Chapter 145: 145: Zoomed out

***Calvin***

“So you’re saying we shouldn’t kill the monster?” Calvin asked.

Kala sighed. “Like I told Grant before, her experiences are currently shaping her personality, so be nice.”

“It’s a she?” Calvin asked.

Kala squinted and peered over at the doppleganger poking the meat slurry.

“…It’s still up in the air, but she’s leaning that direction, yes. She thinks women ultimately wield more influence than men.”

Calvin scoffed. “How did it come to that conclusion?”

“Probably watching children and their mothers.”

“Ah.” Calvin said, nodding. That would do it.

Trait Doctoring has reached l –

Your Princess is in another Castle has –

Calvin blinked away the two prompts.

Oh right, I totally forgot about the princess kidnapping skill. There were the refugees right after the heist, followed by Mujenan…Which I have to get back to, and soon.

Show me the choices for Princess.

Please choose an ability or mutation.

Stockholm Syndrome: YPiiAC correction now also applies to the emotional bonding of captive princesses with the User, as well as the resulting allegiance.

 

Not Heavy at All: User automatically redistributes(Correction%) mass of princess to pursuers when attempting to flee with a stolen princess.

^ From Shifting. Max 98%

Save the Last Dance: 4 Bent to begin a dance with a princess that cannot be interrupted. As long as both participants continue to dance, they are immune to physical attacks, physical restrictions, Bent abilities, mental manipulation, etc.

 

True Love's Kiss:  2 Bent, heals a princess of any curses, poisons, or afflictions, including foreign Bent, restores  condition and heals similar to a week's bed rest, potentially sealing otherwise lethal wounds.  Consumes princess' remaining Bent, but restores User's Bent at level/10 efficiency. 

 

Mutations:

 

Bloodline: Consume Princess blood to potentially gain access to Skills and Abilities unique to their bloodline.

 

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: User is able to adopt a role that make them appear to belong in a given setting, and behave in a way that draws no attention as they aim for the princess...  From Playboy.

Let’s go with Save the Last Dance.

It was situational, but Calvin liked the thought of literally waltzing out of trouble.

As for the Trait Doctoring Ability, Calvin hadn’t had time to think about it yet.

After a few minutes discussing Kala’s plans for her new pet, Grant returned, swooping down on a pair of swords. He’d been flying, but he still seemed out of breath.

“Calvin, You’re gonna want to see this.” he said, pointing over his shoulder.

“What, is the filter destroyed?” Thereby denying me access to its Warp in a cock-blocky sort of way?

“No, it’s just…well, come look.”

“Wanna come?” Calvin asked, glancing at Kala.

“Go ahead,” Kala said, nodding gracefully as she scanned the scene of destruction. “I’ve got a mess to clean up here.”

***Calvin***

“Aside from it being aboveground, I don’t really see the problem.” Calvin said as they watched the crater in the ground. The explosion had ruined the building above it, and there was nothing but a rubble filled crater forty feet across with a black pit in the center. Aforementioned black pit was still radiating Warp, not completely gone like he’d been afraid of.

Maybe not as dense because they were on the surface, but it was still nothing to sneeze at.

Then a blueish tentacle slapped the side of the wall, a single talon at the end digging into the stone and dragging the bulk of a Querda into view. The  massive, blue-skinned tentacle monster let out a chuffing breath as it struggled to pull itself further into this strange new world above ground.

“Yeah, that’s a problem.” Calvin said, nodding. In a matter of seconds, the hundreds of Cobalts surrounding the pit lashed out with their spears, poking the thing until it lost its grip and fell back in the hole.

“Should we seal it up?” Grant asked. “I am not a fan of having Warped monsters show up whenever they please.

“Let’s view this as an opportunity.” Calvin said. “Put up a notice that all the people from the Village of the Abyss are welcome to a job here fishing for and gutting these creatures. They’ve got some very valuable alchemical parts, and I’m sure Uleis would be glad to have another export besides glass.”

Calvin was fairly sure that if they closed the opening, it wouldn’t stop Warped monsters from wandering out of the rift in reality underground. They would simply pop up in places they weren’t expected, having dug their way out.

It was a much better plan to manage their population density, occasionally explore the cave, and profit from the alchemical ingredients

“Gonna have to build a warehouse over top of it to keep the Warp in and the animals out, else some children will get poisoned, and somebody’s pet lizard’ll eat them.” Grant said, chewing his lip as his hand rested on the pommel of one of his many swords.”

Kurawe, Calvin thought, touching his mind to the didstant zealot.

Yes, my lord? The thought came back in the space of a breath.

Did you own the land above the Siphon?

Yes, my lord.

Make sure Murak puts it in my name.

Of course, my lord.

This looks like a great place to build the heart of the West Boles Trading Company. Calvin thought, hands on his hips.

…I’m going to have to put up preserved spinner hands along the walls in case of Brain worm infestation.

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The rest of the day turned into a blur of clean-up and planning, with Calvin designing a warehouse/slaughterhouse with three stories to house all the workers it would need to stay safe. Once that was taken care of, Murak was more than happy to loan him the materials to construct the thing.

After that it was just a matter of setting a sickening amount of knick-knacks to the task, and before the sun went down, Calvin was staring at the solid, humorless building.

It had massive rolling doors to allow entire wagons in and out of the building with ease, space to store thousands of monster corpses and more besides, butchering stations, and the third floor was a giant lab entirely dedicated to rendering their corpses down into useable materials for the modern wizard.

All the floors were connected by massive dumbwaiters on pulley systems that allowed men to haul tons of cargo up and down as needed with the strength of a single man.

“It’s so beautiful.” Calvin said, eyes watering, his gaze tracing his company’s name carefully stenciled onto the side of the building by his own hand.

Drafting has reached level 8!

Calvin couldn’t wait to rush over to his new lands and eagerly anticipate the first shipments, months from now. He felt like a child waiting for his Brian’s Day present again, the anticipation driving him mad.

Sure, the only thing Karen had ever gotten him was practice swords and armor, but still, the hope never died.

The hell is Brian’s day? Elliot asked.

The day Brian the Magnanimus defeated the Mnetetarch of Madness and chopped it into thousands of pieces and fed it to all the children of the land, the only ones immune to its mental influence. Every year the adults of the world give children organ-shaped candy to symbolize the act. And presents.

It’s times like these I remember how long I was out for.

With Kala’s help, Calvin was able to appeal to Loren and many of his followers to be the first generation of workers at the Warehouse. Quite a few of them showed a natural aversion to ever going near the pit again or having anything to do with the monsters that oozed out of it, but Loren understood that without experienced men and women running things, many workers would die to the unforeseen.

Kala was also able to appeal to the man’s sense of patriotism, and pointed out that Calvin had restored a large portion of the royal family’s power in the city.

Not all of it, but more than they had a while ago. The royal family now served in an administrative capacity, which worked well enough for all involved.

Calvin didn’t have any illusions that the royal family was perfectly content with this arrangement. He was sure they were gnashing their teeth behind closed doors, but as long as Calvin kept a tight leash on Murak, the economic fallout of opposing him was unacceptable.

As for Kala, The dusky skinned princess was better at organizing, negotiating, coercing, and leading in general than Calvin could aspire to be. It was like she’d been groomed for it her entire life.

Wow, even your observations are laced with sarcasm.

With her keeping everything running smoothly, Calvin didn’t have to do nearly as much as he’d expected. After the building and the lab were taken care of, Calvin set out to watch the doomed assault on Mujenan.

He had to camp on the cold mountainside overlooking the road leading to Uleis for three days before he saw any sign of them. The Uleisan line looked like a dark brown snake winding it’s way down the road, following the main aterty of trade toward the capital of Calvin’s homeland. The brown helmets shimmered in the sun like the individual scales.

He didn’t expect the war would get out of hand, but stranger things had happened in the recent past.

Shortly before the army arrived, Calvin watched from a distance as Andra’s forces roused the monsters into a frenzy with noise and fire, pushing them further afield, forcing them into the faces of the marching Uleisans.

Calvin ate some dense meat and fried dough on the mountainside, resting beside his  watching the Uleisans receive their innoculation against One.

It’s really just a matter of how this is spun, Calvin thought. There were bound to be a few people who accused Gadvera of creating these creatures. The trick was shouting those people down or making them look like idiots.

Politics isn’t really my thing. Calvin though, idly chewing on the tough travel-pie. It all seemed terrifically pointless and self-serving, and his low Intuition was a major stumbling block.

Still.

Calvin would rather be the one on top.

The Uleisan troops drove massive ballistae woven from thick glass in front of them, siege engines of glass, ropes and ladders of flexible glass, armor and weapons of tough glass.

The mutant horde broke on them at first. Like animals, they attacked the humans in ones and twos, and the uleisan army was able to push them off without casualties of any kind, until the population grew thick.

The advance slowed as the men at the front of the line met more and more resistance, while the ones at the back became anxious.

Calvin could literally see word of the inhuman creatures ripple down the lines of the snake-like formation, front to back, as men turned their heads and whispered to each other, their words presumably growing more and more outlandish as the story traveled back through the ranks.

Then people started getting picked off, one here and there as the groups of flesh-spawned creatures attacked in ever larger bands, totally heedless of their safety.

Calvin watched closely for any sign that the creatures were once again under some kind of centralized leadership, but there was no sign.

The strange creatures sent a visible wave of unease through the lines, and Calvin watched the ant-sized Uleisan commander decide to bring the heavy shields to the front and press forward against the steady hail of attacking creatures.

Ant-sized, Calvin thought as he watched the slowly unfolding drama. That’s a blast from the past.

Of course, Calvin had always pictured himself on the side of the ants, because the ants always won against the beetles, through superior numbers and superior will.

Those creatures do look a little beetle-like, Calvin thought. Albeit red. I’ve been training for this my entire childhood.

He wished the Uleisan commander hadn’t made the choice to press on.

You’ve got more of these things in the woods on both sides of you. Did you think pushing deeper into them would make those ones on the side go away?

The sad tale unfolded over the course of a grueling day and night, while Calvin watched from his mountaintop. The deeper the Uleisan’s got into the creature’s territory, the more One’s soldiers attacked their flanks.

The creatures weren’t trying to be strategic about it or anything, they simply were attracted by the sound of fighting and smell of blood, rushing the first thing they saw. There was simply more flank than there was anything else with a snake of troops that big.

After a few hours of random attacks and slowly degrading morale, the commander called a halt, and the Uleisans changed formation into something more closely resembling a fat square, with their shields facing outward in every direction.

They pushed deep into the monster controlled territory, and set up a well defended camp, luring the creatures in with light and noise so that they could slaughter them by the thousands.

Still, every once in a while, someone messed up and got themselves, or someone else killed, depleting their reserves just a little bit each time.

Calvin was sure the fight was dramatic and meaningful on the ground, every moment a nail biting struggle against death, but sitting up here, it just looked like one blob of ants surrounded by a swarm of beetles that were trying to pick them apart.

Similarly undramatic was the Uleisan retreat. After two days of watching them gradually advance on Mujenan, only to see the flesh-covered walls that were spawning the creatures, they lifted their shields, turned around and slowly cut their way back out of Gadvera.

The losses were light, and the uleisans had a lot more fight left in them, but the commander made the right call: They couldn’t siege a city while under siege themselves. One’s creatures presented an unknown variable that any commander worth his salt would avoid like the plague.

And I had the best seats in the house to this failed mission, Calvin thought, wrapping his arms around his knees as he watched the soldiers march back the direction they had come, tired and frightened at the monsters they had witnessed.

 They were going to go home and spread the story of the great evil that Iletha had allied itself with.

Kurawe would make sure that was the narrative.

Calvin put out his little campfire and stowed the last of his supplies, glancing over his shoulder at the mountain itself. Directly on the other side of the mountain he was on was the one that housed the Genosians.

Calvin was absolutely sure he could wipe the entire mountain clean in an afternoon.

Calvin was deeply conflicted on that one. There were a lot of women and children on those mountains, and killing them would just make him the monster. On the other hand, he had promised retribution.

It doesn’t serve any purpose. Calvin thought, turning away from the mountains. He could kill a bunch of Genosians on the side right now, which would make him feel better in the short term, but it accomplished precisely nothing in regards to becoming a wizard-king.

No, what I need to do now is fly to Mujenan, get my title, get my land, and figure out who’s in the race to marry Kala.

Macronomicon

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