The stoneborn commander filled in the rest of her squad regarding the Nemesis’s new weapon and Fizzy’s involvement in the whole thing while they traveled. Hearing about the golem’s Jobs was perhaps the hardest part. Her being a Paladin to a foreign god as well as an Artificer like the Nemesis herself had given the group a lot to think about. In the end, this bunch were more akin to a family than just a bunch of soldiers, so they were able to rally behind Kragiel and support her decisions. The fact that she had become a Paladin herself - something that had been normally reserved for just the noble caste - was quite inspiring to them, though none of them dared ask Fizzy to teach them as well.

After another two days of moving at high speeds, the group reunited with the rest of the covert unit in the old city ruins where they first met Fizzy. Kragiel brought them up to speed as well, though this lot seemed a lot more uneasy about the whole thing than the ones that had went out to look for her. Fearing a divide in opinion might form, the Fang of the group headbutted each of the ‘unbelievers,’ though this wasn’t an act of violence.

By pressing the gem-like skull-buds on their foreheads together, stoneborn could share memories and thoughts. When done properly - which was to say between individuals of the same race - this act did more than transfer fragmented images and sounds. It allowed each of Kragiel’s subordinates to experience the events of the last several days as vividly as she had. They were shown definite proof that the elders and the nobles were lying to them about the gods. Not to mention the Nemesis and her terrifying new weapons. Swift action needed to be taken if they hoped to head off this new threat, and hesitation in this matter could lead to their doom.

It would probably take them a while for the full extent of the situation to sink in, but the Fang was confident her men would make the right decision when the time came. Until then, their commanding officer went to inspect the results of the men’s hard work. Unlike a certain six that defied her others, the ones that remained behind had fulfilled their orders and dug up the items they originally came here to get. Eager to see what all the fuss was about, Kragiel ordered them to show her the goods. The loot in question was laid out on a cleaned up section of the ground, whereupon she began inspecting each of the thirty seven items they had recovered.

“Hmm, so these baubles are why you came out here for, huh?” asked Fizzy as she looked over the stoneborn’s shoulder. “Quite the haul, isn’t it?”

The golem had already been told about the relic-hunting mission the meatbags were on, so she too was quite curious about what they had unearthed. Mostly because it might help further her own goals.

“Mind if I give them a quick look?” she asked.

“It’s not like I can stop you anyway,” said Kragiel with a sigh. “Just please don’t break anything.”

Fizzy picked through the various weapons, armors, jewelry and other various trinkets, carefully studying each one. Granted, she could only give an informed opinion about the metal ones, but even that told her more than enough.

“Disappointing,” she said with a sigh as she put down a dusty longsword. The stoneborn around her were naturally not happy to hear that.

“What’d you mean?” asked Kadam.

“This gear, you say this is top of the line stuff?”

“Well, yeah. These came from the number one guild’s safe house, so there’s no way they’d be terrible,” he insisted.

“No, they’re not terrible. They’re just… mediocre.”

Frankly speaking this stuff was only slightly better than the standard equipment the human-dominated Lodrak Empire supplied its soldiers with. It was a decent level of quality, but nowhere near what the ‘best adventurer guild’ should have had in its coffers. It would appear that both smithing and enchanting were far more advanced on the surface than they were in this isolated hole.

Well, either that, or this stuff did not actually belong to whoever Kragiel and Kadam were told it belonged to.

The golem was about to give up on the ‘treasures’ halfway through the pile when something at the end of it caught her attention. She rudely shoved the siblings out of her way and bent over three pieces of steel armor that were obviously part of the same set. A heavy-duty helmet with half its faceplate torn off, a cuirass of a simple but functional design, and a right-handed gauntlet that seemed oddly familiar. She stretched out a hand to touch the items with her Metallopathy, but froze almost immediately afterwards. Just being in close proximity to these things had confirmed her suspicions, so she decided to leave them be for the time being.

Fizzy held her tongue until the stoneborn expedition had finished their preparations and set off back to their home base. She escorted them like before, except that this time she walked at the front of the group along with Kragiel and Kadam rather than bringing up the rear. The reason she did so was simple - she had questions she wanted answered as discreetly as possible.

“Hey, elder meatbag.”

“I wish you’d stop calling me that,” she groaned in response.

“And I wish I was polished by Boxxy instead of slogging through this shithole, but you don’t see me complaining. Anyway, I want to talk to you about those items your people dug up. Specifically the three pieces of cursed equipment they had set apart.”

“… Why?”

“Call it a… personal interest.”

The gauntlet she had seen earlier was a perfect match for the Left Hand of the Forsaken Sentinel now permanently attached to her arm. Admittedly the item had gone through a few transformations since coming into her possession, but the original article was very clearly part of the same pair. She based this assertion on far more than looks, however. Fizzy could swear she felt her shielded hand calling out to its lost brethren, almost as if it was begging her to pick them up. To save them and help them find purpose rather than lay forgotten in some pompous god’s coffers.

It seemed crazy, but she had quite literally become one with the curse inhabiting her shield. There was no doubt in her mind that this sensation was as real as it got.

Too bad! she yelled inwardly while tightening her left fist as if to show it who’s boss. Sorry little guy, but there is no way I am putting any of those on.

It wasn’t like she couldn’t. She just didn’t want to.

“Yeah,” agreed Plus. “They’d totally cramp our style.”

“I also highly doubt their curses will be as… beneficial as the first one’s was,” pointed out Minus.

Kadam looked questioningly at his commanding officer, who nodded in response.

“Tell her everything you can. Now’s not the time to be hiding secrets.”

“Aye, ma’am,” he responded with a salute. “So. Miss Fizzy. What would you like to know about them?”

“As much as you can tell me.”

“Ah. Well, that doesn’t amount to much, to be honest,” said the stoneborn with an apologetic tone. “The only thing I know with absolute certainty is that my bosses have several pieces of the set, and that they all bear a curse of their own. The rest is just hearsay and rumors for the most part.”

“I don’t care. I want to hear it all.”

“Understood. Well then, I’ve not seen them for myself, but I’ve heard they’re relics from before the Plague Wars. Er, that’s what we call the undead incursion that threatened my people some two centuries ago.”

“Undead? Huh. Come to think of it, they’re surprisingly absent.”

Things like walking corpses and talking skeletons were rather commonplace around battlefields. Yet there were was not a single trace of them, despite this war going on for two decades already.

“Aye. You don’t see them around anymore, but back then they drove my people to the brink,” continued Kadam. “We were only able to halt their advance thanks to the sages that came up with the Plagueward Totem, a charm made from combining Stonesinger and holy magic. It can sap the Blight from an enormous area in a matter of days, which allowed us to push back against the undead menace.”

The Blight empowered the undead and the undead spread the Blight. The two were inseparable, but they were also dependent on each other. If the unholy disease could be purged from the soil, water and air, then the monsters that relied on it would grow noticeably weaker. In fact, the weakest of them might have fallen over and expired on their own if those totems were powerful enough.

“We won and all, but it’s said our people never truly recovered from the devastation,” added Kadam with a heavy note.

Now it was starting to make sense to Fizzy how come these stoneborn seemed to be so ‘behind’ compared to the rest of the world. Still, she had to commend their resilience. First the tireless, disease-ridden undead, then the Original Artificer and her mechanical hordes. Not many nations could have endured after suffering crisis after crisis like that.

“What about these Plagueward Totems you mentioned? Are they what you use to fight back against Kat- the Nemesis’s poison?” she asked.

“Yup,” answered Kadam with a nod. “However, that stuff is deadlier and more stubborn than the undead plague, hence why we call it Mega-Blight. Unofficially, at least.”

“So it shares some similarities with the Blight? Hmm… No, nevermind that. How does an undead invasion factor into the cursed items?”

“Ah, that. I forgot to mention, but the reason why we call that turbulent time the Plague Wars is because those things had a master. There are no records of sightings or anything, but there’s no other way to explain the undead’s movements. They had tactics, strategies, formations - not things you’d ever expect a bunch of rotting corpses to do without some higher power guiding them. It wasn’t an infestation, it was an invasion.”

“… What became of this supposed undead general?”

“Nobody knows. He disappeared just as suddenly as he arrived. The history books claim he realized his defeat was inevitable when we started rolling out the Plagueward Totems and ran away to save his own hide, leaving his forces to be wiped out. Then again, the truths you’ve shown us has made me doubt how much our history is true and how much of it has been made up or twisted to suit the needs of those in power.”

“I see.”

Truthfully speaking, Fizzy had already heard of undead that were adept at war. She had no way of confirming it, but this story made it seem like the Boneshaper that wiped out the continent of Percepeia had his ‘debut fight’ right here, deep beneath the surface. The experience the undead overlord gained from this failed campaign was likely instrumental during his conquest of the land of the giants. As for the reason he was down here in the first place, she had a gut feeling it had something to do with that Realmstone. Items of obscure yet terrible power always seemed to draw in megalomaniacs like moths to a flame.

“That was informative and all, but it didn’t answer my question,” noted the golem.

“Well, you were the one that asked so I just… You know what, nevermind,” said Kadam with a nervous chuckle. “What I was getting at was that although we never saw the leader, the undead still had champions. Individuals of great power that acted as field commanders. One of those was a death knight clad head to toe in powerful armor that wielded a massive axe. We believe he was once a stoneborn warrior of considerable prowess whose corpse was reanimated and made to fight his own people. He was eventually defeated and purified, and those armaments are what he left behind, though they have been scattered to the far corners of the realm since then.”

“Oh, so that’s how it was. No wonder they’re all cursed.”

Undeath and malignant magic seemed to go hand in hand, so it made sense that gear once belonging to a powerful death knight would be tainted. However, how one of those ended up in Goroth’s dungeon was a mystery that only the God of Earth himself could answer. At the very least Fizzy was able to learn more about the origins of her ‘gift,’ so she wasn’t going to complain.

In fact, she was a bit glad the Left Hand of the Forsaken Sentinel didn’t belong to a human like she originally assumed. She could hardly be blamed for thinking so considering she, Boxxy and the others discovered it on Empire territory. True, the dungeon that spewed it out belonged to Goroth, but the cursed Artifact was far too large for any dwarf or gnome to use without the Well Fitted enchantment. Thinking back on it now, she realized that the item would have easily fit onto a stoneborn’s disproportionately large hands without any magical assistance.

Fizzy continued asking Kadam and Kragiel regarding the pieces of the Forsaken Sentinel set, more specifically about their original owner. Unfortunately, neither of them was able to provide any particularly useful information. As formidable as he was, that death knight of old appeared to be just another footnote in the annals of history, so much about him remained buried in mystery. The only further thing of value they offered was that the power of each individual piece of armor varied greatly, both in terms of toughness and the potency of the magic it bore. Which, given the average level of items those three pieces were found with, suggested that Fizzy had gotten one of, if not the most powerful piece of the set.

The group continued on their way at a rapid pace without much issue. This was mostly due to the dynamo golem’s protection, which they rapidly grew to appreciate. Of particular note was an incident where a migrating colony of shardling ants suddenly burst out of the wall with their enormous queen at the helm. They took one good look at Fizzy, felt her Hunter of Shardling title, meekly turned around and quietly went back the way they came. Or at least they would have, if the golem didn’t chase after them while screaming ‘Come back here and become XP!’ at full volume. Her recent magmite hunt had put her War Golem Job at Level 9, so she had understandably been quite eager to unlock the next Skill in the series.

All things said and done, it had taken roughly five and a half surface days since Fizzy had her run-in with Katya before they entered stoneborn territory. Or at least that’s what Kadam had said. Strictly speaking, the shiny Paladin found it nigh-impossible to tell any of those damned caves, tunnels, and passages apart. It was partly her guides’ fault too, as the unit didn’t make contact with any border fortresses, checkpoints or fortified encampments. Kragiel’s mission had been on a strictly need-to-know basis, so she and her unit skirted all contact with the rest of their people as they headed straight for the stoneborn capital of Deephollow.

Given that Cavewater was a city built on the shores of an underground lake in the middle of a huge cave, Fizzy had already determined that her hosts had a very unimaginative naming sense. Therefore, she expected a place like ‘Deephollow’ to basically be a hollowed out mountain. The memories she ‘inherited’ from that stoneborn prisoner called Rotadin suggested as much as well. Therefore, she was by no means surprised when she finally saw the place with her own eyes. It was a sprawling, tiered city with three concentric inner walls and a massive castle built upon the highest point, right in the middle of it. So far, it was everything she had expected.

What she didn’t foresee, however, was the presence of something absurd that lay embedded in the ceiling far above Deephollow. It looked like a massive lens, easily large enough to crush the settlement underneath if it were to fall. The perfectly smooth crystal gave off a constant yellow light bright enough to light up the entire cavern almost like an artificial sun. After staring at it for a while, Fizzy realized she had been mistaken. That thing wasn’t a lens, but the bottom end of a sphere. One that, assuming that it was perfectly round, must have had a diameter of at least two kilometers.

“Is that… the Realmstone?” she muttered.

“What gave it away?” asked Kragiel, though the golem did not respond to her sarcasm.

“Rather than a stone… isn’t it just a giant dungeon core?”

Granted, the sheer scale of it was overwhelming, but looking at it from afar made it impossible for Fizzy not to liken it to one of those things. Anyone who had seen a dungeon core before would have probably made the same sort of conclusion. Katya, for instance, had her own dungeon in the shape of Lednik Dva, also known as the Vault Beneath the Mountain. Even if she was an otherworlder, there was no way she’d miss the very obvious visual likenesses. It suddenly made sense to Fizzy why she was as obsessed with this thing as she was. A power source this massive would probably be able satisfy her energy needs for millennia to come and then some.

“A what?” asked Kadam.

Though it would appear the people living literally under it had no idea what it was that loomed over them. Either that or the golem was just making wild assumptions and taking them as truth before confirming the facts.

“… Nevermind. What happens now?” asked the golem, not willing to open this particular can of worms right then and there.

“Now we smuggle you into the city so you can meet with my superiors,” answered Kragiel. “Kadam here will create a hollowed-out Guardian you can hide inside and-”

“Rejected.”

“… Pardon?”

“I’m not going to let your meatbag politics cover me up,” said the golem as she set off towards the city in the distance.

“What are you talking about?!” shouted Kragiel as she ran to catch up with her. “You’ll cause an uproar!”

“Exactly! I’m going to make it impossible for those shitty nobles I keep hearing about to ignore me.”

“But what if the guards see as a threat and attack you!?”

“Then the Deephollow security force will have some new vacancies!”

Kragiel rushed out in front of her and spread her hands out as if trying to stop a soon-to-be runaway train before it had left the station.

“You can’t just brazenly attack the city and-!”

“I can and I will!” shouted Fizzy with enough force behind her voice to make the stoneborn shiver. “Did you forget that I am a Champion of Chaos?! It is my holy duty to walk up to the status quo and kick it in the balls! And those stuck up morons in there? The ones that are so desperate to preserve their high status and opulent lifestyle that they’d mislead and stagnate their people even in the face of total annihilation? They’re as much Melvin’s enemy as Katya is mine! So you can either help me, let me be, or get trampled beneath my heels, but you’re crazier than I am if you think you can stop me!”

Every one of the golem’s words weighed heavily on Kragiel. Even Kadam and the rest of the unit found it hard to object to Fizzy’s intentions. Frankly speaking, the fact that it took a sudden shift in the Nemesis’s strategy for the nobility to cough up the location of that cache of relic did not sit right with any of them. And even then it was probably just for their own personal protection or some other selfish goal. Why else would the unit be ordered to hide the nature of their mission from the general populace?

So that those in power can save face and wallow in luxury while the lower castes throw their lives away in the war, that was why.

“Which will it be, Kragiel of clan Sterner?!” insisted Fizzy. “Do you want to keep living like a frog at the bottom of a well, or will you make some freaking waves with me?!”

The female officer looked at the golem, then at her men’s faces, then over her shoulder at the city in the distance. Maybe it was her new faith talking. Maybe she was just getting swept away by Fizzy’s unwavering attitude. Or maybe it was that nagging little voice that she had been told to suppress ever since she was a kid. Its source didn’t really matter though, as the answer to the senior Paladin’s question had already been on Kragiel’s lips before the golem was even done speaking.

“… When you say ‘kick them in the balls,’ how hard are we talking?” she asked in a low voice.

“They’ll be able to taste their own unborn children,” replied Fizzy.

“Men!” she called out with a smile. “Raise your heads and walk proudly, for today we welcome change into our fair city!”

It was a command that was questionable at best, treasonous at worst.

“Ooorah!”

Yet none of those gathered there questioned it even for a second as they raised their arms and voices at once.