Chapter 378 - Friendly Bickering
"My favorite animal?" Kirisho asked surprised, and Eisen nodded his head in reply. "Yes, your favorite animal. Or rather, if you had to choose a single one, what animal would you choose to tame?" He added to his question, and Kirisho slowly held her hand in front of her mouth and thought about it for a little while, seemingly trying to hide a smile from Eisen.
"If I had to choose, then maybe I would say a fox?" Kirisho explained, and without even questioning it, Eisen nodded his head with a smirk. "A Fox, huh?" Eisen asked, and Kirisho nodded her head.
"Yes, but why exactly did you want to know that?" The Mist-Spirit asked from Eisen, but he just winked at her with a smile on his face.
"You'll see." The old man told her, and Kirisho slowly nodded her head, before Eisen turned toward Fluke, trying to speak to him without Kirisho hearing him. "I want to speak to you about an item I would like to create later. From the way you've been speaking so far, you'll probably stick along even in town, right?" Eisen asked him, and the Warforged nodded his head, surprised and curious about what Eisen wanted to make exactly, "Well, that's what I had in mind, at least. As I said, I'm not sure how much help I could be there, but I'll try my best."
"Don't worry, you were a great help so far." Eisen replied immediately, "Especially when we were facing large, rougher golems, your creations really helped out a lot." He told the man next to him, and Fluke just smiled back.
"Is that so? Nice to hear that." He responded with a smirk, and Eisen looked in front of him after hearing a little bit of noise in the distance, although he wasn't really surprised to see that it was just Jyuuk and Xenia fighting some Golems.
"Ah, there the two of them are." Eisen smiled, and before he knew it, the two of them also looked toward the old man and approached the group when they finished off the last golem in front of them.
"Great, you came pretty quickly." Jyuuk said with a happy nod, quickly taking Aotori back in onto his skin, before he turned toward Fluke and his carrier-golem. "Wait, did you make two more Golems while you were traveling?" He asked surprised, but Eisen immediately shook his head with a laugh.
"No, no, this is Fluke, a Warforged. The same race as the 'Failure' that the others mentioned back in Prototype. And that behind him is Fluke's Golem." Eisen explained, so Jyuuk scratched the back of his head embarrassedly, "Oh… Sorry about that, then. Nice to meet you, Fluke. My name is Jyuuk, and this here is Xenia." The Monkey Beastperson said with a slight bow forward, before Fluke shook his head in response.
"That's fine, happens all the time when I'm travelling. Warforged may be considered a race of 'People', but there aren't many of us, and we usually keep to ourselves, so not many other people really saw any of us." The Warforged Tinkerer explained in an understanding voice, so Jyuuk replied with a nod, although he was interested in something else right now, slowly approaching Fluke's back, squatting down behind him to take a closer look at the largest spot of his exposed Bark-Skin on his whole body.
"I heard what Warforged are like, but this is truly surprising. Do you have regular internal organs? Is just your outer layer made of bark, or are you wooden all the way through? And these metal pieces seem practically fused to you…" Jyuuk said curiously, and Fluke nodded his head as if it was nothing. After all, he was the kind of person to do practically the same thing to Eisen before.
"Yes, we have internal organs, although it sometimes happens that they are metallic as well. That's just on rare occasions though, but I for example have a metallic heart. It coincidentally doesn't act like metal though, but regular flesh, which we do have. It's a bit different in its making to regular meat, but…" Fluke said and slowly removed a panel on his arm to subtly show his work off a bit as well, "Here, it's not really proper flesh that all of you have, it's more of a mixture of plants and flesh. It can connect practically perfectly to non-organic matter if you just leave it there for a while and let it 'Heal' onto you." The Warforged explained, seemingly more than just happy to have someone else to speak about his body with.
Eisen was really interested in his mechanical parts, while Jyuuk was curious about his biological parts, so the three of them would surely be able to speak about a lot of fun things together!
But before then, there was something else that needed to be done. "Are the others nearby yet?" Eisen asked, and Jyuuk swiftly nodded his head in response.
"I sent my other eagles out, and they seem to have found them. Their group is about an hour away from here if they don't run into any tough Golems." Jyuuk pointed out, so Eisen slowly nodded his head. "Alright, good. Then let's just wait for them and prepare. Did you find a good spot to enter already?" Eisen asked, before Xenia replied to him.
"There's three entrances in the form of tunnels. But there are a lot of golems in each of them, so we didn't go inside yet. The most useful for fighting against Golems is Brody, after all." Xenia admitted, so Eisen just chuckled and began to move his fingers through his beard.
"That is definitely true, he should make it possible for us to finish the fight with the King Golem pretty quickly." Eisen responded, although the only one that didn't really understand it was Fluke.
"In what way? The King Golem is probably a lot stronger than you think it is… It's a Rank 5 Golem, you know? And it's a Perfect Quality one as well, so it's basically at the peak of the strength it can have. And through becoming a boss, it was surely empowered as well." Fluke pointed out, before the Paladin Half-Dragon standing next to Kiron spoke up in response.
"Well, maybe not as much as you think. The state as a boss increases your stats a fair bit, you have more Health and Mana to use, and a certain few of your abilities are strengthened. But a Golem's strength relies largely on the materials they are made of, and they don't directly have any special abilities in the form of skills that can be strengthened. Its materials will surely be incredible, but as far as I am aware, we can work around that through Sir Brody?" The Paladin suggested, and Eisen immediately nodded his head in response.
"Exactly my thinking. And because the Golem Core is apparently exposed openly, as long as we can make any one of Brody's weapons hit the core at least once, we should be able to damage it a fair bit." He replied, before turning toward Fluke.
"You said you managed to get a look at it through one of your creations? What exactly was the King Golem like?"
While scratching his cheek, Fluke swiftly explained, "It's just a huge golem made of stone-bricks. Proportion-wise, it's similar to my big guy here, but he's about ten meters tall." The Warforged Tinkerer explained to them, so Eisen nodded his head in thought.
"Alright, that shouldn't be too tough then. Especially large golems are pretty slow, right? I doubt we'll have too much trouble hitting the Golem Core." Eisen said, but both Jyuuk and Xenia looked at him with a wry smile the very moment he said it.
"Could you stop trying to actively Jinx us here?" Xenia asked him, but Eisen just looked at her confused, "What do you mean? I'm just trying to say that it's probably going to be an easier fight than we thought it would be." The old man replied, before Jyuuk sighed out deeply in response, shaking his head as if he was disappointed.
"You're going to make us lose if you keep going like that…" Jyuuk told him, and as such, the conversation swiftly derailed from talking about the actual boss to the fact that they would 'definitely lose' because of Eisen. And not because Eisen didn't have combat capabilities, but because he said they would most likely win without much problem. And then, the last group arrived, stopping that conversation from getting away from the actual topic too much.
"Get with the times, old man. Learn what words mean before you're too senile to do so." Brody said with a frowned combined with a smirk, before Eisen turned around toward him and crossed his arms. "Huh? Oh, it's just you, Brody, barely saw you down there." Eisen replied with a laugh, but Brody looked up at the 4 meter old man and didn't back off either.
"Now that you mentioned it, aren't you supposed to stop growing by the time you're 20? Now look at you, older than modern civilization and experiencing a growth spurt again." Brody shook his head back and forth slowly while crossing his arms, for some reason trying to act disappointed, although Eisen just smiled back.
"Be careful what you're saying or I'll make an item that forcefully shrinks you down to a meter, and then we'll see who's laughing about a sudden change in height." Eisen replied to the Demon-Orc, who just stared back at Eisen, nodding his head with satisfaction.
"You got me there, let's just call this one a draw." Brody said with a smile, but before anyone else could say anything, the Combatist swiftly looked at Fluke.
"What's that? Cyborg Groot?" Brody asked as he turned toward the rest, and Evalia, Jyuuk and Xenia all looked at him, obviously mentally drawing the comparison. The others didn't know who or what 'Groot' was, and even though Eisen did know it, he would feel bad for Fluke if everyone laughed about it all of a sudden.
"I'll just take that as a compliment. Because I don't know what you're talking about." The Warforged replied, and Eisen nodded his head as he looked at the new group that joined them just now.
"This is Fluke, a Warforged. He's going to be helping us out a little bit here in the town." Eisen told them, and Brody just shrugged in response.
"Cool. So, should we get going? The town doesn't seem as large as Prototype, but it should still take a little while to find the boss, right?" Brody asked the others, although Eisen quickly shook his head.
"Not necessarily. Fluke was here in town before, and he knows where the boss room is, so we'll probably be able to get there pretty quickly." Eisen pointed out, although Fluke crossed his arms in response.
"Yeah, I'm not so sure about that. It might look like the town I was at before, but this is definitely in a completely different place. I don't know what happened to the other one, but this isn't the same Town that I entered last time." Fluke replied, and before clearing the misunderstanding up, Eisen listened what the others had to say about it after explaining what actually happened.
"Fluke wanted to bring us to the town, but we were walking toward the western end of the island. At the place where Fluke said to have found the town last time was just a huge crater." Eisen explaiend to them, and Brody raised his eyebrows curiously.
"Oh? Did someone just obliterate the whole town?" The Demon-Orc asked, but Xenia tuned in next and shook her head, "That's unlikely, maybe that town was just an illusion and the crater was just always there? There should be a few spells like that…" She suggested, and Jyuuk also nodded in response to that suggestion, "Maybe you ate something from the forest that was unbecoming and hallucinated through that?" He added, but in the end, none of them really had any clue toward what actually happened, and Fluke just got pissed off.
"Well, all of you are wrong. You too, Fluke." Eisen said with a smile, but the Warforged just crossed his arms annoyedly, "What do you mean? The town couldn't just have stood up and walked over here. But something had to… have…" Fluke said, and in the middle of the sentence realized what was going on.
"The whole town is a Golem, isn't it?"