Although formidable, durable, and long-lasting, Rockfist Guardians had one major weak point - their complete and utter lack of any sort of autonomous function. Unlike domestic golems, tamed monsters, summoned demons or raised undead, these soulless dolls were completely helpless without having someone to direct their every move. Even the Pyromancer’s equivalent - the Molten Guardian - had, for lack of a better word, more processing power, though at the cost of a significantly higher MP cost.

The point was that Rockfist Guardians were so brain-dead, that they required constant supervision by their Stonesinger owner. This, in turn, required their operators maintained line of sight whenever possible. It was a quirk that Ekaterina Dragunova knew well. One might think this was a strange thing to notice in the middle of combat, but she had been fighting against these things for decades. Not to mention that spotting and analyzing patterns was something of a specialty of hers. That was how she was able to reverse engineer the Fizzlesprocket-patented electricity amplification circuits Fizzy had shown her so quickly. It was an ability she was rather proud of, and with good reason. It didn’t come from a Skill or a Job - it was her natural talent, which she had honed for many years before coming to this world.

However, said skill didn’t apply to people. No matter how much she studied or tried to anticipate the actions of a sentient mind, free will would always mess up her projected models. Which was to be expected. She was no psychologist, after all, so any such endeavors were doomed from the start. She still gave them a try, though. She couldn’t pass up the chance to obtain information and data that nobody else seemed to bother with. Such things were of great importance in the world she came from, which socially and scientifically far more advanced than this one. And despite many of her various studies being more or less fruitless, they still reaffirmed something she had always suspected.

The more people gathered together, the less individuality mattered, and the more predictable they became as a whole.

This rabble that had gathered at her doorstep was therefore a large enough group that she could anticipate their actions and reactions within a reasonable degree of certainty. That long range weapon of theirs was unexpected, as was that peculiar magic protecting them. Both were so far outside her expectations that it made it painfully clear that stubborn golem was behind it all. In this world, unlike her old, it was much easier for a single individual to change the course of a battle, a war, and even history itself. Not to mention that the element of surprise was a universal advantage. And Fizzy had taken advantage of both those facts to their fullest, resulting in rather significant damage to Katya’s infrastructure.

Yet despite the golem’s interference - or perhaps because of it - the charge came just as Katya knew it could. The stoneborn could not infiltrate and occupy a base with their dolls without personally entering it, so she knew it would inevitably come to this. She watched calmly as fifteen hundred of them abandoned cover and pushed forward, thinking themselves safe as the enemy attacked blindly. But what they didn’t know was that it was all an act, a ruse to draw them out. Having her own firepower turned against her was a setback, but with this big a sample size she was already able to do what she did best.

She noticed a pattern amidst the chaos.

The stoneborn forces encroached on the fortress from all sides, using their stone constructs as walking shields as they pushed forward. The enemy kept firing upon them, but their aim was unfocused and scattered. This steadily drew the invaders out of cover until Katya’s laser-based static defenses opened fire once again. This time, however, they aimed up rather than down. The high-powered weapons bore into the ceiling, collapsing part of the cavern right on top of the attackers. This wasn’t something that Jill’s blessing could divert as it was not a direct attack and would cause some damage. At the same time, a bunch of falling rocks were not enough to even phase a legion of earth magic users. They managed to direct the cave-in away from themselves and their allies, barely suffering any damage in the process.

Killing them was not the goal, though. Although they had yet to realize it, Katya had sealed off their escape routes, trapping them inside her domain. They would definitely be able to clear out the way in due time, but they would have far bigger problems to worry about if they had to retreat. The Nemesis’s forces stopped pretending to be confused and began focusing their fire once more. Especially the Knights armed with heat beams.

However, this time around they behaved differently. Rather than go full blast right from the start, they first fired upon their target with minimal power. The resulting laser was so weak that it couldn’t even singe someone’s eyebrows, but that also meant it would be harmless if it was bounced back. If that happened, then the Knight would cease the ‘attack’ and repeat the process time and again until it confirmed it had hit its target before amplifying their output.

Katya had noticed that whether her lasers would get deflected was decided at the initial moment of impact. From that point on, her energy beams would continue to either stay on target or veer off in another direction regardless of how long they were maintained for. Which was why the freshly updated machine logic of her Knights made it so they would need to register a ‘hit’ before amplifying their weaponry to face-melting levels.

Being subjected to the full, unbridled power of the Nemesis’s newest toys, the stoneborn would die in seconds. With Physics Be Damned circumvented, it was up to God of Earth’s Divine Protection and Lifebinder’s Seal to protect their lives. Unfortunately, the extra defenses, HP, and even the one-time death-defying heal could be overpowered through sheer brute force.

From the stoneborn’s point of view, it seemed like the Nemesis had straight up ignored the holy blessings they were counting on. Their comrades started dying by the hundreds, forcing the attacking forces to hunker down and cease their advance. Deep trenches and miniature fortresses were raised on the spot, but they were already in disarray. Having the tables turned on them so suddenly when they thought they had the upper hand had dealt a huge blow to their morale. They had no idea what to do as they hid in their holes with the enemy’s incomprehensibly deadly weapons hammering away at their defenses.

In a way, this place was no longer a battlefield, but an operating table upon which the First Underground Crusade was being dissected.

Katya did not allow herself to grow complacent or overconfident, however. Not this time. Even if she seemed to have those savages in checkmate, victory would remain uncertain as long as that incomprehensible anomaly remained. Her Bishops kept scouring the field as her Knights, Pawns and Rooks were pinning down the stoneborn, searching for Fizzy. She finally located the newly-appointed High Templar when she jumped out of a trench and moved forward. It would appear she was wearing custom made armor that was hiding her mithril frame, making it much harder to pick her out among the crowd.

But now that she had her primary target in her sights, the otherworlder immediately took action. She pointed over two dozen laser cannons at the incoming golem. A moment later she blasted the Paladin with so much destructive power that it made the ground they hit explode like a miniature volcano. A silence seemed to descend upon the battlefield as an untold number of eyes - be they organic or otherwise - peered into the resulting smoke and dust. The only trace Katya saw of the golem was a half-molten magmite helmet, which momentarily made her want to jump for joy.

“Hey, mecha-slut!”

A piercing yell then directed everyone’s attention to a head of pure white mithril with two electrified orbs attached to it peeking out of a Stonesinger-made trench several meters away.

“You missed!”

Seeing her vision light up with countless precognitive warnings of incoming laser fire, the widely smiling Fizzy ducked behind her cover. She used the rock wall and her own shield to deflect as much as much of the incoming damage as possible. Taking so much of the enemy’s attention had lessened the pressure on the other flanks, allowing the stoneborn to advance closer. Katya realized she had fallen for the golem’s provocation and once again dispersed her firepower, focusing on keeping the enemy pinned down. Even if that one was the most dangerous, allowing the primitives to get close enough to use their magic on her defenses was something she could not allow.

But try as she might, Katya seemed completely unable to nail that infuriating golem as she dashed between Stonesinger-made cover. Every time she thought she had the runt dead to rights, she somehow ended up missing. The otherworlder was very much aware of the effects Fizzy’s Champion of Chaos Skill and how it gave her advanced warning of incoming threats. At the same time, there should’ve been physical limitations to how fast she could move, even if she saw the blasts coming.

Yet the golem continued to dodge that which should have been undodgeable, once again surpassing any expectations Katya had made. To make matters worse, the bright flashes and energy fluctuations produced by converging her laser beams on a single point made it hard to track exactly how that Paladin was doing that. The Original Artificer considered changing up her tactics and whittle the golem down over time, but immediately discarded that idea. Something like that would never work on an unfair existence that could heal herself almost indefinitely. Katya had to hit her hard enough to kill her instantly or at the very least cripple her, otherwise she may as well have been shooting at the ground.

The good news was that the golem’s immediate objective was crystal clear. Even though she was running all over the place, Fizzy was moving sideways in a circle rather than forward. In other words, she was running interference, being a distraction and convenient target for Katya’s weapons so as to take the stress off her allies. She even tried taking some potshots at the Knights, though her pseudo-plasma projectiles were blown out of the sky with a well-placed laser every time. Frankly speaking, Katya wasn’t sure what sort of range that arm-cannon had, but she wasn’t about to let the golem diminish her numbers with it.

The reason behind Fizzy’s stalling became clear when the entire cavern began to shake as a result of multiple Stonesingers setting off seismic tremors via magic. Dust, loose rocks and massive boulders alike began falling off the ceiling, which had already been torn up by Katya’s earlier actions. The rock chunks fell on stoneborn and automata alike, further adding to the chaos on the battlefield.

This earthquake was a huge problem for Katya. Not because of the falling debris, but because it messed with her targeting systems. Almost immediately all of her forces starting missing a significant portion of their shots due to the rumbling making their barrels wobble unpredictably. The automata had to be perfectly stationary in order to facilitate their accuracy, regardless of whether they were projectile or energy based. The Original Artificer had built all kinds of compensators and shock absorbers into them for this purpose, but there was only so much shaking their hardware could take.

Amidst all this confusion, the mithril Paladin charged forward, her own Shock Absorption Skill keeping her relatively stable despite the violent shaking. The vast majority of the incoming firepower missed her entirely, and it was easy enough to sidestep or block the rest of it with relative ease.

She unfolded her right arm once she was within forty meters of the enemy’s defenses and began firing upon the Knights. The stoneborn around her had followed her example and were advancing as well, albeit much slower than the dynamo golem. Once close enough, they began unleashing their rust-inducing magic upon the automated legion. A laser cannon was a delicately calibrated piece of machinery, so the supernatural corrosion made it malfunction almost immediately. Some stopped firing, others overheated, and a few outright exploded.

The quakes subsided soon afterwards. Any more than this and the entire cavern could collapse, which would accomplish nothing but allow the Nemesis time to regroup and rethink her strategy. It wasn’t like her steel fortress would buckle because of a few tons of stone, after all. The two sides continued exchanging bullets, Spells and beams of various kinds. But while the First Underground Crusade was encroaching upon Novyy Dragunov’s outer walls, their High Templar had already gone through them. Not literally though. Granted, Fizzy could probably bash, melt and magnetized her way through the heavily armored fortifications, but it was much faster to go over them instead.

Once inside, she began smashing up everything in sight. There were some stationary machine gun turrets and leftover automata, but they did little to slow down the rampaging golem. Much like she had done at that mining station, Fizzy once-sidedly trounced anything and everything that stood in her way. Then, just as she was ripping her way through a munitions factory and causing as much collateral damage as feasibly possible, Katya finally showed herself just inside the entrance to a corridor of some kind.

Fizzy wasted not a single moment and shot her arm-cannon at the white android. The ball of pseudo-plasma splashed against thin air, revealing some kind of defensive barrier. It was probably not mystical in nature, as it was highly unlikely Katya could use magic. Well, that and the shimmering wall of white light sported a hexagonal pattern that the Paladin had never seen on a defensive Spell.

“Suka blyat,” said Katya as she spat some oil on the floor. “Did you reely zink I vhould come heer if I vhasn’t prepared to beet you?!”

“I dunno, you tend to overlook things,” answered Fizzy. “Like for example, can this fancy wall of yours stop this?!”

The Static Field flared up, causing arcs of electricity to leap between the golem and the solid metal floor. The current spread throughout the area and bypassed the shimmering shield. It licked at Katya’s high-heeled feet, but failed to do anything to her. The golem also tried unleashing her magnetic Skills, but those too were blocked by some kind of interference.

“Eez nice try, but I heff studied you, Feezy,” she said in an arrogant manner. “I admeet, you are much different from last time I saw in person, but you are steel same traitorous dog on inside.”

“Them’s fighting words!” shouted Minus.

“Well, duh. It’s not like we came here for hugs and cuddles,” retorted Plus.

“Do not vhorry zough!” continued Katya. “I shall not make same mistake like last time. Razer zan control you, I vhill just focus on smashing you instead.”

The floor behind her opened up, and a service elevator lifted a four meter tall suit of white armor out of it amidst a cloud of steam. It was a humanoid shape with broad shoulders and massive arms. Oddly similar to a Rockfist Guardian, except that it was clearly mechanical in nature. The various blinking lights and the faint halo of electricity around it suggested it had somehow been fortified against magnetic interference. It had also been armed with a miniaturized version of the Knights’ laser cannons, attached to each of its forearms. As for its armor, it looked to be made of titanium, which was extremely resistant to pretty much everything Fizzy or her allies could throw at it. Katya had once said she didn’t have enough of the rare material to use it in mass production, but this was clearly a one of a kind creation.

“You like?” she said with a sneer. “Eez Queen model, version zero-five-five-beta. Latest creation. Made special for you.”

“I see,” said the golem while cupping her chin. “There’s just one thing, though.”

“Oh? Vhat?”

The golem calmly stripped off the remains of her armor and unhinged her right wrist, bringing her Magitech Cannon out to bear once more. She pointed the barrel of it straight at the cocky otherworlder. Fizzy then vanished with a flash of lightning, reappearing on the other side of the force field with the barrel of her weapon neatly pressed against Katya’s abdomen. Arcs of electricity danced in the air for a few moments as the otherworlder processed what had just happened.

“… Nu pizdets.”

The otherworlder barely had time to utter the equivalent of ‘well, fuck’ in her native tongue before the golem blasted a hole clean through her midsection. Fizzy then swung her wrench with the other hand, cleaving the android in two. She then caught the falling robot’s head in the middle of the Iron Teeth’s head and pulled the small lever on the handle. There was the sharp roar of an engine followed by various crunching noises as Katya’s head got crushed into a pile of junk.

She then leapt backwards to dodge the stocky robot’s swing, which slammed into the floor hard enough to dent it.

“So,” came a female voice over the factory’s loudspeakers. “Zat eez how you kept dodging me. Anozer faking Skeel, no doubt!”

Indeed it was, though ‘facking’ was not the term Fizzy would use to describe it.

Lightning Warp

Description: The war golem harnesses the volatile power of lightning to instantaneously travel short distances.

Requirements: Level 10 War Golem, Lightning Affinity

Type: Active

Activation Time: Instant

Cost: 300 MP

Range: 5 Meters

Effects: Teleport to a desired location within range and line of sight.

All targets within 1 meter of the departure and arrival points will take Lightning damage.

Increases the damage dealt by this Skill by 15% per Level of this Skill.

Increases the range of this Skill by 1 meter per Level of the Lightning Affinity Skill.

This Skill may not be activated more than once every 10 seconds.

It was questionable whether any single word or phrase could describe the complicated feelings Fizzy held towards the latest addition to her repertoire. Which was why she had come up with a flawless and highly scientific calculations to determine if one existed. The outcome looked something like: instantaneous omnidirectional movement, plus combat precognition, multiplied by Badass Factor and divided by not having Physical Augmentation Module equaled ‘unfortunately shiny.’

“How?!” screamed Katya as her creation approached Fizzy. “First you resist my control! Next, you dismantle entire base alone! Zen you come vhit entire army! Now you can teleport! How can you have all zis unfair power?!”

“Fuck you, that’s how!” retorted the Paladin. “I also know what to do with it, too! For example-!”

She then flexed her Geomagnetic Grip, flooding the area with her special brand of incomprehensible magnetic field. The so-called ‘Queen model’ was indeed highly resistant to her attempts at manipulating it, but Fizzy had already anticipated that. Katya wouldn’t consider this thing her trump card if it could be defeated by such an obvious weakness. Which was why she instead ripped the metal plating off of the floor instead. It rose up like a bear trap, slamming the otherworlder’s enforcer on either side of it. She then tore bits and pieces out of the ceiling and walls and wrapped them around the otherworlder’s automaton. The thing naturally struggled, but it wasn’t long before it was imprisoned inside a giant steel ball. To its credit it was still slamming away at its confines and looked like it would escape eventually, but this would immobilize it for the time being.

“Now then,” said Fizzy while pretending to crack her knuckles. “Shall we go find the real you?”

“If you theenk I vhill let you do as you pleez, you are dumber zan I thought!”

The golem broke out into a run, breaking out of the factory and moving into the lower levels of the compound as the battle continued to rage outside. Various automata - including a few rejected Queen prototypes - tried to stop her while Katya continued to verbally abuse her. They were no match though, as the golem eliminated, restrained, or otherwise immobilized them in the most efficient way possible as she moved deeper inside. The only thing they managed to do was make her activate Parallel Plot and Engine of Destruction, which ultimately only made things worse for the poor bots.

Fizzy kept tearing up the place as she looked around for Katya’s flesh and blood body. That tussle with the android earlier more or less proved it was just another doll under the otherworlder’s direct control. This wouldn’t be over until the real one was flattened, and it was definitely around here somewhere. It was a little obvious, but that paranoid freak would never dare to leave it in some remote place where anyone or anything could stumble upon it. She was therefore looking in all the places that she had been ‘kindly asked’ to steer clear of while she and Katya were still on amicable terms.

And then, while passing through some kind of narrow corridor, she felt it. A vague sense of disgust and apprehension which seemed to drift out of a sealed bulkhead. It was titanium too, so this definitely felt like the place. She then pressed a hand against it and inspected it and its lock with Metallopathy. It was a good thing Katya had shut up by that point, as it allowed Fizzy to focus on the mechanism in front of her. Whether this silence was because she had run out of things to say or the lacked through which to say them was hard to tell, but also irrelevant to the problem at hand.

“Hmm, getting through this lock would be tricky,” she mused out loud. “A precisely calibrated Static Field to short out the circuitry and some touch-and-go Geo-Grip action should do it though.”

“Or we could just smash it down,” suggested Minus.

“That’s going to take a lot more time and effort than my idea.”

“I guess. More fun though.”

“I agree with lil’ sis,” chimed in Plus. “Knocking it down seems way cooler.”

“Yeah, okay,” consented Fizzy. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to put on a show for Middleton’s sake, at least.”

“Alright! That’s what I’m talking about!”

The golem gripped her wrench hard enough to crack the handle, but he compound was rocked by a loud tremor and an explosion before she could swing it.

“Oh, right. Those guys are still out there.”

In all the excitement she had almost forgotten the stoneborn fodder she brought with her. Realizing that needlessly prolonging this conflict was probably a terrible idea in the grand scheme of things, Fizzy ended up going with her original intention. After using her various Skills to bypass the lock, she crouched down and grabbed the lip of the door. She strained her mechanical muscle as she pushed it up, the partially rusty components grinding loudly as she did so.

But with every centimeter that she lifted it, she felt more and more disgust crawling over her. It was as if the rush of stale air drifting from within that chamber quite smelled of heresy. Figuratively, of course. Heresy didn’t actually have its own distinct odor, nor could Fizzy detect it even if it did. Still, the odd sensation of her own mithril frame wanting to secede from the rest of her body was impossible to ignore.

Once she had lifted the door up enough to peek under it, she bolted to the other side of it with Lightning Warp. She then came face to face with a large glass tube, where a wrinkled old woman had been encased. Her skin, which had turned into an unnatural gray color, hung loosely off her bones. Only a few strands of her hair still remained, revealing her disfigured skull. There was a strange transparent mask covering the lower half of her face, a visor of some sort over her eyes, and a frightening number of cables and tubes coming out of her.

It was at this moment that Fizzy made two realizations. The reason why Katya’s android persona was so ‘well built,’ why she was needlessly sexualized and why her face was the only part of her that was seamless. It wasn’t because this old hag was reliving her youth by proxy. Quite the opposite actually. Withered by age and obscured by the equipment as she was, her facial structure and short, stocky, dwarf-like stature made it painfully clear she was never that sort of attractive woman. The cold, mechanical facade that Fizzy met about a month ago had been nothing but a fantasy.

It would appear that the real Ekaterina Dragunova was ugly not only on the inside, but also on the outside. This was the first of the golem’s deductions. The second was that she, as a Paladin, was physically unable to stare directly at someone with that Level of Taboo without melting her face off. Which was precisely what she did with a well-placed Magitech Cannon shot.

The ball of superheated energy bore straight through the glass and vaporized the upper half of the body. The overpowering urge to purge the heretic lessened a little, but it was still there. Fizzy then blasted the human’s lower end with another shot, thoroughly cremating the rest of her. It was only then that she cools off enough to notice the life support pod the real Katya had been in was on fire, and that an all too familiar alarm was blaring around her.

“Ah, crap,” she groaned. “The place is going to blow up just like the Vault, isn’t it?”

“Yup, looks like it,” agreed Plus.

“Terrific,” groaned her negatively charged counterpart. “Just when we finally put the bitch down she still finds a way to fuck us over.”

“Guess it’s a good thing we anticipated this, huh?”

Fizzy was not a stranger to the Original Artificer’s love for self-destruct mechanisms. The woman in question would much rather see her work destroyed and annihilated rather than having it fall into another’s hands and having them claim credit for it. A rather selfish mentality she had allegedly brought over from her old world. Not that the golem explained it in as many words to the stoneborn, though. All the rest of the crusade needed to know was to run for their lives if the place suddenly started howling with bright red lights all over the place.

The Paladin decided it would be best to follow her own advice and turned around with the intent to leave. That was when she saw the bulkhead had been sealed shut, and that its lock had been reset. This was a problem, as she wasn’t sure whether she could reopen it and clear the blast radius in time. Then again, she already had another way out, but she would’ve liked to have escaped on her own terms if at all possible.

“I hate owing those guys any more favors, but I guess it’s better than being exploded.”

The golem lifted her shield-bearing arm and tried to open up the wrist like she usually did with her right. Strictly speaking, she actually had a Magitech Cannon in each arm, but the Skill did not account for the permanently-affixed shield on the left one. As a result, her hand could not swing out of the way entirely, and trying to fire with her left would only lead to her blowing her hand off. Which was probably why the built-in safeties were limiting her ability to fire the damn things unless the weapon was fully ‘unfolded.’

It was a bit inconvenient, but it was far better than getting rid of the kickass shield that facilitated her rebirth.

But even if her forearm could only swing open slightly, it was more than enough to allow a small rune-inscribed rock to roll out of the unusable barrel within. It was a Realm Key, the same magic item that stoneborn prisoner tried to use to escape her just before his capture. This particular one was a special case, as it had a lot more magic poured into it than the normal variety. It needed the extra juice to be able to transport someone as heavy as Fizzy to safety. It also meant that the rock used as base material had to be exceptionally sturdy so as to handle that sort of strain, which would in turn make it much harder to crush. The fact that it had survived all of the violent shaking while rattling about inside her forearm was more than enough evidence of its toughness.

Yet Fizzy turned it into dust within her grasp all the same. The golden sands that poured out of her clenched fist wrapped and swirled around her for a few seconds. There was a blinding flash of light and a loud ringing noise as she felt her feet momentarily leave the ground. When the golem opened her eyes, she found herself standing on a small plateau just outside the city of Deephollow. It was a bit ridiculous how much distance those things could cover, but in a way that was only to be expected when one used something as powerful as the Realmstone as their recall point.

The golem wasn’t the only one around. A large number of stoneborn had also arrived in a similar fashion, with yet more appearing every second. There weren’t enough Realm Keys to hand out to everyone, so these were likely just the more valuable soldiers. Fizzy saw some familiar faces among them, including Kragiel and Kadam. The Paladin was a bit proud her ‘protege’ had survived the ordeal, though she had a long way to go if her missing eye was any indication.

The golem didn’t stick around, though. She had to clear the area to avoid interfering with the spatial magic at work, not to mention clear her head a bit. So, she walked away from the gathering crowd and sat down atop a nearby ridge that overlooked the stoneborn capital below and the envoys that were already on their way to greet the returnees. Fizzy then lay back on the ground and stared idly at the Realmstone looming overhead, it’s spotlight upon her person making her sparkle just that little bit extra.

“You know, I never got to tell Katya her invasion was pointless.”

“Oh? How come?” asked Plus.

“I didn’t get the chance since I kind of killed her on the spot without thinking.”

“No, I mean about her invasion being pointless.”

“Oh, right, you weren’t there. See, Kormack told me that the Realmstone is immutable. No mortals, Gods, or anything in between can ever hope to mess with that thing.”

“What about the thing we did with the Iron King’s hand or whatever?”

“Not sure, really. A glitch of some sort. One that would’ve gotten us all killed without His divine intervention.”

“Wow. So even if she did win and wipe out the stoneborn, she’d still be left empty handed?”

“Yup.”

“That’s some poetic irony right there.”

“It gets worse when you realize that, if these stubborn louts had simply let her run her tests, then she would’ve realized her misunderstanding. The last two decades of strife wouldn’t have happened, and everyone involved would’ve been better off.”

“Yeah, well. Sadly there’s no divine law saying the sin of ignorance is punishable by Taboo.”

“Hah. There’d be no pious people left if you declared being a moron was heretical!”

“Hey, you never know until you try! … Why’d you want to tell her, though? Katya, I mean. About the Realmstone.”

“Not really sure. Just to see the look on her face, I suppose.”

“Heh. That would’ve been a good one, huh?”

“Yeah…”

“Also, kind of too late to be asking this but, are we sure we did our jobs as High Templars completely?”

“Wait for it…”

High Templar Fizzy Rustblood has led the First Underground Crusade to victory for the glory of the Gods!

Feat of strength performed! You have unlocked a new Perk: Victorious Crusader.

The Instrument of the Gods Perk has been removed since you no longer meet the required conditions.

“There, see?” said Fizzy triumphantly as all knowledge of the five deities’ blessings vanished from her mind. “Fernando was probably waiting for the right moment to drop it on us.”

“Ohh! ‘Victorious Crusader’ sounds neat! What’s that do!?” asked Plus excitedly.

“Not a single thing, by the looks of it,” revealed the golem after inspecting the Perk in question. “Seems to be just a badge of honor of some kind. Lots of other guys probably got it too.”

“That’s… a let down. I was expecting more to be honest.”

“It’s not all bad. We did get fifty points of Faith when we started. Besides, we can probably cash it in somehow when we get back to the surface though. We can get Boxxy a nice gift!”

“You’re going back to that thing after all, huh?”

“Yeah. And not just because I don’t fit in anywhere else or anything like that. I just… really miss that damned box.”

“Hey, watch it now! No blasphemy, remember?”

The Paladin and her alter ego share an awkward laugh as they continue to stare idly at the ‘sky.’

“Uh, guys? Quick question.”

“What’s up, Minus?” responded Fizzy as she sat back up.

“I was just thinking… These stoneborn, they have Wizards that can teleport people and stuff, right?”

“Yeah?”

“So how come we didn’t save ourselves all this bother and just teleport a massive fucking bomb right in the middle of Katya’s base?”

“Because all military installations have anti-teleportation wards. It’s a basic anti-intrusion measure that Katya would not… have… had… access… to…”

An awkward silence descended upon the trio as realization settled in. Fizzy looked to her left, then to the right, then behind. After confirming nobody was within earshot, she hung her head in shame while covering her face with both palms.

“I think it would be best if we kept that epiphany to ourselves,” she suggested in a low voice.

“Yeah…”

“Ditto.”