Chapter 12


After also reworking the polearms, maces and bows in her arsenal, Sel continued creating Mithoaks.

For right now, they simply took their weapons from those her skeletons wielded, starting with the lowest level ones. When disarmed, her skeletons seemed to eschew their class, instead simply becoming skeletons again. When she had enough Mithoak to replace those on the surface and retain security she was going to be steadily phasing her skeletons out, replacing them down beneath her base with Steeloaks and disintegrating them.

It wasn't that they weren't useful, they were, it was mostly the fact that if living beings were going to be pissed at her using them, and she wanted to keep things relatively efficient, she might as well phase them out slowly, and only when she was sure she wouldn't need them any longer. To that effect she expanded underground, claiming all of the space she was able to with her current pool of mana. But as she did so, the system of letters that seemed to dictate what she could and could not do re-emerged, having been away from her and not interfering.

Artificial Expansion Limit Reached - Unbound Expansion Options enabled

As she read the letters, the wall that had blocked her from expanding beyond the borders she claimed fizzled and disappeared. That was...odd. Tentatively, she carved her way outwards, but hit a limit as to how far she was able to go in the form of Telekinesis not working anymore beyond a certain point roughly where the original border was, as well as being unable to claim the stone she was staring at.

She pondered the problem for a few moments, the sound of her Mithoak being all she heard as they continually walked up the tunnel she had dug. She created them practically on auto-pilot by this point, not letting her mana remain idle. Creating a pickaxe, she waited until her mana was high enough and created another Mithoak, getting it to pick up the pickaxe and try to mine the wall, only mildly surprised when it worked. As it dug out a small hole in the wall she attempted to claim it and found herself successful, confusing her a little more.

Disintegrating the pickaxe the creation was holding she set it to go and turn into a warrior, this being one of the models of Mithoak that had no sockets, while she lazily flew back up through her base. Instead of stopping to read or to do anything else, she flew right up through the base and to the surface, flying to the edge of her surface border and peering outwards.

Sel claimed a small section, her vision moving out slightly further than it had ever been capable of before. Emboldened by this, she claimed more territory, expanding out further. She then ringed around her base, claiming a small circle of extra space which her area automatically filled in. A bubbly feeling, happiness, rose within her as she realized that at least some of her restrictions had now been lifted.

But with it came a slightly chilling feeling. She had freedom, which meant before something wanted to keep her contained, keep her from following her instincts and spreading across the entire area. The major question then was...why? Why was she being held until she was strong enough in mana to be able to claim all of the available space beneath her base?

So far, the system she used seemed logical, but also it was ever-changing. No longer did she gain mana when she claimed space, her capacity was still exactly at a full ten million points. The titling system also seemed odd, as though it was not quite...finished? Was finished a good word...maybe just odd? Whatever the case was, it was clear that there was definitely something intelligent controlling her, restrictions being made and then discarded at later points, seemingly trying to funnel her towards an end goal of some kind.

But that then begged the question of...why? What would be the purpose for a powerful being to create her and then nudge her around, guiding her and introducing abilities and limitations and all manner of changes? Surely if it were so powerful it could just create her as it wanted her to be and then set her upon whatever task it wanted? There had to be a good reason for it after all, none of this could in any way be a bunch of simple random natural occurrences.

Somehow, the lack of any reaction to her thoughts was more worrisome than her thoughts themselves.


Using her newfound freedom, Sel claimed a larger area around her base, then set about raising a second wall.

Constructing the wall took her a few days, even simply planting a massive ring of steel around her base took a long time and a ton of mana to channel, as well as having to make major adjustments to adapt the wall to the hills and drops of Emyn Muil. With that done she then encased either side of the steel with thick stone reaching up to the top of the metal. Her hope was that having a thick layer of steel in the centre of the wall would stop any piercing attacks from easily breaching her defences, though this wall was far enough from the other that even if a hole was poked through it, nothing significant even existed on the surface aside from the other, higher wall.

This second wall was only about three times as high as a person, but it was 6 foot across of stone with the middle being maybe half a foot thick steel, so she doubted any siege engine that could cross Emyn Muil would breach her defences. She brought out her units, spreading them out across the wall in the assigned 5-man teams and setting them to patrol circularly all the way around.

Next, she set about creating towers, lining the inside of the stone with more steel to hopefully better protect them from being flattened to easily. She set Air Sentinels atop each tower, toying with the idea of perhaps inlaying them into the tower or finding some other way to protect them, since a single ballista bolt being able to take them down meant having them slightly hovering above the towers, while it appealed to her cosmetically, wasn't very protective. The issue was that it limited their sight-range, stopping them from acting as pre-emptive strikes against enemy artillery shots.

For now she decided she would just allow them to shoot at ballista bolts the same as other large projectiles, that'd work as a stop-gap until she could make an alternative. She spent a day or so working on raising towers, all the while expending any excess mana on Mithoak production. It'd be nice if she could automate it, perhaps by making some form of bound ritual circle which drew on her mana whenever a unit was destroyed and replaced it, including weaponry or crystals.

It'd need to have limitations of course so she didn't suddenly find herself sucked dry of mana, but if she could simply set a few dozen ritual circles to spawning Mithoaks and Steeloaks for her, she could spend all her time doing other things like reading. Right now her priority was finishing this secondary wall, but when she was done she was doing to put all her mana into making Mithoaks and spend that time scouring the library for any more useful information.

Bizarrely enough, she hadn't found any more spells yet, though she hadn't been able to put much time into reading, and she hadn't set her library-organizing skeletons to actually retain information on what books they'd found, so she'd have to go down there herself and look at the piles of books to see which were most likely to have spells or other knowledge she would want to use, the spares would simply be put away in the lower rooms, out of sight since they were pretty much useless to her.

Of course she'd keep them around in case there were pages missing from the books, she would be kicking herself if she threw out or burned a bunch of books only to realize that one of the books was missing half it's pages and she'd gotten rid of all of the spares, especially if it seemed like an important book that might contain knowledge on the next level of Soul Crystal or perhaps new spells. She had the basic theory-crafting down for creating new spells, it was mostly trial-and-error based on intent, but working from an existing spell was by far the easiest way.

If she couldn't find useful spells when she needed them for a niche then she could just create them herself, though that then begged the question of just where the limit was. She obviously hadn't hit one yet but that was because aside from the unnamed spell her ravens and the Mithril Courier used and the upgraded version of the Wind Blade, she hadn't actually made any noteworthy spells, certainly nothing destructive.

Her most effective direct-attack 'spell' was actually Telekinesis, wielding large and heavy objects and just using those. Maybe though it would be a good idea to make a far more precise spell, one able to easily shoot at the eyes of trolls or with a single shot blast a ballista bolt out of the sky. For an element it seemed wind would be the most effective, but she was a little leery of relying so much on it if there was a chance it could be countered. For all she knew certain creatures simply had an inherent resistance to spells, and if one came along immune to Wind Blades and Firebolts but hideously weak to any other type of spell she'd be utterly doomed.

Though maybe attack spells weren't the way to go. If she could train her mages to raise a temporary wall of wind or fire or perhaps some other element they could protect their squads from attack. Even further, what about buffing them, increasing the speed at which they moved or the strength at which they struck their opponents? She had no idea how to go about even beginning something like that though. Maybe there was some manner of gravity spell she could use to lower their weight or selectively increase it to put more weight and thus power behind their attacks?

For now, she kept working on her defences, letting odd thoughts tick over in her mind as she fulfilled the monotonous tasks.


It was moments like these that she was incredibly glad she was being thorough about things.

She had done a rework of the bows that she gave her archers and specialists, adding a thin piece of Mithril through the bow to give it strength as well as covering the front in the metal, even adding small, razor-sharp spikes pointing outwards from either end of the bow that the archer could use as an emergency melee weapon. She thought the bow was fine and was going to just start making them to start replacing the old ones...but something spurred her to have a Mithoak test it first.

The arrow was only able to be drawn back about halfway before the string snapped, and when fired like that it flew a pitiful distance before hitting the ground. As she made one of the old style of bow and had the archer use that, she took careful note of exactly what was going on, and was surprised to see how much the wooden limbs of the bow bent.

When the arrow was released, the wood itself also pulled on the string, giving it even more speed as it snapped forwards and fired the arrow at the target. She had two archers stand side by side and attempt to continuously fire arrows, the old wooden bow far outshining her new and supposedly 'improved' design. With this discovery, she began thinking of ways to improve the bow.

Mithril string was out, it would have the same properties and wouldn't expand and contract to give that extra speed. She could perhaps find a form of Mithril that did stretch hand contract and bend easier, but that would probably sacrifice strength. Besides, her archers shouldn't be taking hits, so what was the point? Idly she turned her mental image of the regular bow over in her head, then added a reverse bow-shaped piece of Mithril that tapered into sharp points.

She wasn't able to give her archers a regular weapon, swords turned them into specialists, but if the bow itself was able to be used to deflect attacks and stab, that hopefully wouldn't cause a problem. Plus with how light the Mithril was, it didn't weigh the bow down significantly. She created a skeleton warrior with a sword and shield, then assigned a Steeloak to pick the weapon up.

With that done, she ordered it to defend itself without firing any arrows before ordering the skeleton to attack. The Steeloak tried its best, but it was only dodging and avoiding attacks, it wasn't using the sharp points on the bow or the fact the front of the bow was strong enough to take a hit from a steel weapon just fine. Directly giving orders, she started essentially training the skeleton to use the weapon.

It took a while, and the Steeloak accumulated a lot of scratches on its surface from taking hits, but eventually she managed to make it autonomously use the bow itself to deflect and even counter-attack, with no class change occurring. She could see the learning system her creations used aiding it while they figured out new ways to use the weapon to attack or defend, up to trapping the strike between the Mithril and the wood and then twisting to disarm the attacker, something she wouldn't have thought of.

Hmm...that might actually be useful. If her creations were able to learn new methods for doing something outside of what she considered, maybe she could make a creation that would look at her base from another angle and figure out the best ways to assault it. Like...maybe underground? As she thought about it, she realized that the surface was well-defended, but under the ground wasn't.

Going over or through her walls was a meat grinder, but underground there wasn't an obstruction to just digging a tunnel.


Correction: there wasn't an obstruction, but now there was.

Stretching from the existing metal in the wall, she dug and filled a thin layer of disguised Mithril into the gap, raising it up to the very middle of the steel inside of her wall, then dragging them both downwards, excavating the ground as she descended. Then she stopped, something about what she was doing for some reason making her finally realize something odd.

When she intended to excavate an area and thus dug it away...where did the material go? Digging out more space with Telekinesis, she watched the stone disappear into nothingness after a few seconds. As she dug and dug more of the stone it, it just vanished into thin air. That made her wonder just where it went. For that matter, where did her Synthesis materials come from? Did she make them from mana itself, or was it given to her with an exchange fee of mana? She hoped it was the former, since the latter would mean she was reliant on her mysterious benefactor to keep fuelling her abilities.

For that matter, what strength did she actually hold on her own? Her mana at least seemed tied to her Crystal, but her Synthesis was dictated by letters and numbers, evidently something that the letters were in control of. So if she suddenly found herself unsupported, she wouldn't be able to produce materials on her own. That thought actually worried her a little. If she suddenly lost access to Synthesis, Gondor would attack her, and without that ability she would have a limited quantity of creations to use against them.

But then...would her creations even work anymore. Some kind of magic bound them into being golems, and she had no idea whether it was the letters doing it or her own unconscious magic, since they were bid to follow her orders. Though perhaps if the letters dictated it they would turn on her or just stop dead and not help her at all. While her mind turned over these issues, she kept digging downwards, eventually and arbitrarily being satisfied by the depths she had reached and filled in the last of the metal downwards, then started heading to the side, but stopped.

Rising up out of the ground she flew quickly over to the very middle of her walls, high above the surface and looking across the circular area. She had no height limit that she had run into yet, perhaps when her limits were removed it also meant that her claimed space gained a massive increase in altitude? Not that it mattered as she focused on the entire wall, stretching her focus as she grasped a thin sliver of the steel inside of the wall, with a quick yank of her disintegration ability creating a small cavity in the centre of the wall.

Calling upon Synthesis, she then attempted to fill in the entire wall with the thin piece of Mithril, making it maybe a quarter of the way around before she ran out of mana. Not dissuaded, she simply flew to where the Mithril had stopped and started expending her mana income directly into expanding the Mithril vein, steadily and surely filling the wall, not that it was visibly obvious, it all looked like identical and fused-together steel, as though someone had made a giant single ring of metal and dropped it there.

Of course, because she had no mana to spare she had to stop producing Mithoaks, but she had been producing them constantly for the past few days now. At a rate of two per minute, over the course of about two and a half days and with allowances for the little bit of missed time, she had...well, she had to break down the numbers. A Mithoak cost 3 million mana, she regenerated 100,000/s, so every minute she produced two. Over an hour she produced 120 Mithoak, not including Mithril weaponry though. That meant that over the course of a day, she could average her Mithoak production, rounding down a little, to about 2500 of them.

Across two and a half days, that meant she produced about 6000 total, that number being rounded down since the Mithoak skeletons that had holding points for Soul Crystals were more expensive, as well as placing Uncommon Soul Crystals into those sockets. Each one only cost her 100,000 mana, and the skeletons had four sockets attached, so it only took an extra four seconds to craft them.

With a wide order, she had every single Mithoak group up between the two walls, the groups of five being formed and telling her how large the imbalance was when she stopped working on the wall and drifted over to see how many were outside of a group. Since she wasn't being super careful about producing Mithoak, she had produced too many warriors and archers, meaning she needed to produce more specialists and mages to balance out the groups. They all had weapons, there were plenty of disarmed skeletons that had followed their orders and moved to a corner of the Chasm for her to periodically check and disintegrate them, though only a very tiny handful had mithril-edged blades, she hadn't made very many yet.

She sent them back off to their previous orders, except she made sure all of those that had a group stayed within it, then got back to her own previous actions of filling in the wall. Since the vein of Mithril was so thin it wasn't too expensive, as evidenced by ten million mana being enough to get a quarter of the way around. That meant forty million would have been enough to finish it off, so after only 5 minutes she had produced enough mana to fill the gap.

Honestly, she was a little surprised at just how quickly her unit count had spiralled out of control, not even realizing herself how many units she was making. A thirty second gap between creating each one made her feel like she was producing them really slowly, but over the course of days the numbers really added up. Of course, at the beginning she kept forgetting to do it immediately when she got distracted, but since she'd kinda just started doing it on autopilot whilst doing other stuff like building the walls the numbers had just steadily climbed. Next she had to work on arming them, and that was going to be a lot more finicky, since she'd have to get the Mithoaks to come and get their weapons as well as disintegrating the old weapons.

But, at the very least, she now felt fairly secure, which meant it was time to kick back and do some more research...yay.


Heading into the library, Sel was met with an amusing sight.

Her skeletons had been following their orders, piling up duplicate books in individual stacks across the more open side of the room where there were tables and chairs. That meant that as soon as she entered, it was to see the entire floor covered with varying stacks of books, some considerably higher than the average, which seemed to be only two or three books high. Some of the piles went up to ten books tall, and the highest was a rather abnormal 27 books tall.

Curious, she lifted one up from that pile and looked at it, not very surprised to see that it was the book she'd read for the basic two spells she'd learned, Firebolt and Wind Blade. The healing spell was a more advanced one, in another book all on its own. That was one thing that baffled her a little, the fact that these books could speak for such a long time on the intricacies of the spells, their histories and the refinements that had been made to them.

She steadily went over every single book pile, finding those she had already read and setting them off in the rooms opposite the library. Her intent was to pack away all the books she had read away into those rooms and thus wouldn't accidentally waste her time re-reading one. When all the books she remembered reading had been set away, she then picked one pile of books at random and lifted them up onto the nearest table, taking the topmost book and flicking it open.

After a few pages she closed it again and set it aside. It was a book on geology, about the types of stone that had been discovered and their applications. Potentially useful, and something she could use to reinforce her walls, making them out of stronger stone or perhaps mixes of stone and other materials that would make them tougher than normal stone.

The next book was on herbs, potentially useful but not quite as valuable to her. Then a book on candlemaking, a history book, a book on how castle walls were built. Most of the books available that she hadn't already read were useful from a certain stance. Candlemaking wouldn't be useful to her, but it would be valuable if she started making her creations require light to see by using Free Vision. Since her area claimed space beyond her second wall, it meant that those who were guarding the wall didn't need their own vision, they were able to use their connection to her own old method of vision through touch to detect anything that entered the area and move to intercept it.

Learning about herbs wouldn't help her directly as she had no need for their medicinal value, but if she ever had an ally who was injured, knowing what contortions to create to render them aid would likely go a long way to improving goodwill. A history book would, of course, help her learn more about her surroundings, whilst a book on how castle walls were made wouldn't help her since she didn't need to use pulleys and cranes to move stone, but it would instead tell her how enemy walls were built, their weaknesses and strengths. Each book she read had at least some small form of value, even if it wasn't immediately apparent.

Creating a few more skeletons, she gave them orders to ferry weapons she created up to the surface to give to her Mithoak and to then take their weapons and pile them up in one of the rooms nearby for her to disintegrate. With that done, she started producing mithril-bolstered weaponry for her Mithoak, at the same time flicking open a book on 'Dark Magic', flicking through the pages casually as she mindlessly assimilated the information within the book.

One page caught her interest, since it mentioned that Soul Crystals were theorized to be capable of holding a living Soul, but that it required a ritual involving a human heart, a still-living sacrifice, bark from an Ent that had to be over a hundred years old, the eye of a Black Uruk, and various other seemingly random components. She was curious as to whether she was actually being housed within an abnormal Soul Crystal. Her crystal didn't look like those she produced, but those were always perfectly uniform, so perhaps when a ritual wasn't performed perfectly, perhaps with too much mana being inserted, the crystal would mutate and be different?

Whatever the case was, she couldn't exactly perform an experiment like that anyway. The orcs she had killed were all just that, orcs, and the trolls didn't have anything useful aside from their skin. Infuriatingly enough, when she produced Troll skin, it didn't actually have the same defensive properties, so perhaps it required something else to be as strong as it was, maybe a connection to a living host or something?

She didn't know, and while it irritated her, she left it by the wayside. It wasn't like her Mithril wasn't exceptionally strong anyway, and she'd already produced a small army of Mithoak. Closing that book with a lingering sense of irritation, she put it to the side for further perusal, lifting the next up to the table. She wasn't reading the entirety of the books, mostly skimming the early pages and deciding whether she would want to read it imminently, then scaled back from there right back into the books she would only bother with if she had entirely ran out of other material to read.

It was definitely a little bit mind-numbing to read so much material in such a short period, but with her safety secured and with her forces having their weaponry being steadily upgraded, she saw no reason to not bury herself in a literal sea of books. Reading stuff, even rather dry and bland academic-style texts like these, was enjoyable to her, even if she did also like reading the books that seemed more for entertainment than learning. Then again, that was probably the point, and those were the only books that didn't have an actual use, they were fictitious and unrealistic usually, stories of a gallant hero saving the world from darkness.

Yeah, like that would ever happen.


Err...I don't have anything interesting to say, so I'll just say thanks for reading up to this point ^.^