Regina cursed the fact that she hadn’t been prepared for this kind of excursion. She’d already been away longer than she’d really thought, and she hadn’t really expected or prepared for the needs of what was effectively an archeological dig. Which, in hindsight, was a stupid mistake.

Still, with some creativity and judicious use of her Conjuration Spell, they managed to get everything they’d found properly packaged up and ready to be carried without hindering the group too much. It helped that they had higher than normal strength, dexterity and endurance, especially Max, so carrying a box along with his weapons wouldn’t inconvenience him.

Maybe taking the furniture, what little of it was left, was a bit excessive, but Regina didn’t know if they were going to be able to come back.

Either way, they finished as quickly as they could and hurried to leave. She slowed down a bit to inspect the ward systems with her magical senses one more time. If there had been some way to arm them, it clearly wasn’t a thing any longer.

Then Regina pulled herself away and rushed out of the building. She still checked in on the other drones in her hive who weren’t with her, a little concerned she might be missing something.

They were already agitated, probably from her search and knowing something was going on, but nothing beyond that. Regina had pushed some Winged Drones to the east, beyond her reach, but since they were out of range, she couldn’t know if they’d found something until they came back. She considered sending Scouts, but didn’t really want them out of range of her support, either. Odds are that whatever’s going on isn’t that dangerous, or at least not that kind of dangerous, but still … Besides, even if nothing is wrong otherwise, sending them to observe an enemy army would still be risky.

“What now?” Max asked. “Do we go back the way we came, or do we try to find and go through that door we saw from the outside?”

“The way we came is probably going to be a longer trip,” Ira commented. “Then again, we would know the way is clear and it would probably be a lot safer.”

Regina sighed. She wasn’t sure which choice was the better one. “It’s probably nothing we can’t handle, or I don’t think Leian would have let us go in here,” she said, mostly thinking out loud. “It might still be a challenge, though.”

“Let’s just go check it out and see what it looks like?” Tia suggested.

“Alright, but with proper precautions. I don’t want us to get surprised by automatic gunfire or whatever.”

They paused to put on Magic Armor and any other defensive Skills that were applicable, before the group turned in the direction Regina was pretty sure led to the tunnels they’d seen before, and the door where they’d seen the first Tunnel Terror. She focused on her psychic and magical senses, but it was hard to see if there were any especially dangerous monsters around. Or if there was any still functional technology, which there shouldn’t be, but she wasn’t going to rely on that assumption.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that easy. The architecture was a little misleading, and it took longer to reach the entrance (exit?) than Regina had thought. The mana here also seemed to actually be thinner, unless she was just imagining things. It might be because the parts of the city with more intact buildings lay behind them, or maybe whatever had happened when Deirianon had apparently got it opened left an impression. This actually made it harder for Regina to sense anything, since it felt like her senses were duller. Or maybe that was another, related effect.

This part of the city had suffered quite a bit in the Cataclysm, and the walls towering to the sides of their path contained a lot of debris and pieces of shattered buildings, to the point it was sometimes hard to tell if there was natural stone or not. Luckily, they did find a path that was mostly open. Considering the drag marks and some parts of the surrounding debris heaps that were bent out of shape, it was probably cleared by the Tunnel Terror or something else. The sounds of their footsteps echoed oddly in places, but none of them spoke, all too tense and maybe a little bit spooked.

Then the silence was suddenly broken by the sputtering noises of gunfire.

Regina almost dropped to the ground out of some kind of weird VR reflex, or maybe just cultural baggage. She did take cover behind a chunk of concrete leaning against what remained of a house wall before she properly parsed what was happening.

Back then, she had never actually seen any guns, only heard them, seen the bullets and the gas released as another defensive measure. She’d expected heavy guns, but she was not prepared to find robots in the ruined streets of the old city.

Although, on closer look, they weren’t really robots. It seemed more like someone had taken magical golems and welded weapons onto their arms. She’d hesitate to even call them proper machine guns or anything, since they shone with the same mana as the golems. Twisted mana, like she’d felt before. Regina froze for a second, just staring at the shape she could see looming above the street. No System description popped up.

Then Max crashed into the robot-golem, and Regina quickly straightened up and focused on the fight. The thing had stopped firing for now, maybe because it was out of ammo, but it was still solid enough not to be an easy target. Max’s Magic Armor was already gone, and Regina saw a second golem come into view over another hill of debris and rock.

She quickly fired off a Firebolt at it. The attack hit it in the chest area and sprayed sparks. Then there was an explosion.

Did it blow itself up? The guns? No, not big enough for that. A misfire? Regina didn’t waste the opportunity to follow up on her Spell, but this time with a Magic Missile, just to be safe. The robot turned its guns on her, but her spell armor held long enough for her attacks to wreck its two guns.

By the time Regina turned back around, the other golem was also in dire straits. Max was arm-wrestling it in the middle of the street, while Tia poked it with a long piece of metal, pushing it around much better than someone with normal Strength could have. It took her a second to realize they were closely coordinating their movements, and Max brought the golem down the next moment. Tia immediately started hacking it apart.

Regina stepped out, looking around carefully. There didn’t seem to be any other robots, but the fight hadn’t exactly been quiet. “Let’s move!” she called to the others. “There might be more of them.”

Ira had already hurried to the fighters to heal any injuries. The group formed up and quickly followed Regina down the street and onto a reasonably level surface on one of the piled-up hills making up the side of the road.

She hesitated for a moment, then decided to press on. They might need the advantage of surprise, this was not a good environment for a fight — at least not if their opponents had guns — and she didn’t want to go back the way they had come.

Regina still took a moment to focus on her magic senses. She quickly realized she could feel the golems, once she knew what to look for. They didn’t really have minds, at least not ones close enough to biological fauna, so her psychic senses didn’t catch them. The magic of their enchantments was muted and not as strong as it had first seemed to her, but it was still there. Although, now that she got a closer look at them, she realized the golems did seem to be built around a metal chassis, looking like vaguely humanoid robots. The gaps between the metal plates of their forms were barely visible.

She almost got the feeling they were unfinished. Well, maybe not quite that, they weren’t missing parts, but the whole design did look rather rough. Prototypes, maybe? It would make sense for someone to have experimented with combining magic and guns, but without getting far enough to actually deploy them; she did get the impression the Cataclysm happened not too long after the portals were first opened.

She made herself focus on the problem at hand and hurried on, trying to move in a path that would stay hidden from sight as much as possible, while not leading them into traps or dead ends. It wasn’t easy, since the rubble was strewn around the area without rhyme or reason, and it looked like the cave had collapsed ahead of them. Or something like that, anyway.

Max sent her a silent, mental nudge, then led the way to a small tunnel leading through another heap of debris. From here, she could see that it was probably just a big, collapsed building. She had to crouch and carefully test her way forward for a few meters, until they emerged on the other side. Or maybe it was still the same cave. There was a little more glowing moss on the ceiling and upper walls here, which made it easier to see, but that might be a double-edged sword. The scattered sources of light cast irregular and confusing shadows, and it might make it harder for them to hide, too.

Regina crept forward slowly, waiting until the rest of her group had made their way to her and confirmed they were ready. She wished they had something like an illusion Spell. Although she wasn’t sure what kind of sensory information they’d have to hide.

They continued on anyway. Once, they ran into another patrol of two robot-golems. This time, Regina sensed them coming in time to look for a hiding spot. Luckily, there was a small cave formed by a collapsed building and an almost-toppled slab of concrete. They wedged themselves into the small hollow it made and watched the passing golems, while Regina tried to minimize her mana signature as much as she could. It wasn’t something she’d really practiced before. The robots passed them by without seeming to notice anything, however, not changing strides or even seeming to look around. Which wouldn’t mean anything if they had functional wide-angle cameras.

Regina held her breath until they passed, then indulged in a quiet sigh and scrambled out from under the hidey-hole. Being wedged in there with several drones was not exactly comfortable. She looked around, then they continued on her way, the others forming up around her.

Sooner than she’d thought, they reached what she assumed was their home base. It looked like a military checkpoint, if one that had clearly suffered from rust and neglect. The chainlink fence was still more or less intact, but the barricade in the single gate was indented and cracked, so it didn’t really block entry. A boxy gray building crouched behind it.

Regina glanced at the others and quickly checked in with them, before she crept closer to the facility. She didn’t see any cameras, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be any, or more guns. Ira reapplied their Magic Armor, even if that might make it slightly harder to hide.

Regina had just reached the edge of a conveniently placed half-broken-down wall when the facility hummed to life. She froze, swallowing heavily as several signatures suddenly crystallized in her magic senses. They’d been too weak for her to notice before, but now they’d either increased in strength sufficiently or ‘booted up’.

Regina pulled back slightly and drew on her own mana. She formed it into the pattern to prepare a Fireball, then edged forward again so she could properly aim.

Regina almost released the Spell on instinct, but held back just in time. She gritted her teeth and let the mana dissolve before it started acting up, staring at the scene in front of her.

A figure had come out of the main building, one she hadn’t sensed here before, but still recognized. There has to be something blocking magical sensing there, she noted in the back of her mind. The figure was familiar, but changed. She walked across the ground at a steady pace, posture relaxed and confident, little details like the slight disarray of her hairstyle, the creases in her clothing — was that an old military uniform? — and the sparkle in her eyes giving her a lifelike quality that surprised Regina despite herself. She was also walking straight towards her.

“Galatea?”

Regina stood up and stepped out behind the wall of the building. She stared at her friend, unable to conceal her surprise.

“Regina. I was hoping to find you here. In fact, you almost beat me here.” Galatea smiled. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Likewise.” Regina returned her smile, sending a mental admonishment to Max and the others to sheathe their weapons and come out. “I’m surprised to see you here, though. I thought you wanted to see the world?”

“Well, this is part of the world, you know,” Galatea smirked at her. “Like I said, I haven’t been here for long, though. Walk with me?”

Regina nodded and stepped forward to join her, resisting the urge to poke a finger at her friend’s figure to see how immaterial it was. Her magical aura had changed a little, although she didn’t seem to have grown much more powerful since they’d last met. Regina glanced at the robots, who had suddenly stopped moving and now returned to what looked like defensive positions around the perimeter.

“Don’t worry,” Galatea reassured her. “I have them under control.”

“How?”

“Well, they are old military technology. It wasn’t that hard.”

Regina frowned. “Have you always had control of the defenses here?”

Galatea paused and rolled her eyes at her. “Seriously, Regina? Even if I wanted to, how do you think I would have done that? There isn’t exactly an Internet to transmit data along anymore, you know. I was trapped in another cave.”

“There doesn’t seem to be wireless connection here, either, but I don’t see you plugged into them,” Regina pointed out.

“I managed to find a spell — lowercase, not a System Spell — to use my magic as a sort of substitute,” the mana-form-slash-AI explained. “It only works for short distances, unfortunately.”

Regina nodded, but she couldn’t help eying the robots and the fence as they passed through a gap in the barrier into the yard of the outpost. She wasn’t exactly upset that Galatea had hacked them, but it was still making the back of her neck itch slightly. She almost jumped when Max pulled open the side of a breach to make a bigger hole and metal screeched loudly. Galatea raised an eyebrow at her.

“Sorry,” she said, running a hand through her hair. “A bit jumpy.”

Her friend’s look softened, and she briefly laid a hand on her arm. It didn’t seem to weigh anything, and there was no real pressure, but she still thought she felt a faint warmth, which might just be psychosomatic.

“Don’t worry,” Galatea repeated. “I am constitutionally incapable of harming you, Regina. And these kludged-together toys are no obstacle.”

“You are, still?” Regina tugged on her mandible.

“You know I - did some internal lawyering with definitions. On that note, you didn’t happen to run into any proof of your origins, did you?”

Regina hesitated for a moment, before she reached into her jacket, took out the sheet of paper Leian had given her and passed it to Galatea.

The mana-spirit AI read it in silence, frowning slightly in thought. She’d gotten almost scarily good at presenting and emoting like a human. Finally, she nodded, folded it back up, and returned it to Regina. “I see. That should certainly prove you are rightfully a citizen of the state that created me.”

“The state, or the Empire?” Regina asked.

Galatea smiled slightly. “The Empire. I was using state in the context of nation or country, not the parts of the HRE.“

Regina nodded. “Why did you come back, anyway?” she asked to change the subject.

“Well, I only came here, specifically, to find you. But I got back into the area recently, since I had a few other things I wanted to do.”

Regina narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t happen to visit the Cernlian military camp, did you?”

Galatea raised an eyebrow. “As it happens, yes,” she said after a short pause. “I did.” She hesitated again, sent a glance at their surroundings, and then turned back. “We can discuss what I did in detail later. For now, I think it’s best to get out of here. Your Hive is going to need you back to lead them in the war.”

Regina sighed, but resolved not to press the issue right now. They probably did have to hurry back, but she wasn’t going to let Galatea just vanish.