He took a deep breath, a long toke of his cigar.

“I need a full battalion of Second-Model Ultracompact One-Man Tanks,” he said.

A strange disgust contorted the merchant’s face, but the words had already left Crovacus’s mouth.

“Those second-model tin cans aren’t tanks. They’re barely better than basic plate armor,” she said, chuckling to herself. Another drag of her pipe. “But I get it. It’s more impressive to have a couple dozen barely-trained cocksuckers in sputtering tin cans, ‘cause it ain’t like the civvies can tell the difference! It’s sleeker, they move more smoothly, they’ve got a little box with a fuel cell instead of a big fuckin’ engine backpack, they’ve still got the neat-lookin’ glowing visors, so obviously the new models are better! But let me tell you somethin’. A real Tankman can go blow for blow with a Steppe Tyrant and win. A real Tankman is as good as twenty of those mass-produced pussies.”

He hadn’t expected her to get this impassioned about this particular subject. In fact, he hadn’t expected her to even know about suit-type tanks - he himself hadn’t learned about the technology up until relatively recently, as it had apparently been kept secret even from much of the Ikesian military despite its deployment soon after the very first tanks about a third of the way through the war. The full-scale vehicles were ponderous moving emplacements meant to excel in the mire of trench warfare, incapable of engaging high-mobility targets such as enemy cultivators. The so-called Tankman Corps had apparently been created to fill in the flaws of their larger brethren.

“...How do you know about tankmen?”

She took a long, long toke, and a smug look of superiority gleamed in her eyes.

“I’ve had them guarding my caravan since before the first suit was officially deployed,” gloated the merchant. “Our thaumaturgists designed the friction reducing glyphs for the driving mechanisms and conceptualized the first Fog Storage-integrated engine. We replaced our guardian golems with tankmen and nobody even noticed ‘cause we kept the same general armor design. It does help that our golems were already built on human skeletons, though. A skeleton remembers how to move like a human, even centuries after death.”

“That’s how you know-”

“That’s how I know a Tankman can beat a Steppe Tyrant into mulch. Before you ask, yes - we can make new ones, and yes, we’ll sell you some suits, both First and Second-Models, but you’ll have to handle the training yourself.”

She leaned in with a threatening gleam in her eye and Crovacus felt a palpable pressure bearing down on him, “And don’t take this shit lightly. These things demand time, training, and a trustworthy driver. A tankman can beat a Steppe Tyrant into mulch, that much is true - it also means that means a poorly trained, stupid, or - ancestors forbid - rogue Tankman will be a big fuckin’ problem. I’ll get back to you on the aether wave with the details, right now it’s safer than me sitting here for hours in person. As for more mundane armaments, you already know the deal with our rotating stock and you’ve made your selections, but we’ve got some free light manufacturing capacity for any custom orders other than tank suits. Now, here’s the big question - how are you going to get around the ban on any Ikesian state military?”

“Don’t need to. Willowdale is an independent state and did not officially participate in the war. Any question of my motivations for arms procurement is easily brushed aside by the recent incident. At worst I’ll have one of my contacts back home ‘deny reinforcements’ and ‘suggest’ that I expand the local militia.”

“Dear oh dear, one might even think you’ve premeditated this,” chuckled the merchant, finally leaning back again as the pressure relented.

“Of course,” he breathed a smoke-filled sigh of relief. “A small hitch in the plans, however - our remaining secure communications arrays were damaged in the aether skimmer’s implosion. On an optimistic estimate, they won’t be operational for a couple weeks.”

Arnys let out a smoke filled sigh.

“I feared that would be the case,” she said. “How about this? You sell me a nice piece of real estate for a symbolic sum, and I have my daughter stay behind to set up shop and facilitate communication.”

Ever the deal-maker, she was. Crovacus didn’t have a choice, and so agreed.

“...If you don’t mind me asking, where are you getting the money to pay for this? These are not the sorts of sums that even someone like you could afford out of pocket. This is coming out of taxpayer dime, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is,” he answered. “We ran a referendum and the citizenry voted to funnel import goods tax into the fund and then run a short-term up-armament tax to cover the rest.”

“They really bother to vote on that kind of thing?” the merchant raised an eyebrow.

“Many don’t. The ones that care enough to go through the trouble of qualifying for citizenship tend to hold their suffrage as a matter of pride, as far as I can tell.”

Some time earlier…

It had been a strange and difficult couple days for Makhus.

Sigmund had all but taken over running the store while Makhus toiled in the lab, spending most of his working hours on the governor’s Fivefold Philter. Even after having figured out the specifics after the first production run, it was still a laborious and time-consuming elixir to make.

There were still sizable windows in which he had nothing to do but wait for the Philosopher’s Heart array to do its work, and the alchemist filled these readily. Trying to further purify the Necrobeast Serum made up a majority of what he did besides working on the Fivefold Philter. It wasn’t difficult in the same way as producing the Philter, but rather tedious. A seemingly endless loop of identifying undesirable traits or impurities, assembling an alkahestry array, and running the solution through it.

Sooner rather than later it was mostly clean, even if it had unsurprisingly (if disappointingly) turned out that an essentia pollution mutant like a Necrobeast had far more negative traits than positive ones as far as a human user was concerned. Mostly.