***Vendrith Kinzena***

“I don’t understand why we have to keep this in-house,” Raze said, his arms clasped behind his back, stance loose. “I’m sure The Omniscient already knows about it.”

“Because, politics!” Vendrith said. “The Ku’leth wench ran off to our hideaway plane, she stayed there for years, right under our noses, and now this off-world…boy! is using Ku’leth knowledge to support the Vith. The VITH! With every intention of retaking of the Dynamor stretch! Our land!

Vendrith’s voice gradually rose as he explained the problem to his disobedient giant of a son.

“If we asked for help from another family to clean up our mess…To kill a non-alia from a world without magic who was giving us this much trouble…We would look. Like. Imbeciles!”

“I could’ve sworn I stabbed the foreigner in the neck, right before I took the Honnuken back,” Raze said, frowning. “He should be dead.” The giant shrugged. “I suppose I’ll just stab him a few more times to see if it was a fluke.”

“You do that.” Vendrith said, sitting back down in front of his desk. “Take a squad of the men who weren’t poisoned by those damnable insects, cut off the boy’s head and bring it back to me. The Vith can wait their turn.”

“Understood,” Raze said, flickering out of existence in the blink of an eye, with barely a ripple in space, a feat that made Vendrith clench his teeth in impotent fury.

Raze was better than him.

Vendrith took a calming breath and turned his attention to the work at his desk to occupy himself until Raze came back with good news.

Less than three minutes later, Vendrith felt the ripple preceding Raze’s arrival, and glanced up, expecting his son bearing a severed head.

Raze appeared in the center of Vendrith’s office, his clothes absolutely drenched in blood.

“They have Keth’zar,” Raze said, casually summoning a clean towel from the laundry room to his hand and cleaning the thick spattering of gore from his face.

Vendrith’s insolent son tossed the towel away, summoning a portal beneath the bloody rag an instant before it fouled the patriarch’s office.

“Sneak attacks have become…less viable than before.”

***Tom Graves***

“What am I looking at here, exactly?” Tom asked, lowering his torch to more closely inspect the pile of viscera. He had a twisting dread that he already knew the answer.

“Some five or so Kinzena soldiers teleported into the center of the village, just outside your hut. This is what remains.” Gunn said, motioning to the pile.

Tom didn’t fail to notice that there were two Keth’zar bodies among the chunks of human flesh, each dispatched with an identical single thrust to the eye.

Someone among the attackers had been very good.

Tom’s neck itched.

“Well, I’m not gonna be able to sleep any more. Might as well get back to work.”

Tom tracked down his crypts, figured out which ones had generated the Soul Pulses from the dead attackers, and forwarded them to Luz, reducing the debt by a solid thirty-two soul pulses.

Four down, two hundred and forty six to go.

Tom took a steadying breath and began flickering the thing in his chest, driving it past his heart, startling the muscle into motion.

Thump, THUMP!

Tom could feel the handful of soul pulses building his chest, which he then doled out between the healing crypt and the ghostwalk crypt. It was nowhere near as much as a single dead person could produce, but every little bit was important.

The undead had been destroyed in the attack, but there were plenty of Kinzena corpses to house their spirits.

In a matter of hours, the spirits, in their new bodies, repaired all the damage to the foundry and continued the rapid expansion of the village’s ironworking capabilities.

Tom watched as his hired experts tossed dozens of plates of Kinzena armor into the massive cauldron, melting the steel down into iron ingots, using those ingots to make hammers, using the hammers to shape the remaining ingots into billets, forging them back into steel.

Tom didn’t exactly understand the process, but he believed it had something to do with melting the steel armor, which turned it back into crude iron, which then had to be beat and treated properly to become steel again.

Tom would’ve jumped into the process to learn more about it, but he had his own business to attend to.

He dug out his secret workshop by himself, laboriously levering the giant boulder off the ruin of stone, bone and wood.

He wished he could have asked his undead, or the villagers for help, but Tom couldn’t allow anyone to know that he could duplicate objects. Like Luz had warned him. If a higher power ever got wind of his power, that would be it for him.

It took most of the day, but he finally uncovered the bowls of twisted gold and powder that he’d created by duping his crypts over and over.

Tom took a little pewter earing out of his pocket, a keepsake of some nameless woman that one of the dead soldiers had been wearing around his neck.

It’s got the right melting temperature.

Tom’s eyes rolled back in his head as he went to sleep standing up, duplicating the tiny piece of pewter, then duplicating the two pieces, then all four of them, until he had a respectable handful of pewter earrings.

Tom stole one of the furnaces for his own work, and being the boss, none of the undead gave him any shit.

They did however, offer unsolicited advice and assistance.

“If you want to make a wire that thin, what you need isn’t to melt it, you need to draw it through a steel die. Pewter is very soft so we don’t need an exceptionally hard steel. It should be no problem to whip one out quickly. We can have one ready for you in a matter of hours.”

The mutilated corpse of a Kinzena solder gave him a somewhat deserved, somewhat patronizing lecture on how to make wire, hijacking his project in the way only a professional can.

That lecture was followed by another on how to properly produce gold bands of the appropriate thickness, which also involved knowledge and tools that Tom didn’t have.

After Tom cooled his heels for a few hours, the undead got back to him with a long, thin pewter wire and a gold band nearly as long as Tom was.

Tom took the pewter and coated it in a thick layer of the pearlescent powder he’d painstakingly pried out of his duplicated Crypts, then began to roll the two into a tight coil.

“Ahem.” The corpse cleared its throat from over Tom’s shoulder, causing Tom to tense.

“If you want to make an actually tight coil, you’re going to want a steel spool, a base, and a handle for it. And a wooden feeding mechanism. Some clamps wouldn’t hurt either.”

Tom opened his mouth to tell off the rotting know-it-all smiths that were getting on his nerves.

Didn’t you hire them specifically because they know what they’re doing? Don’t be a dumbass. There’s too much at stake to lose your temper for something so petty. Do things right, and less people have to die

“Alright,” Tom said, shrugging off the irritation. “Make it so.”

And they did.

In a matter of hours, they had a coil of gold and pewter far tighter than anything he could have done by hand, held in place by an inflammable clamp.

An experienced smith zombie carefully watched the disc, a bit bigger than a hockey puck. He poked the coals, raised and lowered the temperature, and flipped the puck over and over again.

The goal was to boil the pewter straight out of the coil, leaving nothing but a tight, empty coil of soul-resistant material surrounded by gold.

The smith knew by eye the exact color that heated gold would begin to soften. His job was to keep it just below that point for hours on end while the pewter escaped, bubbling out the center and outer edge of the puck. The slightly softened gold, in turn slowly fused together over the course of time.

None of them asked where he got all the extra scrap gold and expensive soul-insulative materials. It wasn’t their job.

Eventually Tom couldn’t keep his eyes open, and wound up going to bed before the new soul engine was complete.

What greeted him in the morning was surprisingly similar to a crypt.

It was a disc about ten times the size and weight of the crypts he’d scrapped to make it, with a slight discolored band tightly wound in a spiral.

Now we just need to inscribe the soul-trap in the center, Tom thought, inspecting the heavy lump of gold.

Thankfully, gold is a very easy material to work with. All Tom had to do was gently score the surface of the material to make the grooves for the soul-trap.

While he completed the new soul engine, the undead smiths were hard at work equipping damn near every man, woman and child with a heavy steel spear nearly an inch in diameter.

The sounds of metal striking against metal and the smell of burning wood filled the entire village, night and day.

It wasn’t until a week later that the messengers Gunn had sent returned. With more villages at their back.

Suddenly the population of their little forest camp swelled exponentially.

Four hundred ragged survivors became hundreds, thousands of angry Vith, itching to take back the Dinamore stretch.

Tom didn’t realize it was an army until he stepped outside his hut one morning and spotted a group of nearly a hundred warriors leaning on their steel spears as they watched two men spar in the center of a clearing.

The steel rang like a bell as they took shots at each other, the sheer force behind their swings causing them to slide backwards with each block.

The Vith seemed to favor heavy swings as much as they did thrusts with the new spears, as the sheer mass of the weapon made that a viable strategy…

At least for someone as strong as a Vith.

The way all the spears stood straight up in a cluster around the spar was what really grabbed Tom’s attention, reminding him of those grainy old videos of military parades from the History Channel. There were only eighty or so, but he could see the beginning of a forest of brightly polished steel.

As more villages joined the army, their knowledge of the surroundings became clearer, and the roles of the undead smiths gradually became more administrative.

One village reported the existence of black sand in a riverbed a few miles away. After confirming it was indeed ferrous, the undead smiths began recruiting anyone they could to mine the sand, transport it, expand the foundry, and learn how to make steel.

The amount of steel spears being produced doubled in a matter of days. Then quadrupled. The quality dropped for a short while, but the undead were good teachers, and honestly…a sharpened lump of steel doesn’t need much improvement.

Then one bright young man marveled at how flexible steel was and wondered aloud if it could be used to make a bow.

Holy shit.

Tom got started on it immediately. Throwing their steels spears worked, but afterwards they were out a spear. He’d rather have them keep it on themselves and leave the shooting to people who had multiple rounds of ammunition.

Let’s see, whats the best way to take advantage of Vith’s heinous strength?

After brief consideration and asking around, Tom settled on a compound bow.

Vith were…not the tallest fellows, so full-on longbows were out, and while recurves were acceptable, he really wanted to wow them.

Tom didn’t know exactly how compound bows worked, but he understood the principles. The odd-shaped rollers in the top and bottom of the bow moved in such a way that when the bow was fully drawn it would ease up on the tension on the string, allowing the archer to hold the draw for basically as long as he wanted while he lined up the shot.

Then when the string was released, the rollers would make the string snap forward with an incredible amount of energy.

All he needed to do was recreate a technologically advanced bow that had never been seen on the face of this planet before, which he had no references for.

No big deal.

With a piece of charcoal Tom began by figuring out how the rollers worked, what direction they needed to be oriented, how exactly they let off draw weight, then brought it back the moment the string was released.

The rest of the bow was a simple matter, with the possible exception of the string.

They wound up going with steel wire, as there existed nothing in nature that could handle the tensile strength.

Well, except for the spider silk thread, but it was too stretchy and tacky. It didn’t play well in a simple machine.

Making the finished product took several weeks of hard labor, and quite a bit more sanding and polishing than Tom had thought possible.

All the while, the Vith began moving further and further to the southeast…approaching the Dinamore stretch, carrying Tom’s massive furnaces on huge beams of solid wood, which would be fed to the charcoal maker at night, then the next morning, they would cut down entirely new trees to transport the foundry on.

The Keth’zar didn’t follow them. The stony demons didn’t seem to want to do much of anything but sit there rigidly like statues, waiting for someone to kill.

On the other hand, the creatures didn’t seem to care if they were picked up and repositioned, and Tom sure as hell wasn’t going to waste the huge investment he’d paid to have that extra protection against a teleporter ambush.

Tom was just along for the ride.

Feeding this roving band of thousands of angry Vith was actually less difficult than Tom had expected. The lands to the south of the desert were immensely fertile, becoming more and more lush the closer they got to the Dinamore Stretch.

Nema explained that it was because of a certain worm that completed its lifecycle dying on the shore of the area, adding to the fertility of the land as a whole.

Ah, kind of like salmon.

Huge, monstrous animals were brought down every night, butchered by a team of Vith, who doled out handfuls of bloody meat to the women who stopped by, who then preceded to cook for their own family units.

The single men and women basically had an enormous barbeque party kegger every night, chewing on some of the mildly intoxicating plant life while they sat around and chatted, occasionally disappearing into the woods for private time.

A typical teen party. Tom hadn’t been to one of those since…well, since he was seventeen, two years ago.

Tom figured the separate tribes didn’t get together very often, so this budding war was an unprecedented opportunity to meet girls (or boys) from another tribe. Overall, it was a really great time for everyone.

Except for the war part, where people are sure as hell gonna die. The cynical part of Tom’s brain added.

Tom was tempted to join in those parties, Both he and Nema were about the right age to attend…but no.

That’s the sort of thing that got you into this mess in the first place.

Tom loved Ellie to death, but he had to admit he was kind of the poster boy for Not Keeping It In Your Pants.

I got other shit to do anyway, Tom thought, turning away from the blazing fire and heading back to his workshop, where three Keth’zar lurked in the corners, making sure a teleporter didn’t pop in and shiv him.

The lump of steel that would soon be a compound bow was resting in a series of wooden clamps, in dire need of cleaning up.

With a sigh, Tom picked up a file and got back to work.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

The sound of the file almost covered the sound of revelry.

Tom nearly jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Nema set a bowl full of grilled meat and veggies beside him.

Yeah, I suppose I forgot to eat.

“Thank you, I’ll eat it as soon as I’m –“

Without waiting for him to finish, the small woman crawled into his lap, curled up like a cat and closed her eyes.

Tom wordlessly continued his work.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

Nema’s warmth radiated through him, warded off the worst of the cold, and made it much harder to stay mad at himself.