There were a lot of aspects about this monster that seemed to match the various giant races, but no giants lived in Setrayu. Giants were a type of monsterfolk, and there were no monsterfolk nations near Setrayu. It seemed pretty impossible that a lone monsterfolk could be wandering around here.
Basically, it was weird for a monster like this to be in a place like this.
But the monster was here, and it was a threat that needed to be dealt with.
The skin-clad giant, having eliminated the guards, reached for the overturned carriage, destroying it like a child ripping the wrapping off a present.
“Aaaaaah!”
Inside the carriage was no present, but a girl about twelve or maybe thirteen years of age. She was delicate and cute, with features like a doll and glittering gold hair and blue eyes. Her dress was pale pink with only modest adornments, the sort of thing a lady might wear when going out.
Lushera wasn’t sure exactly who she was, but she looked like she could be the daughter of a noble.
The girl had suffered only some bumps and scrapes despite her carriage being overturned, since the carriage was designed to protect its occupants. But she couldn’t run when she found herself face-to-face with the giant. She sank to her knees.
The giant carefully examined her, then reached out its hand and—
“Hiyaaaaa!”
Lushera put all her momentum behind kicking that hand. But, no matter how much force was behind it, Lushera was small and only as threatening as a bullet. All she managed was to make the giant stumble, losing its balance.
The hand felt harder than she’d expected, and there was a metallic clash as she kicked it. “It’s…a golem?!” she cried in realization.
That made sense. Why would there be a single giant in a place like this? Why wouldn’t Lushera have any clue what monster it was? It was nothing more than a humanoid combat golem wearing pelts, with leather worked to look like skin, and magic used to control it like a puppet.
Golems could move wherever they had a user, making a golem not nearly as odd and ideal as a lone giant wandering around.
The golem immediately regained its footing, defending itself to faithfully carry out the orders of some unknown person. It seemed to acknowledge Lushera as a threat and hindrance.
“Well then…I’ll just smash you to pieces!” shouted Lushera, putting herself between the golem and the girl.
The giant golem slowly lifted its darkly glinting club. Slowly? No. It only appeared slow because it was so large, but it was actually surprisingly fast.
The club crashed down, shaking the ground, but Lushera jumped nimbly out of the way. That was a snap decision. If the golem had aimed to take out both Lushera and the girl behind her in one swing, Lushera would have instead blocked the strike, taking it herself to defend the girl, but the golem didn’t step very far forward. Lushera judged that it was only aiming to smash herself.
Hm? Is this thing trying to avoid accidentally hitting the girl with an attack?
She didn’t know why, but the attack wasn’t all in, and that naturally left the golem open for a counter. She bounced up onto the club and used it as footing to jump higher.
“Haaah!”
She rushed up its arm and delivered a rising kick to what functioned as its chin. Her foot met firm resistance, and there was another clang of metal on metal.
Lushera thought she’d put enough force into that kick to tear its head off, but the golem still moved, its eyes turned to the sky.
SCREE-EE-EE… KREE-EE-EE
The golem turned its head, letting out the sound of cogs grinding together.
“I’m over here!” Lushera moved so she wasn’t near the girl, and the golem ignored the girl and targeted Lushera.
It took its club in both hands and swung it, swiping horizontally, mowing across the ground. Lushera easily jumped over it as it passed with a roar.
GA-CHUNG!
It opened its mouth with a clang and belched out a ball of fire. It was probably shot by a mechanism similar to a magic cannon. The fire aimed at Lushera as she jumped, calculating her trajectory without fail.
“Ack!”
It exploded on her, concussive force and raging flames slamming into her, sending her flying like a kicked ball with a trail of smoke behind her.
She hit the ground once, spinning out of control, bounced, then hit the ground again, this time taking control and landing on her feet, cutting grooves into the dirt with her boots as she stopped her momentum.
“That was close… Good thing my enemy’s using fire!” she said.
She was uninjured.
Her body was abnormally resistant to fire and magic, meaning a fire spell wasn’t about to burn even one hair on her head.
The golem didn’t seem surprised. It probably couldn’t feel that emotion. But it did seem able to evaluate the situation and chose not to shoot another ball of fire. It raised its club.
“Shit, this thing just keeps coming!” shouted Ivar, appearing on this side of the river, though Lushera didn’t know how he’d crossed it.
“Ivar, it’s dangerous!” she said.
“I ain’t gonna die, don’t worry about me!” he shouted back. “You need to be looking at that thing. You see it? It’s a golem. There’s gotta be something!”
Ivar already realized what it was. A golem. Meaning it had to have a user somewhere. This wasn’t an “accident” where they happened across a wild monster. This was an incident. Perhaps even a plan. It was Ivar’s job to figure out what that was.
“All right then, Ivar, you stay with the girl! I don’t think it’ll target you!” said Lushera.
“Sure thing!”
Lushera made sure Ivar hid himself behind the remains of the carriage, then turned back to face the golem. She took in one sharp breath and poured the dragon energy running through her into the earth.
“I’ll burn you to a crisp!”
The ground cracked and flames burst forth. The crimson glow formed a wave with intent and rushed towards the golem.
It stumbled, fire enveloping it. But there was nothing about the way it moved that implied it was damaged. Its metal skeleton showed as the pelts and leather burned and fell.
Shhhhhew, the golem’s body hissed.
“…I’m not getting my full power.” Lushera had aimed to burn away the internal mechanism of the golem, but she lacked the power. Unlike a real dragon, Lushera didn’t have an internal organ that produced her breath attack, but she could imitate a breath attack by drawing on the natural elements in the world.
But Setrayu was the land of water, which was the least compatible with Lushera’s fire. The slumbering volcano that was Mount Kugus was an exception. Here, her fire breath was no more powerful than any number of fire spells.
Scree-ee-ee, the golem moved, bursting from the flames towards Lushera as it swung its club.
“Eeek!” the girl let out a stifled cry as she watched the fight. From where she was, it probably looked like Lushera was crushed, but the moment the club crashed down, Lushera slipped towards the golem, inside its reach.
“Take this!” Lushera plunged her hand into the small gap on the back of the golem’s knee joint, grabbed whatever she could, and pulled hard, bringing out a rounded part that had been attached to a rod, shredding mithril cables as she did. Not that she knew what that part was.
The golem jerked and lost its footing, its movements slower.
It started waving its arms around, like someone trying to bat away an insect, but it was far too slow to deal with Lushera.
She bounced up the golem, from part to part, reaching into joints and jerking out whatever she could.
“I-Incredible…” said the girl.
“She’s crazy,” said Ivar, both him and the girl staring dumbfounded at how Lushera fought.
Though, while they might have been admiring her, she was starting to get frustrated.
This thing’s stubborn… I can break parts of it, but it’s so big I can’t get to its core.
Its motions had grown quite clumsy, but it could still move.
It didn’t matter how abnormally powerful Lushera was, it would take no small feat to get through this thing’s heavy armor. Especially when you considered Lushera was using her own body as her weapon, and her body didn’t weigh enough. She also didn’t have an appropriate tool that would let her use her power to its fullest.
Inside! I need to smash it from the inside somehow!
She slipped past a hand that tried to snatch at her small frame and jumped up to the golem’s shoulder, where she straddled its neck like a child riding their parent’s shoulders.
“Conscious light. I am she who destroys omens. The infallible ultimate, the river of glass, the golden ring’s ending, out of reach…” she recited.
“Ack, shit! Miss, get down!” shouted Ivar.
“Uh, o-okay?”
“Ears covered, eyes closed, mouth open!”
Before coming on this trip, Lushera had studied a few spells. As the golem tried to crush her with the palm of its hand, she thrust her own slender arms out to block it. And, just as she was finishing up the incantation, she plunged one of her arms down the golem’s throat.
“Roar, child of blessing! Incinerating Blast!”
For a moment, she felt no gravity, followed by an explosion that rattled her brain.
Lushera launched her explosive spell right into the golem’s insides, and that shattered the creature, sending burnt cogs and mechanical bits flying in all directions.
The golem’s body didn’t completely contain the blast, which left a crater in the ground and sent Lushera flying high into the sky from her very own spell.
She spun wildly and smacked face-first into the ground in a not-particularly graceful landing. She was almost uninjured.
“Oh…?” said the girl.
“You idiot! You go ahead and tell me this thing is dangerous then you go and do that!” shouted Ivar from beneath a tree at the side of the road, spit flying. “You got bystanders here and you go and launch a dangerous spell like that at full incantation?!”
“S-Sorry,” said Lushera. “I didn’t get much chance to practice that, so I didn’t know how to scale back the power…”
“Well, thanks to that, you managed to finish the thing off, but…ah, it’s a mess. How’re we supposed to tell where it was made from this pile of shrapnel?” He sighed and kicked one of the golem’s shredded arms away, his head craning back and forth as he examined the wreckage. “…Welp, anyway, I used a call charm to contact the Guild through the communication office. Someone should be coming soon. They’ll need to investigate this as quickly as they can.”
“Thank you, Ivar…”
The golem wasn’t moving anymore, but this might just be the first move in whatever was going on.