Chapter 7


So, as it turned out, making a new spell wasn't actually her biggest issue.

That didn't mean it wasn't really damn hard. Existing spells had been practised and tweaked a countless number of times to ensure the optimal usage of mana. Every time she tried to make her mana move in another way, it fought her for every single action, half the time just fizzling out without doing anything even noteworthy. It took trial and error to actually make her mana change into the kind of form she wanted it, which was as a stream of information. There were three things she wanted the spell to sent from her ravens to her.

The first was what raven it actually was, so she could focus straight onto it without wasting time. Secondly, she wanted to know what level of threat had been found. A small group of like 4 mismatched people would have a much lower rating than an army of 1000 soldiers. Third and finally, she wanted to know how far the bird was from her base. The first would be much easier than the second and third, simply because they had far more complicated variables. The first was an absolute variable, it wouldn't change for any bird, each one had a distinct identity and thus the spell couldn't really fold over itself.

The second required intelligent target identification. Fortunately, for now she could afford to ignore this, since any alert by her ravens would need to be looked at, but in future it was something rather important for gauging the need for checking immediately or not when she had literal thousands of birds. And the third...the third was complicated in an awkward way.

The measurement system her memory had given her had kilometres, metres, centimetres and millimetres. What she wanted to do was somehow have the raven be able to, at any time, gauge the exact distance down to the nearest metre. The problem was exactly how she could do that, and the answer actually came in the form of bats. She had read a book on biology, and featured within was also the biology and unique method of detection that bats used to 'see', echolocation.

They sent out a pulse of sound which reflected back at them and told them the distance to obstructions. It was why they made so much noise, it was so they could see. Using this as a baseline, she had the spell set so it would travel back towards her base. She had her Book Golem as essentially a beacon, a different mana source which her spell was able to detect and reflect off of.

Using that, she had the spell then bounce back towards the raven. Using this, the spell would measure how long it took for the mana to reach the base and then return to the raven, and once she measured how fast the mana travelled, which was roughly a kilometre a second, she was able to measure the distance. It wasn't yet accurate, since the raven would move between casting the spell and having the distance pulse reach the bird, but for a rough estimate it was the best bet.

The spell then had a second phase, where it took the information and compressed it, firing it out like a very similar pulse as to the distance calculation, except this pulse was designed to target a single entity, her. The pulse would fly towards the base, and once it entered the area it would effectively disperse. In testing, her area latched onto mana that wasn't a part of a spell, presumably why her area expanding gave her a larger mana pool and regeneration, so she would assimilate the spell.

There was probably some kind of fuckery going on from whatever being was getting its kicks from watching her since how it went from that to her assimilating the information contained within the spell she didn't know, but since it meant she had a rudimentary early-warning system operational, she let it slide. The spell now worked, as she created a second Book Golem using the first as template, with the side-note of spawning with a mana bar this time, and then sent it away from the base to cast the spell. The information returned to her, telling her that it was Book Golem 02 who sent the spell and that it was around half a kilometre away.

Now, the actual issue with her making the spell was getting her ravens to be able to cast it. They didn't spawn with mana, and even force-levelling a raven up to level 20 by having it attack the corpses of the prisoners didn't unlock one. That meant she had to implant a Soul Crystal into them and have them draw upon it. Next tier of the issue, the Soul Crystals were almost as thick as their throat, so there was no free space to put them. That meant she had to shrink it down.

But another layer of trouble made itself known when she tried that. Shrinking the Soul Crystals tended to have rather nasty consequences of the explosive variety. The instant they were created they detonated rather violently. She tried a few things, including creating the crystal underwater, or inside of a corpse, or making it appear inside a raven itself in the hopes of the bird somehow assimilating it. Each one ended the same way, with an explosion. She could make the crystals bigger, but not smaller. Any smaller than the standard size her Synthesis produced blew up just as violently.

Unless she could find some way to give her birds mana, her plan was going to be in shambles.


Flipping the page back and forth, she considered the implications of Soul Crystals.

The Soul Crystal - Common had a minimum size because of the quality of the crystal. To make it any smaller would compromise it and let the mana leak out in a big burst, causing the explosions. It was also this size that was the most efficient for mana storage, the larger the crystal the greater the diminishing returns were. A crystal ten times the size of the standard crystal would only have twice the storage capacity. Ten times that was only a 50% increase, and so on.

However, the Uncommon was apparently able to be a full ten times smaller, at the cost of sacrificing as much in capacity. So, an Uncommon Soul Crystal would be able to hold as much as the Common, but much smaller. That meant that if the system was following a logical progression, the Rare would be able to be even smaller. If she could get up to the higher tiers of crystal, her Avatar could become a receptacle for even more mana than her area could hold.

The book she was reading already told her about how to make the Uncommon and even the Rare Soul Crystals, and interestingly enough, they both used human flesh in their rituals, something she didn't recall seeing within the base. She hadn't yet seen how to make any of the higher tier Crystals, but since just with these she should be able to get to a million mana at a minimum, and ten million at her higher estimation.

With 100,000 mana right now, having started at 1000ish, if the Uncommon was only usable 99 times and gave an increase of 10,000 each time, she would go all the way up to a million mana. Then the Rare giving 100,000 99 times taking her up to 10 million. There was always the chance that her mana gains wouldn't shift according to her predictions, which could go both ways, but since the system that was guiding her seemed pretty fair and reasonable, she doubted that it wouldn't continue on its set course.

It'd be pretty bizarre if it randomly started to change after all.


Pushing her mana out, she began to create the next step in her progress.

She'd decided to focus on performing the ritual for the Uncommon Crystal, having a small pile of Normal Soul Crystals all charged near her just in case this ritual took more mana than presumed. She ended up not needing them, but it was far better to be safe than sorry. Having already performed the ritual once, she wasn't too worried when her mana dipped heavily to fuel the creation, and when it was finished she immediately logged it in her Synthesis and began to steadily produce them whenever her mana was capable of it.

As expected, when she absorbed the crystals, she gained a full 10,000 extra mana, as well as a hundred points of regeneration, which sped her creation up further, a feedback loop which ended up making the production of crystals a matter of seconds. Each crystal cost 100,000 mana, so at the beginning it took a little over a minute to make one, but steadily became easier and easier. When she hit a million mana, the increase stopped entirely, the crystal she had been absorbing only giving her a portion of the mana before stopping.

That was odd, maybe some kind of limitation both to keep things neat but also to keep her under control? It didn't matter much, she now had the mana to produce rare crystals. But, before she did that, she wanted to try to shrink down her Uncommon Soul Crystals as much as they could go. She opened Synthesis and selected the crystal, focusing and willing the Crystal to form as a far smaller item than the normal crystals.

It took a minute, and once or twice she almost gave up upon believing the crystal was going to detonate, but eventually, the small gem flashed into existence, immediately being grabbed by her Telekinesis and observed carefully. She could feel the crystal steadily absorbing small portions of ambient mana, and a feeling of satisfaction rolled over her as she deduced that if she removed some of the unnecessary internals of her ravens, she could easily socket the little crystal into them.

She lifted it upwards then let it fall, testing the speed at which it descended, very roughly gauging its mass by the size and the speed of falling. If she took out the lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and basically all the unnecessary bits, beefed up the musculature of the wings and torso, she could make the bird fly faster and be able to lift the crystal that would become its new heart. She would also have to probably do more adjustments to make sure the birds chest didn't collapse, and maybe mess with the aerodynamics, but the main objective had been achieved.

She now had her newly-dubbed mini-crystals.


With a simple order, all her ravens suddenly vanished from the air, dissolving into nothingness.

It was a bit of a waste of mana, but her plan involved such a drastic change that it'd probably be easier and cheaper in the long run to replace all the regular ravens with her new and improved ones simply by removing the old ones and sending the new ones out in their place. Creating the new ones took a short while, as she had to create quite a few mini-crystals, each of which cost as much as a Common Soul Crystal. Of course, that still only meant she took a single second for each Crystal, but since she was making dozens of birds, as well as double-checking to make sure each actually had access to the crystal and that it was regenerating mana by having them cast a test spell, that did take a little time up.

One severe change she had made was on the distance detection. Rather than base it on a Book Golem, she created an immense Common Soul Crystal. This crystal cost a whole 100,000 mana, and was taller than her Colossi. She embedded it into the ground in the very centre of the wall surrounding her base, filling it with mana. She then tuned the spells her ravens were going to use to only reflect off of that specific source of mana, which took a surprisingly large portion of work to do.

Since the Soul Crystal wasn't even pseudo-alive like her creations were, she had to distinguish the crystal from any other mana, otherwise the spell would simply detect ambient mana in the air and reflect back far too early. The solution she eventually came up with was to turn the crystal into one of her creations. She did this by levitating crystals around it and picturing it as a stationary creation, one that would defend itself by swinging the floating crystals at its enemies, but the main crystal being unable to move.

Thus was born her first stationary defence unit, the Crystal Whirlwind. It was just as alive and capable of levelling as her other creations, but had no power to move under its own strength. Since it was literally made out of a Soul Crystal, which was able to tank being hit with a steel sword swung by a skeleton several times before cracking, she figured that was going to be just fine.

With the newly-created Whirlwind, she was able to attune the spell to reflect off of the central crystal, adjusting it so that it gave as accurate a measurement of distance as possible. She sent a raven out to test the spell when it passed two hills, and at the same time, she downsized the Crystal Whirlwind and placed a dozen of them outside of the walls at equidistant points, giving each one pointed orders for how they should attack enemies.

These crystals would probably be able to take anything that the men hunting her could dish out. Since they were a lot larger than the crystal that her skeleton had cracked, they could likely take a multitude of attacks without breaking. One sad limitation was that they only worked inside of her area, and another was that the maximum crystal 'shards' they could wield was 4. That was probably a limitation that would be increased by levelling up. Imagining a swarm of thousands of tiny crystal shards furiously shredding anything that came near was enough to confirm in her mind that her Whirlwinds would do great things for her.

To that effect, she set about figuring out an efficient way to level them up, eventually settling for a sacrificial system. She spawned skeletons and equipped them with steel shields copied from the shields that the soldiers were using, as well as their armour. Then she had her Whirlwinds attack them until dead, upon which they disintegrated into a white powder on the floor.

She spawned five of these skeletons for each Whirlwind, but her Whirlwinds didn't increase much in level, each one going from level 1 to 3 with five kills on armoured skeletons. Instead, she spawned a hundred skeletons and had them fight in pairs. All those who won fought other pairs, which began substantially levelling a handful of the skeletons. The end fight was a level 19 vs a level 23. The level 19 actually won, and rose to level 20, which made it clear to her that while they levelled up and improved, a lower level creation could still kill a higher level.

She then had a Whirlwind attack the level 20 and kill it, rising it from level 3 to 5 in a single go. This proved to be just as inefficient though, so she ended up creating Book Golems and having them fight back as well, since they couldn't cause notable damage. This seemed the most efficient, since her Whirlwinds gained levels at a noteworthy frequency. Using this, she had her Whirlwinds fighting Book Golems.

All her other creations were also training, with the exception of her ravens of course. She had begun the process of making armour for all of her skeletons, as well as doing tests to see what weapons her skeletons could equip. When she gave a skeleton warrior a bow, its name changed to skeleton specialist, and the level returned to level 1. The same occurred when she gave an archer a sword. The specialist could use both weapons, but needed more practice to level up before it could become as effective. If a skeleton warrior spent an hour training, the specialist would need an extra 30ish minutes to reach the same level of skill.

A little tentatively, she gave Prime a bow, relieved when its level and title didn't change. Perhaps Prime was a higher tier of...what would it be, a class? A job-role? Whatever it was, Prime was higher than Specialist and thus didn't get overwritten. Whatever the case was, she equipped it with armour and a shield, as well as a sword-frog to hold the blade if it was using the bow, and a quiver.

The quiver she had made for her skeletons wouldn't work because of the chestplate, so instead she used Synthesis to add loops on the back of the plate where the leather strap attached to the quiver would be affixed. This would hold it quite firmly in place and prevent it from shaking about and pouring out arrows on the floor. She made a mental note to copy that looping system for all her specialists, who would all be getting armour and quivers, setting Prime to continue practising against the second-highest skeleton on her forces. The skill-gap was considerable, but it was even more considerable when the fact that the two skeletons were essentially empowering the other.

Sure, the lower levelled skeleton rarely won, but that skeleton was a good 7 levels above the next highest skeleton, just owing to the fact that it had been fighting Prime, who was incidentally power-levelling it. She started nicknaming the second as Delta, curious to see if her naming system would recognize the skeleton as unique and bestow its own title. if it did, she would then be able to give Delta a bow and retain its level.

She had debated whether or not to Synthesize a 'human', but decided it wasn't worth the hassle, not yet anyway. Perhaps in future using Synthesis and an adjusted version of Speechcraft she could send out her creations as spies to gather information from the human settlements, but for the time being, she was more focused on making her base nigh-impregnable.

To this end she beefed up her walls immensely, the main wall being risen up, whilst the wood was swapped out for smooth stone, formed entirely as a single piece over the course of several minutes of focus with Synthesis. The base cost of the wall was too much for her to do in a single dump, even with her million points of mana, but by deliberately slowing the process down she allowed her mana regeneration to aid her, forming a single solid piece of stone around her base.

There was no need to make a gate, she had no intentions of sending any ground troops out now and even if she did, she could simply lift them over the wall with Telekinesis and then back over upon returning. She made crenellations all along the top of the wall for her skeleton archers and specialists to use, and placed steel spikes all along the wall beneath those pointing down at an angle to stop any from attempting to ascend the wall.

Then, beneath those, she hung blocks of stone from heavy chains. Her plan was to counter ladders and climbing equipment, using telekinesis to smash the rock into the ladders and send them falling down to the ground. She probably couldn't directly influence the ladders since they'd be deemed as owned items, but there was nothing to say she couldn't hit those same ladders with another, pre-prepared object. Sure, she could just make a small rock and push the ladder that way, but this would be something she could do with a mere mental flick. If she was in the middle of a siege requiring that kind of action, every single ounce of mental focus she could spare would be crucial.

A siege. That was one eventuality that she hadn't really thought about. What if the attackers just dug underground or stayed away and bombarded her defences into nothingness? Underground she could somewhat protect, slowly plating the entirety of every single wall, ceiling and floor with thick steel, but what if they broke the aboveground?

Her only hope then would be to barricade the entrance and defend it. She tried to think of effective countermeasures, and eventually came up with one. Say her attackers attempted to attack her with a trebuchet or catapult or anything with an arcing shot. All she had to do was shoot the projectile out of the sky. Failing that, she just had to stop it hitting anything important.

Using what she had learned from the Whirlwinds, she started to experiment.


As another plan went out the proverbial window, she tried to think of a better way to do what she wanted.

All she needed to do was shoot down an incoming projectile at high speeds with other variables like wind, size, angle, and just a lot of complexity. One of the main issues was that if it was a catapult stone, it was a lot smaller than a trebuchet stone and thus harder to hit, plus would likely travel faster and at a shallower angle. She had to make something which could see the projectile, gauge accurately where it would be to a reasonable degree of accuracy even with variable size, speed and strength, then fire a projectile which could intercept that projectile.

Then, she stopped. What said she had to do any of that? What if she instead made something which could fire not one hyper-accurate projectile, but instead dozens or hundreds? All it had to do was hit the target and stop it from hitting the target. With this new mindset, she started working on designs for a different kind of creation. The baseline part was always a large Soul Crystal, since she needed the creation to use magic.

This creation would also serve two purposes. It would attempt to shoot down incoming projectiles, but would also act as an effective anti-personnel emplacement. With a distinct spell in mind she began creating what was essentially a wider version of her Wind Blade. The spell would fire out a Wind Blade, except it would be, well, wider, and thus weaker but also covering a larger area. The weaker part of the Wind Blade was then remedied when she pushed more mana into the spell, costing a full 1000 mana per cast.

Turning her focus onto the main Soul Crystal, she wrapped a piece of steel around it, then inlaid small Uncommon Soul Gems into sockets in the metal, wrapping around the entire crystal and imparting plenty of extra mana into the creation. With this, it would be able to fire dozens of the wider Wind Blades in quick succession, spraying them towards where it thought the projectile would be and thus blasting it out of the sky through sheer volume.

The end cost of this new creation though was a rather ludicrous 500,000 mana, which made sense when she thought about it. Since the Uncommon Crystals would hold ten times as little mana as they cost to produce, with the main Crystal and the steel being a negligible cost in the end, to get 50,000 mana for 50 casts of the stronger Wind Blade would take a creation costing around 500,000.

For a test, she levitated a boulder about the size of one of her skeletons and threw it across the cavernous space beneath her base she used for testing, the Crystal having been animated and ordered to fire upon the projectile. She expected a sudden burst of Wind Blades, so when the air was ripped to pieces by the spells she wasn't too surprised.

The result was rather amazing though. She literally couldn't see a single piece of the projectile any more. This time, she made one about the size of a head, for the same result. Curious, she then made one the size of a fist. When that one was also blasted out of the air, she knew that the new creation would be effective for defence...perhaps too effective. She set parameters for it to ignore arrow-shaped projectiles that were smaller than a femur, as well as regular projectiles smaller than a finger, and limited it to firing a dozen shots on any projectile smaller than a torso.

Eventually, she settled for naming it an Air Sentinel. It would guard her base from aerial attacks, using air. It would also be able to attack ground troops, and if the body she spawned was any indication from the utter evisceration of the entire body, even a single Greater Wind Blade would chew apart infantry. She lifted the Air Sentinel through the base, planting it on the ground while she looked for a good spot.

Recalling the tower she had climbed during her escape from Amon Lhaw, she rose a tower above her wall and set the crystal atop it, granting it an amazing sight-line of the entire base, open to firing up in the sky without worry about hitting a friendly. Raising another seven towers, she filled those with Air Sentinels as her mana regenerated, spending the interludes reading up on the ritual to make Rare-tier Soul Crystals. She had focused on the Uncommon so she didn't skip a tier, but she wanted to keep progressing and getting stronger.

She was just worried about the fact that of all the books she had read, none had mentioned a single whisper about how to make more advanced crystals.


With the creation of rare crystals and the subsequent rush to maximize her mana at ten million, she found herself equally frantic upon the realization that she couldn't progress further.

Claiming more territory would give her a negligible difference compared to getting the next tier of crystal, which was an Epic-tier Soul Crystal. It then went Mythic, Relic, Transcendent, before finally ending with Legendary. If that was correct, the highest tier of crystal would be able to hold 10 billion mana, which was quite frankly terrifying. With her current spell strengths, the idea that a Legendary-level Crystal was capable of just mere avalanches and storms was laughable. Maybe that was the reason it seemed things were cheaper for her than they were supposed to be. The books definitely didn't seem to think that ten single Common Soul Crystals could fuel a ritual to create more of the same kind, yet she was able to do just that.

Even further, she was fairly sure her Synthesis rounded costs up and added a little extra, a convenience tax perhaps. It didn't do it for creations that used Soul Crystals it seemed, probably because the cost was already ludicrous, but for her skeletons, she doubted it'd cost as much as it did to Synthesize them whole if she individually created the skeleton and animated it instead.

Not that it mattered though, since she now could create a total of like 10,000 skeletons in a single go with her mana. They would all be unarmed, but if she regenerated another 3 million mana, which with her regeneration being at 100,000 mana per second, she could make all ten-thousand their own steel sword in 30 seconds flat. That was pretty insane when she thought about it. Every 130 seconds she could make ten-thousand new skeletons and ten-thousand swords for them all, starting entirely from scratch.

Maybe not being able to make Epic-tier Crystals wasn't so bad after all. Thinking about it, she had felt weirdly drawn towards power, so maybe this was whatever being was guiding her trying to keep her from going crazy and chasing power simply for powers sake. She was powerful now as she was, being able to summon ten-thousand armed skeletons in just over two minutes was utterly insane.

She would still keep an eye out for how to make them, but when she learned, she wouldn't immediately start creating them to make herself more powerful. Instead, she would use them to upgrade her creations. Her Air Sentinels would be even more amazingly powerful if they were ringed with Epic-tier Crystals instead of Uncommons, they would probably be able to fire an unending stream of Greater Wind Blades out at projectiles, making hitting her base basically an impossiblity.

Still, more wouldn't hurt!


Shifting her view back, she examined her new creation with a keen eye.

It wasn't entirely new, she was using her skeleton warrior as a basis again. However, rather than give it a sword or a bow, she planted an Uncommon Soul Crystal into the space within its ribcage, with the intent of making it into a mage. The test was successful, since the title changed appropriately, but left her a little but unsatisfied. It was too...mundane. She already had the Book Golems as spellcasters, she wanted her mages to be special.

But, try as she might, she couldn't think of anything to do so, and so she ended up shelving the idea. She still made a hundred mages and had them practice casting fireballs at the rough stone walls under her base where they'd cause no damage. It seemed that with levels her mages became faster at casting spells as well as being able to use more mana to cast them. The mages had an upper limit on the force they could push into a spell, and with each level that limit got higher and higher. They physically couldn't go over it though, so she couldn't create disposable level 1 mages who could cast city-busting Wind Blades.

As she floated up through her base, one of her ravens gave her an alert. She decided to wait until she was at her destination so she wouldn't forget what she was doing, but halfway there the same raven sent another alert. She decided to check it briefly, just to see what the issue was and whether it was double-detecting the same group, but stopped dead when she saw the two orcs she had helped escape being tracked by a squad of soldiers.

Debating the pros and cons, she decided it was worth the effort just to see how the orcs would act. However, rather than just sending some skeletons, she pulled her avatar through the base and up to the surface while she flew there, pulling open the chest. She replaced the crystal there, the common being disintegrated as she Synthesized a Rare Soul Crystal, 100,000 mana. Then she made ten more, but ten times smaller and thus each holding 10,000 mana instead, digging small grooves into the wood in the insides of the torso for them to be socketed

With that done, she poured mana into each crystal then took control of her avatar, 200,000 mana being available to her instantly. She pulled out again after checking that, levitating her body as well as a squad of twelve specialists over the wall. Each specialist was over level 10 so far, so not completely fresh, but just to be safe she also brought over a dozen of her regular skeleton warriors. This excursion would let the specialists get live combat experience and level up, so having them be destroyed would be counter-productive.

She checked where the raven was in regards to her base then took control of her avatar and started a fast run in that direction, not having to worry in the least about stamina. After maybe half an hour of running across rough terrain, they spotted the two orcs. The soldiers had gained on them a little, but were still well out of arrow range. Neither side had noticed their arrival yet, which meant they had a slight advantage.

It was only slight since she couldn't think of a great way to capitalize on it, and decided that just attacking was for the best before one of the orcs faltered and were skewered by arrows. Her skeletons ran down the hill, though her specialists came to a stop when they reached the point that they could fire arrows at her opponents. The warriors she brought along kept charging, and the clattering of stones bouncing off their metal armour finally clued in the soldiers that they were being ambushed.

Unfortunately for them, it was too late, as arrows were already in the air by that time. Their metal armour protected them from the dozen arrows, but forced their attention upwards for a moment to block the following shots, letting her skeletons get ever close, swiftly crashing upon their hasty defensive line. With their shields still out of position, some of her skeletons were able to get their blades past their guard and directly attack the men, several falling in quick succession whilst the others moved to let their armour take the hit, countering by forcing their shields down.

One of her skeletons wasn't fast enough to draw back and lost its sword. She negligently used Synthesis to make it another one in the air beside it, watching it snatch it and immediately stab the face of the shocked soldier who had just removed its previous sword. The battle was a slaughter from there. Whenever her units lost something she was able to use Synthesis to replace it. When one lost an arm, she had it shift back and then grafted a new one into its place, including the missing armour and weapon. It wouldn't be nearly as sturdy as before, but the skeleton could still fight.

Of course, her opponents couldn't hope to match it, and quickly broke, running back the way they came. She had no intent to let them escape, casting a wave of Greater Wind Blades out horizontally and bisecting them all. Since she had already finished her tests, she then used Synthesis to create large stone platforms above each corpse, dropping onto the bodies and crushing them and their equipment into an unrecognizable mess. She quickly double-checked to make sure her skeletons were all operational, then turned her attention to the orcs who had been watching the spectacle with wide eyes.

"Dat...was somfink."


I didn't mention it, but I always thought that the fact orcs speak pretty clear English in the movies when some characters speak other languages was a missed opportunity for Black Speech to be used.

So, rather than that, I decided to add a 40K twist with their speaking pattern being a lot more orky. They still speak normal languages, but they do it with a more rough and guttural way, as you can clearly see.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed!