Edwin grabbed the stretcher, heaving it up onto the carriage with a grunt.

“That’s the last one!” the officer next to him shouted, knocking his mailed fist against the vehicle’s side. “Move out, let’s go!”

With a jolt, the cart began moving, rolling after the rest of the train that was already a few hundred meters ahead. Edwin could just make out two of the white-clothed healer’s assistants lifting the injured soldier off the stretcher and onto a table before the back door of the vehicle slammed shut. Edwin turned and broke into a jog.

“Thank you!” the officer called after him, and Edwin waved without turning around.

The rest of his unit was just a short distance back towards the battlefield, skirmishing against the Marradi who weren’t quite willing to let them leave this time. By pushing towards them, they had left the protective envelope of their archers however, which had allowed the three Harvand crossbow cohorts to get in range and blunt their first charge with a withering barrage of armor-piercing bolts. Now more careful, the infantry was moving up in a close formation with the archers just behind them, pushing the Harvand rearguard back. That was fine, as their only goal was to keep the Marradi from running down the defenseless train or the exhausted and wounded soldiers.

Looking for his banner’s flag, Edwin quickly found his teammates. They were moving in his direction, the fighters looking relaxed while the marksmen stopped to send back an arrow every now and then. Edwin reached a strained-looking Leodin and took back his glaive.

“Seriously, how can you fight with that thing?” the young marksman said, rubbing the shoulder on which he’d carried the massive weapon. “It’s so unfair that you can swing it around like it’s nothing but a stick. I swear, you just keep getting stronger.”

Edwin frowned. That was a preposterous idea… or wasn’t it? As a consequence of the way his body was designed, neither training nor inactivity had any effect on his muscles. Any change was classed as damage and repaired to its standard configuration. Still, something was off.

As their unit was simply keeping their distance from the pursuing Marradi at the moment, Edwin closed his eyes. When the Immortalizer had assembled his body, sealing the core that housed Walter’s mind into a crystal sphere, a copy of that mind had been created to inhabit the body. Like any normal human, what the body experienced was stored inside his brain. The difference was that anything Edwin saw or felt, Walter experienced as well, and unlike the meatball between Edwin’s ears, Walter’s mana-based memory was perfect.

Edwin dove into Walter’s mind, quickly picking out one of his own memories from a few months ago: The day he first found his beloved glaive. He chose a specific moment on the evening of their fateful battle in that forest-themed Pioneer ruin. They had sat around the campfire, relaxing from the exhausting day, and Edwin had played with his new weapon, running his fingers along the silvery edge, caressing the life-like magestone roots, feeling its weight.

Holding the memory of his past self raising the weapon with one hand, he mirrored the movement in the present and opened his eyes. The duality of the life-like memory overlaid onto his vision confused him for a moment, but when he managed to sort out what was real and what wasn’t, he groaned. Where the hand from his memory had only risen to chest height, despite using what felt like the exact same amount of strength, the one in the present was almost above his head. He was stronger than he had been, and not just a little.

Edwin’s muscles cannot change, Walter reasoned, not without large parts of the central ritual failing completely, which would be obvious. That just leaves one option: The density of mana in the body has risen drastically.

While Edwin’s body might look normal, it was foundationally different once one peeled away the skin. Human flesh had a very limited capacity for mana, so he had taken a page out of a direbeast instead. Well, in his fleshmagic research he’d taken a lot of things out of the creatures, a page not technically being one of them. Direbeasts, like many of the native creatures of the New World, could metabolize quantities of mana that would be harmful, if not deadly, to a human. In a way, Edwin’s physique was much closer to the direwolf that had tried to gnaw off his leg all those months ago than it was to his fellow adventurers.

While part of Edwin’s impressive strength and speed came from a carefully designed muscular system, another large part of it came from those muscles being empowered by the constant level of mana in his body. That mana was refreshed by a steady trickle that escaped Walter’s core through infinitely small channels in its crystal prison. What did it mean that this trickle had grown? Had the crystal been damaged in the fighting? Edwin barely suppressed a shiver. If it was, his days were numbered. Any imperfection in the shell would widen under the mana pressure, inevitably leading to its failure. With his mana locked away, there was no way to repair it either.

It can’t be damaged! Walter thought, pulling himself together. I did extensive stress testing, and even a hammer blow against Edwin’s thorax wouldn’t crack it. An attack would need to either penetrate his ribs and hit the crystal directly or carry enough force to flatten a regular human into a pancake, and he was exposed to neither.

But if it wasn’t damage, what had caused the influx of mana to increase? The realization hit Walter like a slap in the face, and he almost stopped walking.

I’ve made a mistake! I calculated the influx of mana based on my core’s output before I stepped into the Immortalizer, but I’m still here! I may not have a body of my own, but I still exist, and as a Lich I never stop getting stronger. My personal power is growing which increases the pressure in my core, which means more mana is pushed through the channel.

Walter suppressed the urge to find a wall and slam Edwin’s forehead against it. How could he, genius without peer, make such a beginner’s mistake as to not properly account for change over time?

Life as a Lich must have dulled my senses, he thought, cursing inwardly.

Without the need for food, sleep, or the movement of the sun to gauge time, the days, months, and even years had blended into one another. He remembered how surprised he’d been when he first learned how long he’d been in his laboratory.

You lived like that for fifty years, Edwin noted. After nothing changed for so long, maybe it’s excusable that such a small thing slipped your mind?

No, Walter thought, not for me. Other people make mistakes, I hold myself to a higher standard. The only reason why I allowed myself to become a Lich, why I didn’t immediately destroy the formula of transitioning when I first laid eyes on it, was that I can be trusted with this power. Lesser men would make mistakes, would let themselves be corrupted by the power I have gained or by their own base desires. I am better. I need to be better.

That may be true, but is it really a mistake? Edwin thought soothingly. After all, I’m basically a prototype, right? Isn’t it the purpose of a prototype to find these kinds of… inconsistencies?

Walter tossed that idea around his mind, tasting it. Edwin was right, he finally decided. It was unsurprising, they were basically the same person after all. Putting aside the question of blame, he focused on the real problem: The mana leaking from his core. Even if he hadn’t anticipated his own growth, for the influx to increase this much over less than a year was worrying, and from a few lightning-fast calculations, it was much faster than he should be seeing based on the information he had. He couldn’t open up Edwin’s body and get to the bottom of the matter, so the best he could do was approximate an expected growth curve based on his original influx calculations and the change he was seeing now.

He came up with two models. If the growth was linear, he would continue getting stronger at an alarming rate, gaining enough strength to snap steel bars like sticks within ten years. If the growth was exponential, he was only just seeing the beginning of a steep rise and would achieve the same level of strength maybe as soon as next winter. He could scour Edwin’s earlier memories to try and map out his growing physical capabilities, but Walter didn’t feel like it. Even without doing so, he was almost certain that it was the second option, and right now he didn’t want to think about what that would mean for his future plans. There would come a point when even the most gullible fool would grow suspicious, where Edwin’s inhuman strength couldn’t be explained by him being a freak of nature anymore.

“Edwin, stop sleeping on your feet!” Bordan shouted. “Pick up the pace or you’ll catch an arrow!”

With a parting sigh, Walter pulled back into his core, ceding control of the body back to Edwin. Edwin rolled his eyes and sped up, quickly catching up to his teammates.

He was starting to realize what a downer Walter could be.