Caladin’s Climb—Part 36 (Patreon)

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          In the state of heightened cognition granted to him by the crown, Caladin could even reason why he was dying while wearing it. All it took was a modification to the Torture spell to allow him to be able to feel damage that was accruing in his brain. What he found was that the blood vessels inside it were being overtaxed beyond their breaking point trying to feed him the oxygen he needed to keep thinking so fast. The finer capillaries in his nose had already burst due to the increased pressure, creating a rivulet of blood down his face. The same would start to happen in his brain soon if he didn’t remove the crown. That would cause irreversible damage, which would be unacceptable.

          First priority: prevent damage. Caladin cast a regeneration spell on his brain which could heal the smaller tears in the vessels as they formed, preventing them from cascading. He focused on the pain of bursting blood vessels he could feel in his brain, and how the rate of increase had slowed. Some quick math told him in another 12.347 minutes the damage would reach a level he could no longer heal. He would need to remove the crown before then. 12 minutes and 20 seconds was all he had. Now 19 seconds. He couldn’t waste a single one.

          Caladin looked at King Philipus. He was moving in slow motion. Correction. He was moving at normal speed. It was Caladin’s mind that was processing at a faster rate. He would need to make sure to talk in slow motion to be understood. An annoying waste of his limited time. What information did he need to communicate with his king? None. King Philipus Haedril was not trustworthy. Fact: he had tricked Caladin into fighting as his champion while using his family as collateral. He coveted Caladin’s power. He desired a more powerful Pyroclastic Destruction wand. How far did his treachery extend?

          Caladin reviewed the evidentiary record of his memories, each of them coming to him with ease, all information contained being understood instantly. Philipus had demonstrated affection for his family and remorse at the massacre his men had conducted. But what did his actions say? He’d spent time with them. He’d ordered his men to construct basic shelters for them. Those had been done with geomancy. Likely the work of one or two geomancers in an afternoon. A prudent investment, but it was real action. Beyond that? The village had become pawns which he used to convince Caladin he had honor and integrity. He wanted a champion.

          Fact: the negotiations with Queen Rusalia likely pre-dated Caladin’s arrival to Fort Sumnter. Perhaps Haedril really cared, but his actions were also consistent with someone looking for a champion to send to a battle he’d already been lining up. Thinking cynically, Caladin realized an argument could be made that Philipus was only optimizing the productivity of his slaves. If they believed he’d “saved” them they’d work more diligently, but were they any freer than when they’d fled Eldesia if their only option was to huddle in Haedenia? Runaway slaves from a rival nation had nowhere to go. Logically, he couldn’t determine the king’s true feelings and intentions based on either his words or his actions. He needed to investigate deeper to find out how genuine Philipus Haedril’s affection for his family were.

          Caladin considered suggesting the use of blood magic. If Philipus agreed to sacrifice humans, then it would mean he didn’t truly care about them. Except he would be able to justify the extreme action due to extreme circumstances. It wouldn’t be proof of anything. Nothing the king said could be irrefutable proof. If Caladin wanted proof, he needed to look into the king’s mind directly. That was the only way. It wasn’t subtle, but once he was inside the king’s mind, he could erase the memory of his attack and leave him none the wiser.

          All magic bent to Caladin’s will. Casting the requisite spells was a simple matter. Actually reading the king’s thoughts, though? That turned out not to be so simple. Caladin cast his first cerebromancy spell targeted at the king’s mind and was stunned when not only was he deflected, but Philipus became aware of his attack. He struck back with a powerful mental assault of his own, though it wasn’t dexterous enough to slip through Caladin’s Ward Net. No hand gestures. No incantations. He was a master of cerebromancy. Interesting. Caladin increased the pressure of his assault, knowing the limits of his mana endurance almost certainly surpassed the king’s even if he was surrounding his mind in a solid ward. The king stumbled and fell to his knees, hands on his temples.

          “C-Caladin,” King Philipus grunted. “Someone… is attacking… my mind! Do something!” Caladin wasn’t sure if the words were said out of ignorance for the source of his mental attacker, or if he was hoping to appeal to Caladin’s mercy. He felt a powerful wave of emotion strike him: regret for having betrayed his king, despair for the damage this would do to their relationship, and empathetic pain for what his king must be feeling. Caladin examined each of them as they came and let them pass over him like water sliding down his shoulders to the ground. His crown gave him mastery of every human emotion at the same time. New ones artificially injected as part of a subtle mental assault were interesting, but didn’t threaten to influence his actions. Caladin filtered his sight with a new custom spell that would take in the invisible threads of cerebromancy and convert them into something he could see. What he found was that Philipus was pulsing out his counter-attack in all directions. It would have been pointless to do that if he was aware of who was attacking him, so it seemed he truly did not yet know that Caladin was behind the attack on his mind.

          “My skill in cerebromancy is limited,” Caladin told the king. “What do you want me to do?”

          “Mental… envelope. Force them to go… through you first,” King Philipus cried in a strained voice. An interesting strategy. He could have used it to pull in any amateur cerebromancer to help defend his mind from an outside attacker.

          “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Caladin said. He walked up to the collapsed king and grabbed his head, looking him directly in the eyes. “Because I am the one attacking you.” Haedril’s eyes went wide with shock. Between the strengthened connection Caladin’s physical contact granted and the surprise his words evoked; Caladin was able to crack the final layer of wards around the king’s mind. All his secrets were laid bare.

          The first thing Caladin did was seize control of his body. Two guards burst into the room, asking what the commotion they heard was about. “It was nothing!” Philipus shouted at them through Caladin’s control. “Get back to your posts and don’t interrupt us again. If I need you, I will call for you.” The guards apologized and backed out of the room. Caladin bolted the door behind them just in case they decided to disobey that order.

          When they were alone again, Caladin delved through the king’s memories. He’d been unsure what he would find, but his discoveries completely vindicated the methods he’d taken to get to the baseline truth about who his king really was as a person. He learned of the king’s order to execute any witnesses that were encountered while establishing their network of towers. The order that had resulted in his family’s slaughter had come from Philipus. Not only had the general that he’d publicly executed been guilty only of following orders, but it seemed he’d used his mastery of cerebromancy to copy the man’s tactical knowledge into the general that had replaced him. So coldly calculating.

          It only got worse from there. The survivors of the massacre had only been spared so they could be taken as slaves. The women had all been raped. Everyone else put to work. The children taken from their parents. He’d even allowed his soldiers to keep a few of their favorite women to pass around the barracks until they grew tired of using them. He saw it only as a useful reward to keep his men loyal, even if it wasn’t something he personally indulged in. Only the protective blanket of Belorian’s Crown prevented Caladin from halting his spell work to vomit in horror. As it was, he examined the emotions and let them pass over him.

          Philipus hadn’t moved to cover up his atrocities until after word got to him about Caladin and his connection to the slaves he’d taken. He’d developed a plan to use them to manipulate Caladin. He collected all the slaves from wherever they’d been taken, then destroyed the memories of their mistreatment with meticulous visceramancy so as not to leave a magical trace for Caladin to detect. He then reenacted their rescue and kind treatment with none of them the wiser. It was interesting that Philipus had known not to create false memories. He’d made sure they all saw a real execution and apology, were introduced to a real village, and really got to spend time with him walking among them with humility. It showed that he had experience as a cerebromancer and knew what was possible. From that point on, he put on a show that would gain their loyalty. To him, they were only a means to control Caladin’s actions. To turn a powerful enemy into a powerful ally. He would say anything to get the results he desired. And what he desired was nothing less than control of the world. He planned to join Fayse’s council and use his mastery of cerebromancy to manipulate the other nations into always believing that it was Haedenia’s turn to make a wish, until eventually he could use those wishes to absorb the other nations.

          The only reason Philipus had not attempted to dominate Caladin’s mind was that he was afraid he was not up to the task. He believed Caladin to be a genuine archmage. He was content to manipulate his actions indirectly for the time being. But that did not mean he did not have a plan ready in case Caladin became obstinate. The belt he had been gifted, for example, gave Philipus a means to track him and easier access to his mind if he ever tried to mentally assault him while he was wearing it.

          Philipus was a parasite. A master manipulator who got others to do his bidding for him while always coming off as friendly. Caladin truly hadn’t suspected he was as evil as he really was… But that was fine. It could be fixed. Caladin took great pleasure in over-writing the king’s personality to better match the public persona he pretended to be. He would make him real. He would care about his people; he would want peace and justice. He would truly despise war and see it only as a necessary tool to be avoided whenever possible. In short, Caladin would make the man into a completely different person. He had the understanding of both visceramancy and cerebromancy to make the changes permanent. Runes were carved into the inside of his skull to continually refresh the personality enchantments with his own body’s mana. Normally, even the most potent cerebromancy enchantments would fade with time, but not any longer.

          Caladin had to hurry the complex spell work along to finish before his time with the crown came to an end. He’d known how much time he’d have before the brain damage would catch up to him, but he hadn’t realized how painful flirting with such limits would be. His head felt like it was on fire by the time he finished with Philipus. Not outside, but inside, where there was nothing he could do to sate it. The regeneration was slowly losing its battle with the accumulating damage as vessels in his brain split open, clotted, were repaired, got clogged, were repaired again… and again… and again. The walls of his veins were getting thinner each time they were repaired, causing them to break faster and more catastrophically. The mana involved corroding everything and causing damage itself which needed even more mana to repair. It was a feedback loop that ended with Caladin’s death. He should have had dozens of seizures. He should have been catatonic. Instead, he was straining to hold onto consciousness through gritted teeth and sheer determination. Blood leaked from his nose, his mouth, his eyes, his ears. Just… a little more. He had Philipus just how he wanted him, but he’d done nothing to address the golem still pounding away at their defenses. He knew he needed to remove the crown and spend the better part of two weeks in recovery, but if he didn’t figure out a solution to their siege, it would all be for nothing. With the mere seconds he had left, he needed the impossible: a spell that could destroy adamantium.

          No. It wasn’t impossible. That was just something he’d believed before. Andrea and her entire city were either liars or fools to not have figured it out. Maybe it was all bluster. Maybe the mages of Tel’Andrid already knew the secret to destroy adamantium. It was so obvious, after all. There was a subset of ferromancy favored by the dwarves that was called metallurgy. Combining that with luminomancy would do it. Metallurgy was able to work on metals directly, like geomancy did with stone. All Caladin had to do was design a combination spell that used luminomancy, chronomancy and metallurgy in concert to infiltrate the time dilated defenses and counteract the enchantments holding the adamantium together to convert it back to gold. The only hard part was that he needed to know how the initial enchantments were made to counteract them. But, as he already knew the basic theory behind adamantium, it was simple to reverse engineer his own version and use it as a baseline to create the countermeasure. And all in the seconds he had left.

          Okay… maybe it wasn’t that simple.

          With the last moments he could endure before removing the crown, Caladin inscribed several scrolls with his adamantium-melting spell and a copy of the spell to create adamantium in the first place. Only when that was done did he take the crown off.

          “Tuan save you!” King Philipus yelled as Caladin came back to himself. “Are you okay, boy?”

          Caladin looked down at his hands. There was blood on them. He didn’t know why. He was holding Belorian’s Crown and had the worst headache of his life. His adrenaline was racing for some reason and… was that more blood? He brought a hand up to his nose and found blood dripping from it at a steady pace. It had already made a mess of the front of his shirt. He tried to wipe it away with a spell, but his mind was in a heavy fog and he couldn’t remember how to do that. There seemed to be some kind of spell working on his head, which was slowly reducing his headache. He had distant, dream-like memories of the events from the last few minutes. He tried to grab one, but it faded from his grasp, leaving only a vague impression of King Philipus being a bad man. No. That didn’t make sense. Why would he remember something like that? The last solid memory Caladin had was deciding to put on Belorian’s Crown.

          “I think I’ll be fine,” Caladin told the worrying king. “I just need a minute.”

          King Philipus stepped forward and used the pristine sleeve of his robe to dab away the blood dripping from Caladin’s face. Caladin didn’t think he’d ever seen the king’s robes even get a single speck of dirt on them before. He seemed… different. His face was etched with concern. “How did this happen?” he asked gently. “Your nose, your eyes. There’s so much blood, Cally!” Something returned to Caladin’s memories as he considered his king’s behavior. He remembered placing some kind of compulsion on the king’s mind. He’d… changed him. He wasn’t sure why he would have done that. Maybe it would return to him in time. As his headache lessened it was getting easier to think. The general gist of what happened while he was wearing the crown was coming back to him, even if he couldn’t understand his own decision-making process or what he was thinking at the time.

          “You didn’t see what happened?” Caladin asked.

          “Of course not! I was kneeling on the ground to pray for victory when I looked up and saw you gushing blood. You weren’t experimenting with dangerous magic again, were you? You mustn’t push yourself too hard. The siege is not worth your life. There is still time for us to evacuate the castle if we need to.”

          “Won’t the enemies destroy us once we’re not behind our wards?” Caladin asked. “That’s absurd. It would be much better to just destroy the golem.”

          “Not if the people we’re trying to protect get killed in the process. If I throw myself at the mercy of our enemies, I’m convinced they might take me and spare the rest of you. It would be better to offer this as a term of surrender before the wards fall.”

          “Don’t be so quick to martyr yourself,” Caladin told his king. He really seemed like he was acting different than usual. There’d always been an implication before that he cared for his people, but this was the first time Caladin had heard him actually offering to sacrifice himself for them. Whatever Caladin had done to him while under the influence of the crown was going to be hard for others not to notice if he started volunteering to die for them. “I have a plan to deal with the golem,” Caladin assured him, even though it was still only a foggy outline at best. “I just need a few minutes to recover. And mana. I’m going to need lots of mana.”

          The king was glad to hear Caladin was planning to save everyone and encouraged him to do all he could. Caladin left him in his study to get himself some mana. For some reason quite a few of the mana bars on his belts had gone dark, so he’d need to recharge. Truthfully, he wasn’t even sure if limiting himself to what his belts could hold would be enough, but it was a place to start. He could always do a trial run and then calculate how much mana he’d need for a second attempt to be successful.

          Nobody stopped Caladin from marching into the throne room, then following the passage beneath the throne to the mana well that fed the castle’s wards. In was dark in the lower cavern, which was odd since normally the well provided enough light to see by. It seemed the reason for this was that none of the mana from the well was reaching the surface once it passed through the series of grates that fed the castle. There was no mana to spare for Caladin’s personal supply. Not a drop. He returned to the throne room, then followed the sounds of the assault outside to get a better idea of how much time they had. The intermittent whump of projectiles crashing against the barriers was much louder outside. He found that vocomancer that ran errands for Philipus out there talking to one of the military officers. As he approached them it sounded to Caladin like they were discussing the feasibility of teleporting in reinforcements from their network of mage towers.

          “Don’t bother,” Caladin told the both of them. “A few soldiers won’t make a difference against this enemy. It cannot be harmed by traditional magic. I have a spell that can hurt it. I just need mana. Galeonis, can you help? I need transportation to the strongest mana well we have.”

          “That would be this one,” Galeonis said. “But why would you need my help anyway? You’re the archmage. Not me.”

          “You know the network better than me. I know Sumnter’s well is the best one we have. I want to know which is the next biggest.”

          “I am flattered, of course,” Galeonis replied. “But like I was trying to tell Commander Haerris here, we can’t use the network right now. The new wards protecting the castle don’t have exceptions built in for vocomancy. No enemies can get in, but we can’t get out either.”

          “I know that, I designed those wards,” Caladin told the vocomancer. “Leaving exceptions in your wards is far more exploitable than any of you realize. I need to gather some mana, though, so we’ll just have to shut down the wards long enough for me to get out. Do you know how to do that? I wasn’t involved in the castle’s infrastructure design.”

          “I don’t have the permissions to do that,” Galeonis said.

          “I do,” Commander Haerris said. “But is that really wise?”

          “It is required,” Caladin said. “Wisdom doesn’t play into it. If I want to do battle with that giant golem, I need mana and everything we have in here is being used on those wards.” He held up a finger and looked to the side at the flash of light as the next crystal spear slammed into the castle’s protective dome. “It won’t be hard. Hear that? It’s firing at a constant pace. Just flicker it on and off between blasts. I can teleport out in an instant.” Even as he described the plan Caladin realized that the necessity of turning off all the wards when the defenders needed only one taken down was probably a weakness in the design he’d have to try fixing in a future version of the spell.

          “What about you, sir?” the commander asked. “Will you not be stuck out there with that thing? How will you get back in?”

          “Don’t worry about that,” Caladin said. “When I come back, I’ll stay outside the dome.”

          “But you’ll be stuck out there with it!” Galeonis interjected.

          Caladin chuckled. “No, I think you’ll find it’s going to be the other way around. I’m planning to destroy that thing.”

          “As you say,” Commander Haerris said. “I will give the order.”

          “I want you to send me to the best tower in our network,” Caladin told Galeonis.

          “That would be tower seventeen,” Galeonis said. “We call it the Deadwood tower since nothing ever happens out that way and it’s in the middle of a forest. No blink wells on the leylines, though, so it’s nice and strong.”

          “Sure. Whatever you think is best,” Caladin agreed. “Just be ready to teleport me the moment the ward goes down.”

          Caladin waited with bated breath while the preparations were made. Three more attacks struck the barrier while they waited. The moment the third attack struck, and before the crystal dust could even settle on the ground, the ward dropped. Even standing in the courtyard on the backside of the castle, Caladin could see the metal golem towering over the forest. When it saw the dome drop, its other arm shot up to its side and blasted out a crystal. He should have realized! It had only been attacking all this time with one arm. It had probably been keeping the other ready in case something happened, so it could respond instantly. Such an obvious strategy and Caladin had just assumed the dwarves weren’t that clever. He didn’t get a chance to see if the wards were raised again in time to block the attack before Galeonis sent him away in a pop of displaced air.

          Caladin appeared in a small wizard tower. The design was identical to the one he had assaulted so many weeks ago. A bored eldrin guard and four undead soldiers were waiting next to the teleportation circle when he appeared. The guard quickly stood at attention and gave Caladin a salute. “Mr. Caladin, sir! I was not expecting any visitors. All our undead are in good condition and we are not low on Repair scrolls at the moment. Are you expecting an attack?”

          “One is already underway,” Caladin told the soldier. The soldier turned to glance out the nearest window. “Not here,” Caladin clarified. “Fort Sumnter. I came here to recharge my mana. The mana well at the fortress can’t spare anything while it’s being sieged.”

          “Sieged? Should I be concerned?” the soldier asked. “Do they need reinforcements? There are only three of us here, but we have more undead than we need. We’ve never even been attacked. They call this tower the Dead—”

          “Deadwood, yes, I heard,” Caladin interrupted. He didn’t want to get bogged down in some inane conversation with a guard who was just happy to have someone new to talk with. He came here for a reason. “Don’t worry about the siege,” Caladin told him. “I’m going to handle things. Even if you tried to teleport to Sumnter right now it wouldn’t work.”

          “Oh right,” the soldier said. “New wards. I was at the briefing. They said if we try to teleport to the main fort or any of the other towers and it doesn’t work to just wait and try again because that means their wards are up.”

          Caladin sighed. “Why does everyone keep trying to describe how these work to me? I designed them!”

          “Oh. Sorry, sir. I didn’t know.”

          Caladin just rolled his eyes and pushed past him to the tower’s mana well. It only had a fraction of the output of Sumnter’s well, but with nothing else drawing on it for the moment it didn’t even take a minute to fill up the empty bars on Caladin’s two belts. While he was charging them, a memory returned to him from his time wearing the crown and Caladin remembered that he’d learned in Philipus’s mind that a hidden enchantment was installed on the nicer belt the king had given him. He gave it an examination. The only enchantments he found were the ones he expected: those to make the belt more durable as well as to regulate the input and output of mana. He trusted his memory more than his eyes, so Caladin inscribed a spell to alter his sight with umbramancy to see through illusions and looked again. He had to remove the bars from the belt to find it even then, but there were hidden enchantments on the back side. They were tiny cerebromancy runes that would feed on the bars’ mana to maintain themselves, and act as a back door for any mind wizard looking to attack someone in close contact with the belt. Seeing it sort of confirmed the insanity of the memories that were filtering back to him about what he’d seen while invading King Haedril’s mind. If Caladin hadn’t attacked the king first, he thought the enchantments might have even worked on him. They would have allowed Philipus to piggyback on the mental link Caladin established with his belts to draw mana from them to allow a mental attack without triggering the lithomancy wards protecting Caladin’s mind. He thought he’d been too paranoid, but he hadn’t been paranoid enough!

          Caladin scrubbed the secret enchantments from the belt, then got back to the task at hand. He looked over the adamantium-destroying spell scroll he had made. Caladin couldn’t even begin to wrap his mind around how the spell worked, except to see that there were three harmonics working together and switching back and forth constantly. The whole spell repeated in a loop every fraction of a second to assault the adamantium one layer at a time. Apparently it could only target the very surface. That was about all Caladin could discern from it. He made sure to create plenty of copies of the spell as he didn’t think he could make it again on his own.

          The true nature of his king was disturbing to learn about, but with his mind shackled to a new personality, Caladin could still feel good about going back to save him and everyone else. Caladin’s personal goal of creating a safe place for humans had not changed and Haedenia was still the best chance to make that.

          The mana from the well was nice, but Caladin still wasn’t convinced it would be enough to deal with such a large golem. He could always hit it and retreat back to recharge, but what if he didn’t need to? What if there was a way to bring the mana with him? As Caladin recalled, the spell he had stolen from Champion Hakan’s mind, Entangled Time Stream, created temporal duplicates. The duplicates were all the same person and shared both injuries and a mana pool. Before, he’d assumed it was a limitation of the spell, but in this specific situation Caladin realized what an advantage it could be. He could attack the golem while another version of himself stayed behind at the Deadwood tower and fed him an endless supply of mana. He didn’t see a reason why that wouldn’t work. He inscribed the spell.

          Caladin’s consciousness split in two. He had a minute of disorientation as he suddenly found he had two sets of eyes, two sets of hands, two beating hearts… two of everything. He was two bodies, but he was also one. And he could see himself. He tried waving one arm and accidentally waved the same arm on both bodies. The guard started yammering questions at him, but he couldn’t even understand what he was saying with the strange echo that was caused by hearing the same words with slightly different delays. He asked the other man to leave the room while he worked. It took Caladin a few minutes of practice, but once he arbitrarily assigned one of his bodies to be his “left” body and the other to be his “right” it got easier to move one and not the other. He sat his left body down at the well and closed its eyes, then cast a Silence spell around it so it didn’t have to take in any stimulus. Once most of the extra stimulus from that body was shut off, it became much easier to ignore it and put all his focus on his “right” body. The experience of even figuring out how to control such a simple application of the spell gave Caladin a newfound respect for the way Hakan had managed to control so many versions of himself at once. It must have taken years of training to split his consciousness so many times. Maybe even centuries of practice, as he’d spent a very long time trapped in loops. Caladin didn’t have years. He was only really comfortable controlling a single body at a time for now, so he decided he’d just leave a copy of himself in a quiet meditative state.

          “I am going back to the fight,” Caladin told the soldier who had spoken to him earlier. “Don’t touch the other version of me by the well unless the tower comes under attack. And if it does, you’ll have to give him a poke since he won’t be able to hear you.”

          “Yes, sir,” the soldier said, giving a salute. “I’ll leave it, uh, you alone.”

          Caladin inscribed the coordinates for the fortress, modified slightly to appear at the edge of the human village, then disappeared.

          Pop.

          Caladin reappeared back at Fort Sumnter. He could see the dome of the ward protecting the fortress shimmering in the sunlight before him, which was a good sign. A hail of crystals rained down from the sky. The massive golem was still off to the right. Somehow, it had noticed the appearance of a tiny little human and was already turning its cannon arms away from the city to point at Caladin. He inscribed a quick vocomancy spell to teleport behind it before the village got caught in the crossfire of their battle. Then he triggered the new spell his other self had designed.

          It… shined a tight beam of silver-gray light at the golem. Nothing more. The mana consumption was ungodly, but he could maintain it by drawing on the mana well through his clone. A high-pressure fountain of molten gold burst forth from the chest of the golem. It worked! Kind of. The gold that burst forth got in the way of the spell rather quickly. He had to move the beam around to keep it working, shaving off layers of adamantium wherever he could reach.

          The golem didn’t stand idly by while being destroyed. It turned its cannon arm towards Caladin. Rather than try to block attack, Caladin teleported out of its way. Then he continued his assault from a slightly different angle. Moving was actually an advantage. He kept teleporting around and shooting his beam of adamantium-destroying light until he punched a hole through the outer frame. He had been focusing his attacks at the joints, so he wasn’t surprised when one of the shoulders was the first thing to give.

          The golem’s left arm tumbled to the ground. He hit the right arm next, before it could become a threat. Just like that, the golem was crippled. With no arms, it gave up on projectiles and started charging at Caladin. He took to the air to maintain his distance. Another hole in the chest. Then a line. He cut off its head, but that didn’t even slow it down, so he next aimed for the knee of one of its legs. When the creation dropped to the ground Caladin lorded over it.

          “You thought you could make something the great Archmage Caladin couldn’t destroy?” he boomed out in a magically enhanced voice. A cheer went up from the nearby castle. Caladin was looking forward to taking the golem apart to see how it worked. He aimed his beam at it again, this time ready to take off its last leg. Instead, it’s controllers teleported it back home. The giant creation disappeared, leaving behind the pieces Caladin had broken off of the main body and a veritable mountain of molten gold. Soldiers were up on the parapets now and they went absolutely nuts when that happened. Caladin knew it looked to the crowd like he’d evaporated the golem in a blink, but he didn’t want to spoil the moment, so he didn’t correct them that their cheers were possibly premature.

          That golem had been the closest he’d come to defeat. Destroying it felt good. Really good. He gave the crowd a wave. “No threat will stand long against this nation, as long as I’m around to protect it!” he promised them.

          “Cal-a-din! Cal-a-din!” They were chanting his name. Hundreds of them, out on the parapets. He even saw a few of his family among the soldiers and civilians that worked in the castle. He still had a killer of a headache, but damn if that didn’t feel good. He’d never inspired such adoration before.

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