I enter the war room and I'm greeted by Frederick, Phila, Chrom, Emmeryn and Lissa. Everyone's face held a dire expression. I don't know what this is about, but I had received maximum-priority summons.

That means that whatever it is, it's bad - and extremely urgent. Has the invasion that Laurent warned us about come early?

Seeing my entrance, Chrom begins. "Good, everyone's here. I'll get right down to it. Approximately ninety minutes ago, our magical security team detected an event of some unknown sort. Four minutes later, a second event of the same sort was detected. The team suspected infiltrators, so a sweep of the castle grounds was conducted. They did not find any. More worrying was what they did not find: the Fire Emblem and Sable both are currently missing. We're looking at a potential summoning event here, people."

My gut drops. They were held inside one of the most secure vaults on the continent! How could they have possibly been stolen?! I let out a breath. "Get on the radio to Basilio. He needs to know so he can take measures to protect Gules. So long as we can keep at least one of the gems out of the hands of whoever's behind this, they won't be able to complete the ritual."

"I've already given the orders. We'll hear back shortly. I've also ordered the cordoning of the city - anybody coming out will be thoroughly searched, but I suspect it is too late."

Frederick speaks up "What about Sable? Have you contacted the eastern garrison?" Sable had been removed from Plegia with the conclusion of the war - instead, it was being held within a mountain fortress in the far east of Ylisse. The place was pretty much unassailable by any conventional force.

Chrom shakes his head. "No, they don't have a radio yet. A messenger has been dispatched, but they won't reach them before the week is out. We'll just hope that whatever plans they have made fall through on that end. Going forward, we'll have to plan assuming that they've already stolen it - along with Azure and Vert."

Phila frowns. "What I want to know is how the thieves managed to so deeply infiltrate our defenses. If they can simply reuse whatever trick they used here, the defenses around Gules will be worthless."

I consider the problem. From what Chrom has said, we can guess that their method is magical in nature - the crux of the issue being the mechanics of how it works. Is it some form of advanced invisibility curse? No - they wouldn't be able to get past the vault door. How about incorporeality? That doesn't solve the issue of them infiltrating the castle without being spotted. Both at once? It would be a stretch - in my experience, it's not often that different spells of that sort play well together - but it is one possible explanation.

No - the simplest explanation: teleportation. If the infiltrators could simply teleport to the inside of the vault and then teleport back out, they'd have had little trouble making with Argent and the Fire Emblem. Obviously, Grimleal remnants of some sort are our number one suspect here, but since when have they had teleportation?

Suddenly, I come to an epiphany - they've always had it; Excellus was a grimleal agent! If they somehow reproduced his artefact - or even just replaced it with a replica cursed to appear genuine - then we would have never been the wiser.

A messenger bursts into the room, and hands Chrom a message. While he reads it, I explain my theories to the room. It is agreed that teleportation seems most likely, and that we should plan defenses accordingly.

Chrom tosses the message onto the table, his face a sharp frown. "We can't raise Khan Basilio - best guess is that they're busy dealing with invaders of their own." The mood of the room takes a nosedive. In a matter of hours, we've gone from controlling three of the stones and the Fire Emblem, to potentially controlling none.

I steady myself. While we don't know that the infiltrators have all of the stones yet, it would be foolish to act as if they did not. This is the very situation that we've sacrificed thousands of hours trying to avoid - contingency plan upon contingency plan had been created, yet not had accounted for the enemy pulling an ace out of their sleeve and snatching the stones in a matter of hours.

Alright. Think - what do they need to resurrect Grima? For one, they need the Fire Emblem and all five of the stones. Next, they need a mass sacrifice, and finally, they need a vessel.

The body I am inhabiting right now is the only compatible vessel that I know of - the culmination of years of selective breeding and eugenics by the Grimleal. But, we cannot rule out the possibility of there existing a second vessel.

As for the sacrifice, they used some sort of mental compulsion to ensure willing participants in the games - for all we know, they could have slipped their preparations past our precautions and have an entire country's worth of people ready to go.

Just how did everything go so wrong so quickly? One minute the Grimleal were practically extinct, and now our most secure vaults have been infiltrated.

That's not important now: we need a plan of action - and fast. Alright, first priority, ensure that this body cannot be used as a vessel for the summoning. That's fairly simple - I can confine myself to the castle and allocate a set of guards to ensure that any form of mental coercion or control will be fruitless.

Next step: reclaim the Fire Emblem and stones. If we do so, we'll be able to prevent the summoning from happening altogether, but even if we fail we'll be needing it to awaken Chrom so that he can kill Grima. I'm not certain whether we'll be capable of killing him conventionally even with our advanced tech, so we'll be needing a surefire way of ending him in case our first plan falls through.

I explain the broad strokes of my plan to the room. Chrom was unhappy that I will be sidelining myself, but he accepted my reasoning in the end. We then moved on to nailing down the specifics of the plan. Once we devised an acceptable course of action, we all departed from the conference room.

I collapsed into my reading chair, exhausted. I'd been burning the candle at both ends lately, and the four-hour planning session had done me no favours. My role in things is officially over, all things going well: Chrom has just left to take some of the Shepherds and a battalion of Ylisse's finest to the Grimleal temple with hopes of disrupting the ritual. Miriel would be joining them as the leader of a platoon of mages.

We have no evidence that it's happening right now, but everyone agreed that it was the most likely course of action for the Grimleal. We also don't know for certain that the ritual has to be done at the Grimleal temple, but given that the temple is literally built into Grima's skeleton and that they have been preparing the temple for the ritual over centuries, I'd imagine that they'd at the very least try to perform it in that location.

I'm not completely in the dark, however; I'm patched into the radio network of the ground troops - it's being piped through several relay stations along our train line back to the capital. Chrom's team was scheduled to arrive in a few hours, so I've got time for a quick nap. I order my guard to wake me then, and promptly drift off.

I'm awoken by a tremor. I launch out of my seat, arms flailing. An earthquake? I grasp my chair, steadying myself, only to notice that the disturbance was strictly limited to the magical plane. I wobble before stumbling and falling to the ground. Absently, I hear shouts, but I'm too distracted by my inner turmoil.

The magical plane was like a sea in a hurricane - eddies and surges battered my perception, each a hammer blow bending my mind against an anvil. I groan, clasping my hands over my temples in a futile attempt to ward myself against the onslaught.

Something catches in my throat, and I begin hacking, unable to properly breath. The offending blockage comes free and splatters onto the floor with a wet slap. I attempt to stand back up, head still being wrought with whatever's happening.

I notice that there's a small puddle of blood on the floor. Is that mine? I prop my hand against the floor, raising myself up, only to slip and fall back down. The pain in my head intensifies. It feels like my brain is being pulled in two different directions - as if it was the object of some childish dispute.

My vision swims, and everything blurs together, like a smeared painting. What the hell is happening? Is it an attack? Once more, my breath catches, and I start coughing. The blockage doesn't come free so easily this time, and my vision begins to darken.

A hand grasps my shoulder, and all of a sudden, the world is shorn in two. I hear the sound of a rip - all encompassing, as if it resonated from within myself - and I know no more.


I felt unbearable burning agony. It was as if someone had replaced my blood with napalm, yet it had lasted naught but an instant. I felt no pain thereafter.

I sat up, looking at my surroundings. I was in a desert, almost entirely flat as far as the eye could see. Was I in Plegia? Dotting the land were squat, brownish shrubs. More importantly, there was not a single sign of civilization in sight.

How had I got here? Teleportation? Did the Grimleal try and kidnap me for their ritual? Did it fail?

Did it work?

Now would be a bad time to panic. I need to rejoin civilization - get myself back into containment if it isn't too late. This was a bad situation if I had ever seen one - what on Earth was that psychic attack? Was it just me that was affected, or did it hit everyone? I grasped my head like I had a headache more out of habit than actual pain.

When my hand contacted my head, however, it made a decidedly metallic clang. Looking down at my body, I saw that I was covered head to toe in what appeared to be armour, only, rather than being bulky, as metal armour tended to be, it was instead as if it were a second skin. Yet, eerily, it felt as if I was wearing nothing at all.

I shoved my thoughts to the side and I stood. I need to keep a level head here. Behind me, there was a spring glistening in the morning sun. It had been nearly dusk when Chrom had departed - was I out the entire night?

As I moved towards the pool, I noticed that there were some distinctly mechanical noises being made by the armour. For one, where was a constant whir coming from somewhere inside my breastplate – it sounded almost like a computer fan. There was also an odd sort of hum coming from, well, everywhere. What on earth?

As I examined my reflection, I absently noticed that the pond contained strange-looking yellow fish. My face was covered by what seemed to be a metal mask. Over my mouth and nose was a yellow box shaped protrusion fitted with what looked like a speaker grille. On my head I wore a yellow hard hat with an attached lamp.

My eyes, however, were black pits. No sclera, no iris. Just perfectly circular holes filled by glass lenses.

Camera lenses.

That's… not Ylissean tech. What the fuck happened?

I tried to take a breath to compose myself, only to find that I couldn't. I tried again, and yet, my breath never came. Okay, that's worrying. Despite being unable to breathe, I didn't feel as if I was suffocating.

Maybe the armour was some sort of exo-suit that fed oxygen directly into the blood?

Maybe whoever stole the Fire Emblem was actually the threat that Laurent described? That would at least give me a possible explanation as to who put me into my current situation - but no clue as to the why.

I tugged on the mask to try and remove it. It stayed put. I felt around for a release. There was none. My head was covered in a perfectly seamless metal shell. At least the hat came off. I started to pace, running my hands over the armour, looking for a way out - a latch, a lever - anything!

Failing to find one, I stopped. Camera lenses, no breathing, metal shell, mechanical noises. They all point to a set of - frankly, absurd - explanations. I sat back down and looked at my reflection. There were definitely cameras in place of my eyes – there was no doubt in my mind.

I examined my hands and could clearly see that they were entirely metallic – not just a layer of armour. There was no way they could not be entirely mechanical – to say otherwise was a simple denial of reality. I raised a clenched fist and roughly rapped my forehead a few times with my knuckles. The momentary light-headedness and pain that would normally accompany such an action was wholly absent.

Three possible explanations, then. In order of decreasing likelihood; I'm now inhabiting the body of a robot, I'm now a heavily augmented android, and, I'm stuck inside a highly advanced skin-tight mech suit.

The skin-tight mech fits the evidence the least - the frame of this body is noticeably taller and thinner than the frame of my previous body. Coincidentally, it's a lot more similar to my original body - robotics aside.

Augmentation doesn't seem particularly likely either - given my thinner frame. That leaves a wholly robotic body. I can't say I'm enthused, but having already experienced a similar phenomenon has inured me to the situation somewhat.

Alright. A plan. I need to get back to civilization. Once again, I cast my vision about, looking for a landmark. On closer inspection, this doesn't look like any part of Plegia I've seen - and I've seen more of that shithole than most.

It looked closer to a steppe than a desert, actually. From memory, Archanea doesn't really have steppes. Am I on Valm? Some other continent?

A different world entirely?

I turn my attention towards the magical plane. Despite myself, I stagger. It felt as if the entire world was some sort of Dead Spot lite. The only magical energy was my own - even the shrubs, which would normally have held a trace of magic back in Archanea were completely devoid of it.

That settles it, then. I'm in a different world. Were I in the same world as Archanea, I would have been able to sense at least some magic - even if it were half way across the world. Instead, it's looking like I'm the only thing with any sort of magical energy anywhere nearby.

I turn my attention towards my signature - or soul, as the dark mages call it. It's definitely the same one that I had back in Archanea. That would suggest that whatever happened back there could have been my soul being ejected from that plane of existence.

How did I end up here though? Did I just drift through the multiverse until my soul found something to anchor itself to? And why did I end up in a machine rather than an organic body, if that were the case?

No… that makes sense, actually. An advanced machine with hardware mimicking human wetware would be an ideal candidate - there would be no soul already occupying the body for me to have to steal it from, but the hardware itself would remain roughly analogous to what I had already been running on.

That's using the assumption that humans from mundane worlds like this one would still have souls, but I honestly don't know whether that's the case. If that were true, does that mean I'm alone on this planet? If there were a concentration of people with souls somewhere, I would be able to at least sense their existence - if not their direction - but I'm getting absolutely nothing from the magical plane here.

I examined the helmet I had removed earlier. It looked to be a typical twenty-first century mining helmet. When contrasted with the advanced tech the rest of me was made of, it looked rather out of place. I looked around for a clue as to what this body was made for - a manufacturers mark, a label, a serial number.

Outside the rim of the helmet, near the back was a few bullet points embossed into the material in fine script. It read 'Von Neumann probe property of the Gate Conglomerate. Initial launch: June 2049. Generation number: 12'. Von Neumann probe? I don't know what that is, but if this body is a probe, that suggests that I'm out in space somewhere.

I'm not sure what to make of the other parts, either. Initial launch? That would suggest there have been multiple launches, at least. Generation number, on the other hand? I don't even know where to begin with that one.

At least, I can reasonably guess that whoever is responsible for the probe - the 'Gate Conglomerate' is human, or at the very least, writes in English.

Ok. Action plan - I need an action plan. I can't just sit around forever thinking about my situation. Goals - what do I want to do?

Not much - get back to Archanea and not die or become otherwise imprisoned. It'll be bad news for me if the Gate Conglomerate comes knocking, wondering why their robot has gone rogue.

Not an easy task, then: I know the broad strokes of dimensional tech, but actually trying to make something will be a gamble at best. Not to mention I'll be needing an industrial base - in all likelihood, I'll be constructing it by myself.

It was at this point that I noticed the overlay that had been projected into my awareness. It was a subtle thing - a few words and a few icons of some sort. A heads-up display? What? What would a robot need one of those for?

The script was a few bullet points; 'Fabrication progress: Not tasked', 'Frame integrity: Normal', 'Gate stability: Normal'. Fabrication? Did this body have an integrated fabricator? That would make my job easier, at least. Frame integrity was probably analogous to a health-bar. Gate stability, on the other hand - maybe it's referring to the same gate that the Gate Conglomerate was named after?

I drew my attention to the icons. Once my focus was on one, a window appeared in my awareness. It wasn't really in my vision - more that I instinctively knew the contents of the window and was interpreting it as seeing the window.

It was titled 'Fabrication tasker'. I closed the window by focusing on the 'x' in a similar manner to how I had with the icon. The other two icons brought up windows titled 'Gate storage' and 'Sensor suite'.

This worked a lot like microsoft windows. Why would there be a graphical user interface in a machine that for all intents and purposes was a robot? There's definitely something going on that I'm not catching here.

Maybe it was my soul subconsciously translating the information this body was giving me into a format I could understand? That doesn't seem entirely correct to me, but I've got no better explanation.

In any case, I've gotta get a handle on this.

With a clear path of action, I begin paging through the windows. The fabrications tasker was nothing more than a list of products, the constituent materials required, and an eta if I were to order it's fabrication. The products themselves were fairly basic - autonomous turrets, autonomous stationary mining units, self-contained steam-powered electric generators. For the most part, it's pretty sci-fi stuff, but nothing completely mind-blowing.

The gate storage tab was more interesting. The way I figured it, it's referring to a sci-fi analog of a bag of holding. Storage space was labeled as 'Available Volume', but there weren't any units to go along with it.

On a whim, I pick up a stone and will for it to go into storage. With an almost comical sucking sound, the stone disappears. In my interface, the volume has gone up by a few tenths of a unit, and the stone has appeared in my list.

With some more experimentation, I find all I've got to do is hold whatever I want stored in my hand and call the system to do the work for me. If I want to recall something from storage, all I've got to do is press the appropriate button in the window. The object doesn't just appear in my hand, however. Instead, it gets put into some sort of holding area where I can then designate a nearby position for the object to be placed.

When I tried to put the ground into my storage by pressing my palm flat against it, an error box that read 'Designated Volume Outside of Acceptable Bounds' appeared. Damn - there's a limiting factor of some sort, then.

In terms of how much I can store… Well, I don't know exactly, but I figure it's on the scale of a few industrial warehouses. That was fairly surprising - how on earth can I fit that stuff? Compression tech? Dimensional tech? If it were the latter, I might be able to take a look to jumpstart my own tech. The former is a bit less interesting, but still something I want to look into.

The sensor suite was fairly bog-standard, but only drew more questions. My internal chronometer says the year is 2694 - more than six-hundred years after the initial launch written on my helmet? I put it aside - it's not important right now.

What I figured from the rest of the readings is that this planet was very unlike earth. The atmospheric pressure was almost twice Earth's average, and was comprised almost entirely of Oxygen and Nitrogen – almost zero Carbon Dioxide. The gravity sat at almost two g's – not that I could even feel the difference.

Now more familiar with my own capabilities, I begin to set about implementing the plan I had drawn up in my head while I had been inspecting the fabrications tasker. First priority: industry.

Fortunately, I've got enough tools at my disposal to make this a comparatively easy process. Step number one is getting an electric generator running. Almost everything I can make runs off of the stuff, so it seems like an appropriate goal.

I don't know exactly how time relativity works between dimensions, but my gut tells me that it's fairly consistent - not that I'd have any way to know for sure. Given that I could potentially be stranded here for years while I figure out dimensional tech… Well, I just hope that everybody back home makes it through everything ok.


I have worked nonstop for almost a week now, and yet, I felt not even a hint of fatigue. It was a little disquieting, honestly. A few days ago, I managed to get some boilers and steam generators up and running and I finished setting up automatic drilling sites to use electric power about an hour ago.

Right now, I've got a solid factory belt full of raw copper and iron headed into automatic furnaces fed by a belt of coal. My steam generators were fed by pumps that tapped an aquifer I had discovered under the spring. Right now the material was simply stockpiling, but soon, I should have automatic assemblers turning the material into more advanced goods.

Around a day into my work, I had noticed strange dog-shaped creatures off in the distance. They were blue and kept close to the ground. I didn't get a very close look before they had run off, but I know that there is at least some sort of fauna on this planet now.

Yesterday, they had returned and I managed to get a closer look at them: they were insectoid, and very clearly carnivorous. Their jaws were filled with almost comically large chitinous fangs. They hadn't attacked, but they did seem to be looking around the place. I had taken to calling them Biters.

I've got blueprints for weapons too. After I first saw the natives, I had flash-forged a pistol and some magazines with my personal fabrication equipment. I don't plan on making the first move, but I would not want them munching on me - metal skin or no.

Getting back to work, I started laying out the foundations for an autonomous assembler. I'll be needing integrated circuitry if I want to start looking at dimensional tech, so there's a few more steps to go.

I lapsed into an absent daydream. It wasn't stimulating work, so my mind wandered. I'd already thoroughly worked myself over for the mistakes I made in failing to account for the Grimleal having teleportation magic - hell, I hadn't even remembered that Excellus was a Grimleal mole until I really sat down and thought about it at the conference.

So, I instead think about Miriel. To say that I'm worried for her is a bit of an understatement - I mean, for all I know, she could be left for dead in a post-apocalyptic wasteland right now. I try to push my worries out of my mind - this was another topic I had worn myself with in the past week - yet it stubbornly refused to stop nagging at me, despite my being powerless to do anything to help her.

One of the things that I have very pointedly avoided considering - fortunately, with much success in this particular case - were the ramifications of my no longer being human. I have no doubt in my mind that once that catches up to me, I'll be in for a world of hurt, but there's work to do right now - no time for an existential crisis.

Something pulls at my attention. With a start, I jolt to awareness. It was dusk now, and off in the horizon was a pack of Biters, all charging towards me at a breakneck pace. Shit.

I fumble with my belt, pulling out my pistol. I spare a moment to consult my sensor suite - only six of them. I know my gun can put out about four bullets a second at the fastest and has ten in a magazine. I sure hope they die in one hit.

Shifting into a readied stance, I put the pond between myself and the Biters. They were about fifty meters away now. Forty. Thirty. I could see that they were far more insectoid than I had previously thought – they were covered entirely in what looked to be chitin plates. Twenty metres.

I squeezed the trigger once, then twice. The pistol let out a pair of claps and delivered the bullets squarely into my targets. The disgusting clicking noises the aliens made had turned into shrieks of pain. I fire two more bullets, and two I had already shot fell to the ground, dead.

They were almost upon me now. I hold down the trigger, and the gun begins firing automatically. Two more of them died in the rest of magazine. I quickly loaded another, but the rest were already upon me.

One bit my leg, its teeth shattered, but still punctured the metal. Its friend instead barrelled into me, knocking me to the ground. I had to fire three bullets into its underbelly before it stopped. Almost panicking now, I direct my fire to the last one, which had begun to claw at me with it's fore legs.

It perishes under the hail of lead with a hideous screech.

I stand. My leg, though damaged, still seems to work just fine. I replace the empty magazine with a fresh one, and deliver another round of bullets into the corpses of the bugs, just to be safe.

Despite the set of finger sized punctures in my calf, I felt no pain. Looking around, the pond now had two biter corpses in it.

Damn, I had liked that pond. It had looked nice.

I moved and pulled the corpses out of it. As a result of the violence, the fish were nowhere to be seen and the pond had been stained an ugly shade of green. Fucking aliens. Why couldn't they just have left me alone?

Mentally, I add another few things to my to-do list. If the natives aren't friendly - I doubt they are even intelligent, actually - I'm going to need some defenses.

Thankfully, my fabricator has no shortage of options.


I spent the next few weeks fortifying my compound and expanding my industrial capacity. The biter attacks slowly ramped up in intensity was the days passed. There has not been a day where there hasn't been an attempted incursion of some sort – though they have yet to breach my walls. The automated turret system included in the fabrication package is a godsend – it is essentially a motion tracking camera strapped to a gun on a rig that allows a small computer to point the gun at things the camera and computer designate as hostile.

Not too difficult a task when everything hostile fits pretty much the same physical profile.

The next few months went essentially the same. I expanded the compound to accommodate something new; circuit factories, oil jacks, more mines – that sort of thing, then, the biter attacks would increase in both intensity and frequency, and repeat.

It's got to the point where there's a major biter offensive every few hours, and it's starting to drive me insane. Metaphorically, of course. Once I properly fortified the compound the attacks started to include other types of biter – bigger versions of the basic Biters, and an alternate type that spit acidic phlegm.

Perhaps the Spitters were the alternate gender to the Biters? And maybe the bigger ones were part of some genetic caste system? Frankly, it's beyond the scope of my ability to say for sure. I only hope I can get myself out of this hellhole before they overwhelm me.

Progress on the dimensional tech is going slowly – with the constantly increasing attacks, I've had to spend most of my time fortifying the compound. I've already automated restocking the turrets with ammunition - a belt and some robotic arms hooked up to a factory did the trick.

With petrochemical processing up and running as of a week ago, I got access to all sorts of useful materials. Once I realised that napalm was within my capabilities, the logical reaction is to load it into a sprayer and get myself some napalm turrets. The basic idea is the exact same as the normal turrets, but with napalm in place of bullets.

One thing lead to another, and I now have a twenty-meter death zone around my compound that is perpetually on fire. It's done wonders for my defenses - I haven't had to repair a turret for a couple of days now - but it's not exactly pleasant. The air is constantly thick with ashes and smoke, and everything is coated in a oily layer of incinerated alien.

Thankfully, my machinery looks to have been designed with hostile environments in mind - there have been no issues stemming from the gunk yet.

It is a good thing that fire doesn't bother me terribly much. Sure, too much heat for too long will probably start to mess with my circuits, but I can spend far more time than a human wading through fiery death.

I also patched up that puncture I got in the first biter attack. It's literally just a steel patch welded to my leg, but at least I'm watertight again. Right now, I'm looking through the data that my radar dish – courtesy of my fabrication package – is getting us. It's not pretty.

As far as I can tell, the Biters are a subterranean species that forages and hunts on the surface – like ants. Their colonies are these bulbous fleshy sacs that dot the surface. I can only assume that they're all connected underground and that my drilling is causing them some major seismic problems – hence the attacks. Thing is, when I scanned underground to see if there were any tunnels under me, I found nothing – it's solid rock all the way down to the aquifer that feeds my boilers.

The thing is, the Biters aren't just numerous, they're completely dominating the local ecosphere – the average density of biter colonies is about thirty per square kilometre. Besides the fish, I haven't seen any other local fauna.

I think I need to deal with these colonies. The question is how I go about that. Pour napalm down the tunnels, maybe? But how am I going to get close enough to do that? Maybe if I build artillery to level the colonies from afar, then move in? Or better yet, why not just use artillery to turn the colonies' exit into a burning hellscape?

Yeah… that sounds like it'd do the trick. I mean, this planet is already a shithole - it's not as if I could make it any worse.

The last couple of months have been rough. I've been working constantly - there's always another thing on the to-do list that needs doing. But, progress has been made. I've got enough of an industrial base that I should be able to construct whatever I need for the dimensional tech.

My signature has slowly been leaking magical power into the surrounding Dead Spot. It's a bit of a worry - I'm only going to get a few tries at the ritual before I'm completely drained. Given that this plane doesn't have magical energy just laying around for me to take, I really can't afford it mess it up.

The way I measure it, I'm at around eighty percent of the magical power I had when I got here. If I know my magical theory right - and I very well might not - the bleed should be following an inverse trend. That means that the closer my magical power is to the surroundings, the less I should be loosing. This sort of bleed happens even in Archanea, but it's nullified by the natural accumulation of energy that happens when there's energy in surplus.


My compound is a wonderful thing. It's a few thousand square metres of industry on top of a solid concrete base surrounded by three-meter-high concrete walls topped with steel barbed wire and turrets. Only napalm flamethrower and machine gun turrets currently, but, I'm accumulating laser turrets to add to that list right now.

What's not so wonderful is the fact that I need so much defence. The biter onslaught has become nearly constant these last few weeks. The air was perpetually filled with the dying screams of the Biters punctuated by the staccato crack of my guns. Things have gotten to a ridiculous - if I wasn't incinerating them, they would have buried my turrets in bodies at this point.

I'm honestly not sure whether they're attacking me because I've been expanding, or because I've refused to yield to their offenses. Things started getting really bad about a week ago when I decided that I'd had enough and started to bombard their hives with napalm delivered by artillery.

It turned out that the Biters were not a subterranean species. Frankly, I'm not too sure what they are. Besides highly flammable, that is. The biter hives had no tunnels underneath them – I even did some digging after burning a few to the ground to make sure.

What I do know, however, is that the hives are less like homes and more like incubation chambers, and are, in no uncertain terms, complete bullshit. They appear seemingly out of nowhere and output Biters at a frightening rate – one every second or so – and will continue outputting Biters even as my automated artillery system burns it to the ground.

On that note, I've figured out how to stop them from appearing.

Burn everything to the ground.

Tests of carpet bombing areas with napalm - courtesy of my artillery - have shown that hives won't spawn while the land is burning. I guess that should have been a given but I honestly have very little idea how these things work.

I haven't been able to get close enough to confirm it, but I suspect that the hives are a form of extremely rapidly growing fungus-like construct that grows from something akin to a spore.

On another note, I'm producing far more napalm than I know what to do with – despite using several hundred barrels a day. I'm not producing enough to carpet bomb the continent, but it's getting frighteningly close to that point.

A few days ago I released a weather balloon into the atmosphere to do a survey of the planet's geology and geography on a whole. As far as I know, there are four continents of about the same size as the one I am on, with islands spread between. Most of the planet is land, but not by too much.

What's interesting, on the other hand, is that metallic rocks are much more prevalent than the more typical non-metallic variety – to the point that I estimate that almost seventy percent of the planet's rock-like material is actually native metals.

That's completely absurd, but, the readings don't lie - if I hadn't seen it with my own two eyes, I wouldn't have believed it. I guess that would explain why my mines and smelteries have been so absurdly productive, though.

With everything that's been going on, I haven't had the chance to focus on dimensional tech nearly as much as I'd like. The amount of manual labour I'm having to do on a regular basis is far too high. Building more industry is fairly simple – the machines are self-assembling for the most part, but managing my electrical and data collection networks, along with doing all the of maintenance is simply too much.

I had given another look through the fabrication tasker, and had found a very simple and resource efficient drone design. The things are about thirty centimetres tall and the same wide filled with some basic tools attached to some robotic arms along with a communications node and some thrusters. They're powered by some high capacity lithium-ion batteries – which I could produce almost endlessly thanks to the chemicals used to create the lithium compound being somewhat common waste products from my mining and refinement operations.

They seem like a massive help, so building a production line and recharge facilities are on the to-do list. Along with twenty other different things. I'll get to it eventually, I guess.

While they would solve a lot of my recurring problems, it would still leave me with too much work. So, given that I'm now essentially software with a metaphysical component, I've been doing some experiments towards creating a secondary instance of myself.

It's been… really easy, actually. Almost scarily so - there was a gui that had appeared as soon as I had the notion. I haven't actually gone through with it, yet, but I do have the design of something resembling a neural supercomputer that seems pretty much purpose-built to copy myself into. The idea is that I'll have one instance of myself running administrative tasks through the use of the remote maintenance drones, while the other works on getting us out of this hellhole.

It's not something I'm comfortable with - not in the slightest - but if I want to get back to Ylisse as fast as possible, it's something I'll have to do.