World Tree War (1)
About two weeks had passed since the gate appeared.
Lahan and the Flame Emperor spent their days outside gathering magic stones, while Ttacttac-i and Mari threw themselves into training. Ordinary days, for once.
"I'm glad Mari seems to have found her own path."
I'd peeked in on her practice and watched her gather something like curses into a mass before firing it off. Looks like Mari was figuring out her role in her own way.
"Maybe I should take a look at Uijeongbu."
Things with the elves had already gone sour. That only meant I couldn't afford to get lazy about keeping an eye on them.
I used Spirit Possession on one of the Bone Birds and decided to pilot it myself.
At first I crashed a few times, flailing through the air without any real control, but after about ten minutes of practice I could fly well enough. I headed straight for Uijeongbu's red tower.
There's something eerie about them if you try to think of them as the elves everyone knows.
Remembering that golem from before, they were nature-attuned, sure—but there was something off about them too. Enslaving the dwarves was part of it. That leaning red tower didn't exactly scream "one with nature" either.
Uijeongbu is a black box. No intel at all.
Even the Flame Emperor didn't know much about the place. The Special Affairs Bureau had no interest in poking at a district occupied by another race, so they'd stuck to occasional scouting and never set foot in deep. Word was that not a single person who'd originally lived in Uijeongbu and escaped had ever come forward with information either.
Which meant I had to find out myself.
Should I try going inside the tower?
I'd observed the perimeter plenty of times and never gotten anything useful. I had time to spare—might as well give it a shot.
I flew up to the upper floors of the red tower and poked my head in through a window.
Huh. It's cleaner inside than I expected.
Despite the tower's slight lean from the outside, the interior was perfectly level. So they'd built a leaning tower on purpose from the start? What a bizarre sense of architecture.
The inside had been carefully decorated, and then—
"Your Eminence, the place where the gate opened this time is said to be the land of the King of the Underworld."
"We cannot control the actions of the False Heaven. It cannot be helped."
Oh—someone was talking inside.
Cardinal? That was a high rank, wasn't it?
"Furthermore, we have determined that they are using the dwarves for everything from beautifying the city to manufacturing weapons."
"I see. With a stable supply of magic stones secured, investing freely would have been easy."
What? They hadn't put up any drones, but they already knew everything about our situation? Looks like they'd found another way to dig.
"Should we not subjugate them at once? Before those filthy things expand their power any further—"
"You overstep, Bishop Aliac."
The reporting bishop had gotten heated, his words speeding up—but the sentence never finished. The one called the Cardinal had risen and cut him off.
Footsteps. The Cardinal walked slowly toward the bishop, whose face had gone rigid. Then he took the man's hand.
"In the name of God, I pass judgment. Bishop Aliac is hereby punished. The sentence is Stage One Plantification."
"A-anything but that!"
"It is already too late."
The bishop apologized in a rush, but the hand seized in the Cardinal's grip was already changing. It greened over like a plant; leaves sprouted a moment later, and before long his entire arm had transformed into a single wooden trunk.
"A punishment this severe is—"
"Ah, it is not simply because of your insolent words."
The bishop sank to the floor, unable to endure the pain, groaning. The Cardinal answered with a completely untroubled expression.
It wasn't much of an explanation—but he turned his head and jerked his chin as if the answer lay at the end of his gaze.
"It is because the necromancer you spoke of is right over there."
…Me?
"I offer my apologies for our bishop's improper speech. It was particularly rude to be heard by the Apostle of the Tenth God."
The Cardinal had noticed me. And he was certain of my identity.
I drew up the power of my soul and asked,
"How did you know?"
"When you ask that while bearing a soul of such overwhelming strength, even I am put in a difficult position."
Damn. Being too strong was the problem.
This man could see souls. From where I stood, the Cardinal's own soul was considerable—but stuffing a Mythic-rank class soul into the body of a tiny bird would obviously stand out.
"Losing twelve dwarves stings, but I will not press the matter further. It was our side's mistake as well. I have yet to decipher the meaning of the letter you sent, but you seem to have no intention of taking it back."
Then he flicked his hand. The gesture was light—but the force behind it was anything but.
"I have no desire to fight. I would prefer to live as peaceably as possible. As neighbors, you understand."
The moment those words ended, my vision went black. A faint green light flickered—and the Bone Bird was smashed to pieces.
And that wasn't all.
"…I can't reconnect."
My undead don't die in the physical sense. Even if a shock severs the Spirit Possession, I can always re-link to a broken body if I try. But the Bone Bird that had just been destroyed was impossible. No matter how hard I focused, I couldn't feel it.
"Is this guy insane?"
The Bone Bird was dead—literally dead. He must have some kind of attack that strikes at the soul.
If I found the corpse and used Death Conductor again, it would probably come back, but…
"This is a problem."
The Cardinal was strong. Strong enough that I hadn't even registered the attack. Which also meant that in a real fight, I'd have to keep resurrecting fallen undead mid-battle while sparring with him.
Just as he had seen me, I had seen the Cardinal's soul.
A vast, towering soul. The bishop before him was nothing special, but the Cardinal was different. In sheer size, he was on par with the Flame Emperor after becoming a Death Knight—or greater.
And the life-force packed inside it. The complete opposite of the death energy that filled my soul and those of my undead. A soul saturated with the power of life.
He'd probably used that soul-force to sever the connection to my undead.
"What about the other watchers… have they already been hit?"
I hurriedly switched my vision to the other bird undead monitoring Uijeongbu—but the connections began snapping one after another. I barely managed to order the birds near the entrance of Uijeongbu to retreat, and only scraped three or four of them back to safety.
"So you already knew we were watching."
Losing the birds didn't particularly sting. I could remake them whenever I wanted. But now that I knew he had a power like that, charging in head-on had become a lot more uncomfortable. Losing my officer undead would be too heavy a cost. I didn't want to lose them either.
"Let's call it a day."
I'd have to try watching Uijeongbu some other way.
I first relayed everything that had happened to my officers through remote communication, then flopped onto my bed at home and rolled around.
The Flame Emperor had already declared that the Special Affairs Bureau wouldn't touch me out of fear, and there was nobody to the left or right of us. If I could just get rid of the elves to the east, I'd have nothing to worry about at all…
"Ugh! Ttacttac-i can handle it!"
I was just going to dump everything on Ttacttac-i. I'd make the final calls, sure—but I wanted to live doing only the things I felt like doing.
"The city development plan is going smoothly."
That was thanks to Lahan and the Flame Emperor continuously bringing in resources from outside, and Ttacttac-i stuffing soldiers into the gate to farm it endlessly.
The magic stones were put to use in a lot of places. The dwarves crafted the weapons they already knew how to make, and piled up fortifications for defense as well. Self-heating oil. Mechanisms that dumped sand down from the walls. Ballistae, cannons, and more. Of course those things ate through magic stones and labor, so they were only installed at key points.
"More important than any of that is this."
I took what a skeleton carefully handed over and examined it closely. It looked similar to an ordinary magic stone, but the color was a little murkier.
A magic stone bomb.
The method of use was simple. Just apply impact to a magic stone the dwarves had modified for maximum explosive yield. Of course, each one cost a dwarf ten magic stones to produce, so they weren't something I could throw around freely.
I was in the middle of that simple inventory check when Lahan showed up.
"Master. The wolf unit is more or less ready as well."
He called it a wolf unit, but it wasn't anything grand. Just the wolf undead—whose numbers had exploded through the gate—strapped in iron plating and sent charging in. Still a step up from the ragtag undead monsters. They had standardized equipment and a clear purpose.
Lahan wasn't forging the plates one by one, either. The dwarves had built an all-purpose furnace powered by magic stones and kept the undead running it nonstop. Even the scrap iron that had been lying around the city finally had a use.
"We've also managed to produce a number of tactical vehicles."
"Ohh. Those actually look pretty decent."
With a few skeletons taking over plate production, the dwarves had thrown themselves into building combat vehicles. But once the wolves came along, pure firepower stopped mattering, so the design focused entirely on mobility.
Open on top, with a wide cargo bed like a truck. Built to pack undead in stacked and crammed so a single vehicle could haul a hundred at a time. The postures required would be impossible for living humans, but undead? Whatever worked was fine.
They'd even picked the smarter ones among the promoted skeletons and taught them to drive, so there was truly nothing left to worry about.
"Hmm. Yeah, this is good enough."
Honestly, the vehicles kind of ruined the aesthetic. Everything else was coordinated in bone and dark blue, and then suddenly—cars. If I got the chance later, I planned to replace every last one of those things with something more appropriate.
Maybe Lahan would pick up a useful skill for that?
He's already working so hard, though. I can't really push him.
Lahan, busy raising walls around the entirety of Dobong-gu, barely had time to breathe. Lately he'd put up so many walls that he'd actually unlocked an achievement for it. Watching him celebrate being able to raise them even faster, I couldn't quite bring myself to just congratulate him.
I finished the inspection and was about to head home when a crow flew toward me.
"Caw!"
"Ugh, what now?"
If a crow was coming, something fairly big had gone wrong. Why did problems keep exploding on me?
"A note?"
This time a scrap of paper was tied to the crow's leg. I untied it in a hurry and found a single sentence written on it.
Successfully captured an elf bishop. —Ttacttac-i
"…What the hell is this about now?"