Over the next two weeks, they fought off three attacks: two from the Fae and one from the Rhulvin, but between Benjamin’s magic and their army of free men, they won each battle decisively. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was deciding where they should put down roots.

The mountains that Matt had picked out were larger than the map had suggested, and though they stood on the horizon for days, it took a very long time for them to get closer, thanks to the magic of the Sea of Grass. That had been an annoying learning curve; for so long, the magic had worked in their favor, slowing their enemies and speeding their advances, but now that the fickle Fae had changed sides, Benjamin’s army was as bogged down by them as much as anyone.

Still, they didn’t do massive burns to clear the way and break free as the Rhulvin preferred. The last thing that Matt or anyone else wanted was to become more like the enemies they’d been fighting for so long. That would have only proved the Thrones right. Instead, they settled for machetes, clear-cutting a path broad enough to mark the way and show progress. Still, it was only when they left the sea of waving stalks behind them and climbed into the foothills that they started to speed up again.

Matt dubbed the area the Iron Hills after a few of the more promising rock formations the scouts found, and they quickly set about looking for a place where they could build a camp that was more than temporary. Such a thing was a tall order, though. Should they journey up into one of the higher valleys? All the best spots seemed to be on the west side of the hills, which would make their location all but unmistakable to passing Rhulvin ships.

In the end, the real question really boiled down to was the best spot, the most hidden spot, or the one with the most resources. For a time, Matt had argued that the best spot was the most defensible, but Benjamin assured him that he could turn any place they chose into a fortress with a few weeks of work.

He wasn’t too concerned with the day-to-day, though. Beyond simply summoning enough food every day to keep thousands of people fed until they worked out more permanent arrangements, he was focused on Emma. While Matt spent most of his day fleshing out maps of the region and marking down the more important resources for the colony they were going to start building any day now, Benjamin was mapping out Emma’s soul.

In the end, he built a simple algorithm that sampled each sector and then ranked them by violence on a scale from normal to bloodthirsty. The results were pretty straightforward, as the data largely clustered into a lopsided barbell. While the vast majority of Emma’s soul still resided in the realm of normal or angsty and a bit more tapered off into categories that might best be called angry or violent, almost five percent of her soul pegged out as bloodthirsty.

It was like a violent cancer that wound its way through her being thanks to some of the initial system choices lord Jarris had made so long ago. Emma still hadn’t forgiven him entirely for letting him escape, of course, but that was just the way it had to be, at least for now. Benjamin wanted him dead, too, of course, but he was certain that letting a powerful and trusted agent of the royal family be the one to bring back the Prince’s soul would make Benjamin’s deception that much more likely to succeed. He just had to hope that the other version of himself would take the Summoner Lord out someday if the chance arose.

Regardless, he and Emma worked in secret, borrowing a few of the other women they’d met along the way to swap out sections of the tortured woman’s soul with pieces of women who might have different crosses to bear.

“This will change you, you understand that, right?” Benjamin asked. “I can make a copy just in case. We have phylacteries to spare, but after this is done. Well, you won’t be you anymore. You’ll be someone else, too. I’m not the same Benjamin I was before I… well before I took drastic measures.”

“Don’t you get it,” Emma sighed. “I get that, but I’d rather be anyone else than the monster I’ve become, Benji.”

That, at least, he understood far too well. He, too, would have rather had anyone’s soul instead of the broken soul he’d ended up with, thanks to his poor choices. While he might do some further editing on some of the darker, Machiavellian parts of the Prince’s soul that occasionally flashed through his mind these days, he was happy enough with the way things stood now, even if he dreamed of demons a little too much for his liking these days.

Turning Emma from a psycho killer to something closer than the woman she’d once been turned out not to be too hard, though, once they had a few volunteers. That, of course, led to more requests for tweaks and changes. Once those started, the rumors spread like wildfire, but Benjamin didn’t have time to do psychosurgery on his whole army right away, as much as he would like to. Not after Matt finally picked out the spot they were going to call home until at least next spring, and they started to march.

They ended up choosing an area of low hills where the land met the sea. It was close enough to everything they would need long term, but more importantly, it had a good harbor.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“There’s no use trying to hide,” Matt said finally, “Not with all the magic our enemies have. The best we can do is pick a spot, build a fortress, and dare them to take it from us.”

That, of course, was exactly what they did. As soon as they had the spot and Matt had a rough idea of where the walls for the initial encampment should go, Benjamin worked with a quickness that left everyone else stunned. At level 10, part of him no longer felt fully human. Though that could just as easily be the piece of the Prince that he’d used to plug the gaps in his soul, he felt disconnected from the world by the awesome powers he wielded now.

It wasn’t the amount of mana he could use or the amount of damage he could unleash, either. He had whole spell libraries he could reference now, and he could take any one of those and customize it to do crazy things. The Rhulvin had any number of spells for manipulating stone, from the Earth Works spell he’d had for so long to Majestic Rampart and Stalwart Fortress for building larger structures on a fairly instantaneous basis.

Though Benjamin used all of these as references, he didn’t actually cast any of them. It wasn’t because they wouldn’t have worked well; instead, the reason he chose was fairly trivial: he hated the way they looked. Rhulvinarian architecture had that awful melted look thanks to various efficiencies and rounding errors in the spells that left them looking like children playing with clay as much as a serious structure.

Though the defenses would have been just as serviceable if they were ugly, to Benjamin, it was unacceptable. So, instead of using some of the spells on the list, he made his own. They were small, efficient things that were more focused on the architectural details than they really needed to be, but he didn’t care. If you’re not going to do it right, then why are you doing it at all? He asked himself.

In the end, he treated the whole thing almost like the small plastic building blocks that snapped together. He couldn’t remember what they were called, but he loved playing with them as a kid. It was a modular approach that led to a whole list of strangely named spells. Outer Curtain Wall, Inner Dividing Wall, Watch Tower, Gate House, Granary, Large Building, Small Building, Paved Street, and Dock were the most important ones, but he had no doubt that in time some of them would morph or merge into other new structures as required.

He spent a full day walking the area with Matt, discussing what would go where, and then, once it was decided, he cast hundreds of spells in the space of only a few hours. Such a task would be grueling enough normally, but given that each of them cost twenty or thirty mana, it was exhausting. In fact, the only way he kept up was to drain a good portion of the mana from most of the men and women with him. By the time he was done, they all felt his fatigue in the form of depleted mana.

That cost was offset by the joy and wonder of watching a city slowly rise from the soil of the hillsides, though. When they started, there was nothing but wind-swept grasses and dunes, but by the time the sun was setting, most of the city had already started growing out of the city a few inches at a time. It wasn’t perfect; it would take an awful long time to get anywhere close to perfect. They would have to make due for open sewers for the foreseeable future and haul an awful lot of lumber to make a mountain of furniture. Hell, simply making the tools they needed to make better tools to build the things they truly needed would be an epic undertaking. Still, it would be better than waging yet another war. Benjamin was sure of that much.

Matt and Emma’s ceremony was held in the newly created town square the following day and presided over by Raja, who was at least mostly serious for the occasion. It was a simple thing, with a few words and an exchange of rings, and almost as soon as it was done, there were other men and women wanting to do the same thing; life might have stopped under the Rhulvin rule, but now that some sense of normalcy was returning to the world, it was coming back with a vengeance.

Still, even as Benjamin stood and watched, appreciating all the happy moments crowded together until they were nothing but one long celebration of life, he couldn’t help but think of all the things left to do. After all, he’d just built a defensible shell for them to take shelter in. It might be a little more polished than a Rhulvin city, but it was a long way from feeling lived in.

A hundred weddings would mean how many children in a year or two? How many beds would they need? How many axes, saws, and planes would that take? How many…

“What's the matter?” someone asked, “Don’t have anyone special? Not looking to take the plunge just yet?” interrupting Benjamin’s spiraling train of thought.

“Hah, it’s nice to see you too, Kalinomia,” Benjamin laughed, recognizing the voice even before he turned his head to see her. “No, I think I’ll hold off. I’ve done enough work for one day. I think it’s time to relax a bit before I make any serious, life-altering choices.”

“Probably for the best,” she agreed as she stood there next to him. “Still, all this… I hope you find some way to celebrate.”

“Because I built an empty city or because we almost won the war?” he asked sardonically.

“Because you survived it,” she said with a smile.

That was enough to make him smile back. It needed no further elaboration. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen, and whatever needed doing would get done, somehow. Despite all of that, though, he’d somehow managed to get through it all in one piece, which was not something he would have expected this time last year.

“Good point,” he answered finally.’

“Besides,” she continued. “Winter is coming. You find the right girl to help you celebrate, and she might just help you stay warm until the snows melt. Longer maybe. Decisions like that are every bit as important as whatever you’re planning next for this place.”

“A name,” he said, dodging her fairly obvious insinuations while he tried to decide how tangled up he wanted to get with the beautiful Greek woman. “The next thing we need to do is give it a name. Then we can start to live properly.”