Calvin’s army of humans and Cobalts sat in a swath of land cleared by the knick-knacks as they constructed the dock and the barges. Calvin himself was eating breakfast on a tree stump and watching Karen’s first lesson as he considered his Genosian breeding tattoo. Turned out Ella had bought tattooing needles from Mujenan, just in case she should she ever have the need.

Calvin rolled his eyes at the thought and centered his attention on Karen, strutting back and forth in front of the assembled army, with her baby tucked in the crook of her muscle-bound arm, a swaddled little love-child with curly brown hair, and light brown skin at odds with his mother’s blonde hair and pale, freckled skin.

“I look around, I see a lot of chubby cheeked babies calling themselves Legends.” Karen’s voice echoed over the assembled crowd.

“Legends! Real legends, spend years on the battlefield drifting from one conflict to the next, honing their skills and surviving earth-shattering events no one has any right to survive. They discover unique skills and develop secret fighting styles to get an edge on the completition. One trick after another to help them survive.”

There was a bit of muttering as Karen laid into them.

“You?” She said, her gaze scanning across the crowd. “You all got where you are now by riding my son’s coat-tails.” She singled out Gulad, the green-sashed engineer. “What was your sixth break?”

“When Calvin killed the army outside Cobalt Castle.” Gulad muttered.

“And what about your seventh?”

“Working in the Warp Warehouse.” Gulad admitted.

“Oh? Any danger, any life-or-death situation between those two Breaks?” Karen asked.

“No ma’am.”

“And how many of you have the exact same story?”

Nearly everyone raised their hands.

“That’s right. You may think you’re an unstoppable army of epic proportions, but that’s an epic load of Guar shit of unstoppable proportions!”

“A fifth-Break Veteran who’s been around the block a time or two could beat you fools silly. Easily. Your limits have been raised by these last two Breaks, but you haven’t had anyone to push you to explore them. Well, guess what? I’m back from maternity leave, and that ends today. From now on, I’m your wrathful god, and every whim is a command blasted down from the horns of the divines straight into your goddamned earballs.”

One of the young men in Calvin’s army raised a hand, Causing Karen’s attention to lock onto him. The young soldier shivered a moment and swallowed before speaking.

“Are you sure you should be nursing while teaching us? It’s kind of distracting, and the baby…” The man’s words died in his mouth. Karen glanced down at the baby latched onto her boob and back up to the young Legend.

“Yes I am. He gets fussy if he doesn’t eat between me brutalizing people. What’s your name?”

“Hurt.”

“Oooh, that’s unfortunate,” Karen said with a wince, “Because you, Hurt, just volunteered for our first demonstration. You don’t have to worry about this little cutie. You’re not even gonna be able to make me move.”

Karen motioned him to come to the front of the class then tossed him a wooden sword.

“So you don’t hurt yourself,” She said by way of explanation as the man frowned a the wooden blade.

“Come on, let’s get this over with, I’ve got more people to humiliate after you, you know. Attack.”

“Ma’am, could you humiliate me after you set down the baby?” Hurt asked, glancing at the baby, then back up to her. “I refuse to attack while you’re holding one.” Hurt said, holding his guard up, but not advancing.

“Oh you do, do you?” Karen asked. “I guess you’re a dead end then. I personally knew sixteen men who died because they couldn’t bring themselves to kill a woman or a baby. Consider this training for real-world warfare. I’ve killed more women than I can count and dashed my fair share of babies against rocks because they were gonna starve otherwise.”

Karen broke into a grin.

“You do know women and babies make up more than half of all people, don’t you? Consider this a crash course in baby-murdering, Legend, and attack me.”

“Nevertheless.” Hurt said, shaking his head. “I won’t risk hurting that baby.”

Karen sighed and looked up at the sky in exasperation. “Nothing you can do is going to hurt the damn baby.”

When Hurt didn’t attack, Karen decided to take matters into her own hands.

“Okay, then we’ll change tactics.”

Karen’s sword whipped forward and impacted against the tip of Hurt’s with a resounding clack, sending the tip of his blade shooting backwards, impacting against his forehead, cutting open his brow.

“Stop hitting yourself,” Karen said with a smirk.

Ooh, Calvin thought with a wince. The old ‘stop hitting yourself’ beating. She must be pissed.

Clack. “Stop hitting yourself.” She forced Hurt’s blade down into his own thigh.

Clack “Stop hitting yourself.”

Clack.

Clack.

Finally Hurt lost his temper and swung his blade back wildly with a sudden inhaliation of breath, aiming to bring it crashing down on Karen.

Karen saw it coming a mile away, and held up baby Sacha, thrusting the squirming infant directly between herself and Hurt.

Hurt hesitated, blade raised above his head.

Karen’s practice sword caught Hurt on the side of the chin and kneck, sending him tumbling down in to the soft dirt of the jungle. Karen leaned over and spat on Hurt’s back as he groaned into the ground.

“And that’s exactly how my first lieutenant, Abram, died. The lesson here ladies: Don’t be Abram. When you pick up that sword you are a pitiless killing machine, and when you set it down you are a normal human with feelings, hopes, dreams and all that stupid shit.”

“While you’ve got the sword in your hand, you bundle all those emotions that make you hesitate together, put a nice little bow around them, and don’t unwrap them until you set the damn thing down.”

“Now,” Karen said with a malicious grin as she scanned the assembled soldiers. “Who wants to go next?”

The dirt beside Calvin crunched as someone approached, pulling his attention over to Maya, who was walking over to him from the main camp, the sound of Knick-Knack saws on wood covering her sound until that moment.

“Are you um…sure that Karen’s the right person to teach them how to fight Legends?” Maya asked. The little ranger was taking a break between assignments to visit Baroke and watch the general infantry being trained by Karen.

“Karen taught me everything I know about fighting,” Calvin said. “She’s the reason I’m still alive.”

“Did her lessons include using a baby as a shield?” Maya asked.

“No, this is new,” Calvin said, frowning as he worried about his half-step-brother baby. He wasn’t going to say anything about it, though. Karen would beat up on him if he did, and Calvin was fairly sure Karen wasn’t going to let Sacha get hurt or killed to prove a point.

If she sparred with someone tough enough to cause a problem, she would put the baby down first.

Probably.

Calvin couldn’t imagine Grant hesitating because there was a baby in front of him.

“C’mon you spineless fucks!” Karen shouted. “Don’t worry about the kid and attack like you mean it! I can just make more!”

“Wow.” Maya said, her jaw slackening as Karen continued her lesson.

“Yeah… I think I’d rather be somewhere else,” Calvin said. He knew Sacha was probably going to be fine, but this was causing a nervous tic in his legs.

Calvin finished breakfast and went over to the docks, where Baroke was assisting with securing the prefabricated walkways onto the main supports buried deep in the riverbank.

As usual, the archer was showing off, shirtless and singlehandedly passing chunks of dock up to the people on top of the poles, who began using their wooden hammers to pound the dock into place. The whole thing was tension fit by the Knick-knack’s exacting woodwork, without needing a single nail.

The nails were valuable, and Calvin didn’t want to use them up on a dock when he didn’t have to.

The reason humans were doing that work was because of its unskilled nature. The hard stuff was being take care of by the Knick-knacks, namely taking apart the wagons piece by piece and converting them efficiently into boats in a matter of days. The jungle had a lot of different kinds of wood, but none of it was dry, with the sole exception of the wagons they’d brought along with them.

I bet we could come up with an alchemical way to season wood if we tried. Elliot said. A little beneath us, but we could do it.

Speaking of alchemy, Calvin thought. I decided what I want to make the tattoo ink out of.

Ooh, ooh, is it a damage absorber? Is it going to replace any flesh that gets damaged or blood that gets lost? Is it going to be a pre-packaged summon ready to burst out of your skin at a moment’s notice? How about Mage Armor permanently inked under your skin?

I was thinking a way to feel Ella’s direction and emotions, like she has with me. I’m pretty sure we could do it by mixing her blood with powdered Lure Membrane to make the ink.

What? You want a Find My Friends app? That’s boring.

Also more thematic to a marriage tattoo.

Fiiine, but I agree to this under protest. Permanent mage armor sounds like a good way to not be getting holes poked in you all the time.

And we might be able to steal her Iron Skin ability.

Now you’re talking!

Calvin walked to the back of the line where his personal wagon was. It was packed with jars filled with powders harvested from the Abyss, what some of the soldiers more affectionately called the Warp Warehouse.

Since he’d created it, it had taken a few weeks to get the hand of it, but under Loren’s caretaking, the threat to the city had been contained and a new revenue stream for the royal family had been created.

One that Calvin was unashamed to siphon off of. After all, he’d created the damn thing. His company’s name was on the side of the building after all.

Now Calvin knew why Maruk hated taxes, though. A huge portion of his hard-won money ripped from his hands to fund his puppet government.

Well, that wasn’t so bad. But it would have sucked if it wasn’t under his control.

Calvin climbed up into the wagon and began rifling through the labeled jars of powders

“Alright,” Calvin said, allowing Abyssal Alchemy guide him as he picked out ingredient after ingredient.

“It’s going to take Lure membrane, of course, And a bonding agent to fuse it with her blood…” Calvin picked out the Husker bonding agent, then a stabilizer to prevent it from mixing with Calvin’s blood and diluting over time.

Something like gluten to make it all bond into one solid piece once it’s already in your skin. Elliot suggested.

Huh… or have it all communicate without touching.

On the same wavelength you mean?

What’s a wavelength? Calvin asked.

It described the frequency of a vibration. It – you know what? We’ll get into that later. Point is we might need more of the Husker long range Wi-Fi ability in there.

Now we need a pigment. Calvin thought as he placed another jar in his satchel.

Black’s a good, solid choice. Elliot said.

Black, black, black… Calvin thought as he searched through the labeled jars for something that would do what he wanted. There were tens of creatures that lived in the Abyss that he hadn’t seen due to his short time living there, so he was facing more jars than he could easily go through in a few seconds.

I’ve got liquid shadow and Primal Fear. Calvin thought, picking up two jars and examining them. One manifested as living shadow when it was reconstituted, while the other would terrify anyone who came into visual contact with it.

No black, though. Oh wait, how about this one? Calvin thought, picking up a jar made of refined Bobber melanins.

Bobbers were pole-ball sized flies whose skin – shell? – color rippled in a hypnotic pattern as they approached deceptively quickly, bobbing in the air like some kind of flotsam. When they got close a taloned tongue would grab its victim and yank it inside its bone-crunching beak.

“What do you think?” Calvin asked. “Get a little bit of motion?”

As long as you don’t try to fuse with Geena Davis at the end.

Still don’t know what that means, Calvin thought, putting the pigment in his bag.