Chapter 435: DIY Golem

Belladonna sighed as she shook the latest shade of blood off of her fists, as not even the sweet scent surrounding her could make her feel better.

They had been at this nearly half an hour already, and while it was going well it was taking longer than she had hoped.

The maze like structure of the city was definitely helping these beasts hide, and it didn’t help that the Elves had designed tunnels or secret hidey holes that the beasts had long since discovered and turned into their nests or personal hunting grounds.

She had to spend a lot of time doubling back on herself, or getting turned around when something led her into a dead end.

Even spending most of her time on the rooftops wasn’t working, as it was a literal jungle up there even before it was overgrown and filled with entire treetops covered in leafy green razor blades. She might heal from it, but damn did those things hurt. Especially after she fought some strange clam that was constantly spraying her with salt water, that stung!

It was just taking too damn long.

Even the latest things she had killed, a little beast called a Trat, took a considerable amount of time. Trats were simple to kill. They were a strange little creature that, for the best possible description, looked like the demented outcome of a very hateful threesome between a triceratops, an ankylosaurus and a very fat, very brave rat.

A rat shaped body the size of a midwestern toddler that was covered in scales, had a protective spiked back, three horns on its beady head and a hammer fixing at the end of its long, worm-like tail.

They were easy to kill despite all that, just a swift punch in the head or punting them like a football would do the job. The issue was that took time. Even if it took five seconds a piece, and that was being rather generous, for the thirty dead Trats she was surrounded by that was a total of... carry the one, divide by sixty... Two and a half minutes!

Two and a half minutes just to kill these miserable little trash mobs. That wouldn’t be so bad, if it didn’t take her so long to find them and even then she definitely was not certain that this was all of them, just one nest of the pests.

There really had to be a better way. Why couldn’t she just summon an army as well?

Actually, that was a good question. Why couldn’t she? Sure she wasn’t a Necromancer or an actual summoner, but she wasn’t a fire mage either and that didn’t stop her from casting fire spells. She was a Glyphborne, the limits of her magic was only limited by the breadth of her imagination and the depth of her knowledge, and perhaps the width of something else.

Even if she had just complained about taking time, she could dedicate a few of those minutes to making something a bit more efficient. If she could get it right, she would definitely recoup her loss of minutes.

Rooting around in her shadow, Belladonna pulled out one of the smaller Sources that she hadn’t found a use for yet. She turned it over, mentally calculating how she would work with it whilst Aki was hard at work in her mind Library.

She was pulling pieces from different spells, fixing them together like jigsaw pieces into a new picture that shouldn’t exist, and yet the pieces were naturally clicking together nonetheless.

A few runes from the [Blood Well] spell, a few from her summoning spells, both for Beans and for the Demon she had a scroll for, all of which was placed on the foundation of a basic golem spell that she was makeshift stitching together in the moment based on everything she had seen from her Fox Figure.

When the resulting spell was created, Belladonna quickly got to work writing the runes for it. She wove them around the Source Remnant, circling it round and round, as she wrote it less like a spell circle and more like a poem.

Then, after a few corrections, Belladonna took a deep breathe and injected mana into her completed work.

When it didn’t blow up after a few seconds, she counted that as an absolute win, before tossing the Crystal down and letting it skid across the blood soaked ground.

It quickly rose on a pillar of blood, as all of the crimson around was rapidly drawn to the Source Remnant at the demand of the spell, and quickly started to take a familiar form.

A bloody reflection of herself stood before Belladonna, its completely crimson eyes staring blankly at her, as Belladonna crossed her fingers and hoped her idea would work.

She had no idea how the Fox Figurine’s mind worked, or how to replicate it for the moment, and a golem was usually useless without someone to control it, that was part of why the Fox Figurine was so special.

So if she couldn’t replicate it, simply take advantage of the one that already existed.

The Crimson Golem, as Belladonna decided to call it, blinked softly and inspected its hands curiously, before looking at Belladonna expectantly.

"Use these Crimson Golems as spare bodies, Help me clear this quadrant." She instructed with a smile, as the Golem bowed its head.

Without a word of complaint, it turned on its heels and darted off into the depths of the city to complete its purpose.

Belladonna couldn’t help cackling to herself, and giving herself a firm pat on the back for a job well done. It was patchwork, crafted through complete amateurish spaghetti code and was heavily dependent on something else to function.

But it was a start, and was just waiting to be improved.

Just seeing the Golem disappear, and eagerly pulling out more crystals to repeat the process, was getting Belladonna’s mind racing with different enchantment possibilities, and how she could alter items in ways she hadn’t thought of before.

Five Crimson Golems filtered out into the street, a number that was decided by the Fox Figurine itself. Although she had made more crystals, and made sure that they were right, the Crimson Golems after number five simply stayed immobile and useless, as the Fox Figurine was unable to handle any more.

But five, or six in this case, was definitely better than one, and it would be even better once she improved it.