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Erick remained on his perch atop the center structure of House Benevolence, gazing out across the land for a while longer. The people of House Benevolence lived their lives down below. Dramas unfolded and crashed and began and then came to closure as people picked up the pieces of their previous existences and tried to make something of them. Not many people had gotten anything close to closure at all, but some had, and that was wonderful. Most people got pretty far in that endeavor, though, considering they had been enslaved little more than a week ago—

A drone floated high in the air above the geodesic node network surrounding the lands of House Benevolence.

Erick reached down with his [Physical Domain], through the command center of the House below, to say to the people there, “I see a drone above us. Right here.” And then he conjured a coordinate map of the drone amid the command center.

Ruby was in the command center right now. She was Second to Querkooda, and she was a ruby-colored dragon currently shaped like an Elemental Plasma-derived elf, her body glowing a little internally. She was well put-together, like all the other people around here. The command center itself was still a wreck.

There were five people on a bunch of tech-based imagery-stations and four on magical scry-based stations, and those stations were only halfway completed. Wires stuck out in the backs of places and people were working in small holes in the machines here and there and tech guys were everywhere. Four people were learning the targeting software for the weapons systems right now, and a bunch were in other rooms, still trying to work on Erick’s [Cascade Imaging] to integrate it into the normal sensor systems that people had bought from this place or that place.

At least all the bugged tech was easily discovered with some Benevolence and scanning magics and scanning software from the various technologically-inclined people of the House. Erick wasn’t sure when the bugged tech started to appear, but they only really noticed it four days ago, and now the whole place —which wasn’t even together yet— needed to be ripped apart and redone in a whole bunch of ways.

So it was kinda fair that they didn’t notice and shoot down the drone yet.

Ruby turned, and her hair flowed as she moved, her eyes focusing on the video feeds and scanner equipment. She flicked her aura at a control center that some other guy was at, taking the controls from him for a moment. “… Looks like a standard spybot. Hmm. That’s at the limit of our capability to scan. No wonder it was missed.”

The guy at the control center looked utterly ashamed.

“Don’t worry about it,” Erick responded. “We’re still building the place.” And then he shot a javelin of light at the bot, erasing it from existence. He turned his attention back down to the control room, and to the [Cascade Imaging] he had set up in a special room, anchored to some metals and the node network. Some guys were currently trying to install some tech onto that working of magic, but they weren’t getting very far with it. “It appears my own Imaging didn’t pick it up, either.”

Down in the control room, Ruby frowned at the monitors. More than a few of the guys working the monitors cringed. They were embarrassed. Ruby said, “Your powers are… quite a lot better than the software we’ve been able to find and buy.”

And needing to rebuild the place didn’t help.

“Keep at it. Most of the spying is being done from far across the shell of Margleknot, anyway.”

Erick looked at the sky, which was a little dark because this was ‘night time’, though night time here in the spatially-expanded lands of Margleknot mostly meant ‘half-light’. This wasn’t the Mortal Lands where the sun actually disappeared behind a black sunblock; this was Slaver’s Den, in the ‘ascended’ side of Margleknot. And over there, in the worlds beyond this one, on those layers of lands out there, far above the atmosphere of this flat place, they were watching this flat place.

… Welp! Let them watch. It was time to see if they did anything truly desperate when he wasn’t out here, surveying everything and everyone.

Erick said, “I’m taking a break now. I’ll be back by morning or in case of emergency.”

Ruby and the entire command room went on high alert, though no actual alarms or such went off at all. People simply looked harder at the scanners, and started running them more. They were on duty.

Everything would be fine.

And if it wasn’t, then Erick could reverse time and save whoever he needed to save. He hadn’t needed to resort to that yet, thankfully. Hopefully he never would.

… There was probably going to be an attack in under an hour, though. The forces of Slaver’s Den were watching him a lot.

Erick got on with his life, anyway.

It was time to make some truly horrific magic to appease Lord Dakka, and he knew just where to go to get some proper ideas for that sort of shit.

A lot of people had been hurt a lot by Slaver’s Den.

They would want revenge.

- - - -

Erick walked into a classroom of his Arcanaeum, interrupting a lesson between Ta’Kamoil and some talented ex-slaves who were all bent on killing slavers in the most painful ways possible. Ta’Kamoil had been trying to get them to calm-it-the-fuck-down with their bloodlust, but at Erick’s entrance Ta’Kamoil merely smiled and promptly shirked his duties.

“And here’s the Wizard himself!” Ta’Kamoil said, “Please ask him how to kill people more painfully. I am sure he will have lots of information about all that!”

Erick was fine with that introduction.

The crowd of 27 ex-slaves were all very quiet. Some looked ashamed.

Surprising them all, Erick said, “I’m actually here to get ideas for that very thing. I need to appease Lord Dakka, after all. Anyone got any good Blood, Carnage, or Death-based ideas? Who wants to see their work on the battlefield?” Erick pointed at a woman who he was pretty sure was named Vanya, and a light appeared over her head. “Yes?”

Vanya looked as though she had been handed the keys to a kingdom. She launched to her feet, saying, “Bloodfire! It was what they did to us through some sort of light. It burned us from the inside out and paralyzed us as we tried to escape their capture drones.”

“Good one.” Erick pointed to another person, whom he did not actually know. “You.”

Vanya sat down, looking faintly happy… and yet somehow sad.

The next person was a man with deep red eyes and skin. He was suddenly unsure, because Erick could tell the red guy wanted to use the magic he was thinking about himself. Vanya was just realizing the same thing. The rest of the people in the class were also pulling back from the hate that they were feeling, if only for their own personal desires of revenge.

Only a few people were rethinking everything about this whole scenario.

Erick pulled the light off of the red guy and stoked the fires of hate, saying, “Come on! Let’s go kill people as viciously as we can! Surely nothing bad will come of perpetuating cycles of violence and hate! These are slavers, after all. They don’t deserve to be treated like people! We can treat them as you were treated, right? … Right?”

Silence.

Erick stopped pretending, and said, “It was incredibly rude of me to say that to all of you, of course. Who am I to judge how you feel as wrong or in any way unjustified? And anyway, war still has to happen. Proofs still need to be made. In this particular case, Slaver’s Den needs to be eradicated through a pure showing of power, to thus dissuade others from attempting to fight back and to keep this House Benevolence of Margleknot protected for many, many years to come. There’s nothing wrong with you all desiring revenge, but instead of trying to hurt people for the sake of hurting them, how about we try hurting people effectively. So. Once again.” He gestured to the red guy. A light reappeared. “Got an idea?”

With an even gaze, the red guy said, “Use Carnage as a damage multiplier. Add it to the bloodfire. Make people explode in gore shrapnel when they die in the light.”

Erick was not expecting something so… Simple, actually. And yet so far beyond how Erick would have done it. Yeah; Erick was not nearly as vicious as he could have been. Erick said, “Easily doable. One final suggestion for Death. Yes, you.”

The light went off of the red guy, and then appeared over a bookish woman with three books open up in front of her.

The bookish woman said, “Have the blood and flesh explode, but leave behind the skeletons as minions of undeath, empowered by the Carnage bloodfire…” She paused. She said, “But that seems hard. Alternatively, make the Bloodfire burn away life and then, in death, twist everything into a Carnage minion.”

… So that was vicious.

This had been a productive detour.

Erick said, “I have no doubt in my mind that this suggestion is probably exactly what Lord Dakka is looking for. Thank you all for your contributions.” Erick said, “I suppose I will be working on some war crime magic now. And make no mistake. These are all going to be war crimes. They have no place in a functioning society, or in the worlds I want to build.”

Erick left it at that, and then he left the room. Ta’Kamoil bowed a little as Erick left, and then he went back to the much more somber classroom. Before Erick had walked in and done all that, they had been talking in hypotheticals and overly-eager wishes. But now, knowing that whatever Erick was going to make was going to be horrific and used on the battlefield? That had done a lot to temper their desires for bloodshed.

It had taken them a minute to get there, though.

When he exited the arcanaeum out the front door, amid students and refugees and returners all, he simply took to the sky, transforming into a great black dragon that was already in the air, his tail the last little bit of his body to leave the ground.

He decided to check on the perimeter before he went to make magic, and it was a good thing he did.

High above the dome of House Benevolence Erick found a drop ship filled with horrors of various kinds, from flesh abominations to living poisons to killers in invisibility cloaks. His normal sort of attack would have pierced the place and killed most everything, but left behind the tech that he could then hand over to the engineers to add to their growing collection of tools. That tech would have been poisoned irreparably, and probably in multiple ways.

Erick was pretty sure that some previous salvage had led to their current tech problems in the House.

The problem was, though, that if he simply evaporated the thing…

Eh.

Less thinking.

More complete annihilation.

He did check on the radiation dome and found it fully functional.

And then Erick blasted the transport with a few lines of light, piercing holes through shields and then through hulls. Next came some [Grand Reincarnation] that managed to erase every living thing in there and send it off to another land, and since there were holes in the defenses of the transport there was no impediment to Erick’s lightning. The only targets he missed were the cloaked people; the other main threat of the attack. They were all falling out of the air and spreading wide, trying to escape the blasts.

Erick lit up the entire sky with a [Luminous Beam].

One thin thread of light sent out a river of atomic blasts into the transport, proving to be complete overkill as the entire sky turned to brightest day. Erick’s attack ended somewhere in the impossible distances overhead, way before it actually threatened anything in the Margleknot’s sky. The city shields, both magical and mundane, soaked the damage. Nothing got through to the city except for bright lights. The invisibly cloaked people were incinerated by light and heat long before they got anywhere near the dome below.

When the light faded, the transport was gone.

On the plus side of showing off that magic for the fifth time, so far, it also showed that the city below was completely protected from incidental damage. The dome below held very well; Erick certainly had enough power going to that thing, after all.

- - - -

Ruby shuddered in the command center. “Brightest stars, that is insane. That he can both do that and survive that.”

Querkooda smiled at her side. “It is a wondrous thing.”

- - - -

Vanya stared out the window of the classroom, watching the sky come back from beyond the blinding light of the Apparent King. She was not the only one. The entire classroom had rushed to the windows to see the light when it appeared.

Vanya wanted that kind of power.

… But even if she was somehow granted that power, right there, she knew she could not handle it, and for many reasons. She would dive into death to avenge her everything and fall both to her own demons and the real demons out there… And, she supposed, it wasn’t right to… just kill everyone.

She still recalled the painful bloodfire light out there on the shores of seaside, so many ‘layers of infinity’ away. She recalled the slavers picking her up and laughing at her as her skin burned in her mind, but not in reality. How they teased her for her invisible pain. How they inflicted even more invisible pain...

Erick had been right about many things.

The slavers deserved to die in horrible agony, but…

Vanya wasn’t sure if she could handle that.

Ta’Kamoil said, “So… That was our Apparent King’s Quasar Beam, or whatever he calls it. I would call that the pinnacle of light magic taken in a slightly different direction than the one I used to be able to do. Probably cleaner his way, though, if you can survive the radiation, which he can as a very strong Ascended. So! Back to Battle Magic?” He rapidly added, “War Crime Magic is completely different, by the way, though it’s hard to split the distinction some of the time.”

Vanya returned to the lesson with everyone else. They were here because they had displayed some strong anger issues as well as aptitude for magic, and Overseer Ta’Kamoil didn’t have much in the way of proper teachers, yet, so he was teaching them. Vanya still wanted to learn.

Ta’Kamoil continued, “A Fireball on a hospital? War Crime. A Fireball on a military base? Battle Magic. A Fireball on a market that is both maintained and operated by warriors of a town? Ehhhhh… That’s iffy territory. It’s pretty safe to say that everything we’re doing here is a war crime, though, because everything here in Slaver’s Den is both a place of warriors and victims, because the warriors use their victims to fight for them. There is no getting around this war crime, and so our Apparent King is just going for the crime and being done with it. As an aside, 3 out of every 4 attacks Slaver’s Den are throwing at us are also war crimes, because most everyone in this House is a civilian, too. That’s how wars of extermination are, almost all of the time.”

Vanya raised a hand.

Ta’Kamoil asked, “Yes?”

Vanya asked, “How do you begin to make a distinction when 4 out of every 5 people were following soul-bound orders? For targeting with your magics, I mean.”

Ta’Kamoil said, “That’s philosophy, and it’s something that we probably won’t have to worry about too much, because in the following battles Erick will likely clear out the vast majority of combatants himself. But to actually answer the question: The answer lies in personal strength of conviction and perception tied into resonwork. Reson work is how spells curve and bend, and mostly you won’t be able to use that, so we’ll start with magical-based targeting systems, which are much more like working computer code and less like working resons…”

- - - -

Lanzoil watched the sky turn back to normal, then he got back to organizing the violent labor forces of the kitchens and farms and getting people separated, off to their own parts of wherever they needed to be. There had been fights. There would be more fights. Some people to the healers who were working on those magics, while others simply got sent home for the day.

This latest altercation had been about the level of spiciness in some food items in the mess hall. There had been blood. The actual problem was not the spiciness, but the myriad traumas of the people of this land erupting in unkind, and unexpected ways. And yet, Lanzoil was still happy with all of this. In a normal society with this level of hurt there would have been murders by now. So far, no one had actually killed anyone else, and all attempts by the outside world to kill the people here inside this city had been thwarted.

The people here were getting along fantastically when compared to normal expectations.

And yet… The ‘city’ of House Benevolence was a crashed ship in a land of pained refugees, and though the warriors defended the walls from incursion, the incursions kept happening. Not a single person living in this land was ‘used to’ the explosions and otherwise happening outside, and those explosions and otherwise were going to get a whole lot worse before they got better.

Lanzoil had his work cut out for him.

At least Erick was giving them all some time to settle down before the next battle came. They needed that time.

- - - -

Erick settled down onto a barren plateau of rock overseeing the wasteland outside of his new city. He was about 40 kilometers away from the white-dagger wall, and he was alone. He was not worried about being attacked, but even if he were then he would prefer they take their big shots out here. Maybe someone would get stupid? It was not impossible.

It’d be pretty fucking stupid to attack the kilometer-long dragon who stepped out into the open, in full view of everyone, though.

Erick had grown sometime in the recent past, yet again. At this point he was about a kilometer long himself, including his tail... Or maybe only 900 meters? Still pretty big.

Erick wasn’t quite sure when his ‘largest size’ turned out to be nearly a kilometer long —and maybe 1.75 kilometers wide from wingtip to wingtip— but it had happened when he wasn’t really looking. He had needed to keep himself small when by the House in order to not cave in the roof or oversize his seat.

According to a short conversation he had had with Shadow about it, getting bigger as a dragon was a natural part of the power of a dragon, and didn’t he already know this? She had been surprised he wasn’t bigger than he already was. She had even hinted that when he approached her true dragon size then she’d reveal that to him.

Erick wasn’t sure if she had been flirting or not.

Anyway.

Time to make some cruel magics.

As he cast some channeled spellwork into the air, filling the world with the cloying sounds of black-green Vile and the roaring sounds of reddest Carnage and the softer liquid-reds of Blood, Erick reacquainted himself with these particular Elements. He had worked with them all before, of course, but not deeply, or with such a violent end-goal in mind. It was time to appease a fae of blood and death, because Erick certainly wasn’t going to try and appease the trickster one. Lord Eldraki wanted ‘a single heartbeat’ or ‘For Erick to share assets equally with Shadow’ and that simply wasn’t happening.

But Lord Dakka wanted magics of Blood and Carnage and Death.

… And Erick’s new people wanted spells of the same.

Perhaps, Erick thought, it wasn’t such a bad thing to step into this sort of arena for a little while, where the spectacle of it all mattered just as much as gaining security in the final outcomes of war. People respected power, and would think twice about disrespect if they felt you would truly fuck them up.

Still felt icky to work toward these dangerous ends.

Erick altered Benevolence to an Elemental Vile facsimile… And considered.

The part of that ‘bloodfire’ that woman had spoken of, the part where the light pained, was Elemental Vile. Vile had a way of doing that rather easily to those who it was tuned to inflict pain upon. Vile was, perhaps, one of the most war-useful Elements out there. Beyond its closeness to Contract Magic, Vile had a whole bunch of other painful and powerful effects. Sure, it pained those who it touched, who were enemies of the caster, but that’s exactly what it did so well. That auto-targeting. The ‘blood’ part of bloodfire was just to concentrate the effects of the Vile upon the blood-filled people out there in the area of effect. Vile, attuned to certain targets, would only harm those certain targets.

Such an auto-targeting system of ‘bloodfire light’ would have also boosted the physicality of all people who had Vile inside of them, too. Vile didn’t just harm, it also helped those on the Vile’s side.

Vile’s angelic counterpart, Elemental Exalted, was a lot more about the buffing aspects of that dichotomy than the injurious option.

And thinking of the Vile/Exalted dichotomy…

Incani didn’t actually have Elemental Vile inside of them, which is why the ‘painful aura’ aspect of this power didn’t see much widespread use on Veird. Humans didn’t have Elemental Exalted inside of them, either, which is also why that power was not seen on Veird. That was also Quiet War shit, which Erick and other world leaders shut down as much as they could.

Erick clenched his claws and extinguished the Vile light.

He moved on to Carnage.

Erick extended his aura forward and filtered the bright red glow of Elemental Carnage into the air. It was a roil of war and pain and bloodshed and broken bones. Unlike Vile and Exalted, Elemental Carnage was present in a people on Veird; the orcols—

Erick sighed as he thought of Quilatalap, and then he got back to spellwork.

Elemental Carnage was basically THE war mana. Orcols instinctively used it when they went to war or got too angry. At lower levels of Carnage, every [Strike] hit a little harder and every step made with [Swift Movement] went a little further. At higher levels, every [Strike] became a [Grandmaster’s Strike] and every [Swift Movement] became a [Rampage Run], or other similar Skill. Carnage didn’t see much use in actual spellwork, though, because Carnage was uniquely harmonious with Strength and Health; they were practically the same color back on Veird. Warriors used Carnage; mages did not. This was not wholly true, though.

The best way to get Carnage into spellwork was to attach it to something else. Usually something physical. [Flying Sword of Carnage], [Summon Carnage Elemental], and any variation of Carnage and Force would always work well together. Carnage and Stone did well, too, if you used the Stone to inflict physical damage. That was what Al back at Spur did sometimes, when he was actually fighting for real. Erick hadn’t ever seen that in person, but he had kept tabs on Al and the people of Spur, both because Al was a Benevolence Dragon now, and because Erick still liked Spur, quite a lot, so he knew what Al could really do if he had to.

… Erick wondered if they were doing okay. If Spur was still standing.

Surely it was, right? It had been the last time Erick had spoken to Yggdrasil about all that, but that was a month or two ago by now.

Right.

So!

Putting Carnage onto a summoned minion? Yeah. That sounded like the best option. That one bookish woman was probably on the right track with her suggestions of Carnage skeletons, or some such idea.

For the ‘best’ summoned minions were Death minions, and Erick also needed to use Death Magic to appease Lord Dakka anyway.

Erick flickered Elemental Death in the air before him. Grey light blossomed and the world turned lesser under that ghoulish illumination.

Elemental Death was pretty good at what it did, and that was to impose a semblance of life on dead stuff. Other Elements that were great at making life were Blood, Healing, and Ooze, and wow was Ooze good at making life. All Elements could make life, though, under the right circumstances.

In the Crystal Forest of 20 years ago, back before Erick and House Benevolence retook most of that land back from the desert, sand elementals were pretty common during storm season, or in certain parts of the land where sands always blew. Not nearly as common as literally any other kind of life, though, because true elementals were pretty rare in places where there were so many different competing elements, but still, sand elementals did exist. The much more common version of elementals out there were not actually ‘elementals’, though. Lesser versions of elementals didn’t go by that descriptor.

‘Lesser elementals’ were just slimes.

By that same token, some true elementals were hard to differentiate from oozes, like Blood Oozes, for instance. Was there a Blood Elemental that wasn’t an ooze? Not really. Life was a spectrum, and sometimes things didn’t show up how you expected them to.

A few different elementals didn’t exist outside of laboratory settings. Elemental Death was almost one of those Elements, because Elemental Death was very good at using what was there to make itself into a ‘living’, hunting, creative thing. So what happened was that ‘elementals’ rose within bones and bodies in areas of death, and then those dead things moved on to make more dead things. It was only when all the dead things moved on but Death still coalesced that you ended up with Death Slimes.

Rare, though.

Anyway.

Because of this automatic-rising nature of Death, it was pretty cheap to make a dead body obey you, compared to all the other kinds of minions one could make, because you didn’t have to spend power dictating how the minion would act in certain situations if you used Death to make them. Elemental Death was already doing all of that for the body it inhabited. All the necromancer had to do was add in some stimulus-response mechanisms and undead bodies would pretty much do what they would have done in life.

‘What they would have done in life’ was mostly walking around and doing not much of anything, actually, until the dead thing found living things that it could make into dead things.

Funnily enough, to hear Quilatalap talk about it, the reason dead things liked to attack the living was not out of any jealousy or hatred or anything like that —though those specific reasons did exist in some undead— but because the Elemental Death inside of them recognized that the living could be turned dead and thus give rise to more dead. This fact, combined with the hard-coded genetic and living predisposition for living things to want to make more living things, is what made undead kill people; it was not an evil imperative that made dead things kill the living, but a reproductive imperative to kill stuff to make more of their kind.

All of that was a fun, dirty joke among necromancers and liches and the like.

So making a dead thing attack and kill the living was pretty ‘cheap and easy’ —which was another sort of dirty joke. It was also basic. ‘Missionary necromancy’, as Erick called it one time, and then which Quilatalap had absolutely loved for all of the different meanings…

Anyway.

Cheap necromancy was cheap and often bad. Well done necromancy cost as much mana as other good spellwork of other types, and some would say it even cost more, because you needed bodies and souls to do the good necromancy. (Which was another sort of sex joke.)

… Anyway.

There would be a lot of bodies in the coming wars, if Erick let there be bodies, which he would need to, right? Because Lord Dakka wanted destruction.

… Did he really want to use necromancy against a bunch of necromancers, though? To create minions that could be taken from him?…

“Theoretically taken from me,” Erick mumbled to himself.

Actually taken from him?

Not bloody likely.

Now was a good time to practice some of his Propagation techniques, too.

Soul Magic propagation techniques, too… Er? No. Not really. But in a small way? Yes. Erick decided he wanted the souls of those he Carnage-killed, or whatever, to remain trapped in the bodies so that they could come out of the cities on their own, and line up to be brought back to life. Erick wanted those souls so he could heal them.

… Yeah. That would work.

And so, how to do this?

Erick kinda wanted to discard the idea of using Elemental Vile to pain people… But Elemental Vile was very good at targeting. Benevolence was good at targeting, too, so did he need to use Vile? Yeah, probably, because people were under Contracts and some Vile might be able to act as a layer of anti-reaction against those Contracts activating if Erick did it right...

Hmm.

An idea.

Elemental Vile and Exalted were rather unable to be used together, but not really. The problem was that there was a whole lot of overlap between the two, so outside of very rare circumstances there was no need to use them both. Vile wanted to primarily harm enemies and secondarily help allies. Exalted wanted to primarily help allies and secondarily to harm enemies. Added to this, there were often mana concerns; one could only cast a spell so often before one’s mana ran out —for those who had such issues, anyway— and there was no such thing as Propagation Magic on Veird due to the Foundation Ban against that sort of power.

Erick had neither of those concerns right now; he had mana, and there was no Propagation Ban.

Added to that, Vile and Exalted had different focus auto-targets… When it came to buffing and debuffing magic, anyway. That’s what Erick was focusing on now, so that’s what he kept in mind at the moment. Actual Vile and Exalted damaging spellwork was a different ball game altogether…

But Vile was kinda Ooze-like and Exalted was definitely more Force-like—

Ah.

It was all slotting into place.

Erick envisioned a drop of Blood, which was the best Propagative baseline, that infected a person’s soul and locked them into that body. That was the baseline magic. When the person died, for whatever reason, their body would hold onto their soul and put it into a state of suspended animation. If there were enough sources of the animate-version of the lifecycle of this magic nearby, then the Vile and Exalted auras of those nearby animated minions would empower the dead body to animate with them. If there were no nearby sources of Vile or Exalted power, then the body would simply release the soul when the magic therein degraded.

But if there were animated undead nearby to power the raising of the corpse…

Yes.

Erick needed to add in some [Renew] spellwork for that.

But then… Yeah. This was an idea.

An animated corpse —the main active form of this magic— would then start oozing out Vile aura and wielding Force-like Exalted weapons that carried the Blood magic, and then they would keep killing others and infecting them with the blood. Carnage would activate if the undead spotted enemies against Benevolence...

Erick examined his thoughts and found them all distasteful.

… And then he considered power requirements, and control. From there came thoughts of how to end this spellwork once it was done.

Maybe he could do both at the same time? Have a few trips through Infinity using resonwork to connect animate-corpse to animate-corpse in a mana-sharing node-network so that they didn’t run out of power and constantly healed each other...

Erick paused.

“This is probably more horrific than that [Cascade Imaging – Luminous Beam] magic… Hmm.”

Now there was a thought.

Erick could probably tie this magic to a [Cascade Imaging] and use this magic both to survey the battlefield from that spellwork and also make a specific kill-switch for the spell through the Imaging. The only downside to that was that the people around here knew about radio waves. That was one of the reasons the [Cascade Imaging] back at base didn’t work so well. The smart forces of Slaver’s Den were using canceling tech to erase their presences from Erick’s Imaging.

… So don’t go off of radio waves, then?

He needed to update [Cascade Imaging] to resonwork and Benevolence and all of that to utilize the curve-through-infinity resonwork that Cascadio had shown him.

… Yeah?

Yeah.

That would be the first task of this magic making today. A new [Cascade Imaging] for a new era.

Erick looked out across the various little ideas he had cast into the air, all of them misleading and ill-formed, from fireballs that pained people through light to bullet storms to world breaking spellwork, and then he erased it all from the air. They were just the doodles one did when they were busy thinking. They didn’t mean anything.

He wondered what the people looking would make of them.

… Anyway!

Time to get back to work. Some people were trying shit.

Erick leapt up into the air and flew upspireward, to where his Lightning Path was guiding him right now. He found a giant abomination of rock and crabs scuttling toward the city. It was very well hidden. Erick landed right on top of it and crushed it dead under one foot. When the remains tried to cloy into his scales and flesh, he frowned at it, trying to understand what it was doing.

Ah.

This was tricky shit.

A lot of soul work in that little shit of a crab— Well. ‘Little’. It had been 20 meters wide, and that was a lot of space in which to put a whole bunch of replicating machines and undead slugs and shit. They didn’t get anywhere. They tried. They failed.

They would have been murder against anyone other than Erick, with them trying to burrow into Erick’s scales like they were. That would have turned a normal person into paste in a matter of seconds.

Erick fried them with copious amounts of fire—

Which they absorbed, and then the whole metal slug swarm grew. Erick’s foreleg was now crowded up to his elbow in black machine-slugs.

He tried Ice and the infection got bigger.

Hmm.

This was a pretty interesting attack. It gave Erick some good ideas for the spellwork he was working on. Of course, putting Mana Siphon into a bunch of replicating minions was probably a very, very bad idea. The creators of these metal slugs certainly didn’t care that they had done exactly that and made a grey-goo scenario, though.

Erick wondered if they had an off-switch?

Whatever the case, the slugs were trying to turn immaterial and slip into his soul, but his soul was a raging river and they could not swim upstream that fast at all.

Erick did not let the infection continue.

[Physical Aura] pulsed out like an explosion, physically ripping the slugs away. A more attuned aura vibrated the slugs into the air, to suspend them away from the ground. Erick continued to flow power away from his arm and the rest of his body, to push the slugs away, and it worked rather well. Within moments the slugs all floated in a vibrating sphere of power. He even grabbed up the slugs hiding in the ground and in the sand, and another, secondary crab hiding ten kilometers away from the first.

The black slugs roiled in Erick’s suspension like black cables all twisted into each other.

Erick broadcast his intentions though the nearest 50 kilometers, “I’m going to take these slugs to all four of the major cities of Slaver’s Den.”

And then Erick took to the sky and dragged along the slugs with him, headed toward Centrics, the nearest major city of—

The ball of slugs exploded like ten million firecrackers going off all at once. Within seconds, nothing was left except for broken flesh and charred machinery.

“… Hmm!”

Erick flicked some physical power at the broken grey goo, crushing it down to a molten ball of various metals, and then he did some Particle Magic separation, pulling out tens of different metals in various combinations; mostly iron. With a bit more flashes of power, Erick turned those different metals into ingots, and then into tiny slug sculptures. Then he made them all into a tiny sphere of slugs with some words written in slugs upon them.

With a bit of power, Erick zapped over to the edge of Centrics, about 190 kilometers away.

The wall of Underling Chains’ major city lay ahead; a solid black wall a hundred meters tall and crowned in turrets. Towering buildings rose into the sky beyond the wall, and everything there was as orderly as Erick had seen back in Wraithborne’s ring city, around the Evil Death Sun, but also a whole lot worse. In some ways, what Erick saw was just people going about their lives, going from market to market, or high-end shop to high-end shop, or eating good food, or doing whatever they wanted, except there were slaves everywhere.

10 slaves for every 1 slaver—

The turrets started firing what had to be depleted uranium, or something. Each ‘bullet’ was a meter across, too. They kinda stung. Didn’t do much actual damage. Erick turned on some defensive spellwork, and then there was no sting or damage at all.

He just hovered there, wondering if the turrets would get bored, or not.

Erick easily survived the turret fire, so he let that happen for a little while; 20 seconds, just to let them know they were ineffective. They did not seem to want to stop firing at him, though, so he turned on some reflective spellwork and returned their fire to them. In a flashing instant, bullets bounced in a way only magic could manage and bullets impacted the shields of the five nearest turrets. Bullets crashed up and away, headed back into the sky. The turrets kept firing for 2 more seconds but Erick tuned his reflections and made some precise return fire that broke through the turrets’ shields. Bullets the size of people ripped through the offensive structures.

People were already screaming about dragons in the city beyond.

Erick turned to lightning, went into the center of the city, to a garden square surrounded by dark trees and with a sculpture of Captain Shackle in the center. With a whip of his tail, Erick decapitated the winged elf statue and put the metal-slug sculpture onto the head’s place.

And then he got out of there, being sure to decapitate another two Captain Shackle sculptures on the way out and place copies of his slug sculptures atop each one’s neck. He scattered a few more slug balls here and there, just to be sure the message couldn’t be hidden.

He wondered what their response would be, for written in slugs, Erick had declared, ‘We’re showing off Propagation Magic now? Okay.’

Erick got back to House Benevolence well before some atomic bombs dropped. He stopped those easily enough. Honestly. Did they think his absence would take any more than 10 seconds? That he wouldn’t be back in time to stop the destruction?

Slavers were fucking stupid.

The only real defense they had was all their intrinsic hostages.

This was almost like that time all those years with the slave cities of Mainland Nergal, back on Veird. Erick had been involved in all of that shit, too, but the main contributors to ending the largest lands of slavery on Veird had been Destiny and Messalina. They cleaned up those lands and turned them into the Freelands, and Erick mostly supported them. He didn’t do much of that himself.

Since then, he mostly tried to forget those evils he had seen.

But now those memories were surging back to the forefront, because this place was so much worse than how Continental Nergal had been.

And to think, he was actually feeling bad about the spellwork he was going to make.

… Eh. Self-replicating angel-demon carnage-blood-radiation zombies seemed about as ethical as one could get with propagation-war magic… Probably. Erick’s version had the souls trapped in their own bodies, quietly riding along for the journey and completely insensate. If he wanted, he could make the souls and minds fully realize what was happening to them. That seemed a whole lot more evil and traumatic, though.

And allowing people to see what was happening to their world after they were soul-captured would probably disrupt the magic. Best not to allow for that sort of vulnerability; just make the souls silent and secured.

But first thing’s first!

An update to [Cascade Imaging] to remove a lot of the current limitations on the magic as well as add a whole lot more functionality and protection.

- - - -

Erick invited Ta’Kamoil into a work room at the top of House Benevolence, into one of his private offices, where a spell diagram floated in the air in front of them. It was [Cascade Imaging], but with a bunch of little tweeks.

“So I have all of it figured out,” Erick said, “The spell is going to function by curving through infinity to see targets in distant lands. The only place where I’m a little stuck is that this spell is going through infinity to see distant lands, and by that same token, it might be vulnerable to back-tracking magic through infinity. How would you solve that vulnerability?”

Ta’Kamoil narrowed his eyes at the spellwork diagrams and adjustments, going back and forth between the basic spell and Erick’s notes. And then he pulled back, and said, “Yeah. So that’s a whole lot different from my own Imaging magics. Oddly enough, I think the only place we differ is in the level of containment and self-reinforcing of our styles. I’m… A whole lot less solid than you are, apparently. This gives me a lot of insight into the Imaging in the command center, and why it isn’t working right—” Ta’Kamoil said, “Sorry about not getting to that before now. It’s been a busy week.”

Erick smiled. “Completely understandable. So how do you— Wait a second. I need to take care of this. I’ll be back soon.”

Erick turned to lightning, zapped out into the sky to become a dragon hovering over the geodesic dome of House Benevolence, just in time to see a 20-kilometer-wide cylinder of metal falling out of the sky. It was thick and grey and jagged on the bottom. It was also mana dead and completely invisible to all of Erick’s magical senses. He had only noticed it because his Lightning Path was screaming at him to move.

And now that he was here, Erick was worried for the first time since—

Shadow appeared in the air beside and above him, like a speck of grey, wreathed in black. She smiled, and teased, “How about learning some Dark Magic, too?”

And then she raised her hand and the sky flashed black.

When the black vanished the cylinder was completely gone and so was all the atmosphere that had been there. The world collapsed overhead, the sky screaming as it filled in the gap, the domed city down below flickering with power as the myriad of protective magics held it all together while wasteland outside of the city flowed up.

And then the implosion of the sky turned into an explosion. A crash of thunder rolled across the world and blasted down the rising wasteland, the shockwave rolling across the world and flattening dust clouds everywhere. More dust clouds rose up when the wave passed. It looked like a sandstorm had just passed out there, beyond House Benevolence. Inside the dome things looked… well. Things looked fine-ish?

Erick turned his gaze back upward, and then toward Shadow. “I don’t think anything broke?”

Shadow turned back to facing Erick, too. She had been looking at the House. She began, “Sooooo… I haven’t actually gone to war in a long time. Forgot about collateral damage.”

“It’s fine.” Erick said, “If this were Veird I would have swallowed it with a [Gate], but no [Gate]s here, so I flubbed that one.”

“That would have been the safer way to solve that, yes. Alternatively, less large-scale Dark Magic, or a simple disk of Darkness.”

“You chose correctly, I think,” Erick said, “No way to tell if there was some hidden magic up there. But anyway.” Erick flexed his aura to the side, conjuring what he had long suspected to be ‘Darkness’. An orb of black held in the air, like a void in the world that sounded like everything and nothing, all at once. It was almost Elemental Destruction, but it was a Destruction flavored with some sort of Void. “Is this Elemental Darkness?”

“Nah,” Shadow said, surprising Erick a whole lot. “That’s Elemental Annihilation. It’s close enough for basic House magic, but it’s not Darkness. Probably safer to use than Elemental Destruction, too. Using Darkness to do what I just did requires you to open yourself up to your true power and then express that power outward in an effort to take apart whatever you’re looking at. That use of Darkness is disintegrative in a way that nothing else truly is, because what Darkness wants to do is pull apart things and see how they work. That’s where the Destruction part of the original Creation, Destruction, Paradox trio comes from.” Shadow said, “Elemental Annihilation truly is good enough for basic magic, though, because only Destruction Wizards can truly touch upon the Destruction parts of Darkness’s domain, and Annihilation is easier to work with than Elemental Destruction, because it is cleaner. And yet, it is not as clean as Darkness. If I would have used Annihilation to get rid of that cylinder there would have been some metal shrapnel left. Probably could’ve added in some resons to make that work as well as Darkness. Keep that in mind! I’m headed back.”

And then she left.

… Erick detoured to the wastelands where he did a bit of spellwork using what he had thought was Darkness to make a beam that he aimed at the ground. A darker-than-black beam of power erupted from Erick’s aura to the side and traced a line of black across the world below, drawing a trench into the ground a good hundred meters deep. The ground caved in around the beam’s path, dirt and stone collapsing back together. The spell failed to penetrate further than a 100-ish meters due to the lack of power Erick had put into the working, at maybe only 400-ish mana for a 5-second-long, meter-wide working, so… Was this okay? Or did he need to do actual Dark Magic? … Hmm.

This was more than fine.

Erick decided that since this was the lowest hanging fruit right now, that he should work on this for a while. Someone in the Den had thrown a city-sized block of strange metal at House Benevolence and it had proven surprisingly effective, if only because Erick had never considered that someone would actually do such a thing… But of course, as soon as Erick had seen the big cylinder of metal in the sky, he knew that he should have expected such a thing.

Absolute destructive spellwork was not something that Erick really liked to do, though.

And yet, Slaver’s Den was bringing up all these old and new ideas of spellwork that Erick had led slide over the years. The update to [Cascade Imaging] was only a few steps beyond that update from hooking up [Cleanse] to that working and auto-targeting every single instance of ‘demon’ within 500 kilometers, for instance… or further than that, actually.

Erick’s update to Imaging could probably reach through the very universe itself to hit very distant places…

Ah.

Well that was a bit distressing, actually.

… Erick hovered in the sky and distracted himself with various workings of Elemental Annihilation.

Beams, Bombs, Bolts, Disks, and a whole lot more. Erick carved up the land with a few different ideas, getting a hang for this magic. Sometimes the spellwork broke itself, blackness spilling out in every direction as it attempted to consume everything. Sometimes it worked well. The ‘disk’ type worked less well than Erick would have liked. He kinda wanted Annihilating Walls of power that he could set in front of something and erase that something from existence.

Blasts and cones of power worked the best for Elemental Annihilation.

This was one of those Banned Elements of Veird, for sure.

Erick experimented with Destruction versus Annihilation versus Void, seeing what the real differences were. He had never done much with Destruction before, either, so this was a good use of his time, too.

The Annihilation form of Elemental Destruction was cleaner than Destruction because Annihilation had a singular purpose to it, which was erasing everything, while Destruction was kinda… weaker? Well. No. Destruction was used in [Cleanse]. Destruction turned matter into thick air, into mana. Thus, Destruction was good for creation, because it left behind stuff that was useful to make more stuff.

Annihilation was more like Void in that it erased everything that it could erase, but it was certainly more destructive than Void because Void sought to make voids in the world where nothing existed. But the edges of Void still existed. Annihilation came through, erasing itself and everything as it tried to escape confinement all the time and then eat the world.

At the end of 20 minutes, Erick was done with his experiments.

Then he wrangled Annihilation into a few different spells, putting them into Benevolence crystals in his soul, but every third or fourth time he tried pressing that button the spell broke apart. It took him another 15 minutes before he managed to make some spells that did not break apart when he rapidly ‘tapped’ them.

Erick temporarily turned himself into a disco-dragon of darker-than-black beams of Annihilation that spun around his body, at his command, and carved the world up like a cheesemaker cutting curd.

Then came thousands of little Bolts of black.

Finally, Erick pointed his power at a mountain in the far distance.

Here now was the ‘greatest’ of these new Annihilation spells.

A dot of black shot from Erick’s aura, and all the world whined at its passing. Air twisted. The sky fell into the dot. And the dot kept going.

The Black Dot struck the mountain and then splashed outward, upward, downward, in every direction, cloying at the entire mountain and then going further, deeper, the mountain collapsing, the atmosphere draining down into that collapse in a rapid, yet controlled manner. The world did not implode and then explode in the destruction of one large mountain. The world simply settled down into a new configuration around a new crater a good ten kilometers deep.

Erick nodded.

He was happy with these new spells.

Annihilation Bolt, instant, super long range, 500/1 mana/reson

A bolt of annihilation inexorably strikes a target, attempting to erase the target from existence.

Annihilation Beam, instant, super long range, 1,000/2 mana/resons

A beam of annihilation aims at your discretion, attempting to erase all caught in the beam from existence.

Annihilation Dot, instant, super long range, 10,000/100 mana/resons

A cleaner version of a spell from long ago, but made with annihilation and updated for new threats. The Dot will destroy a large swath of the world designated at the time of casting. If the Dot is prevented from doing this, it will destroy itself instead.

Erick left behind the new crater in the world and headed back to House Benevolence.

He dropped out of his draconic self, reentering his offices at the top of the main structure, his glowthreads wrapping around his body once again as he went to the office where he had set up the [Cascade Imaging] diagrams.

Ta’Kamoil was not there.

Erick already saw him down in the command center, looking over the [Cascade Imaging] that Erick had put up earlier. Some engineers and other mages were looking it all over alongside Ta’Kamoil, discussing the spellwork, figuring out how it worked, for real. Ta’Kamoil hadn’t been kidding when he had said he simply hadn’t gotten around to doing that yet, but now that Erick had asked for his time he was getting to work on this specific project instead of the tens of other things he had to work on.

The Overseer had left some paperwork behind in Erick’s office, though.

A note rested on top of the papers.

So this all looks like it will work, but the real question is the one you posed about how such a scanning magic could be traced back to its source, making the whole scan vulnerable to corruption and such. The only real answer to that concern is located in Scry Theory.

In a short ways: Make the scanning magic easily disrupted so that the Scry won’t be able to be traced back to the original spell. This is the common way to make Scry magics, because those sorts of magics always do open the user up to Bad Things.

This will not work for the deep connections you’re trying to establish with a truly powerful Imaging spellwork, though, which could allow you to cast spells through this Scry Magic. In my opinion, you should leave the two spells separate. Make a better Imaging with Scry Theory and the ‘curved through infinity’ power. Make another, much more hidden and actively-defensive spellwork to allow that mainframe spell to power other spells. Gate Theory is much more useful for that sort of spellwork than Scry Theory. You might need to make gate nodes.

Erick rapidly read the full diagrams and workings that Ta’Kamoil had left in the rest of the paperwork…

And then he paused.

Yeah.

Using a special core of himself, with some magics in it, would be a great way to do this thing.

And yet...

“I’m recreating [Familiar] but more complicated, aren’t I.”

Erick had a long think about all that.

He came to the conclusion that he was not about to have another child. Not in the middle of a war. Probably not for a long time, too, and if he used his core along with a bunch of soul work and other magics then he might just make a [Familiar]...

Erick missed Ophiel—

Oh, gods, did Erick miss Ophiel.

Erick sat there for a while, thinking about Ophiel, and how they hadn’t gotten the chance to spend much time together after his birth. Did he still have a mana debt? He probably did. Was he rescuing people and getting himself killed? Probably.

Erick would have fallen deeper down a thought hole, but his expanded senses caught sight of something far, far below the ground level of House Benevolence, entering into the massive cavern that Erick had created down there to keep eyes open below the city. It was a gooey thing. Some sort of blood ooze had erupted out of the ground unexpectedly, and then it kept coming. Pretty soon a ten-Olympic-pool-sized animated blood occupied a tiny part of the underground. Red glop flowed, and spotlights on the cavern roof locked on the creature. The creature froze, its gelatin, red body crystallizing into rock in that moment, as though it was trying to pretend it was nothing special.

Or maybe it was thinking.

And then the creature screamed and turned around, vanishing back into the hole it had made in the bare dirt.

The bombardment from the underground turrets struck the hole a second later, caving in the hole.

Erick tracked the ooze for a few more kilometers as it raced down and away from House Benevolence, back through the caverns it had made to approach, to attack. Erick chose to ignore the ooze when it got really far, for he would have needed to pull his sight from other areas to keep looking at the blood ooze.

Erick turned back to his work.

He missed Ophiel.

He was not going to make another [Familiar].

He chose to go the more complicated, non-sapient route with [Cascade Imaging]. The ‘better scanner’ was easy enough to make using Scry Theory and curve-through-infinity resonwork, so that is where he started.

Instead of one giant ball of cascading light in the sky above the Imaging, Erick went with countless smaller cascaders that all worked together and through many different spectrums of light and sensory magics to produce a coherent image at a given location.

He did have to use [Conjure Force Elemental] tuned to be more like [Conjure Benevolence Book Elemental], though, to make the spellwork actually work as desired. It wasn’t a [Familiar] at all, but more like that old spell of [Summon Jewels], his rad-collector spellwork from long ago. He also ended up using [Scry], because of course the spell needed [Scry]. That put his spellwork at 2 parts of the 3 part recipe for [Familiar].

Not the big piece, though. Not [Telepathy].

Knowing what Erick now knew about [Telepathy] having a Mark of the Fractal Universe inside, the fact that this spell was missing [Telepathy] pretty much ensured that it wasn’t sapient, and it would never become sapient.

Book Magic, Scry Magic, Particle Magic, Light Magic, [Ward] and Illusion for display purposes, [Renew] for adjustment purposes, and resonwork, all eventually came together into a working, cohesive whole, 15 hours after Erick started attacking this specific problem. He cast the spell four different ways before he decided on how he was actually going to make the imager, and also the next version of this particular magic.

- - - -

On a plateau outside of the city, Erick stood as a dragon under the dim light of the ‘night’ that sometimes took hold of this land of Slaver’s Den. The sky was still bright, but the world was cooler and the land was dimmer.

And then the light began to return to the land in a gradual brightening. Day was coming.

And Erick spoke,

“Of knowledge vast, this woven art,

“To make all seen, through realms apart.

“Spectrums plied, viewed true and keen

“Touch the sky, and sights convene.”

Erick wove his aura and Benevolence as he worked and Benevolence worked with him, ten thousand bits of power and creation flowing on its own, into positions and into alterings, and throughout his soul. Much like how Erick had created [Grand Reincarnation] in his soul without actually making that magic himself, this magic did the same.

Text appeared.

Infinite Imaging, instant + time, special range, 500/10 mana/resons per Cascader

Conjure a cascader that will build up an image of a greater surrounding area over the course of a minute, or less. Resulting map lasts until dismissed. Recasting Infinite Imaging on the same location will create more cascaders that will network together to make the image clearer faster, to scan from multiple directions, and to extend the range of this spellwork.

All cascaders linked to the same image work together.

If you designate a target, then the image might show that target.

If you designate a search for a target in a different slice of infinity, or a different layer of infinity, then the resulting images generated on the map will be from that slice or layer. Costs of spellwork increased commensurately. This spell’s duration drops from ‘unending’ to 100 minutes when used in this way.

+1 resons added to cost per Slice pierced.

+100 resons added to cost per Layer pierced.

And then the magic appeared.

A soft white mist glowed in front of Erick, while a bright white orb flashed into existence high overhead. As the orb above cast waves of dissipating power into the world, that power echoed out there and came back to the light. The ‘cascader’ began to inform the mist in front of Erick. That mist slipped into place here and there, rapidly forming a map of the surrounding area.

Erick smiled.

He cast the spell a few more times to test it out. He designated stuff that he knew should work first, like his own DNA. Soon, there was Erick’s body glowing in the center of the Imager map, while softer blues were back in town, with a lot of blues on his perch at the top of the House. He was kinda surprised that he still shed DNA like that, but he had built this body to be ‘normal’, so yeah, he shed DNA like a normal person. Kinda nice to see, actually. Made him feel somewhat grounded.

Erick flicked through a few more searches, like ‘blood’ and ‘plants’ and such, and all those normal options still worked as expected, and then he searched for something he knew that [Cascade Imaging] could not do; he searched for Elemental Evil.

With great joy, Erick watched as a great deal of the places beyond House Benevolence, a hundred kilometers away, lit up blue. He could search for intangibles, now.

Erick focused on finding Elemental Evil and also Elemental… Hmm. Stone? Sure. Elemental Stone and Evil, and make it a dual search.

The map shifted, and Elemental Evil remained, while Elemental Stone appeared as well, and the colors shifted. Elemental Evil turned black on the map, while Elemental Stone turned yellow. Evil was black? Eh. Erick supposed it was black in reality, so it was black on the map, too. Much of the land here turned yellow, but it was a thin yellow, as though the Elemental Stone in the land wasn’t that dense at all, and it wasn’t, so that made sense. The spots of black out there were pretty thick, though.

Erick looked into the sky where the cascader continued to image the land…

Erick cast the spell again, and this time he designated an image of the land about 750 kilometers... that way, way beyond the edge of the current image, over by the city of Den, the main city of Slaver’s Den. He did not see the cascader come into being, but he certainly saw when the imager populated with more fog in front of him. That fog rapidly coalesced into another image of more land, all the way beyond the edges of the current image, and the two images flowed together to form one.

The city of Den and the hundreds of kilometers of land around it rapidly came into focus. That image gained the search parameters of the Evil and Stone of the previous cascader command, too, and soon Den was a showcase of black dots and a whole lot of thin yellow everywhere.

Erick switched the search to ‘Dragon’. House Benevolence and himself lit up; a scattering of tiny blue dots on the field. He grinned at that. Long ago, he had been warned about searching for and then finding dragons, but his old [Cascade Imaging] couldn’t actually do that unless a dragon was in their draconic form. This one could find Elemental Dragon anywhere, though, in any form, because Erick’s Dragon had been Paradox’d into Benev—

Shadow stepped into the air beside the spellwork, saying, “That’s pretty neat.”

“I’ll have to figure out a way to make others able to interact with it but it should work a lot better than the Imaging we have in the command center.” Erick asked, “Got something you’d like to search for?”

Shadow was a short 2 meter woman floating amid a 40 meter-wide map, and she was also a tiny dot of blue next to Erick’s own dot of blue at the center. She felt like a whole lot more than who she was as she focused.

Shadow said, “Search for Powers, as in the designation made by Margleknot.”

“… Ah. Well. Let’s scan all of Slaver’s Den, actually, see if there are any out there.”

Erick pressed the button inside his soul that made more cascaders and soon the relatively small, 40-meter wide map, spread out wide, Benevolent white glows rapidly falling down into the shapes of cities and wastelands and forests and rivers and all sorts of places. Mountains, defensive structures, coliseums, and more and more cities, villages, villas hidden in the woods, castles on mountainsides, hidden ports on inland seas and one particularly tall sculpture out in the center of that sea. It was a sculpture of Captain Shackle, the demon Walara, and the pseudo-power Chains, all standing atop the backs of slaves, crushing them underfoot.

Erick looked at that sculpture for a moment. “I’m going to blow up that sculpture.”

“You should leave it until the end and then blow it up. It’s more demoralizing that way.” Shadow added, “And you can make that your final ritual to officially make this land ours.”

“That’s a good option, too.” Erick studied the map for a few more moments, before he declared, “No Powers out there besides you and I, but this isn’t that conclusive.”

“Scanning magic never is. Are you really going to make the zealot zombies you’re planning on?”

Erick skipped past asking her how she knew of that, when he had been purposefully vague about all of his musings and diagrams in the air. Obviously Erick was being spied upon, but…

Had Shadow been listening in at the classroom with the ex-slaves? Maybe Erick had leaned too far into appeasing them, and yet… He had been going for a double-misdirect sort of thing there, but… He wasn’t very good at all that stuff and he probably never would be. That was fine. He didn’t like doing that sort of thing, anyway.

Erick asked, “Do you feel I shouldn’t?”

“I feel that the best thing to do is to be as ruthlessly caring as you can be, and this spellwork might be exactly that.” Shadow pulled out a rather large book from Elsewhere. It was bound in gold, iron, and platinum spider legs, and it looked ancient and yet brand new. Erick tried inspecting it with his various senses, and the only thing that worked was visual sight. She floated the book into the air in front of her, toward Erick, saying, “It’s a Book of Beings and Non-Beings. What you want to make is in there, and this book will help you find the line between a magical effect that makes a person, and a magical effect that you can erase when you’re done with it. When you’re done reading it, it will come back to me, but it would be better if you would hand it back to me yourself. Only open it when you’re sure you’re alone, too. Anyone else reading it will be turned inside out and made into an abomination. It’ll try to do the same to you, of course, but it will fail.”

Erick shrunk down into a person and took the book in a hand, and then he looked to Shadow, floating there above the Image of Slaver’s Den with him, all the world like a map of white light around them. Freely giving information was… Well it was a pretty nice courtship gesture, Erick decided.

Erick smiled softly, and said, “I suppose I should gift my Queen a fitting exchange. Do you have a desire?”

Shadow chuckled, grinning. “You’re already doing it, Erick.”

And then she stepped away into Elsewhere, vanishing from sight and senses.

Erick looked to the side, to the map. Shadow’s little blue dot reappeared at House Benevolence. Erick smiled at that, and then he shifted the big map to search for Evil. The entire map of Slaver’s Den repopulated with blue, all the way to the edges of the continent where these lands melded into other lands, far beyond sight.

And then he held up his hand and canceled the spell, crushing a facsimile of it in his grip, giant white claws breaking every cascader out there and the image floating before him.

Erick turned attention to the ‘Book of Beings and Non-Beings’, looking the metal thing over, and then Erick turned to lightning. He moved away from where he had been to wrap himself in a [Hasted Shelter] and a few other magics, to settle down onto a [Force Platform] before he opened the book.

Golden, silvered iron unwrapped from the book’s cover like spider legs pulling back from a web, the whole book radiating a vicious power briefly, knocking off a few hundred thousand points from Erick’s Mana, Health, and Psyche, before the damage settled down to a low-drain. The pages beyond the first were filled with information that jumbled for a while, before it settled down, and Erick could make sense of the swirling words.

It read to him:

That’s a complicated magic you have in mind.

Ah? A sapient book?

Maybe.

Erick couldn’t see its soul.

The book extended its spider-leg-like clasps and set down on the [Force Platform] before it opened wider, the smallish book expanding till each side of the book was a meter square. Pages flipped until the book reached somewhere closer to the back than the front. Spell diagrams began to appear alongside images of the creation of the spell.

They were four-meter tall sexless warriors with crowns of burning light and swords for wings. Two long arms ended in large hands with larger claws.

Words appeared.

Is this the general idea?

“More or less? Yeah. I guess that kinda works.”

Please read the marked chapters and then we can iterate on this idea.

The book closed. Eight bookmarks, each in a different color, fluttered down from between the pages. The book then opened up to the first bookmark.

… This was a pretty neat book.

Erick started reading the section titled, ‘Making magic, not minions’.

It turned out to be a pretty good place to start, even if it was mostly a refresher course.

- - - -

Erick alighted upon yet another plateau far away from the city.

He was in his human form, and wearing normal clothes.

It had been four subjective days since he started reading the Book of Beings and Non-Beings, though it had only been 2 real days. He had needed to take some breaks now and then in order to establish his new [Infinite Imaging] inside the House, and to prevent a few smaller attacks here and there. The Imaging in the House was already hooked up to the command center and working quite well; a lot better than [Cascade Imaging] did, and probably because this one had been designed to be more friendly. What truly made it easier was that Erick had figured out a way to allow someone to channel mana into a runic web that cast another cascader into the Image. From there, it was just a matter of personal ability to use some basic Elemental Book, and the rest was all computer engineering stuff from the engineers and Ta’Kamoil. They added a whole bunch of new functionality to the new Imaging, enabling the command center to function very, very well.

Slaver’s Den didn’t seem to have an answer for the new version of [Cascade Imaging], either, which was great. A whole bunch of previously unseeable places were now fully revealed down at the command center, and Querkooda was busy at work charting out new threats and responses and war plans.

Slaver’s Den didn’t seem capable of stopping the new cascaders at all. They saw the glowing white orbs, of course; those brilliant cascaders were impossible to miss. But when they approached those orbs with any sort of power at all, the orbs popped. Erick was pretty sure that someone would eventually come up with some ways to attack through those ‘scry orbs’ or block them well, but that was true of all Scry Magic; there was no be-all-end-all solution to the ever-evolving arms race of Scry versus anti-Scry magic.

For now, it worked well.

And now Erick was going to make the Absolute Grand Violence war magic he had originally set out to make.

… He thought of Solomon again.

And then Erick dove into his soul and copied [Infinite Imaging]. With eyes half-lidded and his soul holding onto the copy of [Infinite Imaging], Erick spoke as he adjusted the power inside of him,

“With incantations, weave the base,

“A canvas for all spells to trace.

“Through solidity of magic streams,

“Here holds a power; frightful schemes.”

The copy of [Infinite Imaging] shifted inside of Erick, becoming something simpler, but only vaguely, like turning a computer into a monomolecular wire. The new spell held a promise of endings in a way few of Erick’s spells ever did, because this was the spell that Erick had told himself he would never make. This was a spell that was, perhaps, worse than attaching [Luminous Beam] to [Cascade Imaging], because he could attach any spell to this one.

Erick pulled out of his soul and summoned the new spell to the forefront of his mind.

Words appeared.

Spellsurge Weave, instant + time, special range, 500/10 mana/resons per weaver + Special Cost

Conjure a weaver that will build up an image of a greater surrounding area over the course of a minute, or less. Resulting map lasts until dismissed. Recasting Spellsurge Weave on the same location will create more weavers that will network together to make the image clearer faster, to scan from multiple directions, and to extend the range of this spellwork.

All weavers linked to the same image work together.

If you designate a target, then the image might show them.

Each Spellsurge Weave image is a magic completely unto itself, made at the time of casting, for each main cast of Spellsurge Weave will accept 1 imbued spell from the caster that must be a spell that exists within the caster’s soul. Freeform magic is not accepted. Targets of that imbued spell can be changed by casting Spellsurge Weave again, but the imbued spell cannot be changed once imbued.

Spellsurge Weave will support the imbued spell as it is able, acting as a Node Network for that supported spellwork.

Erick breathed out as he read over [Spellsurge Weave]. The words said a lot, but the actual spell would do so much more than what it said it would do.

As just one not-fully-intended consequence of this magic, Erick could see that he had solved the problem of needing to [Reincarnation] people himself. He could hook up [Reincarnation] to this magic and let the weave work its magic to reset people to a younger age. Maybe he might need to make a few different versions of [Reincarnation] + [Spellsurge Weave] to account for different types of [Reincarnation]s, like one Weave for ‘male human of X variety’, and then another for a human woman… And then all the rest?

That would be a pain in the ass, for sure.

… But not that bad, actually. If that’s the way it worked, then that’s how it worked, and people could just get thrown into temporary bodies to start.

… Or maybe he could make the magic take the person and settle them down to ‘just past puberty’, or something like that. Erick imagined it would be truly difficult for magic to target ages like that, but a massive biological change like ‘the end of puberty’ was an easy target, comparatively.

If he really wanted to go the easy route, he could do two reincarnators and make one male dragon and the other female dragon. Or male protean and female protean. That would remove the necessity for giving people specific bodies at all; just make them all immortal shapeshifters and be done with it—

Oh!

He could make one reincarnator make a male version of his own protean body, and then a female protean version of someone else, and if he ran millions of people through both versions then maybe he could walk around looking like himself and people wouldn’t recognize him as himself. They’d just go ‘Look at that! Another dude who used the House Benevolence reincarnator for male.’

… Whatever the case, this Weave would be wonderful for all the good things it could do… theoretically. Erick would experiment with it for a little while and find out how it all worked, exactly, but it should work exactly as expected; both better and not-quite-as-good as possible. It wasn’t sapient, after all; It was a machine of spellwork with certain inputs and certain outputs.

But that’d come later.

For now, it was time to make the magic that would get Lord Dakka on his side.

Erick focused.

There was no practice for this one. There did not need to be. For when Erick finally put together all the parts on paper, he knew that this was going to work, and that was going to work too well. There was no way around that. There was no stopping that.

To steer away from this course of action was to invite inevitable disaster, for this spell was going to be what he used to fight Nothanganathor, and so much more.

This, then, was the birth of a terrible angel.

Erick intoned,

“By Bloody war, I chant this verse

“Of creatures fierce, in Death immersed.

“With Carnage claws they will disperse

“in battlefields; soul will be hearsed.

“Fallen flesh becomes conscript!

“The warmachine is crop-full crypt.

“A soldier’s style! A Vile hive!

“Spread Siphon wings! Exalted shrive.”

Erick shifted his aura through an array of spellworks as he spoke, a spark of Benevolence in the air before him transforming into a drop of red Blood. Grey Death flowed through that redness, and then the drop of power flashed deeper into Carnage crimson. The hovering spell turned as faceted as a ruby, becoming a red diamond sphere that flickered black and brilliant white-gold at the same time, like the sphere was reflecting and refracting light from two different, invisible sources.

Inside Erick, the spell came together as a Benevolence crystal in his soul.

As for the spell itself, Erick held the red crystal ball in his aura.

It was dangerous.

It was impotent, at the moment.

It tried to Siphon some power from him, but it was too weak to drain more than a few points of Mana, Health, and Psyche per second from his body. Erick heavily inspected it for a full minute, watching as it tried to eat his power. He was looking for signs of infection of himself, and also for signs of a soul. There was nothing there, though. No infection. No soul.

Which was good.

He had not made a [Familiar]. He had made a spell which should have enough Necromantic tricks to make a fully functioning ‘zealot zombie horde’, as Shadow had said.

The spell description certainly seemed like it had worked.

Blood of the Valkyrie, instant, medium range, 50,000 mana

Infect a target until death and then watch the birth of a glorious Valkyrie! Behold, a plowshare of supreme violence that begets more of both. Fly and siphon and harvest and infect without mercy. Exalt in vile war to gather the souls of all, constraining them with Vile Exalted power, to bring them to the Apparent King so that they might live new, better lives, free of war of all kinds.

Erick put absolutely no power into his voice, to test if this worked, as he spoke to the red crystal blood, “I have no need of you at this moment. You can stop now.”

The red crystal stopped Siphoning Erick, and then it burbled as if sighing in sleep.

The spell disintegrated into broken mana.

Erick breathed out, “That worked.”

Shadow was there, standing to the side. She looked at Erick, and said, “Propagation magic always has a way of getting out of hand. That one might not have a soul right now, but it will be gathering lots of them. It will gain sapience eventually. I give it 40 years of use or 50 billion lives touched, whichever comes first.”

“That short, eh?” Erick rhetorically asked, settling himself for what was to come. He stepped into the air. “I’m going to do some experiments with [Spellsurge Weave] and then move on to one of Querkooda’s plans. What are you up to?”

“Checking on you.”

Erick froze slightly. He thawed fast enough. “… Oh?”

Shadow said, “Ultimately, what is going to happen here in Slaver’s Den is a good outcome for all the rest of the universe, for cutting a cancer at the source always makes the body healthier. The problems from this happening will be in how you have hurt yourself to make this happen. You’re not used to what you’re about to do. I don’t want you to become used to that sort of horror. It’s not good for the House, or for you.”

Erick smiled softly. “It’s not that bad, Shadow. I appreciate your worry, though.”

Shadow looked at Erick, and then she nodded. She moved on, saying, “We’ve been contacted by some liches that wish to be not liches anymore. Would you be willing to reincarnate them?”

Erick’s eyebrows went up. “The ones from Wraithborne?”

“Correct. Kakalakot of the Slavehold, Odarimisu of the Depths, and Witch Aragathara. I told them to wait until you were done with your projects, and since you’re done, here we are.”

“I’ll…” Erick decided, “Yes. In an hour. I’ll be ready for them.”

Shadow nodded, then said, “I’ll let the liches know you’ll see them soon, over on the downspire side of the city. If you ever want the Book of Beings and Non-Beings back for a different working, let me know.”

“Sure.”

Shadow vanished.

No time for rest.

Erick set up a few [Spellsurge Weave]s to test out some imbued spellworks.

It wasn’t long before he understood how Weaves functioned. Erick would press both of the ‘buttons’ for [Spellsurge Weave] and another spell in his soul at the same time, and the Weave would come up as normal, with that other spell imbued into the working. From there, Erick cast another Weave into the main Imaging to designate a target, and then, once the spell had a target, it would move the cascading weaver closer to the target in order to enact the imbued spell as soon as it could, the very moment it got within range.

Erick cast a Weave and a [Fire Bolt] at the same time, making a blank map, and then he cast a Weave again while designating a stone pillar in the distance as the target. The weaver blinked through the sky, reappearing a long-range distance away from the stone pillar, and then it released its Bolt payload.

Just one Bolt.

And then the spell went inactive.

Erick had to [Renew] into the imaging to make the weaver spit out more Bolts, but as soon as he did that, a veritable stream of Bolts flowed out of the weaver to impact the stone pillar. The spell stopped long before its wealth of mana ended, though, because the stone pillar could not keep up against the damage, and so the weaver no longer detected the stone pillar as the stone pillar.

Erick went out and conjured another stone pillar. The very moment there was another pillar in range the weaver moved to get into range of the new pillar and then it started unloading Bolts until it ran out of power.

A bit more experimenting had twenty pillars scattered across the land, and Erick feeding [Renew] into the image that was the base control of the attached weaver.

What happened next was odd, but it was also acceptable.

Erick fed power into the image, and the weaver went around to shoot one Bolt at one pillar, and then it moved to the next pillar closest to it, or maybe at random, and then it released another Bolt at the second target. The weaver went on to the next pillar and the next, doing the same thing, until it wrapped all the way around to the first pillar again, to continue Bolting pillars. Once it was done with one circuit, though, it did not do the same circuit a second time. Instead, it went around a different way, Bolting each pillar in turn until the weaver finished a whole different circuit, whereupon it started again. The third circuit was different from the first two.

“I’m not too sure what that’s about, but it’s fine?”

The weaver moved pretty darn fast.

When Erick conjured a second weaver into the same spellwork, the two of them began working in sync to Bolt all 20 pillars and then restart the process, going through mana and the whole route a whole lot faster than when it was just one weaver. There was still travel time, though, so the Bolts did not flow. Not yet.

Erick conjured 18 more weavers, and now each pillar had one weaver Bolting it with streams of [Fire Bolt]s, like ribbons of fire trailing from each cascading white orb to each solid tan stone below. When the first stone pillar became ‘not stone pillar’ according to the image, that weaver began weaving a route among all the other pillars, Bolting once, and then moving on. The remaining weavers continued to stream Bolts.

As more and more weavers ‘killed’ their targets, then the rest of the weavers began to move around to attack what was left.

Very soon, Erick had 20 weavers hanging out in the sky, doing nothing, for all the targets were dead.

Erick did a few more experiments with different magics just to make sure he was seeing what he was seeing.

Spells with durations, like beam spells, chained themselves so that the end of one spell was the start of the next. The weavers didn’t just cast a hundred beam spells from one weaver all at once. Instant spells got chained.

Spells that cast stationary objects here or there, like [Ward] spells, cast the spell where Erick wanted it cast, and then, when Erick damaged the [Ward], the nearest weaver [Renew]ed the spellwork. In that case, the weaver acted as a part of a node network, keeping the [Ward]s solid.

For his next experiment, Erick set out 4 lightwards that would naturally decay from white through the spectrum of red to blue, before finally popping at the end of their power. Each lightward would decay at different rates. For those lightwards, Erick set up the [Spellsurge Weave] with [Renew], and had the weavers keep the lightwards functioning. That worked pretty well. The weavers kept the 4 lightwards at ‘white’ until the mana Erick had put into the Weave began to run low, and then the Weave kept the lightwards going as best it could, eventually putting all of its power into the constantly-failing lightward until the system was drained dry. And then the lightwards popped one after the other, due to a lack of power into the Weave.

The weavers, meanwhile, simply watched that decay… Or rather they ‘hung out’... And yet that wasn’t a wholly correct way to describe their behavior either. Erick tried not to ascribe too much intelligence to them for they had no soul; just orders.

“… I wonder if the tech side of Margleknot has artificial general intelligence that could help with this?”

A question to be answered another day.

Erick had some liches to visit.

- - - -

Kakalakot of the Slavehold, Odarimisu of the Depths, and Witch Aragathara.

They were the three liches of Wraithborne that Erick had tentatively agreed to [Reincarnation], though he had never actually followed up on any of that. He was busy. He expected them to show up when they wanted, which was pretty much what had happened.

And now they were nearby.

Erick only saw Kakalakot of the Slavehold standing before him, though… or at least that’s who Erick assumed this was, since the other two were both many kilometers away and much more easily recognizable as who they were. The witch, far over that way, was an old woman trapped in a cauldron that was filled with murky black liquid. When the liquid cleared now and again, it revealed the witch below the surface. The other guy, far over that way, was a sphere of floating blue waters with an eye far below the surface; that screamed ‘of the depths’ to Erick.

And so, by process of elimination, this guy was Kakalakot of the Slavehold, though that much was kinda hard to tell. There was a man dressed in black clothes hovering inside of a bright orange crystal that anyone could have mistaken for a coffin, while also mistaking the guy inside the coffin as dead. A little skeletal lizard held on top of that crystal, though, and that little skeletal being was an easy match for some of the larger powers that Erick had seen in this world, and back on Veird. It radiated power and control.

Erick set down in front of the ancient lich, asking, “And you’re Kakalokot?”

The lizard spoke with a man’s voice, “Yes, good Wizard Flatt of Benevolence. Please ask your questions and demand your prices in a quick manner, but know that I have already given away everything of true value. I am risking true death to be here at this hour, away from my true wards, and so are those other Great Evils who are here, but we are all dying anyway. If you deny us then we will throw our whole weight behind Slaver’s Den and attempt to end whatever you have going on here.”

Casual threats.

… Eh!

To be expected, anyway.

Erick did not hold it against him.

“Okay, sure.” Erick asked, “ ‘Of the Slavehold’, yes? What sort of intel can you give me over this land of slavery?”

“Lots.” The little lizard skeleton cast a bunch of light into the air, to the side, creating a map of Slaver’s Den. And then he added some glows. “Those glows are the last known locations of the Slave Systems I set up here thousands of years ago. They have probably been moved. You must take those out to erase many of the Contracts out there. The backlash of ending those Contracts in this way would be the deaths of those people, but at least they wouldn’t be sundered. There’s probably a billion people attached to those Contracts. Those places are going to use these hostages against you when you move on them. I have explained all of this and more to Shadow.”

“… Okay. Good to know!” Erick felt a bit angry that they really were going to use slaves as hostages and warriors against him— He banished that emotion. “Wanna join the House and make up for all the wrong that you’ve done?”

“No. I wish to leave and be reborn in some better land, far, far away. Make of me whatever you want. I care not for details. That will be my penance.”

Erick nodded. “What are you escaping?”

“Corruption unending. I touched too deep into the depths of broken universes to ply my magic into power that once raised me above all my peers, but corruption has a way of eating at you even when you think you’ve beaten it. Heed this small warning that you probably already know, Wizard of Benevolence: do not go to corruption for salvation. It turns rights into wrongs and health into death. It does everything you could ever possibly want, and then it extracts everything from you in turn.”

… Erick nodded. “Your warning is appreciated.”

And then he struck the ancient lich with a reson-empowered [Reincarnation], lightning flashing out of the sky—

- -

Erick stood in front of a man in the foyer of a black-marble mansion fit for any emperor in any grand world. The man had orange hair and orange eyes, and he smiled as he looked down at his hands.

Kakalakot softly said, “I can move my hands again…” He paused. He looked to Erick. “We’re in the middle of it now, then. I can see why Wraithborne is eager to extend to you their hands instead of their fists. I can’t feel anything of who I used to be at all, and yet I know I am here. All the power is gone, but I… I am here. All that remains…” He looked up, and then all around. “… Is me.”

Erick smiled a little at that. “Got any big requests for the next life?”

Looking at his castle, Kakalokot said, “A path to power that will result in eternity, and not in an eternal self-prison.”

Erick raised an eyebrow. “I don’t really know what happens to you past this moment in time, but you still have your memories, and your future will be much more Benevolent. What comes next is up to you.”

“I look forward to it.”

- -

—Lightning dissipated from a broken orange crystal to vanish into Elsewhere, vaguely taking the shapes of non-euclidean branches as it soaked into those branches of Margleknot, and left this world behind.

Shadow stepped to Erick’s side. “We have received a great deal of data from Kakalakot’s estate, as well as 4.7 billion resons. It’s more than he promised, but less than we knew he had. We’ll work on the intel in the next few hours after I have a chance to go over all of it and check for traps. I don’t expect there to be any traps.”

Erick nodded. “Good to know.”

Shadow vanished.

Erick moved on.

- - - -

The witch in the cauldron, Aragathara, rested at the bottom of her own soup, little bubbles escaping from her closed lips to rise to the surface, to say, “I’ll be real honest real fast, because I cannot stay away from my anti-corruption wards for long. I know everything there is to know about Nothanganathor and Malevolence because I helped him make all that. I am a former companion of his. I know how he killed Margleknot’s person in the Painted Cosmology. I am dying. I am betraying him by helping you. Let me help you, so that I might help myself.” She added, “I am also one of the original Witches of Wraithborne. Witch Agatha is my sister. She is Morbion’s right-hand woman. I wish to be promised to Creator Shadow in whatever form you desire me to be, and to work with her however she wishes. I filled out paperwork.” Some of the bubbles popped, becoming some of Erick’s reincarnation papers. They floated for a moment and Erick read them in a flashing instant. “You need not follow the paperwork.”

So that was huge.

Erick let his paranoia run wild for a moment, to see what he could see. The paperwork was fine; no problems there. She just wanted to be herself but young and kinda dainty. The witch in the cauldron didn’t look dainty at all; she just looked old and tired.

As for her desires to work with Shadow and her history with Wraithborne...

That all seemed like a desire to integrate into the House and then work from the inside to undermine the House for Wraithborne, or something like that.

… And yet, on the other hand, she knew way too much for Erick to ever not agree to her requests.

Erick rapidly decided, “Sure. You can be promised to Shadow. I’m sure she’ll have you swear some specific oaths. You will be answering questions about Nothanganathor and Malevolence to both of us, though.”

Bubbles burbled to the surface of the cauldron, “I readily agree.”

Erick said, “Bring down your wards.”

Suddenly, the water in the cauldron vanished, exposing the corpse inside. Aragathara started screaming softly as her flesh began to melt—

[Reincarnation] set her to rights, though.

The cauldron evaporated as soon as the world turned to a fractal splash, filled with thousands of… all rather good futures, actually. Erick saw Aragathara as a mother, a grandmother, a teacher of students, a lover of books and a caretaker of babies. She was also a tempest queen of destruction and wrath, but mostly she was a woman of small pleasures and small powers.

Erick picked for her a future of small powers and growing things and a love for community, and gave her the body she wanted.

Shadow appeared at the end of the spell, saying, “Hit her with another [Reincarnation].”

… Erick did exactly that, and the fractal splashes of futures looked… more or less the same?

Erick looked to Shadow. “Expecting subterfuge?”

“Yes, and no.” Shadow said, “Yes; I always expect liars and cheaters. No; I did not expect it of her. But she worked with Nothanganathor and Malevolence, so if anyone was capable of evading a reset then it was her.” She said, “Wake her.”

Erick passed a [Benevolent Cleanse] across the woman and Aragathara blinked. She opened her eyes as she lay there on the bare ground, and then she looked to Erick, and Shadow. She sat up, closed her eyes, and looked inward.

Aragathara smiled, opening her eyes again as she said, “The corruption is finally gone.” She got to her knees and bowed to Erick, and Shadow, saying, “I pledge my life and my fate to House Benevolence and its just rulers, and to Shadow the Creator.”

Shadow said, “I accept your life and your fate on behalf of the House. You’re with me, now.”

And then Shadow waved her hand and shadows rose from the ground, swallowing her and Witch Aragathara in a crash of darkness, before falling back down to vanish beneath the bottom of every pebble and the undersides of every ridge in the rock. Shadow had moved on with her new person.

Erick moved on, too.

- - - -

Erick looked at the floating pool of water that held Odarimisu of the Depths, deep within that dark water. The guy was an eyeball that vanished in those dark waters when he closed his eye, but otherwise he was just an eye.

The water vibrated to allow for speech, “Greetings. I have not been able to leave my Depths more than this right here for the last few thousand years due to the corruption I have drowned in for so long. I would like to leave this cursed existence. Make of me what you will. I have not filled out paperwork at all.”

Erick paused his judgment of Odarimisu’s ‘demand’, because his Lightning Path was angling backward, hard. Something was happening over on the other side of House Benevolence. Erick said, “One moment. I need to check on—”

“Please I need to leave this horror of my existence. I don’t care what I become. I need to move on!”

Erick zapped him with a reson-empowered [Reincarnation]—

- -

“A big fish in a big ocean,” said the glowing goldfish floating in front of Erick, in the air.

“… Sure!”

- -

The water holding the goldfish collapsed, and Erick zapped away to see what was up with the lands on the other side of the House—

Some sort of giant beam made of green-black light fell out of the sky like the advancing finger of a god, moving fast, the world exploding around its advance. Clouds vanished in the sky, expanding outward under the kilometer-wide beam.

Erick threw a lot of Annihilation at the beam as he also expanded to full dragon size, turning on his Mana Siphon to full blast, extending his aura out kilometers in every direction. The green-black beam broke apart on that Annihilation and then fell into Erick’s power and Siphon. It did not get past him, and Erick was kinda surprised at that.

Erick watched as his Status started shooting up by tens of thousands of Mana, Health, Psyche, and even resons, every second. Still, the beam came on, and Erick turned up the Siphon, moving deeper into the black beam, soaking it up, transforming it into his own power.

Erick remained there for a full two minutes, sucking up the power, while nuclear bombs dropped on the other side of the city.

He almost panicked.

But Shadow was there, flying through the sky, swallowing each nuclear warhead with absolute Darkness.

Half an hour and four more all-out attacks later, one of which was an underground surge of olympic-pool-sized blood oozes, the attacks stopped.

Shadow reconvened with Erick in the underground cavern, the two of them in their human-shaped forms, for now. She asked, “Time for the counterattacks?”

“I’m thinking about it,” Erick said, thinking of what could have happened if he or Shadow had been a little less strong, or a little less quick. He missed Ophiel again, and not just because he loved Ophiel. He said to Shadow, “You were great today, Shadow. I appreciate it. I ask for your advice, now. Should I make the Valkyries sapient? Was it the right thing to make them simple tools? Or was it a cruelty? Or did you want them for House Benevolence’s defense? Or for your own use? Is that why you gave me that Book of Beings and Non-Beings to use?”

Shadow floated regally in the dark of the cavern, and in the bright backlights of the many spotlights overhead. She said, “You made what will eventually become a people and I wanted you to make them well. That is what that was. That is what this is. Neither you or I have the power or possibility to raise a child right now, but I would not hesitate to call the Valkyries mine if that is how it would work out.” She smiled a little. “I imagine that how the spell actually works is not at all how you think it will, anyway, but that isn’t the real issue. The fact is that there’s no way you’re getting a positive outcome with the Fae Enclave against Nothanganathor without capitulating to either Lord Dakka or Lord Eldraki, and I am 100% certain that you committing absolute war against a people will be easier for you, mentally, than whatever shifting trick that Eldraki would have you perform in order to gain his vote. So unless you’re willing to give up ‘a single mote of your mana’, which could be taken any sorts of ways, then you’re doing a Grand War, and that’s that.”

Erick sighed a little. “It’s all rather simple, isn’t it.”

“It’s not simple at all, but it could be, and yet, it won’t, because that’s not who you are,” Shadow said, “They’re trying to get you to compromise yourself in some fundamental way, and you are, but not really.”

Erick sighed a little bit more.

Shadow nodded.

Erick floated there for a moment longer.

And then he flashed away.

- - - -

Erick spent half an hour on an otherwise desolate part of House Benevolence’s grounds, near the edge, setting up a [Reincarnation] [Spellsurge Weave] ‘machine’. The space for the machine was about a kilometer in from the edges of two white-knife-wall pieces that Erick had lit red with giant pillars of light. The actual defensive wall between those two red edges was relaxed; shieldwork and otherwise pulled in, like a dimple, to allow people and valkyries and such to come inside the big dome some.

That was where the imager for the ‘[Reincarnation Weaver]’ floated, with a white circle on the ground next to that space. That white circle was just a detection area made with a few different spellworks that would turn that white circle to pale red, then orange, then all the way through the rainbow until it arrived at blue, which was the trigger for the weaver to [Reincarnation] the single person standing inside the space. Erick did it that way so that the [Reincarnation] wouldn’t accidentally trigger. It would take 20 seconds to trigger.

It only took a minute to actually set up the various magics, but then it took 29 more minutes of troubleshooting for Erick to discover that yes, he could ‘simply’ set the Weave to turn ‘the person who steps into this blue area into themselves, but past puberty’ and ‘Make them a benevolent, good-ish person’.

It had not been simple at all to make that happen.

He had needed to do some sapient experimentation to make that work. Conveniently, some raiders weren’t too far away and they were trying to set up bombs, so those guys made for some rather ethically-sourced material.

Those guys were already back in their drop ship and leaving, seeming remorseful and happier. They were already talking about leaving behind everything and starting new, now that their Contracts were gone.

And now Erick had a ‘machine’ that turned people young and gave them a randomly-chosen ‘good future’. So far, from Erick’s short experiments, that ‘random goodness’ usually defaulted to ‘have passion in a positive, productive pursuit + kids + long life’, but the system would need to be watched for aberrations anyway.

And so, Erick got Ta’Kamoil and a few nascent Soul Mages to watch over the place, while he also set up a very large expansion to House Benevolence. Four more apartment buildings, three more mess halls, some other lands… It was good enough. Erick was distracted, anyway. This was it. This was his first use of ‘real’ Propagation Magic. It wasn’t based on corruption, but instead on a whole bunch of interconnected magical systems.

Soon enough, valkyries were going to drop off their captured soul-cargo to this red dimple in the side of House Benevolence’s lands, to make new people out of those souls. From there, Ta’Kamoil and others would pull people out of the machine and set them on their way into the House, into housing and otherwise. The slaves would become ex-slaves, and Erick foresaw that whole event being a whole bunch of trauma, but it was workable trauma; solvable problems. The slavers would become better people, but they would need to go through a different housing system, of course; keeping the slavers with the formerly-enslaved was just asking for killing all around.

Erick went over the ‘machine’ once more.

He spoke of his fears to Ta’Kamoil.

He spoke of instructions to Lanzoil.

He had Querkooda and all of the House go to high alert.

Shadow was already talking with Witch Aragathara of the true defenses of Slaver’s Den and otherwise, but she got ready to defend the land, too.

And then Erick moved on.

To war.