27 Chapter 26.West

Angie barely controlled the western army at all. Instead, she broke down a few roofs to build herself a palanquin she could mount onto an ogre's back. Or rather, she found a couple of people in her army capable of building it for her and made them do it. Once she had her new home built and mounted onto an ogre willing to carry it, she simply sat inside practicing magic. I had shown her my way of building circuits, but she wasn't precise enough to make them correctly. That was a flaw she was dead set on fixing.

Instead of her, the role of organizing the army fell on Euri. She didn't seem to mind it, and her skill as a leader was greater than I thought Angie would be capable of anyway. Many took queues from Angie, though, and built palanquins for ogres to carry. It didn't take many before Euri decided to work them into her marching orders. Due to resistance from the air the shape had to be really sharp to keep it from messing with the ogres' balance, not leaving a lot of room for their human occupants, but they were large enough to have a human sitting between the shoulder blades of an ogre with enough room in front of them to see their circuitry.

Unlike Adrian CMXXVIII, Euri didn't equip her forces with wagons and beasts of burden. Instead they hitched sleds to the hell hounds and palanquins to the ogres and had the soldiers carry miscellaneous supplies. The ogres could carry nearly one tenth of the humans while the hound sleds could carry another four, together half of the humans in her army could be resting at all times. She set it up so the humans would be rushing much faster than was comfortable, but they'd be able to rest on the ogres or hounds.

Random encounters would normally slow down a force, but with my constructs the cleanup would be done in moments. With the average level of power of the army, Euri didn't feel that caution was necessary. Instead she decided to prioritize getting her army as well adjusted to their new power as possible. Her march would end near midday and training would follow. I was already looking forward to how lethal this army would be.

Once the marching started, though, I found the magical experimentation much more interesting. I'd taught all of the humans how to make actual circuits instead of the excessive human ones, and they were proving to be very difficult for the humans and ogres.

The race with the greatest form of success was actually the hounds. They seemed to have an inherent means of understanding circuits based around fire, which allowed them to leap forward in understanding far faster than the humans and ogres that had to manually train themselves in precision. An unfortunate side-effect of their fire-based circuits being so easy, the hounds were even less proficient in all other circuits than anything else. I considered trying to force them to understand everything, but decided against it. Their application was limited, but they were better at the limited application than their counterparts.

Noticing my interest, Euri ordered the entire formation to practice while they ran, exhausting both their bodies and their will-cores at the same time. It didn't take long for a pattern to emerge before me, while running they made almost no progress in precision, but they gained proficiency with the circuit generating process itself making each circuit faster than the one before. While they rested, they learned precision more easily. Not many had noticed, so I informed my forces of this phenomena. Once they started doing it on purpose, the effects became much more pronounced. The announcement also drove Angie out of her palanquin for the first time.

Their attention to their surroundings was abysmal, I had to take care of almost every creature they encountered lest they get torn to shreds without noticing they were under attack, but they could gain battle experience once they knew how to utilize circuits in battle. Training their bodies to fight without using circuits would ingrain bad habits in them. Without an abnormal drive toward excellence, bad habits could be large problems in the future.

By the time they stopped, all of them had managed to utilize circuits to aid their run, whether that be exhaustion removal or speed increases, to such an extent that they no longer required rest. Angie was unique among them as her second will-core allowed her to practice precision while she was practicing speed giving her significantly more benefit than anyone else in the formation. By the time the formation stopped she had perfected her ability to write hundreds of circuits, surpassing her former capabilities by a huge margin, while the civilians averaged around four circuits and the soldiers averaged around ten. The growth may seem small when framed against Angie, but against the other three armies they were exponentially greater. The northern and eastern armies had nobody capable of writing stable circuits by the end of the first day, and this was only the western army's capability at the end of their march.

Instead of the physical training regimen Euri had planned, I interceded to have them familiarize themselves with their body circuits. While it was impressive that they'd learned circuits to allow them to run all day without succumbing to exhaustion, their bodies already had that capability if they'd thought to use it. Even the ogres had many circuits that required active use that they ignored in favor of their passive circuits. They had the mana to keep them on all the time, but that would limit their usage of external circuits. It would be better to merely have them available. Once they knew combat circuits, at least. Better to get in the habit of using active circuits actively in the same way they would be farther down the line.

This was the first lesson that Euri had trouble with. I'd completed her body circuitry with the rest of the template she'd started building, so she had a completely different template than everyone else in the army. Her template was based around stealth and avoiding detection, so she had little defense as the army started learning how to activate their lordly intimidation. Being surrounded by so much pressure, she was having trouble concentrating enough to do anything. I hadn't realized that intimidation also included the effect of interrupting the ability for others to activate circuits. That rune had just become much more valuable.

I still wanted those non-lords to progress, though, so I built each of them their own personal anti-intimidation circuit. I also built one for each lord as their intimidation was working on all the lords that hadn't turned their anti-intimidation(self) circuits from active to passive. One lord couldn't intimidate another of equal stature, but there were many more than one active at once.

As I looked deeper into the structure of the intimidation rune, I found something amazing. Rather than intimidation, it would be more accurate to call it an enemy will hindering rune. More specifically it was a branch of the worship rune built to hinder the effectiveness of others while bolstering your own. The reason it was being used in such a self-destructive way in this army was because they lacked clear understanding of their rank. Had they known that, the rune would have provided benefits instead of demerits as the will hindering was a will aiding when applied to those that saw themselves as your underlings. Once I could figure out how to make my human brood constructs work, I would have to make sure none of them were lords. I already had plenty and it wouldn't be effective to have a lord serving under another, unless they were a special case like Angie who actually was superior and didn't need the benefit of being the underling of a lord.

I immediately started trying to learn composite runes for this one. If I could incorporate it into a new construct and spread the effect over the whole army I wouldn't be as necessary in future invasions. If it was powerful enough, I wouldn't even need to worry about taking out the wizard towers first as the effect would be even more effective on something like a wizard tower than it was on people. Wizard towers were only bound to the will of their user by a tenuous strand of recognition, so causing a small interruption to that connection was far easier than disrupting the will at its source. That small interruption may even be enough for the tower to cease recognition without being claimed again. I wasn't sure if it was because claiming the whole tower would nearly drain a person of their will, and as wizards weren't that much better it would probably drain them too, or if it was based on the fact that if it was completely bound it would be damaged if the owner died without transferring ownership but either way made it much easier for me to keep larger organizations from learning my tactics via wizard towers. I wasn't sure how effective it would be in stopping equivalents to the amulet Adrian CMXXVIII had used to call Celius and Agatha, though. Probably enough to stop them from using it but not enough to sever the connection itself.

I could also incorporate it into my true circuit. Then there would be a tangible benefit to being my worshipper without any active effort on my part. Another definitive plus. I was so glad that the humans had discovered this rune, and their inability or unwillingness to make it a staple human rune. Had they taught it to every civilian or had wizards with this as the core of their will circuit my invasions would be so much harder, if not impossible. I was also glad I hadn't used the will shredding rune I'd used to kill the towers on the lords, as that would have done nothing to the lords except alert them that there was an enemy and how I killed. Had the wizards been warned, they could have looked up defensive measures.

The will shredding rune was in their library, though buried in a remote corner such that the Adrian wizards probably wouldn't have found it, giving them the capability to do permanent damage to me. It seemed like every time I gained something, there was a risk of my destruction hidden behind it that I managed to avoid through sheer luck. No. Not sheer luck, but my paranoia and caution paying off. At least being sufficient, if only by a tiny margin.