Chapter 19

After consuming the library I realized how stupid my initial plan had been. Even if I eradicated Adrian, the city I was currently invading, my ogres wouldn't have been able to destroy the wizard tower. That would have allowed them to keep their connection to surrounding cities and inform them of a city-level threat on the loose. They would have notified every city they had an open connection with before my ogres even breached the walls. Adrian CMXXVIII, the current lord of Adrian, would do something similar but his connections to other cities were much weaker. He only had direct contact with two of the eight nearest cities, the two that had migrated from Adrian. The wizards would be able to connect to a vast number of cities, according to the knowledge within the library there were eight hundred and twelve at their last count, which would create a massive pushback against my forces from nearby cities and all cities learning my tactics in destroying Adrian making each conquest harder than the previous one.

What I needed was a way to take out the wizard tower and the Lord's palace before they could establish a connection with any other force. The guard having already sent a request for reinforcement to the Lord would have them making contact quite soon. That needed to be stopped.

Before I could make a real plan for that, though, I recognized a powerful fountain of mana approaching my camp. The waves it sent through the ambient mana were massive, near equal or even greater than my ogres. I wasn't sure if it was a single monstrosity or a collection of vastly weaker ones, but I wasn't in a great hurry to find out either. The brood I kept behind was only stabilizing their first composite. Trgl and Mgrt were better as they were stabilizing their third, but they wouldn't be able to contend with the source if it was a singular entity.

I'd already claimed a great many more creatures that attacked my camp since the ogres left, so I had plenty for battle-ready constructs. Maybe keeping a few leaking creatures would be useful as a deterrent for others, but I hadn't really had a problem until this massive surge approached. Maybe it was the sudden ceasing of leakage that drew this new adversary. If it was capable of understanding turbulence at a greater range, maybe it was looking for scraps left of whatever had managed to deter it.

Another option was a creature that preyed upon weaker creatures with some means of detection that worked outside of mana. If it knew there was a large number of creatures here but the mana influence was weak it could mistake my camp for ideal prey.

Either way…the options were pretty clear; run, hide, or fight. If it had an unknown method of detection, running could prove difficult and I wouldn't know until I'd already been running for a while. The same problem with hiding. The problem with fighting was the cost in mana. If it took too much mana, that could make my operations within Adrian more difficult.

My solution was attacking with my constructs. That would allow me to know if it was a foe I could defeat with as little mana as necessary and if they were destroyed the cost was only random creatures that wandered into my camp. None of them were collecting mana as they'd reduce the efficiency of my goblins and the mana collected would be insignificant when aligned near my true circuit.

I started scouting with my skin and hair constructs as they could spread out quite a lot and retain their effectiveness. My bone and muscle constructs would be the blunt instruments that allowed me to use my circuits as I saw fit, so I had them tunnel toward the foes. The rot construct was still too small to be useful while I'd needed to make a separate brood construct for each type of creature. None of them were significant.

Only one was actually complete enough to even allow the creation of a single creature, though it was proving to be much more difficult than the goblin one. I'd made eighty offspring within that brood construct, but all of them had failed. They hadn't even grown larger than a goblin despite the creatures they'd come from being nearly as large as ogres.

My hair construct had managed to approach the creatures, allowing me to spread my will to understand what I was facing. It was very different than I'd imagined. I'd thought it would be several hundred ogre-level beings or one creature beyond third composite ogres. Instead was a single ogre-level being leading close to two thousand hobgoblin-level beings, the first composite stage of goblins, and several tens of thousands of goblin-level beings.

They matched the library's description of hounds. Quadruped mobility with a lean frame that got stockier as they advanced in class. Their main weapons were their claws and fangs, each as long as a human's finger in the first class and growing as they advanced. They didn't advance in size as obviously as goblins did, instead you could know their class by their color and build. In the dark, it was easiest to look at their paws as grey hounds would have massive paws while hell hounds had legs thick enough to make their similarly sized paws seem appropriate. Class one grey hounds were two to four pedes tall at the shoulder and muted gray in color, class two dire hounds were three to six pedes tall at the shoulder and black in color with red eyes that glowed a little bit, and class three hell hounds were four to seven pedes tall at the shoulder with the same black coloration to most of their coat but they had crimson patches around their paws and maws while the glow of their eyes was clearly visible even during the day. A plague-type monster similar to goblins that were only dangerous in the numbers they appeared in. Hounds were worse if higher class creatures appeared, though, as goblins were less loyal to ogres than grey hounds were to hell hounds. I couldn't see in color without scrying, but I could see their proportions and feel their class via their mana leakage.

The number was also a dead giveaway. Few creatures lived in such numbers. Only humans, goblins, gnolls, hounds, elves, orcs, wasps, and ursas allowed their populations to grow so large before splitting or eating each other. Hounds were the only ones among them that walked on four feet and would have such disparity between the weak and the strong. Anything apart from goblins or humans could be seen using more than two legs to walk, but only goblins and hounds would have so many weaklings for each strong creature.

In them I saw a vastly superior creature to goblins. The hell hound leading the army had intent that was worlds greater than an ogre despite dire hounds being inferior to goblins. Unlike goblins, something in their maturation process reinforced their intent! The hell hound noticed my probe as well, proving that its will was much more advanced than an ogre's.

I probed it with concentrated intent to communicate. Perhaps I'd finally found a creature capable of conversing with me without using some pathetic excuse for true communication! From the dog's reaction, either it didn't understand or it really didn't want to communicate with me. Pity. What happened next surprised me, though. A circuit was built within its mouth! Creatures apart from humans could build circuits! I almost danced in joy as my hair construct hastily retreated to avoid the scorching cone that blasted from the hell hound's mouth, turning all nearby plants and hounds into charcoal. Even after the circuit's direct influence expired, the wave of fire continued spreading outward in a wider cone for more than thrice the distance the circuit itself made. The fire was weaker, but still quite potent, as even dire hounds yelped and fled the inferno. I inspected the char for a bit, interested in this new material. I'd need another nexus. Thanks to the hell hound, I also had a means of producing it.

I gave thanks to the hell hound for its inclusion in giving me ideas as my muscle construct wrapped around its feet from under the ground and my bone construct ripped into its chest, aiming for the heart.

As I entrusted the killing of the leader to my constructs, I built circuits to tear the dire hounds apart. They were much less resistant to circuitry, allowing my crystal bullets to be effective in killing them. I didn't kill the grey hounds, though. I wanted them as worshippers. Instead I built a wall surrounding the army. It took a lot of mana to enclose a fifty league radius in an earth wall strong enough to survive their attempted escape, but it would be worth it once I had another type of creature to add to my arsenal. The air immediately started rejecting my wall as the earth sought to reclaim it, but it would last for long enough. I only needed enough time for me to gain control of the hounds. My wall would last a week. I predicted I'd be done in as little as four days.

The hell hound had managed to tear free of my muscle construct before my bone construct could do too much damage. Then it started using the cone of fire circuit to continuously burn the ground, turning the center of my stadium into a wasteland of ash and fire. I wasn't sure what it was doing until I tried getting either construct close enough to realize that the earth was quite good at maintaining the temperature the hell hound raised it to with the flaming cone. Good to know. Another interesting fact was that the earth that was heated up lost a lot of the cohesive force that kept all of the earth together. Once I managed to use heat-resistant circuits, courtesy of the library, on my constructs it was much easier for them to tunnel through the heated earth than it had been through the cold earth. I had to use many layers of the circuit because it was learned from humans and far from perfect, but the inefficiency was less of an issue than following the patterns the hound wanted me to.

The hell hound expected the heated earth to force my constructs above ground and as such wasn't paying attention to the ground anymore. My second assault was even more effective than the first, despite following the exact same tactics. The muscle construct wound all the way up to its shoulders and the bone construct also sent spines into its knees, but it was the same basic attack pattern. This time, the hell hound couldn't avoid my assault. It still fought for a moment and released cones of fire that hurt its allies more than me, but it didn't manage to deal significant damage to me. The dire hounds didn't even have clear enemies, so their resistance was pathetic. A few tried to flee, but my wall was enough to stop them in their state of confusion and fear.

Now it was just a matter of time until I had my hound worshippers. I started the lengthy task of killing the rest of the dire hounds. Most of them had survived the onslaught of the hell hound while many gray hounds had been slaughtered with each release. Of the close to twenty thousand gray hounds only two thousand remained. It was remarkable that when the dire hounds that fled first had reached the wall they immediately started threatening the grey hounds that approached, sending many that weren't comfortable cowering where they stood retreating back to the hell hound to be burned to crispy viscera, of which I had far more than I'd ever had access to before. I might even be able to finish a few mana true circuits before the invasion.

Maybe I should have used some circuits that did wide-scale damage instead of my single-target crystal bullet circuit. It felt natural to me, though, to use the only weapon my Creator wrote onto my body to kill adversaries he would have been forced to flee. Once I conquered the wizard tower I'd have access to many combat circuits. The few in the library were pathetic and inefficient. I could make better ones using them as inspiration, but that would take time. I'd barely finished consuming the knowledge, putting it to proper use would still take time. Time I was running short on as Adrian CMXXVIII would be requesting reinforcements any time now.