Commander Alvarez swiftly excised the traitor from his command. He kicked himself for being such a fool when he found out who it was. The man had been one of his lieutenants with the worst engagement ratio against the Council’s forces to date. To the point that he had been thinking of replacing him for some time. But it was never good to undermine his people in the field unless you absolutely had to. Even now it was a mess.

He even found the correspondence between the traitor and the Council. Somehow the traitor had already learned of the Admiral’s intended trip to Ashvale. With the traitor having this information, it meant only one thing, someone in the Admiral’s retinue was also a spy. The question was, who?

Alvarez didn’t know what the Council could do with this information, but he knew the Admiral would clean house regardless. They would have to expedite the trip as well, to ensure the Council couldn’t react to this meeting.

***

The Council was in an uproar at the news that the Admiral and the Commander, of their enemy to the south, would be leaving for diplomatic talks. Over half the Council wanted to push this advantage. The other half wanted to cut them off and strike at this unknown possible ally. Normally Donovan would have agreed, except he knew where the pair were headed. He couldn’t allow one-sided talks with Lord Norman but he also couldn’t outright attack the man. This wasn’t like when he took advantage of shifting allegiances to seize power in California. He cleared his throat and the arguing at the table slowly died down.

“While breaking through the enemy lines might be easier with their command staff occupied. I assume the Commander and Admiral have already taken this into consideration. Just before the meeting, I received reports that his carrier had moved closer inland to support the front. Instead of throwing away our Controllers into a meat grinder, I have another suggestion.”

“This better be good, Donovan, this is a prime opportunity to break through, even with the cover of their aircraft.”

Donovan just smiled slightly at the hot-headed J-son. “Small territorial gains are hardly as important as preventing our enemy from allying itself with another nation.”

J-son scoffed at that. “What do we even know about this place? Just send a detachment of Controllers and undead and get rid of them before they can become a problem. From the report I received, less than a hundred thousand people are living there.”

Donovan wanted to shake his head at how dense the fire mage councilor was. He would never understand how the man had become so obscenely rich in the tech industry and yet be so clueless.

“That is true. But they are allied with two other territories. One is of little consequence… but the other… the other is the gron.” The table went quiet as he let that information sink in.

After the fall, and before the Council’s creation, Donovan had made it a priority to get to know all the big players. Which wasn’t easy but he had managed to piece together enough information from dead souls to get a pretty accurate picture of who and what to avoid. The gron were the biggest group to be wary of.

And every councilor knew this because they had specifically been told to stay away from them or they would suffer permanent death. Now Donovan thought the odds of the gron involving themselves in outside conflicts was small, but it wasn’t non-existent. With that in mind, their policy was to handle anything involving the gron with a soft touch.

He turned toward one of the quieter councilors. “Sharina, I heard you were finally able to entice that portal mage over to our side. Any chance he could get us to the edge of this Ashvale zone?” The woman silently glared at him while Donovan kept a slight smile on his face.

The reason for the woman’s hostility was simple. She had been very secretive about trying to recruit the portal mage to her side. At the moment she was likely trying to figure out how Donovan had learned of this as she wasn’t big on sharing her secrets. But Donovan knew them all. And while she was listed as a transportation wizard, her spells were a bit more nuanced than that.

In basic terms, her spells sped up or slowed down the interactions between atoms. This allowed her to create vehicles that ran off of specifically designed spells and mana. The downside was of course heat buildup. But it wasn’t any worse than a combustion engine. The Council used this to great effect to move buses full of undead around.

“He might be persuaded to help, for the right price.”

Donovan let his smile grow minutely. He always enjoyed negotiating.

***

“Why are we here again?” Eugene asked.

Norman set down the stack of research notes he had been going over. “I’ve noticed something strange for a while and I wanted to test out the theory.”

“Ok, but why am I here?” Eugene gestured around the testing chamber.

“Because I need more than one data point. And you happened to be free.”

Eugene grunted. “Just because I have a bit of free time doesn’t mean I don’t have other things I could be doing. Can we make this quick, Boss?”

“Yea, yea. Hit that plate as hard as you can.”

“That one?” Eugene asked, pointing to a cobbled-together-looking device off to the side.

Norman nodded. The device kind of looked like one of those gimmicky strength-testing games you would find at fairs. Because it was. Only instead of some flimsy boxing bag, it used a thick steel plate. There also weren’t any adornments to the device. Just a stack of weights and a needle that moved to indicate how much force was applied to the device. This machine was also modified to show a much larger range of force than those piddly carnival games.

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Eugene walked over to the machine and punched it as hard as he was able to. The steel plate rang like a bell and the needle jumped about halfway up the gauge. Norman was glad he had overestimated how much weight he needed.

He walked over and marked the line where the needle stopped then he reset the machine. “Alright, now equip this and hit it again.” Norman handed Eugene a half set of Bone Armor. It was based on his earliest spell design and only had bones in its construction.

Eugene sighed and activated the armor. He punched the plate again and there was no noticeable change from the previous time. Norman wasn’t surprised by this result. He had Eugene remove that armor and gave the man a set of full Bone Armor to repeat the process. It was again the earliest version of that armor.

This time when Eugene struck the plate, the needle stopped slightly higher than before. But it wasn’t nearly as much of a difference as Norman had expected it would be. He scratched his head at that. “Ok, one last test. Equip your current armor.”

The white armor flowed off of Eugene and he quickly replaced it with his dark grey compressed armor. Other than the color, the armor looked identical to the old stuff. Only it contained three times as much material and was much denser.

When Eugene punched the plate this time, it dented and twisted. The needle flew past the previous mark, stopping less than a quarter of the way from the top. An increase of at least twenty-five percent over Eugene’s base strength. Which was not an insignificant amount.

Eugene stared at the broken machine and the needle. “Huh… guess I never realized how much stronger the armor made me.”

Norman chuckled at that. “You think that’s impressive, watch this.”

Norman removed the broken plate and attached a new one. Then he hit the thing as hard as possible. As you can imagine, he barely budged the needle. Then he put on his own armor. It wasn’t as heavy as Eugene’s but Norman balled his fist and struck out at the plate. With the armor on, the needle shot up a quarter of the way. It was something he should have realized sooner. The armor used muscle in its construction. And the condensed version added even more tightly packed muscle fibers to the spell.

“With the armor on, I’m almost half as strong as you are without it.”

“While impressive, I don’t see why you needed me here to witness this.”

“What is it we lack, Eugene?”

“A lot of things. But I assume since you are asking me, you are referring to our forces.”

Norman nodded.

“That’s simple then. Numbers.”

“Exactly. We do not have the numbers to take on people like the Council or the SCA. We make do with quality over quantity because we are also short on people with callings.” Norman walked over and tapped the armor Eugene was wearing. “But with this, even our basic guards can be elevated to enhanced soldiers. Maybe not Death Knight levels, let's reserve that moniker for the truly elite in our ranks, but strong enough to hold their own against most threats. Including other enhanced.”

Eugene rubbed his chin while looking at the machine. “Do we really want fully armored men and women patrolling our streets? Seems like people might get the wrong idea.”

“I can see your point. But with the stronger and more magical threats our people are facing, we need to be prepared. Figure out a way to integrate these elites into the guard forces. Maybe only one per patrol group or something. I’ll leave the details to you.”

Before they could continue their conversation, there was a knock on the door. Norman had to shoo Princess out of the way so he could open it.

“Sorry to disturb you, Sir. A telegram has arrived from the border for Commander Eugene.”

“Thank you, Stewart. Please wait outside, we may have a return message for you.”

The man nodded and Norman closed the door. He opened the folded letter, reading it quickly before handing it to Eugene. Norman was glad they had reestablished the telegraph wires through the town. While they hadn’t had time to do this across the territory, they had established signal towers.

These weren’t like the ancient flag-based towers that predated modern communications. They were magical constructs that scouts could relay information to quickly. And even the tower in the name was a misnomer. They were squat pyramid-shaped objects that rose no more than three feet off the ground.

The idea of the devices had come from Varter, the stone mage but it had been Nolia that had presented the idea to Norman. He loved it and immediately had her implement a series of these seismic devices. All they did was transmit and read certain seismic frequencies across massive distances. It meant they could be used at night or in foul weather, although heavy rain did diminish the signal quality as rain tended to produce a low-level seismic event of its own.

Seismic interference was the only downside of the devices though. They were cheap to produce, quick to install, and nearly maintenance-free. Well, maybe not the only downside. They weren’t as fast as telegraphs or modern communications. But it reduced a week-long trek across the country to an hour-long transmission for critical information. And it had to be critical to use the strategic resource.

Eugene looked up after reading the sheet. “How do you want to handle this?”

“I’m still thinking about that. I guess I never expected anyone claiming to be from the US Navy would ever try to reach out to us for diplomatic reasons. How can we be sure they aren’t just blowing smoke up our asses?”

Eugene shrugged. “That’s why I do the fighting and leave the politicking to others.”

“Fair enough. We could try and contact Grobert, but I don’t want to pull him back from establishing that teleporter line unless we have to.” Norman tapped his fingers on his chin as he thought. “Send a runner and invite them for a chat.”

“You sure about that?”

“The worst they could do is try to kill us.”

Eugene looked skeptical about that. “That’s not what I meant. I meant are you sure we should use a runner?”

“Oh… Uh, yeah. Let's try to keep our communication speed a secret for now. Also, this will give our soldiers at the border time to observe how they act. If they are happy to wait patiently for a reply, we can likely assume they are rational individuals. If not, well, we can deal with them then.”

Less than two hours after Eugene left to issue orders to a runner, he returned.

“We have another visitor,” he stated, waving a second telegram in the air.

“Well, aren’t we popular today?”

Norman read over the second telegram and frowned. “There is no way the Council showing up right after this other group did is a coincidence.”

“How much you wanna bet that the first group is the SCA leadership?”

Norman snorted. “That’s a bet I wouldn’t take. It seems they got our message though. Send another runner and have guards escort this group to Ashvale like the other group. By the time they arrive, most of the Ministry building should be complete, we can hold an impromptu summit there.” Norman chuckled.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh, I was just wondering how I got from being a burned-out pothead to someone holding summits. Did you ever think you would be in your position?”

Eugene shrugged. “Guess I never really thought about it. I tend to take life as it comes.”

“Well, life is about to come at us very fast. I imagine this little party will not be a problem-free affair. See that we have plenty of security in place. I will summon the other administrators for a meeting to discuss our incoming visitors.”