“Lord Jhiax is amazing!” Traluna shouted, sitting up straight in her chair for the first time. “He’s the kind of genius that the world has never seen before! The things he invents and comes up with are like from a whole other world.”

“Traluna,” Gree warned.

“Lord Jhiax is on a whole other level than us!” she said, getting more excited.

“Traluna!” Gree snapped. Traluna shrank back down again at the rebuke.

“He’s an artificer, eh?” Carnivac probed.

“He’s so much more than some artificer. Lord Jhiax is a god among us!” she shouted, perking back up.

“That’s enough!” Gree barked at her.

This time she shrank completely into her seat. Carnivac could only see the top of her head poking above the table.

“I’ve got to get going,” Carnivac said, standing up. “Thanks for the drink.”

“You didn’t even dri—” Sarissa started but stopped when she looked in Carnivac’s mug and saw it empty. “When did he...?”

“I’m sure I’ll run into you sooner or later,” Carnivac said, heading out of the Guild bar. When they weren’t looking, Carnivac simply stored the contents of the mug in my [Inventory]. Good thing things didn’t mix together in there.

He headed out of the bar and looked for the valkyrie and was just able to catch a glimpse of the fiery red hair as she vanished into the crowd. She seemed to be heading away from the Factory building so Carnivac decided to let her go.

He turned his attention to the building. There were several armed guards stationed at the entrance as well as some lookouts and snipers positioned at watch posts on the roof. The back of the building seemed to be embedded into the side of the mountain from what Carnivac could see so the chances of them watching that side might be low.

A black wolf, cloaked in shadows might be able to get past them in the dead of the night, but in the middle of the day, he would stand out like a black smudge on a white carpet. An operation of this scale would have to have supplies coming and going constantly and it didn’t look like the front entrance was where it was happening.

Carnivac spotted a rhinox pulling a heavy cart loaded with ore, as it turned down one of the side streets where there was minimal pedestrian traffic. Sentries up high were watching it so Carnivac opted to watch it as well. Carefully, he followed behind. Up ahead a foot bridge spanned between two large buildings, this could be the best chance to sneak onto the cart. The cart had two drivers and was open on top so getting inside wouldn’t work. Given the size of the cart, it had a lot of ground clearance so maybe grabbing a hold of the underside might be better.

Briskly, Carnivac caught up to the cart and as soon as the cart passed under the foot bridge, he slipped between the wheels and under the cart. As much room as there might be, Carnivac was still a pretty large body. I pulled him into my [Inventory] and grabbed a hold of the main axle clamp. Being in my main, and smaller, body; I didn’t take up nearly as much room under the cart and was easily able to hang on without dragging or being easily seen from the area around the cart.

As a bonus, my silver-ish armor plating blended in better with the steel reinforcement of the cart. While I’d been inside of Carnivac, letting the Carnivac process run the proxy, my primary consciousness explored my operating system and worked on developing an entirely new operating system that would, hopefully, make things a lot better for future Automata down the road. Something that would give them something similar to leveling up and gaining experience like the organics did.

In my exploration, I found a setting for my body lights. I can change the color as well as adjust their brightness. I can’t fully turn them off though, which seems odd, but I can get them really low. Apparently, it has something to do with my mana absorption rate. If I could figure out how to crank it up, I might be able to solve my mana depletion problems.

I started out in this world with a crazy large mana pool of 5 Billion but the stuff I’ve been doing has been sucking that up at an impossible rate. Currently I’m at around 2.9 Billion and I’ve only been in this world for two months or so. In my personal stats it says that my mana absorption rate is set at 1 per second. For someone who might have a mana pool of say... 30, that’d be great. You’d be able to keep doing your thing all day long. But for my mana pool, it’ll take me eons to refill assuming I sit inert and don’t use any.

I turned down my body lights and with them my mana absorption. I was now collecting 1 mana point every five hours. While it actually made me feel sleepy, for lack of a better term, I wouldn’t give my position away as easily... unless I passed out and fell off the cart or something...

The cart slowed to a stop and I could see the legs of those knight Automata walking around it.

“Just the two heat signatures of the drivers, no hidden mana sources detected,” one of them announced. “Move along.”

I heard the crack of a whip and we started moving again. The cart passed through a large opening into a cave cut into the side of the mountain. The ground below became more refined and had the look of concrete. Workers bustled about, though there wasn’t much noise. No orders were being yelled, no discussions were being had, everything gave the impression of what you’d expect from a warehouse that was entirely run by machines in my old world.

The cart came to a stop between several other carts. I could hear the drivers climbing down as Automata attended to the rhinox and disconnected the cart. This must be a staging area before they sort and process all the raw ore.

I slowly climbed out from under the cart and under another beside it and followed the line of carts until I got to an edge of the warehouse and a wall. It was much darker back here so I brought my mana absorption back up to max and triggered my [HotSwap(Carnivac)] function which pulled the proxy shell from my [Inventory] and automatically assembled it around me.

I had outfitted Carnivac with a variety of shadow magic based skills, though he could only use them when I was inside, in order to make use of my mana pool instead of the base operational pool that he was equipped with. I switched back over to the Carnivac process and got back to work on developing my new OS. I was tentatively calling it the Primary Operating System or POS. Though now that I think of it POS has some other meanings... eh, I’d worry about that later.

Carnivac stuck to the edges of the warehouse and cloaked himself in shadows, blending in with the dark surroundings. Even right next to him, you’d be hard pressed to notice anything. Though the fact that you couldn’t see anything at all like a thick black fog might be a tell up close.

Worker Automata moved silently around the place doing their jobs. Most of them seemed to have a very simple set of instructions and followed them like true robots. It was possible that they might actually be a form of golem instead of actual Automata.

Carnivac looked around but there didn’t appear to be much security in this area. There were no guards and no overseers. The raw ore was being sorted into smaller bins, those bins were then brought to large crucibles where they were melted down. Specialized bots skimmed the surfaces of slag and poured off the refined metals into molds to create slabs and bars.

From there, it looked like the metal was taken along to somewhere else. Carnivac followed along, observing as the metal was thinned and shaped. Massive machines punched the thinned metal into molds or cut the metal with high pressure water jets.

Just who in this world would come up with this sort of process? Were these massive machines also Automata like Jaffmeern with multiple cores shackled together to provide power? Was this all due to Lord Jhiax, and if so, how did he think of this, or was this more common than I knew?

Some of the metal parts were carried along and looked like they might end up as mass production models of Automata but some were headed for something bigger. Carnivac hid behind machines and ducked around workstations until he was able to find a spot to climb up and into the ceiling support structure. From there he could slink along, undetected.

He passed into another room and froze. Below him, rows of the murderbots sat motionless as worker bots pulled the storage tanks from their backs and replaced them with new ones. All of those tanks would be full of freshly harvested living souls, already bound to a soul core and ready for installation into an Automata body.

“How are things coming along Gree?” an arrogant male voice asked.

Carnivac looked to see a human, dressed in ornate robes. The robes were a deep blood red and decorated with gem encrusted golden armor plates. The human had black hair and glasses; possibly a teenager, though it was hard to tell from Carnivac’s angle. He was flanked by two of those valkyries. This time one with blue hair and armor trim and the other with yellow. Were they a sentai team or something? The human was talking with another human, though this one was tall and well muscled, with long black hair, not the black wolfkin that Carnivac expected.

“The empire is becoming suspicious sir, though our man in the guild is playing things down. For now, we’ve directed our harvest teams across the border into the kingdom of Kokoli.”

“That’s fine, no one cares about those monkey people anyway. As long as we reach our goal by winter then it won’t matter. What about that other thing? The emperor sent his son to clean up some autos that went haywire or something in Urd?”

“We haven’t heard back yet my Lord, though the prince is due back in the capitol today I believe. Minister Quintess will let us know what the prince reports.”

“Well, whatever. I don’t particularly care about that. What about my dragon then?”

“Our strike mages brought down and captured a grand purple. We were fortunate that it had already been wounded somehow and we exploited it.”

“Oh, that’s fantastic!” the robed human said with glee, clapping and hopping up and down in place. “Sapphire, where are we with construction?”

The blue valkyrie stepped forward and bowed her head. “The body is at 60%, and the mega core you designed is nearly ready my Lord.”

“Hmm... I’d prefer it was already ready since we have a dragon now. You have until next week to have it done.”

“It will be, my Lord,” she said, returning back a step.

“I’m sure it will be. We all remember what happened to Jade after all.”

The two valkyries looked at each other apprehensively but nodded in agreement.

“Good, Amber, what about the Titans?”

The yellow valkyrie stepped forward this time. “The prototypes are completed, my Lord, and we have the pilots practicing with them.”

“Good news, good news. You’ve made me happy. I’ll see you tonight, Amber.”

“Thank you my Lord,” she said, backing away.

Carnivac glanced down and noticed that he had already drawn two kunai, though he didn’t remember actually doing it. This human must be Lord Jhiax and was very clearly a bad guy. Carnivac wasn’t confident that he’d be able to take the guy out from here with those two valkyries next to him. The chances of getting out of Trone alive after the attack would also be near zero.

Silently, he slid his kunai back into their holder on his thigh. When Jhiax and his minions left, Carnivac slipped down to the floor and found a store room where Automata bodies were being kept while they waited for shipment or for soul core installations. There were hundreds of them, all lined up on racks.

Carnivac placed an even amount from each row into my [Inventory] so that it didn’t look obvious at first that any were missing. It would be useful to have ready made Automata parts on hand. He also swiped a pallet load of magiSteel bars, two sheets of steel plating, and three industrial sized spools of mana fiber. Oh yes, upgrades for all my bots! Carnivac added a bin full of illusion crystals that had already been cleaned and processed for use in Automata to the shopping cart and was ready to check out.

Near by, one of the steel crucibles was sitting, cooling, before getting loaded up with more ore to begin the process again. He would need a distraction that looked more accidental than sabotage to aid in getting out of this place. He crept over to the huge bucket and palmed the cotter pin into my [Inventory] and nudged the hinge pin until it was just barely holding the anchor bolt in place. He repeated the process on the other side and slipped back into the ceiling support structure and made his way as close as he could to the entrance.

It hadn’t been that long since he’d entered The Factory, and it looked like the rhinox he’d come in with was heading back out again with an empty cart.

A loud crash signaled his escape and he risked a glance back to see that when the crucible heated up with the ore to melt it, the pins popped out, spilling the molten metal and ruining one of the slag skim stations. The guards looked back as well to try to catch a glimpse of the mayhem.

While they were distracted, Carnivac slipped out and under the cart, dissolving into my [Inventory] and allowing me to grab onto the underside on my own. I just had to catch up with Shiro and we could blow this joint.