Shadowboxing 100% repaired. Please refrain from imagining trans-dimensional or existential attacks while using this Ability. Doing so may cause side effects including, but not limited to, shortness of breath, sneezing, itching, anxiety, nausea, Gran-mal seisures, stroke, aneurism, detonation.

Any further abuse will be reported to System Admin 562

Hah, sucker.

Did it say detonation?

****

Calvin barged in on the planning committee, namely Andra, The Hash’Maje – I don’t remember his name! – Kurawe, and Nadia, overlooking a map of Mujenan and the surrounding areas.

What does that put the Evil percentage of this war council at? Seventy-five percent? Calvin knew the general was cold and results-driven, as expected for someone of her station, Kurawe represented institutionalized greed and nepotism, while Nadia was an avatar of primal maliciousness.

At least. We can’t rule out the possibility that Kala’s dad is secretly evil.

Did you forget all those times we Shadowboxed conversations with him? The guy is totally chill.

Maybe that’s what he wants you to think.

“You can’t afford to put all our effort into extermination,” Kurawe said, “nor should you. the entire purpose of sending the Uleisan army was to prove that there was an inhuman threat that we should rally against.”

He glanced at Calvin with a raised brow. “Which you then blew up.”

Calvin shrugged.

“I suggest you instead corral the remaining creatures toward the approaching Uleisan army rather than kill them, and kill two birds with one stone.

See? Evil.

“First, you’ll weaken our army with no loss of life on your part, alerting them to the presence of these creatures, whereupon they will change their goal from conquering to surviving. This weakening will make them less likely to try for Mujenan.

“Second, our people will take care of much of the heavy lifting in regards to slaughtering these animals. As it stands, there are thousands of these disposable soldiers born every day. Exterminating htem is costly in terms of manpower and lives.”

Kurawe marked a V across the map with the wooden troop figurines.

“Burn the spawners away in this formation, push them outside the city, and Uleis will stumble upon the threat in a grandiose fashion.”

“That sounds tenable.” Andra said with a nod before glancing at Calvin. “I’ll be needing more burners from you.”

“Sure.”

“This plan of exterminating them slowly solely to bloody the Uleisan’s noses…” The Hash’Maje said from his throne, overlooking the map. “It doesn’t sit well with me.”

“You realize this is the fastest, most effective way to make them engage with the threat? Kurawe simply calling off their attack would do nothing but draw out the animosity between our people.” Andra gazed up at the throne, her expression inscrutable.

Holy crap she’s besotted with him! Calvin thought as Open Book gave him hints that her expression didn’t

“I understand that,” he said with a sigh, rubbing the skin under his crown. “It’s two things that bother me. The eager sacrifice of lives for politics, and the speed at which we are doing it.”

Andra’s eyes widened. “You think it could grow back.”

“It grew as far as it did in two weeks. Hollowed out tunnels, bred giant crabs, and covered most of the aboveground in those spawners. Who’s to say it won’t recover while we twiddle our thumbs and wait for the Uleisans to show?”

He pointed at Calvin. “We have Count Gadsint, do we not? Tell me you couldn’t scour the land clean in a matter of hours with that summoning spell of yours.”

I…Probably could. Oh, and I told you he was a nice guy.

Lucky guess. I’m telling you, you could have pushed for a Duke title.

“Then you’ll be fighting a war on three sides,” Nadia said, walking up to Calvin and placing a possessive arm around his shoulder. “And he doesn’t have the stamina for that.”

“What the abyss does that mean?” Calvin asked, glancing at Nadia.

“Just advising you not to start a war on three sides,” She whispered in his ear with a grin, deliberately breathing on his ear.

Calvin looked the Ilethan beauty up and down, taking in her outlandishly well-proportioned body with his eyes. Not so much as a twitch of desire.

“I think I can handle that.” Calvin whispered back, eliciting a scowl from his sadomasochistic summoned creature.

“It’s true,” Andra said, drawing attention to herself. “There is a risk that One will recover ground while we take our time positioning its minions, but if we don’t secure an alliance against it with Uleis, we will be done, as a nation.”

The Hash’Maje sighed. “You’re right, of course. Do as you must, but I want you to pay close attention to the remaining creatures, should they begin to act with purpose or spread that abominable flesh again, I want you to drop down on them like Vashniel’s spear.”

“As you wish,” Andra said, dropping to one knee in acknowledgement.

Calvin copied her and left as well. He couldn’t afford not to play the game now that he was a Count, technically speaking.

He hadn’t seen his lands yet on anything other than a map, but they included a river to the southeast that could connect to Gadvera with just a little effort, and Juntai, with just a little more. It wasn’t resource rich, aside from farmland and lumber, but for Calvin, the first several thousand acres were the sweetest.

He’d never been a landowner before, and he was practically jittery with the desire to make it to his new domain and start building it up. Wizard King! The fact that he’d most likely have to spend the next several months fixing up Gadvera to a state where it was inhabitable again was an irritating distraction, but he couldn’t exactly run off and leave the country to wither.

He’d already been paid for his services, and Gadvera was the nation that legitimized his claim on the land. Well, that and Uleis, the northern neighbor. Kurawe had already gotten the ball rolling toward recognizing his right as landholder there.

Now all we gotta do is brutally kick all the natives off their ancestral home, as is tradition.

Hopefully it’s not going to come to that, Calvin thought as he came back to his feet, joining Andra in the hallway outside the throne room.

“The food is working wonders for morale, Count,” she said, glancing at him. “But I need to you save enough for a sudden attack and land clearing. Are you sure you’ve got enough Bent to juggle these responsibilities?”

“Barely,” Calvin said, nodding. “It’ll hold.”

“Good. I want another six units of Knick-knacks to repair and rebuild behind my soldiers, and fortify their position when they stop for the day. I want the city locked down in such a way that it’ll be damn near impossible to move through without our permission.”

“Why not-“

“We both know you could burn the flesh of the city, but our soldiers need their Breaks, and our people need their homes and businesses back. And we as a city need to build fortifications against the Uleisans, rather than tearing down everything we own.

“Isn’t the plan for them not to attack?” Calvin asked.

“If a pie were sitting on a windowsill, would you take it?”

“Um…” Maybe.

“How about if said pie was behind razor-wire?”

“I think I see your point.” Calvin said.

The plan to have Uleis not attack them would in some respects, rely on intimidation. They had to believe it would be far easier to ally themselves with Gadvera than it would be to conquer it, and that involved at least some preparing for war.

Well, more war, Anyway.

Andra branched off while Calvin stayed on the path to the amusement hall, where soldiers recovered from wounds and played darts and foosball.

I can’t believe foosball still exists.

Calvin entered the noisy room where Baroke was playing darts blindfolded, and yet the colossal villager was sinking every dart into the exact same spot while the crowd around him applauded.

Ella was resting off to the side with a leg of lamb from the countryside.

As long as he kept the Genosian stocked with meats, he wasn’t too afraid of her eating someone. A nearby soldier offered her a tankard of booze, to which she shook her head. Genosian stomachs weren’t able to process fruits and vegetables as easily as others, and this intolerance extended to most alcohols.

“Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot!” The soldiers crowding around Baroke chanted as he lined up another dart, balancing a shot on his knuckles. Somehow the archer tipped the drink over into his mouth while simultaneously making another shot dead in the center of the dartboard, sending up a wild cheer.

“You look like you’re having fun.” Calvin said, raising his voice above the din.

Cheering turned to whispers and then silence, extending outward from Calvin in a wave as people recognized him.

Baroke raised a brow and turned to face him, eyes still covered by the black scrap of cloth.

“Calvin? What’s up?”

“Just checking up on you. I figured you might appreciate a timeline,” Calvin said, glancing around the room.

“Hit me.”

“The end is in sight. Three weeks at a conservative estimate, then we can start bringing your families back home. In the meantime, with the siege broken, we can start getting resupplies from rural towns.”

The announcement was met with a rousing cheer, and more than one soldier ignored Calvin’s rank and patted him vigorously on the back, along with plenty of encouragement for ‘The Wasp’, the persona he’d built for himself.

If everything goes to plan, I’ll be building my kingdom square in the center of the jungle in a month.

If everything goes to plan? When has everything ever gone to plan?

A boy can dream, Calvin thought as the celebrating reached a peak.

There was a tap on his shoulder, which Calvin shrugged off, taking it as another good-natured celebratory shoulder clap. A second later it was back, tapping insistently.

Calvin glanced over his shoulder and spotted Nadia. Probably looking for an opportunity to secure some kind of punishment, or make his life miserable. Preferably both, it seemed.

“What is it?”

“One of me just got murdered.” She said with a confused frown.

****

Deep in the jungle to the east, a Brain Polyp was growing to maturity in a man-sized burrow, where Magenta had laid it during her third Break.

The Brain Polyp was a seed, the nucleus of a new army, but it needed to grow in order to accomplish its task. Instinctively, before it had even fully awakened its sapience, it was already sending mycelium deep into the ground to latch onto any and all sources of biomass in order to fuel its resource intensive brain.

Now aware of the fate of its predecessor, and, after studying the creature’s memories, it began devising a new strategy.

But first it would have to hatch foragers, Takers, and finally scrubbers.

The humans, now forewarned, would most likely scour the land with extreme caution, so it would have to avoid detection for weeks, or even months while it built the ability to defend itself.

The polyp began growing the mycelium to the south, forager eggs growing in the ground like potatoes as it shifted its center of mass further away from its current position.

Although it couldn’t move, it could easily create branch brains that could retain its mind if the original were to be destroyed.

This close to Gadvera that had an excellent chance of happening.

When the first foragers hatched, they began piling dead trees onto the polyp, making sure to slather rot between the branches, which the mycelium shot through, absorbing the energy and fueling the rapid expansion to the south.

Once it reached a safe distance, it would focus on its new strategy, which could be summed up in a short Malkenrovian proverb.

Quality over quantity.

***Ryan***

“There’s no chance that egghead is right about any of this shit, is there?” Ryan spoke aloud, glancing at the dumb woman who’d taken to following him around. She knew better than to say anything in response. Or maybe she just couldn’t. In either case, Ryan enjoyed the tacit agreement of her silence.

Still, it wasn’t his job to prepare for the end of the world and gods coming down to the surface of Marconen. All he had to do was deliver messages to the stupid, evil bitch who thought the end-times were upon them.

Not gonna let her stress me about this. Stress makes my stomach hurt.

It was just a fuckwit with more money than sense playing pretend.

The hardest part had been putting everything down in braille by poking the damn paper. It had taken hours to write down a simple message from this Seymour guy that he could have delivered in ten seconds verbally.

On the other hand…

The sheer amount of money in that lock-box piqued my interest, He thought, fingers unconsciously landing on the gold necklace he’d bought with a fraction of the Nem.

Can’t let people think I’m poor, now can I?

For that amount of money, Ryan was more than willing to let her play pretend with her professor.

The series of bumps on paper in his hand, read thusly:

I have come to believe strongly that the Elliot you speak of is indeed one of the ancient Administrators that warred against the gods. According to my notes, the System is able to track souls, and somehow this Elliot was able to coerce the system into recording his mind along with his soul, and now he dwells in the System of his most recent incarnation. This Calvin boy.

They have the same soul, same body. Elliot will most likely attempt a coup when the host has become strong enough to warrant attention from the gods. In a moment of weakness, he will take the body for himself. The only ways to prevent this are to erase Elliot, which would cause substantial damage to the host, strengthen the partition between them, which would be a temporary solution at best, remove the System entirely, unwise, given your personal reliance on it, Or remove the partition entirely and let the two identities compete until the stronger one achieves dominance.

Needless to say, none of these options are ideal. If you wish for a recommendation to someone who can work with the System, I can recommend you to some priests I know, but the chances of contacting the gods to resolve this matter are slim at best.

I will inform you when I know more. They don’t exactly make manuals for this sort of thing, you know.

Seymour

WoooOOooO, the gods, ravagers and the eternal expansion beyond the sky.

Ryan snorted.

Everyone knows you can’t get past the sky. How would you get there, on a catapult?

Ryan was already inside the brothel and ducking into the hall leading to Nadia’s room, when he came face to face with the she-demon right in front of her own room.

The door was ajar, splinters of wood where the handle used to be.

“What are you doing here?” Nadia asked, her hand on a sword as she stopped in front of him, eyes checking every corner suspiciously, lingering on the busted door.

“Your letter? I took the professor to the Pit to Break, and he spent the rest of the night diving through history books.”

Nadia extended her arm. “Give it he-“

The wall exploded outward, and Nadia’s body was crushed against the far wall an instant before it violently burst into green mist.

A little old lady in Gadveran dress, indistinguishable from any of a thousand other refugees, watched him with a reptilian coldness.

“What is The Pit?” she asked, her limbs retracting into her loose-fitting shawl with the clicking of bone-on-bone.

Nope.

Ryan turned and ran, shoving Dara into the creature’s path, bolting around the corner and out the door of the brothel in seconds.

Ryan heard Dara give a wordless shriek before she was silenced. He just put his head down and kept running.

Better her than me. Better her than me. Goddamn, running makes my stomach hurt. The pain made his eyes water.