Gift

Dean returned to cooking at his campfire while the statue continued making a new great-ax. It tried carving magic veins like Dean suggested and found that it was relatively simple to do by just applying dense energy while carving shallow channels along the shaft. It connected the channels to the crystals embedded in the blades of the weapon and shortly finished molding it.

Wielding the new great-ax it felt better and gave it a few test swings before slashing the wall, leaving a deep gash that immediately started mending. It set the great-ax on the weapon rack and moved over to Dean's corner.

"Done already? Not bad, most golems are unable to make weapons. Well, most golems don't have sentience, especially dungeon born ones. If you agree to play nice I can give you a gift that will help you make friends, interested?" Dean offered while stirring the soup in the pot.

The statue tilted its head side to side a few times before sitting down on the ground with legs crossed and elbows on its knees.

Dean nods, "Since you can understand the language you should be able to use it with enough practice. You need to spend energy to use it but you seem to have a large pool so it should be fine," he explains as he rummages through his backpack before pulling out some sort of harness with several obsidian spheres on all of the vertices. "Please don't break it, these are quite expensive to make."

The statue took the harness and inspected it before injecting energy in causing the obsidian orbs to emit various hums and crackles of noise.

Dean smiled, "It's the latest in sound magic technology, with delicate enough control it can produce a voice, and while not flexible enough for use in impersonation it can allow intelligent monsters to speak. It also helps those who are mute, well, those who can afford it at least." He sounded like he was bragging about the magic tool. "I brought it on the off chance that you were intelligent enough to use it since you weren't as rigid as other golems."

The statue mostly ignored Dean and continued to fiddle with the device. It looked like it was supposed to go around the neck but it was too large for the small harness to fit. It continuously probed the orbs with energy trying to figure out the nuances for producing sound and only after a short five minutes a slightly mechanical tone croaked out.

"Wh... Whhy?"

Dean stopped stirring the pot, "... Hey hey, wasn't that a bit too fast?"

The statue tried making other works but failed, then pointed at Dean and back at itself before repeating "Why?"

"You mean why am I here?" Dean guessed, and received a nod, "Well, a couple of anomalies occurred recently and was deemed a priority for investigation. The standard procedure for dealing with a newly born high-level monster is to determine the danger level, determine if it has high intelligence and sentience, and finally if it can be reasoned with. In the past, the Adventurer Guild would just try to subjugate anything they came across and that eventually lead to tragedy. Aside from tamers, they realized it was possible for suitable monsters to be employed just like the sentient races. Ah, I'm getting off track," he paused and began stirring the soup again.

"Basically, my job is to make contact with intelligent monsters and see if they are an active threat or not. If they are then I report back and they assemble a subjugation team. If they are not an active threat then they are tolerated as long as they stick to their territory. What surprises me is that usually when attacked monsters will fight back and kill a few adventurers at least, but you just ran despite having a physical advantage. Thus I deemed you approachable and used an illusion to test you. For monsters who can easily get stronger just by killing, a defenseless adventurer is a perfect bait."

The statue took a moment to digest the information, just like Twilight had said it's much safer to stay in its own territory in the dungeon as the Guild won't actively hunt it down even if it kills a few people. It's a dungeon, after all, people aren't expected to always survive.

It pulsed more energy into the obsidian orbs, "Jut, re-lac," the orbs fumbled. It tried a few more times until it came out as "Just, relax," causing Dean to laugh as he took out a bowl from his rucksack.

"You mean me or yourself? Does a golem even need to relax?" Dean grinned as he scooped some soup into his bowl with a wooden spoon.

The statue sets the harness aside and just stares at the fire.

After a few minutes of silence with the soft sounds of the crackling fire and Dean enjoying his soup, a ringing noise came from his rucksack causing Dean to make an annoyed face but ignored it. The sound eventually stopped, then started again. Once the process repeated again Dean sighed "Damn woman," he muttered and set his bowl aside before pulling a cerulean crystal shaped to snugly fit in the palm of his hand and held it in front of him.

The crystal brightened and sputtered to life, "Dean! How many times do I have to tell you not to ignore my calls!" A feminine voice emitted from the stone.

Dean rolled his eyes, "I don't pick up because you always yell at me, besides it takes too much energy to maintain a connection in the dungeon."

The woman huffed, "I have to yell because you never learn! You never report in when you're supposed to, how am I supposed to know if something bad happens?"

"I'm glad you're worried about me but everything is fine, I even made a new friend," Dean chuckled.

"You didn't just throw yourself into danger again, right? You're too reckless like always!"

"Hey now, why would you assume that, I would never do such a thing, safety is my number one priority."

"Liar!" The woman spouted rude things for a minute before calming down, "Ahem, now report," she said as if she wasn't just berating him.