Chapter 9

Peering up into the skies above the hills, she watched the first stone projectile as it flew towards her base.

Without needing to be ordered, her Air Sentinels recognized the threat, one after another firing as they came into range, an oversight she would need to correct. The crisscrossing Wind Blades intercepted the projectile as well as plenty missing and merely flying off to dissipate uselessly. The projectile itself was blasted into dust, not a single rock or pebble striking her base.

She quickly adjusted the orders of her Sentinels, allowing only the three closest to the projectile to fire upon it, unless they had already fired in the past minute or so, to which the next nearest would fire. If a projectile came within a certain distance of her base, all Sentinels would be allowed to fire, since she wanted nothing to even scratch her walls. The army charging stopped and gawped for just a moment before firm discipline kicked in, orders barked out as they continued their assault, ladders and grappling hooks being charged towards her walls.

The ladders being brought were a fair bit longer than her walls were tall, evidently the scouts had figured out what angle her spikes sat out, so these ladders would be able to rest on the wall and act more as a slope rather than a vertical climb, utterly bypassing the spikes. The grappling hooks were probably intended for those who were far better climbers than the others, and could use the spikes themselves to help climb.

Her archers began opening fire, and as the enemy forces dropped more replaced them, charging towards her walls with as many soldiers as they could have holding shields over their heads to deflect the arrow fire. As they got near to the walls, her Crystal Whirlwinds activated, sending their hovering weapons hurtling into the enemy forces. Immediately however, a problem arose. The Whirlwinds had a short-range attack, so in one moment they sent their crystals stabbing into the oncoming enemy, and the next, the enemy had reached them.

This wouldn't be too much of a problem except for the fact that the Whirlwind relied more on speed and piercing power than strength to use the crystals. One bright spark managed to grab a crystal, and the Whirlwind was unable to yank it from his hands. Soon the word was yelled across the forces and her Whirlwinds all quickly became effectively disabled. She had half the Air Sentinels start firing Greater Wind Blades into the throng in single shots, and considered bringing some of the Skeleton Mages up to throw fire down upon the enemy force.

Another stone projectile was blasted out of the air, and she could see ballistae being dropped into position within view, the first bolts being loaded. She quickly considered her options, then decided this would be a good test to see whether she was right about ballista not being a major threat. As she observed the siege weapons, she also kept a little attention to her ability to sense by touch, feeling as the ladders approaching her walls and were suddenly lifted upwards, slamming into the lip of the wall and avoiding the spikes.

With a nonchalant order, the nearest skeletons took hold of the ladders and attempted to push them back, only to realize a problem. The skeletons couldn't physically push the ladders back far enough to make them tip over, and now stood no chance of doing it with so much weight being placed on them by the men climbing. She told the archers to just start firing, bringing up some of the skeletons warriors from inside to come to the wall and prepare to hold it against the enemy forces.

As she did that, she caught sight of the first ballista being fired, anger rippling through her as she saw the intended target wasn't the wall, it was her Air Sentinels. Her distraction with ordering her warriors to the surface meant she couldn't correct its order to let the ballista fire its shots, and the bolt smashed through the crystal, causing an explosion that chain-reacted with the smaller Uncommon Soul Crystals and obliterated the entire tower, sending rocks crashing around, crushing friendly and enemy forces alike.

Immediately she intervened directly, throwing a Greater Wind blade at the ballista that fired, overpowering the spell to a degree that when it struck the target, the ripping winds gouged a line in the ground itself as it obliterated the target and turned the men operating the weapon into a cloud of red mist. She ordered her specialists and more warriors up to the surface as well, using her Telekinesis to impale those hiding beside the wall with the hidden spikes.

The hanging stone blocks she had placed on the wall didn't have enough slack in their chains to actually hit the ladders, so those were useless for that regard. Instead, she felt for the chain links holding them up, and severed them, dropping the heavy stones down to crush those hiding below. A certain satisfaction arose within her at the screams as men were crushed into puddles, but she had no time for that, as the first men made it over the walls.

Her warriors were still thirty seconds away, so she had the nearest archers charge the men, body-slamming them in their heavy armour and sending them stumbling back, then getting close and slamming their fists into the enemy. As it turned out, a steel fist to the faceplate was plenty to dent the metal, and her archers managed to buy enough time for her warriors to reach the walls and sprint up the stairs.

She was caught off-guard when her skeletons swung their swords at the enemy only to do no noteworthy damage. The lower-levelled warriors simply kept haplessly swinging, but those that were higher level actually grabbed ahold of their swords with one hand on the blade, then used it to guide the point into any vulnerable points on the enemy, keeping them at bay and more actively using their shields. She made a note of the ineffectiveness of the swords and that she needed to develop better weaponry, and soon.

Turning her attention elsewhere, she did a brief flex of her power, sending the spikes out all around her wall and impaling more men who were unfortunate enough to be pressed in by the sheer quantity of soldiers trying to breach her defenses. The ladders on her walls were there to stay, and while her skeletons were trying their hardest the humans had gained a foothold with which to bring more men in. Since her base didn't have a conventional gate the only way in was over, and she had no intentions of letting any more footholds be opened.

Unfortunately that wasn't a decision she could just make, as soldiers managed to climb up the wall in other places using grappling hooks and engaged several groups of her archers who were there. She sent more warriors that way, having her specialists stay on the ground and fire arrows up at them, keeping their distance to avoid direct combat for the moment.

She did a brief scan of the wall, spotting where soldiers were climbing like ants up a surface and redirecting skeletons to each of those positions. She briefly considered bringing more of her troops, and before she could decide that another Air Sentinel was destroyed by a ballista bolt, creating another giant explosion. Her decision to let the enemy build those ballistae was biting her now, a dozen of the weapons spaced out on the hill with nothing exposed, firing arcing shots up and into the crystals, with too many coming for her Sentinels to shoot down, they just didn't have a fast enough mana regeneration.

Feeling anger well up as another of her Sentinels was destroyed, she took a very long moment to centre herself, ignoring the feeling of skeletons being disabled and soldiers dying. When she re-focused, she immediately ordered all of her forces bar the Prime Skeletons guarding her crystal to come up to the surface. Next, she sent a dozen bomb flies out, each one flying straight at a ballista and immediately detonating, ripping the weapons to pieces sequentially. If someone saw the flies didn't matter, she was livid right now.

Those were her creations being destroyed for a reason as utterly revolting as greed. The time for mercy was over. She wanted the crucible of conflict to learn and grow within, but this was just a crucible of anger. Using her Synthesis brazenly, she created large steel blades from nothingness, sweeping them through the air with Telekinesis and then dipping down into the enemy army. No amount of steel armour could protect against such a thick and heavy weapon moving at such a speed, a vast swathe of bodies being created as torsos were separated and heads came from bodies as those who had seen the blade tried to get down in time.

A good portion of the forces had survived, but a large quantity were dead from the singular attack, and many others injured in some form. Next, she created Soul Crystals within the army. Each one was a common Soul Crystal, and each one was just barely below the minimum size for not exploding. The following blasts began eviscerating what was left of the army, dozens upon dozens of crystals being created and immediately destroyed, a chained bombardment that went on for a full minute.

When she finally stopped creating crystals, she looked down upon the field which was soaked crimson, pink slime visible as the pulped remains of those men who just a minute ago had been so fiercely assaulting her base, destroying her creations. She felt...angry still, yes, but also sadness. She was angry her creations had been destroyed, but felt sadness for the men who had died because of her loss of control. The assault had lost all steam, all the survivors utterly in shock at what they had just witnessed. She ordered all her forces to cease fire when a skeleton was about to fire an arrow at a man, activating Speechcraft.

"To all those still alive, I offer a choice. You can continue this assault, and I promise I will kill you all, with no survivors. You can leave, Neither I, nor my forces, nor no other allied force will attack you. To your commander, I offer you a third choice. You can tell me why this ill-conceived assault was attempted. I do not expect much, but even I do not care for such pointless and wasteful bloodshed. If any attempt to assault, your decision will be noted and you will be killed as the rest. I will assume all wish to assault if more than a percentage of the survivors attack my walls. You have five minutes to decide." It would be nice to know why the assault was ever attempted, but really, she just wanted to be left alone for a while to figure out what on earth was going on with her mind.

Her mental changes could not be normal, not as erratic as they were.

"You can't simply go alone, I will not accept it."

Listening in to the conversation, she herself was slightly confused by what the enemy commander had laid out as his plan. He was going to approach her base alone while his forces packed up the camp, ready to leave at a moments notice. He would speak with her about what had happened when she left, his hope being to shed some light on the situation and see if he could resolve the 'problem' without further violence.

That was unlikely in her eyes, seeing as how someone high up evidently wanted her killed, but she had been the one to offer, so if he wanted to come alone it just meant less people she needed to keep an eye on. One of the command staff seemed pretty against the idea though, which was understandable. She had lifted all the corpses away from her walls and piled them up on the edge of her area towards their camp to allow them to retrieve the bodies if they wanted to. She was going to offer to bury the rest anyway, she had no need for them and it seemed like something she should do.

But the main sticking point the man had was that he believed she would just kill him to 'teach them a lesson'. Of course, he followed this up with the recommendation that they report what they had learned about her abilities and thus ensure the next assault was successful in bringing her to 'justice'. Of course, it was nonsense. She had been attacked first, defending herself seemed reasonable, and when she had been imprisoned, killing those two guards was...well, it was unnecessary. She could have tried something else, but she was admittedly just the tiniest bit angry at all humans for being imprisoned like she had. "Then how about you join me if you are so sure of this?"

The man then spluttered, telling the commander that he couldn't possibly walk willingly into an enemy stronghold, his father would likely strangle him if he ever returned for such an act of 'submission in the face of evil'. That seemed a bit steep to her, but then again, to these men she was some mysterious being who had slaughtered literally thousands of soldiers now. "You can tell your father whatever you wish. But this...being has given me opening to parlay, and if it shall be that I shall die, then by Eru's bidding I shall die."

After a few more minutes of argument and suggestions being turned down, the most vocal of the men left the tent, the others following him as they were ordered to leave. She watched for a few more minutes as the man seemingly readied himself for whatever 'fate' would befall him, before he strode out of his tent and she cut her vision to her scout fly.

To hear took only a little work, a slight adjustment of the Channel Vision spell to be able to also hear audio and it became Channel Hearing. She wasn't too sure how well flies could hear, but her own senses were pretty much normal even when looking through the eyes of a bird, and so as her own hearing was normal during the conversation, she labelled it as being equivalent and closed that particular case.

She switched her vision to one of her ravens, tracking the man as he walked across the camp. Several times he stopped to speak to men, disseminating his orders to some of those she assumed were more trusted to get the word out that camp was being packed up. He broke the perimeter with plenty of soldiers watching him, heading up alone over the hill before coming to a stop overlooking her base.

With a quick order, her skeletons slung their bows, whilst at the same time she created stone steps leading from the ground up onto her wall, before finally taking control of her avatar. It would be a little misleading, but if she could make them believe that her avatar was actually her, it would lead attacks away from her actual crystal. So far, no being other than her knew that the crystal was actually her, and she intended to keep it that way.

Rolling her arms, she checked her mobility, having not actually used her avatar since her ill-conceived plan to explore the world, then headed up to the surface and from there up onto the wall as the man approached the staircase she had created. There were a few observers on the hills watching, but nothing that spoke of imminent attack. Most of their forces were packing up the camp, she could see by flicking her vision up to one of the ravens flying above.

The commander reached the steps, turning his gaze to the side where bare stone greeted him. She had piled the bodies up, but since the explosions of Soul Crystals had turned many corpses into featureless slime, she had simply lifted all of that pulped human matter and created a large stone container to hold it all. It was one of the questions she wanted to ask, since she wasn't sure what he wanted done with it. Burial seemed a silly concept, since those doing the burial would be literally burying pink slime, but she was fine with just giving them their...slime.

He then started to ascend, his face set in stone as he climbed towards her. She moved the skeletons back, letting him reach the top of the wall and step down onto the ground. She hadn't actually had much of a plan for this, so had just dug a space into the nearest tower with some chairs and a table, as well as Synthesizing a candle, having gotten the materials from the candles inside of the base.

She led him in, taking the opposite chair and sitting down, letting him look around for a moment before he too sat down. "So, you decided to come. I'll be honest, you choosing to come alone is strange, though I guess maybe that's just who you are? Whatever, I mostly want to know why I've now been attacked twice. I already think I know, but better to be sure than to guess."

The man watched her for a moment, the fact that she didn't actually have a face meant she couldn't have her expressions read, before sighing. "You were attacked the first time by an overzealous former General of the Royal Army, hoping to reclaim his station through bringing a mighty prize before the king. This attack force was sent when word reached the capital that said General had sent a punitive force into Emyn Muil which ended up getting two particular men killed, both of whom were the sons of Lords. This attracted the attention of the current Captain-General, who deemed the threat as being too important to leave alone, thus sending our army with orders to assault whatever foe was within these lands, to not allow them, you, to join forces with Mordor."

She considered his words a moment, letting silence come after he finished. If that was true, then the fault rested mostly on the 'former General' who had tried to capture her and use her as a token to get back into high esteem. The second assault came because she had killed all present, which attracted more attention. "So this entire thing was just an escalation that never needed to happen?"

"It would appear so. It, however, must be said that the appearance of your forces does little to lead us to believe that you are a friend of men, re-animated corpses do not speak of a friend." She stared at him for a second, then rose a hand to where her face would be and rested it on her palm. After a moment to rein her thoughts in, she created a skeleton beside her from nothingness, surprising the man. "By Eru's grace..."

She ordered the skeleton to hop on one foot, then run in the wall, proving its corporeality. "The only skeletons present who were formerly humans were the oldest, I based my creations off what I found when I woke up, which were skeletons. They were the first thing I animated and were my most secure asset, so I just used them. The problem is that I don't have any other creations that work nearly as efficiently. To create something that looks human would take a vastly higher amount of effort, whereas creating merely a skeleton and animating that is more efficient. Their armour would help conceal them, but...none-the-less, I concede the point, they lean towards myself being a...necromancer, wouldn't they? One who kills and reanimates those who died. Not a very friendly appearance."

Waving her arm, she created an ingot of gold, letting it clank down on the table in front of her. "You can return and tell the King that if he is willing to leave the the hell alone, I'll make...I don't know, a hundred gold ingots a month and have one of my Colossi carry them down to Amon Lhaw. That'd leave me enough strength to still do what I want to do, but also is a very fair deal for pretty much nothing. I would need no protection nor any administration. An exceptionally fair deal if I do say so myself. If he wanted to, maybe he could send someone to negotiate for other material instead of hold."

And it really was good deal, for both sides. A gold ingot cost her 10,000 mana to create, which was by weight much more expensive than steel. A steel ingot only cost her a measly 500 mana, and it was an ingot large enough to turn into at least two swords. The gold ingot was a little longer than her avatar's hand and my comparison much smaller than the steel ingot. So if the King wanted to she could produce steel ingots or even directly produce arms and armour, though to avoid tipping her hand too much she wouldn't be making nearly as much as the same price in gold.

Now, 100 gold ingots every month was a pretty princely sum, but that was also only as much as ten percent of the ten million mana she had. She could produce a thousand ingots of gold in a single instant if she had a maxed out mana bar. So, she didn't use really even a fraction of her total mana production in a month on essentially paying off the King to not attack her, and the King came away with essentially a free 100 ingots of gold a month. "A hundred ingots of this size once a month, and that you will handle delivery of?" She nodded. "Well, with your word I'll leave with my forces. When I reach Osgiliath I shall seek an audience with the King and inform him of what has occurred here, as well as your offer."

"I can't say it was good meeting you, not with the whole having to fight each other, but thanks for not trying to attack me or something in a bad notion of self-sacrifice, I wouldn't want to have to do anything unpleasant." She waved the man off, watching him walk down the steps and away from her fortress, disintegrating them once he was away and leaving no entrance into her base again. Maybe the offer would be heeded, maybe it wouldn't, she just felt it was one of the easier and more likely to succeed ways to give the King no real reason to attack her, not if she was already producing him gold.

She didn't know how efficient gold mines were for Gondor, but if her offer was low, she had a lot of lee-way to work with in regards to her total mana per month. Doing some brief calculations, she worked out how many she'd have if she spent a full single day of a month producing nothing but gold ingots. Each cost 10,000, she regenerated 100,000 mana per second, which meant she could produce ten ingots per second. 3600 seconds in an hour and 24 hours in a day, 86,400 seconds, times by ten to get 8,640,000 ingots in a single day.

Of course, that was if she didn't lose even a single bit of focus during that entire time, pumping them out constantly with no regard for anything, and that sounded absolutely hellish, but it just cemented in her mind the fact that she now had an immense store of mana, and could, if she really wanted to, just wipe out any attacker under passes of Synthesized materials.

Casually, she recreated the destroyed towers, first destroying the remnants using her ability to self-destruct her creations, then created it from fresh, topping it off by creating a pair of brand new Air Sentinels already in position. She then considered up-armouring the towers, before deciding she could handle that later. For now, there was a far bigger problem knocking at the door, her mental instability.

That was one issue that couldn't be ignored any longer.

Time passed, exactly how much she didn't know, before she had a realization.

Perhaps her instability came from the fact she was progressing so quickly, with no actual memories to fall back upon. She had been aware now for a few months at most, and in that time she had gained so much knowledge and so many events had occurred. For all intents and purposes, her mind was only maybe a few months old, barring the extra knowledge she had been trickle-fed as she became more aware and the time she spent in the Void.

Using that as a basis, she began building a theory for why she seemed so unstable. With such a small amount of established memories and experiences, her decision-making process amounted to almost nothing. The problem was that this was just a theory, and that it provided no help to her either. So she was mentally far too young to have a good decision-making process, there was no way to fix that aside from gaining experience.

There wasn't really a shortcut she could use for that either. Very briefly she considered trying to find some kind of memory magic that would let her grasp the experiences of others to better equip her for the future, but that was dismissed near-instantly. For one, it would tamper with her decision-making process, tainting it with the mindset of another being, making the decisions not her own. For two, she doubted it would even really be that effective, since she had come across no memory magic in her reading.

No, the only real hope she had for the moment was that she could keep her decisions mostly level-headed until she had some experience and could more accurately judge situations and come up with the appropriate responses. One unexpected boon to the commander speaking to her was that it highlighted an issue she currently had. There was no way to address her, she had no name nor chosen definition. She didn't want to be labelled something by someone else, so had decided she really needed a name, even if it was something she just gave to those who met her, something she could be identified by.

But as she thought about it, she couldn't decide on what she wanted. Did she want it to be something that people would remember, or something casual and common which would be forgotten? This was her aggravatingly poor decision making in action, she just couldn't choose. Eventually, she settled with her original intent to be left alone, so a less memorable name. But then, what would actually be a good name? She couldn't name herself as a place of course, that'd give the game away, it was going to be the name of her avatar in reality, not her.

Since she had based her avatar off of oak plated with disguised steel, maybe Steeloak? Stelok? Sel? Sel sounded reasonable. It was easy to remember and short, but also didn't grab attention. Plus, maybe she could play her avatar off as being a Steeloak, something nobody would know but would act as at least a decent cover. It fit the design as well as sounding at least somewhat like an actual species, at least in her head, so maybe it would work.

Well, there was no reason it wouldn't. All anyone had to go off was her word, so if she said she was a Steeloak called Sel then to the world that was just what she was. It didn't have to be her actual name, even if she did have to admit she actually liked the name after testing it a few times. Sel was going to be her name, so maybe referring to herself as Sel would help her, since it wouldn't do for her to not recognize her own name when controlling her avatar.

With that, Sel moved on to producing more armour, her name now cemented in her mind. She couldn't forget though that she needed to work on weaponry for her skeletons, weapons for different situations like facing those in armour or on horseback. Their swords were effective against lightly-armoured opponents, but against those who were armoured just as well as they were, swords could not handle that, so she made only a few dozen suits for the nearest skeletons, then moved on to brainstorming weaponry.

It upset her a little to have to think about combat so much, but she didn't trust that those who allowed their greed to dominate their actions wouldn't try to attack her, all looking to make a quick bit of gold. Then again, the thought of combat made her realize another role she could undertake. Perhaps she could loan skeletons out for...no, not skeletons, it was already established that her creations made people think she was some kind of necromancer. But maybe she could create some new creation, something that didn't elicit that kind of suspicion.

She just needed a bipedal design from which to draw a little inspiration. Currently she couldn't really think of a design she wanted to use, and raw imagination was failing her. All she got to was an amorphous mass in her mind, one with no actual form aside from being two-legged. Then she stopped. Why...probably some instinctive reaction of her past telling her bipedals were a good idea...no they weren't.

A bipedal combatant was easy to knock over, with a high centre of mass and gravity, making toppling them very easy. If they were tripedal or quadrupedal, then would be vastly more stable, having more supports. If one of her skeletons lost a leg it would be basically a negligible combatant, she could tell just from the encounters they'd had so far and how much they used their legs in combat, kicking and moving constantly.

Sel began designing a three-legged creation, but as she mimicked what was in her mind with random stones laying around in what she now had dubbed the chasm, the empty space beneath her base, she saw the issue. A Tripedal creation couldn't run very effectively. Either it faced forwards with one or two legs, and none really let it travel quickly. No, four legs seemed a more efficient way to go about things.

But then she came across one of the benefits of a bipedal. Placing arms for combat was pretty...weird. That was the only way to describe what she felt when she held some stones in the correct position and mimicked the arm swinging. She tried various positions for the arm, tried two at once, or four, but none really worked. It just looked too weird. Creations with more legs would certainly be impressive, maybe mobile Air Sentinels mounted atop tripedal or quadrupedal creations, but for now, bipedals would remain her creations.

Well, those and avians...and flies. That still left her back on square one though, trying to think of a bipedal design she could use that would be effective but also wasn't a skeleton. Sel couldn't just use her avatar body as a basis, not if she wanted to avoid confusion, but maybe she could use it as a basis for designing something better. She made a new body from wood, sculpting it and Synthesizing extra wood to work with as she created the basic shape of the body.

When she was satisfied, she then plated it with a thin layer of steel before grasping the body with Telekinesis and articulating each joint, making sure it had full range of movement. She then went about animating it, watching it drop out of her grasp and land evenly on the floor. She quickly ordered the creation to move around, testing its own mobility with cartwheels, rolls, slides and other strenuous movements. Next, she created a suit of armour, the same kind she was now steadily equipping her skeletons with, and had the new creation don it, then going through more mobility practice and adjusting the armour as changes were needed. Since it wasn't just bones, certain parts of the armour had to be widened and adjusted to allow for free movement, but she had expected that.

When the new creation was able to move appropriately, she created a sword and shield for it, lifting them both over for the creation to grab. Now it just needed a name. For now, probably just Steeloak Warrior. It wasn't quite the same design as her avatar, but it was made primarily of oak and plated in steel, so the description still fit. Plus, it didn't look human. If the helmet was ever removed it would be blatantly obvious that it was not a skeleton or human they were fighting, but a metal construct.

She then created another three Steeloak units, equipping one with a bow, one with a Sword and a Bow, and the final one she opened its chest and implanted an uncommon crystal, turning them respectively into a Steeloak Archer, Specialist and Mage. They were definitely more expensive per unit than her skeleton. For every 5 Steeloak she produced she could have made 50 skeletons, but the Steeloak had two major benefits. Firstly, they weren't skeletons, so wouldn't incite that way of thinking in humans. Secondly was that they were plated in steel, making them far less easy to damage. Fire wouldn't be effective either, not with a layer of metal between the flames and the wood.

Her next order of business was in developing new weaponry...that sounded like fun.

So, it was all really just the fault of an overzealous former General of the Gondorian Royal Army.

To be honest, that way of progression sounds reasonable in my head. An ex-General sends an attack force intending to claim her as a worthy prize to get back into his old post, but in that attack force were two important sons of Lords, the kind who maybe hadn't yet had a reality check. These deaths attract the full ire of two Lords, and their anger at the general gets the attention of the Captain-General, who after receiving a report from said Ex-General that an attack force numbering in the hundreds was sent out into Emyn Muil to chase down a high-value target and utterly wiped out deemed it a serious threat and sent a serious combat force to wipe them out.

It would be even more likely if that report was embellished by the Ex-General to save his own neck, not mentioning her powers but only that she could not be allowed to escape and aid the enemy, that she could possibly even tip the scales in the eternal struggle between Gondor's shield and Mordor's blade, that would certainly be something to rouse the Captain-General to send troops to find her. I don't know, maybe it's utterly stupid and I shouldn't have written it. Oh well, it's done now.

Hope you enjoyed ^.^