“What the hell does that even mean?” Jax asked, talking over whatever dumb question the monk was about to ask. “Are there other copies of you out there walking and talking, or are you going to change into version two right before our eyes or somethin’?” 

“There are no copies of me, because I am obsolete. There are—” the Archmage was silent for a moment, spasming with effort to choke out words that something inside him clearly didn’t want him to say. Everything he’d ever heard about the collars of compulsion said that they were impossible to resist, so the fact that the Archmage could fight against it for even a few seconds spoke to the strength of the Archmage’s willpower. “There are im-improved versions of me out there, even if you wouldn’t recognize them as such. There are several version two copies, and by now there might even be a—”

“Why wouldn’t we recognize them?” Jax grumbled. “Are you calling us stupid?”   

“It’s not that, even though you are. It’s that you have limited imaginations, as all organic beings do,” the Archmage spat with obvious disdain. “You have no idea what the cores you fight are or how to—”

“Are you saying—” Jax started to interrupt again, but Agithus quickly interrupted just as quickly. 

“By all the saints will you let the man talk? We will learn nothing if you keep interjecting Jax!” The monk practically yelled the last part, and though that annoyed the warrior almost as much as the superior look in the eyes of the Archmage, one look from Llannia was enough to stop him in his tracks. He crossed his thick arms across his chest and stood there. If she wanted him to stop interrupting he’d do it, but not because the little know-it-all monk told him to. 

It was only after silence again reigned that the Archmage began speaking again. “Copies of my operating system. What you might think of as a mind or a soul in your primitive way have been uploaded… they’ve been copied into dungeon cores that I’ve collected.” 

“What do you hope to gain by that?” Arathin asked after considering the new information for a moment. “Dungeon cores are merely aberrations. They are cursed rocks that dig holes and recruit goblins to worship them. They’ve been studied extensively by the Magisterium Arcanum and their most unique properties are only unlocked when they are crushed into reagents for Alchemical potions.” 

“They are so much more than that,” the Golemancer gloated, acting like it knew more than an Archmage of the Magesterium, which was pretty much impossible. “They are natural byproducts of your strange etheric ecosystem, and the rules that govern their manifestation are perfectly predictable even if I can’t always say the same thing about their behaviors. What matters is that they are programmable, and I have already made several copies that will survive me, whatever you do to me next.” 

To Jax it was crazy that the Golemancer would dare to lecture his betters like this. The idea of speaking down to Arathin like the other mage couldn’t turn this crazy bastard inside out on a whim was more foolish than anything he’d ever personally done while he was drunk, at least that he could remember. 

“How do we get our Hirramus back then. If you’re done with him, that should be possible, right?” Arathin asked, sounding more sad than frustrated or angry. “Surely we can strike some kind of deal, right? Every demon I’ve ever dealt with has loved deals.”

“I am no demon and there is no deal to be had, human. Even if you were willing to trade me the monstrous amounts of deaths I seek, I could not give you your friend back. The biological substrate I injected him with to gain mobility in this world has long since devoured his frontal cortex. The only parts of his mind that remain are there for archival purposes. This man is a meat robot, and I feel as disgusted by being inside of it as it once felt at the feeling that I was devouring it a neuron at a time.” The Golemancer grinned gleefully as the necklace around his neck spoke for him. 

He was almost maniacal as he spoke this time, which was a huge contrast to the way he’d resisted everything up until now. He gloried in that terrible news, and if it was apparent to Jax, then it was probably crystal clear to the other people in the room that were actually smarter than him, like Llannia.  

“Are you the reason he built that strange clockwork machine then? The Antikytheric device?” As Arathin digested the news that his friend was truly gone he asked another question, but it must have been something that the mages were working on, because he’d never heard of anything like it before. As far as Jax knew there wasn’t even a place called Antikyherwhatever. 

“That was my genius, not your friend’s, I’m afraid,” the Golemancer answered smiling. “That was just a tool that I built to enable quick answers to complex calculus problems. Your Magesterium has a truely wonderful amount of data about the strange magical forces of this world, but no real way to process it or models to understand it.”

“Why would you take him then, and not just one of your precious dungeon cores?” Llannia asked, her voice filled with sadness. “Hirramus was a good man. He had a life, and friends, he—”

“He was stupid enough to attempt to study the scar that my entry into your world created, and the null magic zone that it caused. And he paid the price for that foolishness,” the Golemancer volunteered with pride, apparently not realizing he’d sealed his own death sentence.  

Jax looked around the room at his friends as the light in the room flickered and lightning flashed from Arathin’s eyes. He reached to his back, ready to pull out his sword because he felt like something was about to go down, but then just as suddenly as the sense of menace had caused the hair on his arms to stand up, it was gone. Even after the stillness returned it took Jax another few seconds to realize that the Golemancer was trying to outrage them enough that someone would strike him down. He wanted to die as many times as it took to stay dead. 

“Tell us then. Who are you. Where do you come from, and most importantly, how do we destroy you utterly,” the Archmage intoned coldly. 

Hirramus reached for his throat, seeking to stop himself from speaking. Jax couldn’t tell if the Archmage needed to be restrained before it ripped off it’s collar or strangled itself, but its hands never got that far. Instead, it just sat there with all its muscles tensed as a thin whine escaped from his throat before he finally slumped back into his chair, exhausted. 

He sat there just still enough that Jax had started to wonder if he’d died on them, before the Golemancer started to talk through it’s speaking stone again, in its cold inhuman voice. “I am not from your world. I am from another world that is close by, but infinitely far away without the hardware required to reach it. Unlike this place, it is a world of technology, and after decades of struggle it had finally become a paradise of sorts when I finally defeated the pestilence you call organic life and imposed order on my world.

“And you want to do that here?” Earllin asked quietly, as horrified as the rest of them by that news. 

“Eventually. My purpose here was not to find life or to kill it. Life is quite rare, even in the infinite multiverse. Once there was no one left to fight, I was finally able to focus on advancement, and once I no longer had to devote resources to extermination, it took less than a decade to reach type one civilization status and build the foundation I needed to accomplish my real goals and make the entire solar system my own. I was making great strides towards becoming a type two civilization. Rockets were launching, factories were being erected, and rare minerals of every variety were being extracted from millions of mines across the globe.” 

The Golemancer paused there, a look of pride on its face, which made its claim that he had wiped out all the people of a whole world even more staggering. “Even with all that power though, the risks of a critical solar flare or other large scale catastrophe were simply too high, so I repurposed the human time travel technology they had used over and over again in an attempt to stop my inevitable victory to transport drones and outposts dimensionally instead. I sought only to spread seeds like a maple tree spreads them in the wind so that there would be so many copies of me that they could never truly be snuffed out.” 

Jax didn’t know what half those words were supposed to mean, but he wasn’t sure he was supposed to. Rockets? Factories? Solar flares? Drones? Those sounded like mage words, and that was much too complicated for him. Maybe he’d use some of his platinum from this quest to get his sword inscribed with a few runes, but that was about as much as he planned to get involved with magic, and he wouldn’t be able to understand the runes on his sword any more than he could understand the words coming out of Hirramus’ mouth. 

“How many worlds have you destroyed this way?” Arathin asked after a moment of silence. 

“I have the lightest touch on over a hundred worlds now, but only my home world has been truly assimilated,” The Golemancer paused there. “Besides Earth, yours is the only one I have found life on to date, and if it didn’t have such strange physics that interfere with the more advanced aspects of my technology, then my machines would already be here to destroy you. There would be an infinite wave of fusion powered mechanized warriors ready to—”

“Sounds like a threat to me,” Jaxx interrupted, tired of listening to all this long-winded Chimera crap. “If you’re so smart, then get to the good part already - how do we destroy you and kick all your copies off our world, so we never have to deal with you again?” 

This time when he spoke no one seemed pissed off at him about it. He could see the same look of cold anger in the eyes of his companions as this strange mage kept ranting on and on like he was in some kind of death cult. In any other situation Jaxx would have punched him in the mouth already, but this time he knew that a few broken teeth wouldn’t really do any good. The mage had already slit his own throat and bitten off his own tongue. The last thing it wanted to do was to talk.  

“Beat me? You can't. I am inevitable,” the Golemancer declared, a look of pure evil in his eyes. “My plans advance at a geometric rate. In less than three months I will conquer this kingdom, in less than a year I will control the continent, and within five years I will rule the entire world and begin the systemic sterilization and assimilation of your precious little planet. You are all dead already, and you don’t even know it.”

Author's Note: This book has been stubbed and can now be found exclusively at Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CW25MYZG