add-on but it could not replace a true one that allowed the golem to actually see. Without the eyes the golem would be only able to see the general area it was in and the spot its targets were in.

The amount of movement it would be able to react to would be also very limited. The map worked at a large delay that could only be brought down to one second per update. This made the feature good for a wide area scan but not for close-quarters combat.

Through working with the golem cores his fine mana skills had been upgraded as well so Roland didn’t fear this crystal bursting in his face.

“Well then Boss, I’ll leave you to it!”

Bernir helped out with the initial assembly but Roland would be doing all of the rest himself. The initial rune craft procedures were done by him on the separate parts while Bernir was working on them.

This was one of the first times that he had worked on so many separate parts. This project required a lot of planning and mapping out. All of the legs needed to be inscribed with runes before the assembly.

After all of the parts were brought together it would be quite difficult to proceed from there. He would not be able to heat up the whole golem to make it easier for himself out of fear of something getting broken. Using his hammer on the parts when they were all connected together was also out of the question.

He could attempt a hands-on approach by forcing the runes in through his hands. This would take some time but was possible if he managed to increase his limits further. Just as his level went up, so did his stats grow but with how harder runecrafting was on the better materials Roland expected to stick to his hammering for quite some time.

This meant that with this one he just needed to use the hard method of doing it by hand on just the spots that connected to the premade chassis. Ethereal pathways for the joints were a must as it was a requirement for any moving parts.

With this being Roland’s first time he was meticulous. The spots where the joints were connected were touched in a gentle fashion and his mana flowed in at a slow pace. Sweat covered his forehead as he worked.

Compared to the previous years his skills had increased exponentially. Thanks to this it didn’t take him that long to complete this part of the project and in only a few hours he had everything fused together.

The debugging skill was a godsend at moments like this. With only one glance he could tell if there were any mistakes made. Even though he saw a few red lines here and there it seemed that the whole process was a success. Now came the last phase of the plan, giving his creation a proper power source.

While he would be happy to just plug it into his runic generator this was not a possibility yet. Instead, he used this world's equivalent which was Elokin’s crystals. The one that he managed to receive from his dungeon expedition would finally see its use.

This as everything else had already been pre-arranged. While the golem core was right in the middle of the rectangular body the small compartment for the Elokin’s crystal was right below it.

After opening a little latch he just slid the crystal in. This power source was quite pure as it was able to retain a solid form. With time it would start to turn to liquid which after a while would be burned up and vanish.

The inside of this little square compartment was fitted out with special siphoning runes. The power source didn’t need to be placed in any kind of socket as the runes would just suck the mana away by themselves.

As with all of his previous creations Roland didn’t shy away from adding a couple of mana stones to lower the power consumption. Only after he had worked the kinks out of this prototype would he attempt making it from aether versions of deep steel.

Then maybe he could move up to more exotic metals that could produce a real powerful golem that could go toe to toe with high tier 2 monsters or even tier 3 ones. While the creations of Runesmiths were mostly slow, they did possess an uncanny defensive capability.

Even strong monsters would find it hard to do any damage to a golem’s metallic body. Without a noticeable weak spot that was a golem core it was quite hard to take one out. This also made ones created by human or dwarven hands much better. The craftsmen could hide the core deep inside of the metallic body which would make it extremely difficult to battle such a metallic behemoth.

“Finally it’s time…”

Roland swallowed his own saliva hard as he completed his checks. All the runes looked to be in order and the inside software had been implemented from the books. In theory, this would be enough to activate it.

Before going through with it he looked back onto his notes. After double and triple-checking everything he finally decided to go through with it.

The activation process was quite easy. There were a few ways a craftsman could go about it. One was by just activating it by giving the runic structure a jolt with their own mana. Such an activation would just place the golem into a perpetual ‘on’ state. The only way of shutting it down would be by touching it again to turn it off.

This was fine when working with a prototype like this but would not work if he wanted to have it function for other people. Normally a craftsman would first create a remote item that they used as a medium so that they would not need to do everything by touch. This would also save them from having to run after the golem if it ever ran into some kind of system error.

Roland was in a somewhat rush with this one, so he decided to just go with the hands-on approach. His hand was placed on the golem’s main body and it started to glow. The runic structures lit up in a bright blue light before settling down.

The golem was down on the ground and had some space to move in. For the first test, he decided to use a closed environment. If this thing went berserk and started causing chaos he could contain it easily here.

The gem that represented his creation’s eye glowed for a moment before settling back into its brownish color. The light show soon stopped and Roland’s facial expression went through a few stages before it settled down on a frown.

“Did it fail?”

But the moment he asked he heard a familiar sound which was followed by a popup screen.

Roland grasped his forehead as he could feel a surge of information getting shoved in there. This was a bit similar to how he used to receive knowledge about how to cast certain spells when he was still training his mage class.

While the simple spells like mana bolt didn’t give him much trouble this injection felt a lot worse. After it was done he could feel that he already knew a lot more about his new creation than he did a few seconds ago.

The title was quite grand as it had the ‘Architect’ part to it. Roland deduced that this might have been some higher title that he achieved due to his using the debugging skill on the golem designs from the books he was lent. It seemed that by altering a few things made him more of a designer and the golem’s creator in one fell swoop.

While he was confused why the golem was not working at first, with the title giving him some aid he realized what the problem was. The golem was in working order but it needed outside input to make it function.

It was as if he managed to turn on the pc but he didn’t go into the operating system just yet. Thus while stretching out his hand towards his creation he finally gave it a simple order.

“Golem… stand up!”

The little gem eye of this small automaton shone for a moment before the legs started rattling around. It looked a bit strange for a moment but soon the insect-like legs started moving around and the golem rose up slightly from the ground.

“Golem… move one step to the right…”

The small contraption creaked a little bit but it managed to slowly move its legs in such a way that they carried it to the side. Even though Roland was not responsible for the runic program running these calculations he was quite fascinated that his newest creation was working.

A smile appeared on his face as he clutched his fist in victory. The title was there and it was working, his preparations that took him months to plan finally bore fruit.

“Huh… wait what’s that smell?”

His little victory pose was brought to a stop as he noticed that something was off. He looked at the small golem and noticed that a certain part was starting to glow orange.

“The hell?”

Bernir almost fell down from a chair as he heard a loud sound of something exploding. He looked to Agni for a moment before both of them sprinted to Roland’s workshop.

“Boss, are you all right?”

“Bernir?... yeah I’m fine. When I try to use untested minerals as power sources from the dungeon next time… please kick me.”

Roland was spotted on the ground with a lot of dirt on his face. The golem’s parts were scattered around the whole area and Bernir could not hide his amusement.