The first seven turns spent as ruler of Schnitzeland passed without much dramatic occuring. They invaded the surrounding cities, using the contracted lookamancy from Albinny as well as hiring Headmaster Isaac for more, specifically hiring him to better teach lookamancy to Maggie through practical demonstration. It was on the expensive side, but given that Albinny’s coffers still flowed into their treasury, it was quite affordable.

The main reason Queen Virginia wanted Tanya to permanently settle, after all, was because that would void the mercenary contract. Janis did good work, and as such it was only in effect as long as the intent of the contract was still being upheld. As long as Tanya intended to work against the Empire and then leave, the contract was still in effect.

Her warlords had leveled easily with the firepower rifles gave them; the weakest among them was now level six, half of them were seven, and Visha along with von White had leveled to match Tanya’s own level eight. Getting the level 1 knights to level three or four was also simple, although it was difficult to keep enough alive to not have at least a few level 1s slowing down the formation without turnamancy to help them out. Despite feeling rather invincible, once she expanded her coterie beyond the original rapid response battalion of reinforced stacks, it was impossible to keep her no-casualties record. Mostly because she attacked far harder targets than she ever did when it was just her, Visha, von White, von Newsman, and von Kurig plus their subordinates.

But the Toadie’s march on another of their capitals was repelled, despite Tanya rolling out the metaphorical red carpet for them, and that meant the Empire had the wherewithal to counterattack.

Apparently, the Empire had managed to figure out how to produce their own guns, because they had mounted anti-aircraft guns on… “Okay, I know what that looks like to me, but I’d like your input.” Tanya said to Sizemore. Does he even have the word ‘train’ in his vocabulary?

“Oh, their dirtamancer, an odious man by the name of Albert von Spear, “ Which was a bit interesting, that the affectation of using ‘von’ was shared between their two sides. She knew that it was because she was reborn in a Germanic Empire pre-WWI and these people were clearly signamantically Germanic as well, but it was interesting. In another time, she might have allied with these people. But a job’s a job. “-is making minecart tracks to help move the siege emplacements. It’s certainly a strategy, but it’s generally considered a waste of juice, inefficient.” How is that man keeping up with his juice demands? “Whatever turnamancer they have enchanting the mobile emplacements must be high level, because I’ve never seen that kind of speed from a turnamancer vehicle.”

Elya spoke up: “Her name is Myne Camp, also known as Lady Ultra, or Mistress of Ceremonies Ultra. She’s one of those Nobles that pop with completely different signamancy than the side they belong to, but she’s a fanatic that the Empire’s tribe of men is the best in the world.” One advantage to having agents and alliances within the Magic Kingdom is getting all sorts of gossip about enemy casters. Very useful.

“That reminds me.” Tanya said, brow furrowing. “How does tribal affiliation work? I know Sizemore and Maggie are both of the Plaid tribe, and that my units have their own tribe, “ Which was ‘Salve’ or ‘Salvic’. It was what the ‘Slavic’ ethnicity was called in the Empire, and it was a hint on what Being X had planned once the Nazis started rising to power. Not only did he have to make her a blonde-haired, blue-eyed German aged perfectly to be in her twenties when that happened, the bastard had to make her one of the ethnicities that the Nazis hated anyway. “-but how does that work?” One very good thing about being summoned to Erf was that she didn’t need to make a contingency plan for someone blackmailing her into a marriage by threatening to sell out her faked ethnicity to the Gestapo. She never got much further than ‘geld the fucker’, which was only a single step in a plan, nowhere near a complete one.

“Oh, it doesn’t mean anything.” Sizemore said.

Janis nodded in agreement. She was mostly here to support Sizemore, but she was technically hired to provide consulting services, as an experienced caster. “It’s an unfortunate tendency among certain commanders to ascribe meaning to that facet of their signamancy, as if the Titans have a distinct plan in which it matters.” She huffed in amused laughter. “If Marie was still around, she’d need minutes to recover from her laughing fit.” Ah yes, Janis was also friends with that manipulator. Well, Tanya was willing to let bygones be bygones there. Marie was dust in the wind, after all.

“I have a theory on the rail-line.” Tanya announced, “But I’d like for someone to watch one for the whole turn, see if they do anything unusual with it.” Like putting in fuel for an engine. One of the principles of moneymancy was that value could be converted into juice. If one wanted to make train tracks, having the raw materials at hand would make the juice cost of the improvement cheaper, and moneymancy dictated the conversion rate, much like how the physical quantity of food and the amount of upkeep it could mitigate was also moderated via natural moneymancy. The Gobwin Knob Shock Exchange was just the logical end result of that line of thinking.

The unusual physics of Erf still had an internal logic, even if the application of the logic seemed off to someone raised in an era of science. But that’s why it’s called magic. “I know someone who’d be willing to do that.” Isaac offered, “For a low price.” Declining the request and offering a solution in one go, how efficient. She didn’t blame him, from her limited understanding of Lookamancy, keeping watch on something for an entire turn isn’t difficult, and it’s kind of expensive but very doable even for a level 1 novice, but it’s very boring.

“Make it so.” Tanya said, looking over the intelligence collated on the table in front of her. Magic nodded primly and put her hand to her temple, which she had explained was not actually required, but it was a nonverbal cue that she was using magic and was not paying attention to her surroundings. The thinkamancer equivalent to putting one’s hand to their head in a phone-like gesture even when using a hands-free phone. “Meanwhile… Sizemore, you say that making rails would be… expensive?”

Sizemore nodded, “Yes, I’m not a moneymancer or mathamancer, so I couldn’t tell you how many carts he’d need to use to make a rail line like that worthwhile, or how long he could make it before the maintenance costs would be impossible, but it’s more than just the two currently with their column.”

Tanya glanced at Maggie. She seemed to have finished her negotiations with Isaac’s contractor, and with a silent order, a minor telepathic linkup was made that allowed Tanya to cast a calculation with Sizemore’s understanding of Dirtamancy, without needing an extensive conversation to do it with Language. “Without any supplementary dirtamancy, given the maintenance costs, from here to their starting point…” Given a few other factors, like the strength of their firearm-based platform weaponry… “-it’s more efficient to use this rather than additional golem labor to push a traditional platform with double their current forces.” Which is a lot less than she expected, given his words.

“...Can you make me a railcart?” Elya asked, looking carefully at the designs of the platforms. “Maybe there’s something special about rails that make turnamancy vehicles fast.”

“A changemancer may be required to make a workable vehicle.” Kurt suggested, “They’re the casters that modify ships and carts and stuff.”

“No, I can make railcarts fine.” Sizemore insisted, “It’s part of the rail system, so you make the rails and the carts for the rail at the same time.” Well, some overlap in the capabilities of two Stuffamancy disciplines did make sense.

“Ordinary railcarts.” Kurt corrected, “Not necessarily whatever they’re doing.”

Sizemore’s eyes narrowed, offended. “Maggie, do you think we can link up? I want to get a good Look at those carts.”

Tanya liked where this was going.

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As it turned out, the anti-air gun platforms were actually special golems, a collaborative effort from the Empire’s thinkamancer, dirtamancer, and turnamancer. Which they also had, but it wasn’t a useful innovation for them right now. Incredibly fast along rails, a single one could travel one hundred and twenty hexes of rail in a single turn… at the cost of being unable to travel off of rails. So letting them build a rail to their capital was a doomed proposition… and also explained how they could reinforce their cities so quickly. Given how much ground a train could cover compared to an army marching on foot… yeah sounds about right. Might even be a little slow. Most importantly, the fact they were units instead of objects meant they could not be looted and used against them. The turrets themselves could, which was not nothing, but the golems would require large juice expenses to make work.

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“Yep, more rails in an underground tunnel, with a stack of dorfs maintaining it.” Isaac confirmed, using foolamancy to guide the infantry unit that was drawing the rail network on the map. Each stack of dorfs, advanced infantry-class digger units, patrolled the rails, using the natural dirtamancy of their digging special to maintain the tunnels. They were slow, only covering four hexes of rail per turn, but they were able to hunt and forage in those hexes to mitigate their upkeep and even send a little bit of food surplus along the rail lines to eventually make it to whatever fronts they had.

Why, then, were they not using such a network to invade Schnitzeland? It’s quite simple: The act of conquering the capital and forming a new side had automagically destroyed the tunnels in a seven hex radius, so they couldn’t do so easily. The exotic senses she had access to as a ruler would be able to notice hostile terraforming like tunneling within that same radius, which was why it was not a common tactic.

In fact, in a way, they were: there was a bit of a surplus army being built up in the tunnels that remained, which would presumably rejoin the column when it approached close enough, ballooning the offensive force the turn before they invade. Clever. It was exactly the kind of blitz-krieg inspired tactic that she’d make, given the chance.

…Come to think of it, she did discuss a similar strategy of making tunnels between their cities for Yojo Mojo’s Interior Lines doctrine, didn’t she? It was dismissed for some reason, although she didn’t recall why. It had been a busy few tenturns.

“So, the rails he’s making are just to keep the anti-air turrets functional.” Tanya deduced, “It’s a bluff. The only rails that actually matter are the last seven from the tunnel network’s terminus to the city’s tunnel zone.” That wasn’t to say that the rails that were being laid weren’t functional, it was just a distraction, a target for her to ‘sabotage’ so they’ll catch her off guard with the underground ones. “Okay, planning time: Can we defend against them?”

“The numbers are bad.” Kurt explained, “Even if you maximize production and pull everything you can to the capital over the next ten turns while they get here, you have a 40% chance to win against their currently visible forces. Whatever they’ve got waiting down the rail will erase even that chance.” With the turned forces and the theoretical production, they could just about match the basic garrison force that was present when Tanya conquered the place herself. A full push from what was essentially three sides in a trenchcoat could not be stopped by that. “That assumes they’re not hiding yet another trick. Off the top of my head, they could be only using that slow army to garrison the place afterwards, with the actual invasion force coming in nine, eight, or even seven turns.”

They’ll need to be tricky about this.

---------------------------

Tanya liked their plan. Step one was to have Janis and Sizemore link up and upgrade the city to level 5, also incidentally completely rebuilding the place from the ground up to a customized signamancy. Specifically, one that could pop some kind of firearms-using unit. Despite looking a bit like a WWII propaganda cartoon battlefield, that part failed. However, the backup plan worked perfectly: It completely changed the form that the defenses took, specifically designing itself to work best against the theorized capabilities and attack of the enemy. The tower was adjusted to being high-capacity instead of high-recharge, it was loaded up, and that power was hooked up to some nasty anti-digger defenses, Walls and siege doors that would electrocute anyone who attempted to use digger to bypass them until the tower ran out of juice, and given that the traditional wisdom of going through shockamancy defenses was ‘throw infantry at it until it runs out of juice’ this meant they would lose a massive amount of units trying. This was at the cost of being unable to use that juice to fight a flying invasion, but she could use shockamancy to do the same with her wand and recharge off the tower if that became necessary.

Further, there was a massive cistern at the top of the tower, sending high-pressure water in accordance with the direction of Sizemore, who will direct it to flood their tunnel the instant it breaches, sealing off all routes the water could take but their railway. Water was one of the few things that could cross hex borders, so if it worked properly it could croak their whole force.

Instead of the riflemen, the city (now named Stalling Glade, as Janis couldn’t resist making the place very green once the rifleman idea failed. Tanya thought naming it after a successful defensive siege was good practice) could produce 3 useful defensive units.

First were the Tartans, colorful armadillo-like units that had the ‘Phalanx’ special, which was a natural Healomancy special that made it so that you couldn’t croak any one unit until you’d dealt enough damage to croak the whole stack and provided bonuses against area attacks, although as a drawback it also meant you could inflict that damage on just one of them to do so. This was great, because you normally had to put units on a city wall to achieve a similar benefit. They also had a special stack bonus at 300 units, which Tanya was still debating going through with what it would take to get that many within the necessary amount of time, as 300 units with her full bonus plus a non-zero stack bonus would be impressive. It would take a LOT of resources. More importantly, it would still get torn up easily by firearms, although 3600 hits was a lot of hits to get torn through by bullets. A single one of their reinforced stacks going full-auto would do it, though. Unless… No, they didn’t have enough pull to get that much dollamancy ready. Not worth it.

The second unit type were the Bettys. Cartoonish units that were bouncy in more than one way, their primary special was a kind of natural stealth-dirtamancy called Mind the Field, digging little foxholes for themselves and disguising the hole, with a secondary special called Surprise Party that gave them bonuses on stealth attacks and also let them attack massed infantry like heavies, scything through them like wheat with enough bonuses. More importantly, Mind the Field could obscure their position even from dirtamancers, although Tanya didn’t like their odds of remaining hidden from a master-class one like von Spear. The fact that they will be unlikely to even guess at their presence should help. As assassination squad of the knight-class units stands a very good chance of mission-croaking a few of the enemy’s commanders or armaments, either outcome would be fine. For some reason, they were exceptionally foul-mouthed, and they also had the same signamancy censorship Tanya had, so the Bettys said ‘boop’ a lot.

The final unit Tanya had high hopes for. Mickeys were sizable heavy mouse units with rubbery hides that had the ‘Gummy Block’ special, an amalgamation of several natural magics which gave bonuses against ranged (non-siege, it functioned as Hard against projectiles only on top of a defense bonus) attacks and also made any misses ricochet back to the stack that fired it. Tanya was pleased to get a unit named after the famous Russian tank in WWII, and it should perform nicely against firearms. Sure, they still croaked to guns, but they’ll soak a lot of bullets in comparison to literally any other unit on a per-upkeep basis. They even had Mount, large enough to fit four knights atop it!

Setting up a similar level of protection to their other four cities was a little tricky, but with Elya using the disposable production boosting spell on the other cities, recharging from her and then spending her full non-linked budget of it on the capital meant they effectively had twelve city-turns of production per turn, six from the four cities and six again from the capital. They were also given substantial fortifications and were upgraded to three for the ones that weren’t already. The Mickeys had 80 upkeep, and popped at a rate of one per turn, a good rate for a level 3 city unit. They were also fast enough to get to the capital in a reasonable time period, so the outlying cities focused on producing those. They budgeted six turns of production, thirty-six of the Mickeys for that before they made the final decision on whether or not to raze the cities.

By arranging these Mickeys into six-stacks, they could mount one of their reinforced rifleman knight stacks on each one by only using three each (two for the command Mickey), as using all four mount slots imposed a penalty on the mount screen. Date-a-mancy linked them to their mount, allowing for a sizable defense force that could quickly deploy from the garrison to any front that had a fallen wall. Using six of her twelve knight stacks on this seemed like a good use of them.

The Bouncy Bettys popped at one per turn as well, but could also be popped at two per turn with Garrison, so two turns multiplied by six netted them three stacks of that, placed in two twelve-stacks strategically for optimal ambushes. The rest of the turns were spent popping garrison Tartans, which popped at three per turn ordinarily, so that was thirty-six per turn for five more turns at a minimum, so that was nice. It was much cheaper, juice-wise, to organize them into twelve-stacks with date-a-mancy instead of the full sixteen, so while it would have been easier to instead pop regular infantry, no one with sense would use bullets to croak infantry, so they were dangerous enough to be difficult for the Empire’s conventional forces to deal with, so as to provoke the expense of more ammunition. Regular infantry wouldn’t do that.

With these specialized forces, trap defenses, and other fortifications natural to having a level 5 city instead of a level four and having a dirtamancer link up for additional layered defenses, the numbers improved. Their currently displayed forces would lose handily if they tried a frontal assault, and a tunnel invasion ends even worse for them unless they not only bring von Spear directly into the battle, a generally foolish proposition, but he also manages to be on-the-ball enough to fully counter Sizemore’s super-trap.

The only question was: what did they have up their sleeve? Their rail-lined, underground sleeve.

---------------------------

Now, one might think that it would be trivial to repeat their previous actions and use rifle skirmishes from outside their column to do some damage. This was not true. Mostly, this was because von Spear made trenches and metal barriers that drastically mitigated any damage their rifles could do. So they’d expend massive amounts of munitions to do comparatively little damage.

This didn’t, however, apply to all of their units. They had some air cover to hold fliers in place while the anti-air turrets did their thing, non-heavy flying mount birds called Uber Lyfts with knight-class riders known as Wafts, who had a pungent special that imposed penalties on enemy units engaged in melee with them. Uber Lyfts were immune due to being incredibly unhygienic as well, so the Lyft-Waft air force was quite fearsome.

Fearsome, but outgunned. With mathamancy to negate the indirect fire penalty, Tanya led a force and croaked most of them in one turn with precision sniper shots, and the rest of them fled the column immediately after to prevent an encore.

“Ding!” Tanya announced after personally croaking the twenty-fifth Lyft-Waft airman she personally shot down and the last one they could reach. In WWI dogfighting lingo, she just became an Ace of Aces. The euphoric feeling of a level-up matched the level of accomplishment she felt at this, and she knew that she had grown some more, now taking on the appearance of a fifteen-year old version of herself with level nine. It was a substantial growth spurt, actually. She only noticed it because she was paying attention, but she must have shot up at least five whole centimeters. Exquisite. She hoped she’d grow just as much for level ten, but knew that level eleven would likely be next to nothing. Girls generally finished growing in height at about age sixteen, after all.

“Congratulations, your Majesty!” von Gratz was the first one to speak up, but everyone else started echoing the sentiment quickly afterwards.

Now, they had a few other counter-offensive maneuvers to complete…