Silenos had called on his apprentice the moment he heard of her return to the city. She had, however, been late in answering his summons. Late by an entire minute, no less. Such a transgression was unheard of from her, and not a thing he had any intention of humouring. He made his way sharply to her quarters at the turning of the sixtieth second following her time of arrival, storming through the expansive building and letting his displeasure show to frighten servants and administrators from his path.

Her quarters were not far from his own place of work, and that much was by design. He had barely resisted the urge to dedicate an entire afternoon worsening the old king’s punishment, after discovering the unforgivably inefficient layout of his palace, and ensuring as many people of import were within easy reach of him at all times had been a priority in their restructuring.

Silenos knocked once upon the door, waited barely half a moment to be granted entry, then pushed his way in. The sight awaiting him inside was something even he had failed to anticipate.

Upon her bed, Sphera lay strewn longways. She was uncovered and unclothed, save for a few thin strips of fabric which clung tightly to the more intimate parts of her, chocolate skin on full display and eyes luminous in the dull light. She smirked at the sight of him, stretching legs and pushing her chest out in quite a deliberate way.

“Forgive me for not answering your summons, Master.” She purred. “I thought it more fitting to await you more properly like this.”

Silenos held her gaze for some time, watching as the woman’s face slowly shifted. First to uncertainty, then confusion, then worry. He saw the humiliation slowly bubble up, relishing its infancy before finally speaking.

“Are you attempting to seduce me?” He asked, deciding to leave the question simple. He could aim more particular points at her upon hearing a response.

“I…Thought that I would…Would show my gratitude, Master, for all you have done…”

Sphera was sitting up, and not-so-subtly drawing in covers to hide her body. Silenos let the sight of her embarrassment stew a moment longer.

“Because you believed I was in any way attracted to you.” He finished, watching her humiliation deepen. “Well then, let me clear matters up now and inform you that I am not. Some in my Household continued to indulge the primitive stimulations of biological impulse, but I was never among them even before being taken on as an apprentice.”

Had her skin been lighter, Silenos knew he would have seen the pink tint of her shame. Instead he sensed it only through the biological triggers as blood pooled and flesh warmed. Sphera did not meet his eyes, merely nodding.

“I understand, apologies…Master Shaiagrazni.”

“Good.” Silenos nodded. “Now we have work to do, stand and aid me while I assemble a new undead.”

She climbed from her bed, and made for a drawer beside it. Silenos realised that his apprentice intended to clothe herself.

“No.” He said. “You will not waste any more of my time, work as you are.”

He could sense the embarrassment and fury in her as they walked, but none of it was directed towards him. The sure signs of a valuable lesson going well learned. Silenos was not certain what he’d have done if he’d detected contempt in her, he was not, after all, within House Shaiagrazni’s territory any longer. And after…

Blinking, he turned his thoughts to more important matters.

Silenos’ new laboratory was not so far, and it was no great thing. Back in his homeland he had laid claim to a workspace so large that ten thousand people might have lived within it, fit to display even the greatest of grotesqueries and fit every millimetre of their volumes inside. He was making do with rather less, now, but it was still far better than the open fields he’d conducted the majority of his New World research in. Silenos found it oddly, disgustingly luxurious.

Today he was not working on any creature large enough to require such space, in any case. He needed something with a touch more subtlety. Ironbane, from what he had gathered, was a region protected by great walls and tight passes in the surrounding geography, which meant efficiency and ergonomics were vastly more important than maximising sheer destructive potential.

Fortunately, Silenos had already surpassed anything he might have managed in the past. There were few advantages to finding himself in the New World, but none were so great as Vigour. That ephemeral, mysterious magic that allowed creatures like Galukar to wield the physical potency of a grotesquery dozens of times their weight. If it could make a humanoid weighing mere hundreds of kilos so strong, Silenos suspected the true potential of it in a properly made body would be fearsome indeed.

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But there were natural limitations, too. Diminishing returns came in combining both Biomantic perfection with excessive Vigour- Silenos had found himself able to bolster Collin Baird’s strength far less than he had Ensharia’s, and found a negative correlation between the benefits gained by fleshcrafting and the presence of Vigour within a subject. Something made with both would always be stronger than was possible using only one, but the difference was additive, not exponential.

The second limitation was one Silenos suspected would prove less immutable, though for the time being he had yet to find a way around it. Vigour was difficult to handle, a power not native to his homeland or, apparently, his people. Silenos had no innate ability to manipulate it as he might ordinary magic, and even his Entity-granted power to see the stuff of the arcane only provided him knowledge, not influence.

He could not bolster Vigour, nor could he control, combine or redistribute it. If he wished a creature he made to boast magically-augmented tissues, he would have to make it entirely from organic matter which was already magical in nature.

His experiments to take a small sample of flesh from a Vigour-boasting creature and simply grow more of it through standard Fleshcrafting proved futile.

Fortunately, neither of these limitations were things Silenos found himself entirely halted by. For one thing, simply knowing the presence and density of Vigour in any given sample allowed him to carefully mix it with tissues from others, keeping a roughly constant level as he grafted one set of Vigorous anatomy onto another.

Sphera could not see the magic, which came as no surprise. Rare enough to possess such an ability even in House Shaiagrazni, Silenos would have almost been offended to see it manifest in a primitive. What she could do, however, was serve as an extra pair of hands. Clumsy ones, albeit, but still sufficient to ease the process of Silenos’ own work and keep his genius fully free to manipulate the finer details.

It was a successful campaign in which Silenos took his new nation, and so few of his own forces had been lost. None among them had been Rangers, but he had carried the hindsight to keep the corpses of those previously lost well preserved. He ordered them brought through, each contained in large Fleshcrafted pods designed to stave off bacteriological cultivation and decay until such a time as he had use for them.

Collin Baird had taken some time to convince, but the sheer utility of reworking their bodies proved well worth the effort of twisting his hatred back towards the Dark Lord. Silenos decided to use only one Ranger for each of his new creations, having only a few dozen to spare, and wanting to maximise their efficiency.

He armoured them, taking the time to make plates of the very same material as his own body was protected by. It would not have been possible, were he not leaving them with such light and thin amounts, but there were benefits to foregoing quantity. Once they had been encased in millimetres of the stuff, he moved to their general anatomy.

The human form was rather inefficient, locomotively. Silenos went about correcting it, finding no small measure of satisfaction from being able to finally exceed the simple limits of aesthetic normalcy imposed upon him when he worked on Collin Baird or his other subjects. He altered joints, improving angles of movement, adding additional elasticity to limbs and elongating tendons and connective tissue about restructured bones. He broke down neuronal tissues, diffusing them into clusters of rudimentary cogitators serving as relays between myosin-sheathed nervous pathways to allow for a near-instant processing. That, above all, was something he could not have managed in other subjects. The price was dispersing his creations’ neurons so thinly as to leave their reanimated intellects more bestial than human.

More bestial, but not entirely. Silenos ensured he left a sufficient fraction of higher cognition to keep the creatures crafty and unpredictable, estimating by the time he finished that their intellectual prowess would have been comparable to Venka.

He felt a flash of amusement at the memory of the imbecile continuing to scribble his lobotomized drivel out, blissfully ignorant to the damage each new publication did to his legacy.

The muscle fibres required no great creativity, merely some mechanical engineering in regards to which angles and dimensions would best generate an explosive strength of movement. Silenos compounded them with natural weaponry, covering his creations with blades of keratin and nacre, carefully hardening their edges and treating their structures to leave weaponry able to slice apart steel without so much as a nick to their faces.

He added tails, too, deciding that the opportunity for added killing power was worth the added weight and recycling slain Knights to make the limbs from slower, more powerful Vigour. If any defence proved more than a match for the talons and claws already tipping his smaller grotesqueries’ limbs, Silenos estimated the great lance affixed to their tails would prove able to punch through all the same.

Silenos altered balance, enhanced sensory prowess, added in instincts towards stealth and ambush-fighting and, of course, bolstered their aggression as best he could manage. By the time the first creation was finished, it was unrecognisable.

None were larger than they had been as men, but their bodies were made lean and sinewy, almost serpentine in their lithe efficiency and hardened with armour plating and wire-dense muscle. Both limbs ended in scythed blades, and smaller gripping blades protruded from the feet where they might climb, or else disembowel a target via kicking. The tail was of particular note- every bit as destructive as he had envisioned.

He took a step back, then smiled in appreciation as he watched the creature exert itself in tests. It passed them all, and passed them well, with only a scant few flaws revealing themselves, all of which were rectified quickly.

“It is perfection, Master.” His apprentice breathed, seemingly so enraptured by the creation as to have forgotten about her own near-nudity. Silenos hummed.

Once he’d worked with materials produced by others of his Household, tungsten-based metals and steels of the strongest order. Once, he’d made creatures able to bathe in fission-fire and live. This was…

“Acceptable.” He decided. “Given my limited circumstances, but one creature does not make an army. Let us produce more.”

Sphera blinked at that, but solidified quickly with a more certain nod.

“Of course Master.” She grinned. “You have some means of producing them more quickly?”

Silenos allowed himself a smile. She really was quick, this one.