Jack watched with pride from his raised pavilion as the new army of Jiangshi streamed through the gates of Ten Huo, drawing cheers of adoration from the masses lining the streets.

They certainly made for an impressive sight, with their shiny metal armor and blue cloaks. Though truth be told, much of the fanfare was focused on the walkers trailing along behind each ‘squad’. The great crab-like constructs made the very ground shake as they marched in lockstep. They weren’t all the same though. Some had been outfitted with flamethrowers or cannons, while others had a large cargo compartment intended for transporting soldiers.

Though I doubt it’s a particularly comfortable ride, Jack thought.

He was already concocting plans to replace the walkers with tracked or wheeled variants of the design. The machines had originally been designed as a mobile weapons platform – basically just a walking gun – intended to support militia-members when they traveled beyond the city limits and into the untamed wilderness that made up much of the Empire.

And perhaps they might still see use in that role. While Jiangshi had become a bastion of safety - and the intended destination - of all refugees that heard of it, Jack was sure there were still pockets of survivors hiding in the forests and mountains of the expansive province.

And even if there weren’t, there soon would be.

While Ten Huo had survived its recent trials, many other cities in the province hadn’t. Refugees from those fallen cities would soon start making their way here, and Jack intended to receive every one of them with open arms.

They were basically free manpower after all.

And if this insane plan to secede from the Empire was to succeed, Jack was going to need to pull on every resource he could possibly get his grubby mits on.

Aggressively.

Fortunately, with his recent behind-closed-doors elevation to City Magistrate, he had quite a few new options available to him.

Or he would once he was actually elevated to the position. For the moment, knowledge of his position as the next magistrate was a secret held by only a few of the city’s most high ranking officials.

Shui still held the position in name, if not practice, until an official ceremonial changing of the hats could occur.

It was an odd situation to be sure, but those tended to happen when plans were forced to adapt to last minute changes enforced by the whims of nigh omnipotent beings. The Rooster had said he was to be the next magistrate, and now the leadership of the city was quietly scambling behind the scenes to both accommodate that desire and adapt to it.

Theoretically, that would take a week at minimum.

A week in which Shui could get up to all manner of mischief in an attempt to keep me from ‘officially’ stealing the job she’s literally just stolen, Jack thought as his gaze panned across to the ‘Sect’ pavilions.

The woman in question stood atop them, smiling and waving along with her fellow sect members and a few of her fellow leaders from other sects.

Only a few though. And that was worthy of note.

Most of the city council had died in the recent dragon attack, and Shui’s alliance of sects had been formed from her relationship with those leaders – not necessarily the sects themselves.

And while it was clear she had managed to wrangle a number of newly elevated sect leaders to her side, Jack could only see the colors of half the city’s sects represented around her. Others had chosen to set up their own pavilions halfway between his own and Shui’s, a political statement that even an ignorant jackass like him could understand.

Though the fact that only half of them abandoned her after I killed a dragon and have a divinity in my corner is cause for some concern, Jack thought.

“It’s a façade,” a quiet voice murmured from next to him.

Jack glanced over at Huang, who was watching the parade with studied disinterest. As if none of it mattered to her. Which, to be fair, it might not. The former-magistrate had been… withdrawn since losing her powers in defense of the city – and then subsequently being dethroned by the occupants of said city.

“What?” he asked.

“The Sects,” the Imperial Princess continued as if it was a topic barely worthy of mention. “Those who still stand with… that woman are simply making a perfunctory show of resistance. It’s a paper-thin attempt to salvage something from the situation by wrangling a few concessions from you in return for their fealty.”

The woman looked around. “Even at their height they could not stand up to a Divinity, and with the recent ‘troubles’ they are far from that.”

Ah, she’s looking for Yating, he thought.

Well, she was looking in entirely the wrong direction. Yating was over by the gate and quite invisible to anyone that didn’t have an EM sensor suite.

Despite his jovial nature, the Rooster was a reclusive – almost voyeuristic – presence in the city. He’d made a showing a few days back to privately throw his support behind Jack as the new magistrate of Ten Huo to the big wigs, but beyond that seemed content to remain hidden in the shadows.

And while Jack was sure the Divinity had his own reasons for doing so, the miner himself was quite happy for that state of affairs to continue. Having an invisible divinity flitting about the place was no doubt doing a wonderful job of making the sects think twice before privately plotting to depose him.

Even if he knew that the Divinity actually spent most of his time bumming around Jack’s workshop and poking things that the human would rather have left unpoked.

Buttons mostly. The damn chicken was obsessed with buttons.

“So…” Jack asked. “If I go over there and shake my spear at them, they’ll just… back down?”

The former-magistrate nodded slowly. “Essentially, yes.”

Jack gazed over to where Shui was jovially talking to a rat-woman in a dress that left more of her visible than not.

“And Shui?” Jack asked.

“I…” The Dragon-kin hesitated, a show of ‘weakness’ that he knew she would never have allowed herself even a week earlier. “She will probably back down.”

Jack frowned, something he quickly regretted as the Imperial princess mistook his growing silence as irritation at her hesitance.

It made him feel incredibly shitty.

He knew the woman was feeling… insecure in her new station and as his guest. And he was disappointed to say that he’d done little to rectify that insecurity in the week she’d spent in his compound.

He’d barely spoken to her. Hell, he’d barely been in the city for the past week.

He’d spent pretty much the entire time flying across the province in his suit collecting bits of the Red Death. Something that had to be done quickly before some enterprising alchemist swiped the valuable reagents out from under him.

Or the local wildlife ate it.

Even with his ability to fly and the use of his onboard computer to roughly guess the landing sites – plural - of the corpse, he knew someone or something else had gotten some of it. Even ignoring the fact that some of the dragon would have been all-but atomized by the explosion, the collection of scales, skin, teeth, bones and flesh Jack now had sitting in his basement’s oversized freezer was smaller than it should have been.

The locals move fast, he had to admit. Both the four legged and two-legged variety.

He could only hope that ingesting dragon meat didn’t result in some oversized ferret becoming a giant flying fire breathing oversized ferret that he’d have to deal with a few months down the line.

“She has wanted my position for a long time,” Huang said quickly, returning Jack’s attention to the topic at hand – that of the very pissed off and very powerful boar-woman from whom he’d sniped his position as top dog within the city. “She’s a pragmatic woman, but even pragmatists have limits. She is also a powerful cultivator and possessed of a cultivator’s pride. Finally and most importantly, while your killing of the Red Death has granted you a great deal of renown… the means by which you performed it are unknown. That you are dangerous is known, but the strength of your arm is not. Given that you are a craftsmen, she might believe that it was a one-time use artifact that granted you the ability to slay the beast, not your own innate strength.”

Well, that was actually closer to the truth than he wanted to admit.

“You think she might try to kill me?” He asked.

“Or use some other means to remove you from the board before you are officially elevated to the position of Magistrate. Any movement after that will see her as the woman who betrayed two magistrates.” There was a certain bitterness in the woman’s tone. “Which she could not afford. Her disposal of me could be justified by my recent circumstances. You, though? The man who slew the Red Death?”

She shook her head. “No, if she intends to make her move, it will be soon. Before the ward-totem is carved.”

Jack nodded slowly. As he’d so recently learned, the title of Magistrate wasn’t just a title. They were also the person who controlled the city’s wards using a specially carved ‘totem’. Said totem was the reason why Shui still technically held the title. It would take at least a week – and that with him threatening the artificers in charge with bodily harm if they dallied – to carve a new one.

Though whether it would actually work for him, given his extra-planar nature, remained to be seen.

I’ll deal with that problem when we get to it, Jack thought as he watched another Crawler amble by, the rear compartment loaded full of soldiers that he noted were wearing markedly less armor than the ones he had seen thus far. More to the point, their blue cloaks had been replaced with a mottled green color.

Glancing over, he noted with some amusement that Gao looked halfway between infuriated at the break in protocol and considering. Watching the man wince each time he clenched and unclenched his bandaged hands was rather amusing.

Well, darkly amusing.

The commander of his armies had never been a handsome man, but his recent run in with the Red Death had left him scarred to the point that more than one child had burst into tears at the sight of him. The dragon’s fire hadn’t quite been up to the task of rupturing a crawler’s safety regulated internal structure – but not all of the machine had been built using corporate blueprints.

Jack had been the one to replace a number of sections of the machine to accommodate a human crew and the many weapons the crawlers sported.

And he was not an engineer by trade or predilection.

A number of survivors from the crawlers now sported burns across large swathes of their bodies where the insides of the machines had become scalding hot – turning the crew compartment into a veritable oven.

Many of the men had nearly died of heat exhaustion and dehydration before they’d been pried out of their metal coffins.

They made for a grim and terrifying bunch now as they stood below the pavilion with the other survivors of the Ten Huo contingent and watched the parade through dark hooded eyes.

Jack was looking into mystical forms of healing for all of them, but his initial inquiries had been met with disappointment. Even ignoring Ren and Huang’s skepticism at the wastefulness of hiring a healer for a bunch of ‘mortals’ who were ‘fine’ beyond the disfiguring scars they all now sported, the fact of the matter was that healing did exactly that.

Healed.

And scars were a part of the healing process.

Still, Jack wasn’t about to give up. Even ignoring the fact that the men had been injured in his employ, they were too valuable to just be left hanging in the breeze.

He’d find a way to fix this.

Provided Shui didn’t kill him first.

“She’s done nothing over the past week,” Jack pointed out. “Surely if she was going to make a move, that would have been the best time.”

You know, when he’d been down to a skeleton crew of guards and didn’t have an entire army streaming through the gates of the city.

“This Huang would point out that you’ve been out of the city for the past week,” Huang responded. “It has been hard enough to locate you for a conversation, let alone an assassination. Even with your… devices.”

For just a moment, there was some heat in the woman’s voice as she let some of her very real frustration through. Despite feeling slightly guilty for the reprimand, Jack was glad to see it. It meant that the old Huang was still in there.

He paused for a moment in thought. “Alright then, say she kills me in the next week, before I’m formally inducted as Magistrate? Then Yating would kill her.”

Lords knew enough of the immortals’ plans hinged on Jack being alive. He doubted the old monster would take kindly to some up-jumped ‘short-life’ ruining them.

“Would I now?”

Jack winced as a completely useless proximity alarm blared in his ear moments after the Rooster appeared right behind him, poking a slightly feathered head around his side. Across the pavilion, more than a few people stiffened at the Divinity’s sudden arrival, but nothing more than that.

The Rooster’s presence in the city was still a secret to anyone outside of the highest echelons of power and it had been stressed that it was to stay that way.

Plus, the Rooster had performed his little teleportation act a few times now. Mostly when he saw something he was interested in.

Usually a button. The bigger and redder the more likely it was to attract the immortal’s attention. It was enough to make Jack glad his base didn’t have a self-destruct button of any kind.

His assembly lines did have an emergency stop button though. And as a result Jack had been forced to restart them a few times since Yating had made it abundantly clear he had no problem getting into Jack’s workshop.

Despite the many guards in the way. And security doors. And cameras.

“Don’t do that,” the miner muttered. “And what if someone see’s you?”

The Laughing Divinity lived up to his namesake as he giggled to himself. “I’m cloaking my presence to everyone outside your little pavilion.”

Given the way Huang – and Ren in the background – stiffened once more, Jack could only assume that kind of targeted invisibility was impressive.

Well, it wasn’t impressing him. “Alright then, what do you mean, ‘would I now?’”

“It means exactly what I said.” For just a moment, the Divinity became oddly serious. “Why would I bother avenging you if a single overly ambitious sect leader could kill or neuter you? If she could kill you, you’re not worth my time. Even as a bluff. Because, busy as it is right now, the Empire has a lot more than a single disgruntled sect leader they could and will throw at you.”

That… wasn’t unexpected, but not great to hear. And kind of obvious in retrospect. If the Empress couldn’t move her big guns against him because his strength was unknown to her, her response would be to send smaller assets at him in an attempt to gauge that strength.

And Jack shuddered to imagine what kind of force an Empress considered adequate to make a Divinity-level power get even slightly serious. Hell, she didn’t even have to send someone very far – there was still a whole mess of Imperial Cavalry holed up in their compound-slash-fortress in the city.

The group hadn’t made a single move since they’d withdrawn their support from Huang in Shui’s coup. Huang’s theory was that with her no longer being ‘worthy’ of their servitude due to her depowered nature, they’d chosen to withdraw and await orders from the Imperial Throne – or any Imperial Scion, really.

One order from either could have a small army of oathsworn cultivators raised from birth to obey the Imperial Throne break through the very polite sect-based siege they were under on a mission to kill him in an attempt to ‘adequately gauge his strength’.

It was a firm reminder of just how deep the pool was that his short-sighted ambition had plunged him into.

Though, to tell the truth, being a nobody had never really been an option for him. Not since he’d killed the Red Death. And certainly not since the Rooster had co-opted him into this little rebellion. Even if he’d declined Yating’s offer – and somehow survived the temper tantrum that followed – he had little doubt that the Empress would soon be sending demands for her new Dragon Killer to march into the Northern Breach.

And while he might have been able to do something there, it was about as shit a set of circumstances as he could be forced into. Something he might have been able to argue to the Empress in order to be employed properly, but that would have been him relying on a cultivator both changing their mind and listening to someone beneath them on the ‘power’ hierarchy.

No, as precarious as his current position was, it was still miles better than the alternative.

Or at least, that’s what he told himself when he was trying to justify his impulsive blind leap for power.

“Alright, so you’re leaving Shui to me,” Jack muttered. “Fair enough. Can I at least rely on you to eliminate some of the Imperial assassins that are going to be sent my way?”

The Divinity chuckled before disappearing.

Jack had no idea whether that was a yes or a no, which was par for the course for the flighty immortal. Jack still didn’t know why the guy was assumed to be a woman by the world at large.

“Do you think Shui knows that Yating might just decide to write this whole thing off as a bad investment and leave her be if she successfully manages to take me out?” Jack asked, eyes flitting between Huang and Ren.

Ren remained silent, as she tended to do when the former Magistrate was in the room, eyes flitting toward Huang.

The woman in question scowled at where the Divinity had just been standing. “The Rooster’s fleeting nature is both well worn and documented. Shui will be aware of it.”

“Does she know, though?”

“She may consider it worth the risk,” Huang finished.

Well shit, Jack thought.

His eyes panned down toward the woman in consideration. He could kill her. He’d done it before back in the day when some rival had challenged his position in one gang or another.

He probably couldn’t take her in a straight fight – yet – but that didn’t matter if they didn’t actually fight.

He knew where she lived after all. And the skies above the city were clear of flying beasts due to his explosive balloons.

Slowly, his mind returned to the state his compound had been in when Huang had granted it to him. The place had been torn up. The sect that used to live there had been utterly destroyed by the former Magistrate in both a show of power and a lesson to the other sects.

An idea started to form in his mind.

“I don’t like that smile.” Lin said slowly, speaking for the first time since his conversation had started.

The young woman had no doubt been listening with half-an-ear to the ongoing discussion, but she’d spent the entire time watching the parade.

“How can you tell? I’m wearing a helmet.”

Normally he didn’t bother with armor in the city, given the stigma surrounding it, but the suit had gained some notoriety after he’d been seen wearing it when the Red Death had died. Hell, he’d even seen some lower level – and younger - cultivators wearing helmets the other day. Which would have been unthinkable months prior.

Nor was he sure how practical it was either, given that your average cultivator could use a sword to slice through steel like he might cut through wood. Perhaps the metal was enchanted in some way? Or perhaps it was just for fashion?

It said a lot about cultivators that either could be true.

“I just can, and you are.” Lin opined lazily. “Which says a lot about how bad the idea percolating in your head must be.”

Jack sniffed. He thought it was a pretty good idea. It was elegant and shit.

He was about to say as much before a distant figure caught his eye and any thoughts of Shui or power-plays fled his mind.

“Sir?”

“Jack?”

“Master?”

He ignored the calls from his women in the pavilion as his massive bulk stepped around a startled militiaman and took to the sky. Fortunately, the brief burst of flight meant that he only lightly singed the wooden pavilion he’d just been standing on as he soared over the heads of the crowd and his guards to land amidst the parade.

Which in retrospect wasn’t the smartest move as the carefully ordered marching cadence of the army was thrown off by his sudden appearance, nearly causing a pileup as soldiers and crawlers missed a step.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long for their ingrained training to reassert itself as they continued their march. Though their eyes did track him with unerring intensity as Jack marched down the side of the parade, using the small gap between the parade and the crowd to thread his way through.

He walked past rows of militia members, crawlers and towed artillery before he reached his intended target.

“Master…”

The diminutive rider made for an amusing sight, sat as she was on a shiny and gleaming dirt-bike. It was clear to see that the offroad vehicle had seen a lot of use in the time since it had rode off the assembly line, with dents and small scratches all across the chassis, but it had been cleaned and polished to a mirror shine for the parade.

Jack had no idea An had been using a motorbike for her trip to the city. Hell, he had no idea one had even been manufactured. He’d certainly not set up the assembly line.

An must have figured out how to use the search function of the terminal he’d left behind all by herself.

Which… he supposed wasn’t too surprising. She’d used the manufacturing base he’d left in Jiangshi not only to build the army she’d arrived with, but an entire collection of towns and fortresses around the one he’d left behind.

He’d thought she’d just been using the assembly lines and macros he’d left behind.

It seemed he was wrong.

“You’re throwing off the parade,” the rider murmured weakly as she gazed up at him through a mess of windswept ravan hair.

She had a few new scars to add to the tally. Across her arms and on one cheek. The past few months had clearly not been without conflict.

She also looked stronger. Not necessarily in her frame, but in the way she carried herself. It was a veteran’s gait, one borne from conflict.

Yet for all that, she still looked like a beautiful young maiden as she sat on her little dirtbike, both happy and embarrassed to see him.

“A dirt bike? Really?”

He’d planned to say a lot of things when he saw her. To thank her for all she’d done. Not just holding down the fort while he went off to play politics in the city, but building and expanding his domain beyond anything even he might have dreamed of.

And then riding to his rescue at the end.

Sure, this new army hadn’t arrived in time to break the siege and stop the Red Death, but it had certainly made mince meat of the fleeing elements of the Instinctive Horde – which would have been a problem for years, otherwise.

Hell, if they’d managed to regroup, they might well have been able to threaten the city again – or Jianghsi.

Instead they’d been hunted down and eliminated. Not all of them, but the fighting core. The cultivators. The leaders. Now all that were left were those women and children wise enough not to pick up arms. They traveled back to the breach not as a cohesive army but as a broken mass – never to threaten these lands again.

Because of the woman in front of him.

“He is a proud mount,” she responded, a surprising amount of defiance in her tone. “Tian is a proud steed who has seen me through much.”

“I’m sure, I’m sure,” he said quickly in commiseration, holding out his hands in surrender. “…Not very tall though, is he?”

Definitely not compared to a horse. And definitely not next to a crawler.

“…Perhaps I would have been better suited riding in the front of the formation,” An finally allowed. “Unfortunately, I promised that honor to the Third Division for their actions at Liqin Ridge.”

Again, there was just a small tilt to her head, as if asking him to contest her choice.

It seemed she’d grown more confident in her time away. Less submissive.

He was… honestly glad to see it. He’d always felt a little awkward with the master-student relationship they had. Not least of all because it was based on a lie.

…Mostly because he found confidence sexy.

Which reminded him why he’d marched down here in the middle of a parade – and was currently holding up the elements behind them. And with the elements in front long gone on ahead, he realized that the entire city now had an excellent view of him and An as they stood there.

Yet he didn’t hesitate. He did what he’d come down here to do.

He pulled off his helmet, enjoying the slightly pink tinge that reached An’s cheeks as he did.

Then he leaned down and kissed her.

It was not chaste.

When he finally pulled away an indeterminate amount of time later, he didn’t even notice the cheering of the crowd behind him. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. All that mattered was the woman in front of him and the fact that she was back with him. He… hadn’t truly known how much he’d missed her steadfast presence.

“I’ve missed you, An.”

The woman actually required a few moments before she finally managed to clear the glassy surprised look from her eyes.

When she did, she smiled shyly up at him.

“I’ve missed you too, Master.”