"You're sure this is what it's supposed to be?" Roxy asked, pressed into my side and looking at the chemicals arranged on my lab bench—in particular, a glass beaker clearly labeled with a skull and crossbones, and the words 'Sulfuric Acid' under it.
"I'm sure," I confirmed.
"How…?" she asked, only for Sprite to pop up beside us with a smile.
"Johnny was a chemist's son, but Johnny is no more~! What Johnny thought was H2O was H2SO4~!"
Roxy paused, blinking at Sprite, before covering her mouth as a giggle fought to escape. Turning to me, my pregnant Migurd wife glared. "What have you been teaching her?!"
"Only the most fun chemistry," I grinned.
Roxy pouted. "I'm not sure how I feel about teaching our children that."
I turned and grabbed her by the hips, pulling her tightly against me. Roxy's blue eyes stared up into my green, separated only by our safety goggles. Her hands came up and rested on the dragon leather apron I wore for chemical work, the (dragon) leather gloves on her hands too thick for either of us to feel much of anything. "I'm going to teach them all the most fun magic and science. They'll be able to topple kingdoms by the time they're Aisha's age."
Roxy blushed, biting her bottom lip as her gaze narrowed and she got that look that told me she wanted to practice making babies again. Finally, she groaned and turned away. "Why does that turn me on more?"
I laughed, giving her ass a good pat and a squeeze, drawing a quiet, needy whimper from her lips. "You say that like you don't remember why you decided to marry me," I pointed out.
"No, I remember," her tone was chagrined as she shook her head. "How could I refuse, when you sent me such a wonderful gift. Who even does that? Just sends someone a gift of knowledge that could uplift entire kingdoms, like they were just sending any other gift?" Sighing, she glanced at me again and muttered, "No, I know who. You're still impossible."
"Glad you think so. I'd like to think I can still surprise you occasionally," I chuckled. Looking to Sprite, who had moved across from us, I gestured at the chemicals and materials scattered across the table. "Alright. Fuck it. I give up. You can do the prototyping a thousand times faster than I can. Go for it."
"I thought you didn't want her to do it, because you wanted a fun project?" Roxy asked and Sprite nodded.
"That was exactly what master said," she sent me an amused look.
"I did," I agreed, before running a hand through my hair in frustration. "That was before we learned they were moving a lot faster than we thought."
We thought we'd have months at minimum, maybe even a year or two before Milishion finished preparations and made their way towards us. We thought they would try the sea route first. Plenty of time to build up, prepare our tech, and train our forces.
We were wrong.
Apparently, I'd missed a trick, or Milishion had more tricks up their sleeves than I'd thought. That, or as with the anti-summon enchantments, they had gotten help from someone. Honestly, I couldn't rule either out. Not many people had had the benefit of being able to watch their troop movements from the air and had likely assumed, as I did, that it would take them the normal amount of time to move troops and if troops arrived before they were expected to, then obviously they had set out earlier.
As it turned out, there was in fact a trick to it. Thanks to Sprite, we could observe that effect in action and guess at what it was doing.
It took another few weeks from the point where I killed their king and new religious leaders, and we had finished our little tour of the Demon Continent for the girls and made it home by the time they started moving. But when they did start moving, they went fast.
As far as we could tell, they were using some kind of space warping magic. It wouldn't be inaccurate to call what they were doing similar to but distinct from a wormhole. It was more like space compression within a field defined by their boats or troops. From the outside, they appeared to be moving faster, but when using lasers to actually measure their relative movement speed to the area directly around them, they were moving at a normal speed—it was the space around them that was distorted.
The effect was much more pronounced and easily measurable on the soldiers marching in formation by land than on the ships. Every marching step (thirty inches) came out to 3.452 miles—or one league. Once she had that number, it was easy to see the ships were moving at the same rate of distance compression of 1:7291.2.
Their normal marching speed outside of the distortion was 3.4 mph—or one league per hour. That was not a coincidence. It was a very intentionally measured out and regulated speed.
One league per hour marching speed, with every step covering a league, at 120 steps per minute, gives us 7200 steps per hour. Seventy two hundred leagues per hour.
Thankfully, for the sake of literally everyone, they couldn't keep that up all day. They weren't me—they didn't have near infinite mana on tap thanks to solar arrays, or even my own personal ridiculous amount of mana. It took a lot of mages to keep that spell up and running. They managed to keep it up on each group for a good twenty minutes each, for a boost of 1200 leagues—or about 4142 miles. That put the ships halfway around the Milis southern coastline on their way to pass between East and West port, and their troops most of the way across the Milis continent from Milishion. They kept marching and sailing from there, but at the normal pace.
And that was just on the first day. On the second day, after their mages had rested, they did it again.
The ships had made it through the strait between East and West port, and at their current speed, would make it to the line I'd crossed in the water by tomorrow. The ground army had marched all day, set camp, and then continued their fast march first thing in the morning, crossing the water as they went—some enchantment or other allowing them to just march across the water. It wouldn't even be a full twenty minute march the next day to put them at my line in the sand.
Clearly I had underestimated them.
Thankfully, they had underestimated us as well, and the speed and sheer scale at which we could build things and prototype new technology. Sprite had constructed the wall cutting off the Central Continent above the Dragon King Kingdom within a day of Ariel making the ask. She had deconstructed a few of those mountains and erected an enormous wall that would make any engineer proud. The entire thing was three hundred feet tall, another three hundred feet deep to prevent tunneling under, and at its widest, five hundred feet wide.
The wall itself was built more like a star fortress—instead of a single flat plane, it was a series of points facing outwards, with excellent viewing angles on everything below and bastions between each pair of points to mount cannon, machine guns, and other weapons. The top of it, behind the points, was wide enough for four carts to pass side by side, covered, and walled in with regular windows and doors for men and vehicles—making it easy for people to patrol the top or move equipment.
Below that, the next interior level was one long, continuous corridor lined with rooms for receiving supplies and housing men, along with elevators leading up to the top and down in the rear, turning the entire wall itself into a fort. Two rail lines were set into place in regular sections between sending circles on the interior level, one for cannon ammo and one for machine gun ammo, so we could send ammunition straight to a magazine room, have it loaded into rail carts, and distributed where it needed to go—all controlled and assisted by spells attached to manual levers, switches, and buttons, so that if the enemy army made it this far, there were no spirits here for that aura to disrupt and potentially cripple us. Everything would be able to be operated with a minimum level of training.
From what Sprite had told me, the entire wall was stone bricks reinforced with steel rebar and mesh, further backed up with earth magic as it was tied into a solar mana array—an array which had its own self-destruct feature, in case the wall was taken, or someone who shouldn't started poking around with it. And speaking of earth magic, the wall had enchantments to disrupt earth magic in the ground within about five hundred feet, to prevent burrowing, sabotage, and other terrain manipulation attempts.
Then, there was the large scale terrain manipulation leading up to the wall Sprite had done to prepare the field. The land had been stripped and utterly flattened for two hundred miles approaching the wall. When they arrived, we wanted to see them coming, but we'd been a little tricky about how we arranged things.
From the two hundred mile mark, the ground rose almost a thousand feet in a gentle slope for several miles, before topping a hill and descending the other side. The ground below had been lowered in elevation. Any army marching down the continuous hill would be highly visible from miles and miles away—well within the range of mobile artillery, with no way for them to counter it.
From the top of the hill one would seem to walk down another very gentle decline at the hundred mile mark, a hundred feet down below normal ground level, that stretched for twenty miles—at least, in the middle. On the western end, it was forty miles wide, while on the eastern end, it narrowed to half a mile. Then, on the northern end, seventy miles from the wall, they would encounter a much steeper fifty foot incline everywhere but the road, which rose to meet the incline much more gently further back, held up by supports.
The entire area described a rough bowl shape a thousand miles across, neatly bisecting the land, higher in elevation on the western side than the eastern, but if one were to look at it from just the right angle on the eastern side, they would see a half mile wide channel cut through the land and expanding the further away it went westward, which terminated on the east side in a thirty foot drop into the water below where, coincidentally enough, there appeared to be large, sharp rock formations jutting up from the sea that would make for a nasty fall. Strangely, the entire coast north of the wall all the way to the Sanakia Kingdom appeared to have grown similar spiked rock formations pointed out towards the sea almost overnight—only visible at low tide, or if one happened to spot the occasional bird circling and landing on them.
If they were to observe the western side, they would only see a manmade retaining wall covering a forty mile span of the shore and a very large stone pipe—or perhaps funnel—extending another ten miles out from that, which narrowed as it approached the center of the channel. If someone were to get close enough, they might even be able to make out the multitude of earth and water magic inscriptions across its surface. With time and study, they might even learn that for some reason, those inscriptions were designed to strengthen the funnel and draw water in towards the center, very quickly.
…The fact that my wives looked at it and laughed had left me stumped for a bit, until Roxy sent me a smile and answered the question of just what they were laughing at.
"So you've returned to your roots… and made a giant toilet." Of course, that only cracked them up more.
I might have gotten them all back for that since—mostly in ways they enjoyed anyway, so I couldn't really claim it was much of a punishment. But at least the spankings had been fun.
From the giant water slide, it was all open terrain at the moment. However, once Sprite completed development of proper gunpowder, I'd have her lay down a mine field. I'd already prototyped the design—resistant to mana so that nearby spells didn't set them off, and undetectable to normal earth magic manipulation so they wouldn't know what hit them until the first ones started going off. Moreover, they had their own spells on them and would only go off under certain conditions: if they were magically armed, if a group approached, and only once any group had passed the nearest two rows of mines to the south, which would prime the ones that had been passed for anyone coming from the north—that last one specifically so that if they tried to retreat, they'd find themselves running into more explosives.
After multiple miles worth of minefield would be a stretch of quagmire. Miles of waist deep swamp with random traps meant to suck people in, explode, or release acid, toxic gas, and other nastiness. Only the road was safe, and the road itself was enchanted for remote control, to throw anyone who stepped on it off and into the swamp in sections, with the swamp to either side being as lethal as I could make it.
Assuming they made it past the swamp was finally no man's land. A flat, hard packed stretch of dirt with nothing growing on it and enchanted stones buried under it specifically to disrupt earth magic. That started thirty miles out from the wall. At the twenty mile mark was a last warning—a simple stone wall, waist high, that anyone could scale. It was marked every hundred feet with signage warning that anyone who approached and wasn't coming specifically from the road would be killed, and that armies were prohibited from marching upon the road under penalty of death.
Everything from that point to fifty feet in front of the wall was a kill zone for the artillery we were developing. There were highly visible grid lines on the ground made of different colored stone delineating range and direction and poles with colored flags on them every ten yards out. The entire thing had been marked out down to the foot and I was sure that once Ariel's troops got some practice in, they would be able to hit those marks with pinpoint accuracy. I almost felt sorry for the poor fuckers walking into that, not knowing what they were getting into. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Sucked for them. They shouldn't have decided to invade us.
The last fifty feet were another mine field, followed by a twenty foot moat of quicksand, and then ten more feet to the wall itself—and all of it would be covered by machine guns, with everywhere one could stand covered by not less than two fields of fire from the top of the wall. The issue of being able to tilt the guns down to shoot was resolved by a system that let someone get into an armored ball turret that could be swung out to pitch down far enough to shoot back and hit the wall itself if need be.
All they were lacking now were the guns, and the ammunition to use in them…
"Promise you won't be mad?"
I blinked at the surprisingly vulnerable and hesitant tone from my summoned spirit. "Sure? Why would I be mad?"
"Ahahaha~," Sprite laughed nervously, before a flash of light from the table drew my attention. Looking down, I blinked at what I saw there. Picking it up, I examined it, turning it over in my hands as I took in the very familiar form.
Five and a half, maybe six inches in length. A shiny, smooth brass cylindrical shape, topped with a piece of copper that came to a point. On the bottom side was a circle in the center made of something other than brass. It felt heavy in my hand—much heavier than simply the weight of its individual pieces.
"How long?" I asked as Roxy took it from me, likewise examining it, probing it with magic.
Sprite winced, reaching up and rubbing at the back of her head. "When Ariel asked you to handle it and you said you would take care of it, I… started then. I remembered the samples of black powder you had made before Roa was destroyed and all of your theoretical notes on the nitrating process for more advanced powder. So I built myself a lab on the Demon Continent, under a mountain, to make sure no one could find it or get to it. Then I followed your example and used magic to brute force a solution, except on a much larger scale, creating the materials I needed and then testing thousands of different combinations of chemicals, materials, and processes.
"First, I studied how the chemicals interacted with materials individually at the molecular level. Then how they interacted with each other. Then how they interacted with materials together. From there, I did a lot of tests with different materials and methods of preparation, from paper, to cotton and other cloth, before settling on a custom made type of pelletized fiber made from a plant from the Demon Continent that burns more completely and with a few extra steps in the processing I can even control the burn rate for different load types! I've been experimenting with different sized cartridges and different types of payloads. Basic lead, ceramic, steel, copper, aluminum, tungsten—and all sorts of different combinations. Also, different types of munitions based on your other notes and the ways you've been using earth magic to manipulate the Stone Bullet spell—soft, full metal jacket, hollow point, frangible, radically invasive, incendiary, explosive. I've also been playing around with enchanting individual rounds for different effects when they hit!"
Roxy and I stared at her. Sprite blushed at the attention, until I reached out and reflexively pulled her into a hug. Her body was solid and warm, soft to the touch even if it was still just hardlight at the moment. She let out a quiet sigh and wrapped her arms around my waist, returning the hug. I heard her inhaling as she sniffed at me, rubbing her face in my shirt.
"You did good, sweetie," I praised her, stroking the top of her head and earning a happy sound. "So you've already figured out the weapons we'll be using?"
"That fast?" Roxy asked.
"Mm!" Sprite nodded. Looking between the two of us, she asked, "Do you want to see?"
"Absolutely," I agreed.
"You should bring Ariel as well," my Migurd wife pointed out, and Sprite nodded.
I felt teleportation magic well up around us and, a moment later, we disappeared in a flash of light, only to reappear on an empty field of flat, solid stone—clearly the work of earth magic. Looking around, I saw we were in an area on the western coast of the Central Continent and that the flat surface we stood on was a perfectly square block, bordered by grass—one of many, all in a row stretching east to west. North of us were the foothills of the Dragon King mountain range—many of which were nothing but flat, bare earth now as they had been converted into raw materials for the wall. To our south was the back side of the wall, looming tall.
Ariel appeared beside us a moment later and grinned. I took a moment to appreciate her body in that tight dress that showed off the curve of her hips and bust, and the swelling of her belly.
"Hello!"
"Ariel," Roxy nodded, earning a hug from the blonde.
"Roxy, Rudy! Sprite said she had something to show us?" the blonde queen asked, and I nodded.
A flash of light from nearby pulled our attention to Sprite, holding a very recognizable object in her hands. Ariel sucked in a quiet breath while I took the rifle and looked it over.
I found everything I expected on it—folding and telescoping stock, well oiled steel frame, adjustable iron sights, a detachable magazine, fore-grip, pistol grip. Every part of it was recognizable in function and form, and the overall aesthetic was very minimalist and functional—rugged, really.
I ejected the magazine and made sure it was unloaded, before stripping it down—finding the process had been made amazingly simplified compared to something like the AR platform on Earth. As I studied it I quickly came to a conclusion: the entire thing had been designed from the ground up to be rugged, have tolerances that would let it fire even if it was full of debris, and so easy to use, service, or repair that any idiot could do it in the field, in the dark, in a matter of seconds—all with no tools beyond a rag and some oil.
Putting it all back together, I created an earthen berm several yards away and a series of clay targets and moved a bit away from the others. Racking a round, I aimed and paused to warn, "Cover your ears."
I gave them a moment, then fired. I was happy to see that it was dead on accurate at about thirty yards, but the bullet exploding after a second when it hit the berm was unexpected. Strangely though, I didn't feel any recoil. Likewise, after running the entire thirty round magazine through it, the barrel was cool to the touch.
"You enchanted it," I looked to Sprite, who nodded.
"And the bullets. I used inertia spells transfer the inertia from the recoil after cycling the bolt back to the bullet. A cooling spell manages the weapon's heat—I learned that one after melting my first barrel!" she giggled. "Various earth, water, sending, and summoning spells handle cleaning and maintenance. After every hundred rounds it will clean itself and after every thousand, it will remove the current oil and replace it with fresh oil. Ammunition, if it's available, can be summoned straight into the magazine by pulling the follower down and holding it in place for two seconds. Ejected casings are all Sent back to a location to be collected, then Sent to the magi-factory I've built just for making ammunition to be reloaded and Sent back. The bullets are all enchanted to explode and burn up after they've hit, so that no one can recover enough of one to figure out what we're doing. Also, the guns are going to be keyed to tags issued to Ariel's soldiers, so that if anyone who isn't wearing one picks one up or casts magic on it, it burns up in their hands—oh, but there are failsafes to prevent someone from exploiting that, so don't worry!"
"Can I…?" Ariel asked, approaching with a hopeful look.
"Sure. Come on, I'll show you both how," I sent them a grin.
I quickly got Ariel set up and backed off to give her room. She yelped at the first shot, then steeled herself and leaned into the next one. After a few more, she was hitting targets with every pull of the trigger. When it ran empty, she followed Sprite's instructions and pulled down the catch on the outside of the magazine, holding it for a few seconds. Then, she turned the gun over and examined it for a moment, before lighting up in a grin. I saw her click the fire selector over and watched as she raised it to her hip.
"How did that American movie go? Say hello to my little friend?"
"That's the one," I answered.
She laughed and held down the trigger, spraying the berm and sending up gouts of dirt with each small explosion as the berm began to smoke with melting metal and burning dirt. Quietly, Roxy murmured, "I want to try that… It looks like fun."
"Oh, it is," I laughed as Ariel's gun went dry.
I took the gun from her and checked it over, finding it was still cool and in perfect condition. I handed it to Roxy and showed her the same things I'd done for Ariel, before turning her loose and heading back to Ariel so we could watch. Roxy took very cautious, precise, and measured shots for the first magazine, then the second, before going through the third the same way Ariel had.
"Rudy~," Ariel purred as we watched Roxy play. "That got my motor running. I see why you Americans love your toys now. Everything feels kind of… tingly."
"Now you know," I nodded, grinning as I squeezed her hips. "We'll take care of it later. I'm sure this isn't the only toy Sprite has for us, or she wouldn't have called us out here."
"It's not!" the spirit beamed as Roxy finished up and removed the magazine, then locked the bolt back as I'd shown her.
"That was fun!" my bluenette wife laughed. "We should invite everyone next time."
"We will," I nodded. "We need to see what Ghislaine and Eris think. If it's actually a problem for a King-level swordsman, then it's great. If not, it'll still be effective against normal troops."
"So, Sprite? What else did you have to show us?" Ariel asked as I handed Sprite the rifle, which she Sent away.
"Bigger guns!" the spirit giggled, before summoning a weapon on a tripod that looked even more familiar than the rifle had.
Tripod mounted, belt fed, with a single long barrel, a carrying handle on top and on the barrel, and a butterfly trigger… it looked so much like the Browning M2 that I wondered if Sprite hadn't pulled the image of that straight from my memories, since she had access. "The M2 is forever," I chuckled, shaking my head.
Sprite went through showing off the setup, which was almost as simple as the first rifle, before handing it over to me. I settled into place and ran through a quick test and demonstration, finding it to be pretty much exactly what I expected. I got up and let the girls have a turn each testing it out before Sprite sent it away as well.
Finally, she summoned what I had been expecting—a pair of artillery pieces, each on their own tripod style base, along with two steel crates full of ammunition. The first was maybe forty feet long and, with the barrel laid out flat at the moment, maybe five feet tall, and the ammunition with it seemed to be six inch shells—big artillery rounds that it would take a normal man both hands to lift and maneuver into place. The second was almost exactly twice that size, with twelve inch shells.
I wondered how they were supposed to be loaded, but Sprite moved over to the smaller of the two and demonstrated. "Step one: adjust the elevation and direction," she instructed, spinning a pair of hand cranked wheels rapidly to lift and turn the barrel and the unit, raising the barrel and turning it to the west, out to sea.
Moving over to the back, she began turning a dial that looked like it went from zero to one hundred. "Step two: select load size for range. We'll go with ten." She turned the dial then pulled a lever under it and I saw the flash of summoning magic as a group of ten round plates fell into the bottom part of the chamber.
"Step three: select ammunition." Another dial turn, another lever pull, and a round was summoned into the chamber. "Step four: load." A lever pull slammed everything on the back end into place and locked it in. "And step five: fire. But um, you might want a noise canceling spell!"
I quickly cast one for us and, once she saw we were ready, she pulled a lever on the back with a red handle. I felt the thump of the gun firing through my feet and in my chest. A few seconds later, there was a splash out in the water, followed by a small geyser as it exploded. I dropped the noise canceling spell and Sprite beamed a smile.
"What do you think?!" she asked, practically begging for praise at this point.
Ariel pulled her into a hug with a big smile of her own. "It's great! They won't know what hit them!"
Roxy and I shared a look and my Migurd wife sighed. "This is going to be a massacre. I wish there was some way to reason with them."
"Can't ration with the irrational until you've hurt them bad enough that they'll stop and actually listen," I pointed out, and she nodded.
"I know. It's just… There are going to be a lot of lives lost. And for what? A pointless war against a foe they won't even be able to properly comprehend, let alone defeat. I would say it seems unfair, but… if they had the advantages we do, they clearly wouldn't hesitate, since it's obvious that they believe they have such an advantage, and they've used it before."
"They probably have other things no one else has lived through seeing," Ariel pointed out, and we nodded. "We shouldn't assume this is going to be a certain victory. We should expect the worst, then prepare for worse than that."
"Sounds like good advice," I nodded. Looking to Sprite, I said, "With their main forces on the march, this might be a good time to go down, disrupt the anti-summon spells around Milishion, and hit their library. Want to go steal their shit?"
The spirit lit up with a huge grin. "Yes! If we go soon, I can work out their shield magic for ourselves, then develop a counter. By the time they get to us, they won't have that advantage anymore!"
"Mm~," Ariel purred, pressing herself into my side. "I knew there was a reason I married you."
Roxy took the other side and sent me a lusty look. "Let's go home."
Well, how can I argue with that?