The Last Guardian

Part 9 war comes knocking

Sophia frowned as she watched the two crab spider thingies work to build what a few of the guards were calling a trebuchet. Meanwhile, the guards were opening up and inspecting the contents of several crates with the help of the town's blacksmith.

The town's blacksmith was a grumpy old man in her opinion. He was very skilled, but his level was relatively low. Most decent blacksmiths were in the thirty to fifty level range, but he was only in the twenties. In comparison, her own mother's seamstress skills were in the high forties.

All this pondering about other people's skills just made her want to look at her own but she didn't have a status stone of her own. The only public one in town was currently in the process of being moved underground along with the contents of what used to be the church. Their town hadn't been big enough for an actual priest or preacher to show up but they had a place of worship for all the major faiths at least the ones she knew of. But the church itself was just a building maintained by the townspeople, allowing them to worship their given patron. Nothing important had been damaged but a whole swarm of mostly melted scrap shell Beatles headset the thatch roof on fire. Thankfully due to the quick actions of the weird rollie things and the spider crab thingy they had managed to put the fires out before it spread too far but they also tore most of the roof off in the process.

So, most of the people who weren't busy with their daily tasks were undertaking the ceremonies needed to move their shrines into the newly dug underground church/temple. She wasn't really sure what to call the room that had been dug out for them just yet.

"Sophia, can you come here for a moment?" Frederick shouted, calling her over and jolting her back to reality.

"Hey, , what can I help you with?" Sofia said padding over feeling the now familiar weight of her moth companion landing on her head. She hadn't really been paying attention to where the thing was, but it generally had just been following her around.

"I know you haven't had the best of luck trying to communicate with your metal friend or it's buddies beyond somehow getting it to agree to help us out. but we're kind of wondering-?"

"What the fucking hell is this metal made of!? My skill can't make heads or tails of it it's lighter than dwarven steel but stronger than anything I've ever seen. The blade doesn't dull easily either and its sharpness. This thing would cut through leather armor almost as well as vibranium or adamantium would but it's still strong enough to hold its edge even when used against tougher materials like wood and even stone. And these edges it looks almost like it was cold forged and then cut into shape but that doesn't make sense that would just be downright impossible the tools simply don't exist to do such." The blacksmith blurted out, inspecting one of the swords that had been brought over.

"Yeah, that's about what I was going to ask to. Where did they get them they're in too good of shape to have been just lying around? So, it can't have just found them not only that it's setting up a freaking trebuchet in the middle of the town. I mean these things are clearly smart they're building homes and reinforcing walls, but this is just ridiculous. Have you managed to find out anything about them." Frederick asked generally just baffled as he picked up and inspected the strangest looking bow Sophia had ever seen. It had two small pully wheels one on each of the arms and the string was coiled around it in such a way that it would be impossible to remove without tools. It was even made of some material other than wood. So maybe it didn't need to be unstrung to keep from warping the bow.

"I don't know..... And this might sound weird, but I think they're all one thing I've been trying to talk to them, but I think the reason why I haven't been having much luck is I'm trying to talk to the wrong um thing? When I first went out to gather more herbs after I found the beetle it let me back into its cave. I found this thing in this weird room with flickering blue lights. There was this orb like thing that almost looked like an eye connected to loads of metal vines. It looked at me, but I could also feel it looking into me. I didn't know it back then and I only really understand it sort of now because I have a lot more experience with it. But that whole room felt like a person. A person who was hurt and impossibly old but so much, much more..... I, I can't really describe it I wasn't even looking for it but could feel its presence, and these, these, things are just tiny pieces of it not even children more like hands or limbs. Even now if I reach out like straining to hear a very quiet sound off in the distance, I can still feel it even though it was on the other side of the valley. it's, it's not the valley itself but it's everywhere or so prevalent that you could mistake it for the valley itself." Sophia said her eyes taking on a faint greenish blue glow.