Amazon Apocalypse 4: Chapter 54

“Reluna, are you alright?” I asked.

“Uh... uhm...” Reluna’s mouth opened and closed several times irresponsibly.

“Sorry, I didn’t think things would get quite that explicit.”

She nodded slowly.

I’d guessed her people weren’t shy about sex, considering I hadn’t seen her wearing underwear all that often. According to Bridget, Sakura, and Myrina, she wasn’t all that shy about talking about sex either. They'd mentioned she'd said it wasn’t uncommon in elven society for onlookers to witness a newlywed couple mating for the first time as part of the celebration, but maybe Reluna was the shy sort. Though, she certainly hadn't given me that impression so far.

If I’d misjudged her, I felt bad having her stay and take notes for me. But she soon righted herself, and though she was flustered, she could still hold a technical conversation as she went through her notes. I added the notifications I’d seen, and we came to a few realizations.

As I suspected, my new Scepter of the Supreme Patriarch ability was a powerful tool for managing not one, but many lovers. The soulbond could theoretically scale to a harem of thousands of women, allowing me to drain a huge number of women of levels all at once, and also keep a sprawling harem sexually satisfied despite only having so much time in the day. Not that I intended to reach such a level.

I suspected the need to have my companions willingly accept the soulbond placed a more realistic hard limit on my number of lovers. If enough of them started feeling neglected, they could go on strike and cut off a serious chunk of my power. I would keep my ear to the ground and make sure none of them were forming a union on me, since that would be my true Achilles heel.

The ‘scepter,’ as my ability called it, by default, belonged to me, and it granted me substantial bonuses to maintaining order among a group of otherwise strong-willed women like my companions. Under normal circumstances, or when I was on top, that influence was all mine, but when one of my lovers was on top of me, ownership of my Scepter was shared with her. I hadn’t noticed, likely due to how it was always there, but apparently, the rush of extra willpower, charisma, and dominance was too much for some women like Bridget.

No doubt there were more secrets we could figure out, given time and study. But that could be pieced together from my companion’s notifications.

I hit the shower first before all of them, since if they came in with me we’d just end up having to shower again right after. Reluna would copy down their notifications, and we’d figure out how effective the stat boosts we’d gained really were.

***

Once I was clean, following my duty as the new patriarch in the household, I left my companions to clean up or sleep things off as they wished.

Meanwhile, I needed to check back in with Crownhill. I took the short trip there and looked in on the clinic. Most of my C-Grades looked much better after a few days’ rest. Most were still in bed, but they were looking better by the day.

“Kyle, glad to see you up and about. How’s the arm?” I asked, gesturing at his new arm.

“Am I part undead now?” He asked, clenching and unclenching the pasty gray limb.

“I’m sure it’ll get better with time. It just needs a bit of blood flow. The arm couldn’t have been dead for more than a few weeks at most.” I gave him a tight-lipped smile to cheer him up.

“I don’t know. It feels weird.”

I shrugged. “There are plenty of people who can regenerate a limb. Think of it as a prosthetic until you meet one of them. Hell, I might even have the spell somewhere.”

I figured that healer I killed probably had a regeneration spell or two kicking around, considering his subject of study. And if not, a high enough regeneration proficiency could probably fix a lost arm.

“Yeah. I guess that makes sense...” Kyle shrugged.

“Listen, I don’t want to throw any more responsibilities on you after what you’ve been through, but...”

“Go ahead. I think I could use a mission to take my mind off things. That dragon fight was... rough. I thought I’d gotten pretty strong, but I couldn’t even join you in the final battle.” Kyle shook his head.

“Well, if you’re feeling up to it, sometime over the next few days I’d like it if you and a few other people scouted the golem shard. A bit more thoroughly than I did. You’ll find my full report somewhere. Margaret will know where it is.”

“You can count on me, sir.”

I repeated my request to a few of the other healthy-looking C-Grades, especially those with abilities good for stealth. Then, I made the request into an official quest. Anybody who could get feet on the ground on the golem shard and start collecting maps for the scouts would be welcome to decent rewards, courtesy of all the people I killed on my recent training quest.

I left a bag of holding stocked full of rewards for Margaret to distribute as people came in with new information. Then, with my duties as Shardking of Crownhill taken care of for the moment, I turned my attention to more personal matters.

There were no servos for sale in Crownhill’s teleportation network, but there was plenty for grabs over in San Antonio. I eagerly purchased their entire supply, as well as my usual loads of goods for my ongoing trade route with the Dragon Lodge.

From there, I dropped off the supplies with Gobgob, picked up a bunch of mostly finished sets of old-style enchanted armor and a few sets of half-enchanted Mark One power armor, then took a brief trip to Themyscira where I dropped everything off with my enchanters in Shadefall for the final details.

***

It’d been a while since I’d done the whole circuit, and I picked up the finished goods they had waiting for me.

“One thousand full sets of enchanted armor...” I shook my head at the sight as Morgathor’s Satchel was full nearly to bursting.

I would have danced a little jig a month ago at the sight. This was damn good armor, the same kind I’d gifted to Cyra for that final battle against Dramonar and his undead army.

But my new Mark One power armor had rendered it completely obsolete. Despite being highly engineered pieces of magical technology, I just wasn’t thrilled by them. I was even a little embarrassed as I looked over the designs and saw how many mistakes I’d made. If I’d known then what I knew now, I could have made it nearly twice as efficient at using mana.

And that was if I didn’t take my new abilities into account. Just looking the design over, I could have fit way more defensive enchantments across the armor’s surface with my new photolithography technique, to say nothing of making use of extradimensional space. It wasn’t necessarily bad, considering how little I’d known back then, but the stuff I’d thrown together from scrap materials and handed off to Eowyn had been leagues better than this thing.

Still, it would have been a waste to just throw them away, considering how many goblins and enchanters had worked hard to make them. I would have given them away to charity, but people were still willing to pay thousands of gold for them. I’d sell half of them on the markets of Crownhill really cheap for F and E-Grades to buy, then sell the rest as second rate gear over on Mucaria for when I ran out of good stuff.

The Mark One armor was the big seller there, but opening a shop and only selling one product felt strange. These would at least fill shelf space.

Unfortunately, the Mark One armor had been much slower to mass-produce. While the goblins could still make most of the parts, folding things into their true shape by pushing matter through to an extra spatial dimension was something only I could do. Gobgob and the goblins had done their best and completed a full hundred sets of Mark One armor.

But the enchanters in Shadefall weren’t nearly as productive at enchanting them. Despite having a full week to work on them, they’d only finished thirteen sets of armor. And looking a few of them over, I could already tell three of them were screwed up and needed their enchantments repaired. One was a manufacturing error, but the other two were on the enchanters, which was why I found myself face-to-face with a long-bearded old enchanter who I’d only met briefly when I’d been sent here with Myrina, Cyra, and a group of Amazonian saboteurs sent here to destroy Shadefall’s supply lines. He'd been among the survivors from those attacks, and Sakura had hired him off the streets when we got our own workshops started.

“What in the blazes are we supposed to enchant? You handed us a blank sheet of metal!” the old man waved his hands in the air.

I blinked in surprise. “You can’t see them? I guess it would be hard for E-Grades. Let me think...”

I frowned, then reached out the window to the streets below and grabbed a handful of sand from the ground with telekinesis. I held it tight, then used my Aethersmith powers to turn it hotter. That didn’t provide enough juice, but a few quick pulses with a Mana Bolt soon had the thing hot enough to be molten. The chemistry was all wrong for good glass, but this didn’t need to be perfect. Plus, I could take the worst of the contaminants out of the molten sand using telekinesis.

When I was done, I had a glass lens. I demonstrated its use while manufacturing several dozen more with my other hand.

“See this? This is a magnifying lens. It should help you see tiny details.” I handed the lens off to the wizened old enchanter.

“By the System! There really are enchantments here. I thought you were pulling my beard. These lines are tiny! Did you mind control a race of gnats to have them carve these things for you? Otherwise, I can’t fathom how you might have done them.” The old man shook his head in amazement.

I chuckled. “I didn’t do it by hand, that’s for sure. A light-aspect Mana Bolt, or really any sufficiently powerful light spell, reacts with residue coating the metal, leaving behind a set of enchantments. It’s really just making the obvious stuff smaller so I can pack more extensive enchantments on a surface than normal. I can’t do it for everything, since some of the defensive enchantments need to handle a lot of mana, but it works great for anything that needs to interact with the servos.”

“The what?” the old enchanter asked.

“The mechanical devices here and here. They lift the arms of the power armor, since otherwise they are too heavy for a normal wearer to move.” I pointed to the various servos.

“This is supposed to be armor?” the man asked incredulously. With the extradimensional portions of the armor exposed, the suit looked more like a cockpit surrounded by metal tubes and gadgets than anything else. “I assumed it was some sort of elaborate torture device. Perhaps some means of restraining powerful Amazonian matriarchs and breaking their wills through a combination of pain and pleasure. I even added one of those magic wand devices from the wizard Hitachi you brought here a while back to help treat hysteria.”

He pointed to the crotch pieces of each armor, which did indeed have a magical vibrator sticking up through the center. Yeah, that settled it. These were definitely commercial models. If I brought these things back to Crownhill, I was going to get some strange looks.

“It’s definitely armor. Watch.” I used my aethersmith extradimensional senses to give the armor a push, and it folded in on itself, passing through higher spatial dimensions as it wove itself together in ways only I could perceive. It must have looked nonsensical to the old man and the small crowd of enchanters watching the process.

“See? Armor.” I patted the side of the fully assembled Mark One armor.

“By the System! Just what kind of magic do you wield?” the man took a step back from the armor.

“Let’s call it... advanced artificing. Anyway, it’s clear you guys need new tools to make these things, and I should have seen that coming. I'll get you some more magnifying lenses. And I think some sort of silver prod pen-like device to channel mana through into the admittedly tiny reservoirs my enchantment instructions indicate should also be a big help.”

I quickly manufactured a small bundle of new tools. It was clear though that my ability to create magical devices would soon completely eclipse my worker’s ability to keep up with me. I’d either need to invest time into additional teaching and training for them, or accept I was going to to have to do a greater share of the work myself. Hopefully, the tools I’d just given them would be enough for them to handle what I currently wanted out of them.

I took the finished sets of armor, as well as the ones that had been incorrectly enchanted. Bringing them home filled most of the bags of holding I had on me, since every set of armor had to be transported in all their multi-thousand pound glory instead of in their dimensionally compressed state. Just as soon as I arrived, I was gone. That was all the time I had for Themyscira today, though it was nice to see stuff was moving along fine without me.

***

I soon made it home and went to my barn to tidy up. Reluna had definitely been here. I could tell because I was out of both paper and printer ink. As someone with a scribe job, the printer fascinated and intimidated her. She’d been rather fond of having it copy symbols from the book of forbidden knowledge.

I reached into Morgathor’s Satchel and pulled out the other book I’d found during my Personalized Training Quest. When I had the chance, I was going to record every symbol in both those books and try to reverse engineer the language the text was written in through context and brute force computing. But that was for later. For now, I had a trip to Mucaria to meet up make.

I’d checked in with Myrina and the others and discovered everyone’s paperwork was ready so they could finally come to Mucaria with me. I had planned on having them run my armor shop, but now that I thought the idea over, I realized how many holes that plan had in it.

None of them were enchanters, and none of them could answer any questions about the armor's enchantments. Myrina knew a surprising amount about armor in general, but was a member of the Samhain Clan and would probably bring the wrong kind of attention to our little shop so I wanted to downplay her presence as much as possible. I needed someone smart and who was actually involved with making this armor.

So I stopped by the goblin workshop.

“Chief Humie? Do you need more from us? We’re still working,” Gobgob said, looking up from her workbench.

“Hey Gobgob, would you be willing to come off world and do a different job for me? It will involve buying and selling the armor you made to people off world. They may have to ask you some questions.”

“Off world?”

“Yeah. I want you to run a shop for me. Plus, I’ll double your pay.”

Gobgob frowned. “What pay?”

I rubbed the back of my neck sheepishly. Had I still forgotten to start paying the goblins?

“Triple it, then. Come on, it’ll be fun!”

“Okay, if the chief says so!” Gobgob gathered up her favorite tools. I frowned, looking at her homemade shop clothes.

The goblins had advanced significantly since I took them under my wing. Where Gobgob had once been a wild and savage creature living in a straw hut and working with stone tools, she was now a skilled craftswoman in a goblin culture focused on industrial mass production. She was also twice as tall as before now that she was a hobgoblin, and she looked much more in line with what was normal for the powerful humanoid races of the Arcadia Multiverse.

But her clothes hadn’t kept up with her transformation. Beneath her shop apron, the scraps of cloth she wore were criminally undersized for her significantly more feminine body. If I arrived with her looking the way she did now, she’d draw more attention for what she was wearing than because she was a goblin.

“First, quick trip inside. Hey, Bridget, Myrina, Sakura! You girls up yet? Reluna too! Do you think any of you girls could give Gobgob here a little makeover? I want to bring her along for our upcoming trip.”

Bridget, who had previously been snoozing with her face planted on the floor and her legs over the nearest sofa, suddenly woke out of a sound sleep and looked up.

“Did somebody say makeover?” Bridget asked.

Like a horde of zombies, my lovers sprung to their feet and quickly pulled Gobgob out of my hands. Even Reluna set down the recording crystal she was reviewing to lend a hand. I had a brief chat with all of them and was relieved to find them acting like they usually did. For all its new power in the bedroom, my newly empowered magic cock didn't mess with their heads much outside it. And from their system logs, each of them had to regularly keep accepting my soulbond to gain its full effects. I could already think of a few good uses for that, if they were willing to keep it. For one, I might be able to extend the effects of my passive skills like Iron Will to them. Maybe I could even send them extra health during a fight using Lifesteal.

I let them consider the possibilities and finish pulling themselves together while I made one last stop.

I checked in on my new workshop and the cell tower next door, which was running the medieval kingdom building simulator responsible for most of the ongoing construction efforts around Crownhill. My new workshop was coming together nicely, but I could already think of a few new tasks.

“What can I do for you, milord?” the governess program asked. I admired the sprite she was using for a moment. I always remembered the governess in the game as dressing like a nun, but this sprite suddenly looked a lot more attractive.

“Just doing a few upgrades...” I rested my hand on the computer a bit. Hopefully that was long enough for a little bit of Machine Spirit Awakening to take effect. Some of the tasks I had in mind were a bit more elaborate than just stacking stones, and it definitely wasn’t included in a medieval kingdom builder game.

“Anyway, let’s build some roads over here, and here, new houses, sewers... and the works. Done.” I clicked enter as I finished scheduling the various tasks.

“Not yet, milord, but it will be,” the governess replied.

I gave the computer a little pat, went back to check in on Gobgob, and packed my things for an extended trip off-world.