“Verbum, good news! You’re going on a little field trip!”
“First of all, even if this floor is empty, we’re still in a library; be quiet. Second of all, no.”
“Unfortunately for you, you don’t actually get a choice, because one, this is important, and two, I asked Killi before coming up here and she already agreed,” Ben told him. “Which means we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
When he offered the easy way, Ben held out an empty, friendly hand for the man, but when he offered the hard way, what he held out was chains, and that didn’t make for a difficult choice, even if Verbum still shrunk back and complained.
“Ugh, do I have to? Just let me do whatever you need here, where it’s comfortable and safe.”
“Unfortunately, doing it here would be inconvenient for a lot of reasons. It would get a lot of eyes for one, and I really don’t want to have to deal with that.”
“Eyes why? What do you need?”
“I just need you to examine a body for me.”
“Oh, Ben!” Abrus greeted him brightly. “What brings you here with your… friend? This doesn’t look like your high priestess again.”
“No, this is Verbum, he’s already a third-tier and one of the summoned to boot,” Ben said, putting the chained man down and releasing the gag on him to immediately be hit with complaints.
“How did you walk me from the library to the guild like that without anyone stopping you!”
“You’d be surprised just how much you can get away with in life by walking somewhere with enough confidence.”
“You went through the guild master’s office and he said nothing!”
“Ha, yeah, he knows better than to open his mouth by this point; it’s not important. Now, can I release the chains, or are you going to try to run away again?”
“If you don’t want me to run away, don’t tell me you need me to look at a body!”
“Verbum, you’re the record holder. If you try to tell me you’ve never been asked to look over a body before, I’m not going to believe you.”
“It’s different when it’s you, you psycho! I don’t want to be a part of whatever angle you’re playing at!”
“Well, if you’d just said that in the first place, then you could have had a far nicer walk here because I would have explained it to you. We’re here to look at a machine.”
“... That’s not a body.”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“Maybe not in your reality, and maybe not in mine,” Ben sighed. “But in this one, the machine in question had a soul. I’m trying to build it a new body, but unfortunately for me, its original one was a mythic item and I can’t reach that level yet. Even the other crafting gods couldn’t figure out how it was built, and its maker is dead, which just leaves me to be the one to try my best for it. Now, your skill could potentially help shed a lot of light on some of the mysteries I have here if you help, and as a bonus, I’ll even take those chains off. So, what do you say?”
“... Alright, fine, so let me go already!”
“That’s the spirit,” Ben grinned as he broke the chains binding him and slipped them into his ring. “Now that your arms are free, though, don’t take off the amulet I’ve got on you. Lot of charm in these parts. I don’t need you affected by it, and Abrus, since you heard why we’re here-”
“Don’t worry. As promised, we kept it somewhere safe. It’s just in one of the rooms in our sub-basement; I’ll lead you.”
Taken down entire flights of stairs, Ben was eventually led to an area of the large residence he hadn’t yet been, in front of one of the many storage rooms found in the building’s sub-basement, but also the only one that was plainly locked, its contents not to be disturbed until Abrus stuck his hands into the wall itself and pulled out a key, opening the door to reveal the body of the Talos laying inside.
Looking almost exactly as he’d left it all those years ago. By human standards, it was giant, just shy of nine feet tall, with metallic bronze skin, even if bronze couldn’t truly have been what made up its flesh. Like every other part of the man’s body, its composition was a mystery, only being somewhat revealed by Ben’s new, high level of material sense yet still wasn’t enough for him to guess at its molecular arrangement, especially not what it could have been before breaking down.
There were no longer any signs of the enchanting system that had once covered Inux’s body; only scraps of mana remained. The unique arrangements of mana that had seemed solely made to allow the talos to exist in the first place that Ben had been able to learn a bit from in his time of desperate repairs, and had eventually helped him succeed in sealing away a soul were gone, leaving the fullest form of them to still exist only found within his memories.
His eyes ended on the hole in the talos’s chest where Ben had cut out his core, the unique soul-storage container that had made the man’s existence possible, leaving only the empty vessel behind as Ben’s attention then turned to Verbum and all they’d need to do.
“Hope you weren’t expecting something quick,” Ben said as he materialized a circlet and handed it over to his companion. “Because we’re extracting every speck of information the system managed to collect or figure out on him, no matter how small and insignificant. Even if the gods didn’t understand how he worked, maybe the thing they built does.”
“Am I at least going to be able to go home tonight?” Verbum asked, putting on the circlet and handling as his mind was split in ten far better than anyone else Ben had given such a tool to would have; the other summoned’s mental speed receiving a significant increase with it.
“Consider the morning to be a more realistic option,” Ben told him. “Now, come on. The sooner we start, the sooner we finish.”
With those ten streams of thought, Ben had Verbum examine the talos from every angle he could, be it Inux’s history, composition, original enchantment structure, and more. The record holder scrolled through the information he brought forth while Ben read and processed everything the system held on the topic, even once the information turned to nonsense. He was going to leave no stone unturned, but once he got everything he could from those initial searches, he moved to go even deeper.
Using all of the skills he held, Ben studied the talos’s body composition to the greatest extreme he could. Even if he couldn’t determine any composition on a molecular level, he could feel both material and structural differences, and with that, he used his magic to peel away the surface layer for Verbum to examine what hid beneath with his skill, leaving far more to go.
Even if there was little difference in what the system told him with that one change, as he stripped away more and more layers, those differences would add up, and with them, Ben would gain a more and more complete idea of what a talos was, leaving only the issue of whether he could build one himself.
