Chapter 11
Expending a full 50% of her mana, Sel created ten bars of Mithril, the valuable metal appearing on the table in the meeting tower with a few clinks as they settled.
Anborn had gone back and forth with her when they met in what route the Mithril courier should take, where the handover point should be, working out those little details. Since there was only ten bars of the light metal, even a single Steeloak or skeleton could carry them all in a pouch, making detection far easier to avoid. With this in mind, it was decided that the handover point would be on the stretch of river between Cair Andros and the Entwash, since with ten ingots instead of a hundred, it would be far easier to simply ferry them down the river with a single small group of trusted soldiers and a boat.
She didn't ask how they intended to handle their end of things, presumably boating up the Anduin and then straight back down and into the city of Osgiliath using the river that split it in two and from there across to Minas Anor, she only cared that they were willing to make the task far easier for her. Her chosen Steeloak would simply march straight south through the Nindalf Marshes and reach the river, upon which it would hand over the Mithril to the soldiers and then return, a simple and easy handover.
Lifting the ingots with Telekinesis, she checked them each over just to be safe, then created a leather pouch which was attached to the Steeloak Specialist's chestplate by way of a set of steel latches, inserting each ingot then closing the pouch. The Steeloak then marched around the room, shifting around and deliberately attempting to dislodge the pouch from its position, but was unable to knock it off, even deliberately.
Having ensured the safety of the valuable ingots, she sent the specialist off, watching it leave the tower then vault over the side of the battlements and slam into the ground below, immediately beginning the run southwards. Since it was carrying something so valuable, she'd given it a Rare Soul Crystal as a core, though to avoid accidentally turning the specialist into a mage only taught it a variation of the spell her ravens used. If the specialist ran into trouble it would cast that spell, informing her of trouble and thus letting her disintegrate the Mithril ingots to avoid their capture.
While it wouldn't affect her all too much if someone got their hands in the ingots since she could just make more, the idea of someone being able to steal from her really pissed her off. Even this monthly delivery annoyed her a bit, she didn't like having to be submissive to some human kingdom, but in order to keep them off her back, she'd bear with it. Besides, it took all of 50 seconds to get the mana to produce another 10 ingots, so she was in effect losing less than a minute of time.
All while this was going on Sel was still producing more Steeloak units, assigning them to the orders the skeletons had previously filled. The easiest way for her to do it was for her to create a Steeloak, then assign it a skeleton. That skeleton would in effect 'give' the Steeloak the orders it previously held, before then moving to the chasm to begin training. While this sometimes caused a few issues with her mismatching units and assigning an archer to the job of a mage or whatnot, they were usually easy to fix, and she steadily but swiftly replaced her skeletons with Steeloaks.
As she replaced the last skeletons, she then realized something she hadn't yet tested. The specialist she sent out had a Soul Crystal, but it also wielded one of the bladed polearms she had made as well as a bow, meaning it was operating with all three types of weapons. Perhaps specialists could also become magic casters, able to cast spells, fire arrows and attack in melee all as one class. Specialist actually wasn't very apt there then, there were a generalist if anything, but it sounded more like she was putting extra effort, making them the stronger and better units in her composition.
Whatever the case was, they were named now and changing them would be pointless. But she did bring the nearest specialist to her and create an Uncommon Soul Crystal, embedding it within the chest of the Steeloak and sealing it back up with Synthesis. When nothing changed, she began the process of teaching the Steeloak how to cast a Fireball, wary to see whether the name would change to Mage or not, and was relieved when it stayed the same.
After having the specialist cast a few Fireballs, she left it to practice at spellcasting, turning the implications over in her head. If she could make all her units able to use any type of weapon, including magic, that sounded like a great idea...which meant there had to be a drawback. She wasn't about to go around making all her units into Specialists only to realize a detrimental problem and have to remake her entire army.
No, she'd just experiment using her newfound resource, the skeletons in the chasm.
After some time experimenting, Sel discovered what the drawback was, and it was pretty hefty.
She had a quartet of skeletons all training, an archer, warrior, mage and specialist, all from level 1. The three regular classes had each hit level 7 before she stopped them. The specialist? It was level 3. Since they gained the early levels quickly and later levels much more slowly, the gap was even more significant than it first appeared. So, if specialists gained experience at a much slower rate, then it stood to reason they would be her most valuable units...or maybe they were just inefficient.
Perhaps it was based on how many different weapons the specialist was equipped with, since the bow/sword specialists had gained levels faster than this one had, which also had a Soul Crystal. So, specialists had the potential to be more powerful than the others, but would only come into that power after a longer training time. This meant that having general units that only had swords or bows or a Soul Crystal would be much faster to train, but also less versatile.
For now, she decided to stick to her original plan, sending the skeletons that had been training further away in the chasm to go train on their own and creating more Steeloaks. For every two specialists, there would be an archer, a warrior and a mage. She was about to send the group away to go train, then stopped. What if she bound her Steeloak together in groups of five. An archer and mage for ranged damage, the warrior for close-range, then the specialists who could switch roles easily.
During the attack, her archers had been pressed too hard and her defences insufficient to keep casualties as low as they could have been. If all of her Steeloaks travelled in groups of five, then the problem would be mostly avoided. It would also clump her units up, making it harder to guard everything, but since she was producing such a high quantity of troops, it didn't matter much.
What did matter much was the physical presence she could feel enter her area. Immediately she dropped what she was doing, flying straight up through the base and homing in on what she could feel. As she breached the surface and spotted the intruder, she felt annoyance come over her. There was an orc currently hiding beside her wall and seemingly trying to climb it.
She didn't want to kill it, for all she knew it was trying to get into contact with her, but she had done a pretty decent job at only letting a few...well, a few dozen soldiers onto her walls, so she turned on Speechcraft, controlling her volume. "Why are you trying to climb my wall?" She expected a few things, like the orc to get worried or to ignore her. What she didn't expect was for it to make a loud and shrill noise then bolt from her wall and to the nearest rocks, then from there away as fast as it was able to run.
But what was most confusing was that its face wasn't fearful, it was determined. Curious, she lifted up some of the nearby Steeloak, forming a squad of 5 as she intended and setting them to try to track the orc, rolling the brief interaction around in her mind. Try as she might, she couldn't figure out why it would react so violently yet not have fear on its face as it fled. The only thing she could think of was that it wasn't supposed to be there, and it knew that, but it was doing a task and was...determined to see it through? But they why did it flee if it had a task it needed to do?
Hopefully those questions would be answered soon, she had plenty to do and being distracted by an orc wasn't high on that list.
When the specialist in the group she sent cast a warning spell, she immediately started using Channel Vision to see from its eyes.
An unconscious growl generated and reverberated through her base as she looked upon a horde of orcs. She'd had some time to think about things, and what her mind had been leaning towards was that the orc was a forward scout, intended to scout out her defences. Maybe she was just being cynical and overly aggressive because of the two attacks she had already suffered, but she decided it was better to be ready for conflict and not fight than not ready and need to fight.
Immediately she started preparations for the attack, pulling her Steeloaks back towards her base while they were still undetected. Whatever was commanding the orc army was obviously not as dumb as a boot since they had sent orcs out to scout, even as she realized that meant they likely knew that she knew they were coming now.
Maybe they were moving at this speed because they assumed that she would think the orc that ran away was on its own, or maybe they were just complacent, assuming that she wouldn't be expecting such a large army even if she did expect an enemy force to attack her. What gave her at least a small level of satisfaction was that the orc force seemed at least as large as the human force that had attacked her, and since they didn't seem to really have any noteworthy siege equipment with them, she could expect their assault to be far more simple and easy to defend.
Just in case, she set up a few extra Crystal Whirlwinds and Air Sentinels, including some hidden behind the walls of her base, which would shoot upwards but out outwards. This way if a stray projectile made it over the wall it would still get shot down by Sentinels whose role was just that. She expended all of her mana repeatedly to achieve this, only taking a brief break to lift the Steeloak group back onto the wall where they were to continue their previous orders.
She also created as many more Steeloaks as she could, the walls being lined with her creations as she created more soldiers. While the orc assault would be more simple, that meant she was at more risk of being simply overrun. Sure, her base had no gates, but that meant the orcs would likely try to surround her and swarm over the walls with ladders.
What worried her more was that she had literally just managed to secure a tenuous peace with Gondor. To suddenly get pulled into conflict with Mordor made her quite angry. The Mithril courier hadn't cast the warning spell, and it was past time for the drop-off, so she assumed it had gone well, but she was beginning to re-consider even bothering. If Gondor wanted to attack her again after the bloody nose they had been given, they were welcome to try.
The offer she had made was more about not having to bother fighting them when she wanted time to experiment and read, but if she was going to be attacked by Mordor anyway, what was the point? She created yet more creations, producing defensive units and Steeloaks and deploying them all across her wall, most focused on the direction the orcs were approaching from.
Before too long she saw the first orcs crest the hill, and when they yelled and began to charge she already knew this assault was going to be a hassle, as ladders were visible in their arms. Her archers, specialists and mages opened fire, whilst at the same time her Air Sentinels cast Greater Wind Blades through the enemy force, and when they got too close the Crystal Whirlwinds began sweeping their crystals through the enemy army.
As before, the weakness of the Whirlwinds was discovered and abused quickly, causing her to take note that she should consider re-designing those, as they simply weren't cost-effective, but she was forced from her notes as a ladder clanked onto the top of the wall, metal hooks clanging down as they latched onto the wall to hold the ladder in place.
Already irritated by the unprovoked attack, Sel reached out with Telekinesis, taking ahold of the ground beneath the army and shifting it, making their footing unsteady. That wasn't her endgoal, but it held a good portion of the enemy forces still as she grasped hold of the ground and then suddenly pulled it open, making the orcs drop into the floor itself before releasing it, letting the weight of the stones force them back down, crushing those who had fallen below.
The control of so many individual stones and all simultaneously took a bit of a strain on her mind, making her feel actual pain as the backlash of the action hit her. She ignored it though, deciding that what she had tried to do was ineffective and shifting tacks, starting to create a large steel blade, her intent being to cleave the army apart just as she had with Gondor.
Of course, that was when a roar echoed across the stones, the orcs cheering as what she assume was reinforcements showed up in the shape of several large...things. They had pale, almost rocky skin and were practically unclothed aside from a cloth covering their groin. What was of far more note was the fact that they were each at least four times as tall as the orcs, and each one, of which there were at least a dozen, was carrying a huge sword.
Immediately she direct-ordered her Air Sentinels to fire Greater Wind Blades at the new arrivals, and as the spells impacted the trolls, they knocked them back, but failed to do significant damage. Perhaps some kind of natural magic resistance, or maybe just natural toughness itself? Whatever the case was, all the spells seemed to do really was piss the giant beasts off, as those that had been hit roared and began to charge her walls.
The Sentinels kept firing shots, but it was clear that they were ineffective and so she changed them to continue keeping their eyes out for aerial targets. The blade she had been making was now underfoot of the orcs, and seemed to have run afoul of the strange claiming system her telekinesis relied upon, as she couldn't lift it up or modify it in any way, so she disintegrated it.
Before she could start work on a new one, the lead beast smashed into the wall, shaking it and knocking the Steeloak stood above that section over. When it stood up fully, it wasn't that much shorter than her wall, and when it reached up and planted its hands upon the wall, that was the moment she began to panic. Immediately she lashed out directly, filling a Wind Blade with about ten times as much mana as it took to make it a Greater Wind Blade, then sent the whirling blade at the beast.
As it smashed the bulbous head straight on, it knocked the thing from her walls and onto its back, crushing a score of orcs as it landed. Unfortunately, aside from a livid red cut on its face, she hadn't done any critical damage, even with such a powerful spell. The only thing she could assume was that these things were really resistant to magic, since the spell had lashed out downwards and upwards as well, carving a chunk out of the wall itself.
It was at that moment that she really regretted not copying any of the siege weapons that Gondor had brought to bear, they would have been very useful right now, as the absolutely livid troll got up and roared, smashing it hands down against the top of her wall and practically throwing itself upwards and over. She felt a pulling sensation inside of herself as she watched the troll land on the inside of her wall, and she idly catalogued it as fear as she watched the troll stand up and look around, roaring as it did so.
She...didn't have a counter to this. What could she do? Maybe if an arrow went into one of its eyes, that could work? She ordered all her archers to start aiming at the eyes of the beasts, her mages and specialists all still occupied fighting off the orcs ascending the wall in various places. As they did this, more of the beasts planted their hands on the walls and hauled themselves up, crushing Steeloaks underfoot as they did so.
That was when one of the archers managed to fire an arrow right into the eye of the troll that was inside of her base, its mouth opening and allowing her to see that the insides looked fleshy and vulnerable. Immediately she ordered her archers to aim for the mouth when it was open, turning her focus back towards the depleting force of orcs. Some had made it onto the wall, but were ruthlessly cut down by her specialists, who switched to their polearms and sliced through the unarmoured orcs like they weren't even there.
Some of the orcs had crude armour, which was when her warriors stepped in with their blunt weapons and smashed them to pieces. between the two different unit types the orcs could be handled, the beasts were of bigger concern. Fortunately, she heard a sharp screech be cut off, turning her attention to the beast that had made the noise in time to see it collapse onto the wall, smashing through the nearest tower and causing the Air Sentinel to fall but not break, simply clinking off the ground and falling off the wall.
She quickly flew over, ascertaining that an arrow had entered its open mouth and hit the roof of its head through the far less tough insides, killing it. Encouraged by this, she made an arrow, upscaled it to about the size of a ballista bolt, then accelerated it as fast as she could with telekinesis before flinging it right at the mouth of the beast which had been the first in and was currently in the process of tearing an Oak Colossi into two pieces.
The bolt-sized arrow whacked right between its lips, forcing the jaw open and coming to a sudden stop about halfway in, the bolt having hit the back of its mouth and presumably been stopped by what she could only assume was an absurdly tough skin. The troll immediately collapsed, crushing the Oak Colossi it was holding as it died. She created another arrow, aiming for the next beast, then the next, all the while her forces fired at their eyes then their mouths when they opened them to scream in pain.
But that wasn't to say that she wasn't also taking damage. Many of the Steeloaks were up on the walls the trolls had climbed onto and were now crushed into unrecognizable piles. The only ones still active were those lucky enough to avoid being stomped on, or who were on other parts of the walls. She briefly wondered whether she'd already need to call up her trump card army, and as she wondered that she fired off another arrow.
The beasts seemed to have noticed the bolt that appeared and killed their kin, as many were now covering their mouths with one hand, still smashing her creations whenever they got the chance. Not that it saved them, she merely adjusted her aim so the arrow-bolt hit their eyes. The immense force behind the projectile meant that even when they shut their eyes, thus ensuring it didn't get into their heads, it was still plenty of concussive force, enough to pulp the eye that was hit and knock them out.
As another troll fell, it seemed the enemy force had decided enough was enough, the orcs were making screeching noises as they withdrew from her base in a full rout. Even the surviving beasts were wary of sticking around, and another arrow-bolt knocking one out saw them following the orcs away as they fled, leaving her with a significantly damaged base and with maybe a few dozen Steeloaks left active.
Sure, she had won, but she was worried. From how big Krant made Mordor's armies sound, this size of force wasn't really an army so much as a raiding force. She wasn't sure about how common the bigger beasts were, but that many orcs was a drop in the bucket. If Mordor could afford to throw that many orcs away so casually, she was going to need to figure something out, and fast.
But first, it was time to figure out just why those big things were so utterly resistant to Wind Blades, magic in general and even damage in general, since very few of the arrows that hit them had stuck. She first animated one, pulling out the arrow that had pierced its brain and healing the damage there before then grasping the entire thing with her Telekinesis and moving it with purpose, as she always did when animating her creations. As expected, the same binding magic wrapped around the beast, giving it movement and holding it upright as she let go of it.
Interestingly enough, when she looked at it, it had the name of Mountain-Troll, so perhaps that was what this particular beast was? Not that it mattered aside from naming convenience, she didn't care what it was called or how they were created or even how many toes it had...not that it actually had any, it had semi-rounded feet instead of toes. No, what she wanted to know was why its skin was so resistant to magic. The arrow-bolts she had come up with on the spot seemed pretty effective at killing it, but as she made one and fired it at the troll directly, she saw the bolt be deflected by the scaly skin it possessed.
She took note that the scales didn't cover its armpits, the backs of its knees or anywhere where scales would severely hinder movement, so she aimed a bolt at the back of its knee and watched it pierce the pale skin with a moderate amount of success. So, anywhere where the scales receded and were replaced by skin was a weak point. Of course, those points also were small targets and not easy to hit, but easier than trying to aim for its eyes or mouth, meaning immobilization might be more effective.
Shots to its chest, back, its head, arms and legs all were deflected by the scales, though she noted that two consecutive arrow-bolts in the same place weakened the scales with the first hit, breaking through on the second. Regular arrows had no such effect, being too weak to damage the scales significantly. She made a note to see if she could perhaps make some kind of larger bow, one with more power behind it, much in the style of the ballistae used by Gondor, but portable. The one she had copied and refined was a ranger bow, so presumably it was for scouting and lighter work, but her Steeloaks could definitely handle a bit more...a lot more draw-weight.
Maybe if she had reels of bowstring at each end of the bow, that would give them more to work with...but then she'd have to give it tension somehow and the specifics of designing that sounded just a tad too complicated to her, for now at least. Maybe in the future she'd work something like that out, but really, a bigger and sturdier bow that could fire scaled-down arrow-bolts would be a good idea.
The trolls had displayed a modicum of intelligence, covering their mouths and shutting their eyes as well as climbing the wall, but when it came time to fight in an intelligent way they were sorely lacking, not even using weapons and instead simply using their immense bulk to crush her creations underfoot. Maybe they normally would have weapons then, or perhaps whoever decided to send this force this way hadn't actually been able to train them to use them? The orcs all wielded crude iron blades and wore seemingly whatever armour they could find, some having certain pieces of the harsh black armour that seemed standard replaced with dull steel armour in the form of that the Gondorians used, though heavily blackened by soot, probably to avoid mis-identification.
It did explain though why the trolls had no armour of their own, their natural skin was superior to steel.
With just a quick test, Sel ascertained that Mithril retained more strength than Trollskin.
It was honestly a bit of a shame, since if the Trollskin actually ended up being stronger, she could make armour out of that instead, something that Gondor wouldn't even question seeing. As it was, she was now reconsidering making her Steeloak creations into Mithoak, since maybe covering them in the skin of the trolls would be better, she could play that off much easier than she could for making them out of Mithril.
Then she remembered her avatar, a sense of anger coming over her as she realized she was a massive idiot. She had already disguised the steel plating her avatar as wood. She went through Synthesis, opening the extra section to see that she could still change materials cosmetically. Pulling up Mithril, she changed it to be the appearance of steel, producing a small sheet of it and catching it before it hit the ground with Telekinesis.
Holding it in place, she used Synthesis to produce a steel sword, grasping ahold of that as well and then slamming the two together. In the aftermath, the steel sword was left with a hefty roll on the blade as the metal edge had bent back and around itself, whilst the disguised plate had lost none of its functionality or form, remaining the same as it already was.
With this re-discovery, she pushed her frustration to a side as she started to replace the external steel layer on her Steeloaks with Mithril. Of course she couldn't leave it looking like that, so she changed it to appear as normal steel. She was still pissed at having entirely forgotten about being able to change material cosmetics like that, but she would berate herself later.
For now, she finished replacing the steel layer with Mithril, and as an afterthought ran a pseudo-skeleton of the metal through the wooden inside of the Mithoak she was making. Her thinking was that even if immense force slammed into it, the internal skeleton would keep it stable, even if the internal wood fractured and broke into pieces. There wasn't really a need for the wood any more though, so as she did that she then removed the wood itself.
Once done, she then essentially copied the Mithoak in her mind, working on the internals and positioning rings of Mithril attached to the skeletons from which she could easily socket Soul Crystals to use for the Specialist and Mage roles they would undertake, which would allow for much more mana to be used. She had nothing she would want to put within the archers or warriors though, so she essentially had two different forms of Mithoak to create.
These creations were going to be incredibly expensive though, a full three million mana each. The Mithril plating them was thin, as was the skeleton, owing to its strength, but that still meant three ingots worth of the metal was being used. At that kind of price, she could make a countless number of Steeloak. The problem with producing her Steeloak wasn't the cost. An ingot of steel equivalent to two swords only cost her 500 mana. Each ingot of Mithril cost her a thousand times that, meaning that to produce a single Mithoak would have let her produce six thousand Steeloak.
No, the problem was space. After she had discovered the 'class system' which defined her units, she still had to give them orders, but not stupidly complicated ones any more, they knew how to shoot a bow and whatnot, they just needed to know what to shoot at, where to move, stuff like that. But she couldn't have 6,000 units marching around, she didn't have the room for it.
So while she would keep the Steeloak she had now made, she would start working on steadily filling out their ranks with Mithoaks...not that the name worked anymore, not when they had no oak within them. She started rolling names around in her head whilst she worked on creating Mages and Specialists, outfitting them with Rare Soul Crystals. Each Crystal cost her a million mana, meaning she had to wait ten seconds between crystals to regenerate her mana, but she usually took that long if not longer to correctly affix the crystal inside of the body of her creations.
If she took long enough that she was going to hit her mana cap, she created another Mithoak, no point wasting mana after all. Since she was already getting used to the repetitive motion of adding crystals into sockets she began working Mithril into the weapons her creations were going to be using. She wasn't an idiot, she knew from watching the fights that her creations had already gotten into that the weight of a weapon was also very important, not just sharpness.
Sure, sharpness helped, but it was also the weight a sword carried that let it cleave deeper into an opponent. So what she decided was that she would essentially leave the sword itself alone, but around the blade would be a thin layer of disguised Mithril. This wouldn't increase or decrease the weight in a noteworthy way, but would add durability and sharpness to the blade, thus making it more effective.
The Mithril could afford to be sharper than steel with much higher resistance to being rolled or chipped by impacts, but retaining the weight and allowing strikes to cleave straight through the target. As an afterthought she also coated the tips of the arrows she had made in a Mithril casing, lengthening the tip and even running an even thinner layer of disguised Mithril down the shaft most of the way to the feathers at the back of the arrow.
She did keep the original designs though, since these new creations were vastly more expensive than the originals. Each sword cost her 50,000 mana now, each arrow a full thousand mana. The cheapness, relative to other costs anyway, was because of how thin the Mithril was, likely sacrificing some of its incredibly-high durability in the name of cost-efficiency. Since she recovered a full 100,000 mana per second, she could still produce them in very healthy quantities, but nowhere near the insane speed that she had before. A sword used to cost her 300, including the wood and leather for the handle, so the price increase was a very substantial quantity, being able to produce almost 150 regular swords for a single Mithril-coated blade, but the cost would hopefully be worth it.
Even so, the first to be equipped would be her Mithoaks.