“Okay, let me get this straight,” Calvin said. “The Harbinger thought I was the reincarnation of an ancient traitor whose revolt caused a superweapon to be used on an entire planet. Aforementioned planet housed the Harbinger’s main squeeze, and he’s still looking for her soul?”

“Basically.”

“And in retaliation, Grethna, who he thinks I am, launched a semi-successful coup, murdering the ‘mad king’, only to be captured immediately afterward and turned into a Ravager as punishment, making him a martyr that launched a massive, sweeping regime change. And when the dust settled, Emelior, the Mad King’s consul took control of the rebellion and became the new emperor?”

“That’s the gist of it,”Tzen agreed.

Something about that story makes me wanna punch somebody. Elliot said.

Me too. Somehow, the details of that story made Calvin’s guts burn with deep, simmering anger. And he didn’t even know why.

“That information is definitely worth a pallet of Nem.” Calvin said, stroking his chin with one hand while passing the deed of ownership to Tzen.

They were heading to the local Hunter’s Exchange, a place where rough men and women got together with merchants to swap exotic monster corpses for gold and Nem.

While not mercenaries per se, people who made their living hunting monsters were the kind of people who were willing to risk great danger and commit a fair amount of violence for a big score.

The transition from hunter to mercenary was an easy one to make.

When they arrived in the Exchange, the smell of blood from butchered animals was nearly overwhelming, along with the bitter tang of Warped juices.

The place actually looked like a combination of an open air market and a slaughterhouse. There were tables with built in hangers spread out across the area, and over half of them had people standing beside the hanging corpse of some exotic critter, usually dribbling blood out of it’s mouth.

Calvin saw a widowmaker being peeled open while two women haggled over the price of the man-snaring pheromones. Across the way, a blunt, rodent-like creature was being quartered as several men briskly traded payment for the meat.

The meat was either a healing supplement or an aphrodisiac, Calvin couldn’t quite make out the conversation from here.

A massive fish was being hung from a pole near the center, it’s skull being cut open to retrieve a strange melon-like object from its skull. The receiving merchant had several stone-faced bodyguards and held the jiggling mass of flesh like a newborn baby.

My kinda place. Elliot said, soaking it all in with Calvin.

Being a shepherd, Calvin was no stranger to butchering animals for fun and profit. Abyss, he’d annoyed Karen by playing with sheep guts with his sister when they were younger.

Ah, memories.

What really interested him was the price tag associated with these creature’s parts. For example, the melon shaped organ commanded a price of a bag of gold coins the size of a man’s two fists, A Glimmer at least. The Widowmaker glands exchanged hands for a fistful of stones, while each quarter of the stubby rodent sold for a single stone to the interested parties.

“One would assume the more valuable parts have more valuable effects.” Calvin muttered to himself. He should devote some of his time and effort to finding out what those effects were.

“Oh hey, look at that!” Ella said, tugging his elbow and pointing at a giant black and green grub with tight skin, seemingly full to bursting. The chest cavity of the creature was half carved open, and the Hunter selling it was cutting it up and packaging it in neat little slices, each one approximately five dust.

“Let’s try that!” She said, shaking him, drooling as her eyes scanned the fatty tissue.

“Are you going to be good here?” Calvin asked Tzen.

“No one here is any threat to me. In fact, having an obvious foreigner standing next to me might make this task harder than it has to be. You may leave.” the prince said, waving dismissively.

Arrogant little shit.

Eh. Calvin shrugged and allowed himself to be pulled away by Ella.

Calvin and Ella took a seat at one of the empty bloodstained tables and started barbequeing exotic meats while they waited for Tzen to wrangle up some mercs. They attracted a lot of attention, being a genosian and a Malkenrovian. Calvin’s race was even rarer in these parts than Ella’s was.

A few people struck up conversations with Calvin, most of them interested in his Knick-knacks. Before long they were seemingly entertaining a half-dozen people, sitting around the blood-sticky table and awing them with stories of the lands to the West and the race of metal men within, who did services in exchange for raw materials.

Calvin was in the middle of explaining to an interested slave trader that these particular knick-knacks were on a permanent loan and he couldn’t sign them away when Tzen made his move.

The Bolesian prince cimbed up on top of one of the tables and started shouting like a madman.

Or at least, that was how it looked to Calvin. Everyone else seemed pretty impressed. In summary, Tzen shouted out who he was, the horrible things that were happening in his absence, and then offered a substantial reward for any Hunter interested in taking the fight to his brother.

For some reason, during Tzen’s speech, people were getting emotional, dabbing at their eyes when he explained how he’d been abused by his family, getting angry when he described the death of his mother and his righteous fury…

You think he’s got Infectious Emoting? Calvin thought, watching the crowd eat it up. Calvin had always figured it was a powerful Ability, but Calvin also wasn’t particularly interested in giving speeches. He’d rather just explode the necessary people and call it a night.

Don’t you think you’d get a notice if you were resisting it? Elliot suggested.

Maybe? Those emotion manipulating Abilities don’t really work if people know they’re being affected by them…It could be we just don’t care.

Yeah man, there you go.

There were a lot of allusions to their national pride and what seemed like odd parallels wth Bolesian folklore, identifiable by their outlandishness. People were thinking about joining Tzen’s war on his brother, but the obvious question on everybody’s mind was this:

‘Sure I’m concerned about the direction my country is headed, and this guy talked a good game, but how do I support myself and my family with colorful rhetoric?’

When six muscular Bolesian hunters Tzen had obviously scouted in advance brought the pallet of Nem out and set it down in the center of the table Tzen was standing on, and he started offering sign-up bonuses, People lost their damn minds.

“I love the way this meat is squishy and crunchy,” Ella said, biting of another piece of Ritter steak as they watched Tzen amp up the crowd into a righteous frenzy.

When the commotion died down, Tzen was busy sorting through his new hires, and Calvin had promised a road, so they broke apart for the evening.

Calvin climbed up to the top of the enormous walls and fixed his eyes on the hard-packed dirt roade leading to the south. It wasn’t quite as well-developed as the rest of them, because nobody really went south, expect maybe to hunt.

Recently all the military wagons rolling through had created massive divots in the ground, showing him just how untenable a dirt road was.

If we’re going to do this right, this road is going to have to be capable of resisting not only thousands of pounds of pressure without deforming, but also shifting earth and the relentless movement of tree roots and such.

First thing’s first, have to clear and smooth it. Calvin thought.

With the lord of the castle watching in interest, Calvin raised his hands and summoned knick-knacks.

He split them into three knick-knacks per summon, each of them thirty thousand pounds apiece.

They rattled the enormous walls when they alighted on the ground, their feet sinking into the hard-packed earth like brittle icing. Each knick knack stood about a third of the height of the city walls, a testament to their size.

Calvin made fifteen of them, then followed them up with four more summons of regular sized knick-knacks to handle the detail work, totaling ten thousand units.

“You may have to direct southern traffic out the west gate for the rest of the day,” Calvin murmured, watching the Knick-knacks begin to enthusiastically slice an eight foot deep section of earth away, clearing room for the road’s foundation.

“Do you have any preferences about the material?” Calvin asked. “I was thinking jade, marble, quartz, maybe?” Calvin shrugged.

“I-I’m sure whatever, Erm, whatever you choose will be fine,” Zhin’er spluttered, watching the Knick-knacks race off into the distance in an amorphous swarm that left behind a perfectly smooth rectangular slice cut out of the ground.

“Decorative concrete with quartz studs on the top layer?” Calvin said, frowning to himself. “Yeah, that could work.”

At Calvin’s request, they brought him a single bucket of cement and a head-sized chunk of white quartz.

He summoned another wave of knick-knacks, this time they were carrying a single enormous Mass Converter over their shoulders , feeding the dirt and felled trees to the creature while simultaneously milking the undifferentiated mater out of the creature’s glands and into oversized barrels.

They couldn’t immediately use it, because a fair amount of the undifferentiated matter was partially a Bent construct, so they were simply the cleanup team. When they reached roughly the halfway point, Calvin would dismiss the summon and they would carry the undifferentiated matter back, where they would use it to finish the rest of the road.

After they passed through, the sides of the road, which had been piled high with dirt, rock and logs, was suddenly clean enough to eat off of, leaving an unnaturally smooth, perfect edge on either side of the soon-to-be road.

Then Calvin took the refined undifferentiated matter from the steel egg he’d ridden in and handed it to the final team of knick-knacks, along with the concrete and quartz.

They began piping the matter into place, building a road that grew right in front of their eyes.

That’s a good idea, roads that grow. We need to figure out how to do that.

Hmm.. Some kind of plant that grows keratin on oversized roots?

“This is marvelous!” A twiggy Bolesian girl said, coming to stand next to the lord of the city, covering her shocked expression with her hand. “I’ve never seen anything built so fast.”

“…Is that your daughter?” Calvin asked.

***Nadia***

Brennoth wasn’t much to look at. Just another craggy Ilethan port city weathering a spray of salty air, bald mountains and little local wildlife.

Everything was normal except for the shimmering sheet of Abyssal steel rising above the ocean just outside the port, casting the ocean itself in shade.

The strange construction was maybe half an inch thick, held up by pylons that couldn’t have been more than a handful of inches wide.

It was a construction that would have never been possible with any kind of metal known to men. The platform stretched far off into the distance, rising above miles of ocean. It was difficult to see the end of the construction.

Nadia could make out a ramp accommodating wagon after wagon of soil, refuse, shit, and all manner of pungent cargo.

She could practically smell it from here.

What on earth are they doing?

It looked, for all intents, that Brennoth was attempting to…build more farmland, held out of the water by tiny stilts thinner than her wrists.

This is ridiculous, Nadia thought, landing outside the governor’s mansion. It was fairly obvious what was causing Brennoth’s sudden lack of productivity: some godsdamned idiot had come up with a ridiculous idea and people had gone along with it.

Well, at least this is an easy fix, Nadia thought, banging on the front door with her fist. All she had to do was kick some asses, straighten things out, then go back home.

The door swung open less than a minute later, revealing a wispy haired Ilethan man in sweat-stained finery.

Her nose was already wrinkling before the smell hit her, but it still struck hard. The man’s home was practically a bubble solely designed to contain his B.O.

“Oh, princess Nadia,” He said, gesturing to her like a man who’d recognized and acquaintance on the side of the road. An instant later, his eyes widened, and his voice raised an octave.

“Princess Nadia!” The door slammed in Nadia’s face, and from behind it, she heard clattering, banging and cursing, as though someone was desperately stumbling around a messy, cluttered room in a futile attempt to clean, change clothes, and prepare snacks for company, all at the same time.

“If it’s all the same to you, let’s talk outside!” Nadia shouted through the door.

The sounds stopped, and a moment later, the door opened again, forcing Nadia to take a step back as the stench rolled out of the house.

He emerged, tucking a new shirt into the old stained pants and giving her a hesitant smile.

“Princess, to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

“I wonder.” Nadia said crossing her arms. “Did it not occur to you that falling behind on your taxes might happen if you squandered your resources?”

“What? Oh! you mean the land extension?” He said, stepping further out of his house on the hilltop until they were standing on the street, with a clear uninterrupted view all the way down to the bay.

“Isn’t it incredible?” he said, motioning to it with both hands in a ‘behold!’ gesture.

“Incredibly stupid, I think you mean. You know that couldn’t possibly be a permanent structure, right, then everything you’ve put on it goes into the drink.”

The madman’s eyes lit up with passion and more than a little mania.

“Oh but it can be a permanent structure!” he declared, holding up a finger for some unspoken reason. “I’ve put Abyssal steel into every possible scenario and it has come away with no tarnish of any kind. The metal is totally incorruptible. That single sheet of steel will sit there long after I’m dead and gone, possibly longer than the city exists, without need for maintenance.

“And the strength!” he said, eyes bugging out as he leaned closer to Nadia. “That single sheet can support tons upon tons per square inch without deforming in the slightest. It’s a godsdamned miracle, and the king wants to use it for pickaxes and minecarts, the man sneered.

“This mysterious material has only one conceivable purpose, and that was to make megastructures that can stand the test of time! A hundred, nay, twenty years from now, Brennoth will have the largest viable farmland in Iletha, making us an agricultural powerhouse!”

“Right, right,” Nadia said, leaning away from the man’s armpits. “A hundred years in the future is all well and good, but what about your taxes right now?”

“Oh,” The mayor dropped his arms. “Oh, I didn’t think about that.”

“Ahuh,” Nadia grunted.

“I know! We’ll call a town meeting! I’m sure I can convince my townsfolk to spare what they can in order to meet this year’s quota, because next year, we’re having…” He waggled his fingers, “Potatoes.”

Nadia was severely tempted to call the mayor out on his idiocy, declare martial law on the city as a whole and order the abomination to be deconstructed.

Except…

If the townfolk can swing the taxes, then this city could succeed in the future. If they fail again next year, that will be plenty of time to distance myself.

If they did succeed, it might be a way for Nadia to win some points in the game she played with her family.

“At the town meeting, if you fail to round up enough support, I’ll be forced to drag you in front of the Throne to explain yourself,” Nadia threatened. She left it implied that she’d leave them be if they did manage to scrape their taxes together.

“R-Right.” The mayor stammered, crossing his arms defensively. “I can – we can do this.”

***

As it turned out, the mayor could do that.

Despite his lack of confidence and stage presence, the mayor was able to deliver a rousing speech that had the wealthier citizens of the small city tossing money at the man. coins, jewelry, and even a nubile young Malkenrovian girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, all went into the collection hat.

Metaphorically, of course. There was no way a pleasure slave would fit in a hat.

By the time it was all over, it was the middle of the night, and there was a wagon full of loot that more than made up for the missing taxes. Nadia was exhausted, but pleased that everything had gone so easily.

Perhaps with a little support, she could gain power over this region before the land became more valuable. And if they failed miserably, well, she would just burn the city down and recoup her losses from the ashes.

Maybe I’ll have Green’s contact drive the wagon, Nadia thought as she laid down to sleep for the night after a long day of watching nobles haggle for lots of literally made-up land.

As long as she got the money, she didn’t really care.

Nadia closed her eyes and relaxed into the bed, stretching.

Sleep was almost as good as sex, and she’d come to appreciate it even more since getting a living body back.

Then a callused hand clamped over her mouth.