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 battle unfolded, Mort leaned back, closed his eyes, and committed every detail he could access to memory.

When the rain of fire struck the enemy’s position, a discrepancy appeared.

Magical defenses suddenly appeared all at once in response to the attack.

They were not triggered from storage devices, nor were they created through the will of a wizard powerful enough to do so. They appeared there fully formed in an instant.

He had encountered such things before. After reaching a certain magical stratum, everyone eventually did.

But this made no sense.

Somewhere in this primitive world, which had not even known magic existed a month ago, a local had not only conceived of such an idea but gained enough power to cast a time-stop spell, or some similar distortion of the fourth dimension.

It was absurd.

If he claimed such a thing before the council and his lord, he would be dismissed instantly for delusion or incompetence.

Reaching that level of power required decades of work. It required an extremely clear image of what one wanted to happen, or else the spell would collapse into a knot of dimensional distortion that would at minimum kill the caster.

That, or it required astonishing talent and outside help.

If a local had the power and talent to grasp such an ability, which was already unbelievable on its own, they would still need support from someone who truly understood how to unlock and develop that potential.

To Mort, accomplishing that in two weeks seemed impossible even with the support of a magical nation.

But in the greater order of things, the archon himself was only a figure of middling strength.

He did not know what those above him could truly do.

The thought that some power competing with his lord and master was interfering in the invasion of this remote region completely overturned Mort’s understanding of recent events.

The resistance was no longer a group of talented locals he hoped to recruit once Mavis controlled this world. They were dangerous agents of an unknown enemy, armed with unknown magical knowledge.

They had to be destroyed before they achieved their goal, and that goal was almost certainly the elimination of Mort himself.

The most talented of those locals were no longer magical novices groping in the dark for answers. They had, knowingly or unknowingly, been handed dangerous tools they otherwise could not have obtained for decades.

Fortunately, the battle revealed not only the skills of those agents but also their limits.

Methods that failed against them could be discarded, but methods that worked were critical information.

The fire witch who dealt with the army of skeletal archers possessed astonishing power projection and control for someone her age, but her speed and physical ability were far less impressive.

The obvious solution, surrounding her with high-speed melee servants, would be troublesome because area fire magic was designed specifically for that kind of situation.

The warrior-mage was more problematic, because Mort was certain she was the one who had stopped time.

Any single trap could be broken or avoided through the use of that power, and she possessed great strength and mobility.

Moreover, the sudden magical enhancement she had revealed could not be underestimated, nor could her invisible weapons.

Finding a way to counter any one of those factors was feasible, but countering all three at once would be too difficult unless…

The archon carefully reviewed the full list of available resources, then smiled.

It would require starting over yet again.

But it was possible.

And if it was not, there were contingency measures.