Chapter 25: Dig Yourself a Hole

I did not end up throwing Electra out of the window.

Call me a puritan, but I tried not to throw away the people I actively needed in my schemes, because it set a bad precedent. Well, no, the bad precedent was already there, I just wanted to move past the generational villainess trauma that mandated I mistreat my underlings for no good reason.

“Where’d you even find this forking drill?” Electra muttered.

I bopped her on the back of the head, shooting another surge of electricity from my suit’s battery into her skull. “Less talky, more drilly.”

Instead, I mistreated them for perfectly valid and responsible reasons.

With a grumble, Electra got back to powering the electric drill I’d cobbled together. Now, when I said drill, I’m sure you pictured something that I would use, like a handheld drill for driving screws into pre-bored holes. No, this was a mining drill. The head was bigger than Electra’s, and it was powered by running a charge through a tightly-wound copper spool, forcing the drive shaft to spin.

Electra was using it to dig us a hole under the wall.

Not the fancy interior wall—too many guard patrols for that—but the outer wall. You’d think there would be guard patrols there too, but turns out if you burn down a good section of the old docks area and evict pretty much everyone else, you’re left with a lot of buildings leaning up against the outer wall that make a perfect staging ground for a tunnel.

“How does it look?”

Electra glanced over her shoulder. “Are you sure you can squeeze through this?” she asked. “I mean, are you hecking sure I can squeeze through this, because these hips don’t lie.”

“Not without photoshop, anyway.” I rolled my eyes at her indignant ‘hey!’. “You’re only breaking up the stone and loosening the soil. Our new friends will be digging the actual tunnel.” I reached over, scratching the head of my newest demonic acquisition.

The dire-mole, working name, came up to the middle of my thigh while it sat back on its haunches. It had a big mouth, full of grinding teeth for chewing on gravel, and two big, shovel-like mitts that it called paws. Really, with hair that was smooth on the surface and bushy and warm once you stuck your fingers into it, they would make excellent pets.

Once you got past the whole, you know, demon thing.

“And why am I the one drilling a hole when you have a bunch of hell badgers to do it for me?”

“Language,” I chided.

Electra sputtered, a clod of dirt flying into her open mouth before she spit it out. “Wh—am I supposed to call them heck badgers?”

“That might be better than dire-mole, actually.” They only looked like moles a little bit. They didn’t have the weird tentacle nose thing, and they had eyes.

I gave the newly re-christened heck badger another pat. “To answer your question, the reason I’m not having my friend the heck badger or his buddies do it is because I’m afraid they’ll start trying to eat the wall. And also since I don’t offer pay in human souls, I have to be a bit more flexible in my agreements.” I paused. “Actually, it’s helping me level a decent amount too.”

“Munchkinnery at its finest.” Electra gave a happy nod. “At this rate you’re going to unlock a third class and take out the whole city by yourself.”

After she dislodged a big chunk of clay with the drill and pushed it out of the widening hole, a second heck badger waddled over and started munching on it. That was the deal: they help me dig a hole, and in return they get lots of free food that they didn’t have to excavate themselves.

Apparently, real world soil is very mana nutritious.

“Don’t sell yourself short.” I flipped open my spy mirror, taking in a view of the city from above as my invisible cloud skimmer continued to circle. “I’d need you to power up my armor; the lack of proper charging infrastructure really is a wrench in my plans. Take a quick break, there’s a patrol coming along the top of the wall, don’t want them to feel any vibrations.”

Electra pulled back, wiping the sweat from her brow. “This thing isn’t that powerful, is it?” She shook the drill once, dirt cascading off of it.

“Stone carries waves differently.” I shrugged. “In any case, it’s not worth the risk. They’ll be past momentarily.”

“Then maybe you can take a turn with the drill?” She held the handle, which, again, was little more than copper leads wrapped around a durable drive shaft.

“I already told you, I can’t power it because it won’t plug into my armor.”

She huffed. “You’re the one that’s designing all this so-called infrastructure, why aren’t you making it backwards compatible?”

I sighed. “One day, I’ll sit down and explain replaceable parts to you, and why it was such a revolution in the process of industrialization.”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Why wouldn’t screws be replacable?”

“Why not,” I nodded to my slow friend, “why not indeed.” But the only standardization in this fantasy world was when my family of forge imps decided to make all of one thing the same size. There was only so much I could do in such a short period of time.

Electra stared at me for a moment, to see if I was going to elaborate, before she shrugged. “Speaking of parts,” she continued, wiggling her eyebrows “what about yours and Rel’s?”

I slapped a hand across my face. “That was a truly terrible segue.”

“You’re blushing!” I could hear the smirk in her voice. “You’re really blushing, aren’t you? That’s so cute! Oh I knew you two would be perfect for each other.”

“I am not talking about this with you,” I said.

Electra giggled. “Who else are you going to talk about it with, then? Or are you going to go over your feelings when you call Rel again tonight?”

I grumbled, glancing away. “I’m just…worried.”

“Huh? Worried about what?”

“That this relationship will…get in the way.” I looked back at the mirror. The patrol had passed our section of wall, but I didn’t tell Electra to get back to work just yet. “I’m essentially the ruler of an enclave deep within hostile territory, engaged in a shadow war with my far more powerful neighbors.”

“So, business as usual then,” Electra said. “You know, for you.”

I ignored her.

“I am just not…certain that I can be both the leader I need to be and a partner at the same time.”

She snorted. “What are you, a female lead from a classical sci-fi?” She turned back to the hole. “They’re gone, right?”

“…Yes.” I eyed the back of her head.

“You can be a girl boss and have a girlfriend, Em.” With a crackle of ozone, she powered up the drill again, blue lightning flicking off of her sleeves as the head of the drill dug back into the earth. “It’s not rocket science, and you do rocket science.”

“I wasn’t aware you were such a connoisseur of turn of the millennium films.”

She giggled again. “Wonderman loves them, oh my god. Every time it’s his turn for movie night he picks something from the aughts. It’s like, practically hilarious.”

I folded my arms, putting the spy mirror back away in the sealed pouch on my utility belt. “What would you suggest I do, then?”

“I mean, do you like her?”

I bit my lip. “I don’t know that I like anybody.”

“I mean, that’s fine you know, if you’re wired like that,” Electra said. “But it kinda seems like you like her. She’s your fav, right?”

“I don’t have a favorite.” I rolled my eyes.

“Suuuuuure.”

“Fine.” I huffed. “Out of all of you, Rel is definitely my favorite minion.”

“I’m sure the boys will be crushed.”

“Yes, well, I stole Dee and Dum from a rival gang after I killed their boss.” I paused. “Actually, now that I think about it, they went along with me rather easily, in retrospect.”

“Probably wasn’t a very good boss?” Electra shrugged, dislodging a particularly nasty rock. Two of my three heck badgers got into a tiny scuffle for it, but the one with red markings on his light brown coat came out victorious. “They had the chance to stab you in the back and didn’t take it, y’know?”

“I do…” I rubbed my neck. I’d been closer to death, over the course of my long career as a villain, but never so viscerally as a noose, drawing tight—too tight.

I shook my head.

“So…you’re suggesting what, exactly?” I asked. “Go with the flow? Let nature ‘take its course’ or some trite nonsense?”

The dirt beneath the wall shifted, allowing for a sliver of light to poke through from the far side of the wall. “There we go!” Electra leaned back, clambering out of the hole as she brushed the dirt from her hands. “I mean, would it be so bad to not have to be in control all of the time?” She asked back. “Seems kinda exhausting.”

“It’s the only reason I’m still alive.”

“Hey.” She slugged me in the shoulder, before hissing, shaking out her hand.

I raised an eyebrow. “You forgot about the armor, didn’t you.”

“I forgot about the armor.” She started rubbing her knuckles. “Anywho, you got friends now, don’t you Em? You don’t need to be on top of everything always all of the time!”

I sighed, gesturing for the heck badgers to get started with the hole. “Maybe not.”

“That’s the spirit!” She slung an arm over my shoulders, and for once, I didn’t feel the urge to shove her off of a cliff into an erupting volcano. What can I say, Electra had that effect on people.

Together we watched as a trio of heck badgers munched their way through the guide tunnel Electra had dug, widening it to the point that the two of us could easily crawl through.

“Well, no point in wasting time.” I hopped down the slope, peering through the four meter long tunnel under the wall. The dirt was a bit loose, but we’d avoided the supports, so hopefully it wouldn’t catastrophically collapse while I was beneath a hundred tons of stone.

Electra could make her own way.

“But what about our heart to heart?” Electra followed after me. “We were like, having character development or something.”

“I prefer the development of my character to happen at the expense of someone else’s,” I replied. “So let’s go see what Seneschal Hawkright has in store for us, hidden away in his domain.”

“You know,” Electra said as she crawled through the passage after me. “That explains so much about you.”

On the other side, we quickly dragged a few thick fronds over the mouth of the tunnel and covered it with underbrush. Exit successfully made, we quickly vanished into the jungle just before the next guard patrol rounded this section of the wall.

“So anyway, how are we gonna find where all those mercenaries are hiding?” Electra asked. “It’s not a small island, you know.”

I flicked out my spy mirror once again. “That’s why we brought air superiority.” Holding the mirror closer to my lips, I spoke again. “Circle inland and pass over any areas with large concentrations of people.”

Electra let out a low whistle as the sky skimmer obeyed my command, winging away from Silverwall high above to scout our way to the target. “How’d he hear you? Cause I know the mirrors send sound, but isn’t that taped to his belly or something?”

I smirked as my Safe Words skill leveled up again. It was incredibly useful, knowing that your orders would always reach their destination perfectly intact. “See, that’s the thing,” I said. “It’s magic.”