“It’s not very iconic,” Jack mumbled to himself as he watched the frame of the newest variant of Crawler come together.

Though calling it a ‘Crawler’ was a bit of a misnomer, given that the vehicle didn’t actually crawl. Instead, it would move about on treads. Like a normal tank. Which, while practical, were rather boring to look at.

To make matters worse, Shui would be taking just over half of the iconic older variants of crawler that did actually crawl with her on her journey North. Doing so would allow her force to be entirely mechanized – or horseborne in the case of the cultivators – reducing a journey that would normally take months into one that would take weeks.

Plus, a mountain pass is actually a location where the mechanical legs might see some practical use, he thought.

Shui was certainly pleased about the extra support. While Jack wouldn’t go so far as to say she was giddy, there was certainly a degree of ‘pep’ to her steps as she rushed about the city organizing her new ‘army’. Even the mortal elements, which he got the feeling were normally an afterthought in these kinds of engagements.

She’d be taking fully one third of the militia that An had arrived with a few weeks ago. Ten thousand men and women. As well as fifteen cultivators – who Jack had made sure came from differing Sects. A move that would hopefully keep her from getting up to mischief by turning them against him.

Hopefully.

Ideally, he’d like to say that was why she was taking a contingent of homegrown Jiangshi ‘natives’ – for a given use of the word. The reality was that she was taking the militia because the alternative was a force of spear wielding sect troops, which would be like feeding meat into a grinder.

Which might have been just fine for the Empire, but mortals actually had some innate value to him. To that end, those sect troops still in the city – all fifty thousand of them - were going to be re-equipped and retrained as part of his new Ten Huo army.

Which was why five thousand militia members would be sticking around to train them in turn, while the remaining fifteen thousand returned to the very important task of guarding Jiangshi.

Which was a priority, given that An had all but stripped the province bare of soldiers to create her rescue force – and if they didn’t return soon their absence would be keenly felt.

Of course, this all relies on the Sects giving up their personal armies without a fight, Jack thought. Here’s hoping my most recent lesson in who holds the biggest stick will remain stuck in their mind when I make that announcement…

“Perhaps.” Elwin said from beside him, returning his thoughts to the mundane nature of his latest construct. Not that you’d know it from looking at Elwin. The elf’s arms were crossed as she watched with no small amount of awe as his workshop’s many pneumatic arms worked to bring the tank to life. “That will change though. I have oft found that the iconic nature of a soldier or weapon only grows with their success. And to hear little Lin go on about this machine, it will be very successful indeed.”

Jack hummed, conceding the point. Both Lin and Huang were down in his workshop with them – the two seemingly near inseparable these days for some reason – both huddled over a data-slate as they chatted animatedly about something related to the design.

They were a mismatched pair to be sure, but it seemed that Lin had chosen to take the former princess under her wing. Which was rather ironic, given that she was the goat-kin and Huang was the dragon-kin.

“Do you think Shui’s realized that she won’t actually be spending much of her time up north building her fortress?” he hummed.

“I would worry for her intelligence if she didn’t,” Elwin opined. “And the fact that she’s not battering down your door to demand changes to the manifest she’s been provided suggests she has.”

Jack hummed in agreement. He didn’t doubt that Shui had already noticed that her little taskforce was almost entirely devoid of building materials or craftsmen. Not that she’d want to be lugging stuff like stone or timber halfway across the province when there were plenty of natural resources at her destination.

Still, she’d want craftsmen trailing along with your supply chain though.

As well as nails.

To hear his advisor’s talk about them, you wanted nails by the barrel. To that end they had some. Gao, Ren and An had stressed that no army should ever be without things for even a moment, but they weren’t present in nearly the quantities required to build a mountain fortress like the one he hoped would soon block off the only remaining route into the province – if you ignored the ocean.

Which both Imperials and Instinctives were seemingly content to do.

No, the Pig-kin had probably known from the moment the plan was presented to her that Jack would be waiting for her to arrive at her destination before he flew over in his suit and built a fortress basically overnight.

That thought made him feel better about his decision to put her in charge of the job. It was an important job after all, sealing off the last ‘free’ entrance into his small empire.

I’ll probably want to head back to Jiangshi first to resupply basic building materials when I do head over there, he thought as he made a mental tally of what was currently floating around in his inventory. The thought made him sigh. The sooner I get a train network set up the better.

There was just so much that needed to be done…

He shook his head as he refocused on the task at hand, which was creating the prototype of the new Kang Barrel. A name that had created nothing but confusion for his underlings, but tickled his funny bone.

Not least of all because he hadn’t been the one to come up with the joke.

His microbots were. And while the fact that his microbots were currently capable of making jokes terrified him to his core, he couldn’t deny that they were good at them.

Because truth be told, he’d never wondered why tanks were called ‘tanks’. Though, to be fair, he never wondered why half a dozen other things were named as they were.

As it turned out, the reason tanks had been called what they were was because they’d been smuggled to Europe – or the irradiated zone as it was now known – disguised as water tanks.

Thus, Barrels had seemed an apt name for his own variant – even if no one but him got the joke.

Hell, that just made it funnier to him.

“So, how are things coming with your apprentices?” he asked the elf.

Smiling, the woman was about to respond when Ren rushed in, looking more frantic than usual. Which was a rather impressive feat given that she’d spent the last few weeks effectively running his city for him and was normally operating somewhere between totally overwhelmed and barely hanging on.

“Where are your formal robes, master!?” the merchant all but hissed. “I told you the ceremony would be starting in a few hours!”

Jack glanced over at a nearby clock.

“Ah… I knew I was forgetting something.”

Not that it mattered, he didn’t care what Ren said about tradition.

He was going in his armor.

--------------

“With that, I present your new magistrate,” an older man called out to the crowds below.

The male cultivator was actually the oldest looking cultivator Jack had ever seen. The man was a craftsmen, a well respected one. And he was also the one who had been in charge of creating the staff that ostensibly controlled the city’s runic defenses.

And keying them to Jack.

Theoretically.

That wasn’t how it had gone down – and the other man had made it abundantly clear what he thought of this change in tradition.

Jack didn’t care then and he didn’t care now.

Which was why he ignored the other man’s stinkeye as he stood up from his throne and strode over to the balcony.

“The Empire has abandoned us.”

His first words were solemn, yet they rolled over the crowd below without trouble. A feat accomplished by a few carefully positioned loud speakers.

Which might have been why, despite the distance between him and the throngs of… not quite human mortals and cultivators below, he could almost hear the audible intake of breath that followed his statement.

Criticizing one’s superiors really wasn’t done in the empire, by virtue of the fact that said superior was usually your superior because they were entirely capable of lopping your head off. If they weren’t, you’d be the superior.

Again, certain parallels between the Instinctive hordes and the Empire leapt to Jack’s mind.

“The Empress has abandoned us. Time has dulled her edge. Corruption has infested her courts. Lethargy pervades her armies. And now, like an ape grasping for a branch as it plummets to its doom, the Empress pulls tight on her outer provinces in a desperate attempt to arrest her fall.”

It helped that what he was saying was mostly true. Or so he assumed. Because he’d yet to meet a system of power that wasn’t at least a little corrupt.

Silence was the only response he received to his words though.

Which, again, was to be expected. While the Empress wasn’t a ‘goddess’ in the religious sense of the word – the empire as a whole was surprisingly secular in that regard, focusing instead on something Jack would have described as Pseudo-Buddhism – she was also one of the founders of the Empire.

Again, not someone you criticized for long before you found yourself suddenly a few feet shorter from the top down.

Fortunately, Jack had a secret weapon.

“Yet Ten Huo only grows in power!”

That was the signal for the doors to the palace to open, and from them cart after cart of sizzling pigs, cows and whole chicken were wheeled forward. Prepared by the palace’s chefs, they’d done an incredible job with the task they’d been given. Even from his position up high on the balcony Jack found the smell intoxicating as it wafted up to him.

Fortunately, the line of sect troops guarding the front of the palace held steady as the crowd almost unconsciously surged forward at the sight of such a feast.

Really hope no one’s going to get crushed in that, he thought.

That was why he had a few cultivators on standby who would use directed burst of killing intent anywhere the press of bodies got too tight. The effectiveness of which Jack had been a little dubious of, but it was apparently a tried and tested method for ‘delicately’ dealing with unruly crowds.

Personally, Jack would have preferred to use his own troops, but Ren had quite reasonably pointed out that when it came to keeping crowds of agitated mortals in line, none were better than the personal armies of the sects.

…Or the Imperial army – but most of them were dead now.

That didn’t mean he’d come completely unprotected. His own troops had emptied out the palace of all courtiers and Sect guards hours ago in preparation for his speech. A feat that would have been impossible mere days ago, but it seemed that his little display to the Sect leaders had the effect he’d intended it to, because the cultivators present on the premises hadn’t even made a single peep of complaint as they were ordered out by a bunch of mere mortals.

Albeit, mere mortals who had An commanding them.

“We must cast off the shackles that have for so long held us back!” Jack announced. “This is not about power. Not about greed. Or pride. It is about survival!”

This time he got roars of approval – though whether that was down to his words or the food that was now being passed out to the crowd, he couldn’t say.

It didn’t really matter. It was about the optics of the thing. When people looked back on this moment, they would remember the cheering. And that would mean it had to have been a good thing, right?

“Ten Huo must grow. Must cultivate it’s strength. Must power through the troubles ahead,” he roared. “Which we have. Through our guards. Through our walls. Through our cultivators. And through our gonnes. Through those things we broke the back of the horde and slew their false dragon. And it is through the power of those things that we might beat back any foe that might threaten our home.”

He raised his fist high – and at the correct moment, his Red Dragon armor flared into being, the feathers atop fluttering proudly in the wind. “Ten Huo forever! Against all that might come! Together we are strong!”

Perhaps it was just his imagination, but that time the cheers felt more genuine. A chant even started.

“Ten Huo! Ten Huo! Ten Huo!”

“To that end, I intend to correct some of the failures of the old regime! Firstly, I shall be cutting the mortal guard force of our city’s sects down to one tenth their current size.”

That caused a stir, not just from the cultivators who were stood on the nearby pavilions, but from the rearmost ranks of the sect guard that were currently holding back the crowd while simultaneously handing out food.

Which made sense, he was currently discussing their livelihoods. The only thing that separated them and their families from the desperate crowds in front of them. Because while the city wasn’t quite close to starving as a result of the recent hostilities, it was true that a great many households were now tightening their belts.

Service in the Imperial Army or Sects provided some degree of protection from that reality.

“And from those men and women, I shall forge a new force. A grand Ten Huo army to rival that of the decrepit Empire. Well trained. Well armed. Professional soldiers. An expansion and revitalization of the Jiangshi militia that saved this city all those weeks ago.”

That seemed to silence much of the hesitation that had formed in the sect troops. The crowd though was all for it, whooping and hollering at the idea of more troops of the ilk that had so captured the city’s love with their arrival into it.

“I do this not out of contempt for the sects but out of love. With this I free them from the responsibility of policing the city. Of dealing with the mundane details of the mortal world. I free them to focus on their one true goal; the pursuit of cultivation and immortality.”

More importantly, it would make a coup significantly less likely to be successful later down the line. Or at least, less viable. Because as potent as cultivators were, they were still just individuals. They had more in common with fighter craft than infantry. They could take ground and destroy targets, but they couldn’t be expected to hold it without support.

Support Jack fully intended to cut out from under them while claiming he was doing them a favor. And while he could certainly see some idiots in the pavilion nodding along with the idea of ‘freeing themselves from the need to deal with mortals’, most of the leadership was rightly frowning at the thought of losing their ability to project power into the city.

Without mortal soldiers to form a buffer around them, they would effectively be besieged within their compounds.

Yet even as he could see them slowly considering raising some form of stink over it, he could also see them glancing over to the empty seat in their lineup where the Silver Paw sect might have stood.

No, they might make a perfunctory fuss, but they’d do as he told them. This was the ideal time for him to make a move like this. It was almost expected.

To be sure, he knew some would cause some form of trouble over this move, but that trouble would be a lot easier to deal with when he tripled the number of soldiers he had at his command within the city.

Down below, Jack could see the distant figure of Gao – and a small application of magnification showed the man was looking rather pale. Which made sense, given the massive task Jack had just slammed down in front of him. An, for her part, looked positively giddy about the whole thing. Ren just looked… tired and unsurprised, as if more work appearing on her lap was just to be expected where Jack was concerned. Elwin looked disinterested in the whole thing, which was par for the course.

Lin and Huang were… nowhere to be seen?

Huh, he thought.

For just a moment he was worried something might have happened, but a quick glance at the trackers attached to them – via some ‘gifts’ of jewelry – showed the pair were back at his compound. In the same room even.

Very close.

Probably caught up in some science experiment, he thought with a small smile.

“Yet what is a mortal army without a core of cultivators?” Jack continued. “Am I to demand a tithe from the sects that have already given so much? To both me and this city?” He shook his head. “Nay.”

He stretched out his arm, and with perfect timing a dozen figures dropped from the windows of the palace, landing perfectly behind the sects guards in a crouched position.

They were clearly cultivators – yet they didn’t look like them. For one thing, they were armored. From head to toe. Gleaming steel armor that was inlaid with protective runes.

It wasn’t as comprehensive as metal plate would be. Gaps existed to allow for great locomotion from the user. Yet it was still more armor than any cultivator would ever be caught wearing.

Because in the local parlance, armor was a sign of weakness. A lack of confidence in ones skills and cultivation.

Or at least, that had been the case until Jack showed up.

The next thing about them was that they were uniform. Perfectly so. Only the weapons were different. Some had glaives. Some had swords. Others axes. The only commonality there were the revolvers at their hips.

He didn’t doubt they looked absurd to the cultivators in the pavilions, each of them dressed differently to their fellows, with only a small adherence to their sect colors to mark their allegiance. Because cultivators didn’t do uniforms.

They were warriors. Heroes. Not soldiers.

Or at least, they weren’t, Jack smirked.

He raised both arms high above his head.

“I demand nothing of the sects, for volunteers have already shown up to be part of this great army. Ready to give their lives. Their souls. Their very identities to protect our great Ten Huo!”

Jack slammed his fist down onto the banister, letting the loud thud echo across the courtyard.

“I present to you, the Steel Paw!”

For the first time since they had arrived, the mystery cultivators stood up, their blue cloaks fluttering in the winds as they pulled back their hood to reveal not faces, but helms.

Helms shaped like a snarling tiger.