Titan: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 4) by Jez Cajiao (beach books .txt) 📗

trail went cold there, even though I knew from Jenae that he’d returned at least once since then.

“I’ll find you, bro…” I blinked away the spectral memory and looked around at the dozens, no, hundreds of people roaming the clearing and forest. “But for now, I have to protect them…” I whispered, shaking my head. I knew Tommy would be all right. Hell, if I knew him, he’d probably have found a way to get to a pleasure island and was probably banging the realm’s equivalent of supermodels somewhere, off his tits on booze and weird local drugs.

I didn’t know when things had changed, but the longer I was here, in this realm, the more I felt the pull to defend its people. Tommy was a hard lad, and he’d already survived five damn years here. All I had to do was survive as well, get these people back to the Tower, and I’d find a way to save him yet. Now that Jenae had narrowed his location down to the city six or seven weeks ago, she’d be able to find him more easily when she searched next. If I hadn’t torn that goddamn Valspar thing out of myself the way I had, she wouldn’t have had to provide the costly healing I had needed, and I’d have probably found Tommy days ago.

He’d be all right, I decided. I had to believe that, or I’d go mad, having been so close to him, and having left the trail behind. I had responsibilities to these people, ones I’d given myself, and I would not abandon them or Tommy.

“I will find you…” I muttered again, burying my worry and self-recriminations down deep. Straightening my shoulders, I strode forward to Romanus, who was standing nearby in discussion with Elize and Athena.

Chapter Four

“Jax!” Athena said cheerfully when she spotted me. Romanus and Elise spun to face me, the Legion Prefect smiling in relief, and Elise nodding her head in recognition.

“Athena, Romanus… and Elise!” I said, nodding to them each in turn. “Elise, I have to congratulate you. None of this would have been possible without you. You did an amazing job… so thank you,” I said to her.

“Aye, well… I didna do it fer free, ye ken?” the stout dwarfess grumbled, trying to ignore the fact that her cheeks were reddening at the well-earned praise. “I had help. Finbar an’ Viktoria were part o’ it, sendin’ me spare staff an’ all… I’d have no made it in time otherwise…”

“There’s no shame in needing help, Elise,” I said firmly. “That’s one of the reasons I need to talk to you. Has Augustus explained to you yet about the Golems?” The diminutive engineer nodded quickly.

“Oh, aye. He be directin’ them now, an’ that ‘Servitor’ one, ah… can I keep ‘im?” she asked hopefully. “I’d be able t’ work miracles on the ship wit’ ‘im under my command!”

“Man, I forgot about that. Heph and Seneschal are going to go mental when they find out I left one in the city…” I muttered to myself, before shaking my head and smiling fondly at Elise. “You can’t have this one for the long term, but you certainly can use it as you see fit for now. Give me a minute…” I closed my eyes, reaching out and feeling Oracle gently guiding me.

The area surrounding me was black, as I traveled inside my mind, but slowly, it started to fill as I reached out with my thoughts. First, there was the sense of warmth, of people, all around me, and a… river? No, stream… that was it. A stream of light that connected me to each of them. It was as thin as a thread of silk, but it seemed to carry so much: information, emotions, desires. I knew instinctively that it was a soul-thread. I also knew that each and every one was a bond between me and the person who’d sworn to follow me.

I reached out, still guided by Oracle, and I soon found eddies where the threads and streams seemed to be bent, reminiscent of water running around stones submerged in the path of the stream. I concentrated on these sections, finding that they glowed to my spectral sight, and then I felt them.

The Golems.

They had a rudimentary awareness, or at least these level two and three versions did. The level twos were slow, plodding minds, dull as dishwater, but still there, while the threes were… different.

I could only compare them to animals in my mind. If I were to continue with the water analogy, the level twos were fish; they knew to eat, to swim and to do, but not to think for themselves. By contrast, the level threes were closer to seals; they could think, reason things out, but they weren’t human minds, and they didn’t have the self-awareness I was used to. Instead, there was an almost ‘hive’ mentality. They reached out and commanded their ‘lesser’ brethren through a kind of neural link, and the more individuals they linked with, the faster their minds worked.

I had a vision of the hundreds that had once filled the Great Tower, and I couldn’t help but shiver at the capacity they must have once had.

The greater Golems were far more intelligent, becoming almost fully sentient, and would live until destroyed, Heph had explained once, with the ‘King’ level of Golems being capable of true majesty in their works.

The flying cities, I’d been told, were the work of a Golem King, and although I knew it would make no sense for one to be here, lying in dormant repose on one of the cities that had crashed, I still had a momentary fantasy of finding it.

Then I shook the thought away. If it had been here, it would have fixed the damn city.

I searched quickly, jumping from one Golem mind to another, until I found the level three Servitor, and I sank into it. The Golem was working on the far side of the ship, two