War: Part 1

I had come up with a thousand scenarios by the time I got back to the Keep. None of them prepared me for what I saw. Lethe was still naked, but now she was…bulbous. That wasn't right. I'd only been gone a few days. She looked ready to give birth already. She was glaring at me as soon as she recognized me coming in. "You left me to wake alone, bastard. Don't think my ridiculous pregnancy gives you a freebee."

"Far from it. When did this happen?" I would have noticed her bloating up while we were fucking. So it had happened after she fell asleep. She wasn't swelling when I left, though…so just when she woke up? Which would make the time even less of a factor. "When did you send Vyktor after me?" he would have told me if she was pregnant.

"When I woke up. Today." I couldn't form a full thought. What was going on? "I wasn't pregnant then, of course. I've been bloating by the second. Fucking world." I was suddenly very glad I'd chosen to teleport back to the keep instead of leaping. Even that passage of time would have been a vast difference. Who knew what could have happened in that time? "Fucker!" she screamed and something wet skidded across the bed's almost-liquid form. Followed seconds later by a twin. She wasn't bloated anymore. She wasn't tired, or even slightly fatigued either.

Lethe slid to her feet, armor appearing with a snap. Her form blurred as she rushed to shove a blade through my chest. I grunted, but my hp remained over eighty percent. So she wasn't as mad as she wanted me to believe. She pulled out, and the venom started. If my eyes could water, they would have. I gasped, barely keeping it short of a scream. Maybe she was as mad as she looked. That venom was a lot more painful than normal. "We need to act fast. We're not sure how the kids in this world work. Maybe we can teach them classes until they're adults. Given the speed of their pregnancy," I bit down on my words as the poison shifted from a burn to slashing tears through my flesh. "we could be looking at a growth period of a week." A week was most likely, if I guessed right and the whole pregnancy had taken nine hours. That meant a month was an hour. Given a thirteen month system, that meant we had two hundred and four hours until they hit adulthood. Eight and a half days. Great. It also meant that the npcs could reproduce at an astronomic rate. I shoved that thought out of my mind as I linked with the two babies that were visibly growing. The cost of using spells and abilities while in pain was amplified, for some reason, so I drained all of my mp and stamina teaching every class to both kids in a second.

I was expecting screaming, as usually happened when I taught skills. They were different, though. Both of them stopped crying, flipped to their pudgy little feet and started looking around. Good. They were fully cognizant. Maybe they could acquire skills at the same rate! That would be an amazing level of skill growth. I summoned one of my skeletons that roamed the Keep idly. It was always a good idea to have my pets in the building, searching for stealthed assassins that would be useless against me in this place, but it did make my life easier to have them killed before they got to me. I handed the kids to it, told it to teach them to craft weapons until they'd reached adulthood, when they'd be brought back to me.

Lethe was still glaring at me. "How are you not screaming, damn it! I worked on that poison forever!" good to know. At least I was worth the effort of a quality poison. The only reason I wasn't screaming was because I was in the Keep. All of my stats were a thousand times as potent, which meant I was a thousand times more resistant to pain. Which brought the fact that she'd reduced my hp as far as she had with her first strike meant she was even more pissed than I'd anticipated…unless the Keep's effect worked on her too. Did anyone wearing a set of crown gear get the same bonus from being in a keep they owned, or their guild owned? Not something I was ready to test at the moment. I needed to figure out the limits of this new world.

"We can have six kids, between the two of us. It seems that fertility doesn't cycle, as far as I know. Does it?" she shook her head, her anger blazing so hot her mask had burning orbs of hellfire for eyes. I needed something action-oriented to knock her anger off its feet. Maybe if she had all six of them in a two day time frame, she'd get over the anger. "Want to knock those out now, or wait until I have a conference of sovereigns again?" I'd meant it as a joke to buy some time to think of a real idea, but Lethe's armor vanished and I was tackled back into the bed. Had it worked? She didn't…look angry. I stopped asking questions and tried my best to make sure her anger didn't come back.

"Sorry to bug you, Master, but we've got a problem that requires your immediate attention." Lethe glowered up at me, daring me to leave again. I decided to get more information before I left my empire to fend for itself. Vyktor seemed to understand. His shadow started elaborating. "You ordered me to expand my network, so I got some spies into Heaven. They've reported an army of two hundred million marshaled directly above Zezhria. It seems like they're planning on boring straight through to you. I must say your ability to make enemies is impressive." Lethe was still glaring, hard, but she sat back on her heels.

This might work to my favor. I had a few thousand pets in Zezhria, as well as a couple hundred thousand in the surrounding plains. If I used all the ones grouped together and at a high enough level to be effective in this battle…I had somewhere around forty million, not including my uber-monsters. I wasn't ready to sacrifice any of them for the cause of war. I still wasn't sure if they were resurrected when they died like everything else I owned. It was far too expensive of a test to run. There was reason to believe that they would and they wouldn't. "Any uber-monsters in the mix?" that would throw a massive snag in my plan. It might even mean my death.

"None. Though, none of the foes above us are under level one hundred eighty five. It will take them a few weeks to dig deep enough to fall through, but when they do…Zezhria isn't built for this large of an attack. Especially from above. A ground-based assault wouldn't make it through the Darkwood, but they'll circumvent that defense entirely." Painfully obvious, at this point. The ground was protected by the deed of the city, prohibiting all tunneling within the area of the city, which included the pasture as well, but Heaven followed a different set of rules. I could probably bore straight to the tip of Heaven to battle God directly, if he was one of the uber-monsters or npcs that lived in the Tower of Justice.

I connected with my living dragons and told them to go into the surrounding pasture and start making undead boars as fast as possible. I had been trying to get more living pets that could use mana to the same level, but it was a slow process. Undead started powerful. That would have to work for my defense. 

Now the problem was getting the boars to the bore directly above Zezhria. Vyktor's spies were neutral, so I didn't have access to their vision. I couldn't teleport somewhere I hadn't been and I couldn't leap through existential layers. "Get the governor to extend the borders of Zezhria upward into Heaven. Make the ground the army is camped on belong to me." That should stop the bore, or at least slow it down, as well as giving me a look into their army. I could see everything that I owned, so I'd be able to teleport my pet army upstairs, where every fallen enemy would become one of my new pets. They would probably bore around the city, betting on the ubers in the Darkwood ignoring an aerial army. I didn't need my map to find a doorway nobody was likely to stumble through. I built a spell around it, but held it at the cusp of activation. "Don't come back when that's done. Once the army is marshaled, then you can come report at that point."

"Does that mean you're done being an emperor, for a minute?" Lethe demanded. Her gaze was heated and she wasn't on her heels anymore. "My title isn't the only one with specific duties, you know."

"If you don't mind me being a bit distracted, yeah. I've been planning for this for a long time, so the execution won't take a lot of brain power." From her immediate response, me being distracted didn't matter to her all that much. I wasn't sure if that was something to be excited about or not. With my intelligence stat being so high it was almost effortless to execute the plan, but I'd said I would be distracted. Didn't that mean she was doing it more for her benefit than as a mutual exchange? Well, I wasn't actually that distracted so it wasn't really an issue.

Finally, a chance to use one of the defensive arrays I'd been dreaming about for months. I started building gateways throughout the keep as I connected the teleport gates with other gates in my empire, and started calling pets back through them. Heaven wanted a war, I'd give it a fucking war. All I could hope was that Camelot wouldn't hear of this and activate their hidden army that I hadn't found on the islands surrounding my continent. I wasn't sure if I could fight both at once.

Then I felt Lethe tense under me. That was odd. I hadn't changed my pace, or anything. She'd been happily writhing a second ago. "Father." The voice belonged to a male I didn't recognize. Though, to be fair, I shouldn't recognize any voice that called me father. "We've finished the task you gave us. Is there anything else?"

I turned to see a fully grown Dark Elf standing in the doorway. He looked like a male version of Lethe. Blacked out with long hair and blazing red eyes. Beside him stood a female with my coloring and Mohawk, though hers was longer and sharper. Both had a red scar across one eye, though it was a single wound in both cases. Neither had a name. Fuck, I knew I'd forgotten something. Oh well. They could be identified as the only beings in the world without names. At the moment. I didn't doubt that there would be more nameless babies as time passed. "Which task was that?" I'd remember better if I wasn't trying to do three things simultaneously.

"Becoming the best crafters in the world. We have maxed out the craft weapons, craft armor, god-craft weapons, and god-craft armor skills." Holy fuck! That went far beyond anything I'd expected. Their skill learning ability was ridiculous! "The passives are just the ability to make higher-quality gear. We can craft anything we want in mythic quality, if you wish." He didn't sound…like a person. Mostly the tone. Their tone was like they were basic npcs from a game a thousand years ago. All of the npcs were better. Were player offspring broken? Nobody would sound like that…unless they were really uncomfortable. People sounded like robots when they got uncomfortable. Then I thought about it. I had two children, both of which were looking at their nude parents that had been boning until they walked in. As I realized that, I stopped thrusting. Whoops. That would make anyone uncomfortable. "What is our next task?"

"Learn necromancy and stealth. As well as combat in general. You're too weak for this war, but I want you to be powerful for the next one." Lethe was still really stiff. She'd loosened slightly since I stopped moving, but she was still absolutely frozen. Apparently, she didn't like being seen by her kids. She loosened up as soon as they closed the door behind them. "That was…awkward."

"You think?" she giggled at me, unexpected to say the least. From her freezing act, I thought she'd have a more extreme reaction afterwards. Maybe she thought if she pretended nothing really happened it would be so. If it was an act, she was doing a good job. Her eyes blazed when she looked at me, but the anger was gone. It was a warm blaze, now. "Sorry about poisoning you. I overreacted."

"No worries. It was a dick move." I kissed her lightly, letting her pull me into a deeper one. I made sure to pay more attention to my plan, though, so it didn't take half a day to cast a single portal spell. Maybe not that bad, but my spellcasting had been abysmal.

Apparently all she wanted was a deep kiss, though. She pulled back and contented herself with cuddling. "What are you doing?" still no anger. A good sign. She was just curious. Then another feeling started to register. Her stomach was growing. Stretching to fill the gap between us. Quickly. I wrenched back to look at her. So she didn't need to sleep first. "Yup. Pregnant again. Super annoying."

"Gathering my forces. Mostly just ordering pets to teleport here, with some help for those that are in remote locations. Doesn't matter if we can access the enemy if our army is all over the continent." Hate especially had been almost entirely drained, and they didn't have a port pad. The closest one was a full week if they were marching.

The next guest knocked on the door. Vyktor poked his head into the room tentatively. Seeing us separated and Lethe indisposed, he decided he was safe to continue. "Your borders extend into Heaven, Master, and your forces are gathered." I had some hardcore magic to do before I could think of Lethe and her second set of kids.

Gates. Hundreds of them. I opened all of them at the same time and gave my pets orders to rush through. I already had an army assembled from the gates I'd opened over the last eight days filling the lower levels of the Keep, so they provided the first wave. My gate opened directly above the army aligned against me. Undead rained on them like a hurricane of death as the army of pets rushed through my gates to establish the beachhead of my heavenly conquest. An entirely disposable army was a commodity I still hadn't figured out just how powerful it could become. Undead were intrinsically weaker than the living creature it had come from, especially in relation to the increased stats they could get by eating, but the differences were insignificant when you realized just how many undead you could make when every corpse your army made became a new soldier and every single one that fell was instantly resurrected in the keep. When I got living pets to level two hundred they'd be able to massacre my undead, but it was still a long time until that day came.

As an afterthought, I added an order for all of my max-level pets to keep a standing army of undead pasture creatures equal to the population of the city. I was amazed that I'd never thought of each city as a war zone before. I'd always thought that when war came it would be armies clashing, not a wave of small forces, but I couldn't assume anything. Players knew of guerilla warfare, and npcs were also smart. Npcs doing it first was a bit of a surprise, though.

Lethe's shriek knocked me out of my thoughts as a slimy baby slid into my leg. I gave it to the skeleton standing by for this exact reason. "Teach him to make statues. After he's maxed that out, learn enchanting and necromancy. Let…" what to name him? He had my coloration, so…what? "Oblivion choose what he wants to learn after that. Make sure the learning time is maximized, though. Skills are what he needs." I taught him all of the classes before I needed to catch the next skidding kid. Lethe's miniature. I handed her to the next skeleton and glanced at Lethe. What did she want to name her daughter? "Rogue or mage?"

"You, take Edge to learn all of the skills associated with being a rogue." I confirmed the order in the skeleton's mind before sending it on its way. Edge and Oblivion. Two nameless others. What would the other two be named? Apparently Lethe had the same thought. "We need to think of a name for the last two. And what's so special about statue-making that would make you want to have that as an urgent skill?"

"If he can make a statue of something he's never seen or heard of, I can make it into a species of npc. I want an aquatic npc species so I don't need an indestructible navy so damn bad, but nobody I know has the skill to make a statue of an imaginary species. Now, he will. I could make species at will. And with the first two being able to make mythic gear…we'll be unstoppable. They'll teach my pets, which will teach me, and then we'll have an uncountable number of mythic smiths. Every pet wearing mythic gear…can you imagine?" having someone train you doubled the rate at which you could learn a skill. With those two teaching hundreds of my pets how to forge mythic gear at once, I'd gain it almost as fast as they had. Once I was over the threat of millions of enemies hanging over me. "I suck at names. What're your ideas?"

"Since we've got two left…we need two girl names and two boy names. Just in case." We'd gotten one and one for the first two, I'd be willing to bet the third came out the same, but I didn't want to say anything. "I was thinking Phyx and Steel for boys and Nissassa and Htaed for girls." Not only did most of them not make sense, but she'd come up with them in less time than it took to say them. Damn. She must have thought this through. "Htaed might be better for a boy, though. Sounds kind of masculine, don't you think?" something in my expression must have been very negative because she suddenly decided to explain each of them. "Phyx, like asphyxiation except short. Nissassa is assassin backwards. Htaed is death backwards. Sounds awesome, right!"

"Phyx and Steel, I like. The others, though…not so much. Maybe Htaed." How had she come up with something as normal as Lethe? Or…maybe it was something other than a variation on lethal. I wracked my brain, but I couldn't think of something that had Lethe in it. Or spelled backwards. "How'd you come up with Lethe?"

"My name in the old world was Ehtel. Ehtel Barkovsky. Disgusting name. I like Lethe better. What was your name?" that drew me up short. I couldn't remember it. I shrugged. Why would I waste valuable mental space to remember the name of a pathetic loser? "Come on! I told you my embarrassing name. Tell me yours!"

"I can't remember. Honest. The only times I heard my name were when some teacher was calling for me, or a bully, so I took it as a reflex. Now that reflex is gone, so I don't remember the name that came with it. I'm more Void than I ever was…whatever it was." Barkovsky, huh? I'd known a girl with a strange name, like that, before. I knew it started with a B and sounded Russian…or Hebrew? Which was Barkovsky? It didn't matter. I couldn't remember the name. As I thought about it…I couldn't remember any names from my old life. Not mine. Not the few friends I'd had. I didn't even remember Hell's old name. Oh well. It was the old world. I wasn't going back and that was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

I pulled out my map to see how the battle against the heavenly army was going. My undead were getting slaughtered. Even raising the fallen wasn't enough to survive against Heaven. Unfortunately, heavenly monsters had a large number of anti-undead spells up their sleeves. My army had gained a small foothold by killing the pasture creatures that spawned because of the influence of Zezhria coming from below. They looked like winged worms with beaks. Strange creatures. "If you'll excuse me, Empress, I need to rectify the battle upstairs. It's not looking so good for us up there." I equipped my gear and teleported into the fray.

Angels surrounded me. Everything from simple winged npcs to living suits of armor with glowing light coming from the cracks. I started laying about me with the heavy sword and staff. One suit of armor that didn't glow charged for me. I knocked the falling blade aside with a casual flick of my massive blade and snapped the base of my staff to his helmet. The explosion that resulted destroyed the helm completely, tearing metal into twisted shards and throwing it everywhere. The armor exploded, as living armor did when it died. The shrapnel ripped two nearby angels into fleshy ruins. I grinned as I activated an ambient fire spell, and fireballs started raining from the sky. The real reason my undead had been falling so fast was because I didn't have any mages among them. The enemy was balanced, and they also had a lot of spells that allowed them to work together well. My spell started to tip the balance back toward myself. I had so much power stored in my staff that I might as well be a whole contingent of mages by myself.

Then I noticed a necromantic cloud forming. Lethe had followed me. Trails of vitality started to fill the air as she sapped the power from the surrounding foes. She didn't use the blasts of fire and lightning that she could, but she was just as devastating with the Necromancer as she would have been with the other mage types. They were a versatile class of mage. I'd enjoyed my time as a Necromancer.

Magic started filling the air then. The angels realized they were losing and started resorting to greater works of magic. Clouds of healing magic appeared, conveniently having the holy effect of damaging undead at the same time. The problem was that as powerful as me and Lethe were, there were only two of us. And our power wasn't all that impressive. The monsters around us were stronger than we were. The only reason we were winning at all was because of how powerful our armor was. My army needed a push.

I activated an atmospheric pressure spell and widened the area as wide as it would go. Hopefully, I'd kill all of the pasture creatures as they spawned. The effect wasn't something I'd expected. The flying serpents exploded into massive snakes that ripped through the surrounding hosts of Heaven. They were immune to the holy effect of anti-undead damage, so their attacks were more effective than ever. I knew there was a huge difference between my modified necromantic aura and the basic one, but damn.

Burning light blinded me for a second. I stumbled back to see a being of armor coalescing from the blinding flash. It was a mixture of armor, mist, and light. It didn't have wings, armored or otherwise. It drew a shining sword from the air and pointed it at me. "Thou hast defiled this pure world with the breath of Hell, monster!" it rushed me, a cloak of mist billowing behind it as it moved. I knocked the blade away as I had with the last bit of armor, but he caught the butt of my staff before it made contact with his helmet. "Fall on thy blade, and forgiveness might yet be given." I grinned behind my helmet as I slammed my face into his. The being stumbled back, drawing a second blade from the air. "Thou hast sealed thy fate." I coated my weapons with necromantic power, wary of how closely he was linked to that mist, as I dropped into a ready position. I had to blast a nearby angel to pieces as it tried to take advantage of my averted attention.

Shakespeare dissolved into his mist as he moved faster than I could react, coalescing just as his blade slammed into the crack between my shoulder and chest plates. Unnecessary, given the defensive bubble of the armor was all of the defense and the material itself wasn't important, but it still hurt to have a blade digging through my shoulder into my chest. I wrenched the opposite way his momentum would carry the blade, pulling it from his grasp, as I swung my heavy sword into his gut. It passed through him as he turned his midriff to mist before coalescing again right after my blade passed through. He'd treated it as a normal blade. Fool. Black mist started infecting his pure whiteness as he stumbled backward. 

I stalked forward, knocking a charging angel aside with the explosive surface of my staff. "Can you feel fear, angelic ally?" If he'd had wings, I'd have thought him an angel, but he didn't. I severed the head of another charging angel, shearing through his blade in the process. The black mist of necromantic power emanating from my blades had grown to the point that it was causing the green grass below me to wither and die, revealing cracked and dead earth beneath. Having spells that grew more powerful with each enemy they were used on was one thing that made Necromancers vicious enemies in pitched battles. Not nearly as effective against small forces or the usual packs of enemies, but they seemed made for this sort of warfare. "Will those at the pinnacle of Heaven feel fear when I bring their shining city down around their ears?"

He responded by rushing forward, twin blades both pointed right for my chest. I knocked them aside with the blade of my sword, shearing through the misty things, and spun to bring my staff into direct contact with the center of his back, pumping mp into the staff to amplify the explosive power it held. The explosion ripped angels to pieces that were over a dozen meters away. Shakespeare dropped to his knees, black smoke leaking from the hole I'd just blasted in his torso. The gap didn't fill with smoke and reform.

"If your soul goes up before Ryne claims it, tell the high Angel that I'm coming for him." And I ripped my blade through his neck, watching with satisfaction as the mist dispersed and the armor clattered to the ground. I looked at it for a second, wondering if he'd get back up again. He didn't. The misty body coalesced into an elf, though. That was interesting. The items were all of rare quality, showing that their previous owner was no longer among the living. Maybe that was another reason why Heaven was a hard place for Death to conquer; none of the stronger angels left corpses to reanimate. This would have been a much more difficult battle if the pasture wasn't there.