Chapter Twelve

“Who is this Knight Commander?”

“We don’t recall his name,” Ellmut said. “He was a nobody. It’s after you went, a group of men who were so adamant to fall, raised. They hunted us like animals. Their dominance soon spread like fire.”

Us, I noticed.

“He was one of them, rising in the ranks. I heard he owns a blade, he loves it more than his woman. It’s seen more blood than a butcher’s cleaver. No one has ever survived facing it.” He turned towards me, “he just hates us.”

“Why don’t you hate us, Ellmut?” I asked. “Why do you treat us differently?”

“Difference is relative, master Clinten,” he smiled. “You are not different but new, the world will follow. Someday.”

We walked into the chamber at the beckoning of a gnome, who signalled us. I took my position near the two supports, in the centre of the edge, close to the entrance. They used a trail similar to the one in the inventory, but smaller and more functional. The chest piece dragged down hanging by the chains. I went through it as Ellmut pushed me in. Another gnome brought forth a metal glove in blue. It went above my fingers and pulled my whole hand. I donned the other glove and stepped on the metal boots that covered my whole leg. I realised why they didn’t attempt to do it themselves, for it was incredibly heavy and cumbersome to wear.

I took the first step like a jacked machine and slowly moved to the middle of the crowd. A large group of gnomes and dwarfs were gathered to send me off. Ellmut brought a metal hook and caught the armour into another trail.

“No worry, Clinten,” Ellmut said. “You have successfully destroyed a mole, remember.”

“What’s a mole?”

“The headless machine you fought within the mill,” he said, stepping back.

I could see the whole crowd as I went up, it slowly dragged me into the above storey through an opening and halted near the elevator. I unhooked the chains and caught the grill platform with my feet.

“Listen,” Armdan’s voice echoed from the communicator inside the armour. “It’s fairly complex, you spread the explosives equally and leave.”

“What about the Knight Commander?”

“He’s in the Control,” he said. “He shall die in it.”

I stretched my toes, put on the helmet and proceeded to the elevator. It was empty, completely dead and held slightly above the storey.

“What should I do?”

“Open the floor.”

I did everything, exactly how he instructed me to, I pulled out a tube from elsewhere and the cylinder it connected. I detached the cylinder and cornered it, replaced it with a cylinder from the bag they had attached with me. The element immediately started to flow through the tubes, it was like reloading the arm.

“Guess it works…”

I raised all the switches, an engine roared below, and the door automatically dropped. I closed the plate, stood back and waited for it to open. Two Knights who stood as guards approached me.

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“It works!!” One of them said in his cracked voice.

“It always did.”

The two knights glanced at each other.

“Yes it did,” said the other knight.

“Where am I going,” I talked through the communicator, sauntering past the knights towards the metal stairs.

“There is a problem in deploying the explosives,” Armdan said.

“What is it?”

“We don’t have enough synthesised elements,” he explained. “We have to grab some from the delivery storage.”

I stopped behind the container where no one could spot me, the short ladder had gone up. Must be the flood. I checked on four sides and jumped to catch the ladder but the armour weight stopped me.

“What are you doing?” He hissed.

“Trying to climb…”

“You can walk around.”

“But the elements -”

“Those won’t do, the synthesised ones are stored in large crate-like boxes…”

“Like the trams with arms?”

“Precisely.”

I walked around the storey. The lever room where I set off the flood was wrecked. There were pieces of element cylinders the knights burst while firing. But the corpses were all missing.

Did they survive, I wondered. But realised that doesn’t change anything either.

After hours of searching, I finally found the huge column of trams dominated by the containers around. I got to the first tram, “what should I do?”

“Did you find it?”

“Yes.”

“There will be a knob-shaped lever between the upper end of the tram doors.”

“I see it.”

“Low it gently to the other end.”

The knob pressed itself as I kept my finger, and bars under the latches moved one by one under the doors. The slit emitted a sudden burst of red glow between the doors when the knob reached the end.

“It turned red…”

“Try another.”

I walked away like nothing happened even though the tram glowed like a red lamp under glass. I reached a tram away from the knights and far away from the glowing tram. I pressed the knob to the end and it did the same, and Armdan repeated the same.

“Why is this happening?”

“The trams contain two-step protection so that it cannot be obtained by the knights,” he said. “It needs a special key to open, which we don’t have.”

“So why are we wasting time trying.”

“There are complaints that most of them don’t work properly, we are trying to find something like that.”

“What are the chances?” The third tram also turned red as I pressed the knob, I pulled it again and pressed down. The glow went off when I pulled it back.

“It’s based on how lucky you are.”

He strongly held his patience for a long time, but not until I failed the ninth tram in a row. He suggested trying to find elements that were left in the open, but we weren’t fortunate in that either. I got back to trying the tram doors, and finally, after trying a dozen of them, I put my fingers within the doors and tried to pull them to the sides. The doors broke apart, the edges changed to green, and cold air ejected from the opening. Inside there were containers holding cylinders of elements.

I made sure none of the knights saw me, “I opened one.”

“Un grand merci,” he murmured. “How many elements do you see?”

“A lot.”

“Take seven.”

“We already have two,” I tried to let him know.

“We need at least eight,” he said. “And one extra for the elevator.”

I loaded the elements into the bag when the announcement boomed through the storey. It was the voice of the Knight Commander himself, bold and elegant. I could catch only a few words, but those were enough for an average one like me to infer the situation.

“They are coming for you,” I shouted over the communicator and then regretted, by looking around. “They know you are hiding.”

“We know,” he said. “They are not that dumb.”

“They just found it, I can reach there before them.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” he rejected me. “We should stay on the plan.”

“But-”

“Would you have accepted to do this, if we had told you that there is only one hope to survive?” he asked.