Runic Cleansing has reached L4

Roland looked at the cleansed golem core in his hand while grumbling. The item had been cleaned of any remains of the monster that it had belonged to. Normally this would be a moment to cheer but the number of shattered cores that ended up in the dumpster still made his head hurt.

Several weeks had passed ever since he received the basic books on golem creation from the cat Professor. They introduced him to some golem designs that he could use and explained the pros and cons of them.

As this was his very first iteration he would need to go for the most basic model. There were a few designs that he could go with but he chose a simple one.

The golem’s base would be shaped like a rectangle. From the sides of it, he would insert four legs that would be used to give it motion. The first basic quadruped design was a good starting point as he wouldn’t need to worry that much about the balance.

Getting a golem to have a human shape was not such an easy task. The biggest problem was the balance of parts. One badly fashioned part could make the whole creation be unable to move and stumble all over the place.

The human body went through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. It was not easy to just recreate the joints in metallic form. Even then, if the program that the golem was running on was buggy the whole thing would just not work.

Thus for his first try, he decided to make something that didn’t need as much attention to detail. Animals that run on four legs had less trouble with balancing themselves. He also had a good test subject to work with, his trusty ruby wolf, Agni.

While Roland did intend to try mimicking a wolves walking pattern this first prototype would be more similar to a small spider. Instead of eight legs, it would have four now as a similar basic golem model was presented in one of the books he received.

It was quite astonishing how these golems worked. At first, he thought they would be similar to robots but they weren’t quite as complex. At least not with their outer shell. While robots required complex joint design and a lot of movable parts to make them work it wasn’t the same for golems.

For instance, a knee joint could require a separate motor to be mounted on the side. It could also use pressure pumps, springs, and all sorts of other solutions. With runes, on the other hand, magic was the driving factor.

The magic could generate all the push and pull forces that joints needed. This also didn’t require separate small motors or valves of any kind. The golem just needed one power source on its body along with the golem core.

Thanks to this fact he didn’t need to worry as much about the design. For his first spider-type golem he would use simple joints with some constrained movement.

The first iteration would have legs composed of three parts. They would start out by being connected to the main body and to the main joint. This joint would have limited back and forth movement that wouldn’t allow it to bend downwards.

To it, he would attach the middle part of the leg which would have the reverse type of movement. This would allow it to somewhat be able to squat down to the ground. The last part would have the same movement joint as the previous one. This would be the foot portion that would actually be making contact with the ground.

With all four spider-like legs connected to the main body, the golem should be able to somewhat move itself around. By moving the joints that were connected to the main body part it should even be able to turn itself around.

The last important part of this golem would be the ‘head’. This would be the part with all the golem’s sensors that it required to see the world. This was a part that he had already worked on before and created his mapping device with.

Making his golem identify him as its master wouldn’t be hard. Just as he thought it over before he would create additional items that would be recognized by his golems. Luckily in the books, this was all discussed and the craftsman could imprint their magical signature onto their creations.

This was similar to a fingerprint and was hard to copy by others. Hard but not impossible, there of course were ways to take over golems that didn’t belong to the creator. This was not an easy task to perform while the golem was active and defending itself.

Thus the only real way of doing it was after it was disabled. An easy way to go around this would be when a person knew the creator's magical fingerprint or had access to the golem’s key.

These magical automatons could be given to other people. The craftsman just needed to imprint them as the true master. Even then, the person fashioning this golem mostly put a backdoor in for themselves. No one wanted their own creations to be used against them, even less when they were giant war machines.

“Here Boss, the last one, just like you wanted it… but are you sure this is what you wanted?”

Bernir was to the side bringing in the golem’s legs. With the help of his assistant, he could focus more on the runes than the basic skeleton for his new creation. With all of these parts here he would just need to ‘weld’ them together and then apply the runes.

With a good enough diagram and a splendid helper in Bernir it wasn’t much of an effort to get the golem’s body into place. The prototype wasn’t that big with its chassis being about the size of a modern laptop.

The golem’s main body had special attachments for the legs which were just screwed into place. With time these hastily produced joints would start to loosen up. When that time came any golem would need a varied amount of repairs. Only when using superior materials could a creation like this work for years and not fall apart.

When all the parts were put together the creation looked like some kind of four-legged creature with a silly square-shaped head. The main ‘camera’ in this golem was just a small square box with a brown matt gem.

This was not a mana stone, it was a crystallized mineral called the Levin crystal. It could be polished down to form a nice-looking orb and came in various shapes and sizes. It was one of many other various materials used for magic-related items.

A runesmith was able to inscribe light runic inscriptions in these types of crystals. The crystal was needed as a sort of lens that let light in. Through it, the golem would be able to see and distinguish between targets.

This was not the only way for his contraption to distinguish between targets but it was one that he was more familiar with. He could mimic his mapping device that he previously inscribed onto a ball of metal.

This type of sensor was more of an add-on but it could not