264, 1/2

Erick remained on his perch atop the center structure of House Benevolence, gazing out across the land for a while longer. The people of House Benevolence lived their lives down below. Dramas unfolded and crashed and began and then came to closure as people picked up the pieces of their previous existences and tried to make something of them. Not many people had gotten anything close to closure at all, but some had, and that was wonderful. Most people got pretty far in that endeavor, though, considering they had been enslaved little more than a week ago—

A drone floated high in the air above the geodesic node network surrounding the lands of House Benevolence.

Erick reached down with his [Physical Domain], through the command center of the House below, to say to the people there, “I see a drone above us. Right here.” And then he conjured a coordinate map of the drone amid the command center.

Ruby was in the command center right now. She was Second to Querkooda, and she was a ruby-colored dragon currently shaped like an Elemental Plasma-derived elf, her body glowing a little internally. She was well put-together, like all the other people around here. The command center itself was still a wreck.

There were five people on a bunch of tech-based imagery-stations and four on magical scry-based stations, and those stations were only halfway completed. Wires stuck out in the backs of places and people were working in small holes in the machines here and there and tech guys were everywhere. Four people were learning the targeting software for the weapons systems right now, and a bunch were in other rooms, still trying to work on Erick’s [Cascade Imaging] to integrate it into the normal sensor systems that people had bought from this place or that place.

At least all the bugged tech was easily discovered with some Benevolence and scanning magics and scanning software from the various technologically-inclined people of the House. Erick wasn’t sure when the bugged tech started to appear, but they only really noticed it four days ago, and now the whole place —which wasn’t even together yet— needed to be ripped apart and redone in a whole bunch of ways.

So it was kinda fair that they didn’t notice and shoot down the drone yet.

Ruby turned, and her hair flowed as she moved, her eyes focusing on the video feeds and scanner equipment. She flicked her aura at a control center that some other guy was at, taking the controls from him for a moment. “… Looks like a standard spybot. Hmm. That’s at the limit of our capability to scan. No wonder it was missed.”

The guy at the control center looked utterly ashamed.

“Don’t worry about it,” Erick responded. “We’re still building the place.” And then he shot a javelin of light at the bot, erasing it from existence. He turned his attention back down to the control room, and to the [Cascade Imaging] he had set up in a special room, anchored to some metals and the node network. Some guys were currently trying to install some tech onto that working of magic, but they weren’t getting very far with it. “It appears my own Imaging didn’t pick it up, either.”

Down in the control room, Ruby frowned at the monitors. More than a few of the guys working the monitors cringed. They were embarrassed. Ruby said, “Your powers are… quite a lot better than the software we’ve been able to find and buy.”

And needing to rebuild the place didn’t help.

“Keep at it. Most of the spying is being done from far across the shell of Margleknot, anyway.”

Erick looked at the sky, which was a little dark because this was ‘night time’, though night time here in the spatially-expanded lands of Margleknot mostly meant ‘half-light’. This wasn’t the Mortal Lands where the sun actually disappeared behind a black sunblock; this was Slaver’s Den, in the ‘ascended’ side of Margleknot. And over there, in the worlds beyond this one, on those layers of lands out there, far above the atmosphere of this flat place, they were watching this flat place.

… Welp! Let them watch. It was time to see if they did anything truly desperate when he wasn’t out here, surveying everything and everyone.

Erick said, “I’m taking a break now. I’ll be back by morning or in case of emergency.”

Ruby and the entire command room went on high alert, though no actual alarms or such went off at all. People simply looked harder at the scanners, and started running them more. They were on duty.

Everything would be fine.

And if it wasn’t, then Erick could reverse time and save whoever he needed to save. He hadn’t needed to resort to that yet, thankfully. Hopefully he never would.

… There was probably going to be an attack in under an hour, though. The forces of Slaver’s Den were watching him a lot.

Erick got on with his life, anyway.

It was time to make some truly horrific magic to appease Lord Dakka, and he knew just where to go to get some proper ideas for that sort of shit.

A lot of people had been hurt a lot by Slaver’s Den.

They would want revenge.

– – – –

Erick walked into a classroom of his Arcanaeum, interrupting a lesson between Ta’Kamoil and some talented ex-slaves who were all bent on killing slavers in the most painful ways possible. Ta’Kamoil had been trying to get them to calm-it-the-fuck-down with their bloodlust, but at Erick’s entrance Ta’Kamoil merely smiled and promptly shirked his duties.

“And here’s the Wizard himself!” Ta’Kamoil said, “Please ask him how to kill people more painfully. I am sure he will have lots of information about all that!”

Erick was fine with that introduction.

The crowd of 27 ex-slaves were all very quiet. Some looked ashamed.

Surprising them all, Erick said, “I’m actually here to get ideas for that very thing. I need to appease Lord Dakka, after all. Anyone got any good Blood, Carnage, or Death-based ideas? Who wants to see their work on the battlefield?” Erick pointed at a woman who he was pretty sure was named Vanya, and a light appeared over her head. “Yes?”

Vanya looked as though she had been handed the keys to a kingdom. She launched to her feet, saying, “Bloodfire! It was what they did to us through some sort of light. It burned us from the inside out and paralyzed us as we tried to escape their capture drones.”

“Good one.” Erick pointed to another person, whom he did not actually know. “You.”

Vanya sat down, looking faintly happy… and yet somehow sad.

The next person was a man with deep red eyes and skin. He was suddenly unsure, because Erick could tell the red guy wanted to use the magic he was thinking about himself. Vanya was just realizing the same thing. The rest of the people in the class were also pulling back from the hate that they were feeling, if only for their own personal desires of revenge.

Only a few people were rethinking everything about this whole scenario.

Erick pulled the light off of the red guy and stoked the fires of hate, saying, “Come on! Let’s go kill people as viciously as we can! Surely nothing bad will come of perpetuating cycles of violence and hate! These are slavers, after all. They don’t deserve to be treated like people! We can treat them as you were treated, right? … Right?”

Silence.

Erick stopped pretending, and said, “It was incredibly rude of me to say that to all of you, of course. Who am I to judge how you feel as wrong or in any way unjustified? And anyway, war still has to happen. Proofs still need to be made. In this particular case, Slaver’s Den needs to be eradicated through a pure showing of power, to thus dissuade others from attempting to fight back and to keep this House Benevolence of Margleknot protected for many, many years to come. There’s nothing wrong with you all desiring revenge, but instead of trying to hurt people for the sake of hurting them, how about we try hurting people effectively. So. Once again.” He gestured to the red guy. A light reappeared. “Got an idea?”

With an even gaze, the red guy said, “Use Carnage as a damage multiplier. Add it to the bloodfire. Make people explode in gore shrapnel when they die in the light.”

Erick was not expecting something so… Simple, actually. And yet so far beyond how Erick would have done it. Yeah; Erick was not nearly as vicious as he could have been. Erick said, “Easily doable. One final suggestion for Death. Yes, you.”

The light went off of the red guy, and then appeared over a bookish woman with three books open up in front of her.

The bookish woman said, “Have the blood and flesh explode, but leave behind the skeletons as minions of undeath, empowered by the Carnage bloodfire…” She paused. She said, “But that seems hard. Alternatively, make the Bloodfire burn away life and then, in death, twist everything into a Carnage minion.”

… So that was vicious.

This had been a productive detour.

Erick said, “I have no doubt in my mind that this suggestion is probably exactly what Lord Dakka is looking for. Thank you all for your contributions.” Erick said, “I suppose I will be working on some war crime magic now. And make no mistake. These are all going to be war crimes. They have no place in a functioning society, or in the worlds I want to build.”

Erick left it at that, and then he left the room. Ta’Kamoil bowed a little as Erick left, and then he went back to the much more somber classroom. Before Erick had walked in and done all that, they had been talking in hypotheticals and overly-eager wishes. But now, knowing that whatever Erick was going to make was going to be horrific and used on the battlefield? That had done a lot to temper their desires for bloodshed.

It had taken them a minute to get there, though.

When he exited the arcanaeum out the front door, amid students and refugees and returners all, he simply took to the sky, transforming into a great black dragon that was already in the air, his tail the last little bit of his body to leave the ground.

He decided to check on the perimeter before he went to make magic, and it was a good thing he did.

High above the dome of House Benevolence Erick found a drop ship filled with horrors of various kinds, from flesh abominations to living poisons to killers in invisibility cloaks. His normal sort of attack would have pierced the place and killed most everything, but left behind the tech that he could then hand over to the engineers to add to their growing collection of tools. That tech would have been poisoned irreparably, and probably in multiple ways.

Erick was pretty sure that some previous salvage had led to their current tech problems in the House.

The problem was, though, that if he simply evaporated the thing…

Eh.

Less thinking.

More complete annihilation.

He did check on the radiation dome and found it fully functional.

And then Erick blasted the transport with a few lines of light, piercing holes through shields and then through hulls. Next came some [Grand Reincarnation] that managed to erase every living thing in there and send it off to another land, and since there were holes in the defenses of the transport there was no impediment to Erick’s lightning. The only targets he missed were the cloaked people; the other main threat of the attack. They were all falling out of the air and spreading wide, trying to escape the blasts.

Erick lit up the entire sky with a [Luminous Beam].

One thin thread of light sent out a river of atomic blasts into the transport, proving to be complete overkill as the entire sky turned to brightest day. Erick’s attack ended somewhere in the impossible distances overhead, way before it actually threatened anything in the Margleknot’s sky. The city shields, both magical and mundane, soaked the damage. Nothing got through to the city except for bright lights. The invisibly cloaked people were incinerated by light and heat long before they got anywhere near the dome below.

When the light faded, the transport was gone.

On the plus side of showing off that magic for the fifth time, so far, it also showed that the city below was completely protected from incidental damage. The dome below held very well; Erick certainly had enough power going to that thing, after all.

– – – –

Ruby shuddered in the command center. “Brightest stars, that is insane. That he can both do that and survive that.”

Querkooda smiled at her side. “It is a wondrous thing.”

– – – –

Vanya stared out the window of the classroom, watching the sky come back from beyond the blinding light of the Apparent King. She was not the only one. The entire classroom had rushed to the windows to see the light when it appeared.

Vanya wanted that kind of power.

… But even if she was somehow granted that power, right there, she knew she could not handle it, and for many reasons. She would dive into death to avenge her everything and fall both to her own demons and the real demons out there… And, she supposed, it wasn’t right to… just kill everyone.

She still recalled the painful bloodfire light out there on the shores of seaside, so many ‘layers of infinity’ away. She recalled the slavers picking her up and laughing at her as her skin burned in her mind, but not in reality. How they teased her for her invisible pain. How they inflicted even more invisible pain…

Erick had been right about many things.

The slavers deserved to die in horrible agony, but…

Vanya wasn’t sure if she could handle that.

Ta’Kamoil said, “So… That was our Apparent King’s Quasar Beam, or whatever he calls it. I would call that the pinnacle of light magic taken in a slightly different direction than the one I used to be able to do. Probably cleaner his way, though, if you can survive the radiation, which he can as a very strong Ascended. So! Back to Battle Magic?” He rapidly added, “War Crime Magic is completely different, by the way, though it’s hard to split the distinction some of the time.”

Vanya returned to the lesson with everyone else. They were here because they had displayed some strong anger issues as well as aptitude for magic, and Overseer Ta’Kamoil didn’t have much in the way of proper teachers, yet, so he was teaching them. Vanya still wanted to learn.

Ta’Kamoil continued, “A Fireball on a hospital? War Crime. A Fireball on a military base? Battle Magic. A Fireball on a market that is both maintained and operated by warriors of a town? Ehhhhh… That’s iffy territory. It’s pretty safe to say that everything we’re doing here is a war crime, though, because everything here in Slaver’s Den is both a place of warriors and victims, because the warriors use their victims to fight for them. There is no getting around this war crime, and so our Apparent King is just going for the crime and being done with it. As an aside, 3 out of every 4 attacks Slaver’s Den are throwing at us are also war crimes, because most everyone in this House is a civilian, too. That’s how wars of extermination are, almost all of the time.”

Vanya raised a hand.

Ta’Kamoil asked, “Yes?”

Vanya asked, “How do you begin to make a distinction when 4 out of every 5 people were following soul-bound orders? For targeting with your magics, I mean.”

Ta’Kamoil said, “That’s philosophy, and it’s something that we probably won’t have to worry about too much, because in the following battles Erick will likely clear out the vast majority of combatants himself. But to actually answer the question: The answer lies in personal strength of conviction and perception tied into resonwork. Reson work is how spells curve and bend, and mostly you won’t be able to use that, so we’ll start with magical-based targeting systems, which are much more like working computer code and less like working resons…”

– – – –

Lanzoil watched the sky turn back to normal, then he got back to organizing the violent labor forces of the kitchens and farms and getting people separated, off to their own parts of wherever they needed to be. There had been fights. There would be more fights. Some people went to the healers who were working on those magics, while others simply got sent home for the day.

This latest altercation had been about the level of spiciness in some food items in the mess hall. There had been blood. The actual problem was not the spiciness, but the myriad traumas of the people of this land erupting in unkind, and unexpected ways. And yet, Lanzoil was still happy with all of this. In a normal society with this level of hurt there would have been murders by now. So far, no one had actually killed anyone else, and all attempts by the outside world to kill the people here inside this city had been thwarted.

The people here were getting along fantastically when compared to normal expectations.

And yet… The ‘city’ of House Benevolence was a crashed ship in a land of pained refugees, and though the warriors defended the walls from incursion, the incursions kept happening. Not a single person living in this land was ‘used to’ the explosions and otherwise happening outside, and those explosions and otherwise were going to get a whole lot worse before they got better.

Lanzoil had his work cut out for him.

At least Erick was giving them all some time to settle down before the next battle came. They needed that time.

– – – –

Erick settled down onto a barren plateau of rock overseeing the wasteland outside of his new city. He was about 40 kilometers away from the white-dagger wall, and he was alone. He was not worried about being attacked, but even if he were then he would prefer they take their big shots out here. Maybe someone would get stupid? It was not impossible.

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It’d be pretty fucking stupid to attack the kilometer-long dragon who stepped out into the open, in full view of everyone, though.

Erick had grown sometime in the recent past, yet again. At this point he was about a kilometer long himself, including his tail… Or maybe only 900 meters? Still pretty big.

Erick wasn’t quite sure when his ‘largest size’ turned out to be nearly a kilometer long —and maybe 1.75 kilometers wide from wingtip to wingtip— but it had happened when he wasn’t really looking. He had needed to keep himself small when by the House in order to not cave in the roof or oversize his seat.

According to a short conversation he had had with Shadow about it, getting bigger as a dragon was a natural part of the power of a dragon, and didn’t he already know this? She had been surprised he wasn’t bigger than he already was. She had even hinted that when he approached her true dragon size then she’d reveal that to him.

Erick wasn’t sure if she had been flirting or not.

Anyway.

Time to make some cruel magics.

As he cast some channeled spellwork into the air, filling the world with the cloying sounds of black-green Vile and the roaring sounds of reddest Carnage and the softer liquid-reds of Blood, Erick reacquainted himself with these particular Elements. He had worked with them all before, of course, but not deeply, or with such a violent end-goal in mind. It was time to appease a fae of blood and death, because Erick certainly wasn’t going to try and appease the trickster one. Lord Eldraki wanted ‘a single heartbeat’ or ‘For Erick to share assets equally with Shadow’ and that simply wasn’t happening.

But Lord Dakka wanted magics of Blood and Carnage and Death.

… And Erick’s new people wanted spells of the same.

Perhaps, Erick thought, it wasn’t such a bad thing to step into this sort of arena for a little while, where the spectacle of it all mattered just as much as gaining security in the final outcomes of war. People respected power, and would think twice about disrespect if they felt you would truly fuck them up.

Still felt icky to work toward these dangerous ends.

Erick altered Benevolence to an Elemental Vile facsimile… And considered.

The part of that ‘bloodfire’ that woman had spoken of, the part where the light pained, was Elemental Vile. Vile had a way of doing that rather easily to those who it was tuned to inflict pain upon. Vile was, perhaps, one of the most war-useful Elements out there. Beyond its closeness to Contract Magic, Vile had a whole bunch of other painful and powerful effects. Sure, it pained those who it touched, who were enemies of the caster, but that’s exactly what it did so well. That auto-targeting. The ‘blood’ part of bloodfire was just to concentrate the effects of the Vile upon the blood-filled people out there in the area of effect. Vile, attuned to certain targets, would only harm those certain targets.

Such an auto-targeting system of ‘bloodfire light’ would have also boosted the physicality of all people who had Vile inside of them, too. Vile didn’t just harm, it also helped those on the Vile’s side.

Vile’s angelic counterpart, Elemental Exalted, was a lot more about the buffing aspects of that dichotomy than the injurious option.

And thinking of the Vile/Exalted dichotomy…

Incani didn’t actually have Elemental Vile inside of them, which is why the ‘painful aura’ aspect of this power didn’t see much widespread use on Veird. Humans didn’t have Elemental Exalted inside of them, either, which is also why that power was not seen on Veird. That was also Quiet War shit, which Erick and other world leaders shut down as much as they could.

Erick clenched his claws and extinguished the Vile light.