79. There Are Contingency Measures

There Are Contingency Measures

In his mind, the map of the city was less a map than a pattern of forces.

The remnants of the old military, the outposts, the local resistance, and the few local talents growing against all odds into genuine threats.

All of them were moving toward an endgame he had been arranging for some time.

And yet the situation was now developing in a direction he had not foreseen.

The local resistance’s firepower had suddenly increased significantly, showing two distinct patterns of magical weapons he had never seen before.

The first greatly enhanced the mysterious projectile weapons the locals seemed to favor almost exclusively, and not by the two or three times one might expect from someone just beginning to work with enhancement, but by several orders of magnitude.

The second used fire in a… unusual way.

It did not rely on the conceptual nature of that elemental magic to burn, purify, destroy, or empower. Instead, it somehow burned magical power itself, using that as fuel for its physical properties and forcing those properties to apply to supernatural targets.

The two nominally small resistance groups were advancing faster and achieving disproportionate results.

The archon abandoned every production plan he had prepared.

His original plan had been to spend a week slowly accumulating strength, ensuring that when his forces finally moved, they would have an overwhelming numerical advantage. That plan was now becoming steadily less viable.

A flicker of irritation at being challenged was quickly suppressed. He had not survived more than a century of war by refusing to adapt.

Step one: delay the enemy.

He sent more power into the newly completed temples, changing their output from materializing additional Dark Masons to summoning four blade demons.

Blade demons cost more than their weaker fire-demon cousins. These servants made up for their lack of magic and ranged power projection with endurance and an ability to track specific targets.

The goal was not merely to slow the enemy advance, but to force them to spend more resources, weaken them while prolonging the violence, and let the magic level rise further.

At the same time the first blade demon teleported away, Archon Mort reassigned his Dark Masons to construct more temples.

In the long term, this would be less efficient. True, he could materialize more souls through multiple summoning points.

But he had only a limited number of souls available for materialization, and building three of these resource-intensive, space-consuming structures cost more early output than a hundred Dark Masons.

Yet he had no choice but to build them. He needed the temples to summon servants stronger than anything tombs could produce, and he needed them now.

On the other hand, this was also an opportunity to observe the enemy through his forces.

Regrettably, his plan to use that foolish sympathizer had largely failed. Once the fool was captured, someone among the locals must have suspected his true nature: a trapped gift.

Mort could see and hear through it, and that gift should have been brought back to their base.

His unwitting pawn had vanished behind subtle concealment, and the loyalty link between them was not strong enough to pierce it.

But since he had to spend resources responding to local talents anyway, why not learn as much about them as possible?

As time passed and his first base was slowly dismantled, he created a number of skeletal mages and spread them through his forces.

In the short term, that cost even more than building temples, especially because he had no strategic objective that would allow them to shine.

Standard Mavis military procedure was not to deploy expensive units piecemeal, but to slowly increase their numbers until they formed a decisive advantage.

For the first time in nearly ten years, the archon took the risk of ignoring that procedure and placed an obvious threat that was also a tempting target.

As the second…