Over the next week, Harlan kept a close eye on things, there really was nothing wrong, Mosley just seemed to be a prodigy.

But since he had done nothing but work, Cole decided that he should go out shooting when they went to test the weapons that the as of yet unnamed gunsmith had made. Harlan had asked for their names, but everyone told him that the family preferred not to tell anyone, because they were all just known as the Gunsmiths and that is the only part of them that mattered.

“You been shooting before?”

“Not really. I’ve fired guns before, but I don’t see the point really.”

“Well, sometimes it is fun to just let off a few rounds. And women love this.”

Cole began to twirl his guns around on his fingers before he handed them to Harlan.

“Now be careful, those are loaded, so we should-”

Harlan spun the guns like he had done it before.

Anne joined in on the display, twirling her guns alongside Harlan.

“You sure you ain’t done this before?”

“I am good at taking in the details of what I’ve seen, from there it is just a matter of reflexes to put what I’ve seen into action, and then once I’ve gotten the copying learned, the new moves come easily.”

She tossed her guns to him, and he effortlessly added them to his act.

“Well that hardly seems fair.”

“Life is unfair, but I know a man who is barely a mage and I’m sure he could do this just as well as I could.

I’m simply built differently on a fundamental level from humans, but the same could be said of any mage.”

“Alright, but can you hit anything with a gun?”

Harlan had seen the others ‘fan the hammer’ as they called it, and Ned was a crack shot while doing so.

He fired all 24 shots while juggling and drew a plus on the target before he handed the weapons back.

Colten grumbled slightly, and Anne teased him about it.

The gunsmith duo, the father and on who did the actual design and fine manufacture compared to the other members of the family who were doing more grunt work, came out along with a few others and set up the cannon based on the Black Sentinel arm cannon along with a drum fed machine gun and the heavy sniper.

“Colton, you can do the first test.”

He stepped up and started with the drum fed machine gun which was based on what Harlan had seen when he rode on the Castian battle tank.

“Brace properly, there will be more recoil than you expect.”

Colton held down the trigger and the barrel flew upward until Harlan grabbed it.

“We should consider adding a grip on the stock for more support.”

They looked down the range, finding that despite the failure to control it, at least the first few shots had hit.

Harlan took the gun from Colton’s hand and explained the magazine release and loading the circle drums with rounds.

They didn’t really understand how the rapid fire on the tanks worked, and it wasn’t like Harlan could’ve torn the gun open and looked inside. So what they had was a sort of revolver mechanism that relied on soulsmithing to make sure the rounds would flow into the loading mechanism without jamming.

On the second shooting, Colton blew apart the head of the flat stone target Harlan set up.

Next was the sniper based on the one that almost killed him back in Borden.

Colton missed the first shot, and so Harlan gave it a try, finding the sights were just slightly off, nearly causing the elder gunsmith to shoot Harlan on the spot, knowing it wouldn’t really hurt him anyway.

But a harsh stare that promised it was a very bad idea caused him to stand down.

With the second shot Colton fired, the chest of a thicker stone target much farther away was blown apart with cheers from everyone.

“Now that is a weapon. I bet you could kill Eolgi with this thing.”

“Very likely you’d just piss them off, but I saw the one I injured get eaten by the others, so perhaps hurting it would be enough.”

Harlan picked up the last weapon, a shoulder cannon based on the arm cannon which his Black Sentinels had.

“This on the other hand, will surely kill an Eolgi.”

“I’m not gonna break nothing shooting this, am I?”

“I soulsmithed it, without the spells which are activated when you pull that trigger it would fly back, shatter your shoulder, and then probably kill whoever is behind you.”

“And you’re sure it won’t don’t that now.”

“I am very confident in my ability to create something which doesn’t kill its user.”

Harlan had learned quite a bit from his near death while testing his train.

The cannon had a long thick barrel with two grips on it, one holding the trigger, and the other just to give a little more support.

Harlan loaded in the shell and slammed the bolt shut, warning them that he couldn’t soulsmith in a spell to make it anything but quieter, but he didn’t go into the details about decibels and nonlinear increases in mana cost as things got louder.

Harlan had set up a group of 10 targets in a row, and when the shell struck all of them were reduced to clouds of dust as everyone clapped and cheered.

It was all fun and games with everyone trying out the new weapons until a gate opened up and D’if was on the other end with two Cast prisoners.

“Take them down to where the broken targets are and bind them.”

“Yes sir.”

Harlan had seen Colten do hardly anything in the week he had been here, so far as he could tell the story of how he became ruler was right, he had been thrust into the position because everyone above him had died in an accident. He had no real idea of what should be done, and simply kept the status quo as best he could.

Things suddenly became tense as D’if walked the chained men down the range.

“You’ve never fought a Cast, have you?”

“You can’t do this, have these men gone through a trial? What crimes have they committed?”

Harlan ignored Colten, continuing on with his speech.

“They are defensive fighters mostly, not as strong as a Goliath, not nearly, but they are hard to crack for normal people.”

Harlan unloaded all six shots into the head of the Cast, those that struck his eyes penetrated, but the others simply deformed the metallic face.

A veil had been set up to avoid the screams bothering anyone else.

“If you tried to fight them now, they would simply rush in here, walk through your attacks.”

Harlan picked up another one of the machine guns and unloaded the entire magazine, doing little real damage.

“They’d kill the men first, human slaves are just worse than any other race, too weak, but not as small and good for spies or assassins as a Bijou.”

Harlan braced the gun on his elbow for support as he fired the sniper.

“The woman would be taken though, playthings to be used until they break.”

The round severed the arm of the Cast, and he silently screamed out as he bled metallic red, but his body was still stuck in the rock, he couldn’t thrash around.

“If you are lucky, they’d just kill Anne and Phoebe.”

Another round was loaded with telekinesis and went through the man’s head, bursting it like a tomato.

“Have you ever trimmed a tree?”

Colten was shaken up by Harlan’s actions, his tone had not shifted at any point so far.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

He understood killing, but Harlan seemed too disconnected, like these men were just targets of stone like he had shot before.

“You trim the branches so that the energy that would’ve been wasted on them can instead go towards the main branches that you want. Not only does it make the tree healthier, but it also makes them grow larger fruits.”

Harlan picked up the shoulder cannon.

“The other goal is to remove dead branches, or worse yet, diseased branches, because they risk killing the good branches.”

He fired and struck the more distant Cast in the chest, blowing a hole through him and the stone which held him.

“Killing Cast isn’t a matter of good or bad, it is simply removing a diseased branch that will lead to more harm the longer they are left there.”

Harlan placed the cannon back in the hands of one of the gunsmiths.

“These are good weapons. I’ll have my people start making more of them, and you’ll be paid well for that and any other designs you can make that are improvements on these. But try not to make too many weapons in the same role, I’d like things to be somewhat standardized. One rapid weapon, one rifle, one heavy, and a sidearm would be great.”

Harlan got on the back of the horse golem he made and waited for Anne and Colten to get on theirs.

At exactly halfway between the gunsmiths little compound and Kingdom, Harlan turned his horned steed to the side and stopped.

“What is your purpose?”

“I was asked to get this nation, all three of the nations, to a position in which they can stand against the empire. I was asked the night of the dinner, and I was asked again a bit more strongly the day before we left. That stronger asked said that I should do anything that needed to be done.”

Colton moved his hand towards his gun, but Harlan just shook his head.

“You know that won’t hurt me, and I don’t want to hurt you. If you died, would the UT crumble?”

Colton kept his hand on his gun.

“They’d put someone new in charge, eventually, but not much would change. Most of the nation is ranches, outposts, people who do what they do and they don’t cause much trouble for others and we come together to solve the bigger issues.”

“Do they actually like living in this shithole desert?”

“It’s not the best place to live, but it’s where we’ve been.”

“And what if you could be somewhere else? Your nation is 200,000 people, give or take 10,000, but you are spread across over 160,000 miles, that is nothing. Kingdom has a population less than Kor, the capital of Ragne has half of your entire nation’s population in a single city.”

“Cut the bullshit, just say it.”

“I’m inviting you to dissolve the UT, giving control of the lands to me so I can build a series of military and mining outposts and you’re people can live in my lands.”

“That is a lot of change, a lot of people need to move, a lot of ships and wagons and-”

“I have gate. We are less than 1,000 miles away, that means I can move one town or a farm at a time directly into my lands.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Then you remain federal lord, I do my best to turn this place into somewhere that can stand against the Cast, slow them down. But I have two more questions before you start thinking about saying yes or no.

Are you a ruler first, or a father?”

“A father.”

“Then bring your children to greener pastures, let them live in a place that is more comfortable, let yourself be a mayor or just a farmer, whatever job you want. And the other question, what is power?”

“I believe you said to me just the other day that power exists to protect the weak.”

“Power is the ability to force your will onto other people, and you are weak, both as a man and as a leader.

I want to force people to be better, to live longer, happier lives, to treat one another with some manner of respect as the baseline for interaction. And that will be built on a mountain of corpses from which rivers of blood will flow. I will take those sins myself as I should, but you will just be a man of my nation.”

The pair could see Harlan was speaking a heartfelt message, he didn’t want to say what he said, or do all that he intended to do, but he intended to do so anyway.

“I-”

“Give it a day, don’t tell me now, even if you are absolutely sure that this is what you want to do, let it sit in your mind, talk about it with Anne.”

Without another word he turned and continued to ride back to Kingdom.

When they got back Harlan went to see the children.

“Ned, how has your training been going?”

“Sensing just don’t feel nice. How’d you get over the nausea?”

“I was born able to sense, so I never felt anything wrong. Really I get nausea when I’m around too low a level of mana or my senses are dulled by magical constraints on mana flow.”

“That’s just bull-”

“I’ll tell mama.”

“Snitch.”

“I’ll-”

“Phoebe, leave Ned be. How has your training been going?”

“Well, I was trying, but-”

The teaching golem stepped closer and gave a look to the girl.

“I wasn’t here until late, and then I refused to work.”

“Why?”

“I hate sensing, it’s just downright awful and it makes me sick.”

“I won’t force you to learn, you must choose to do it, but.”

He formed a black and white butterfly that glowed as it flew over to her finger.

“Magic isn’t fun, not all the time, it is work as well, but like when you help your mother in the kitchen, that work ends up as something wonderful. Magic just takes a long time to learn and you can’t eat it. At least not all the time.”

“Mosley can already do magic though.”

“I can’t understand Mosley, but not everyone learns as fast as everyone else.”

In the week that he had been there, Harlan had not heard Mosley say a single word to anyone, but he seemed to get across whatever he wanted anyway.

At the moment he was burning designs into a piece of wood, he had an eye for fine details, and he could fight better than anyone Harlan had seen him get in a scrap with as the Marshall.

“I’m very impressed that you went through sensing so quickly, I know it gets easier to learn magic the older one is, but you are very fast regardless.”

Mosley nodded, but didn’t look up from the 2x2 board that he was burning a landscape of forests into.

Harlan sat there and watched them go through their lessons while he moved over to another body who was running some tests.

No Eolgi could be found around the towns, cities, ranches, or closed down mines.

Harlan had spent a few days looking for why, and he had an idea.

Each of them had reservoirs of water underneath them, underground rivers and streams that came in from the sea and were filtered into drinking water.

Eolgi were also never anywhere near the sea, which Harlan took as further proof of his idea.

As for why he needed to move to this body instead of running the tests by sending the other to the lesser mind and having it carry them out was that he needed gate, and only with his largest mind could he summon the feelings required to cast the spell.

For where the gate was being cast, it was to be from the inside of the nest he had been observing to the ocean.

They fled from the water, but once it stopped flowing the creatures had returned.

They dipped their appendages into the water and he saw the small puddles shrink, the creature then recoiled, realizing it was salt water and not fresh.

He had seen a species of spiny lizard that would absorb liquids through its feet, and understood what the Eolgi were, or at least he thought that he did.

He moved with hover over to the creature and the moment he touched the ground it knew where he was even with sound canceling spells, which were more accurately sound dampening spells.

Harlan punched it in the face, using imbibing to help bridge the gap in power between his original body and this one, snapping its neck back and paralyzing it, but not killing it; his hand exploded as a result of the power that was required to actually bridge that gap.

When it hit the ground the others just knew, and they planned to devour their weaker kin, but before they reached it, Harlan cut out the ground and the water flowed to fill in the space.

When it flowed, they all clutched their heads, despising the sound it made.

With Harlan feeling extremely confident that he was right, he took the paralyzed Eolgi and left through a gate.

Harlan cut the creature open and understood no more than with the others he had done the same with the other subjects.

Every single one of them was cancerous, their bodies covered with tumors on their skin, which is what gave them the stony appearance they were known for.

But what was odd was that the tumors were actually stone, and the older ones were actually metal.

The creature was deeply earth aligned, and it manifested the element naturally even before it evolved into something actually magical.

Harlan got a message from the lesser mind he left behind, there was trouble and it wanted him to take over.

The moment he returned to his main body he understood everything that the lesser mind had seen, heard, and done.

They were rushing outside because Mosley was called away for marshall business and had invited Harlan along.

“We got a group of bandits up on a farm, owner's son got out, told us they got his ma and sister, but pa is out in town.”

“Point me in the direction, and I’ll-”

“Sir Fomoria, Colton said he didn’t want you to be out killin’ people, and Mosley is the sheriff marshall.”

Mosley gave a thumbs up.

“I think that means I can do it.”

Mosley nodded and the deputy pointed in the direction of the farm, Harlan kicking up a cloud of dust as he flew at high speeds to the area.

He saw the bandits, and they had the women, dragging them towards the house from the barn where they had been hiding.

He landed a few dozen feet away and the men shot him.

“I was asked to avoid killing, so I’ll-”

“YOU STEP FORWARD AND I’LL BLOW HER HEAD OFF.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think you understand, I’m not negotiating, you’ll give yourself up or I’ll kill you.”

The man moved his gun towards the woman and Harlan skipped. Holding the man’s head in his hands when he stopped.

“If you move your weapon towards the girl, you know what I’m going to do.”

Harlan slowly walked to the other man who was shaking with fear and went to grab the revolver from his hands when two shots rang out, followed by many more.

Rifles, shotguns, pistols.

Those who weren’t a foot away from the man who tore their bosses head off so quickly that nobody saw it happen were braver than the man who was, yet still in a panic he fired his revolver.

Harlan dodged the closest shot and then skipped around, taking the mother and daughter somewhere safe.

Then he returned to the fight, starting by tossing the head at a man who had taken up a position in the barn, and who had fired the first shot.

When the two heads clashed they were both broken.

By the time Mosley and his men arrived, bodies were hanging around the area, and Harlan seemed contrite.

“I swear, I gave them the chance to surrender, I tried to arrest them.”

Half of a man fell from the windmill, splashing blood onto the marshals.

Mosley just turned around and started trotting back to Kingdom, leaving the deputies under him to clean up the mess.