The Golem Mage

It had been days since the three assassins were dispatched to the Gordons Clan to eliminate Alec, but with no word or sign of their success, the City Lord was beginning to regret his impulsive decision, the silence gnawed at him as a bitter reminder that he might have once again acted too hastily.

He still fumed at how Alec had exchanged sharp words with him in front of so many people, tarnishing his credibility, and the only way he knew to deal with such a problem was to erase it.

Alec was quickly becoming another Gordons weed, stubborn, persistent, and dangerously difficult to uproot.

On the night of the planned assassination, he had seen the massive array deployed over the Gordons estate, he’d almost allowed himself to relax, convinced that the assassins must have succeeded in their mission.

In his mind, there was no other reason for the Gordons to raise such a formation unless it was to contain either someone or something, and he believed it was to keep the assassins from escaping after taking Alec’s life.

Not that it mattered much if they were caught, he’d been extremely careful, never meeting with them directly, always sending intermediaries to meet the mage agents from the dark guilds, even if one of them broke under pressure and described the mage who issued the contract, it would send the Gordons chasing shadows, with no trail leading back to him.

The only flaw in his scheme, was that there was one possibility that he hadn’t anticipated, and that was the possibility that the assassins had been captured before carrying out the deed, worse still, the array wasn’t meant to restrain intruders but to conceal the enormous surge of Mana energy within the clan that night.

Fortunately for the Gordons, the city lord was blinded by his own guilt and suspicions, so he assumed the Gordons were merely hiding something like their clan getting attacked, that belief kept him from appearing at the Gordons estate under the guise of official authority to investigate the matter of the runes which he should have done.

In his paranoia, he convinced himself that staying uninvolved was safer than heading towards the Gordons clan as he didn’t want to be linked to the assassination.

But this very inaction had only given Garrick Charles Gordons, the Grand Elder, more reason to believe the City Lord was behind the attempted assassination of Alec.

In response, Garrick advised George Gordons to continue the lock down duration of the clan and give whoever is behind the attack thoughts that their plan worked, this decision, however, left the City Lord unsettled.

By now, he had expected George to fly into a fury, the kind of reaction the Gordons Patriarch was infamous for whenever even a single clansman was threatened.

He had counted on George’s impulsive nature to derail the Gordons’ upcoming auction, thereby discrediting their ability to keep their promises and weakening their standing in the city.

The assassination plot itself was a tangled mess of political schemes, spun by the City Lord because of his growing dissatisfaction with how things had turned out after the last Blood Moon battle.

Although the Gordons had seized the upper hand in that conflict, it hadn’t been enough on its own to push him this far.

What truly triggered his move was the unprecedented aftermath, for the first time, every mage who fought in the Blood Moon battle refused to submit their kills for merit points. It wasn’t just a matter of pride; it was a financial blow.

While zombie corpses held no value on their own he was looking into the future where what the Estonia city faced won’t be zombies, the system of merit points built around them was one of the primary ways the low and mid rank cities profited.

Typically, clans in low- and mid-tier cities left the demonic beast carcasses and other remains to the City Hall of their respective city in exchange for meager merit points.

These points could eventually be traded for rare spirit weapons or armour housed in the city’s merit treasury.

The problem was, most clans lacked the necessary top-tier profession specialists like — master alchemist and forgers, to process the beast corpses efficiently themselves.

This gave City Halls control over those resources, but if the Gordons’ actions inspired other clans to follow suit, the City Lord knew it would destabilize the entire merit point economy and strip him of one of his key sources of influence and wealth.

What most of these clans failed to realize was that they were being blatantly cheated, the merit points awarded for beast slaying never truly reflected the actual value of the materials gathered from those kills.

In truth, the Northern Kingdom regularly recruited hundreds of talented young mages under their control, training them in specialized fields like array crafting, pill refinement, and spirit equipment forging under the direct guidance of the royal clan’s finest.

Upon completing their training, these graduates didn’t just leave as novices; even at the most basic level, they were leagues ahead of ordinary specialists, and they were then assigned to various low- and mid-tier cities to gain practical experience, with their placements determined by performance assessments.

Each city, as a result, had its own team of these professional specialist mages, so whenever demonic beast or second-dimension creature corpses were delivered, it was these experts who dissected the remains and processed them to their fullest potential.

They forged spirit weapons, refined pills, and crafted equipment to the best of their abilities, and these items would later be displayed in the merit treasure rooms.

The most valuable of these, however, were quietly claimed by city hall mages for themselves, while the rest were sold back to the clans at inflated merit point costs.

The irony was that while the clans surrendered the corpses for free in exchange for paltry merit points, those very corpses yielded resources that created goods worth far more than what the clans could afford to buy back.

Worse still, even when a single corpse could be used to craft several valuable items, the amount of merit points needed by a clan to obtain just one of those items remained painfully high.

It was an uneven system designed to keep the city hall’s forces outfitted with better gear than anyone else.

But the City Lords didn’t care in the slightest. In their eyes, city hall mages were the first to face danger in battle and took on the burden of defending the city, so they were entitled to this unequal share of the spoils.

Backed by the royal clan, whose oversight granted them near-limitless authority within their territories, they acted with impunity.

This was also why it was nearly impossible for small and mid-tier clans to strike independent deals with forgers and craftsmen.

As the few freelancers who weren’t bound to the royal system after being free from service charged outrageously high prices, knowing how desperate these clans were for resources and how little other options they had.

In this way, the kingdom kept the clans in the low- and mid-tier cities firmly under the control of their city halls, ensuring they could be extorted for resources and wealth under the guise of merit systems.

The city halls would then pay a substantial portion of these extorted gains back to the king as taxes, using the remainder to develop their cities, strengthen their armies, and enrich their own officials.

This system thrived in the lower and mid-tier cities, while only the high-tier and ancient clans in the high tier cities were exempt from such exploitation, those powerful clans possessed enough wealth and resources to train their own specialized mages — alchemists, array masters, and even forgers, though it took a lot of resources and talent to shape a master in this field but it meant they never had to surrender the corpses of their kills to the city halls for merit points.

It was precisely this attempt to break free from Estonia City Hall’s control that truly pushed the city lord over the edge.

He couldn’t afford to have anyone encouraging the local clans to abandon the merit system or to refuse trading in their corpses, as such defiance threatened the entire power structure he benefited from.

So Alec’s actions and influence posed a dangerous precedent, one that the city lord intended to crush before it took root.