The Automated Quarry
He didn’t know how long he was out. When he woke, a small flame sat in his dantian, fully bonded to his soul—no longer pure black, but shot through with a thread of dark green.
The bad news: most of his ki was gone.
Not the kind that regenerated easily, but the refined, source ki he’d spent the last year building. His mana pool had taken damage too, though that would recover faster.
Fate glared at Pan.
“Why didn’t you warn me that would feel like getting torn apart, and that I’d lose most of my ki?”
He looked around and found Pan in an… unusual situation—sitting on Shafir’s head while hundreds of shadow-black tendrils held her pinned to the ground. She couldn’t even move her tail.
“What is going on here? Pan, why is Shafir tied up?”
Pan laughed, teeth flashing white against the pre-dawn gray.
“So you do know her.” He shifted, almost lazy. “To answer your first question—you’re supposed to absorb the stone in small pieces, not all at once. It’s a miracle you’re still breathing.”
His expression sharpened.
“As for the second: she attacked me ten minutes ago. I was about to kill her, but at the last second I noticed she’d positioned herself so she wouldn’t hit you—like she was trying to shield you. Genuinely impressive, for a drake to come at me at all. She has to know it would’ve killed her, and she still didn’t hesitate.”
Fate frowned, weight settling behind his eyes.
“Wipe that grin off your face and let her go.”
Pan started to laugh again, but one look from Fate turned it into a cough. A moment later he’d shifted back into the black horse—probably just so Fate couldn’t see his face. The shadows dissolved instantly, freeing Shafir, who roared once and trotted over to Fate.
“It’s fine now,” Fate said, stroking her scales, her hide warm despite the cold morning air. “Just don’t go after that idiot again. He’s a little sensitive.”
Shafir eyed Pan with suspicion and no small amount of fear. Drakes were proud, fearless creatures, sitting near the top of every food chain—but they were also smart enough to recognise when they were badly outmatched.
Fate looked around, scanning the tree line.
“What are you doing out here at this hour?”
Sari stepped out from the trees a few minutes later, hair mussed from sleep, looking surprised—and more than a little intrigued by Pan.
“These two days are for bonding with familiars,” she said. “Shafir took off while we were playing, so I came looking for her.” She gave the horse a wry look, then frowned as Shafir backed away from Pan when he came closer. “That’s your familiar?”
“His name’s Pan,” Fate said, smiling, reaching out to stroke him—though Pan seemed far more interested in Sari than in Fate.
“He’s a beautiful horse,” she said, with a note of pity in her voice.
Fate didn’t correct her. He just smiled and nodded. If people wanted to think Pan was weak, that suited him fine.
“Want to spar a bit while our familiars sort themselves out?” he asked.
Sari thought it over, then nodded.
“Sure, why not.”
They left Pan and Shafir to their own devices and sparred for ten minutes before Sari stopped, frowning, sword lowering to her side.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“Sorry?” Fate said, caught off guard.
“Your technique’s improved a little, but your speed and strength have dropped—badly. You’re weaker now than you were three days ago.”
Fate sighed, the sound heavy in the cold air. He’d thought it might just be his imagination, but if Sari had noticed, it was worse than he’d realised. He sheathed his sword.
“A bit of trouble with ki training. Honestly, it’s the first time I’ve really understood how much strength ki actually gives me. I should fix this before I head back to school.”
Sari looked at him, worry creasing her brow.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“You’ve already done more than you know. This one’s on me—the problem’s internal. I don’t think anyone else can help.”
Fate sat down and began sketching out a matrix, the immortal flame at its centre. Sari lingered a while longer before finally leaving with Shafir, not wanting to interrupt.
Night crept in, but Fate didn’t move—too absorbed in his work. As for Pan, he knew better than to interrupt him when he got like this.
Just before dawn, Fate opened his eyes.
“I need more life force to continue.”
Pan shifted into the shape of a handsome man in his twenties, black flame still curling off his skin, smoke-dark and restless.
“I think I can help with that. When I was out looking for that fire treasure, I spotted an orc tribe. Two hundred and seventy-three miles from here.”
“How big?”
“A hundred and twenty, maybe a hundred and fifty. No more.”
Fate thought it over for a second, then nodded and swung up onto Pan’s back the instant he shifted back into the raven-black horse.
“There’s still a little night left. Let’s move fast.”
Pan dissolved into shadow, and two minutes later stepped out of the shadow of a tree at the edge of the orc tribe’s camp. At night, shadows are closer to each other.
“Want me to clean this place out?” Pan asked, shifting back to human form, clearly eager for a fight.
Fate shook his head.
“I need the combat experience. Besides, there’s no point in you killing them for me. I can’t create Death Field with my current strength.”
Pan looked almost stricken.
“But you’re so weak right now!”
“I don’t plan on dying. Just watch my back if something goes wrong.”
Pan finally nodded and fell in a few steps behind him. Fate was glad for the chance to sharpen his close-quarters skills—it had always been his weakness—but he knew he was no match for orcs, who fought from the day they were born.
That wasn’t his way, though. Deep down, he was still a necromancer.
When an orc guard stepped outside the old, half-rotted palisade to check for intruders, Fate loosed three bone arrows at once—heart, throat, belly. He wasn’t sure any would land clean; his astral roots were still painfully weak.
Only the one in the throat did real damage. The one aimed at the heart stopped dead against the ribcage. The last was barely a test, just to see how far it would sink.
Not the results he wanted, but there was nothing to be done about it now.
The orc clawed at the arrow in his throat, but it wouldn’t budge—as if something invisible held it in place—and a few seconds later, he dropped. Barely any noise beyond the thrashing.
Fate moved in close and drew the life force straight out through the bone arrows. Necromantic spells weren’t compatible with his life-force matrix by design—the matrix hadn’t been built for them. Rather, necromancy was the only school of magic Fate had ever found that was compatible with the matrix he’d built, back in his previous life. He’d tried everything else first.
A quick incantation, and the orc rose again—but only the skeleton moved, the meat left behind on the dirt. Fate pressed a hand to the bone and fed it a trickle of life force, and small green flames kindled in its eye sockets.
A few minutes later, another orc died. This time, just one arrow, straight to the throat. Two more fell before the tribe caught on that something was wrong.
By dawn, thirty hunters had left the palisade to track down the attacker, but Fate had already pulled back into the forest, widening the gap—and leaving deep horse tracks behind, easy enough for the hunters to follow.
An hour into the chase, the orcs finally caught up to four skeletons. They charged in without a second thought. Seven fell into the oldest trap in the world—a simple pit. Four more died to bone arrows. The rest breathed in poison mist, the last spell Fate’s mana could support.
A follow-up air spell collapsed part of the pit onto a scatter of half-buried bones, killing three more and crippling four others. Those four were as good as dead already—so, functionally, the trap had claimed seven.
Once the mist cleared the air, Fate ordered his skeletons to run, and ran with them, leaving nineteen orcs standing amid eleven dead. He kept running for another hour—long enough to circle back unseen, raise eleven fresh skeletons from the orc bones, and push them ahead at speed to set another trap deeper in the woods.
Before he could send four skeletons out as bait, the remaining orcs finally realized, two hours in, that they’d walked into an ambush, and began to retreat—leaving the second trap untouched.
So Fate simply ran them down. They’d been carrying poison in their blood for two hours by then, weak as it was. When fifteen skeletons dropped on them, they barely got a fight in. Still, they managed to destroy two skeletons before the whole hunting party was finished.
Fate returned to the tribe’s palisade with thirty-two skeletons, green fire burning brighter in some eye sockets than others. He didn’t attack outright—even with thirty-two bodies at his back, storming the camp would’ve been reckless.
He waited to see if another search party would go out. None did.
When night fell, he hit the camp with poison mist six times over, softening the whole settlement, and waited.
Just before the next dawn, he moved to one side of the palisade, tore a hole through the wooden wall with a Decay spell, and sent his army through.
The fight was short and ugly. The orcs had already noticed something was wrong—every one of them sick to some degree, weakened by the poison. Even where the shaman managed to heal it, the survivors were left too drained to fight properly.
The strongest warriors had already been sent out on the hunt and never come back, leaving only a handful of elites to defend the camp. Fate focused his bone arrows on those few, keeping his skeletons’ losses to a minimum.
By the time it ended, every orc was dead—one hundred and forty-three total, counting the hunting party. Roughly half were women. As for the children, they barely got a childhood at all—some grew from newborn to fully mature in under two weeks—so only a handful were even present.
It was a massacre. Fate didn’t blink.
Twelve skeletons survived. Fate went to the fallen ones and drew the life force straight out of their bones, turning them to dust. The matrix embedded in every skeleton he raised absorbed life force from each kill, and even if the skeleton itself was destroyed, that stored energy stayed locked in the bones.
He could have set them to self-revive using that reserve, but it would’ve defeated the entire point of the raid. He needed the life force. Wasting it made no sense.
In the largest cave, Fate found gold, scattered treasure, the wreck of a broken carriage, and other odds and ends—the tribe had clearly hit some wealthy caravan at some point to collect all this. But what really caught his attention were the water stones: a cluster of them, and more embedded in the cave walls.
Water stones sold for a solid price, and a haul this size would fill his pockets nicely.
Thinking fast, Fate left his twelve remaining skeletons with just enough life force to keep their matrices running, and set them to mining the stone. The matrix would draw in ambient mana automatically, keeping them working around the clock, indefinitely—until he came back and told them to stop.
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