The third and top floor of the building was divided into two rooms, both with two beds each in them. Though Koyl didn’t like it much, Vaozey insisted on having her own room, so he had to sleep in the second bed of the room I was sleeping in. I didn’t understand Koyl’s aversion to sleeping in the same room as other people, but it didn’t really matter what his reasons were. As we both lay in our beds, trying and failing to get any rest, Koyl finally spoke up.

“How much did you hear?” he croaked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.

“You were listening in on the conversation we had,” Koyl sighed. “I know you were because you didn’t even try to ask about it.”

“I assumed it was private,” I lied again, and Koyl sighed.

“I hope I didn’t say anything that went over the line,” he muttered. “I just didn’t want you to think I suspected ill intent of you or anything. It’s just that-”

“Two separate entities that aren’t in constant contact and may have conflicting goals cannot trust each other completely,” I said. “It’s not wrong to keep the possibility of betrayal in mind.” As much as Koyl’s ideas about my operator were based on incorrect superstition, I knew that from his perspective they were completely justified, and I had no desire to try to explain the full truth to him.

“That’s a horrible thing to say,” Koyl replied.

“It’s the truth,” I countered.

“It’s still horrible,” Koyl muttered. “You’re basically saying people can’t ever fully trust each other.”

“They can’t,” I agreed. “Well, I suppose they can, but only if they’re irrational.”

Ten Hours Later

“You should probably throw those out,” Koyl advised, gesturing to the magic boosters that I laid out on the table as we went through our gear. “They don’t keep for very long, even the Rehvite ones only stay useful for about a month.”

“You got your hands on some, rich boy?” Vaozey asked.

“When they came back three days after you left, a few of the people who attacked our mansion were carrying them,” Koyl explained. “We got seven in total. By the way, are those filled with the Rehvite formula, or did you refill them?”

“Original formula,” I replied. “Is it different?”

“It has a fruit extract in it that lets it keep for longer,” Koyl explained, grabbing one of the vials from the table. “Let me just-” he uncapped the metal tube, then gagged and retched. “Yeah, that’s gone bad,” he choked. “Gods, that is vile. Shuwao, can you dump those and keep the tubes?”

“Yes boss,” Shuwao nodded, grimacing as he took the open tube from Koyl and the rest from the table. The scent of the contents finally wafted over to Vaozey and me, making her cough and prompting me to hold my breath.

“We should go outside and let this room air out,” Vaozey grunted, inhaling deeply and then holding her breath to avoid the smell.

“Yeah,” Koyl agreed. “I have a bunch of fresh ones from my father anyway, so if you have any more, just dump them.”

Eight Hours Later

“What do you mean you can’t make a spring like that?” Koyl snapped, slapping his hand on the blacksmith’s table. “We’ve gone to everyone in town and they told us you’re the best smith in Awrehrehzha. You’re telling me you can’t even make a simple spring?”

“It’s not about can’t,” the smith sighed, rubbing his beard nervously. “To make one that thin and small needs special metal that I don’t have on hand.”

“If I could get some, could you make the spring?” Koyl asked.

“Maybe?” the smith replied. “It would take at least a day or two, and it would cost-”

“I don’t care how much it costs,” Koyl said, cutting the smith off.

“What could you need it for anyway?” the smith asked.

“Don’t concern yourself with that,” Koyl advised.

“No, I think I am concerned with it now,” the smith retorted. “This whole thing reeks of crime, and I’m not getting involved in anything illegal.” Koyl glanced at me, and I knew what the look meant. Show him the mask, I translated, Kill him if you suspect anything. Warming up some electric magic in my left hand, I used my right hand to remove the modified Rehvite assassin mask from my bag, placing it on the smith’s table. He looked at it for a few seconds, confused, then recognized it.

“My apologies,” the smith blurted out, lowering his head. “I had no idea you were- Right, if you require replacement parts I can provide them, but I will need the materials provided to me.” So he knows what it is, but he doesn’t know who we are, I thought.

“Can we expect confidentiality?” Koyl asked.

“Yes, sir,” the blacksmith confirmed, still not looking up. “If you should like, for an extra fee I will shut down the smithy to eternal customers until I am finished.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Koyl replied. “Just keep it away from the front. My servant will give you the materials tomorrow morning. How long will creating the replacement spring for my mask take?”

“Your servant will be able to retrieve it by sundown,” the blacksmith said, contradicting his previous answer.

“Excellent,” Koyl replied. “You will be paid well. May you be favored.”

“May you be favored as well,” the blacksmith replied.

Eleven Hours Later

“Here it is,” Shuwao announced as he walked out of Koyl’s building into the backyard where we were waiting, carrying a barrel that looked to have about two liters of internal volume. “One barrel of-”

“Let’s not announce it,” Koyl said. “If it weren’t for that smith, we never would have found this stuff, and we’re not supposed to have it.”

“Right,” Shuwao grunted, looking embarrassed. “Anyway, this is a small barrel and it’s not full to the top, but it should be good for just over a dozen… well, you know.”

“Two dozen,” I said, looking at the short barrel and doing some quick math.

“You’re the expert,” Vaozey shrugged. “We can’t really test these in the city walls, but if you show us how to make them we can get them done quickly.” Reaching down into the pile of grenade casings near my feet, I pulled one out, then began deforming it with force magic. I added a simple square crease pattern that would probably create an even shrapnel distribution upon detonation, even with a lower-powered explosive like black powder. In the process, I also reduced the internal volume by about twenty-five percent, which would help to extend the powder.

“Can you start making this sort of pattern on the… ‘shells’?” I asked. “You might need to use some metal wedges and hammers.” Vaozey and Koyl both looked at the deformed casing with looks of equal parts curiosity and confusion.

“How close does it have to be?” Koyl asked.

“So long as it’s a regular crease pattern like this it’s fine,” I explained. “The idea is to weaken the ‘shell’ in certain areas so that the explosion preferentially breaks those, generating an even distribution of metal shrapnel instead of just a random one.” The pair both looked at me, and even Shuwao raised an eyebrow.

“So this will… change the shape of the explosion?” Vaozey asked.

“Like I said before, it’s not the explosion that causes the damage, it’s the shrapnel,” I reminded them. “The explosion is just air pressure, like if you fill a waterskin with air and cap it, then crush it. It tries to break out of the ‘shell’ by pressing against it in all directions at once. With spherical ‘shells’ like these, it’s probably just going to break the top open where the fuse is and waste most of its energy in one direction.”

“But it still has a fuse hole,” Koyl pointed out.

“We’re going to address that too, using some of the broken ones,” I said. “However, even if we didn’t, this would greatly improve the shrapnel pattern.”

“Why don’t we just use leather bags and put metal on the outside?” Vaozey asked. “That would work, wouldn’t it?”

“We already have these,” Koyl replied. “Let’s see how many we can make first.”

Five Hours Later

“Come on rich boy, if I can do it, you can do it,” Vaozey scoffed as Koyl stared at the side of the wooden cup, sweat beading on his forehead.

“You should be practicing force magic,” I said, waving her back out into the yard.

“You’re not messing with me, right?” Koyl asked for the fourth time since we had started. “I could believe you can do this, but Vaozey can really do it too?”

“Yes,” I replied. “It might be harder for you because your magic is more typical for a human and uses your eyes as its primary method of targeting.” Koyl inhaled through gritted teeth and began to strain, holding his breath in and shutting his eyes. The water in the cup didn’t react at all, but some smoke began to billow off of the side near Koyl’s hand. “Wrong,” I said.

“I know it’s wrong,” Koyl exhaled. “I can smell it.”

“Then try something else,” I suggested. “What method are you using?”

“Same thing I always do,” Koyl muttered. “Picture a fire, pray, and… use magic.”

“For you, it might be possible to learn my method,” I said.

“Don’t tell me to spin a cube in my head or I’m going to slap you,” Koyl groaned.

“You won’t be producing fire with this magic, you’ll be producing heat,” I continued. “It’s much simpler, but it requires you to understand what you’re doing.”

“What god would I even pray to for ‘heat’ instead of fire?” Koyl asked incredulously.

“I don’t believe it really matters,” I replied. “Vaozey often prays to Yaytgayao, maybe try that one.”

“That fits better than I would have thought,” Koyl chuckled.

“Heat is motion, at least when referring to matter,” I began. “On a sub-microscopic scale, which is many times smaller than the eye can see, heat energy causes atoms, the particles that make up matter, to vibrate. What you are doing when you produce heat is essentially vibrating these bits of matter, or rather increasing the energy of their vibrations.”

“Wouldn’t that make it force magic?” Koyl asked, looking more interested than he had when the explanation started. That’s… actually a good question, I thought.

“Not important,” I said. “What’s important is that heat is not fire. Fire is a chemical reaction that can be caused by heat and produce heat by breaking chemical bonds in certain types of matter, like wood. You will not be attempting to produce fire, you will be producing heat, which may or may not produce fire.”

“Alright,” Koyl nodded. “How?”

“It’s pointless to try to imagine every molecule or atom in a material,” I explained. “Instead, in your mind, create an image of the object you want to heat up, but colorless. Dark sections will be cold, lighter sections will be hot.”

“Can I do this with, I don’t know, not the water I can’t see?” Koyl asked.

“Just use the table’s surface,” I instructed. “What you will do with this visualization is make a section brighter while using magic. For me, this visualization instructs my magic to increase the heat of the target.”

“Okay,” Koyl said, putting his hand above the table and closing his eyes. He held it in place, breathing slowly and not saying anything as he tried to do as I instructed. “I don’t think this is working,” he finally said about two minutes later.

“As I’ve come to learn, not everyone can pick up magic techniques as quickly as I can,” I said. “Keep trying. Once you get this to work, I’ll tell you how to use a volumetric technique that can easily reach through materials. If you need more explanation of the inner working of the process, just ask.”

Seven Hours Later

“Got the spring,” Koyl announced. His interruption drew my attention for just long enough to allow Vaozey’s fist to slip under my guard and crack me in the jaw, but thankfully she had either failed to use force magic with the attack or pulled it at the last second. She was certainly improving in her consistency when using internal force magic, but around thirty percent of her strikes still lacked it, and from what she told me it was entirely unintentional.

“Seyt,” Vaozey swore. “Did you have to butt in like that?”

“Sorry,” Koyl shrugged.

“No, it’s fine,” I said, cracking my jaw and neck. “I was just about to suggest a break anyway.”

“Where’s the mask?” Koyl asked.

“Upstairs,” I said. “I’ll go with you.”

“You really don’t trust me to put a spring into it on my own?” Koyl laughed. “At least wash yourself off first, you’re covered in blood.” I hadn’t noticed, but Koyl was right, nearly my entire torso was splattered with a combination of blood and spittle.

“Don’t do anything until I get there,” I instructed. “We only have one of those masks and I’m sure we wouldn’t be able to get another as easily as we got the spring.”

Seventeen Hours Later

“If you say this spot isn’t isolated enough I’m going to leave before it gets dark,” Vaozey growled. “I don’t care, we’ve been walking for hours. There is no chance anyone will even hear us, let alone walk by.”

“I’m inclined to agree with her,” Koyl panted, pulling the backpack full of cheap fabric up so it wouldn’t fall off his shoulders. Between the three of us, he was the most exhausted by far, and it made me worry about his ability to fight. Still, she has a point, I sighed, we’re about two hours from town and it would be better to get back before dark.

“Okay, let’s do it here,” I said, removing my backpack and setting it on the ground. “Koyl, start putting up some sheets in the trees there, there, and there.” I pointed to three spots with tree branches that would be suitable for hanging fabrics. Koyl, looking relieved, began doing as I instructed while I took out the test grenades and checked them over. Using pieces of the few broken casings and some glue, I had sealed the fuses inside of them and marked the spot where heat magic could be used to light them. They would need to be thrown immediately, but if my calculations were correct, they would also be far more effective than Rehvite designs.

“Tell me again why you made him drag that fabric out here,” Vaozey said, walking up and grabbing one of the grenades from me.

“Be careful with that,” I told her. “The sheets are to check the shrapnel patterns. We only have five test grenades so we need to make them count, and you two will be throwing two each since you’re new to this.”

“If we’re only putting three of them up, why did I have to bring this whole backpack?” Koyl asked as struggled to smooth out one of the sheets of fabric.

“Because we’re changing them after each throw,” I replied. “Now, come over here and watch what I do so you don’t end up blowing your arm off. I doubt you could learn how to grow it back as quickly as I can.”

Two Days Later

“Is that tight enough?” Koyl asked, pulling on the straps of my new suit of plate armor.

“I think so,” I replied. “I’ve never worn this type of armor before, but it doesn’t feel loose.”

“You’ve never worn full plate?” Vaozey laughed from inside her new armor. “Here I thought you were supposed to be a warrior.” The conical faceplate of her helm blocked me from seeing her expression, but I could imagine it well enough.

“This kind of armor isn’t useful against the weapons of my homeland,” I explained. “Even the grenades we tested would easily pierce it, and those are very low-powered compared to the kinds of things we fight with.”

“Don’t tell me that stupid sword that can cut anything is real too,” Koyl snorted. It was remarkable how easily the pair of them accepted my sanitized recounting of stories from Earth as factual. I did tell them that monomolecular blades were commonly knife-sized though, not sword-sized, I thought.

“Those kinds of blades are real, yes,” I confirmed. “Before you ask, yes, they would cut through this metal like it wasn’t even there. There are some things that can obstruct them better than others, but generally speaking, softer metals don’t have the sort of…” I struggled to find words that would explain the concept. “Do you remember what I told you about atoms and molecules when we discussed heat?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Koyl nodded.

“For a material like steel, you can imagine it as being made of an amorphous chunk of atoms,” I explained. “They’re sort of… stuck together, like sand mixed with glue. The strength of the glue determines how hard it is to cut or deform the metal. That analogy is highly imperfect, but I think it should get the point across.”

“Then why can’t a sword cut metal easily?” Vaozey asked. “Not that I think you’re wrong or anything. Of all the crazy things you say, this seems the most believable to me.”

“Compared to the size of the atoms, the blade of a sword is very blunt,” I replied. “Essentially, at scales small enough that the eye cannot perceive them, almost all blades are more like wedges that force materials apart rather than the sharp edges they appear to be.”

“So these special swords are like blades, even down to the smallest levels,” Koyl guessed.

“Basically,” I nodded, rolling my arms around to confirm their range of motion. It wasn’t as good as being armorless, but compared to what I expected I was still highly mobile. The increased durability would be worth not being able to reach the small of my back.

“How would you even make something like that?” Vaozey asked. “I don’t know much about smithing really, but from what you just said, I’m assuming you can’t just grind an edge to that level of sharpness. If you could, we would already have these for ourselves.”

“It requires special materials, especially to hold the edge for more than one use,” I said, raising my legs and testing how well I could bend my knees. “I think my left shin plate is loose,” I told Koyl, putting my foot back down. He examined it, pulled on the belts to tighten them, then backed off.

“How about now?” he asked.

“Better,” I replied.

“Okay, I’ll re-mark that one,” Koyl said, bending down and using a piece of chalk to draw a line along the belt to show where it should be clasped as he had with the other pieces. “You’re paying attention to what I’m doing right?” Koyl asked. “You have to do this for me next, Shuwao is still out trying to get a map.”

“I’m familiar with the process,” I replied.

“So then what kind of armor do your people use?” Vaozey asked, raising her faceplate.

“Lighter forms, because speed is more of a priority in our style of combat,” I replied. “Generally it’s made of materials that are designed to slow down projectiles from guns or deflect them, but in some cases, there are also suits that are made to resist heat, stabbing, and other things.” And usually, about half of those would be built into my body, I thought. Vaozey frowned, thinking about something, then put her faceplate down again.

“Are your people only this good at killing, or are you this good at other things too?” she asked.

“Like what?” I asked back.

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “It’s just… I can’t picture what one of your cities would look like. The only things that pop into mind are battlefields.”

“Don’t concern yourself with it,” I replied. “My armor is good now, Koyl, let’s start on yours.”

One Day Later

“You do not want to know what I did to get this,” Shuwao said, putting a roll of thick parchment down on the table in front of us. “Now if you’ll all excuse me, I need to take a nap. Boss, you tell your father I want a bonus.”

“Yes, thank you Shuwao,” Koyl replied, and the man slowly ascended the stairs beside us. Koyl unrolled the paper, revealing something that looked like a map, but didn’t have any sort of scale on it, and had a number of extraneous drawings that didn’t contribute useful information. Thankfully, I knew the exact size of the triangle in the middle of the map, so I could approximate the rest.

“About three-quarters of a kilometer across,” I muttered, looking at the circular structure of the noypeyyoyjh site.”

“How big is that?” Koyl asked.

“That right there,” I said, pointing to the triangle in the center. “That’s the noypeyyoyjh, and if the one I saw is the same one that’s here, each of those lines is about fifty meters long. A meter is this much.” I gestured with my hands to show an approximate measure.

“So that would make this…” Koyl mumbled.

“Seyt,” Vaozey cursed under her breath. “It’s huge.” I had to agree with the assessment, at least using Uwrish standards. The fortifications around the noypeyyoyjh consisted of three circular rings of walls, with the space in between each layer segmented into between eight and sixteen sub-sections, with more on the outer layer and less on the inner ones. Purely mathematically it was about a four-hundred-meter sprint to get from the outer wall to the noypeyyoyjh, but I knew it would be anything but simple.

“About a thousand people living there,” Koyl read from some notes at the bottom of the map. “Only two hundred dedicated guards in total, mostly just regular worshipers and priests and such. This looks… am I wrong to say this looks a bit easy? They can’t possibly have good coverage of the walls with one two hundred people.”

“How high are the walls?” I asked. I couldn’t see any measurements on the map, but Koyl looked more familiar with where to find information than I was.

“Uh, looks like they’re regular city walls to me,” he said. “No, wait, it says double height.”

“So twenty meters or so,” I thought aloud.

“Do you know what those mean?” Koyl asked, pointing to two subsections of the outermost residence, just inside the outer ring. Each of the sections was marked with a symbol: Some had a house, some had the triangular symbol for Rehv, some had a symbol for money or weapons, but the two Koyl pointed to were marked differently.

“Those are ant words,” I said, recognizing the strange method of creating a shape with a twisting line immediately.

“Do you know what they say?” Koyl asked.

“No,” I replied. “But, logically, those are probably where the nests they’re using to supplement their guards are.”

“So we stay away from those,” Koyl said.

“No,” I said, tapping the one closest to the road on the map. “If we’re lucky, this will be our entry point.”