“You have a stick,” Shiro said, eyebrows raised. The two Heroes had returned from their trip to Brightharbor just before noon.

“I do,” I said, cradling the staff in my arms. The powerful hum that coursed through the deceptive piece of wood felt pleasant against my skin. “Did you have fun in town?” I asked.

“As fun as a town full of fish can be,” Shiro replied with a grimace.

“That’s… a very nice stick?” Sarah tried, tilting her head quizzically.

“It is. It makes my magic 50% more powerful.”

Sarah’s jaw dropped and Shiro’s eyes went wide. “Damn,” Shiro said, whistling appreciatively. “Did you craft that while we were gone?”

“I wish,” I replied with a snort. “I got it from the System, actually. I don’t think there’s anything made by mankind that can come close to its effect.”

“Wow. So, you managed to cheat the System again?” Sarah asked.

“Not quite. At least, I don’t think so,” I said, holding the staff tighter. “I tried to do the same thing — creating the mana well, that is — but this time I did it on the outside. The System tried to do the same thing, but much more intensely, this time. It seemed to try to create a dungeon.”

The two Revenants stared blankly for a moment, then Sarah finally spoke. “That makes a lot of sense, actually.”

“It does?” Shiro asked. “I don’t see it.”

“When we went to that dungeon, didn’t it feel a bit… I don’t know, arbitrary to you? Like, why is the mana concentrated there?”

I wanted to rebut her words, but I stopped at the last moment. I had taken it for granted that areas of different mana density existed — it was practically axiomatic, according to the Academies. But the System had already shattered my world view several times already, and it did seem much more deeply involved with the world than I had previously assumed.

“It is generally thought that mana density is random across the world, so it would follow that extreme concentrations can also naturally occur, but… you may also be right.”

My mind wandered to my tower and the surrounding province. I had assumed the mana desert it was located in was simply the result of randomness, but the discovery that the System could be the hand behind dungeons cast doubt on this theory. After all, if the System could force greater amounts of mana into an area, what’s to say it couldn’t also siphon them away?

“Huh,” Shiro said, breaking me out of my thoughts. “Hey, Sarah, can you try something?”

“Sure?” she replied uncertainly.

“Can you just look for a few seconds at the staff, and like, think ‘what is this?’ in your head?”

“Um, okay…” Sarah said, and a few moments later her eyes went wide. “Huh.”

“Care to explain?” I asked, tilting my head.

“A System screen popped up. It says ‘Staff of Magic Amplification.’”

“Interesting. That is what the System presented it as when it gave it to me. Do names not usually appear for other items?”

Sarah summoned her sword to her hand and stared at it intently. “Nope,” she said, finally. “It even has a name, of sorts, but that doesn’t seem to matter.”

I shrugged. “It probably only works for objects made by the System itself,” I guessed. “In any case, I have a stick.”

“That you do,” Shiro murmured.

***

We began moving towards the next target — the town of Windfire — not long after noon. Windfire was one of the towns I was most worried about, and having the Legion freshly empowered did a lot to alleviate my fears.

The Viscount of Windfire was one of Count Malloc’s staunchest supporters. He had been the first to add his voice to the original revolt against Duke Illvere, and the first to throw his lot in with Malloc in their attempt to stop my conquest.

So far, we had met small forces relying on tricks and ambushes to thin our numbers, but I doubted Count Malloc’s closest ally would be as woefully undefended. We were, I believed, nearing the Legion’s first proper battle in an open field.

It took two days to reach the borders of Windfire’s outer domains, and as we approached the town itself my avian scouts discovered the defending army’s encampment straight ahead, ready to block our advance.

Once we were finally within sight of the army, I felt the first licks of doubt run through my mind. Malloc had prepared well, and force of at least eight thousand was arrayed before us — perhaps even more. He must have mustered much of the same people who had sieged Ardenburg.

“Hah! Nobles, right? They pretend they care about shit, but they really don’t,” Sarah said, her voice full of bitter amusement. “He was happy to let the east get taken, but as soon as we get to his buddy’s place, out come the big guns!”

“Could have been just a tactical decision,” Shiro said conversationally.

“Sure, it could have. That’s probably what he’ll say if we question him about it. But it’s still more likely he’s just an asshole.”

“That’s true, I guess,” Shiro said with a frown, then glanced at Sarah with a worried gaze.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, finally. “His army is here, now, and getting it out of our way is the only thing that matters right now.”

“Any particular plans, right now?” Sarah asked.

“They must have noticed us by now. I want to see how they’ll react. Perhaps we can parley,” I said.

“They didn’t last time. I don’t see why they would, now,” Sarah said.

“They call themselves a Resistance. I’ll eat my socks if they send anyone unless it’s going badly for them,” Shiro added.

Sarah looked at Shiro in wonder. “That’s brave of you.”

“Har, har.”

“In any case, if fighting breaks out—“ I began.

“When,” Sarah corrected, and I raised an eyebrow at her.

“When fighting breaks out, I’d like to see how the Legion can handle it, without my input. They may be outnumbered, but I have high hopes for this new iteration.”

We remained on that hill, watching for changes in the enemy encampment, but the minutes passed and no one came forward. Eventually, the whole army began advancing, moving steadily towards us.

With a thought, I directed the Legion to march ahead and meet the enemies head-on. And so, the Battle of Windfire began.

***

The first clashes were awkward for the defenders, most of them uncertain on their feet and unprepared for war. Perhaps they didn’t expect to ever be at the forefront of a battle — and they died, in droves. The wights knew nothing about hesitation, nothing about fear or mercy — all they knew was they had an enemy before them, and enemies had to die.

This changed quickly, as the enemy’s resolve was bolstered by their fallen comrades. It must have helped that they weren’t fighting against actual people — their enemies, after all, were little different from the monsters some of them had fought in dungeons. And like anyone who had at least heard tales about adventuring, they knew the one thing you were supposed to do to monsters — kill without hesitation.

Despite the enemy army being twice as large as the Legion, my minions were holding fast. They could take much more damage than any of the living, and their newly upgraded fighting ability was showing its value. The wights could easily fend off the attacks from two opponents at once, in single battles, but right now their greatest deficiency was that they fought like a large number of individuals instead of an army.

Count Malloc’s troops did not have this issue. They covered for each other, making use of openings created by their brethren, coming together like a well-coordinated single force. It almost didn’t matter that they were outmatched, pound for pound, when they knew another soldier had their back.

Humans fell, wights fell. The battle was evenly matched so far, but I knew I held the advantage in the longer run — undead did not grow tired, while humans would begin to lag behind, soon. Come sunset, the battle would devolve into a slaughter if it continued at its current pace.

A wave of nausea hit me as I realized that the Legion was killing mostly innocent people. I had had no compunction setting them on the followers of Yain — we were the ones defending, after all, and they were trying to murder the townsfolk.

But these men and women, in their minds they must have been protecting their own families. I was the evil Dark Lord coming to pillage and plunder, to ruin their livelihood and their way of life. They were fighting for my enemy, but were they my enemy?

“What to do, what to do?” I mused out loud.

“Boss?” Sarah asked, having remained at my side instead of following Shiro, who had gone out to fight.

“I was just wondering whether all this slaughter is justified,” I said, juggling with the moral conundrum.

“Define ‘justified’,” she said, and her simple answer was surprisingly eye-opening.

“Well… Is it right to kill so many people, when to them they’re only defending their homes?”

“Defend them from what?” she asked.

“From myself…?” I asked uncertainly, not sure what she was getting at.

“But is it worth defending themselves from you? You’re not exactly doing anything to the people. Unless I’ve thoroughly misread you, you’ve only forced the leaders to not bring arms against you.”

I went silent for a moment, mulling over her words. She was far from wrong — in fact, I suspected she would have abandoned me had she thought me a murderous lunatic, but it was likely the soldiers didn’t know this. Getting news from the east must have been difficult in the middle of the war, and if their leaders wanted the soldiers to think themselves besieged by evil forces… there was little that could get in their way.”

“My only enemy here is Count Malloc and the Viscount of Windfire,” I concluded finally. But I couldn’t stop the fighting — if I had the Legion retreat, they would get slaughtered on their way out, and just empowering them further may have triggered an enemy rout, but at a much higher cost than I was willing to pay.

“So, how to stop the fighting with the least bloodshed?” I murmured.

“Can’t you do the same sleepy thing like with the siege?”

“It doesn’t work as well when the targets aren’t already asleep. It would make them incredibly drowsy, for sure, but not enough to stop them from wanting to fight.” It had been the first option on my mind, but I had discarded it just as quickly. The spell was too large, too complex to empower with Origin, and in its default state it was just not strong enough. It did not seem plausible to use it in this engagement.

“Not even with the staff?”

That was a good question. I didn’t know how the staff would interact with the spell — its description had mentioned an increase in power, but I wasn’t sure how that would apply to the spell. Would it increase its range? Or the intensity of the effect?

I set the staff against a rock and began channeling a miniature version of the spell, making sure to measure all of its attributes. I then picked up the staff, channeling the spell through it as one would through an ordinary focus, and observed as the spell blew up in proportion.

The answer, it turned out, was both. The range had increased significantly, its radius now a quarter again as long as the original — and I could feel the same quiet thrum of the staff now radiating from the spell, and I knew its effect would go just deep enough to work for my purpose.

The only thing that remained, now, was getting the spell to cover the entire army. If I included the staff, the maximum radius I could generate would cover at least three-quarters of their force — which should be enough to cause the rest to rout. But for that to work, I needed to punch through their ranks, and reach deep into enemy lines — and because they were awake, the spell would take at least a minute to kick in, so they would be trying to fight me off every step of the way. And at the same time, I would be all but unable to defend myself.

Unless…

“Sarah,” I said, eying the knight and her bear with a shrewd look, “what do you think about a cavalry charge straight into the heart of their formation?”

The grin on her face told me all I needed to know.