The Hundred Reigns 257: The Workshop of Horrors (16) (Patreon)

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All those months of practicing Arrow-Snatcher paid off when Simon caught the holy bullet in midair.

However, doing so required a free hand, which caused Simon to let go of the Earth Megalith for a second. The Gear Champion immediately used the opportunity to fire at him with a hail of manalith projectiles in an attempt to blast him off the mana reactor.

However, it failed to predict Arrow-Snatcher’s movements—something expected, considering Louis had survived the Musan Sniper’s attacks with it in the previous reign—and missed Simon by an inch. He twirled on himself as the manalith projectiles flew past his head, threw the bullet back at its sender with a steaming hand, and then completed his motion by smashing the Earth Megalith with his mace.

“Magic Eraser.” 

The Mana Goddess’ precious jewel shattered into pieces.

Magic Eraser’s power grew proportionally to the number of effects it stripped, and Simon might as well have been striking at the physical embodiment of sorcery itself. The resulting explosion burst the mana reactor asunder, throwing him out through its steel coffin and sending the pieces flying across the vault. Some hit the machine that held Coil’s corpse, and others struck the Gear Champion. Silk and Velvet had enough agility to dodge out of the way, while one of Bert’s arms was torn off by shrapnel.

Massive Earth damage!

All of the vault’s manalith cables and lights fizzled out all at once in a catastrophic system shortage. Many exploded, opening cracks in the walls in a series of blinding flashes, followed by utter darkness.  

Meanwhile, the redirected bullet struck the Musan Sniper right in its Crestone eye and cracked it. Lightning coursed through it as it smashed through metal doors too small for it and opened fire on Simon’s crew. Its cannon’s fire was the only source of light in the otherwise darkened vault. 

Of course the Sniper had been an automaton all along. The only real surprise was its ability to use a Crestone like the Mechanical Tower itself. The damn artificial abomination likely stuffed a soul inside its chassis. 

One of the projectiles grazed Simon’s shoulder as he hit the ground, a Mythic damage notification flashing on his System screen, while another tore Bert’s head off and killed him instantly. The puppet’s wicked life was snuffed out before he could even realize death had come for him.  

That Sniper had nearly put Simon in the grave when under Darkbound, so its attack power had to be phenomenal. 

If the entire Crafter’s Tower is alive, then this ability might work on it. Simon pressed his hand against the floor the moment he landed and donned a fiery halo. “Crown of Pain.”

His power rippled through the vault and seized hold of the Mechanical Tower. As Simon suspected, it was no different from an artificial dryad; a colossal living structure capable of manifesting smaller avatars to exert its will. Every wall shuddered at the touch of Hell’s caress as Simon tried to cast it into an extraplanar cell. 

It failed.

He sensed a psychic resistance to his power, like someone raising an immense dam to repel an onslaught of raging waters, and then a violent pushback. A great power denied Hell’s hunger. 

“Catastrophic power failure,” the Tower ranted as the scale of the disaster dawned upon its artificial mind. “Activating all auxiliary sources of mana… damage containment… modelizing evacuation routes…”

His ability had already failed against Valravn once, so Simon knew it wasn’t foolproof, but it still stung. This so-called Godmind either possessed anti-teleportation abilities or it was simply too high-level for Simon to affect it. This failure likely suggested his Brand of Pride wouldn’t work either.

This left only one option. 

I’m sorry, Simon mentally apologized to Coil and Magda for what he was about to do, before issuing telepathic commands to the sisters. “Put on your Cursed Flame rings and join me. We’re evacuating.”

The chances that he could save the Coil couple had firmly hit zero now that he had run out of disposable minions to heal himself with, and considering what the Godmind had done to Jym, a quick death might be mercy at this point. 

He would save them both next time. 

“You’ve forced my hand,” Simon snapped at the Gear Champion while Velvet and Silk rushed to his position while avoiding the Sniper’s onslaught of bullets. The mix of darkness and flashing lights from exploding manalith cables provided a measure of distraction for now. “Such a shame your creator taught you how to lie.”

“I calculated a 97.5 percent probability the Overlord would go back on their word,” the Mechanical Tower replied through its construct, which raised its fist to pummel him into the ground. “This was the only possible outcome.”

“You’re right,” Simon said as he opened his Inventory. “It was always going to end this way.”

Edicts required either a Dungeon or a willing creature to serve as a lynchpin for its sorcery, with the disaster’s radius depending on the host’s level. Even soulforged creatures could take on that duty… and unlike all others, Simon could store those in his Inventory.

Two golems materialized next to him, and set the world on fire. 

Two Edicts fired off at once: his Wounded Earth, and a fire-aligned Eerie Storms. The former empowered the latter’s incendiary properties, resulting in a cataclysmic blaze erupting across the vault. The combination turned the ceiling into a rain of molten slag and the floor into rising lava, bringing destruction to the Mechanical Tower. 

The Gear Champion was melted down to scraps in an instant, alongside Coil and Magda. Simon watched the flames vaporizing them, the blaze melting Magda’s flesh off her bones and then reducing them to cinders in short order, while Coil boiled inside his own vat-prison. Their deaths were painless and instantaneous, but still shameful to Simon. If only he had been more paranoid about their safety…

The Crafter would pay for this!

Only the Sniper managed to survive by raising some kind of anti-Fire barrier around itself, while Silk and Velvet’s cursed rings allowed them to weather the flames in return for gaining a Frost vulnerability. 

“Warning, warning!” The alarm rang out louder than ever. “Severe structural damage! Emergency protocols! Emergency proto—” 

Simon wasn’t sure whether the rush that followed came from the Gear Champion’s destruction, the incineration of the Coils, or the sheer destruction his Edicts had surely wrecked on the Mechanical Tower, but it flowed into him with the Overlord Class’ appreciation. 

Level 80 Overlord Perk: Miasmic Archmage VIII (Passive): You can learn and cast spells up to Tier VIII, but only those fueled by miasma.

All those efforts to turn over a new leaf, only for his time in Muse to end in utter destruction once again. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Simon.

However, he had no time to ponder this. The ceiling was collapsing in on itself, and the Godmind still managed to restore the Gear Champion with Instant Crafting; except that the machine now weathered the flames thanks to a newfound Fire Immunity. 

I’ll return with reinforcements soon, Simon promised himself once Silk and Velvet managed to reach him. I’ll bring an army to stamp out your ruins, Godmind. Messing with my friends will be your last mistake.

He teleported away with these words, using Silk’s Skeleton Key to bypass the Tower’s remaining defenses and escape back to his Dungeon to fight another day.

Or at least, he tried.

Simon sensed something was wrong the moment he activated his Perk. A pull stronger than gravity ensnared his Party midway through their teleportation and caused a notification to flash in an instant. 

Planar Timebox redirected your teleportation.

What? Simon’s eyes widened in horror. “No—”

The sea of fire turned into cold darkness, and the crumbling molten floor into solid iron. Although there was no light, Simon could see in the dark well-enough to spot metal walls, a small ceiling, and opened doors. He sensed no miasma in the air, nor mana of any kind. He couldn’t hear anything either, and the only smell in the air belonged to rusted metal. 

“What’s this?” Velvet wondered. “I’ve seen cleaner safehouses.”

“This isn’t my Dungeon,” Simon admitted, his fist clenching. “This is a trap of some kind.”

The Crafter had seen Silk teleporting in and out of the structure, and quickly designed a countermeasure while its minions fought Simon’s forces. They had been caught in a dimensional net. 

Worse, his inability to telepathically contact Shabram swiftly confirmed that it worked similarly to the Sanctuary. Had they been trapped in another part of the Mechanical Tower, or a hidden Dungeon? 

Simon checked his Inventory and confirmed it worked enough for him to bring out a spare teleportation gem. “Use this,” he ordered Silk. “Bring us out now.”

Silk shattered the gem, and nothing happened. Space wouldn’t shift nor bend to their magic.

“Why?” Velvet asked, her moxie turning to worry as the seriousness of their situation dawned upon her. “Why isn’t it working?”

“My Skeleton Key works by making me count as if I had the necessary authorization to cross barriers of any kind,” Silk replied with a scowl. “I still need a door or crack to slip through.”

“They threw away the key after trapping us,” Simon guessed. “You can’t falsify the authorization because no one is allowed through anymore. This place must be a one-way prison.”

They had been sealed away. 

—----------------

On one hand, it quickly became clear that their prison had no warden nor executioner to ambush them. This place was utterly devoid of people except for the three of them. 

On the other hand, it had no exit either and seemed to go on and on. Every single room was an empty metal cube with more rooms on each side, each leading to an identical copy of the previous in a seemingly endless cycle. Simon’s Abyssal Chronicle recorded the map of anywhere he had been, and its records of this ‘Planar Timebox’ confirmed it was an utterly nonsensical maze.

They found no light, no food, and no water. Demonbinding didn’t work, and Shabram had orders to use Overlord Call to summon Simon should he fail to answer telepathic contact after a while. The fact he didn’t sense any attempt at contact indicated they had to be in a closed demiplane of some kind. 

At least this confirmed Simon’s fears about consuming Skeleton Key. While it could bypass Domains and even the most powerful barriers, it did have flaws a cunning enemy could exploit. 

Simon eventually turned one of the rooms into a temporary base, using a stored light manalith to illuminate the darkness and emptying his Inventory of anything useful. He had been paranoid enough to stock some basic supplies and lab equipment in case he somehow found himself back in the Abyss, but his options were limited. 

Could he blow a hole in the structure? If it worked like a box, then all he had to do to trigger Skeleton Key would be to leave a crack on its outer shell, however far it was… assuming it had one. 

Simon first attempted to smash the walls with Magic Eraser in case he could destabilize whatever enchantments fueled this complex. His attempts only resulted in metal tears and cracks. 

He then considered using a pictobox to create a picture doorway, but lacked a Zodiac crystal to do so. Miasmic sheets merely showed rusted walls devoid of any secret hidden in plain sight. Prayers didn’t work either. This place had cut him off from the Light Megalith itself. He couldn’t even contact his own Dungeon core and recreate one here.  

He was steadily running out of non-destructive options to escape this snare. 

Velvet and Silk eventually returned from a scouting mission. “Did you find anything?” Simon asked them, though he could already guess the answer from their crestfallen expressions.

“No. Either this place is infinite, or it loops back on itself.” Silk glared at him. “You’ve led us to defeat.”

“Not yet,” Simon replied harshly as he furiously tried to consider his options. “I still have a few aces up my sleeve.”

“Then use them quickly. We may not have an infinite amount of air to breathe in here.” 

This didn’t concern Simon too much, since he had survived the depths of the Abyss, but he couldn’t risk Silk dying now. The loss of Skeleton Key might prevent him from slipping through this place’s defenses. 

“Our enemies should have destroyed my Edict golems by now, so I should be able to use you as sources,” Simon suggested. “I could try to blow up this structure from within.”

“It risks collapsing on us if you do that,” Velvet protested. 

“Yes, hence why it’s a last resort.” Moreover, the Edicts would remain active so long as Velvet and Silk lived, which would cause its own set of problems. “If this place works like my own demiplane of torment or the Attic, then it might be possible to destabilize it… though it’ll bring its fair share of risks.”

Silk’s scowl deepened, at which point she searched her pockets and brought out a small doorknob. “This is an emergency tool Verney gave us to escape to the Attic in a pinch.”

Simon’s blood boiled in his veins. “And you’ve kept this from me?”

“You enslaved us,” Velvet replied scornfully. “You didn’t order us to surrender it.”

“At this point, contacting Valravn sounds less risky than other options,” Silk pointed out. “However, we need an actual door to connect it to, not a mere opening.”

“I can craft one,” Simon conceded. He was once again reminded how magically-enforced loyalty was fickle, and how the Brand of Pride’s orders could be maliciously interpreted. “Let’s try it.”

Simon cut out a metal panel from a wall, transformed his Overlord scepter into the right tools to hammer it into a door with its own hinges, and then incorporated the doorknob into it. He fit it into one of the room’s openings, then hoped for a miracle.

Silk opened the door, and found herself staring at yet another metal cube. 

Simon could see the hope leave Velvet’s eyes after that, while Silk glanced at him with clear unease. “No feedback.”

“I’ll try to empower the door with more curses,” Simon decided. “If that fails… I’ll have to resort to more dangerous options.”

He spent roughly a week—the Abyssal Chronicle at least allowed them to keep track of time—trying to craft an escape door with his tools, to no avail. Either the Attic couldn’t connect to another plane, or this place was truly inviolable. 

Otherwise, his meager supplies began to slowly dwindle while Silk and Velvet fruitlessly searched for an exit. Their exploration at least confirmed that their prison was roughly eighty miles across rather than being infinite in scope, at which point the structure looped back on itself. This unfortunately meant they had no ‘border’ to cross. 

At least Shabram’s and the Honorius Family’s brands remained active, so he could drain small amounts of mana from them over time to refuel his own reserves. He had attempted to establish communication with them by snatching energy at semi-regular intervals in the form of a code, but since it worked only one way, he had no idea whether his allies could do anything about their situation. 

Was this how people felt when he trapped them in his demiplane of eternal torture? Feeling powerless to escape as they steadily exhausted all options? Simon guessed he could consider himself lucky the Godmind didn’t include any torment in its prison. 

This technology could prove useful to him in spite of its frustrating nature. Sealing the Zodiac Fiends in prison demiplanes would let him sidestep the Parade entirely, assuming they couldn’t escape them. There had to be a reason why the Oracle never made use of a similar device before. Maybe an archdemon’s Domain interfered with them, or they had a storage limit like how he destabilized the Attic once…

“There’s enough space for us to breathe for years,” Silk warned Simon when the sisters returned. Her immensely high Perception let her pick up on details that eluded him. “However, we still couldn’t find any food or water.”

“We’ll run out of those soon,” Simon admitted. He had taken supplies for himself, without considering he might have two extra mouths to feed. “Do you have any way of contacting your Cobweb allies? Or Vouivre? I’m willing to entertain any possibility at this point.”

“We already tried them all,” Velvet answered. When you weren’t looking, her tone implied. The darkness and claustrophobia had made the sisters more rebellious than usual. “No one’s coming to save you, oh mighty Overlord.”

Simon’s eyes burned with Hellfire. “You forget yourself, spider.”

“What are you going to do, enslave us? Kill us?” Velvet sneered. “Thirst will do that soon, or you’ll do it yourself to fuel some desperate ritual that won’t work anyway.” 

“Do not tempt me,” Simon warned her. “I’ve just unlocked a new spellcasting tier, and I can make magical books from human skin.”

“Go on, skin me if you dare! And when it fails like everything else, my corpse will be there to remind you how you got us into this mess to save two people you killed anyway!” Velvet spat at his feet. “Never understood why you liked those two so much. I hoped you at least fucked one of them—”

Simon grabbed Velvet by the throat and choked the words out of her mouth. She and her sister tried to reach for their weapons, only for their Brands of Pride to paralyze them. 

“I’m only keeping the two of you alive because you might be of use; that is true,” Simon warned them after throwing Velvet back to the floor. “But we still haven’t exhausted all of our options yet.”

“Like what?” Silk asked with skepticism.

Simon sighed and focused. “Extreme measures.”

His fight with the Oracle had taught Simon that summoning Dark Eidolons could interfere with spacetime magic. Blowing open a hole in the demiplane might risk destabilizing this reign, and using this ability would warn the Sanctuary something was deeply wrong on the surface, but their odds of survival were better than the other possibilities. 

Thankfully, Eidolons manifested as avatars born of his own energies rather than being teleported in, so he managed to call both Carbuncle and Culebre into the prison realm. Reality briefly twisted once he did so, the walls bleeding and wailing for a few seconds. 

Unfortunately, the effect didn’t last and causality reasserted itself, leaving Simon with two new inmates to share his cell with. 

“Change of plans,” Simon decided. “Touch each other.”

Carbuncle and Culebre obeyed the order, and immediately began to merge together the moment they made contact. Their essence began to melt together into a unified whole; a process which Simon suspected worked similarly to how demons could band together to form a Legion. He had avoided experimenting with this phenomenon for now to avoid alerting Alcyone and the Sanctuary to his activities, but necessity called. 

“They’re fusing?” Velvet wondered, a spark of interest in her gaze. “Like us—”

“It’s irreversible,” Silk cut in coldly. Velvet’s mouth snapped shut. 

The wicked Phul formed out of its components as it did in the previous reign, a vicious and gaunt shadow with a wicked grin. The syncretic Dark Eidolon immediately turned into a third copy of the sisters when he spotted them, smiling at Velvet.

“We remember, seared in our flesh,” Phul whispered to the Assassin in her own voice. “The fear, cold and trembling, the terror.”

Velvet paled. “What did you say?”

“Look at us, look at us! Look at what he does to us!” Phul smirked with Velvet’s lips. “But they all looked away like they did with all the others, because he was their Duke and we were nothing. His precious whores and killers, blossoming flowers plucked from the gardens. Even their blood on our petals can’t help us forget the screams…”

“Shut up…” Velvet drew her sword, her face pale with a mix of dread and horror. “Shut up now…”

“We seduce men to regain control, but no matter how many we strangle in their beds, it never dulls the nightmares. They always come back, always…”

“Enough,” Silk said as she stepped in front of her sister with what could pass for a hint of sisterly affection. “Quiet or—”

“We thought we could cut the pain out of us, but now it stands in front of us every time we look at ourselves,” Phul taunted Silk next. “Our weakness reviles and torments us. We can’t escape our lesser half no matter how much power we acquire. We’re slaves still, from one master to another—”

Velvet snarled in anger as she lunged forward, sword out. Phul easily stopped it with its own, grinning with the same smug contempt Silk always showed those she was about to con and slay. 

“Stop!” Simon ordered as he cancelled the summoning before this could spiral into an outright brawl. His brands froze the sisters in place, while Phul collapsed back to the darkness that birthed it. 

Silk glared at him. “What was that thing?”

“A failure.” Simon stared at the sisters for a moment, unsure of what to say. The conversation’s grim implications weren’t lost on him. “Did the Duke of Gor—”

“Don’t you dare ask!” Velvet snarled at him with fury. “Brands or not, I swear I’ll gut you if you try!”

“Fair enough,” Simon replied. He still looked down on the sisters for their constant treachery, and a terrible past didn’t absolve them of their actions in the present, but there was no point in reopening that kind of wound. “I’ll see if I can create a more useful fusion.”

Afterwards, Simon moved to summoning Vayan into the prison realm and attempted to merge him with the others. Velvet sulked in a corner after that, a haunted look on her face, while Silk stared at her with an expression Simon could at best describe as a mix between sympathy and contempt. She didn’t like seeing her own flaws reflected in herself. 

Simon’s attempts yielded no fruit. Whereas fusing Carbuncle and Culebre simply required physical contact, Vayan could touch both without melding with either. No resonance followed, nor even a reaction. 

Do Dark Eidolons need certain conditions to fuse? Simon wondered. Vayan might be too strong to create a stable merger with the other two, or maybe it was a compatibility question. The Storm-Father lacked the other two’s Artificial typing. I don’t have a fourth Eidolon to test that theory with. 

Could he give his summons messages to carry back to the Sanctuary to engineer a rescue? No, Alcyone would probably prefer to leave the Overlord trapped in a hole rather than mount any rescue, and his Eidolons’ non-corrupted selves were unlikely to be sympathetic to any requests. 

“Gee, it failed,” Velvet commented scornfully as she looked down at their last, empty bottle of water. “Who would have thought?”

Simon reminded himself he wouldn’t get experience if he killed her for her insolence to better calm down. “Unless my allies outside somehow find a way to extract us, I have two more ideas in mind,” he said at his wit’s end. “You won’t like either of them.”

“The skin-book plan?” Silk guessed. At this point, she sounded more resigned than furious or pleading. 

“Yes. Since I can’t cast healing spells with my blocked Prayers and we have few healing poultices left, you’ll likely die from the procedure.” He had become desperate enough to consider skinning and then raising them as undead, but Silk’s passive Sealed Lips Perk series would prevent him from harvesting her soul. “It should let me craft a Grimoire capable of casting a Tier VIII spell. I hate the very idea, but it is an option.”

“Teleport is a Tier VIII spell, which this place blocks,” Silk pointed out. “You’ll also lose access to my Perks if we die.”

Don’t be so sure about that, Simon thought. He still had a Devour Crestone Perk left, though he would be loath to use it on something that might fail. I can’t even confirm the Grimoire will be capable of casting the spell I need. 

“And what’s the other option?” Silk inquired. “The Edicts?

“Yes. I’ll use you both as the focal points of two Edicts, like I did on the golems I wrecked the tower with, and hope the magical power will destabilize this place from the inside.” He had enough miasma left to cast those. “You’ll be personally unaffected, but you’ll spend the rest of your lives setting everything for miles on fire. If we’re lucky, we might bounce back to our physical reality.”

Velvet scoffed. “And if we’re not?”

“I don’t know. It might just fail, or we’ll die, or we’ll be thrown to another plane.” The only test case Simon had in mind was Valravn’s Attic, and he always made sure to evacuate before it collapsed on itself; though the fact that its own creator fled such calamity didn’t bode well for them. At least I’m guaranteed a do-over should the worse come to pass. 

The sisters exchanged a long, heavy look. They were both utterly demoralized.

“What would you pick?” Silk asked after a moment. 

“Oh, now you ask for my opinion?” Velvet snapped back.

“Our options are both equally bad and unlikely to succeed. There is a chance he can still harvest our skins should the Edict plan fail—”

“I would rather bite my tongue and kill myself than let him touch me where that man…” Velvet shook her head. “I’ll take my chance with the flames, and pray he dies with us.”

Silk frowned. “Pray to whom? Nobody ever listened to us.”

“Yes, because you never believed.” Velvet waved at Simon. “Get on with it. I’m sick of you both.”

“Very well,” Simon said as he placed his hands on both of them. Neither sister resisted. “Here goes nothing.”

Simon swiftly called upon all of his Overlord sorcery to cast both Wounded Earth and Eerie Storms in quick succession. The very flames that had consumed the Mechanical Tower surged to engulf its prison, melting the walls and incinerating miles upon miles of closed rooms. A power mighty enough to lay regions to ruin surged inside the closed realm, bursting it like a pressure cooker attempting to hold an explosion. The very fabric of space screamed and ripped at this violation. 

The prison cracked open like a hatched egg.

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