The clang of hammers returned to the Ash Company's camp like an old anthem—familiar, rhythmic, and promising progress. With coffers swollen from the sale of Uru-Maul's Relict remains, Fornos had issued a single directive: "No luxury spending. Upgrade everything."
Konos took that to heart.
Workshops bloomed into organized chaos as engineers, handlers, and smiths swarmed over half-disassembled golems. Frames lay in segmented rows like titans mid-autopsy, their plates stripped to reveal core lines and Codex wiring. The air smelled of hot oil, rune-burn, and ambition.
Konos stood at the center of it all, his hands stained with grease, voice like a whip snapping across the organized frenzy.
"Check your alloy calibration! Codex integration comes after traction mod tests! If I see one more golem with mismatched servo cores, I'll have your workbench turned into firewood!"
"Understood, Lead!" came a chorus of voices.
The first priority had been movement. Several Ash Company golems had fought Relicts in unstable terrain—and survived—but Konos knew they had been one stumble away from obliteration. So traction systems were overhauled.
Wider footpads embedded with localized balance sensors. Hydraulic reinforcements in ankle servos. Adjustable weight distribution nodes to adapt to mud, gravel, and mountain slopes. Each addition made the golems faster, more stable—and harder to knock over when something the size of a manor came stomping through the trees.
The second overhaul involved recoil dampeners. Many of the Company's mid-range and heavy golems used integrated cannons or large-throw launchers. With Relicts as targets, accuracy was crucial—but recoil often threw shots wide or destabilized aim for follow-up volleys. Konos commissioned a new set of recoil frames using coiled mana-glass strips, lined with etched runes that would absorb shock, then redirect it as micro-energy pulses to the golem's Codex core for rapid refocusing.
"Make your weapon hit harder, but don't let it throw you off balance," Konos had said. "A miss is a death sentence."
He didn't need to say it twice.
At another end of the camp, Roa and Peter had taken over a more experimental corner near the old spare-part pit. Both of them hovered around Koter—Roa's personal golem, whose frame bore deep scars from the Uru-Maul encounter.
"Let's try the compound layering again," Peter said, handing Roa a modified Codex shard. "If we bind three layers of reaction protocols together, we might be able to trigger auto-evasion."
"Without confusing the sequence recognition?" Roa asked.
Peter raised a brow. "That's what Koter's for."
Roa gave a lopsided grin and slid the shard into a compartment above Koter's core casing. The golem, sensing activation, blinked once. Then twice.
"Alright, big guy. Catch this," Roa said, and hurled a weighted disc straight at its torso.
Koter's torso twisted. The disc whistled past, missing by half a finger's width.
"Fast," Peter said.
"Faster than before," Roa nodded. "If we link this with a proximity Codex, he might be able to dodge even melee strikes."
"I'll write the next layer tonight," Peter said.
They both turned as Koter flexed its arms and returned the disc with perfect aim. Peter ducked just in time.
Meanwhile, Martin and Wraith had taken on the task few wanted: handling the continued sale of Relict tissues and refined materials.
The spinal crystal clusters from Uru-Maul were the most lucrative. Cleaned, sliced, and polished into translucent slabs, they were sold in encrypted exchanges to noble-funded research enclaves and private codex labs. Each trade required precise negotiation—Martin ensured they were paid not in gold, but in trade weight: transport contracts, armor-grade steel, codex-writing ink, and crystal-dust processors.
"You want a piece of a dead god?" Martin said to one merchant, pointing at the sealed trunk. "Then give us what builds giants."
Wraith, ever silent during the deals, stood behind him like a mountain with eyes. No one ever countered the first offer more than once.
Park and Mark, untouched by the engineering frenzy, kept their section of the camp in brutal order. The two towering figures, never speaking yet always understood, oversaw the combat drills.
Today, they had raised the stakes.
"Three on one?" asked a nervous recruit, staring at the dull iron training blade in his hand.
Mark pointed at him, then pointed at the ring—where a heavily armored golem was already in motion.
Park simply tapped a rune stone beside the ring. Spikes rose from the floor. A low hum filled the air—the Codex circle was active. Mist hovered near the arena edges.
"Holy Axis, are they serious?" whispered a soldier.
The answer came quickly.
The moment the recruits stepped into the ring, the golem surged forward—not lethal, but fast enough to break bone. It moved like a veteran, not a sparring dummy.
"This isn't training anymore," someone muttered. "This is war prep."
And it was. Park and Mark weren't molding soldiers—they were preparing survivors. Those who couldn't adapt, who hesitated too long, were knocked unconscious or carried out bruised.
By the time the third session ended, half the camp was watching.
Fornos arrived just as a spar ended with a golem pinning a soldier to the ground with a shield.
He said nothing. But his eyes swept the camp—from Konos' upgraded schematics to Roa and Peter's experiments, to the bloodied recruits panting under Park's brutal regimen.
Then he gave a single nod.
Later that night, under the firelight, Konos approached him.
"We're not just rebuilding," Konos said. "We're becoming something else."
Fornos didn't look up from the documents he was reviewing.
"We have to."
Konos narrowed his eyes. "You think Varnhollow's going to be worse than Uru-Maul?"
Fornos finally looked up, gaze unwavering.
"Worse than the Relict? No. But in Varnhollow, we're not fighting monsters."
He tapped the page in front of him—an intel report stamped with the sigil of House Ornes.
"We'll be fighting men who think they're the gods."