The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++I encountered one of the servants of these so-called Gods today. A towering, haughty figure that seemed to expect me to bow before it. I would sooner have ignored it and gone on to focus on my work, but the creature was not to be denied. I, however, was not to be humiliated, and refused to bow. We fought. I won. I must begin to build an army, these prideful entities will not allow such a slight to go unpunished.++

- Fragment of Lord Dread’s archives, date indeterminate.

I consulted Sethira before anyone else. Blakely may actually have been the better choice, compensating for experience with sheer paranoia and intuition, but he was still busy overseeing the defences, and I preferred the opinion of a fellow magician when it came to defending from magicians.

She was not worried, which did not surprise me. To her this entire refinery was just a diversion. She had not complained openly, but I knew that she considered it to be a waste of my time. Perhaps basic humanity was actually interfering with her ability to see the utility of currency.

“That went well then,” she remarked dryly as I finished explaining what had happened in the meeting. “An interesting woman you met with, too.”

“Focus,” I told her. “What matters is the tactical situation, nothing else.”

She sighed, like I was being terribly tiresome and her terribly indulgent of me. “Fine. Well, she’s not bluffing obviously.”

“Obviously,” I agreed.

“They’ll want to attack in one stroke, with overwhelming force. Especially after your threat to run if the refinery is destroyed—lovely piece of manipulation there, by the way. Now they’re going to take their time mustering a single, massive offensive.”

“Which gives us time to prepare,” I concluded. “Yes. We have thoroughly examined the obvious. Now what are your thoughts on the tactical situation?”

Irritation flashed in her eyes for a moment, but Sethira buried it. “...Not as bad as it could be,” she said after a moment. “But far from ideal. We won’t know specifics until we’ve seen whatever force they send, of course, but they’ve recognised the danger you pose.”

“It will ruin their reputation to kill me,” I noted. “Even out here, with no evidence of their involvement, carried out by mercenaries not connected to them and magicians who won’t be identified as Vorets. It will take generations for their political influence to return fully.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You’re a human with the natural power of a Demigod, and the potential to push yourself far higher than even that. Are you really going to tell me that wouldn’t be worth the price of ensuring you don’t continue to threaten them as a rival?”

We did not take long to start developing weapons from there. I had already pondered the potential for a more permanent version of the one I used to free Agrian from Sethira’s ambush, and I got to work on perfecting it now.

My initial design had been impermanent. Made of aether, and designed to survive precisely one firing without destroying itself. Attempting to make a new, more long-lasting version brought with it additional challenges. Most of them came from the sheer amount of energy involved.

For one thing, even assuming unlimited ability to harness energy from nearby sources, actually producing that much power was, itself, difficult. A simple coal furnace could not, not unless I was willing to burn dozens of pounds of the stuff with every shot, and wait the required hour or so for them to finish releasing all their energy. Experiments with burning naphtha were no more promising.

There is only so much power that can be wrung out of physical matter, so perhaps inevitably I turned to the arcane.

An enchanted power source was actually quite easy to set up. For me, that was. For other people it took a great deal of time and effort even compared to normal enchanting. Enchantment at its core is simply the act of infusing permanent, self-replenishing magic into an object, with it being typical, but not required, to make an enchantment power its own effects.

This tended to create endless, uncontrolled power output unless the effect itself was made completely targeted on the object being enchanted. A heat enchantment would continue to output warmth forever, no matter how hot the room around it was, while a cutting enchantment, though it still left a blade supernaturally sharp at all times, would not be a problem provided that blade was not touching anything.

My enchantment was somewhat less complex. A single stone made to output a steady flow of mana. Mana on its own does nothing, except to occasionally become sentient and try to kill everything around it, which I did not care about since it happened very rarely and only threatened stupid or weak people anyway. This way, I could produce an essentially limitless power source that could be used directly by larger magical structures, provided they were sufficiently reinforced to channel that much power.

The downside was that it takes an age to make any significantly powerful enchantment, and I was not done with my enchanting just yet either.

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Because the second feature of this new weapon was that I wanted it to function on its own, without the need for me to operate it. That meant more enchantments. Little things, granted. By having a single, large power source supplying the raw mana, I was able to make a system of lower-energy, more quickly-made enchantments that could simply harness that energy. It sped up the creation process a dozen times over, though it still took me the better part of a week to make a single model. By the time I did, though, I was confident in having learned enough that the next one would be twice as fast.

And the final product was already worth the week.

Sethira and I stood by for the test-firing, selecting a nearby plateau just beyond the wall as our target. I waited for the twenty seconds or so the device took to build up power, then watched as it unleashed a great jet of screaming gas, pinching it tight with a hastily constructed aether channel and concentrating all the vast energy into its target. The ground shivered for a heartbeat, the air felt suddenly warm, and a wind rushed over us. When the light and dust cleared, there was a crater rather larger than a horse-drawn carriage smouldering in the side of the stone.

“That was excellent,” Sethira grinned. I turned to see that several of the mercenaries had been watching too, most of which just stared at the devastation, their faces pale.

That was not surprising. Enchanting like this was something that really required my touch for magic, the ability to see it made creating interfaces between multiple enchantments so much more convenient. There were probably thousands of magicians in the world who could replicate this device, but very few who could do so easily.

I was not surprised that Garamon made such heavy use of purely mundane artillery, given the time required for heavy magical guns.

That was a good start, but we could both do better.

While I was working on the magical cannons, Sethira spent her time mining the area outside the fortress. Her defences were simpler, but far quicker and easier to produce. This largely came from her heavily augmenting them with mundane technology. Thanks to the ongoing undead labour, I was still drawing in enough money that, after my payments, I could afford to divert funds for additional defences. We spent much of this on dynamite, and within a day Sethira had dozens of sites that were keyed to be remotely detonated by her will, each storing some hundred pounds of explosive material each.

By then we had a decent means of killing the enemy from afar. The problem with that, of course, is that enemies who were afar tended to close in. Particularly magicians, who could fling themselves through the air like trebuchet stones, or warriors who could simply sprint faster than a horse with sheer muscular strength.

Our force of five hundred or so mercenaries would do well in delaying any open attack, and the magicians—now being reinforced by even more of Sakhent’s cult, albeit with many months of travel needed before they arrived here—would do even better, but I was expecting an assault of thousands.

To turn that away, I needed something a bit less fragile than the wet meat constituting a human body, and a bit deadlier than the small arms usable by human upper-body strength. Golems were an obvious choice.

Of the many, common magical craft that other magicians made use of routinely, golems were one that had passed me by. For obvious reasons of course. If I ever need a fully automated servitor, I can simply kill someone and use their corpse. If I need one with the strength of a dozen zombies and steel-hard skin, I can simply kill ten people and cover them in steel armour.

Or rather, I could. In this modern age, zombifying humans was generally frowned upon, and so I was being forced to make use of tricks I would never have considered otherwise.

Golemancy was, at its core, the art of creating a complicated facsimile of the human mind and installing it into an artificial body, usually a great, hulking one made of extremely durable material. If one was going to go to all the trouble of making an animus, it had better be housed in something that would not die over little inconveniences like falls off cliffs or impacts from trebuchets.

They had fallen off in military use somewhat with the modern age. A golem could still very handily cut its way through many men, but they were not the invincible war-constructs they had once been. One sizable cannon could reduce one to so much scrap.

But I did not have anything better just now, and among the most useful abilities granted by my natural magical sight was the power to make long and costly processes short and cheap.

I got to work seeing what it could do about this one.

The steel was the biggest annoyance. Even in the modern age, with new, industrialised processes for producing it by the ton, the metal was not without its price. And I did need it by the ton. That was another notch out of my profits, but I was fortunately able to transport the required materials by improvising my flying glider into a sort of cargo hauler. After a crash or two.

From there it came down to the animus and the physical side. I decided to create the golems in a relatively simple way, thick layers of iron as armour and bones, with ‘muscle’ systems made of long tubes filled with mercury. Magic would act on the mercury, moving it around to provide motion without the risk of damaging it as would exist for purely solid ‘muscles’. The animus was the central controller, stored throughout the whole golem. This meant that even a slight chip would erode the animus’ intelligence, but also that it would require major structural damage to fully disable. Just to be safe I ensured the top inch of steel was not housing it.

It was faster to make one golem than it was to make one of my new cannons, but not by much. Sethira was able to contribute much more here, fortunately.

“Sterile and lifeless things,” she said with disgust. “But far beneath my abilities, I can churn these ‘animus’ out by the hour.”

Apparently her knowledge of the Depths and the soul made this particular task easier.

Occasionally, I used Lord Dread and Sakhent to speed things along. We dared not call on their power in full, but in small applications it would be another surprise, and another advantage. We needed as many of those as we could get. One after another our golem forces were built, until we ran out of material and had a dozen and a half glinting steel constructs awaiting orders. Too large and clumsy for the work around tarpits and oil pools that needed doing, but plenty big and strong to tear apart my attackers. They would do for now.

And so I turned my focus to the next weapon in my arsenal, and then the next.

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