Amazon Apocalypse 5: Chapter 10

Reluna, in Carter’s Farmhouse Castle.

Reluna took a break from using Carter’s experience farm to make sure her talisman production equipment was running properly.

“Good... good... not good.... there we are...” Reluna hummed to herself as she padded around in slippers and a large fluffy robe. She had one of those icy flavored drinks Myrina had kindly shown her to obtain from the juice dispensing artifact they’d uncovered in town.

This world truly was a land of marvels. Most worlds had a bare handful of inventions from their pre-integration days that were worth studying, but this place seemed to have something like that around every corner.

The printers, in particular, had gotten her most of the way through C-Grade with her job. Her race was only lagging behind a little, thanks to the experience farm Carter had constructed.

Between the two, she felt like the pampered young lady of a noble family being handed levels by the bucketful by an army of servants. All she had to do was occasionally check on her production line.

The priceless ancient artifacts, which Carter called printers, occasionally jammed and needed to be cleared. They also had mysterious disconnection issues, though thankfully, the artifact spirit Carter had created to maintain his small army of construction golems proved quite capable of resolving those. She really had to do something nice for that spirit.

But first, she had a bit more house-sitting to do. Sakura occasionally sent back letters containing requests for resources and equipment. At first Reluna had been seeing to those herself, but the artifact spirit had proven quite helpful at taking over that duty as well, and those odd-looking humanoid golems Carter called mannequins were ferrying goods to the teleportation array.

With those details taken care of, she might as well make sure all the other artifacts were working properly. The refrigerator was well-stocked with food. Reluna sampled a little of everything just to make sure it was still good. The sauna still ran fine as well. Reluna spent an hour there every morning to make sure. The vibrating massage chairs were also working properly. That was also something Reluna tested thoroughly.

After putting all Carter's household artifacts through rigorous tests, she penned a letter to her former classmates, who’d been drafted to war recently, about how she sympathized with their struggles, and how things were rough all over as she lived among primitives on an unintegrated planet.

“Your snacks, milady? There is a letter as well,” said the voice of the artifact spirit, known to Carter as the Governess.

“Yes, thank you. Please obtain another slushy for me. And put this letter on the teleportation array pad,” Reluna said from her vibrating throne.

The mannequin left, and to her despair, Reluna realized the controller for the moving picture box she sometimes enjoyed was just out of arm’s reach. She would have enjoyed entertaining herself with it, but not enough to stand up out of the comfort of the euphoric massage artifact she was currently enjoying. She should have asked the artifact spirit to get it for her.

Some days of researching these pre-integration artifacts were harder than others. But she’d signed herself up for this burden when she decided to become a well-published scholar in the field.

Bereft of entertainment and unwilling to leave her comfortable seat, she flipped open the letter the artifact spirit had just delivered. To her surprise, this one was from Carter.

Reluna,

Please do something about the golems. I’ll owe you a favor. Ask people back in Crownhill for help as needed. I’ll be back to check in and help finish up when I can get away.

Thanks.

A favor? Now that was something worth getting dressed for.

It was a bit odd she was so eager to leap into action. After all, this sort of elaborate exchange of favors was the sort of politics she’d left the Dragon Lodge for once she reached the peak of D-Grade and completed her studies. But a favor for Carter didn’t seem so bad. Truthfully, she probably owed him more than one favor for letting her use his enormous collection of artifacts.

And he mentioned coming back to check on her? Her workflow was highly optimized for maximum effect through minimum effort, but she had little doubt that if he dropped in now, he wouldn’t be impressed at what he saw. Reluna wasn’t sure why she cared so much, but that thought was enough to light a fire under her.

Carter certainly seemed to like women who could get things done, and Reluna could get things done just as easily as Sakura, Bridget, or Myrina. She just liked to work smarter, not harder.

For the first time in weeks, Reluna exchanged her slippers for adventuring boots, and her comfy, fluffy, wizardly bathrobe for a considerably more utilitarian wizardly combat robe.

Then she donned her personal project. She’d seen Carter making his giant suits of combat armor, enchanted for massively increased stats and combat effectiveness. She’d been inspired when she saw the prototype he’d created, and she’d decided to create something of her own.

“This sounds like a job for... the Shroud of the Moonlight Enchantress!” Reluna declared as she plucked the item she’d poured the last month of work into.

It had started as a cloak. In her homeland, some people wove swan feathers into their cloaks to add warmth and embellish their appearance. Those particularly wealthy and stylish would sneak a few talismans into the feathers as a special surprise.

But why just have one surprise? Reluna had the bright idea of replacing all the feathers with talismans.

Normally, this many talismans would cost as much as a castle. But thanks to Carter’s artifacts, she could make it herself with just a few hours of printing.

No doubt, the natives of these barbaric, unintegrated lands would be extremely impressed.

***

“Why are you wearing a trash bag with paper scraps taped all over it?” asked Kerrie, a talented archer among Carter’s fighters.

“This is a cloak of extraordinary power,” Reluna explained, chin tilted high.

“Okay...” Kerrie shook her head.

Reluna let out a sigh. Many of the natives didn’t have the education to recognize a good idea when they saw it.

“It doesn’t matter. Gather your fellow warlords. I have received your overlords’ writ of war, and he has chosen me to lead. We shall assemble a mighty host and smite our enemies in his name!” Reluna declared. Then, she revealed Carter’s letter, written by his hand and clearly stating his objectives.

Kerrie squinted at the paper for a little while, then shrugged. “Alright, I’ll get the others.”

A few minutes later, the rest of Carter’s warlords surrounded the letter, taking turns examining its legitimacy.

“About time we squashed those golems. They’re getting in the way,” said warlord Frank, who Reluna knew to be among the fiercest of Carter’s bloodthirsty barbarians. Artemis, the scout, nodded along with her.

Others agreed, and soon it was decided.

“By the realmlord’s edict, I have been granted command. Fear not, warlords of Crownhill, I shall lead us to victory against the foul golem menace.”

Reluna thought she struck a rather impressive presence between her words, her new cloak, and the mysterious ambiance music she’d strategically set up behind her when the meeting began.

“Okay. I mean, If Carter thinks you’re up for it. You’re pretty high level, I guess.” Frank shrugged.

“Well spoken, Warlord Frank. Between my wit and your barbarian ferocity, our foes shall soon rot in shallow graves!” Reluna proclaimed.

Kerrie cupped her mouth, whispering to Margaret next to her. “Aren’t we fighting golems? They’re made of rock. They aren’t going to rot.”

“Just smile and nod. We could use a high-powered wizard to take those things down safely from the walls, and if Carter’s not here, she’s the best we’ve got,” Margaret replied under her breath.

And with that, the council meeting concluded and Reluna was appointed supreme commander of Carter’s warbands.

***

Reluna once met a smith who told her an hour on the anvil saves a week at the grinding wheel. That adage had stuck with her through her life and provided a consistent reminder of the importance of preparation.

And so she spent the next week preparing for war. And sometimes that meant making sure her army looked the part.

“Marching into battle in mismatched attire may work well and good for Carter, but while I’m in command, I require a certain level of decorum and gravitas,” Reluna explained to the gathered forces of Crownhill.

“So... uniforms?” asked a young man. His name was Marcus, if Reluna remembered correctly. He was young, ambitious, and talented. No doubt he would make it far in any military, but especially far in a newly minted one such as what Crownhill had.

“Uniforms, banners, and drummers. We will also be marching in formation,” Reluna said.

She had spent a considerable amount of time on Glacia when taking a break from her studies in the Dragon Lodge’s junior academy. There, she’d sometimes watched the soldiers march while she sipped tea and read her books, thinking about how much it must suck to be tromping through the mud. She left that last part out when telling others of her extensive studies of military procedure.

“Is this strictly necessary?” Kerrie asked skeptically.

Marcus shrugged. “Carter put her in charge. If she says we need uniforms and banners, I guess it must be so.”

And so uniforms and banners were commissioned and made with all speed. Reluna feared they wouldn’t be done in time, but several people in town had taken the tailor job. Much to Reluna’s surprise, there wasn’t a single one of them who hadn’t maxed out their job relative to their race.

Apparently, there was yet another pre-integration artifact in this world called a sewing machine, and it made the bulk of a tailor’s work trivially easy. Reluna would have to recruit help from a tailor with one of these machines for her next iteration of the Shroud of the Moonlight Enchantress.

Despite her insistence on formality, not all of Carter’s new warriors were suited to the regimented structure of Glacian warfare. Carter’s scouts, for instance, were a massively bloated force by the standards of most militaries, but such skills were sorely needed here on this unintegrated world. There was plenty of unexplored wilderness full of monsters that was worth scouting.

Reluna granted them permission to skip the uniforms and marching and proceed directly to the wall with the golem shard, where they were to establish a base camp and monitor the enemy position. Carter’s artifact spirit had constructed sturdy walls, but they would be sturdier if guarded by men and women with keen eyes and sharp arrows.

While the warriors under her command scurried about under her orders, Reluna was not idle. Gone were the days when she could sip slushies and recline into a massage chair without a care in the world. Now she had to sip her slushies while using a massage chair to help her focus on military supply lines and planning an extended campaign to grind these golems to dust under a never-ending hail of long-range magical bombardment.

After all, that was how any good spell caster ought to fight. A magic user would have to be insane to run around with a sword, thinking they were some sort of spell blade as they tried to hack and slash like a warrior.

She settled on mass producing a series of impressive talismans that could launch a spell roughly equivalent to a fireball but tuned to crack the shell of a golem. It was based on a siege talisman Reluna knew of meant for cracking city walls, but she’d used the characters from the books she and Carter had been studying to mix in elements of deactivation and destruction into the earth-aspect talismans.

Her own affinity for frost and moonlight mana was of little help there, but Carter’s mana-gathering array that utilized the sun panels he’d tiled over proved more than capable of filling in her weaknesses with artificially collected and converted mana.

When the day finally came that Reluna and Crownhill’s forces were ready for battle, everyone was uniformed and as prepared as they could be.

“March!” Reluna declared, stirring the army from muster and into the field. They cut a magnificent sight, stomping in uniform across the city’s strangely smooth streets. It looked like they were ready to march off to a far-off land and conquer it in the name of some great empire.

Carter’s banner flew high over them all. Reluna had chosen a thick and girthy golden scepter piercing the world as his symbol. No doubt he would be impressed when he saw it. Reluna certainly felt a fluttering in her heart at the sight of it.

The march took Crownhill’s army all the way across the street, where they broke up into units and embarked the rest of the way in trucks and cargo vans as usual. Just because Reluna wanted these forces able to march didn’t mean they had to. There was little point in tiring the troops by making them tromp through the forest on foot when they could simply ride there.

“Hey, Reluna, sorry I’ve questioned you so much lately. I’m actually thinking you might not be half-bad at this logistics thing,” Kerrie said.

Reluna nodded along, as though she’d expected the skeptical woman to acknowledge her skills right then and there.

“I’ve not even begun to show you what I have planned. I’m told the phrase ‘work smarter, not harder’ is common among your people?”

Kerrie nodded. “It is.”

“I have taken that saying to heart, as it resonates fiercely with me. I plan to fight smarter, not harder. When we reach the front lines, you will see,” Reluna said cryptically.

“Does this have something to do with all the printers and computers you’re bringing along?”

Reluna suppressed a sly smile.

***

A few minutes later, at the furthest extent of Crownhill’s territory, the golems were still raising their wall. The C-Grades on the front lines stacked brick upon brick, building their barrier ever higher. They should have been done by now, but there seemed to be some confusion among their ranks, as occasionally a brick went missing and was ferried off for elsewhere sometime in the night.

As a result, many of the golem’s most powerful entities were still constructing the barrier that whatever apparatus controlled the bulk of them deemed necessary. Unfortunately, it was entirely insufficient for what Reluna planned for them.

“Activate the first row of talismans and begin the bombardment!” Reluna ordered. And at her words, a thousand talismans were activated at once.

An explosion of rock and stone echoed out in all directions as thick globs of earth mana twisted together and flew high overhead, then down on the C-Grade golems. Hundreds of attacks landed all at once. Though each was weak and only D-Grade, the sheer quantity of them destroyed a large part of the wall and even dropped one of the C-Grade golems.

“Reload. Ready? Aim. Fire!” Reluna issued more orders, and more spells flew, bombarding the golems again. And again. And again.

Only when the outer line of golems were reduced to dust and debris did she edge Crownhill’s forces closer. Behind her, printers whirred as they prepared the next volley. It would be hard getting non-magic users to charge them, but Reluna had a few ideas on that front already. Even though there weren't any true magic users in this army besides her, talismans could let them fight like one.

This sort of fighting style was what the taught at the Dragon Lodge. It might be long and slow, but bit by bit over the next few months they'd grind the enemy to dust. Reluna couldn't imagine anyone who'd do it differently.


<Note>
The golems naturally had to be addressed. I think this is the cleanest way to show something is happening with them. Plus, we get to check in with Reluna and the others and show how a traditional Dragon Lodge commander fights a military campaign.

Eventually, I have to bring Reluna over to join Carter, but that's got to wait for a big enough break in the war for Carter to go back to Crownhill. They need to finish clearing this last stage of the integration before C-Grades can freely come and go.