Bone Golem

Angie didn't move. Most of what colored her will now was confusion. "You want me to pray to you once a week and give you spare food when I want something?" That definitely wasn't the reaction I was expecting. "How could you be so confident you'll win, anyways? You heard Lady Grace. They're not scared of ogres."

Worship was another thing that humans got wrong, apparently. "I think you'll find my ogres are different from what they expect." Entirely true. In their natural state, no ogre could threaten the city. My ogres weren't the natural state, though. The only way they weren't utterly superior was strength. "As for your food, I don't need it. Nor do I want prayers. Worship is more of a deal. I take a few pieces of your soul and you promise not to work against me sealed with a rune. It won't affect your ability to use magic. I'll teach you some as well." As powerful as my ogres were, it would be a long arduous process to teach them magic. It would be better to use humans or other creatures that started out more capable. There was a risk of them already having bad habits, but training the ogres from scratch was hardly a process without risk of error. To fully utilize humans I'd need to see if their brood construct could work as well, but I didn't see a reason it wouldn't. Humans weren't that different from goblins, were they?

Angie immediately sat up. "You'll teach me magic? I don't care about the rest, let's do it! Now!" expectation had blown away her exhaustion. She was so much better at that than the ogres were.

This would be so much easier with someone capable of magic. I still needed a way to show the rune without making it, though. I started moving in this direction with one of my creeps. I'd had the other start searching out other creeps to hunt down. Now that I had a way of figuring out the locations I needed a way to keep them from being broken by either my invasion or crossfire with the defenders. "I'm going to use your finger to trace the rune in the air. You need to power it."

She nodded and sat up with a hand out. She waited for a much longer time than an ogre would have. "Well…um…are you going to do it?" I could have moved her hand with my will alone but that would have taken a lot of energy and time.

It was faster to just wait for a puppet. "A body will arrive soon. How did you think I was going to move your hand?" embarrassment and confusion swept through her will.

"You don't have a spell for that? Isn't it a simple air manipulation spell? It's just a rune, right? That's the easiest part of a spell." She was doubting my prowess? Doing it like she was describing would be impossibly difficult, though. Did humans have such malleable circuits?

Now that I thought of it…I could make an air nexus. Maybe. It felt like there was a nexus-type of force already applied to the air, though. It was the simple will that suffused the mana that permeated the air, the earth as well. It felt dangerous to test the waters if there was an entity that had already dominated the air that I would be provoking by trying to claim some of it.

While I'd been considering the prospect of a couple other forms of nexus circuit my creep had arrived. Angie wasn't pleased. "This attempted rapist is your ally?" She was surprised?

"You left the body. Why wouldn't I take it?" Angie was confused for a moment before she started to understand. Then disgust ripped through her will followed by hesitation and more disgust. That disgust amplified by a lot when the creep grabbed her hand and started moving it in the air. She wouldn't relax, though. Her elbow was straight and she was looking at her hand with a mixture of rage and revulsion. "Relax your elbow. I need to draw the rune."

"Why do I have to get closer to the corpse? It stinks. It's a dead thing. And a rapist. It doesn't smell dead, though. Why doesn't it smell dead?" was she really asking that? He had been dead for less than an hour.

Her hesitation was really starting to irritate me. I didn't bother asking again and had the creep drag her hand into the right shape. After being pulled back and forth a couple of times, she didn't complain and just relaxed her arm. Wonder and confusion had started to erode her disgust, which was interesting. Worship was a sixty four faced rune and as such very complex, but her reaction was a bit too strong for that.

"What type of spell requires such a rune? It isn't even in the same class…so beautiful." Glrt's reaction had been similar, but she actually wrote spells. How could she be so enamored? It was derivative of the will rune, which was the most perfect rune, but even then her reaction was too strong. "Nobody could write this one down."

All strange thoughts were driven from her when the rune activated. Her screech put all of the goblins combined to shame. It made sense, though. Her will-core was more refined than the goblins had been. She even had a circuit built inside, though it was horribly basic. It was also slightly misshapen.

Now that I had access to her will I considered giving her a true circuit. Her circuit was so simple I could easily alter it into a true circuit. It still would be much weaker than mine, as the core rune was significantly weaker, but as she was she'd be utterly useless after I learned about the city. Now was the best time to alter her circuit, as once she stabilized it would be much riskier to alter the shape again.

Nothing risked nothing gained. I entered her will-core, feeling a slight feeling of rejection as it had yet to finish the process of becoming mine. I had to cause a bit of damage, but it would be better in the long run to do it now. I would have to break the will-core to reshape the circuit anyway, the best time to break something without hurting it was when it was already broken and being put back together by an external force that rejected flaws in the reconstruction. Worship was a powerful rune.

Her screaming became even more pronounced once I started altering the structure of her circuit. It was amazing, the pace at which she pulled air in and shoved it back out again. It was enough of an issue that I swept through her will to find the exhaustion and shoved it a bit with my own will, empowering it to overwhelm other feelings. Her screaming lessened but didn't stop. That was enough, though. Multiple conflicting aspects of will colliding within her caused much weaker turbulence in her will-core than a concentrated single aspect manifesting itself more powerfully than she could handle.

Angie's rune was horrible, but it had much more potential than it had before I'd fixed it. She'd even lacked a will-type rune to make sure she wouldn't be bound to her body when she advanced far enough. She also lacked a means of gathering and storing mana, but those runes could be embedded into her body easily enough later. The shape was also fixed, so she didn't leak mana anymore.

The way it worked gave me a few ideas for Trgl, though, so it definitely wasn't a waste. I'd still wait until I got access to all the knowledge the humans of this city had to offer before I gave her a true circuit, though.

While I waited for Angie to wake up after falling asleep immediately after the process completed I explored the last material I hadn't built a construct for yet. The creep quivered involuntarily as I started trying to figure out the runes for his brain. I was also trying to find the correct way to reshape the circuits in my ogres to work on the creep, but the brain was much more interesting to me. It was the opposite of all other materials I'd explored before. With everything else, every rune was difficult to find. In the brain it was difficult to make any runes because every flow of intent seemed to start an entirely different rune.

The complexity enthralled me for the entirety of Angie's sleep. I hadn't even managed to learn a single rune by the time she was looking around the room in confusion and wonder. "Whatever that worship stuff was…you undersold it by a huge margin." Had I? No, she was linking the improvement of her will circuit into a true circuit and the worship into a single event.

It was a little irritating that she would mistake the brilliance of my work with the effect of worship. "I altered the spell in your soul. That's probably what you're thinking of. The one you were using was pathetic. Even my ogres have better ones in their souls. At least now you're superior to them." Some of them. The l.u.s.t-based ones had enough problems that I put them a rank lower than hers despite being of a higher complexity and capability. They did serve their purpose, though, so maybe I was being unfair.