The mana dampeners were a massive issue, and one Amelia needed to fix immediately. Her abilities were more than halved. Not enough to kill, but enough to give her a really hard time. And just a slight disadvantage could have been enough to kill.

In front of her stood three golems, spread out on all sides, with another somewhere behind her. They, of course, had that special encasing around their soul gems that allowed them to retain most of their functionality, without the dampeners weighing them down.

An unfair advantage stacked on top of her considerable disadvantage. These golems had no other directive than to take her down with any means necessary, and her specifically. So there was no way of getting out of this except to fight through it.

It helped that they were tree golems. Three of them made of wood chips and sticks and whatever other nearby substances their soul gems could attract. The fourth was a shell model, a tree carved into glossal shape with a soul gem planted deep inside.

Amelia had a wooden fist slam into her side, then a body slam from a companion. She absorbed the blows as well as possible—which mostly meant she shook it off after tumbling to the dirt.

“Are you ready to give up?” a voice called out from the porch.

That voice, of course, belonging to an even more smug than usual Ed, in between sips of lemonade.

“No.”

“What? I couldn’t hear you over all the golems hurting you.”

Sometimes—

Walloped in the face—

Sometimes, Ed infuriated her. Made her want to scream in frustration. Normal for every couple, but less normal when one partner created golems specifically to kill her.

She took those domestic issues to her heart and decided to sort them out the only way she knew how—by fighting.

The shell golem attempted to sneak up on her and take ahold of her, but she jumped up and kicked off of it. As she flew backwards, she raised her hand and activated a [Mana Burst] volley...

...And nothing happened.

A few sparks of mana energy speckled out of her hand, and then she crashed on the ground, having forgotten to land on her feet.

She stood up, now surrounded by three of the four golems, and decided to end this quickly. With a [Slice] swipe, she could cut them down to...

...That did not work, either.

After a minute or two more of lopsided strife, Ed stepped into the yard and waved her hands around. Those beautiful magical aura waves sprouted from her fingertips, and soon the three conglomerate golems fell apart completely, all their branches and scattered leaves collapsing onto the grass. The shell golem, too, ceased to move, as if locked in place in its current position.

Amelia stood up and pushed the tree over. It crashed on the ground and split into four pieces.

“Now why did you do that?” Ed asked.

“Revenge.”

“Oh, honey.” She kissed her on the cheek. “So you understand now, what I was saying about your powers?”

“Yeah.” Amelia strained herself to admit it, but Ed was right. “I’m not strong enough.”

“Not yet. When your powers are gone, you can’t win anymore. That’s a huge problem.” Ed’s aloof tone suddenly turned much more serious, catching Amelia off-guard. “The North Sunwell Company uses mana dampeners in all of its major facilities. They say it makes security better, and it’s true. It hurts most mages. It utterly ruins golems.” Ed walked over behind a nearby scarecrow and picked up the small metal device she custom built for this exercise. “They’re so simple. It’s ingenious. Take a soul gem, project a mana field so powerful, so thick, it cancels out the mana of everything around it, and leave it there somewhere your foes can’t reach it and break it. It’s energy intensive, but it’s so easy. If you’re not protected, you’ll suffer instantly.”

“Then protect me,” Amelia said.

Ed shook her head. “Can’t. It reduces your powers, encasing your soul even further. Your core does that already, but at least that one’s necessary to live. The extra layer helps you with dampeners, but only by dampening you everywhere.”

“So the lesson here is...?”

“Keep training until you can beat four golems at once, with a mana dampener on. Then I’ll be impressed.”

“Got it.”

“Now, since you lost the bet,” Ed said, “Guess you’ve got compost duty the rest of the week. Better get on that before it gets too hot out here.”

“Dammit.”

Amelia plugged her nose and went to check on the compost piles.

***

Years later.

Today.

Amelia, powers dampened, traveled through cramped, white hallways, with low ceilings and alarms ringing off with every wall she and her companion Hummer passed.

The next step—the only step—was to find the main data server for this facility, to find some way to turn off the mana dampeners and hopefully a map, because otherwise there may have been no way out, no way to finish the job they had started by destroying the greenhouse room.

Her Scan Module helped her sense mana concentrations, but with the power dampening, it was so faint that she could only tell the general direction of the large spot that was likely the source they were seeking. And with the maze-like design of the synth facility, getting closer in that general direction was nearly impossible.

They were constantly pursued by thundering footsteps of guard golems. They were likely going in patrols, likely responding to the alarms but unaware of these two glossals’ considerably unauthorized presence.

With every turn down a wrong hallway, with every hesitation they made, the golems came closer. They marched with clinical precision and speed, and catching up was an inevitability rather than a possibility.

But, in a chance turn down yet another stark, white hallway, they found a door. Unmarked, but also unguarded.

They went in and closed the door as quietly as possible—

Now finding themselves trapped in a supply closet that could barely fit one of them, let alone both.

Amelia and Hummer found themselves smushed together against a vacuum cleaner and cardboard boxes full of janitorial supplies, barely able to move whatsoever.

The golem march came closer, and closer, with those footsteps rhythmic and constant.

Then they passed, and the sound faded until it disappeared from Amelia’s ears entirely.

“Wow, they’re gone,” said Hummer.

“Yeah, so we can...” Amelia tried to move her arm, but accidentally elbowed Hummer in the breast. She yelped in pain for half a second before tempering her volume. “Sorry.”

“I haven’t been this close to someone in a while, you know,” Hummer said. “I didn’t realize how sweaty you were.”

“I sweat.”

“You don’t smell so bad, though. Do you use deodorant?”

Amelia declined to answer that question.

Hummer decided to harp on it. “Well, it’s such a shame we have to waste this quality quiet time together. Just think of what we could do in this closet together...”

“We need to get out of here.”

“...”

“What?”

“...You didn’t even blush. What’s with you, Amelia? I can’t even get you by teasing? You’re made of iron.”

“I’m made of stone.”

“Yeah, you sure are,” Hummer whined. “It sucks. Mino always gets all flustered when I tease her, but you do nothing. And I can’t even tease Aeo, or else she takes it as a serious proposal.” She paused for a second, as if to allow Amelia to ask the obvious question that hung in the air. But it was the sort of question whose existence already answered itself, so she let it hang and then fade into anticlimax. “Whatever,” she repeated.

“Load your flintlock. Just in case there’s something waiting outside.”

“Good idea.”

Once they were ready, Amelia flung open the door—

Amelia had the [Shock Pummel] skill activated before she even took the swing, just half a second later and the first clay golem had cracked into pieces. It was gone before it even realized that they were there.

Three more to go.

She and Hummer entered a frenzy of clay and stone flying every which way, bursts of energy and bruises all over. The glint of steel from Hummer’s sword that slashed its way through every enemy around her.

After only a few seconds, it was all over. The two women looked at each other, panting, taking in each other’s power.

“Good work,” Hummer said.

“Likewise.”

“Let’s keep going.”

They wound through the labyrinth of a facility and continued to avoid the golem patrols.

Amelia knew they were getting closer, but how much closer was a mystery.

She thought back to Ed and remembered everything she was fighting for. If she destroyed Fourland, it would help destroy the North Sunwell Company. Ed was there somewhere in that company, and they would be reunited. If she failed, she would never see her again. That thought was incentive enough to keep her going.

And, soon enough, she found it.

That faint, but potent mana source behind a tightly sealed door.

“It’s here.”

“Is that not another elevator?” Hummer asked.

“No. I know it. The database is behind this door.”

“How are you going to get that open? It looks a lot more heavily reinforced than—”

Amelia tore at the door with all her strength, keeping the memory of Ed alive with every moment of strain.

But... it would not budge.

She smashed the door with her right fist in anger. It budged, but only the slightest bit.

“This is going to take some work.”

“Uh, Amelia, we don’t have the time,” Hummer said.

Footsteps approached the room—from both sides of the hallway.

Amelia kept punching as hard as she could with her right fist, over and over again until the door dented, then began to cave in on itself, loosening the seal that kept it in place until it finally broke away.

Then, the golems appeared in view. Three of them on each side, marching quickly and without any emotion.

“Stop there,” one of them creaked.

Amelia made a last-ditch effort with the door: She held up the flintlock and fired directly at it—

And then the bullet bounced off the door and ricocheted six or seven times all over the hallway until it found itself embedded in a wall.

Way to waste her only shot, she thought.

Hummer raised her own flintlock and fired at the approaching bullets. It went straight through the chest of one and then landed in another’s, but they did not stop or even slow down. They continued to come as if nothing had even happened.

Amelia punched and punched. Even dampened, her powers were strong. She had trained so much these past six years of life. And she would not let Ed win that bet once again—

The door came loose, just loose enough that she could pry it open.

“Hurry!” she shouted to Hummer.

The two women slipped through the narrow opening of the door and went inside the room.

As soon as they made it in, Amelia pressed buttons on the side of the door to make it close automatically again—but, of course, it did not function properly now. It closed about halfway, and then stopped. Amelia had to pull to get it most of the rest of the way, just as the golems reached it.

They did not attempt to break the door down and enter. Instead, all six golems stood, waiting patiently for the two to leave so they could be apprehended or smashed in.

Finally, Amelia turned around to view this room. It was the database room, all right, with several terminals each with large boards of keys, many more than the unit on Floor 4. It was cool, almost chilly. And, most importantly, there was a large cylindrical structure made of glass at the center of the room.

Inside the structure, there was a glossal shape with an oversized soul gem in the middle. Instead of flesh or rock, it was made of pure mana energy, flowing and cycling in various purple hues. It moved around as if in stasis, its limbs floating around in place in the structure.

“A golem,” Amelia said.

“THAT’S a golem?”

“Golems take the shape their creators give them. Usually that means glossal, bipedal. But when a golem cannot give itself a physical conduit for its power, this is the result.”

“So underneath all your skin and rock...”

“I look just like that. Yes.” Amelia stepped over to the structure and gently flicked the glass. “It doesn’t seem conscious.”

“Huh... I don’t know anything about this, sorry.”

“I do.” She went over to one of the terminals and typed in a series of commands, hoping for something. It was all locked behind passwords. Unfortunately, Fourland’s incompetency was not all-pervasive. “I think that golem is the database. I think it’s the server that powers this whole facility.”

“So, like, it computes everything and sends all the information to all these terminals? Why do they need a golem for that?”

“It’s probably just faster.”

“Profit.”

“At the cost of a living being.” Amelia thought for just one brief moment, then walked back to the structure and punched it hard. The glass cracked and then shattered all over the floor, clean enough that no shards went in Hummer’s direction. “I’m going to absorb it.”

“You’re... what?!”

“It’s what I do.”

The golem, now exposed to the mana dampeners without any direct protections, shrank in size and began to stir, as if its endless dream had changed.

Amelia reached into the field of energy surrounding the unconscious golem, and immediately regretted it.

Energy surged through her, but not in a positive way; she was blown backwards and collided with the nearest terminal in seconds.

“Oh.”

“There’s an extra barrier, isn’t there?” Hummer asked.

“Looks like it.” Amelia got up and popped her neck on both sides. “I’ll fix this.”

Time to prove how much she had grown since that day on the farm with Ed. Time to prove she had gained enough power to overwhelm even the most deadly of foes, even in the most mana dampened places out there.

She held up her right hand to the shrunken golem and used [Mana Burst] with all her willpower.

First, just a tiny spark came out. The dampeners suppressed her powers, and her HUD did not even possess the ability to turn on at the moment to warn her about it.

But then something happened. It grew. More than a spark, more like a purple ember. Enough to inject into the protective barrier around the golem and feed it even more mana, but not quickly enough to do anything.

She strained under her own body. She pushed harder than anything in her life.

And, eventually, the [Mana Burst] increased even more. It was a fraction of her normal power, and with the same energy burn, but it was enough to make a difference. The barrier flowed with energy, but the added mana disrupted it. Overflowed it. Overloaded it. The barrier rippled, expanded, and essentially tore at itself in a desperate attempt to get rid of the excess energy. But the only thing it had left to do was break.

The structure exploded.

Amelia once again went flying into the terminal behind her, and Hummer had to duck to avoid a piece of metal that sliced its way into another terminal.

When the dust literally settled, Amelia found the willpower to stand back up and stagger over to the golem, now a soul gem with merely a hint of its former body. Without the barrier, with the full weight of the mana dampeners suppressing it, its mana-made body had shrunken and gone outright translucent body. But, even through this, it did not stir.

She had wasted so much of her mana reserves on that [Mana Burst] attack. She felt so drained she might have been forced to go into power-saving mode, had it not been for her new prize.

“You’ve got this,” Hummer said. Words of encouragement, but not ones Amelia needed. She had no lack of confidence about her skills here.

Her only worry was in becoming too powerful. Too unstoppable.

She yanked the soul gem from the ground and placed it against her chest. It flowed into her all at once.

Her body roared out in power—and then, indeed, too much of it. Far more than she expected, even from a database golem.

It was so much that her body gave out and she fell to the ground.

Energy surged through her.