The OP Lich is a Returnee, Chapter 21 (Patreon)

Chapter 21 – Commission

Obviously, you couldn’t be involved (even as an observer) in the most high-profile assassination attempt in the last hundred years and not expect some of the craziness to try and follow you home. Of course, it wasn’t the Irish rebels that were her concern. They didn’t have overseas resources, afterall, being too focused on their (far more local) troubles.

The Purifiers, on the other hand, were a menace all across the globe. They had grown out of extremist elements of different Christian faiths, and viewed the advent of magic as a sign that divine intervention was coming, to smite all the nonbelievers, or some such nonsense. Honestly, for Kaori, trying to listen to one of them for more than a couple minutes would have made her brain leak out of her ears from boredom, if she still had flesh.

Fortunately, the King and his guards were impressed with the way things ended, and, while it was necessary for her to leave rather quickly, they would be happy to have her back sometime. More importantly, she heard that the King had mentioned to the Prime Minister that ‘perhaps it would be best to look into training Britain’s mages to foreign standards’. Which was a typically British way of saying that they wanted to try and make some of their home-grown mages be able to act on her level.

Naturally, that wasn’t possible for most people. She’d gotten some heavy boosts from being a Summoned Hero, and transforming into a Lich had allowed me to train further with magic than any mortal mage could have hoped to do, unless they trained for twice as long as she was in the other world, at the least. And there was the fact that the international community still hadn’t quite settled on the proper role of mages in the military, since there were more than a few mages who could be considered walking weapons of mass destruction, even if they weren’t on her level.

Oh, she could easily wipe a small country off the map, if she chose to, especially in this world that didn’t have any mages or powers that were at a level where they could stop her, but that didn’t mean this world’s mages were weak. Actually, with the way they viewed magic scientifically, they had the potential to be even more deadly, if they could figure out the right formulae. Explosions were easy, after all, but if a mage figured out how to do matter to energy conversions? Or even just being able to transmute matter to antimatter? Well, the possibilities were nasty as hell.

This wasn’t an issue in the other world, of course. Not because the power requirements made it impossible, far from it. No, the problem was that to transmute something, you needed an understanding of both what you were going to transmute, and what you planned to transmute it into.

Turning a bar of lead into gold? The more you knew, really knew, about both substances, the easier it was. Wanted to turn a goblin into a rat, so it would stop trying to shank you in the kidney? The more you knew about what you were transmuting, the better.

That was why most transformation spells actually were far more generalized. For instance, take a spell to turn an orc into stone. Now, how specialized you made the spell determined how easy it was to pull off. So, a ‘Flesh to Stone’ spell would be easier to cast than a ‘Orgur Bloodaxe to Layered Marble’ spell, and would be applicable to more than just a specific orc.

The downside of the general spell, of course, was that, because it was more general, the counterspells were easier to come up with. This meant that it was far easier to remove a transmutation spell that targeted a general group, rather than specific individuals. Normally, that wasn’t an option, since most mages didn’t have the time to construct individual spells for their targets, but some elite assassin mages had been known to do that, for their more… particular targets.

So, a personalized spell was harder to pull off, but if it landed, you could get a much greater effect for less effort, and it would be harder to remove the spell. The only real downside to the personalized spell was that it only applied to a single person. In fact, depending on how it was personalized, there were times where a mage could be flummoxed by a spell that didn’t work, because the target had changed enough in the interim to put him out of the dataset.

At any rate, going back to the ‘Flesh to Stone’ spell, the basic version turned the target’s flesh (the skin, muscles, and fat) into whatever the mage thought of when they thought ‘stone’. Typically ended up being gravel, or the like. Now, this most basic spell worked, if your goal was to kill someone in as bloodless a manner as possible. However, that spell wouldn’t transform anything but the flesh, meaning the target’s brain would still be active, for a while. How long depended on whether the caster imagined the heart as one of the muscles, or one of the internal organs. Either way, it was likely to be the longest three minutes of their life, before they finally died.

Fun fact, that spell was literally used as the highest form of punishment amongst the vampire clans in the old world, above even making them sit in the sun. At least, with sunlight, the pain would be over soon. With the imperfect Flesh to Stone spell, however, an immortal creature like the vampire would be locked in eternal stasis, unable to move, or even scream, not even being able to die. All that was left for them was madness.

So, to get a version of the spell that did what most people actually wanted (turning someone into a statue, so that they could potentially be restored later, if needed), you’d need to know enough about general anatomy to include the entire body in the spell, and have an idea of what kind of stone you were turning them into. This would allow you to basically ‘suspend’ someone in a kind of stasis as a statue, where they would be unaware of anything until released. From their point of view, time would have just stopped, and never started again.

It was for this reason that, in the other world, the Mage’s Guild was one of the premiere sources for anatomical knowledge in the world. In fact, it was number two, after the Healer’s Guild. Of course, the Assassin’s Guild, at number three, was actually number one when it came to knowledge of how to end a life, naturally, but their specialization left them behind the Mages as far as general knowledge went.

You’d think anatomy would be even more important for necromancers than it would be for other mages, but, in fact, that wasn’t quite true. The curses and maledictions necromancers were needed a little knowledge, sure, but only enough to break it. Ask anyone who knew computers, and they’d tell you the amount of programming you need to know to destroy a computer is a fraction of what you need to really get in and use it to its fullest. Same idea, there.

You needed even less anatomy knowledge for creating undead. Sure, you needed to know bones, to reinforce and animate them, but creating undead was more about Soul Magic than anatomy, and the further up the ‘food chain’ of undead you went, the more and more soul magic trumped science. After all, a wraith didn’t even have a physical body, so what good was anatomy when making one?

This was most when you got to the highest forms of undead, the various kinds of liches. To be able to make a lich, you literally had to perform soul magic on your own soul, ripping it out of your own body, severing its ties to its mortal shell, and forcibly binding it to a new shell, all before you became too dead to complete the process of turning into an undead. There were various permutations, mostly depending on the kind of vessel you chose, and what body you ended up possessing, but that was the core of things.

If she were going to be honest with herself, it was truly luck, and the combination of boons she’d gotten as a summoned hero that had allowed her to complete the transformation as a true lich, despite her lack of knowledge and power. It had been a desperate gamble, since her teacher hadn’t mentioned liches before, except for once in passing, but magic responds to intent, often enough. Same as on Earth, there were plenty of tales of people doing things beyond all sense of their capabilities, because they were pushed into a corner, and had no other choice. Only, this time, those desperate acts had magic behind them.

She shook her head as she leaned back in her chair. The King had bought, again out of his family’s own funds, shield foci for all the guards attached to Buckingham Palace. According to her father, they Prime Minister was negotiating for bulk orders, to supply the rest of the armed forces, starting with the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service, and Joint Special Forces Aviation Wing.

Not that the British were the only ones looking into things. The number of governments seeking contracts were astounding. If even a fraction of them came through, the research and development process would more than pay for itself by the end of the year. Phantomline stood to surge above several other divisions in the family corporation.

And it wasn’t just Phantomline. Athelian Arms had delivered its first commission piece, and everyone in the world knew that the King had chosen them to add to the Crown Jewels. The fact that it was an enchanted item, and not just a fancy CAD, really sparked interest.

Her studio was swamped with a sudden wave of commission requests. Not one of her crafters was wanting for work, that much was certain. No matter their discipline, there was someone in the studio that needed something made. Which brought her to her current project.

Dennis, the master blacksmith she’d hired, was talented and skilled enough to well and truly deserve his title. But he was trained in European styles. For the majority of things, that did not matter. Steel did not care about your nationality when you forged it, after all.

This request, however, was different. The granddaughter of the leader of the Inagawa-kai was getting married. She was something of a rebel in the typically conservative yakuza world by taking an active role in the organization, having worked her way up as an enforcer.

Normally, something like this would not be accepted. After all, traditions are part of what made the yakuza the yakuza, and not some gaijin trash like the American syndicates, or the Italian ones before them. And things were already changing, with the Awakening, so the oyabun had folded one more change in with the others. Some complained, but only until the clan became number two in Japan, instead of number three, with the rise in profits that accompanied that growth. Everyone agreed that the oyabun had ridden the waves of change well.

So, when his favorite granddaughter announced that she was getting married, the oyabun reached out to Athelian Arms, to create the perfect wedding gift for her. There were plenty of things we could have made for her. After all, we had all kinds of craftsmen. But the oyabun wished for his granddaughter to receive a sword, one that would rise to legend, as he hoped she would.

Dennis was many things, but he was not trained in the art of making traditional Japanese swords. If he were to forge a European bastard sword, I trusted him to make it worthy of tales, right up there with Arthur and his knights. But this and that were different things entirely.

I had a little experience with Japanese-style swords. Or close enough, at any rate. The elven country of Waselin had used blades almost identical in form to the Japanese style. That was to be expected, since they often fought on horseback, when they descended from their mountain forests. I had learned their techniques, so I felt confident in my abilities to make a sword that the Oyabun and his granddaughter would accept.

Now, I just had to make it.