“Eaaatttt!”

“Diiiieee!”

Listening to the two idiots in front of me, I felt like blasting both of them into charcoal. Their noisy arguments were worse than a bunch of brats fighting on the playground, since the kids would at least have had access to a broader vocabulary. Though, weirdly enough, I was starting to get a feel for the flow of the conversation, as I watched Bas tossed a wrecked golem aside, barely missing Slith.

“Dieee Dieeee!” The slime wraith's agitated bobbing in the air was followed by his slapping the golem a few times with a ghostly tentacle. I interpreted it as something like, 'Watch it!.'

Shaking myself out of my bizarre contemplation, I almost regretted the fact that undead creatures almost automatically formed mind links with one another when in close proximity. Worse yet, I couldn't exactly close off my mind link to either of them, since I was it was how I was monitoring them and keeping them from ripping into one another. However, I was seriously wondering if I should purge their souls, even it ended up damaging them.

Suddenly, both of my subordinates went quiet, displaying their best submissive attitudes. While Bas used his best imitation of a dog crouching, Slith rearranged the broken golem in a bizarre sitting posture while trying to buff its badly corroded chest armor. They may have even convinced me, if Bas wasn't knocking over other things with its tail and if Slith wasn't breaking off frozen pieces from the destroyed golem.

“Sigh... We have a long ways to go....” Rubbing my hollow eyes, I almost despaired thinking about how long it usually took to properly train a undead summon. Even Neduzar, who had been skilled and brutal had taken a few months to properly indoctrinate and fine tune a new summon. In living terms, it was like taking some newbie employee and pumping his/her head full of crap until they could be of actual use. Usually, the newbie learned, got fired, or rage quit. Unfortunately, with undead summons, they usually became tame or turned into half crazed existences. Though thinking of some of my former coworkers, I had to wonder.

A crashing noise drew my attention to where the metal eaters were busy digging through piles of scrap enthusiastically. If they were humans, I guessed it would have been like them jumping onto a bed full of cash. However, maybe it was more like a bed full of pizza or burgers. While it may have sounded disgusting, their pleasure also suddenly reminded me of the fact that I had lost my ability to taste and even feel.

It was maybe the first time I really felt regret after arriving in this world. For everything I gained, I had lost something else. Staring at the claws on my inhuman hands, I sighed. Unlike Neduzar, I was not so deluded about magic and immortality that I forgot all about living 'life,' even in the broadest definition of the word. Moreover, there was an entire fantasy world to explore.

Looking at the corridor heading inwards towards the treasury and past that to the inner sanctum, I made up my mind about having to get out of this fortress as soon as I could. “Alright play time is over!” Driving my subordinates to get moving, I made my way to the fabled vaults from my memories. The trashed corridors were nothing new, but the large vault gate was definitely daunting. Two large, humanoid golems were collapsed on either side of the gate, their hulking forms covered in half melted mithril armor that had once boasted powerful enchantments.

The open double door, itself, seemed to have a large, half eroded engraving that was split in two between the doors. With a bit of creative reconstruction in my mind, I realized the the figure looked like a hooded, skeletal figure holding its bony arms up in some ritualized gesture, while standing on a mound of bones and skulls. “It couldn't be ...”

Smashing the memory from my mind, I tried not to remember all the other art Neduzar had ordered depicting himself around the fortress. Self aggrandizement had been a big necessity for the crazy bastard, and he had implemented it on a scale that even Comrade Stalin would have been amazed by. Though, I had to admit that he maybe had bragging rights since he did personally carve out his own realm in this crazy world.

The open doors were not much of a surprise, since Slith's memories had included the image from its time spent oozing through these halls. The insides of the treasury also seemed to be as large as my memories indicated, but the once dazzling splendor was gone. The far end of the treasury seemed to be caved in, and rubble covered much of the floor, piled on top of hundreds if not thousands of metal crates, some of which were crushed open. Gold and silver coins, gems of all kinds, bars of mithril, adamantine, and other magic metals, and even remnants of weapons and armor could be seen leaking from smashed crates or just lying about.

“A king's ransom... no a dragon's hoard.” Yep, the wealth piled up in front me had belonged to the monstrous dragon that Neduzar killed in his heyday. Though, while it wasn't exactly like a large ocean of gold, I had no doubt that I was looking at literally enough wealth to buy a decent sized country on Earth if I had any way of going back. However, my purpose in dragging my ass to this place wasn't to gawk at some shiny stones or count coins.

Sending an image of the specific type of metal I wanted to my subordinates, I backed off as they went to work digging through the mess. My final goal was to find a way to break the seal pinning my original body to that damn throne. However, the holy power from that spear was doing more than that. It was literally pinning my soul to a space-time coordinate, entrapping me in that throne room. So, the only option I had was use my avatars to move around, like I had been doing. Moreover, the key to breaking the seal was not in the fortress. There were important resources Neduzar had hidden in the world at large, not trusting his subordinates, and I also had to find the damn brownies. However, my avatar leaving the fortress meant that I needed a way to quickly traverse long distances, including returning back to the fortress in an emergency.

There was a high tier spell from the books that the brownies had left behind that could be used for that purpose, and it was familiar, since Neduzar had sometimes used it to get around his fortress whenever he wanted. However, there was one downside to the [Portal] spell. It required space-time coordinates to use safely, and the long distance use of the spell also required something to 'anchor' the target spot, so the spell could find it. The ruined teleporter outside my throne room worked in the same way, except it had other teleporters that it had been linked to. However, if I wanted to travel, I needed a mobile 'beacon' of sorts that I could link to whenever I cast any portal spells from the throne room. Mind you, I hadn't tested out the [Portal] spell yet due to some other issues involved, so I was still in the preparation stage of my plans.

Just then, I heard, “Eaaaatttt!” Looking over at where Slith was floating, I found him waving around a chunk of black metal. It was familiar looking, and I felt one piece of my plans fall into place as my gaze fixated on a pure bar of one of the rarest magic metals in this world: Selentrium. It was the key part of enchanting a 'beacon.'