The subjugation of Brightharbor went off without a hitch. Despite her bitterness, General Palas had been relieved to finally sign the fate-bound contract, signaling the cessation of hostilities between her soldiers and my troops. They would return to their homes, forbidden from taking up arms against myself and the Legion, or else fate itself would enforce the terms of the contract. To some degree, at least — the contract wasn’t quite as foolproof as I would have liked, but it would do, in a pinch.

The only thing I had to do was to let them leave in peace, which I didn’t mind in the least. With them gone, Brightharbor was undefended — while she had only had the authority to negotiate for her own troops, the point was moot. The city did not have the fortifications needed to fight off an invasion, and it took no time before they agreed to surrender.

I wasn’t keen on moving to my next target so quickly, though. With the war taking precedence for the past month, I had put any kind of research on the back-burner — but my mind still raced with ideas, with hypotheses I wanted to put to the test. What finally convinced me to take this break from the war was the fact that if I could get them to work, some would be immediately useful for the campaign.

For that reason, I hesitantly stationed the Dead Legion out on the hills outside of Brightharbor — not close enough that people would panic, but within a couple of hours’ march.

Sarah and Shiro elected to visit the city, and I saw no reason to deny them the opportunity. They could handle themselves if anything happened, and it was the prerogative of youth to explore new places, anyway. I’d have been just as excited at their age.

Though, I felt a bit guilty for getting their hopes up. Brightharbor was… well, it wasn’t on anyone’s list of places to visit, to put it simply.

And that was how I ended up sitting alone, in the middle of a field, surrounded by thousands of undead all posing in silly ways.

***

The first idea on my agenda pertained to the living dead that I mass-produced. Wights were, plainly speaking, completely lacking in almost any kind of intelligence. The only part of their mind that was close to a human was the one that processed language — they needed to understand an order to execute it.

What they didn’t have was creativity. They would act exactly on the orders given to them, with no deviation, and any kind of complex task needed to be broken down into easy-to-digest parts, or else they would behave unpredictably.

This was sufficient for menial tasks, or for tasks such as guarding, where they mostly acted as a deterrent rather than anything else. I had an entire suite of commands programmed into them that made them useful as assistants, of sorts, though they couldn’t be trusted around anything delicate.

The current problem was that their fighting ability was abysmal. They were sturdy, which tended to offset this, but the movements they made while fighting were as programmed as anything else about them. They suffered here, from the lack of creativity, as once someone figured out their attack pattern, they would be able to counter a wight perfectly.

Count Malloc’s men had already begun to figure it out in our last engagements, and the only reason I wasn’t already losing was that the Legion had so far outnumbered all its enemies by a significant margin — but this wouldn’t last for long, as Malloc was even now mobilizing people in the westmost provinces, while only allocating a token force to the east.

What I needed the most was a way to make the Wights better at fighting, harder to predict, and I had some ideas on how to proceed.

Fate was an Aspect of seeing, of predicting. In combat, I had used it to great effect to help my allies’ strikes hit true. It was an odd Aspect, manipulating both friends and enemies, tweaking the odds in the caster’s favor. In this case, I wanted to use it to add an element of prescience to the wights’ attacks.

A wight was a construct of Mind and Soul, but that didn’t mean it had to stop there. I chose a smaller-looking undead, one in a better shape than most — it had likely been one of the last to jump, judging by the lack of broken bones and the singed aspect of its skin. I sat on a boulder in front of the wight, concentrating on the connection between us. The thread of Soul that linked us lit up in my mind, and I followed it to its conclusion, right up to the wight’s makeshift soul.

From there, I had full access to the other workings of its body, though the only one that interested me was the mind. Like its soul, it was a chopped-up thing, a chimera of disparate instructions connected to the empty husk of an animal mind. I searched through its mind, going from command to command until I found the fighting routines.

They were a complex little mechanism, one of my proudest creations, but in their current state, their usefulness was limited. Gingerly, I pulled a thread of Fate, the Aspect already answering me with much more eagerness than it had done in the past. I guided it along the thread of Soul and into the mind, where I began to work.

I wove it closely into the existing fighting routine, imbuing it with the simplest Fate spell that I knew — True Strike. Its simplicity meant I could discard the spell framework and work solely with the intent, making it flexible enough to follow the guidelines created by the older construct.

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Carefully tying everything together was an intricate job, and I spent hours on that boulder carefully weaving everything in its final shape. Finally, it seemed like I was done, and I released the breath I had been holding for most of the day.

I summoned another undead to test my work — a larger, more powerful specimen, which held a definite advantage in reach over my smaller test subject. The odds were stacked against my experiment, and I watched with bated breath to see the outcome of their fight.

It took three hits for the small wight to disarm its opponent — literally, and I barely reacted in time to stop it from dispersing the larger wight’s soul. A resounding success, I couldn’t help but cheer.

But that was only one wight, out of three thousand. There was another step to this experiment, one I had used before, but not to the extent I needed now.

I had expected from the start I would need to modify the wights’ programming en masse — that was why I had created a protocol for propagating changes from one wight to the rest. But this was meant to modify the Mind constructs each undead held, and what I needed was to imbue each and every mind with a strand of Fate and have the protocol mold it into shape. A much higher degree of complexity than simply altering an existing shape.

I jumped off from my rock, stretching my limbs while thinking about how to approach this new problem. As I pondered, I took the time to reattach the limbs of my test subject’s victim. The original spell for extending the changes used my own connections to the wights to transmit the information — so it would follow that I could inject threads of Fate into the transmission, somehow. Easier said than done, but I had precious few options right now.

I hopped back onto my rock, focusing once again on the connection between me and my test subject. Tentatively, I activated the propagation protocol as it was while holding onto a thread of Fate for it to use.

Naturally, nothing happened — from its point of view, nothing had changed. It was only designed to look for changes done to Mind constructs since nothing else was expected to be there. Delicately plucking a thread of Mind, I re-wove the meaning of the construct, broadening its scope. Much like the previous time, I then turned it on again.

This time, something did happen. The change to the propagation protocol itself was sent to the other wights, and I could feel the wealth of information passing through me as it was transmitted through my Soul threads. The thread of Fate, however, remained untouched, which was expected. The protocol needed to be taught how to connect to a new source of mana before it could do such a thing.

Once again, I held my breath and got to work.

***

The sun was just rising as I watched the wights sparring against each other, a satisfied smile on my face. It had taken hours to get the propagation to work — and a second test subject as well, the first one having exploded in a mishap. At least, it was much easier to weave Fate into the construct the second time around, and I was able to fix some defects I hadn’t noticed in my first attempt.

I blamed the gods for it, for surely my mastery of the arcane arts was not in question. Not one bit. There was little chance I could have accidentally caused vast amounts of Soul mana to concentrate into poor wight instead of spreading across the entire Legion.

I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought. I had held it with such conviction I almost believed it myself.

The new Legion was vastly improved over the one from last night. They sparred without weapons since, in spite of their increased deadliness, they were just as single-minded as before. I had already lost some in the experiments, all exploded or disintegrated beyond reuse, and I wasn’t going to lose more over something as simple as sparring.

That was one hypothesis out of the way, but I had one more I wanted to try.

When I had created a mana well, the System had referred to it as an anchor. Both times, it had tried to use it as such, destroying the fragile construct as it worked to attach itself. What I inferred from this was that the fact that it emanated large quantities of mana was only secondary to its usage as an anchor — after all, I had only guessed at its purpose from what I could see of its function. I had none of the expertise required to reverse engineer a construct made of Origin mana, so I could only blindly mimic the construct’s shape without knowing the function of each part.

I wondered, then, what would happen if I tried to create the construct outside of my soul — for example, right here, in the middle of this field. So, for the fourth time, I drew all six Aspects to my hands and began molding them into Origin.

I was already well-practiced at this stage, and constructing the well — the anchor — went smoothly, the small object rapidly taking shape in my hands. Like the last time, I Hasted myself, just before putting in the final touches, then I watched as the System manipulated the construct before my eyes.

I saw the same Origin construct summoned inside the well, but where the construct had summoned maybe a dozen threads before, now I could see thousands tearing and ripping my poor anchor in the blink of an eye.

Before I could blink, I was assaulted by another array of blue screens, and a sudden thonk against my head.

System Anchor detected! Attempting to attach Dungeon Process... 0%

Alert! System Anchor integrity (15%) below minimum threshold (65%)! Unable to attach Dungeon Process! Aborting...

Alert! Abort failed! System Anchor has been destroyed in the process. System will accept liability for damages. Generating appropriate compensation...

You have been awarded an item!

Staff of Magic Amplification

Item - Special

Increases power of magic effects by 25%.

I was too busy reading the screens to notice the staff that had landed on top of me, but as soon as I read its description I rushed to pick it up. It was a gnarled staff made of wood, frail at first sight — but I could sense the power coursing through it as soon as I touched it, pulsating under its surface relentlessly, like the sea in a storm.

I stared at it in wonder, and finally I sent a gesture of thanks at the sky. With this, I felt much more optimistic about the coming days.