Today I continued to refine the design of my puppet. I mostly focused on the arms, seeing how I could change them to make them most effective in combat. Blocking is entirely out of the picture, the skeleton is too fragile to not be damaged when blocking some heavier attacks, so I mostly focused on perfecting some sort of polearm set to dual wield, easy to support cumbersome weapons like a polearm when you can design the entire arm around it and it lets me keep distance while still being able to attack.

The actual design of the polearms was more or less inspired by a spine. It uses a bunch of very flexible vertebrae to swing around whatever head I think is going to be most useful. Gives me a good range of attack in addition to allowing me to react quickly and bend around any weapons they are trying to use to block. In addition to letting me grab onto things like weapons quite well if I need to disarm an opponent.

I’ve been spending all of my excess mana on armoring up the bones, but given how fragile they are despite that I feel like it is a waste of mana. It only really slows the puppet down. I should take that mana and either improve maneuverability somehow or give it more arms to work with. I don’t know which, I’ll figure that out tomorrow.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

As for how well I am doing, I won about half of my matches today. This type of violent conflict is actually really fun, more so than I remembered.

Oh yeah, two days from now I am going to try and challenge Par, this time with no limits on the amount of mana I can use to build the puppet. He should be back in town from his latest conquest by then, if not then it will be the next day.

Speaking of Par, he got a letter from the angelic council, which I still think is a stupid name. To put it nicely, it asked us to ally ourselves with them for our own good, to put it not so nicely it said submit to us or die. After that I don’t think peace is an option, the people don’t know yet but when they find out there will be no option other than war. And considering how quickly both of us are expanding our borders, that war is going to happen very soon. It’s gotten to the point that Par has stopped conquering, and instead cities are scrambling to declare themselves to be part of one empire or the other. Our opponents have already all but declared that any city that tries to stay neutral will be crushed, as the one city that tried was quite literally reduced to rubble. Even the scholars are rushing to our lands, everyone predicts war on a scale that has only been seen a handful of times before, and they want to be the ones to record it.

Meanwhile, my forest is expanding faster and faster, it isn’t going to be long before it overlaps with the borders of our empire. And from there into the borders of our neighbors. And eventually to the edges of the continent, and hopefully out into the oceans, where no plant has gone before.

Anyway, Good Night Dairy.