Spellheart 10: Chapter 27 (Patreon)

“So, do you think you can get them?” I asked the Fairy of the Immortal Glade. Her feet kicked back and forth as she gazed at the images I was showing her in the locket.

After a long moment, she nodded. “Yep. But it’ll cost you.”

I straightened. Here was where she named her price. She really had me over a barrel right now. Taking away Louis and Ethan’s special items was the best way to turn the odds in my favor. My only other option was to wait until all my matriarchs had reached the Demigod realm and defeat Louis and Ethan’s forces with overwhelming power. But that would take both time and lives.

In short, our chance for a swift and good ending to this conflict lay entirely in this little fairy’s hands. She could demand anything she wanted from us, and I’ve had little choice but to pay her price.

“I want...” she began, and I tensed, face wincing at what would no doubt be an exorbitant price. “...ten!”

“Ten?” I shrank back, bracing myself for the worst. Then thousand years of servitude? Ten nuclear missiles? My firstborn ten children?

“Ten cookies!” the fairy declared, hands on her hips.

“Wait, that’s all?” I froze in surprise.

“Ten really big, really tasty cookies!” the fairy insisted.

“Bigger than the ones I gave you before?”

“And tastier!”

Slowly, I nodded. I had to school my expression to avoid looking too relieved, though inside, I was ready to throw a banquet in this little fairy’s honor.

“Little lady, you’ve got yourself a deal.” I held out my hand. The fairy grabbed three of my fingers, which were all she could wrap her fingers around, and gave me a firm shake. “I’ll get you your reward on my name as Patriarch of the Hearthwood Clan.”

“Deal accepted, Pastry man of the Hearthwood Clan,” the fairy replied.

“You know, when I pulled you out of that jar, I introduced myself but didn’t get your name. It feels odd to keep thinking of you by your title.”

“I’m a fairy,” the fairy of the Immortal Glade replied. “But sometimes my name is...” she paused, meeting my gaze. I leaned closer. “Sometimes, my name is... Bob!”

“What? That can’t be right...” I frowned.

The fairy, whose name definitely wasn’t Bob, left in the blink of an eye, leaving behind only the sound of bells and windchimes in her wake. I glanced at my hand. A mark appeared where she’d shaken my fingers. There was tiny, neat handwriting in elvish.

The note said, ‘It’s not actually Bob.’

I shook my head. The Fairy of the Immortal Glade seemed as scatterbrained as her lesser kin at first glance, but I got the impression that she knew a little more than she let on. Did she intentionally act dumb to make people underestimate her? But if that was the case, the Satyr King never would have captured her. Maybe she was smart, but just a bit too crazy for it to do her any good?

Whatever the deal with her was, I rallied the forces of the Hearthwood to bake pastries and cookies that smelled increasingly delectable. I wasn’t sure what kind of price the Fairy of the Immortal Glade would charge for Ethan and Louis’ other items, but it was better to be prepared.

***

I returned to the walls to check out what was happening there. As soon as I got to the top, I shook my head.

Our previous fight had turned the beautiful forest view surrounding the city into a real dump.

All that surrounded us now were the burned-out husks of broken trees. Even now, the fires were still raging, and the air was full of so much smoke I wouldn’t have been able to see my hand in front of my face if not for the city’s shield.

The Cult and their forces had to be completely reliant on magical senses. And even if they could see, they were probably pretty miserable sitting in the middle of a muddy wasteland. The beautiful grassy medow outside the walls had been completely destroyed in the earlier fighting. Thankfully, everyone in the Hearthwood was nice and comfortable.

It wasn’t just the smoke from burning trees making the air unbreathable. Sulphur filled the air just as much. Dean, in particular, had been lashing out wildly with powerful attacks that shattered the ground. If not for Mac stabilizing things, we would have had even more trouble, but as it was, some chasms were deep enough to draw out molten magma from deep beneath the planet’s crust.

In short, even with my earth cultivation, it would take weeks to clean this place up. Probably months, depending on how far the damage extended.

The Teleportation Array still had a constant stream of people arriving from Deania and our vassal nations, so I suspected that the Hearthwood wasn’t the only place affected. Unleashing planet-destroying forces on the world had consequences, and we were seeing the most obvious of them.

The Cult of the Unblinking Eye would pay for this...

Shortly after having the thought, a frustrated scream echoed through the air. Had another priceless treasure of the Cult of the Unblinking Eye unexpectedly gone missing? I could only hope.

It wasn’t long before I got the opportunity to find out for myself. The Fairy, whose name definitely wasn’t Bob, came zipping around the corner and fluttered to a stop before me.

“Got it!” she declared.

“Well done!” I congratulated her. After a swift exchange of cookies for an artifact of immense magical power, I pocketed my new toy and sent her off on another mission. The Fairy of the Immortal Glade vanished and reappeared moments later, which made me suspect she’d grabbed both items in one trip and had saved the second set for another set of cookies.

I didn’t voice my suspicions though and happily handed over her reward. She munched the cookies down in the blink of an eye and soon started jumping from place to place even faster than she’d been moving before. Her sudden bursts of teleportation took her into the air a few times before she landed in one of the upper branches of the nearby tree and swiftly went to sleep while rubbing a slightly distended belly.

She seemed happy and healthy, which was good. The last thing I wanted was for her to get sick from all the sugar. If she lost her fondness for sweets and started asking for actual payment, keeping her happy would get much more complicated.

When she was gone, I pulled the device I’d gotten out of my pocket. It was a bulky-looking old pocket watch. The original humans really were fond of timekeeping devices that weren’t really timekeeping devices.

I flipped the lid open to reveal a small touchscreen display. A digital pocket watch, how silly. I read the text on the screen.

Remaining Redos: 7

Time until next charge: 14.5 years.

Redos? What could that mean?

The item was very peculiar, and unlike the locket, no matter how I looked this one over, I couldn’t quite figure out what it was supposed to be for. This item felt a bit more powerful than the locket. Perhaps it was on the same level as the crown Queen Lyanva had taken from the Sunspire King. Or the new QCA that I’d integrated with The Wanderer.

There was only one way I was going to figure out what this thing did, and that was by using it. I started pushing buttons until the number of Redos went down by one.

Nothing happened.

I shrugged, then tucked the device into my pocket. I could always figure it out later.

While she was sleeping off her latest rewards, I rejoined Comela with the lesser fairies. By now, there were few wisps worth stealing around the Hearthwood, so it was time to set the rest of the fairies on a new task. These fairies were damn hard to catch, so anything they could gather outside the walls would be a boon to us. What else did I need?

We already had samples of all the valuable plants and monsters in the Hearthwood. That was a good thing, too, since most of it had already been rendered sterile by all the smoke and magma of our last fight. More people? Most of our vassals had made it here through the Teleportation Array.

“What is it, Father?” Comela waited patiently while I toyed with the digital pocket watch. “I don’t want--“

As Comela spoke, I sensed something falling from overhead. If it had traveled faster, my senses would have caught it earlier, but this was slow enough that my instincts hadn’t identified it as dangerous.

And it really wasn’t dangerous, but my daughter had her mother’s lovely golden hair, and I would have hated to see it messed up for even a moment. I stepped forward and leaned over her. A sticky cold pile of bird poop fell directly on the top of my head.

“Father!” Comela held a hand over her mouth. “How dare that insolent bird poop on the Patriarch of the Hearthwood Clan! I’ll have someone shoot it down immediately!”

I waved her off. “It’s only a little bird poop. You know, some cultures consider that lucky. Anyway, about the fairies...”

I cut myself off as something about the world changed. It was so fast and so subtle it could hardly have been said to have happened at all. And yet happen it did. I looked around to find myself alone. Comela was walking toward me, but she wouldn’t arrive to where she was standing for another few seconds yet.

“What is it, Father?” Comela asked, voice exactly the same this time as it had been before. “I don’t want--“

A clump of mud shot out of the ground at Comela’s feet, directly upward and spreading outward. The glob of bird poop that would have struck my daughter instead was intercepted and bound up in the mud.

“Impressive reflexes, father,” Comela said. Meanwhile, I examined the digital pocket watch.

No, upon further inspection, it was more like a stopwatch. Only this one worked in reverse. That’s what the time indicator was about. It inverted time for the user, and from the looks of it, I had six shots left.

I would have loved the chance to experiment with something like this, but at the current time, the combat applications were more important. No wonder Louis had done so well against an overwhelming force of Demigods if he had an item like this at his disposal.

How many charges had he blown through to make it through our last fight? At least a few, no doubt. Tricking my allies into fighting illusions couldn’t have been easy with their centuries of battle experience.

But all that was moot now. The item was in my hands, and it, like the others, would soon work for me.

“Father?” Comela asked, sensing me lost in thought. I tucked the magic stopwatch away for when I had a proper plan for it and addressed what I’d wanted to speak to Comela about.

“I think it’s past time we set up another Sacred Grove,” I said to Comela. “Talk a few of the fairies into helping you get started. Use one of the spatially compressed bunkers Dean made.”

“Me?” Comela asked with surprise.

“Yes, you. I’m not sure a Sacred Grove’s power will cross over from compressed space to real space, but as long as you’re inside it, you’ll have an ace up your sleeve. And if it works for you, maybe we can duplicate the feat for a few of your siblings.”

“Why not make one for you?” Comela asked.

“I’ve been down that route before, and while I will do so again, a Demigod Sacred Grove requires a lot of resources, though. Another source of Wizard-level power won’t do anything for me, but it would do a lot for you. As I understand it, that’s how the elves of the Elven Star Dominion used Sacred Groves. They were training aids to help keep young, promising descendants alive.”

“Understood, Father. I will try to recruit some fairies!” Comela smiled. She’d always been the most ambitious of my children when it came to cultivation.

After speaking with Comela, I did the usual rounds. I checked out the repairs and renovations to the defenses, the new prisons, and their ability to extract zeal crystals from our prisoners, making sure we had a steady supply of clean water and food, managing waste, and all the thousand other problems that crept on when managing a city.

I was quite thankful I had Mac and the Hydroponic Farm. The former was keeping the city tectonically stable and had built underground leech pits to process the city’s waste. The latter was feeding everyone using nutrients harvested from those same waste systems.

The volcanic activity had broken my dam, so all the water drained out. Somebody clever had cast a spell to keep the turbines spinning by hand. That seemed a bit backward to me. If we were going to do that, we might as well cast a spell to generate electricity on whatever it was the things were powering. I’d have to suggest it to Argona. It looked like the power cables mainly were headed toward her lab.

I opened the door to find a nuclear weapon disassembled into its component pieces on the table. This was our latest design, fully self-propelled and even capable of some target-seeking capabilities. It relied more on Argona’s knowledge of golems than my knowledge of circuitry, but there were a few tricks I now knew how to pull, thanks to technology that would make these things harder to fool or knock out using a spell.

I helped her make a few minor improvements, but the project worked well overall. My help wasn’t even really needed since Argona had already hired three hundred assistants.

“How many of these missiles can we field?” I asked Argona.

“More than a thousand!” Argona said proudly. “And some of them are super-sized, too!”

A thousand! I felt beads of sweat on my forehead. That was enough to kick up the kind of dust that would blot out the sun and send a world spiraling into an ice age...

“You seem troubled, Dad?” Argona saw the tense look on my face.

I shook my head to clear it. We were in the middle of a war for survival. I wasn’t about to demilitarize in the middle of something like this. After all, detonating a few nuclear weapons had proven very effective in the past. I was certain the Cult of the Unblinking Eye had a trick or two. This was one of mine.

“Argona, I want you to double production. I’ll give you whatever resources you need. If need be, I want to field enough weapons to flatten the Cult of the Unblinking Eye’s entire territory.”

“Okay.” Argona shrugged. She had no further reaction. I supposed that was to be expected, though. At heart, she was born on this world, not on Earth. To her, nuclear weapons were just one more unique discipline of study. She returned to work, and I left her to it.

A question remained on my mind even after I left, though. How far would I go to save what I’d built here? To protect my family, vassals, and everything we cared about?

The answer was obvious when I thought about it. I was willing to go all the way.

There was only one question. Could Louis say the same?