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Even now, without touching it, Luann was again sensing something different from the gargantuan thing. Its segmented, cylindrical body was glowing with a soft amber light, just as usual, but there was an undercurrent of activity within its ardor. Stirring around inside it. Bleeding out into the surrounding walls, as well.

How odd. And slightly concerning, too. That wasn't a containment leak, was it? Damage in the weave? Surely not. Nothing had breached this chamber. He was sure of it.

He had to check, though. It would be absolutely disastrous if he was wrong here.

He approached the Lantern's wide base, which on its own was still as big as a small house. There were four tubes--one for each cardinal direction--that fed into the central chamber, and each was large enough for him to walk through without ducking.

But only when they were open. Right now, they were all shut.

Wait a minute.

Was it... working on something?

He hadn't put anything in there. But the activity was unmistakable. Flowing ardor. Thinking ardor.

He rapped on the shut metal door with his knuckle. "Hey," he said in Ghisi, "what are you doing in there? You're supposed to be resting."

It didn't even occur to him that someone else might have placed something in there. That was an even greater absurdity than the idea the Forge was conducting work all on its own.

Air released from the upper segments in the main cylinder, as if he'd just pulled a pressure release valve. But beyond that, the Lantern did not yet respond. Was that a sigh?

He was about to ask again when the door slid apart on its own, opening the way for him into the Lantern's core.

A thick murk awaited him, glowing with the same amber light, and he brushed it away with his hands as if having to clear through overgrown foliage. What was this smell? Burning metal? That couldn't be good.

He soon discovered the half-melted results of the Lantern's solitary work. It was just sitting there, waiting for him on a raised pedestal.

Luann frowned as he examined its aura, not daring to touch it yet.

What a mess. Smoking. Distorted. Certainly not a successful creation by any conventional metric.

He bit his lip, unsure what to say. While he didn't necessarily wish to encourage this behavior, he also didn't want to be too critical. The Lantern was his child, after all.

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Either way, he'd been developing countermeasures for that, too. Sealing the workshop off completely had been the first step, but that had been far from enough to solve the problem. He'd eventually discovered that the insect hordes were being long-jumped into various spatial weak points within the workshop.

In other words, even after he'd sealed all the physical cracks, the saboteurs had begun taking advantage of metaphysical ones.

And the insects were getting more deadly, too. He'd found a few Jaskadan jumper ants in the mix, but thankfully, he'd known to prioritize them before they did too much damage.

He couldn't wait to turn the tables on whoever was sending them.

This captured Andanatt servant's head might be able to tell him something, but he wasn't going to get his hopes up. That interrogation could wait a while.

At the moment, he was more concerned with checking up on his Fusion Forge. Thus far, none of the attacks had penetrated all the way to the heart of his workshop, where lay the Lantern of Doma, but it was doubtless the main objective of all this harassment.

Through a host of mechanical doors and a dozen more layers of automated defense systems, he found it, just as he'd left it. The Blade of Perdition followed quietly behind him, its fiery sparks having calmed down to a low simmer.

Oddly enough, Luann had noticed that the Blade and the Lantern seemed to have developed some kind of relationship of their own. Something akin to a master-servant dynamic. Or officer-soldier, maybe. Whatever it was, the Blade always settled down in the Lantern's presence, while the Lantern always warmed up a little more when Luann brought the Blade around.

It was fascinating, Luann thought. When he'd decided to try implanting the Blade with a pseudo-consciousness, he hadn't expected it to take form so well and so easily. Perhaps the Lantern was even better suited to making items of this nature than he'd realized.

Or perhaps it was growing in power.

That was a rare but known possibility. He'd been using the Lantern for decades now, and while it was difficult to say for sure since his own skill was improving over time, too, it was increasingly on his mind that the Lantern seemed subtly different in some ways.

Not physically, of course. That would be too noticeable. No, it was in the flow of its ardor. In the way it responded to him during the pinnacle of active work.

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The Blade hovered there above the severed head, burning with an orange light while wisps of flame radiated outward from its serrated edges.

It was actually a much larger and more complex item than it looked. The Blade was connected to an entire computational network that was constantly providing it with tracking data, and the magnets embedded into its body allowed it to work in conjunction with the various magnetic focusing beams around the workshop in order to give it the appearance of true, self-propelled flight.

Still not quite the free-form, fully mobile "familiar" that he'd originally envisioned for it to be, since it couldn't leave the workshop, but hey. It was a work that he remained quite proud of, overall.

One day, perhaps, he would have his pet sword following him wherever he went, cutting down any who dared to threaten his life.

For now, though, this was more than adequate. He hardly ever left his workshop, anyway. Too much could go wrong while he was away, thanks to the Andanatt always hounding him.

He seemed to have become their favorite subject in recent years, which was no skin off his nose. It just meant that they weren't bothering the others as much.

And some of his contemporaries certainly needed the cover. Many were struggling far more than he was, Luann knew. If he wasn't constantly being pestered by infiltrators, he might've liked to go help some of them directly. Provide advice, at least.

But no. That would just put more hostiles eyes on their work, which would be no help at all.

He proceeded to the new janitorial chamber and flipped a few switches. The cleaning bots mounted on the walls came immediately to life and scooted out to work.

They were a bit slow and bulky with their thick wheels, large vacuum hoses, industrial tanks, spinning scrubbers, sprayers, and scoopers; but he couldn't be bothered to make them more sleek or efficient. Cleaning was far from where his passion lay. It had just become an unfortunate necessity, as of late.

The Andanatt weren't the only ones bothering him. They were just the ones sending stealthed human agents. Some other nuisance was sending periodic waves of insects to gunk up his machinery. By comparison, that method of attack had been far more effective against him.

Technically, he supposed the Andanatt could've been behind that, too, but he doubted it. Didn't seem like their style.