“Oh, shit!” Bird dove over and put his hand on the golem, forcing mana into it manually with the intent of having it turn. And it did, a little bit.

To their credit, the other applicant did get out of the way, but the wide arc that Bird had the golem turn in was mildly inconvenient for their own work. Which is to say the golem walked through a couple of desks, pushing them aside like they were made of parchment. He called an apology over his shoulder, the slip in focus causing the golem to knock a cart from it’s path with a powerful step.

Bird guided the construct to the circular course and set it in one of the rings. He was relieved when it began to follow the circular white lines as it was programmed to do. He also felt markedly stupid for not knowing the golem would move on it’s own, or not foreseeing that trying to power it with something like that might have side effects.

When he turned from the construct and looked back over the arena, he realized that every set of eyes in the room were focused on him. The proctors seemed to be flicking between him and the golem at least, but the sheer amount of attention on him was the worst thing.

“Are. You. Insane?!” Bird had the decency to blush as the question hit him. It was the same proctor that had been near the golems, who had stormed over with an intensity Bird didn’t care to try and match. “I just watched you hit a mana-gem with a hammer!”

“Er, just because it wouldn’t fit in the… core.” He was realizing how stupid it sounded out loud. “But! Hey, it worked!”

“I, yes, but-!” The proctor looked somewhere between furious and impressed, glancing between the golem and Bird. “How did you do that without exploding?! That gem had enough mana in it to wreck a twenty foot circle of workshop! It was about to explode and… what the hell did you do?!”

“I uh… not really sure?” Bird backpedaled hard when he saw the anger starting to win out on her face. “I mean, the gem was humming and, well you know how you can sorta cancel out one sound if you have a really similar sound?”

“Are you being serious right now?”

“Well it worked, didn’t it?!” Bird did not like the attention, and he was getting a bit too frazzled to answer the questions with any lucidity. He kept trying to form sentences and kept losing the plot halfway into a thought. “I could hear the gem humming and it was close to the glass and I figured keeping them one step out of time could stop the rock from exploding and funnel the mana down into the motor because that would be the only thing not vibrating and I figured hey, that’s where the mana goes anyway right?”

The attention shifted from Bird to the golem in the wake of the word vomit that had managed to escape his lips. He took that moment to take a breath and scream as internally as he could manage.

He felt a bit helpless as a handful of the proctors gathered to discuss the golem. Roderick, seemingly the leader, was actually arguing in his favor.

“Applicant Barda?” he broke from the circle of proctors and faced Bird, nearly tripling the level of anxiety he felt in the moment. “Bird, is this golem what you intend to present?”

“Yeah. I mean, yes.” Bird finished more respectfully. At this point the golem had finished a lap around the track, and was well into a second.

“We feel clarifying questions are required. First, you remarked that the mana-gem was humming audibly?”

“Yes.” Bird answered that slowly, legitimately confused by it. “Were you not able to hear it?”

Roderick’s response in the negative was surprising. It wasn’t exactly loud, but it was definitely an audible noise. To be fair, there were a number of things in the room making the same kind of hum at differing volumes. Not enough to be distracting, but it was certainly a present background noise for him; maybe they just couldn’t hear it over the general din.

“And your reasoning for agitating it was based on a theory that you could match this hum and stop an explosion?”

“I, uh. Well, shit, it sounds a lot worse when you say it like that.”

“How do you sustain the frequency? Surely the glass will stop vibrating at some point.” Bird’s brow raised, the thought not having arisen before.

“Huh, that’s a good-”

Kra-KOOM

The sound of protesting metal and a barely contained blast sounded from behind Bird, cutting off his observation. He was almost unwilling to turn and see what had drawn everyone’s eyes from him.

The golem’s torso had thankfully absorbed most of the explosion, though it was ballooned out almost comically. It was frozen, mid-stride, and still for a moment longer in a balanced stance. Then, the creaking of metal sounded out in awkward slowness as the remnants of mana in the joints failed to keep the construct standing.

Turning from the heap, Bird mentally retraced the path he had figured out earlier to get out of the building as fast as possible.

“Well I suppose that answers one question and raises another.” Roderick was the last to turn his attention from the golem as it sputtered a few times on the ground.

“What’s that?” It was terrifying to ask.

“Do you think you could replicate that without the explosion?”