As Blake sat in the comfort of his quarters deep inside the belly of his fortress, watching thousands of people try to kill each other, he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt that the first thought to cross his mind was that it was a shame that Scyria didn’t have popcorn. Though the view reminded him of the real-time strategy games he’d played as a younger man, Blake tried to keep in mind that these were real people fighting and dying thousands of feet below his flitter. Still, no matter how much he told himself this, he couldn’t feel the same emotions and weight from a distance that he’d felt witnessing death up close. Perhaps Stalin had been right when he’d said that a single death was a tragedy, while a million deaths was a statistic.

A new haul of small cantacrenyx crystals had arrived from the mines, many of them just the right size to put in new flitters. This meant that he could finally create enough flitters to stretch a chain of them all the way to Crirada without having to sacrifice coverage of Otharia. As long as the flitters in the chain stayed within communication range of each other, Blake could now watch the goings-on in the Eterian capital with just a few second delay as the video feed made its way back down the chain to Otharia. He found said goings-on to be enthralling and set aside important work to watch whenever a battle started, like now.

What must have been several hundred thousand men and women assaulted the city of Crirada from all sides. At first, he’d likened the scene to a colony of ants swarming over the carcass of a dead rat, but that was actually not accurate. It better fit those videos of sperm surrounding an egg, each of them pushing as best they could against the egg’s outer boundary, trying their best to be the first to make it through. So far, in the two days since Blake had started watching, no Ubran troops had been able to effectively pierce the Eterians’ perimeter atop the wall. There had been many close calls, but every time the defenders would rally, sending what he believed to be some of their elite soldiers to stifle the Ubrans’ progress. That, or they would sweep through with their giant death bears.

Blake had never seen anything like these creatures before. It was as if somebody had combined a bear and bit of tiger and enlarged it to be almost twice the size of a rhinoceros. He had no idea where they’d come from, how the insane people riding atop them kept them under control, or how the Eterians had managed to coax them to the top of a gigantic wall. All he could think about was how glad he was that they weren’t native to Otharia. If he’d run into one of them while out in the wild after just arriving here...

Putting aside questions like how the defenders managed to feed such massive animals while under siege, Blake couldn’t deny that these beasts were currently the MVPs of what he’d seen. The Eterians placed them in small groups of two or three around the wall and would hold them back in reserve when the fighting began. When a section of the defense was close to breaking, they’d mobilize the nearest unit of death bears and send them hurtling along the wall, their massive weight and armor allowing them to crash through the enemy marauders like a bowling ball through a mass of pins.

But no matter how powerful these monstrosities were, they couldn’t change the fact that the Eterians were going to lose. After every skirmish, a group of hooded figures in animal masks would appear and take away the corpses of those who had lost their lives. While the “battlefield janitors” had been carting away more dead Ubrans than Eterians since Blake’s recon drone had arrived two days ago, each dead Eterian was one less man or woman to hold the wall. Meanwhile, enough Ubran reinforcements to replace their casualties arrived each day. The end result was clear, the question was just how long it would take to the inevitable conclusion.

Unless he stepped in. And he wasn’t gonna.

Blake knew it wasn’t fair that so many people were dying while he just watched. He knew this full well. He just wasn’t in the mood these days to care. Lots of things in the world were unfair, like the fact that the leaders of the Republic of Eterium, who’d sent assassins to kill him, would likely never directly pay for their crime. Well, somebody was going to fucking pay. While he didn’t have the time or resources to hunt down a bunch of cowardly rich fucks he’d never met, who’d likely abandoned everybody else in Crirada and hidden themselves away elsewhere in Eterium, he didn’t have to do so to make them rue the day they’d crossed him. All he had to do was sit and watch as they gnashed their teeth in anguish while the Ubrans stripped them of all their power and glory, knowing that he would have stopped this if only they’d never tried to kill him.

Revenge: often messy, but ever-so-satisfying.

Seeing that this latest skirmish was nearly over, Blake stood up and stretched his stiff shoulders, eliciting a small pop from each of them, before sitting right back down. Time to get back to work.

With just a few clicks, Blake brought up a map of Otharia overlaid with his planned train routes. Finding optimal routes that stayed on ground solid enough to support a train car’s weight while also not cutting directly through a bunch of people’s farmland had proven difficult, but he’d eventually found some routes that he could be happy with. Currently, several teams consisting of robots and Otharians were clearing out the routes and preparing the ground for track-laying.

Blake took pleasure in the existence of these new teams. They were the first major case of Otharians working in concert with his creations, rather than simply doing their best to stay out of the way of his skitters. Of course, he still had to pay those Otharians an exorbitant wage just to get anybody to sign on. He didn’t mind, as they were making a good amount of progress. He could see an overlay showing how much of each route was prepped for the rails. At the moment, most of the routes were somewhere between a third and halfway prepped, with the installation of rails to begin soon.

The Otharians were almost entirely stone Observers whose job was to feed quality stone into a crusher as fast as they could. The resulting gravel would become the ballast upon which the railroad ties and track would rest. The ties themselves were also being created by stone Observers back in Wroetin. Blake had created some molds which they would fill with solid stone, in order to make sure they all conformed to the same size and specifications. Once the blacksmiths were finished with the rails and spikes, and once Blake had gone over all of the rails to fix any problems with their dimensions, they’d be able to start laying the track itself.

The overall design was cruder than Blake wanted to admit, but a bevy of problems had forced him to make a whole slew of compromises just to get the project going. Originally he’d wanted to go all-out and create a series of pseudo-maglev trains running on tracks raised up above the ground. But Otharia, as it currently stood, was unable to provide enough metal for such a system—in fact, just scrounging up enough ore for the rails alone had been a challenge—so he’d scrapped the elevated tracks idea.

Then, after some experimentation, he’d come to the conclusion that while levitating a train car was possible using the techniques he used in his robots, it would require an infeasible quantity of large cantacrenyx crystals to make work. Levitation took a large amount of constant power and only crystals of a certain size would do, but those crystals were uncommon and would be better used in almost any other project. So any dreams of maglev trains were over, and boring old normal rails became the plan.

While Blake didn’t want to admit it, much of what he knew about railroad tracks came from a bunch of Wikipedia articles he’d read one day while bored and curious. Still, he believed he knew enough to figure most of the important details out and work from there. One thing he remembered was that there were two different ways to construct the tracks, the old way that used ballast, or the newer way without ballast that resembled how concrete highways were created. On Earth, the old way was cheaper up front but required significantly more maintenance to keep in working order, while the newer ballast-free method required a steep initial investment to lay the foundation.

Here in Otharia, the situation was a bit different. Theoretically, Observers could lay down a solid foundation of thick contiguous stone from city to city, providing a wonderful foundation on which to lay the tracks. The problem was that the stone would have to be very strong and thick to handle the kind of weight Blake planned for, and creating stone of that sort took too long. He could still remember how long it had taken for the stone he’d been encased in to recede once he’d arrived at the coliseum. Just to make sure, Blake had recently run a test with a few Observers to see how fast they could work and had come to the conclusion that it would take at least several years of non-stop work to complete all of his planned routes. The older ballast method, on the other hand, required much less stone by volume and so would be completed much faster. While Blake knew that this would come back to haunt him later, he wasn’t inclined to wait years just to do it right.

Beyond that, he knew that there were much more sophisticated ways of securing the rails than the old railroad spike, but the blacksmiths here were not sophisticated enough to create anything beyond a spike quickly and repeatedly enough for his liking, so spikes it was. All of these compromises combined to put a massive damper of Blake’s dreams of three-hundred mile per hour bullet trains zipping across Otharia. Maybe one day he’d see his initial ideas come to fruition, but for now, he was stuck in the land of mediocrity and disappointment.

There was another way that could have resolved many of these issues and helped put him closer to his original goals, which was to build using concrete. But he had no intention of using concrete for one simple, highly-embarrassing reason: he didn’t know how to make it. Blake’s ineptitude in the realm of chemistry was his secret shame, one that he’d never cared to rectify while back on Earth. Sure, he remembered some of the basics—not to mix acids and bases, what salt was, the composition of water, and other elementary knowledge—but anything more advanced he’d either forgotten from lack of use or never bothered to learn in the first place. Back home, his philosophy had always been that he didn’t need to know what hydraulic fluid was made of or how it was made; all that mattered was that it worked as it was supposed to and that he could get more when he needed it.

But now here he was, stuck in a different world, and all that lack of knowledge was coming back to bite him in the ass. How to make concrete? He knew it was stone mixed with something, but what? What about how to create gunpowder? He remembered that the recipe involved saltpeter... but he didn’t have any idea what saltpeter was. And what about making a bomb? That sure would be useful these days, but the only way he knew to make an explosion right now was to overload a cantacrenyx crystal, a criminal waste of resources. Even the basic elements like helium were out of his reach.

More than anything, however, Blake wished he knew how to refine oil. Every machine he made had to be designed to compensate for the fact that he didn’t have a reliable source of oil to lubricate his parts. Joints and rotors were the main culprits, requiring convoluted designs that used the pseudo-magnetic properties of his circuitry to create a buffer between the various parts whenever they had to move. While this allowed him to largely eliminate friction even better than with oil, it came at the cost of power. Oil would change that. He believed his skitters, for example, would be able to function identically with only about sixty percent of the cantacrenyx crystals each one currently required if he could just use oil instead. But there was no real way for him to get his hands on the oil he desired.

He was sure that, given time and enough drills, he’d be able to find a pocket of crude oil somewhere beneath Otharia. But then what? He had no idea how to refine it, and nobody else in Otharia knew either. Not for the first time, Blake considered just ordering a search for underground oil deposits and having somebody else figure out what to do with whatever came out later. Actually...

Blake stood up again and put on his armor. By now the flowing metal formed over him almost by instinct, some part in the back of his mind forming the complex circuitry without his full concentration, which was nice. There were times when he felt more at home inside his suit than with it off.

The clanking of his boots against the metal floor echoed through the hallways as he made his way out of his personal quarters and into the public area of the fortress. As usual, the place was a ghost town. A large number of people worked in the fortress now, as he’d long ago given Leo and his ministers license to hire as many subordinates as they deemed necessary to fill out their departments and effectively carry out their respective duties, and yet for some reason he almost never ran across anybody as he walked through the halls. It was as if they could somehow tell he was coming. Idly, he wondered if he should invest in some sort of carpeting.

Leo’s assistants did their best to look busy and avoid his gaze as he entered the room. He ignored them and strode past, opening Leo’s door without knocking—rude, he knew, but he couldn’t help abusing his boss privileges just a little every so often. Not that he expected to catch Leo in the middle of some untoward activity; the man was far too upright for such a thing. As usual, the man was seated in a chair, reading over several books-worth of reports.

“Leo,” Blake sighed as he took in the sight of his most trusted subordinate, “how many people work under you now?”

“That depends on how you define working under me,” the administrator replied as he looked up from his reading. “Seven directly, with more beneath them, my Lord.”

“You see, the thing is that I’d thought that the point of getting help was to lessen the burden being placed on you. So why is it that every time I see you, you look even shittier than the time before?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Lord Ferros.”

“Don’t give me that, Leo. You’re thinner than ever and the bags under your eyes are as dark as I’ve ever seen them. When’s the last time you took a day off?”

“I took two days off just last season,” Leo replied after thinking for a moment.

“Not good enough. You look like you’re going to fall apart at any moment.” Blake clapped his hands together with decisive finality, generating a loud clang that rang through the room. “Alright! I’ve decided. You’re going to take a full week off. Oh right, you guys don’t have weeks here. That means seven days. Seven full days of no work. Just you and a bunch of free time to relax and recover.”

“My Lord, I assure you that such measures are not necessary-”

“This is an order, Leo.”

“...yes, Lord Ferros,” the man answered with resignation.

“I don’t care if you go on a trip, find a hobby, or just do nothing but eat and sleep, but no work! You’re working yourself into an early grave and I would be a shitty boss if I let that happen. You have people now. They can carry your load for a few days. If they have any questions, they can just ask me for help.”

Leo looked like he was about to say something but then thought better of it.

“Now why did I come in here? It wasn’t to tell you to take a break...” Blake muttered to himself before straightening up in realization. “Oh right! Oil!”

“Oil?”

“Yes, oil! I want to start doing some exploratory drilling for underground oil. I’ll build some drilling robots but we’re probably going to need people as well.”

“Oil, like what comes from animals? How would it be beneath the ground?”

“Something about decayed plants or something from long ago or something, I forget. The point is, we might have some, and I might be able to use it. If there’s any area where a black substance bubbles up from the ground, that would be the best place to look I think. That or the Beverly Hillbillies lied to me.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that myself, but perhaps Minister Tievais would know better than I,” Leo replied, rubbing his chin in thought. “I’ll get on it right away, my Lord.”

“You do that. And then as soon as that’s finished, vacation time. Understood?”

“As you command,” Leo acquiesced.

“About time somebody around here listened to me. Anything I might want to know about before I go?”

“Minister Tievais did report that another shipment of cantacrenyx should be arriving...” He glanced out of a nearby window to check the sun. “...any time now. He thought you might want to see these ones. I was going to tell you once they’d arrived.”

“Another shipment so soon? Awesome! Why did he think I would want to see these ones, though?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Alright then, I’m out. Enjoy yourself for once, Leo. Get some rest. It’s not normal to work all day every day.”

Leo just sighed even louder as Blake walked out.

Unable to ignore his curiosity, Blake ambled his way down to the fortress’s loading dock, or at least did as close to an approximation of ambling as a paraplegic in a suit of full armor could manage. Today he felt pretty good. His body hadn’t been acting out as much as it had the last few days, he’d managed to catch a bit more rest, and he’d even gotten Leo to finally take a few days off. Things were looking up.

His lucky streak kept going, as he discovered upon arriving at the loading dock that the aforementioned shipment of cantacrenyx crystals had just arrived. As he entered the room, his ears caught the sound of a disagreement going down and he spotted the people he assumed to be the dock workers huddled up, arguing about something. Hearing the clanks of metal on metal as he entered, they turned to look and froze as they saw him. Blake froze as well, but for a different reason: he’d just spotted the shipment.

“L-Lord F-Ferros, our apologies,” one of the dock workers said. “We were just discussing how to properly unload these-”

“Leave,” Blake said, his mind barely registering the man’s words. “I got this.”

The people meekly filed past him, afraid to incur his fabled wrath, but they hadn’t needed to worry. They could have spat in his face and he wouldn’t have even noticed. All he could see were the three enormous crystals that sat amongst the twenty or so normal ones that he’d expected. The sight was enough to nearly bring him to tears.

One of them was the biggest crystal he’d ever seen up to this point. Standing at about four feet tall and seven feet wide, it seemed to thrum with energy, begging for him to fit it a purpose. He knew exactly what to do with it—the crystal would be perfect for his secret project. He’d been struggling for weeks now to find a way to properly balance the energy flow from the dozens of large crystals already installed in the design. The shifting nature of their workload emptied out some crystals faster than others, both a problem in his design and a simple consequence of the device’s nature. This baby would be able to serve as the regulatory battery, sending extra energy wherever it was needed to maintain stability and relieve the burden of overstressed crystals. It was beautiful.

And yet, the crystal beside it was even more beautiful. Nearly twice the size of the last one, it was taller than he and easily twelve feet wide. As he stared at the massive rock, his mind overflowed with ideas. Could he use it to power a ship or a submarine, and explore the seas? Or why stop there? Maybe he could use it to send things into orbit and start a space program of sorts! Or, if he wanted to be conservative, he could perhaps use it to power an entire city. There was so much he could do with this wondrous thing, he didn’t even know where to start!

But neither of these two wondrous stones could compare to the behemoth that sat behind them. Sitting on a series of wagons that had been halfway disassembled and recombined to properly contain this monster was officially the largest crystal he’d ever imagined. Standing at over twelve feet tall and nearly twenty-six feet long, the enormous, gigantic, monstrous beast of a thing dwarfed the other two massive rocks like a husky dwarfed a chihuahua. Whereas when looking at the second crystal Blake’s mind became swamped with ideas, when he looked at this regal rock his mind went blank. No matter what he thought of, no matter how ambitious the idea, it seemed like an insult to the stone, the equivalent of asking an All-Star baseball player to join your six-year-old child’s tee-ball team. Blake didn’t know what to do with it. He just knew that he was in love.

With just a thought, the tucrenyx floor beside the crystals flowed upwards, absorbing several of the smaller crystals and forming several large heavy-duty skitters specially modified to carry the giant ones. Blake smiled as the one struggled to lift the largest stone. He was going to have to carve a massive wide pathway through the fortress in order to get these beauties into the deepest recesses of his abode, but it was worth it. He’d store the larger two crystals there, deep down under his home where they would be safe until he figured out a use for them. The smile grew wider. He didn’t know what he’d do with them just yet, but he did know that, whatever it ended up being, it would be absolutely glorious.