The growth of Elias's metal plague was a slow, glacial process, a test of his inhuman patience. For weeks, nothing outwardly happened. The Seed remained buried in the slag heap, a silent epicenter, its only function to maintain the contagious, transformative signal. Elias could feel it, a faint, distant hum at the very edge of his senses, a single note of his own will being played deep inside enemy territory.
The null-field around Vanguard was a powerful suppressant. The transformative "rust" could only spread through direct physical contact. A piece of infected slag had to touch an uninfected piece. It was a chain reaction in slow motion. First, the entire slag heap had to be converted, molecule by molecule. It became his "garden," and he was its patient, remote gardener.
He spent his days in a state of bifurcated awareness. Part of his mind was constantly tending his garden, feeling the slow, creeping conversion of the slag heap. The other part managed his own domain. He oversaw his golem-servants, reinforced his spire's defenses, and kept his distant, silent vigil over Sunstone through the Soul Anchor.
Elara was thriving. Freed from the immediate threat of the Hegemony, she was proving to be a shrewd and capable leader. She had established a council of elders, organized the hunters into more efficient patrols, and had even begun a system of barter with a peaceful tribe of fisher-folk to the north, diversifying Sunstone's resources. Elias felt a profound sense of satisfaction. His monstrous interventions had created a pocket of stability where true, healthy progress—not the poisonous "progress" of the Hegemony—could take root.
His secret project in Vanguard was the ultimate guarantee of that peace.
After nearly two months, the slag heap was fully converted. It was no longer a mountain of inert refuse. It was a single, dormant, collective entity, trillions of metal particles all resonating with the Seed's core instruction, all linked to Elias's will. It was a sleeping Golem the size of a hill. Phase one was complete.
Now, he needed to spread the infection beyond the garden. He needed a vector.
Through the eyes of a raven circling high overhead, he watched the daily routine of the smelter. Carts would haul raw ore to the facility and, more importantly, carts would haul away slag to be used as landfill or foundation material for new construction. That was his vector.
He gave his garden its first active command. It was a subtle instruction. Coalesce. Form a shell. Encapsulate.
Deep within the slag heap, a portion of the infected metal shavings began to move. They flowed like sand, creeping upwards through the pile. When a Hegemony cart next came to haul away a load of slag, Elias willed the infected shavings to silently, invisibly coat the inside of the cart's wooden bed before it was filled with fresh, uninfected material.
The cart, now a Trojan horse, rumbled away. It traveled to the site of a new barracks being constructed on the eastern edge of Vanguard. The slag was dumped, spread as a foundation layer. And now, the Seed's influence, its transformative plague, was in the very ground upon which the Hegemony soldiers would sleep.
Elias repeated this process again and again. Every cartload of slag became a carrier. The rust-plague began to seep into the foundations of the town, spreading from the barracks to the mess hall, from the quartermaster's warehouse to the stables. It was a cancer spreading through the town's skeletal system.
The null-field was still a problem. The infection could only spread through direct contact, a slow, methodical creep. It couldn't leap from one building to another. To truly take the town, he had to take down the tower at its heart. He had to disable the null-field generator.
He began phase two: reconnoitering the tower. It was known as the 'Null-Spire' and was heavily guarded. Wraith Walk was useless; the field it generated shredded ethereal forms. His ravens could only give him an external view. He needed to get a look inside.
This required a more audacious plan. He found his vector in a Hegemony quartermaster, a man named Corvin, whose duties included resupplying the small garrison inside the Null-Spire. Through his distant surveillance, Elias learned Corvin was a gambling man, frequently in debt.
Using the same technique he had on Fendrel, Elias began to haunt him. Soul Whispers of phantom winning lottery numbers. Dreams of a hidden stash of coins. He didn't try to control Corvin. He just made the man increasingly desperate for a single, large score.
Then, he prepared a lure. In his forge, he created a single, beautiful object: a steel ingot, perfectly cast, but with a thin, inner core of solid, gleaming gold he'd painstakingly refined from trace deposits. He left this "flawed" ingot in a place where one of Silas Marwood's former village contacts, a man Elias knew to be greedy and still resentful, would find it.
As predicted, the man found it and, seeing an opportunity, traveled to Vanguard to trade, seeking out the notoriously desperate Quartermaster Corvin. The deal was struck in a back alley. Corvin, believing he had cheated the "primitive" villager out of a valuable prize, acquired the gold-cored ingot.
Now, the bait was inside the town's logistical chain.
Elias simply waited. Corvin, needing to hide his illicit prize, smuggled the ingot into his next supply run to the Null-Spire, hiding it inside a barrel of salted pork.
Elias had his eye inside. Before he'd sent the ingot, he had bonded a tiny, dormant spark to its golden core—not a transformative spark like the Seed, but a simple, passive scrying stone of a soul. The moment the ingot passed inside the tower, away from the null-field's main suppressive effect and into an area of relative magical stability, the spark activated.
Suddenly, Elias had a viewpoint. It was limited, showing him only what was visible from inside a pork barrel in a storeroom, but it was enough. He could hear the guards' patrol patterns. He could see the layout of the storeroom level. And he could sense the flow of power.
The null-field generator was not, as he had assumed, a single arcane device. It was a network of conduits running through the walls of the tower, all drawing power from a great, humming crystal in the sublevels. He had found its heart.
The stage was set. His rust-plague permeated the foundations of the entire town. He had a direct view into the enemy's nerve center. His silent, patient war of inches had brought him to the brink of a total victory. He had not raised a single sword or Golem in aggression. He had simply planted a garden and waited for it to grow. And now, his garden of rust was ready to bloom.