Jill and Anya ambled down the road towards the seaside city of Slightly-Newer-Than-Evennewerport-Port. The name was a bit of a mouthful, but a previous king had ruled that all settlements must have unique names, and thus the normal strategy of calling every other port town Newport was off the table. Alas, that ruling hadn't magically granted those bureaucrats responsible for naming every other port town Newport any additional creativity, and so they had followed the letter of the law without quite grasping its spirit.

The pair were in no rush at all, given that Anya had packed several years worth of food and, having decided that the tent didn't have a sufficiently large or comfortable bed, a full two-story house that they'd picked up in an intervening town. The look on the realtor's face when Anya had handed over a fist full of diamonds, then casually picked the house up and tucked it into her dress was priceless. Then Jill had made the mistake of explaining that they were also paying for the land the house was built on, at which Anya had picked up and stored that too, an act which had left the town rather geometrically confused. Jill felt guilty about that for all of ten seconds, before realising what a great tourist attraction it would make. They'd soon be attracting mathematicians from the other side of the planet.

As they rounded a corner, they found the road ahead blocked by a fallen tree trunk. Jill sighed as Anya stepped off the road to walk around it, and grabbed the neckline of her dress to stop her.

"Urk!"

"Sorry, but here's another bit of education for you. Note how the tree is perpendicular across the road, and how the end is flat and cleanly cut. Taken together, these suggest that it was placed deliberately to block the road. Also note the group of rugged looking men leering at us while drawing various weapons, as well as the other groups coming out of hiding from the trees behind us. These are bandits."

The muscle-bound brute who appeared to be their leader, or at least the one who had the biggest leer, stepped forward. "Well well well, what do we have here? Two beautiful ladies, all on their own. And on foot, even. What say you come back with us? We'll give you a roof over your heads, and show you a good time."

Anya considered their offer. They seemed nice; not only were they complimentary, but they even seemed concerned for their welfare. But she already had several roofs in her pocket, and she was already having plenty of fun. Then again, more friends wouldn't hurt. "Thanks for the offer, but I'm already having a good time with Jill. Hopefully we can still be friends, though?"

The bandits fell silent in confusion, that response falling some distance away from their expectations. Jill just sighed, the response being easily predicable to her, or to anyone else who had known Anya for more than a minute. She spoke to the bandit leader. "Excuse me a second; she doesn't understand what you mean. You have to be direct with her."

Jill turned and started whispering to Anya, who shifted expression from smiling to confused, responding, "what's wrong with that? It sounds fun." Jill sighed again, and started whispering with slightly more urgency. Anya's face changed again as realisation dawned. "Oh, so they're bad people, like those soldiers from before?"

Jill beamed, stepping back and returning to normal volume. "Finally. Yes, they are."

Anya nodded. "Sorry, let's try that again. Thanks for the offer, but I'm already having a good time with Jill. And apparently you don't want to be friends and are going to attack us now?"

The bandits glanced around, aware that this wasn't going quite to plan. It wasn't so much the black-dressed one, who apparently had no idea what was going on, but rather the scantly clad one, who obviously did, yet who wasn't showing the slightest shred of the fear that would have been appropriate given the situation. The bandit leader shrugged. "Yes, I think we will be killing you now. As much as I'm sure you'd make us at a slave auction, I don't want to risk whatever you're infected with spreading to the rest of our merchandise."

Jill facepalmed. Some people were in far too much of a hurry to die. But from their talk about 'merchandise' it sounded like they'd kidnapped others. It would be easier to go there themselves than to explain the situation to the guards. Besides, she hadn't taught Anya the concept of capturing people alive yet, and there's no way a guard would believe the two of them without evidence. Maybe they would if Anya got eldritch again, but she didn't want to accidentally end up ruling another city. "Can you eat one of them and extract the location of their hideout?"

"Hideout?"

"Base. Where they live. Wherever they're keeping their kidnap victims."

"Oh, okay."

That byplay didn't escape the notice of the charging bandits, who suddenly had second, third and fourth thoughts about their occupation, but unfortunately had too much momentum to abort. Jill closed her eyes, slowly counted to ten, then reopened them, doing her best to ignore the viscera now dangling from the nearby trees. "Well then, let's go rescue some damsels in distress."

It had taken the mayor an hour to bodge together his first golem. It didn't live up to his own high standards, but it was sufficient to build a third golem while the mayor built the second. After a second hour, four golems constructed numbers four to seven. A day's worth of hours later, and large parts of the town had been deconstructed for materials, but that was fine; golems didn't need housing or comforts. The exponentially increasing mass numbered over ten million, and with a workforce that large, some had been diverted to the construction of weapons. Battalions of golems armed with swords and pikes, more with bows, and yet others wielding deadly magical devices. There had even been a very short and messy attempt at cavalry, the mayor noting that his golem army weighed somewhat more than normal knights, and thus flesh and blood horses were unable to cope. He made a note to order the creation of some horse shaped golems, but for now, what he had was enough.

Across the plains, dozens of armies, each a hundred thousand golems strong, marched towards their missions. The safety of Glimmerhome must be ensured by any means necessary. Arranging matters such that Glimmerhome was the only thing that existed in the world would be the logical first step towards that goal.

Keri was bored. It wasn't an emotion she'd expected to feel, having watched her guards be slaughtered by bandits, her trade caravan pillaged and burnt, herself tied up at sword-point and dragged into a dark, dank cave. She'd started off terrified, faced with the fear of imminent death, torture or defilement, but it had soon become clear that these bandits wanted her in optimal saleable condition. Her fate was to be sold on the black market, not to die here as the plaything of bandits. They'd even given her and the other captives plentiful food and water. Not that they'd been kind enough to untie their wrists; Keri had needed to shove her face into the bowl like some sort of animal.

The acute panic had given way to a sort of low-key, gut-wrenching fear. Her future looked bleak; even if some twist of fate led to her being rescued, her life savings had been invested in that caravan. She had nothing left. It would almost be better to be sold as a slave than to try to fit some sort of living back together from nothing, so long as she wasn't sold to anyone too sadistic. Most of the bandits had left to hunt new prey, and Keri was left imagining various horrible scenarios for the future. But that had been hours ago. She'd already been over every dark ending she could possibly imagine, multiple times. Now she wanted them to just hurry up and get back so she could find out which one was going to happen and get it over with.

Another hour later, and the guards that had been left behind were starting to look nervous. One of them in particular kept walking back and fore between his post and the cave entrance, looking out. Obviously something had gone wrong with the bandits' latest hunt. That didn't really suggest a likely rescue; if her own guards had fought off a bandit attack, she wouldn't then let them search the area for a hideout. The best case would be that they'd report the attack at the next town, and soldiers or town guards would be dispatched, and probably wouldn't find this cave for days. The remaining bandits would move them long before then.

"It's not my fault. All these trees look the same!"

"I didn't say it was. You've done a great job. It's just that my feet hurt."

Sheesh, most of the bandits had been wiped out, or at least delayed by something, and now what sounded like two lost girls were about to walk straight into the lion's den of their own accord? She almost screamed a warning, but the bandits were already moving and the girls wouldn't outrun them even if they started fleeing now. There was no point causing problems for the bandits when it wouldn't achieve anything; they'd just get their revenge on her later.

"Do you want me to carry you? I could give you a piggyback?"

"No thanks. It's nice of you to offer, but I can see the cave over there. I can make it that far."

They knew the cave was here and were deliberately looking for it? Were they members of the bandit gang too? No, they can't be; the guards were on alert. They had no idea who these girls were. In fact, one of them was drawing a bow. Keri watched in resignation as he fired, feeling a pang of pity for the girls, whoever they were. Then there was a... squelch. A head rolled in front of Keri, a look of surprise frozen onto its face, and by some fluke its eyes meeting hers. The scream that Keri had pragmatically decided to hold in decided it had other plans, and made a bid for freedom. The decapitated corpse, still holding the bow, dropped slowly to the ground as gravity spotted it and fulfilled its obligation.

"This looks a bit different from the others I've seen. There's no green gunk dripping off it."

"Maybe that was poison? Wait, when did you... Ah, before coming to my store, right? You did mention it."

"Yeah. Why are there so many people who aren't nice?"

Keri watched a pair of young girls dawdle unconcernedly into the cave. One of the bandits won, in Keri's opinion, several awards for bravery by managing to stammer out, "who... who the hell are you? Where's the boss?"

The almost naked one completely ignored the bandits, her eyes fixed on the bandit leaders 'throne'. It was a rather sorry thing, basically just a plain wooden chair that various items of gold, or that were just gold-coloured, had been nailed to. It didn't even have a cushion. Nevertheless, to Jill's tired feet, it looked like pure bliss.

As she staggered towards it, flat out forgetting the bandits even existed, several of the unluckier ones took a swing at her with their various weapons. Keri watched the resulting bloodbath in morbid fascination. This couldn't possibly be real, she thought. I've broken and gone delirious. A human can't just be dismantled like that. Meat doesn't stick to the ceiling like that in reality. Young girls don't have that many tentacles.

Jill flomped onto the throne, heaving an almost orgasmic sigh as she took the weight off her feet. That lasted only a few seconds before she started shuffling.

"What the hell am I sitting on? What? Why? Who thought it would be a good idea to nail a bowl to the seat? How is this supposed to be comfortable?!"

One of the remaining bandits decided to make a break for it, managing two steps before his legs fell off. The remaining ones, those who had been too cowardly to move after watching the death of the bowman, or who had simply been fortunate enough to be standing too far away to join the attack, turned as one towards the throne and knelt. One of them, the one who had already won bravery awards, managed to win another one.

"Welcome back home, boss."

Jill stared at him like he was something unpleasant stuck to the bottom of her shoe. "Don't you dare. We came here ourselves rather than fetching the professionals because I didn't want to accidentally end up ruling another city. I'm bloody well not going to let you spoil it by appointing me ruler of you sorry excuse for a bunch of bandits instead."

"Am I supposed to be killing them? You said there would be hostages here, so to only attack the people who attacked us, but you're talking like the rest of them are bandits too."

Jill glanced around the room, her eyes meeting Keri's for the first time. Then she looked over the rest of the 'merchandise', all bound on the floor. "Those poor girls over there are the hostages. All these kneeling guys pissing themselves over here are the bandits."

Anya nodded, and the bandits went away. Messily. Keri's brain, which was no longer bored in the slightest, decided that consciousness was overrated, and it would rather not have to witness any more of this, thank you very much. The last thing she managed before she slumped to the floor was to throw up, losing her lunch along with the remains of her sanity. Of all the dark futures she'd been imagining, this one had certainly not featured.