Published at 30th of July 2022 8:28 am

Chapter 677: Clockwork Welcome

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

In a realm where the sky was covered with layers of smog and blackness and the land was infertile and barren so much so that puddles of oil would join around to create an endless swamp of grease and copper-colored garbage, a Portal opened in the sky for two figures to fall through.

The descent, which would be lethal to many, was negated by the fact that the two of them came into contact with a mound of garbage before tumbling down into the oil swamp beneath. Heads first fell but Laaneth was luckier than Glymet as she landed on top of him.

He groaned, seemingly from the weight which pressed softly yet heavily on his chest. The view that he was blessed with, however, was splendid enough to let him forget about the pain for a second.

But Glymet wasn't a man of deviant thinking like some other people, moreover, as Laaneth was practically his ex, it could get awkward and blatantly inappropriate to comment on such things.

"You alright?" Laaneth was self-aware, however, as she stood hurriedly to move her chest off his face.

Her mind was somewhere far from the thoughts that plagued Glymet's and she darted up immediately to check her surroundings.

"The old hag!" Laaneth spoke in anger with gnashed teeth, "I can't believe she did this!"

To make it even worse, Laaneth found her feet stuck in a grease pool which made it all oily inside her boots. In one wave of anger, she screamed her rage out.

Seeing a usually calm Dark Elf this frustrated, Glymet had to stand himself up and check on the situation while hoping that his dizzy head would fix its own soon. Teleporting wasn't his favorite magic and his dizziness seemed not to be getting any better. Still, he can now confirm that the smell of the place they ended up in would make things worse.

It was a dumpster, plain and simple. Mounds and mounds of metallic garbage could be seen everywhere with the skyline being hazy and difficult to see through from the clouds of carbon wastes. In this polluted weather, all Glymet could see, apart from the sea of garbage, was the silhouette of a city in the direction that he assumed to be north.

"Fuck!" Laaneth, on the other hand, was banging on a small crystal orb with her hand and shouting, "Work you piece of shit!"

"I don't think a Crystal can connect you to anything in this place." Glymet spoke as he approached her, "This place doesn't seem friendly anyway."

"You think I don't know that?" Laaneth replied in a sharp tone as she turned to him.

Her red Dark Elven eyes were brimming with pure anger but the moment she looked at Glymet's face, she took a breath in and returned the crystal orb to her bag.

"I am sorry, Glym." She then apologized to her middle-aged human companion.

He wasn't even concerned about her unusually sharp attitude but if Laaneth is worried about something, he is sure that he should be worried too.

"Let's go find who we came here for, alright?" He spoke, "I don't think contacting anyone on Nirn would help at the moment anyway."

"But that Hag… she just decided to throw us into another plane of existence and expect us to find our way back on our own?" Laaneth flared up again, "She had us hunt a Troll, delve into a Falmer nest, and fight a Dragon just to get rid of us while she could just send us here with a flick of her fingers?"

"It's okay." Glymet sighed, "I have a feeling we can handle it."

She was still in a sulky mood but with his words, she started to ease up a bit and follow him around.

"So… the Clockwork City, what should we expect?" Glymet asked.

"By Azura and Dagon combined! What were you expecting when you aimed to come here with Swims-at-Night in the first place?" She cried at him.

"Not to barge into this place right away and do some research first, obviously." Glymet replied as he felt offended by her action of jumping to conclusions, "All we were planning to do is to get our hands on the Mazed Band and use it to travel here after we made our preparations. No one accounted for two Arch-Wizards to fight over the ring and Swims getting dragged into it with them."

"Real smart, the two of you." Laaneth laughed mockingly, "You two were planning to come here for treasures and never even thought that after 200 years, this place would turn into one giant fucking dumpster."

Glymet sighed and decided not to clash with Laaneth before she calmed down. Instead, he dragged the conversation to talk about this plane of existence they are in, Clockwork City.

"Well, I am sure you at least know this." Laaneth went into a lecturing mode as she was struggling her way through the piles of sharp junk, "Clockwork City is an Artificial plane of existence. Officially, it is a subspace made by magic but its owner, God-King Sotha Sil, couldn't muster enough power to do something like Nirn (Planet), which is a creation of the Divines, so he made it that this subspace minimizes everything that comes into it so it can contain way more space than what it physically should."

"So you're saying we've become miniature versions of ourselves?" Glymet asked.

"Yep." Laaneth nodded and pointed around her with both hands, "Everything here you may perceive as normal-sized but imagine it only being a fraction of its actual self."

"So is the city itself on a physical plane then?" Glymet asked, "Is it on Mundus (Mortal World), to begin with? Because even with the most complicated Alteration spells, you can't keep such large space miniatured in such a stable state."

[A/n: Lore Warning!]

"Ah! Here is where things get exciting." Laaneth became wholly engrossed in her explanations and forgot how angry she was, "Sotha Sil created this realm as a metaphysical clockwork realm. What he meant to do was to replicate the mythic structures of Nirn as a metallic miniature. It supposedly exists outside space and time but still in the physical world, it is represented in the form of a Clockwork Globe that is no larger than a large chamber, and requires an individual to be magically shrunk to enter."

"Well…" Glymet thought, "None of this makes any sense."

"I know it is difficult to understand but what are your thoughts?" She asked.

"So it exists physically but not in the same space and time. There is a physical representation of Clockwork city on Nirn as you said but it still isn't there. This means that we are on Nirn but we aren't at the same time." Glymet started noting the conflicts of information.

"I know it may seem like this but this whole place is a mystery." Laaneth explained it the best she could.

"No." Glymet asked, "Magic teaches us that there is an explanation to everything. While I am just a Battlemage and not versed in Scholarly Magic like you are, I have a clear conviction that there is an explanation to this."

"Well, you do you, Glym." Laaneth said and smiled for the first time since meeting Glymet, "Thanks for taking my mind off things, by the way."

"Ah!" Glymet chuckled as he was caught, "Don't mention it."

Still, the two had their minds filled with questions after that conversation.

"So…" He spoke first.

"Yes?" She turned to him.

"What about the Aurbis (Universe) itself? The Tower and the Wheel and all this? We are not out of it, right?" He asked.

"The Clockwork City's exact location is shrouded in mystery, with the city itself being described as a [metaphor made manifest]." She said.

"That's somehow scary." He laughed in a worried voice.

"Yes. I agree." Laaneth nodded but she soon looked at the bright side of their ordeal, "But it's said Sotha Sil died two centuries ago. Still, the machines he built may still be active. I assure you this is going to be fun."

"Let's agree to disagree."

Just as Glymet said those words, Laaneth bumped into him as she wasn't looking ahead. Just before she was about to ask what was going on, she saw it with her own eyes.

Machines… No! Animals!

Animals made machines as if a mix of organic matter and metal. They looked sickening and totally monstrous as if a mishmash of all sorts of humans, animals, and monsters was put together. Some bipedal, some quadrupedal, and some were even tripedal and pentapedal.

Once these "things" spotted Glymet and Laaneth with their human/monster faces and multiple misplaced eyes, a moment of silence was exchanged before those things started shrieking madly.

*SCREECH!*

Hundreds of unidentifiable monstrosities rushed madly from every possible angle, some crawled even and some hopped disorderly. What they all had in common, however, were the fangs and teeth opened wide and aiming for the tender meat they just spotted.

Immediately, Laaneth set up a "Circle of Protection" spell and started to repel the waves of those mad creatures while Glymet was sword in hand and spell in another, circling around Laaneth, and dropping down all the monsters in his way.

The two of them were fast and efficient but they were overwhelmed with sheer numbers. They had no place to retreat to and the monsters seemed mindless with rage and hunger.

Glymet was bitten a few times and the bites of these creatures seemed acidic and poisonous. He had enough Flame Aura within him to overwhelm any foreign bodies that may try to harm his constitution but he wasn't sure he would walk away from this fully unscatched.

But just as he lost his focus and a large monster jumped over him, a strange sound of explosion and metal clinking disoriented his senses as the monster that almost jumped him was torn apart and smote down with a thundering blast.

Glymet and Laaneth turned to where that sound came from and up above a heap of garbage, a man stood tall with a strange cylinder object in his hand aimed towards them.

The man raised his strange weapon up and lifted his goggles for his blue eyes to shine bright. The rest of his face was mostly covered in metal and cloth that was all in the color of rust, but there was a very distinctive red beard growing from the man's face and reaching down to his waist.

"Ram, Kota! You're up!"

The man called in a clear but weary voice and following his call, two more individuals appeared not too far from him. One of them held a menacing version of the weapon held by that man and the other was holding a hammer and a shield.

The one holding the menacing-looking weapon just aimed it towards the monster surrounding Laaneth and….

*BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR*

… a hail of projectiles was unleashed with the sound of booming thunder put in sequence.

The weapon unleashed tens of projectiles every single second to the point where monsters were bursting into shreds all around the place. Still, that was to get rid of the monsters that aren't close enough to Laaneth and Glymet.

As for those which got too close to shoot with the Gatling Cannon, the other figure sled down on the garbage heap and as it got closer, its size was notably appearing to be that of a small creature.

In fact, it appeared to be Argonian in origin with the size of a child. But once that one came close enough, something strange happened.

The small Argonian was suddenly enlarged to a size that can't be called Argonian anymore. It became a Behemoth, a hulking breed of the lizardfolk Argonian race with a burly body almost like a hybrid of a man and a dinosaur.

Once that Behemoth descended, something akin to a natural disaster occurred and every moving thing aside from Glymet and Laaneth was immediately crushed under his mighty shield and hammer.

[A/n: Ram and Kota are Sponsored Characters!]

In mere seconds, those monsters were no more.

The one holding the gatling cannon stopped firing with the last monster dropping and the Argonian Behemoth stopped his destruction as he looked closely at Laaneth. The man that led them descended the garbage heap and as he got closer, the other two stood behind him.

The Behemoth Argonian, the one known as Kota, started to shrink back to normal which was the form of a short Argonian male and the other one, known as Ram, wasn't even a living being but rather an autonomous humanoid that is native to the Clockwork City, a Factotum.

A Factotum wielding a gatling cannon and an Argonian that can shift into a Behemoth, the red-bearded individual leading them should be just as great at the very least if not far greater. He, who was wielding a spear-like weapon that can shoot at far distances, walked closer and revealed his face.

He saw Laaneth and Laaneth saw him. They recognized one another immediately. Even Glymet recognized him since they just met a few days ago on Nirn.

"L… Laaneth?" He asked, "Am I dreaming?"

"Jon?" She walked to him, "Azura! What happened to you?"

He looked way beyond his age. It was as if he was no longer 21. His skin was badly withered and his right eye was covered with an eyepatch. He looked at empty space and his expression found it hard to gather his thoughts. He wanted to speak and his voice seemed tired and weary.

"It has been…" Jon looked at his own hand and started counting…

"My God!" Glymet couldn't believe what happened to young Jon and looked at Laaneth who was also looking at him.

How long has it been?

They didn't think about it at all.

The time difference between realms.

The reality phenomenons that cause temporal anomalies.

The effects that time causes in the different parts of existence.

The principal of the Aka, the time, and the formation of Auri-El, Akatosh, and Alduin as the trinity that outlines time in the Mortal Realm, Mundus, and separates it from the alien realms of Oblivion and Aetherious.

It was all too shocking for them to…

"… five days!" Jon finished counting.

"…"

"Alright, we're done here."

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