This is the first chapter by which her strength is proven, and I hope you're enjoying this story ^.^

Also, I'm honestly trying to think about whether this story should move into a different Universe quickly. I've established that the Kingdom of Gondor is still strong, but waning. It's obviously not under the control of the Stewards yet, but I think a timeskip would be a good idea, and then from there having her move on from LOTR and into a new Universe, one where skeleton warriors and Oak Colossi and all that aren't actually very strong.

Just curious what everyone thinks.

(Also SURPRISE CHAPTER! =D I felt like uploading today as well since I have a decent backlog, so ta-da!)

Chapter 6


Looking around the cavernous space she had excavated, she claimed it all, then moved on upwards towards the surface.

She had expanded as much as was able, her high regeneration allowing her to quickly claim all the available space that her current mana pool allowed. She also discovered that when she went down another level, it did increase by 50,000, just as each outward expansion increased by 25,000, which was very useful. It all seemed centred directly under and around the grid that held her base, so as long as she made sure to expand mostly evenly the costs wouldn't ramp up too far.

Her idea of claiming space and using it to increase her mana storage and production had fallen completely flat with this experiment though, since compared to how much storage and regeneration her crystals had given, by comparison claiming an area wasn't as effective. She still increased her total storage by ten percent, up to 110,000 mana points, but the looming threat meant she didn't have time to spend longer on it. She wanted to see if she could get more mana and thus summon more creatures and use more abilities at the same time.

Her Telekinesis was strong, but as she tried to move more and more objects, it got progressively more expensive. Moving a single item was cheap enough that she could do it even only fuelled by 1000 mana, or two if she needed to, as she had when killing the guards, but if she had to rely on her own ability to kill enemy soldiers, she would likely need to wield literal dozens of weapons simultaneously.

That was part of the reason why she wanted her creatures to level up and become strong enough to protect her. She wasn't good at fighting, and without the element of surprise, she doubted telekinesis would be nearly as effective, not against solid shields with which they could block her projectiles. On top of that, she had only seen the rank-and-file, what if they had specialist troops with much stronger armour that protected their throats, faces and other vital points? Simple stone projectiles wouldn't cut it, she doubted even steel rods would do so.

No, she wanted to have Colossi who could simply crush an enemy underfoot, or skeleton warriors who could fight them in a straight-up fight and hold their own, even win against then. That was why she now had all of her skeletons training against each other. The fact they were now actually fighting instead of just aimlessly swinging saw a large increase in level gains, with Prime leading the pack with a ten-level lead, the majority of her skeletons now between levels 15-20 whilst Prime was up at level 32, the second-highest skeleton only at 22.

Why Prime was gaining so much experience was unknown to her, but when she looked at it, rather than being named skeleton warrior as the rest, the skeleton was actually named Prime Skeleton, so maybe the title was giving it some kind of buff? Whatever the case was, she was just glad to have a skeleton that could hopefully stand up on its own in a fight.

Her Colossi were also gaining levels, though slowly since there was no good way to train them aside from having them swing their arms about hitting nothing. If they fought each other they'd likely cause serious damage to one another, and the skeletons were obviously a no-go. She briefly considered arming them with a sword and training them as she had the skeletons, but decided to shelve that project for future testing.

As she reached the surface, she looked at her hastily-constructed fortifications with displeasure. She had used Synthesis to make thick logs which were attached together by a steel pole stabbed through their centre, each one facing the other direction from those next to it, a back-and-forth barricade. The logs all had sharpened ends, and these points were at chest-height, so it would hopefully ward people away. Behind it was a wooden stakewall, just a bunch of logs stabbed deeply into the ground. Behind that wall, in the little nook between each log, she had stabbed steel spikes deep into the ground via Telekinesis, which would hopefully help to brace the wall. There wasn't an entrance or exit anymore, the wall and spiked logs surrounded the entire base.

But those weren't sufficient. If a concerted enemy attack hit her defences, she doubted they would ever hold out, not against a determined attacker. Her first order of business was to make a hundred new skeletons, dazed lightly from the sudden drainage of literally all of her mana. She was steadily getting used to the sensation, but it still wasn't pleasant to be so suddenly drained.

As her mana returned, she began mentally constructing a bow in the same form as the rangers had wielded. It looked nothing like theirs by the time she was done with it, but it would suffice for her purposes. She also designed a steel-tipped arrow for the bow, cementing them in her mind and unlocking them both in Synthesis, producing one and a handful of arrows then giving them to the nearest skeleton, unsurprised when it turned into a Skeleton Archer.

She then ordered it to shoot an arrow at the palisade, realizing an issue as soon as it fired. She hadn't feathered the arrow, though a quick journey downstairs to break open a pillow say a feather for her to copy with Synthesis, attaching them to the arrow in three points, then creating more arrows. She had to rework the arrow twice more, and the bow a full five times before the Skeleton Archer was able to actually use it properly, issues consistently cropping up and needing to be ironed out.

When the archer was able to reliably fire the bow without an issue, she made another 99 bows, waiting for her mana to return as she then began making a crude quiver. It would wrap around the skeleton's spine and dangle behind their back, within reach of their right hand to grab and draw their arrows easily. A hundred of those were made and distributed, then she began creating a large pile of arrows, ordering the skeletons to grab at least ten and then begin practising, following on that order by telling them to collect their arrows and re-use them after firing all ten.

She added another layer of orders by telling them that if an arrow broke, they would continue, but when five arrows were broke or perhaps lost, they would come back to the middle of the walled area where she would make a pile of arrows. They were to grab as many as they needed to go back up to ten, then go back to practising. She laid over a few more orders as failsafe, like if their bow broke and whatnot, went over and created a pile of a thousand arrows which the dumped on top of a quickly-synthesized flat piece of wood, then it was back to the wall.

Sure, archers would be helpful, but only if they could actually fight. To this effect, she started extruding a wooden platform around the wall, on the inside and dipped down so the spiked tops of the wall came up to about the waist of her skeletons. This way, they could crouch down for cover against return fire. She supported it regularly with steel poles which jutted down into the ground and anchored in place, ensuring the wood wouldn't easily collapse.

Next, she added inverted steel spikes in each gap between the logs pointing down at an angle, so anyone trying to climb would be met with a row of sharpened steel points. Her main hope was to keep her enemies out of the walls. If they got inside, they'd have to contend with her Colossi, but she hated the idea of letting them get into her area any further than necessary.

This was how she spent several days and nights, time being tracked merely by the fact it changed between day and night a few times. She fortified the walls, replacing the wooden barricade she had made with steel, serrating all the surfaces so just touching it would cut her opponents. She raised the entire height of the wall and put a rounded piece of steel on each of the logs making up the wall, to stop it from being set on fire easily or chopped with an axe.

She also made more skeletons, hundreds of warriors and archers, having to send them underground to train since she was running out of room aboveground. She also sent a dozen freshly-made skeletons out towards where she assumed her enemy to be coming from, to act as a scout. Then as an after-thought she made another few dozen skeletons, sending them out in all directions to search for the enemy, flicking through their vision occasionally. For all she knew there was a group of soldiers who were actually approaching from the east, and she wouldn't have known until she saw them.

That was when she took note of a bird flying overhead, and had an idea tip-toe into her mind. Her skeletons and all that were good for fighting, but if she wanted a good scout, what was to stop her from using a flying creation. Better yet, it would also give her access to an aerial attacker who could peck out eyes if they got lucky. She looked around for the highest level archer, a level 13, and ordered it to shoot down a bird, then went back to work upgrading things and doing preparations.

She didn't have her clock nearby nor was a skeleton looking at it so she couldn't check, but it didn't feel like too long before her skeleton brought her a black-feathered bird. She sent the archer back to practice after pulling out the arrow embedded in the bird, using one of the spells she had gotten from reading. It was a basic healing spell, and it slowly closed up the hole the arrow had shot through the bird. Of course, it was still dead, but that didn't matter.

She grasped the bird using Telekinesis, making it flap its wings and...hmm, maybe the best term for it was animating her creations. It seemed like the best term for what she was doing, giving them artificial life and thus animating their lifeless forms. it would suit it for the time-being unless she found a word that more suitably fit the scenario. She also had unlocked more for her Synthesis, having not actually remembered to add the forms of any guards she killed to it, not that she was sure her avatar was also capable of it.

She was now able to make the flesh, the jelly-like eyes, the black feathers and all the other parts of the 'raven' as her vision told her, as well as producing another Raven for a pretty steep 500 mana. Then again, it was using living matter she supposed, flesh and feather rather than just bone, so maybe that was why such a small creation cost an exact half as much as her skeletons. She created a dozen ravens, discovering quite quickly that they were able to see using their own eyes, and she was also able to view the world through them.

This saved her some time casting True Vision, sending them all to fly off in all directions and scout for targets, recalling the skeletons she had sent out. Before too long, as she was checking their vision, she saw that one of them was circling high above a column of troops. Focusing on that one, she quickly counted the column. 5 wide, and at least a hundred men long. They were marching straight towards her base, and at the pace they were travelling at, it'd be less than an hour before they arrived. It was currently midday, so the night wouldn't help either side.

She got the nearest raven to head behind the column and see if they had more troops coming, quickly flicking through all other viewpoints and seeing nothing else. 500 sounded like a lot, but she had that many just in archers, with maybe a hundred more skeleton warriors. Just to be safe, she went back to her crystal, carefully lifting it up and carrying it all the way to the lowest level of her base, creating a thick stone wall around herself. She wasn't able to fully encase herself in stone, there had to be a hole at least as big as one of her skeletons, but it seemed able to recognize doors, as she was able to put a heavy stone door on the entrance, one side of the door extended up and down which was used to lock into holes in the floor and doorframe. This would let the door pivot but not be moved out of position.

Prime was ordered to stay stood inside the room, as well as a full five-dozen regular skeletons arrayed in front of the room. If push came to shove her main backup plan was to levitate herself upwards, digging a hole through the ceiling with Telekinesis and finding somewhere to hide, create more skeletons, and slowly whittle down any invading force. All of her archers were still training, but the instant she decided it, they would all stop what they were doing, immediately grab all discarded arrows then rush up to the surface where they'd grab another fifteen arrows from the pile before moving to garrison the entire wall.

She'd only had to replace two bows and thirteen arrows so far, which was rather useful, since it left it unlikely that they would break during the fight. Just to be safe she placed fifty bows equidistantly spaced around the wall, so if one broke the skeleton who broke their bow could grab the nearest and keep firing. There were also wooden bins around the wall with more arrows, so when the skeletons fired their arrows they could replenish without needing to go back to the middle of the area.

One thing she only noticed by luck when flying through to go and double-check that she was secure was that the Book Golem in her library seemed to have gained a mana bar when she wasn't looking. It was only level 7, and when she focused on it she could see it possessed 700 mana, so presumably each level gave it 100 mana, but that was quite considerable. 700 mana was enough to cast 70 candle-blower spells.

Offensively, she only had a fireball and a wind blade spell. The fireball cost 300 mana to fire and the wind blade a slightly cheaper 250, so if the Book Golem could use those spells, it could prove to be a potent magic caster. This also explained part of the reason why her Golem was more expensive than even a Colossus, because it could cast spells! Immediately she ordered her Book Golem to attempt to cast a fireball spell, slightly disappointed when it didn't work. She tried the same with the Wind Blade, to no avail.

On a hunch, however, she Synthesized the book that had taught her the Wind Blade spell, dropping it into the Book Golem. As it entered the empty space in the middle of the creation, the book was halted, the cover and pages being flipped rapidly before slamming shut and moving to a seemingly random point on the golem, letting it grow just the tiniest bit.

When she again ordered the golem to cast Wind Blade, the stone she ordered it to target was slashed by the magical attack, rending a vicious gouge in the rock. Relieved at the discovery of another powerful weapon in her arsenal, she sent the golem up towards the surface. Rather than immediately sending it to actually be outside, she sent it to the nearest room to the stairs, then had it training. It would continue it's aimless attacking, but it would also, whenever it had the mana, cast a Wind Blade at the wall.

Unfortunately, her plans weren't also without setbacks. Because she had focused so much on immediate external defense, she had neglected to build any underground fortifications aside from those around her crystal. If things got bad she'd have to do it on the fly, and while her mana regenerated quickly enough to...that was an irritating realization.

She honestly didn't need much of what she had planned. Wind Blade cost 250 mana to cast, which was certainly a reasonably number. She regenerated 1000 mana per second, meaning she could fire four of those spells in a single second. Considering how it gouged a line in stone when cast, she doubted that steel armour would withstand more than a few blows. Fireball wouldn't even care, it would blast through any gap, burning skin and lighting hair on fire. With just those two spells, she could probably hold off a 500-man strong assault. Slightly annoyed at herself, she still decided to continue her last-minute preparations.

After all, if she fought all the men, none of her units would get live combat experience.


Finishing up the last steel spike, she viewed her newly fortified base with satisfaction.

She hadn't had time to set up anything advanced, but what she had spent the last twenty minutes digging small holes in the ground, thin but deep, then putting steel spikes into them. The idea was that she would use telekinesis to suddenly lift several spikes up underneath a target, impaling them where she hoped their armour was weaker, on the bottom of their feet and their groin.

Her ravens were still flying around all over the place, but she had made a new group of them which would be flying around seemingly at random, but on her order would begin trying to attack the soldiers. She doubted their effectiveness, but every eye poked out was one less looking at her base. Plus her birds would be a major distraction, allowing her archers more shots. If push came to shove she could raise all the spikes around her base and make a wall of them, but that'd cripple her offensively, since she couldn't hope to lift all those spikes at once and retain enough focus to do anything else.

Even up to the moment that the first soldiers crested the nearest hill and started scouting her base, she was still adding and changing small parts of her base, making absolutely sure she had done everything she could to win this battle. For all she knew they could nullify her abilities and beat her creations with ease, but she wouldn't be able to live with knowing she hadn't tried as much as she could think of in the time she had.

Several times she had realized plans but too late to do anything about them, like rolling boulders down the hills of Emyn Muil to damage the column of troops, keep them wary and injured, maybe killing a few in the process. It was too late to do it now, of course, but maybe in the future if she survived this assault she could try it. Interestingly enough, the assault came a lot earlier than she expected.

The scouts probably reported upgrades being performed through magic, and the commander of the unit must have decided that allowing her any more prep time would be lethal. What did shock her was that the entire force was being used in one attack. It made sense, their best chance of victory was to assault and overwhelm her, but it also went against a lot of the tactics she had read about. Normally an attacking army against an entrenched enemy would use siege equipment, a single boulder would probably break her walls after all.

If they wanted to attack her so abruptly though, that was fine. Her archers began firing off shots, more than half the arrows missing. Since she had literally had a hundred or so archers able to engage currently, that meant with a miss-rate of over half, that still left a lot of arrows to hit their targets. As expected, most of those arrows simply bounced off their armour, but there were a few lucky hits to vulnerable spots, some soldiers dying outright after being hit in the face whilst others had arrows find their way into parts of the armour that were of leather rather than metal, the steel arrowheads piercing through and injuring them.

As the soldiers took their first steps over the steel spikes, the holes for which were small enough to not be easily noticed, she grasped the spikes underneath targets and suddenly, violently ripped them upwards, impaling a dozen men at once, then immediately retracting the spikes back into the ground before anybody could react. The sudden sight of a dozen men being brutalized from seemingly nowhere was a rather nasty hit to morale, made worse when she began firing Wind Blades out. These weren't able to break through the steel armour of the soldiers in a single hit, but two or three hits in the same place would gouge enough metal away to break the target in half, usually chestplates, and leave the soldier targetted exposed to a final hit.

She threw a few fireballs in for added effect, lifting more spikes whenever the enemy soldiers stepped on them. Using telekinesis she pulled some of the nearest corpses up and over her wall, piling them behind it for future examination. The theft of their comrades corpses seemed to rouse a fury in the attackers as they rallied and attempted to charge.

Attempted being the keyword. She waited and let the enemy forces mostly come over her spikes, then rose the entire section as one, impaling five dozen and change in a single blow. This time, she held the spikes up, letting the men see the impaled and eviscerated corpses of their friends and allies before letting them drop down to the floor unceremoniously, going straight back to carving a bloody swathe across the enemy forces.

It wasn't a hammer that broke their morale, but a stick, as she simply killed and burned and impaled through the enemy force without care. She spotted one man attempting to organize a harried retreat, focusing a dozen Wind Blades towards him and being rewarded as they cleaved through his armour and then his chest, splattering blood across the nearest soldiers.

She took care to make sure nobody escaped, a full dozen Wind Blades carving straight through the armour of any who tried to run. The last survivors were the ones who had made it across her spike field before she rose it, the rest all were already dead. Maybe if she cared at all about the species who had betrayed her she would have offered them a truce, but she did not, and worked her way through the soldiers as they tried and failed to do anything against her forces.

As she cut the last head off, she took stock of the situation. A dozen of her own skeletons had been 'killed' by arrows fired by the enemy force, and many of the spikes embedded in the ground were now blunted, but these really were not notable losses. In comparison, every single soldier of the 500 man group had been butchered. Interestingly enough, it seemed that her skeletons counted death as being damaged enough to be incapable of action. The ones that had died all had some sort of major injury to their spine or skull, one of whom had an arrow go straight through one eye socket with no other damage.

She hovered over the battlefield, spotting those who were merely injured instead of dead. Rather than immediately kill them all, she lifted the ground beneath them, hauling those downed men into her wall where her skeletons then disarmed them and stripped their armour, leaving them highly vulnerable. Any who resisted in a meaningful way were immediately killed, she didn't want to risk even a single incident.

It wasn't like she had an actual plan for those she had captured. She had to think of one quickly though, since she only had a rudimentary knowledge of first-aid, having not exactly looked at that kind of book very much. That meant the injured would probably die within a day or two. She also had no food or water, and while raiding their camp for their supplies could be a good idea, she also felt like that was a lot of effort expended for mot much of a reason.

She decided to just try different tests on them, like trying to lift of influence them and items around them with telekinesis, gauging the limitations of her ability. It seemed anything designated at theirs, so themselves, their armour, weapons etc were off-limits. However, the ground beneath them was not theirs and so she was able to move them using the ground itself. When she impaled someone with a spike, she was also still able to control it.

Using this, she was able to stab spikes into critical points on her subject and crudely force them into a facsimile of motion. They bled out soon after, but she was learning more about the limitations she was living within. This led her to wonder if she was able to actually stop arrows fired in mid-air, since it would still be deemed as their object but had left their sphere of influence. When the armour and weaponry of the injured had been removed, even while still alive she could move it around, so perhaps she could do the same with an arrow?

She wasn't about to give any of them a bow, obviously, but it was something to test in future.


With a quick lift, she confirmed the death of her last test subject.

She had tested a few things, which included trapping one of them in a stone room with a skeleton, each having a sword, to see how they held up. The skeleton was a level 20, and it was clear from the get-go that against regular rank-and-file infantry, it had a small advantage. It wasn't immediately apparent, but her skeleton took less hits in general, with the attacks that landed being less severe than the long bloody rents scored all over the body of its opponent.

She had also tested how effective certain attacking methods were. Eventually she settled on simple steel balls, about as big as a human finger-nail. If she accelerated a steel ball to maximum velocity and hit someone, even one wearing a steel helmet, the ball punched straight through. What was rather interesting was that as long as she maintained a telekinetic connection to the ball, she could then force it all the way through the target and into another.

There were various other tests she performed, like testing how fast a sufficiently motivated soldier could run fully-armoured, quickly deducing that her skeletons would be outrun over short distances. Where they shone through was in endurance testing. If she could force her target to flee, her skeletons could continuously run towards them, never stopping or tiring. As long as the opponent had no way to rest, eventually her skeletons would run them down.

The last, and most important test she ran, was on deducing just how tenacious 'humans' could be when pressed. Already there had been three escape attempts, each one by those who hadn't seen the others who tried to escape. This led her to attempt making an example out of the escape in front of the other soon-to-be-deceased humans. The term was unfamiliar with her, but she had heard one of the prisoners say it and had gotten him to tell her what it meant through the aforementioned endurance testing. Needless to say he was similarly unable to run away from her skeletons for more than 15 minutes before his exhaustion caught up to him and he was skewered on swords.

With them all dead though, and her steadily-increasing quantity of raven scouts all seeing nothing, she found herself free to do what she felt like once again. Her first order of business was establishing a method for her ravens to autonomously scout and actively report back to her. Right now she was relying on checking their vision every so often, and if they were circling a group then it was obvious they'd found someone.

It'd be best if she was immediately warned though, so she turned back to books, looking specifically for some kind of message spell, or at least some kind of theory-crafting book which would let her create her own spell. Her hope was to compress down a Soul Crystal to as small as possible and implant it within the ravens. The capacity would likely take an immense hit, maybe enough for a single candle-blower, but since her plan was for an extremely cheap alert system just telling her that she needed to look at that ravens view point, even that little mana was enough.

But first, she had to actually find out how spells were made.