Amazon Apocalypse 5: Chapter 11

I soon learned I had two weeks before Prince Herius expected each of his legions to muster. At that point, we would gather, he would give a speech, and we would march through a large-scale teleportation array to our destination planet.

No one knew how deadly the situation on Ladwick was, but an advanced force that included Grandma Luthrin was already on the way to our destination by spaceship. There, she and two other Samhain Ancestors would establish a beachhead and teleportation array to ensure the army arrived safely.

That was all we’d be able to count on them for help, though. Doing more risked putting themselves under the leadership of the local noble house, the leader of whom was supposedly something of a tyrant and part of the reason why Ladwick and its surrounding border worlds were in such dire straits.

The more I read, the more confident I was that there were elaborate political waters to navigate for this mission. Battling our way across an invaded world would only be half the conflict we were in for. We could only hope Prince Herius proved shrewd as both a general and a courtier.

But at the moment, those were problems I couldn’t do anything about. So, instead, I focused on the things I could do. I debated going back home to check in on Reluna and see if she had started scouting out the golems. I hoped her magical knowledge would let her find some weakness or something.

When we are done with this campaign, I might recruit some of these wizards into coming back home with me. An army even a third the size of what was currently under my command, would make short work of the golems. And probably whatever the System threw at us afterward, too.

In the end, though, I decided my talents were of more use here in Mucaria. My Aethersmith job had lagged behind my race and class thanks to all the levels I’d gotten, and I figured that if I really pushed it I might be able to get it to the peak of B-Grade.

If I did that before actually reaching B-Grade, I should be able to get another level up quest, just like I had when reaching C-Grade. Those rewards from System quests were nothing to scoff at, and trying to get a chance at a second one was worth the extra time and work. The fact that I could mass-produce additional sets of weapons and armor for the upcoming campaign was a bonus.

Most of that work happened in my new mystic realm. I still felt a little bad about swiping it from the Samhain Clan when they needed it so much more than I did, but maybe by studying this one I could figure out how to make another from scratch for them.

To that end, I set up my temporary workshop in the mystic realm. Originally, it had just been a pile of tools. I hadn’t thought it possible for it to rain in the little mystic realm, but a few days in, it happened. I was forced to pull a few contractors off the job of building the barracks and mess hall to build a shelter for my tools. And since they were building something, they might as well build something nice.

In the end, I wound up with a short and squat round structure for my workshop that was buried partially underground. It wasn't much now, but it was clearly the start of something pretty large. When I told them about the job, the contractors looked me up and down, realized I was a wizard of the Dragon Lodge, and started building a wizard’s tower for me without any further questions. Apparently, any wizard rich enough to afford their own mystic realm would naturally have a wizard’s tower constructed inside it.

I went with the flow of things, and the mystic realm's infastructure slowly expanded around me while I ground out job levels and new sets of weapons and armor. Occasionally, the mystic realm prompted me with new events and indicators, and I tired of seeing the label of the 'unnamed mystic realm', so I eventually consulted Myrina on picking a name.

“What about... the Legendary Hall of Supreme Champions?” Myrina suggested.

“Not bad...” I nodded along. “I’m worried that the name will already be taken though. We need something more unique.”

“Ferocious Fief of Fearsome Fighters!” Myrina said excitedly.

“I don’t know about that. We’re going to have a lot of magic users here.”

“The Realm of the Supreme Patriarch?”

I grinned. “I like the sound of that. Maybe that’s what we’ll name our bedchambers. But the mystic realm will be housing goods, materials, and maybe even people from our legion. Word is certain to get around. Prince Herius and the other legion commanders might get jealous of me flashing around my huge patriarchy near them.”

“You’re right. Something more innocent. Let me think. You’re doing a lot of crafting here, and this is your mystic realm, so something aethersmith-related. Besides, we don’t want people thinking it’s property of the legion. It should be something persona."

In the end, the two of us settled on ‘The Sanctum of Carter and Myrina, Supreme Aethersmith of Wondrous Creations and Almighty Warrior of Unstoppable Ferocity!’

Unfortunately, the System automatically shortened the title to ‘Sanctum,’ much to our consternation. As was everyone we mentioned the name to.

“Back from Sanctum?” Sakura asked me.

“Yeah...” I grumbled as I plopped down a fresh load of weapons and armor on the table at Doomblade’s Armory.

“How exciting! The shelves will be full again. Try as I might, I just can’t find a source for things as good as what you and Gobgob make. I swear, the quality of enchanters is lacking here...” Sakura eagerly took the new load of goods off my hands.

Half would go into our equipment reserves, and the other half would be sold on the open market to fill out our supplies with everything we couldn’t make ourselves.

Plus, since we were going to war with our own mystic realm at our disposal, we might as well stock up on supplies and people far beyond what we initially intended. Medical supplies and additional logistical and support staff would be sorely needed.

One nice thing about leading wizards who’d received conventional training from the Dragon Lodge was that we had no shortage of healing spells. In fact, while officially we would be present as artillery, I had little doubt that healing would be just as vital a role for us, if not more so. Technically, the squads on Glacia had their own medics, but comparing them to a Dragon Lodge academy graduate with a healing specialty was like comparing a field medic to a resident doctor. Which led to my latest project with Sakura.

“So...” she lowered her voice. “I did like you said and had somebody buy examples of medical tools and enchantments from all the shops in town. Just don’t make our stuff look too similar.”

I grinned and slid the items straight from Sakura’s bag of holding to mine, along with a substantial amount of crafting supplies.

From there, I went back to The Sanctum of Carter and Myrina, Supreme Aethersmith of Wondrous Creations and Almighty Warrior of Unstoppable Ferocity. I let in a few more local contractors who were continuing the construction work.

Now that I saw them underway, I was impressed by the scale of the project. Only the foundations were done now, but it looked like a small city was appearing in the forest grove, complete with cobblestone streets and signposts. My own workshop was also a story taller than I remembered, and now it was looking more like a short tower than like a peculiar round building.

Then, I promptly put it all out of my mind as I got back to work aethersmithing. This time, I was reverse engineering the tools and medical equipment Sakura had discretely obtained for me. A lot of it seemed familiar, like someone had built an MRI machine with magic. It used the same principles, but the way of getting there was entirely different.

Another was a sterilizer wand. When supplied with the right aspects of magic, it would purge all non-intelligent lifeforms in its radius. The way it functioned relied on a rather clever interaction with souls, which took me some time to wrap my head around. Once I understood it, it opened the doors to all sorts of enchantments that required secure identification. Combining that with my recent study of cursed equipment could lead to greatly tightened security on high-value creations like my Doomblade armor.

Finally, there was a magical painkiller wand that put nerves to sleep. It did this in a roundabout way that baffled me for a while. It was almost like the creator of the device was convinced perception of pain was an effect that came from the soul instead of from nerves and had gone about the project in completely the wrong way. Did the local enchanters not know what cells were?

I ended up reverse engineering all the equipment Sakura gave me, and the new inventions provided me far more experience than just mass-producing more of the same designs I was already familiar with. I ended up getting so involved with the project, I didn’t even notice as the levels ticked by and eventually landed me the quest I’d been looking for.

New Quest available:

Transcendent Craftsmanship

Your ability to create surpasses all modern peers. You possess skill, talent, and understanding not seen since the creators of the System. Prove your worthiness by manually constructing trans-dimensional System infrastructure based on the provided blueprints.

Reward:

Greatly increased favor with the System and bio-magical upgrades to your body-soul interface that will massively improve affinity for mana manipulation.

Soon after the quest arrived, I received the recommended blueprint. Truthfully, it didn’t look too hard to work with. The most difficult aspect of putting it together would be finding somewhere without System infrastructure already in place to interfere with it.

Thankfully, I had such a place right on hand. Sanctum, my new mystic realm.

But like my other quest, the reward seemed too good to be true. Cyra had shared with me that her B-Grade quest rewarded her with mild enhancements to her Amazonian bloodline. I’d enhanced my bloodline a few times, but between the two, I thought massively improved affinity for mana manipulation was a far grander prize.

I shrugged. Perhaps I was reading too much into things. The System really liked me, so it was giving me good rewards. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was steering me in a certain direction.

Despite my worries, I certainly wouldn’t turn down the reward. So, like an electrician working with invisible wires, I started constructing System infrastructure in the realm of the Kindling, the dimension of raw creation from which the ancient creators of the System drew their power.

It felt a bit like grasping hold of clouds. This dimension, just beyond reach, was one of pure thought and chaos. Only by pulling it toward me, closer to reality, and forcing my will upon the mysterious substance, could I turn it into something tangible. A large part of the blueprint required the use of the ancient symbols I’d been studying with Reluna, and visualizing specific ones while working was included in the blueprint.

There were parts of the process where I felt like little more than an amateur cook following along with a recipe they didn’t understand. But the more I worked, the more pieces started fitting together. I figured if I did this again, I could design a few subcomponents, even without a blueprint. I might do just that, since some of this technology would dramatically improve my automated construction crew controlled by my gaming computer back home.

Building System infrastructure was simply visualizing components and assembling them correctly until I had created an orderly row of wires leading to a central terminal. This last part required some unique resources from the physical world. The System had to think, in some respects, and that meant a computer processor of sorts. The blueprint I was following called for computational engines, so that was what I used. I had plenty of extremely high-grade in Morgathor’s Satchel in case I ran into any more obelisks I wanted to repair.

All that was left was to connect the wires I’d made to the rest of the System, so I threw the switch.

In the physical world, the sky flashed with the light of an aurora borealis. The colors cut lines in the sky, and tracing them with my aethersmith senses, they extended far beyond the world to the System’s infrastructure in the Mucaria mystic realm this one was inside.

The hairs on my arm lifted as I sensed power flowing into the computational engine I installed, and soon, the lights on the circuit board I’d included flashed with activity. The System was loading whatever passed for its software onto this little slice of territory I’d given it. I was pretty sure the LED lights on the board could only ever flash red, but soon they transitioned to green.

The board itself warped and twisted, and the circuit board took on a more flowing organic shape, like the whole thing had puffed out and expanded. It was like someone squeezing into a suit that had the wrong cut in a few places.

Immediately, I felt myself standing before an immense presence. It was like an eye had opened wide in the sky and was staring down at me. Grandma Luthrin was nothing but a candle before this powerful entity. I almost had the urge to kneel, but I fought the instinct and remained on my feet. The contractors working on the nearby buildings couldn’t quite manage that though.

“Gah! What in the System?” a bricklayer gasped as he collapsed to the ground.

“The heavens are descending on this place! System have mercy!” another yelled.

Before I could calm any of them down, bright blue light flashed through the sky, washing out the light of the aurora borealis and returning the sky to its normal blue. The pressure on us all lifted, and if I hadn’t seen the System infrastructure I had just crafted squirming like a nest of live snakes, I would have thought it had vanished.

I stood transfixed awhile as the System worked. Time passed, and eventually the contractors managed to climb to their feet.

"False alarm, the world's not ending, back to work everyone!" the construction crew supervisor yelled as he ordered his workers to stand up and get back to putting down bricks.

When things finally calmed down, my quest for reward flashed across my vision.

Quest Completed: Transcendent Craftsmanship

Your favor has greatly increased, and your capabilities have been confirmed to be sufficient for advanced and highly sensitive tasks pertaining to the continued existence of the Arcadia Multiverse.

Your bio-soul upgrades are pending. Please find somewhere comfortable to lie down.

“Huh. Well, that was easy. Now...” I looked around and saw the cot I normally kept in my tent. I’d pulled it out for somewhere to lie down and let my eyes rest between crafting sessions. I lay down in it, and the moment the back of my head hit the pillow, I felt the most excruciating pain I’d ever experienced since the integration.

Within moments, it proved too much for me, and I blacked out.

<Note>
Finally, a chance for some extra worldbuilding. But that's next chapter.

Anyway, it's cold as fuck where I am, and the only things I do in this weather is write or play video games. My steam deck got stolen a whiel back, so I ended up getting a lot of writing done this weekend.

I've got about a 4 chapter lead on you guys, and hope to turn that into a 5 chapter lead by tomorrow. If I can do that and also manage 4 chapters this week, we'll transition to the old mon-wed-fri-sat schedule.