*** Vendrith Kinzena***

Vendrith Kinzena had hated paperwork in his youth, but at his age…well, he still hated it, but he also saw the value in properly managed logistics.

So it was that Vendrith found himself staring at the letter detailing the disappearance of the hundred and eighty second comapny, nicknamed ‘the fire brigade’.

They had been patrolling the Vith side of the Dinamor stretch, keeping their eyes on the state of the Vith. Whether or not they would pose a threat.

Not returning at all fulfilled their task just as surely as coming home defeated.

The loss of a company and their vessal was bad, but it was the sort of bad that Vendrith saw every day over morning tea.

The thing that really stood out to him was the attached healer ostensibly ‘in charge’ of the mission.

Sasha Honnuken.

Isn’t she Corvos’s favorite niece? Vendrith thought, stroking his beard.

***Tom Graves***

A thousand to my debt, five hundred in Zombies, two fifty lost as healing, and one thirty-eight remaining in the crypts.

Tom felt a bit queasy, over the burning sensation in his chest. Because the estimated number of soul pulses was so accurate, and the amount of soul pulses a crypt created was a known factor, Tom could easily reverse engineer the number of people he’d murdered last night, even without trying. Numbers just kind of came easy to him.

1888 ÷ 8 = 236

Yep, there it is. Tom didn’t feel like a guy who’d killed more people in one night than Jefferey Dahmer or any of those psychos, but the numbers didn’t lie. Maybe it’s because I didn’t eat them afterward?

Tom couldn’t say he didn’t enjoy it either. He couldn’t deny there had been a moment of satisfaction watching the boat full of people who’d set him on fire get a taste of their own medicine.

That feeling had fled when he saw a man on fire jump from the ship into the water to escape the blaze.

While Tom brooded, twelve spirits, hand-picked by Luz for their extensive experience running or assisting the mining and production of ceramics, iron and steel from scratch, jogged back and forth tirelessly, in the process of constructing a massive log building. Miners, Potters, Blacksmiths, an engineer, mason, and an architect all putting their heads together to create the biggest structure the Vith had ever seen.

About the size of a duplex.

It’s to create a controlled environment. Can’t have the furnaces and kilns getting rained on. It’s the basics.

Ah. Tom turned his attention to his furnace, currently being hauled out of the ground.

How did I do on my furnace? One to ten.

It’ll be very useful in making the primary forge. It’s not quite good enough for the quantities and temperatures we’re going to want for steel, but it will allow working, tempering, and forming iron and allow us to process quite a bit more limestone than your original design, saving us nearly a month in the process.

The blacksmith zombie glanced over at his original pile of bauxite rocks. It was a pile of rocks. Doesn’t get much worse than that.

Six out of ten.

I guess that’s a generous assessment, given the lack of experience, knowledge and resources, Tom thought.

It is. The blacksmith zombie sent back with a nod. It’s almost above the level of an amateur. If you truly started this path this year, I look forward to seeing what you create in the future.

Tom thought of his homemade soul engine.

Me too.

The log factory was set up in a shocking amount of time: no less than eight hours after the zombies had begun working on it, the building completely finished, billowing smoke from the smallest chimney.

It made sense when you realized you have a dozen Outsiders who knew exactly what they were doing, hundreds of years of experience, no need for food, rest, or bathroom breaks, and the ability to telepathically communicate with each other.

Of course they’d be fast.

Honestly that’s gotta be the most broken part of this ability, Tom thought, not for the first time. The instant, perfect communication between him and his summoned spirits was a logistical fucking miracle, yet it was easily taken for granted.

He had just seen the two miners from the mines – Tom had mines now, apparently – deliver the exact amount of bauxite and limestone that each pod of workers had requested.

Without words, from about two miles away.

I wonder if Orsothians ever bothered to measure the speed of communication between these undead. Because my modern sensibilities are telling me that communication over large distances is the key to winning a war.

He glanced over at the massive pile of logs that made his previous attempts at rendering charcoal look like a child’s sandcastle sitting right next to its inspiration.

It was currently being supervised by one of the old-timey blacksmiths in the body of a dead guy, hands on his hips as he kept an eye on the rate of the burn.

The mason, potters, and the engineer, while waiting for their kilns to dry, went wading out into the ocean for fun and profit.

The north side of the Dinamor stretch was resource poor – nobody on orsoth knew much about aluminum, since bauxite is a bitch to refine – and the zombies hadn’t found an iron source yet, but there was one place they knew they could retrieve a healthy amount of iron.

Turns out a ship has a lot of metal in it. Be that massive thumb-sized, foot long nails helping to secure bigass beams, or no less than a hundred suits of full plate, the wreckage of the ship was chock-full of iron slag in various states of heat warp.

The blacksmiths took the best salvageable pieces, threw them into Tom’s furnace, and formed them into shovels and pickaxes for the miners. The potters put their heads together with the blacksmiths and the engineer to start planning out the kind of crucible they would be needing, and how to achieve it. Tom kept his plans on what he was going to do with it close to the vest.

While the zombies were intelligent, totally obedient and dedicated to their jobs, Tom couldn’t trust them one hundred percent.

They had knowledge and experience from previous jobs, which meant that they carried on memories from previous jobs.

And Luz had made it quite clear that if any demon lord or demigod got wind of his ability to dupe things, they would most likely turn him into a xerox machine for valuable artifacts.

Which meant if any of his zombies saw him copy things, they could take that information with them to their next employment. Sooner or later, the info might slip.

So he kept the duping under his hat. But he did need to know the exact specifics of his ability to dupe items. He needed to know what his limits were. For a few minutes, Tom was stumped. He didn’t have any equipment to procure accurate measurements, and so no way of figuring out precisely how many soul pulses it took to move a certain amount of mass across the time boundary between yesterday and today. If it even was dictated by mass.

Tom was scratching his head until he realized he had a few empty oil bottles that had precise markings on them, exactly one liter.

It was at this point that Tom thanked god for his science classes and the simplicity of the metric system. One liter of water was one kilogram. Water displacement is the same as weight.

So what he did was fill up a narrow pot with water, carefully marking each one-liter increment as he poured in the water from the liter-sized motor oil bottle, then divided them into exactly ten units apiece, and Tom had his scale.

By a putting a floating object on top, then putting another, denser object on top of that, he was able to measure the weight of the denser object as water displacement, which was one kilogram to the liter, or two point two pounds.

Tom did some water displacement experiments, and for the sake of being as scientifically accurate as possible, he figured out that one kilogram cost fifty soul pulses to move from the past to the future.

Twenty-two point seven soul pulses to the pound, for the layman.

A crypt floating on top of his plastic bobber displaced just a hair below one and a half notches of water, or zero point one four kilograms.

50 X 0.14 = 7

50 ÷7 = 7.14

So, the math says I can dupe eighteen and change crypts with the remaining soul pulses stored in my crypts, with a modest remainder.

Tom’s first attempt to dupe crypts failed, until he realized that the sticking point was the soul pulses in them.

It took an identical amount of soul pulses to move them between the past and the present, creating a net-zero exchange. So Tom duped the debt-repayment crypt, which was perpetually empty.

That time, it went off without a hitch, using seven soul pulses when he pulled it off.

Once Tom had the duped crypt in his hands, he was finally able to do something he’d been wanting to do for a long time: Break it open and see what made it tick.

Tom took a pair of pliers from Jacob’s toolkit and wrenched the soft gold apart. The spiral of off-color gold revealed itself to be a tiny tube of powder smushed impossibly thin.

This powder was most likely the path the soul was encouraged to take. Tom was able to pull the insides apart and got a good view of delicate spellwork on the inside of the gold, another, darker material composing the ink that drew the soul in initially.

Tom carefully scraped the two materials into two different bowls. Then he did it again.

I have been informed that being able to fall asleep at will is not natural, with no small amount of envy. It would make sense if that is simply a part of my natural ability that it never occurred to me to question.

Thump. Tom deliberately spiked the soul pulses in his chest, drew some soul pulses from the charged crypts, then secured the table in front of himself in a death grip, and went to sleep.

He awoke the morning before, sat up out of bed, then immediately hit the Escape button.

Tom’s eye fluttered open just as his forehead was sinking down toward the table, his neck cramping.

Looks like there’s a little bit of time dilation between being awake and asleep, Tom thought, resetting his stance and rubbing the cramp out of his neck.

He gripped the table again. Here’s the money shot.

Tom went to sleep again, and when he opened his eyes to the dream, he was standing in front of the table with the gold scrap and tiny clay bowls of powder he’d scraped out of the innards of his dissected crypt.

Tom grabbed them and discharged his soul pulses while he hit the escape button again.

“GAH!” When Tom opened his eyes the cramp in his neck was back, and worse.

Note to self, find a better escape button.

When he focused back on the table, the scrap gold and tiny piles of powder had been…scattered around the table, making the powder nearly unrecoverable.

Hmmm… gotta figure out how to stick the landing.

Tom spent a few minutes organizing the gold scraps and remaining powder before moving it to the side so the new stuff arriving couldn’t disturb it.

Tom drew more soul pulses, gripped the table and went back to sleep.

He opened his eyes, rubbed the cramp out of his neck and spotted the messed-up bowls of powder and gold scrap. He cleaned them up as quickly as he could, then duped them again. This time he was careful to just barely touch them, leaving them laying exactly where they were, with nothing in the present that could complicate their arrival and make a mess.

When he opened his eyes this time, hit forehead had already touched down on the table, on account of that extra work cleaning up the last batch.

When he glanced up, the scraps of two crypts were sitting in the nice tidy pile he’d made for them, but the powder had been flung to the side, making a curious streak of pearlescent powder on the side of the table.

Damnit. That was weird, and Tom didn’t wanna have to put the powder in a container to move it, because that lost so much potential, wasted on the container.

Tom dipped into the soul pulses stored in his crypts and went back to work.

Over the course of the day, Tom experimented over and over with duping the separated materials of a crypts. The pile of gold rapidly doubled over and over again, until it was a respectable sixteen crypts in weight.

Assuming the amount of gold in a crypt dictates its carrying capacity, then multiplying a crypt’s volume by sixteen gives me…eight hundred potential soul storage.

We’ll round down to seven hundred to account for the fact that there will likely be some lost gold and/or impurities in the forging process.

The piles of powder on the other hand, kept getting spread around every time he copied them, like some malicious air sprite slapped them over in that tiny instant before he opened his eyes.

A sane person would have just accepted the cost of putting the powders in a container and duping that along with everything else. It would have actually saved a lot of soul pulses.

But Tom wanted to know why.

Why the hell does the powder keep getting scattered? Something was generating momentum between then, and now.

Tom tried for hours, experimenting with little pinches of fine dust between being awake and asleep, and they always wound up scattered.

Some kind of turbulence from being moved between the past and the present? At first Tom thought it was because he flinched or something, but after he tied himself to a bed and asked Nema to drop some dust on his hand – something she was willing to do, but gave him strange looks for – he found that it still got scattered, and Nema, who watched him sleep, said that the dust just kinda exploded to the side, while his hand didn’t move at all.

Weird. Tom thought. Still, he couldn’t afford to spend all of his time chasing a tiny anomaly. He had other things to do.

Namely the Indeathstrial revolution.

Three weeks after the battle, the blacksmiths began churning out steel spears. Rather than a steel tip and wood body, Tom requested a solid steel spear to capitalize on Vith warrior’s insane levels of strength.

Their biggest problem was their typical weapons not being able to penetrate steel armor.

Generally the steel spears were poorly received. The warriors didn’t like the extra weight, and how much they changed their balance. Many asked why make a steel spear when a rock could crumple armor.

Gunn was what you might call an early adopter.

The aged chief picked out one of the detractors and threw the spear through the man’s stone hut and out the other side. It lodged into the stone of the home beyond it.

“With these, you can kill the man guarding the Alia, and the Alia behind him,” Gunn said, meeting everyone’s eyes. “If you can’t understand why we need that, then you don’t deserve to take your homeland back.”

They weren’t spears for hunting.

They were spears for war.

“How many more can you make?” He asked Tom.

“About eight?” Tom said with a wince. The spears were incredibly iron intensive, and duping them wasn’t an option either. Each one weighed about twelve pounds as a rough estimate, which would demand two hundred and seventy-three soul pulses to copy.

Or the equivalent of thirty-four dead people.

Tom was unsure if a single steel spear would net thirty-four dead people or not, so he was unwilling to devote the soul-pulses to it until he knew it would.

Besides, a single blacksmith zombie can make spears as fast as he get the materials to do so. Better value, for sure.

As soon as we find a source of iron. The miners were currently scouring the local area and beyond for useable ore.

Vith blood was red, so Tom was fairly confident that Iron was a common element on this planet. They’d find it eventually.

“I see, well, we’ll just have to make do with what we ha-“

Between one moment and the next, Tom felt a strange, nearly imperceptible ripple inside his chest.

What the hell was that?

An instant later, he heard the sound of metal scraping against bone.