A/N: Like before, you can join the discord channel for questions and discussion with this invite code: X6WeHRn

Cato put down the tube of metal with a huff. That thing was heavy and Cato was definitely not a soldier.

While the specifics were not the same, just about any Earthling could recognize that hollow tube with a trigger. Open on both ends, the ten centimeter wide bore was the same width as the spell cannon barrels and sized to fit the same ammunition.

"This is your answer to the bone worms?"

Cato nodded at Erin, the expedition commander. "Indeed. Single shot infantry portable launchers. "

"Didn't you say that spell cannons can't store enough power on a human portable device?" she asked.

"The assessment was that trying to fire a shell in the normal spell cannon method was impossible to power from a device that was human portable. Not if you wanted to get more than one shot out of it," Cato clarified. "But this weapon doesn't use magic to launch the shell. The ammunition is, in fact, rocket bodies that fail the required tolerance, like the ones we use for shells, but are made into rockets anyway. "

He took out the ammunition from the back of the launcher and slipped. The shell fell out of his hands and hit the table with a solid thump.

Cato looked around the room awkwardly as Erin and the rest of the division commanders at this presentation picked themselves up from the floor. Yan, sitting on the far right, was hidden behind a buzzing shield that radiated far too much magic.

"Uh, it's all right. This is just a dummy round," Cato said sheepishly. He really ought to have informed them of that first.

Erin sighed as they arranged themselves back into their seats. After everyone had gotten settled again, she continued her questions.

"Aren't the failed rocket bodies failed because they were too inaccurate? That would seem to be a problem for such a weapon. "

And once again, Cato was struck by how new all of these concepts must be to these people. "These launchers aren't meant to be used for long range bombardment like the rocket batteries are. They're meant for the same street fighting that the scouts engaged in while taking this city. At those ranges, the inaccuracy of the rocket nozzles and fins aren't that important as long as the deviation isn't too high.

In fact, due to the short range, these rockets are made with less rocket fuel and an oversized warhead. They're actually more powerful per shot than Landar's rockets. Add that these rockets will contain more explosive and less living fire, they are better for destroying hard materials like the bone armour and walls than wiping out swarms of infantry. "

Erin nodded, "what about the spell cannon shells?"

"The explosive shells are still better than this. Not only do the spell cannons launch them further, they are all warhead and no propellant, and the reinforced warhead body allows it greater penetration before exploding. But spell cannons are not portable. "

The expedition leader looked around the room, the interest among the division commanders was obvious. "Very well. You should proceed to testing prototypes. If they succeed, the Northern Fort will put in an order for at least thirty. "

The wooden frame wobbled on its rails, the light wind breezing through the open grassland rattling the wood and causing the paper skin to flap noisily.

Around the contraption stood a large gathering of people, alchemists, recordkeepers, ironworkers, even the rare mathematician. Most of the University had turned out to catch this historic moment.

For all that the frame looked rickety and unreliable, the design of the craft was the culmination of many months of design, more months of careful construction and yet more months of testing. Two years had gone by since the project was conceived and only now had they advanced to the point that a field test was possible. Even then, this version was only a proof of concept, its engine was heavy and anemic, certainly not something commercially viable.

But the airplane waiting for launch represented the very frontier of human knowledge and ingenuity.

The blood and treasure poured into this project had been immense. The number of failed tests, repairs and upgrades of wind tunnels and prototype wings was beyond count. Gliders tested and crashed had slowly evolved, one painstaking and expensive advancement at a time.

The Flight Project had been steadily eating up more and more of the University's budget even as the dividends of the University contracts poured in in an increasing flood. Among the University researchers, the Project had become something of an obsession and the spin off technologies, in improved steam engines, plywood and aerodynamics, had been sufficient to convince Cato to increase the backing for the project.

"Supercritical water storage loaded. " The coordinator spoke to the team preparing the airplane for take off.

The storage tank for the pre-heated water that drove the small steam engine was loaded into the insulated container. While steam engines gave poor power for weight, without a boiler and using sufficient magic in the cylinder itself to drive the expansion, the engineers had managed to coax enough power out of it to get into the air.

According to lab testing that is.

"Flush lines. " The pilot pulled the handle, prompting the engine to hiss and spit clouds of steam as superheated water flashed to boiling in its feed lines and out to the atmosphere.

The pilot had been drawn from a pool of volunteers, all eager for the glory of the first flight. Quite a few of the contributors to the project had not entered however, since the risk of something going wrong was considerable.

"Throttle up. "

The moment of truth came as the engine was cranked into a slow start and the propellers attached to the drive belts began to spin. The preparation team backed away now, leaving the pilot in the prototype clear.

There was a long pause as the engine continued to accelerate and pull the propellers into higher speeds. Each puff of superheated water injected into the pistons was subjected to a further pulse of heat from the magic power storage, the steam driving the piston before being vented into the atmosphere. It was extremely inefficient both in water and magic consumption, compared to the fixed steam engines with multiple expansion cylinders, but those were all too heavy to use.

The propellers had already disappeared into a blurred roaring circle, the wind blasting backwards kept conversation to a minimum.

"Brakes off. "

With a squeal, the aircraft began to roll forward immediately, picking up speed on the rails. The observing team had a short anxious moment as the airplane shot past the calculated point where takeoff speed would be achieved. Then just before the launch rails ran out, the aircraft lifted gently off the ground.

The spontaneous outbreak of cheers and whistles as the airplane soared into the sky was deafening.

They died off quickly when not ten seconds later, the airplane pitched upwards a little too much, stalled and plunged into the muddy ground below the hill.

The new ammunition factory was considerably more special than the other factories. Despite its size and cost, the output of the factory was a mere tenth in weight of the living fire manufactory. It was staffed with not necessarily the best but certainly the most careful of the workers in the Ironworker company. All of them were volunteers, from the lowliest cleaner to the floor manager himself.

All around the site, in a two hundred meter exclusion radius of empty fields, was rings of fencing festooned with warning symbols indicating in no uncertain terms that a multitude of things were banned from the site. The list ran the gamut from fire magic to torches to smoking pipes, lit or unlit. They all boiled down to no ignition sources allowed.

The factory also did not have an attached warehouse for stockpiling output, its output was immediately carted away on specially built and marked wagons, under military escort.

This was the experimental factory for explosives manufacturing.

Despite the precautions, there had been a continuous string of minor incidents and near misses ever since the factory's opening. The main reaction vat that produced the batches of nitroglycerine for later stabilization was the most sensitive part of the whole process. The shock sensitivity of the product meant that accidentally dropping a small tool into the vat at the wrong time could result in an explosion.

This was the conclusion that the inspectors had come to after the final incident that demolished half the factory. At some point, a small object, possibly a bolt or other fastening, had gotten loose somewhere above the reaction vat and fell down while a batch was being made. The object hit the roof of the reaction vat, as one of the surviving witnesses reported hearing a loud metallic clang just before the explosion, and then possibly bounced into the mixture through the pressure release vents.

The reaction was almost complete and the nitroglycerin in the vat detonated to devastating effect. The shrapnel of the reaction vessel killed the four closest workers and injured dozens more through the factory floor, damaging or shattering equipment nearby. For unknown reasons, the shockwave ended up mostly focused into a single quadrant and blew through all the obstacles to create a hole in the wall of the factory.

This final incident led to the shut down of the explosives manufacturing plant and a full review of all safety measures. Further research into the production process with a view to limiting the amount of unstabilized nitroglycerin present was conducted, as well as a search for a more stable explosive. Explosives production dropped to a trickle for months after. Ad hoc improvements in safety based on analysis of risk factors and mitigating measures were replaced with safety departments, incident analysis and error prevention.

Later, the Explosives Factory Incident was remembered as one of the case studies that resulted in a formalization of industrial safety standards.

Landar watched as Cato added the final touches to the Sword Stone casting aid. Despite his objections that the casting aid was quite unfinished, Landar wanted him to try making a militarily useful version for her Sword Stone.

"But I still think this is a waste," Cato said as he fired up the magic circle. In a flash, the enchantment snapped together into the metal disc molded to hold the shard of green crystal. "Your Sword Stone is more complicated than most and uses a control scheme that isn't shared by anything else. Whatever I build here won't be useful for anyone other than you. "

"That's a good thing! After all, being an alchemist, my control is much greater than most Iris summoners, so I was given one of the trickier stones to use. "

Landar leaned over Cato's shoulder to pluck the disc from the magic circle. She pushed a small amount of magic into the device and they watched as a faint Sword appeared next to her at minimum power.

"Well, it works," Landar said. "Feels anticlimactic though. "

"Try it with an external power source. "

He unplugged the magic circle from its power storage and passed the flexible metal pipe that transferred compressed magic over to Landar. She almost reflexively drew directly from the power source out of habit but remembered enough to plug it into the port on the disc.

With the same silent bloom of power, she fed the casting aid a trickle of her own magic. The enchantment drew on the power source and amplified the power Landar had been sending to the Sword Stone. A second Sword snapped into being beside her.

She ran through the usual Iris exercises, setting the translucent blade of force rotating and orbiting her, moving it this way and that. She tested it against other spells, disruption and solid objects, reforming the blade each time.

"Hm, it's a little clunky," Landar noted after fumbling the reformation of the Sword after reducing it to a lump of disorganized magic from bashing a wall of disruption. "The casting aid takes a short time to respond when I try to control the Sword. It's a small delay but noticeable. It'll take some getting used to. "

They looked at each other.

"Field test?"

"Field test. "

Landar agreed with a happy smile. She was always happiest when things were about to be destroyed.

They didn't have to wait long before the next zombie attack.

The Northern Fort's defences were arranged to take advantage of the recent advances. No curtain wall of old existed here, instead the ruined wall of the city was slowly broken down for materials to shore up the wide bastions and killing ground around the fort.

Based on experience with Fort Yang trenchworks, the fort's barriers consisted of raised earthernworks and steep slopes. Wire was strung everywhere and each raised platform was angled to cover the sides of its neighbours with enfilading fire. Further above, a second level of raised platforms of packed dirt allowed spell cannons to be dug in behind concentric rings of Mist defences and provide supporting fire to the manned lines on the first level.

The product of countless hours of manpower and steam driven mining rails, it was practically an artificial hill piled up around the city. Clumps of fused dirt pockmarking the areas around the main defence lines spoke of their effectiveness. Lightbeams and projectile weapons simply wasted their energy against the massive bulk of soil. Even now, the fort was still under construction, most areas did not yet have a proper second level.

Outside, in the killing grounds, was a series of shallow trenches that afford no cover from the fort's raised spell cannons, yet allowed skirmishers to be protected passively from light beams from the front and still be open to easy retreat. The grounds were pounded flat and kept scrupulously clear to afford no cover for hundred of meters. It was here than the marked non-magical minefields lurked and batteries of rockets and shells dialed in for indirect fire.

Set into one of the raised spell cannon positions was where Landar and Cato set up their experimental Sword casting station. Taking the place of a spell cannon emplacement, the stockpiled magic and power transmission infrastructure could be easily taken advantage of and a prototype device for controlling Landar's Sword Stone was quickly built.

"I think this is a device with great potential," Landar nodded again as she rubbed the pedestal that her Sword Stone would fit into.

Cato sighed as she tried to fill the air with chatter, but her efforts were once again rebuffed by the stoic line of Iris summoners standing against the back wall.

When news arrived of an incoming monster attack and that Cato's prototype casting aid would get a turn at live fire demonstration, the Iris delegation with the expedition insisted on observing it.

They were polite enough to stay out of the way at the back, but having her father stare at the casting aid without speaking made Landar nervous. Cato sighed to himself, wondering if Landar would ever get over her innate discomfort with her father. Even if he was now supportive of Cato.

"Don't you think so, Cato?"

He patted her arm gently. This was an important demonstration, but even if Landar made a mistake, that just meant they had to stay out here longer. "Just do it like you practiced and this will go perfectly fine. "

Landar bit her lip and stayed silent for all of a minute. She was about to speak up again when the alert tone sounded.

The previous tension in the room was replaced with a very different kind of tension. That alert meant that the zombies were within sight of the fort.

The observers from the Minmay Guards fidgeted, fingering their weapons. The thought of zombies appearing made them want to kill things. The sergeant in charge looked especially jumpy.

Landar turned back to the pedestal and checked the power draw one more time.

"Power up the systems," Cato said.

Landar nodded. "Check. "

"Targeting?"

"Sights leveled. "

"Ready to fire," Cato confirmed.

Landar placed her hands on the pedestal, the massively oversized channels for power transfer lighting up in the magic sense. Large power draw pipes on the floor lead back to the magic power storage behind the emplacement. Unlike the laboratory test version, this casting aid was meant to draw as much power as a normal spell cannon.

"Zombies sighted in A4," called the spotter, "group size estimated at one thousand. "

A4 was at the outermost ring. That was quite outside the effective range of a Sword Stone, so they waited.

The zombies came at the fort head on, blundering through minefields and suffering fire from the skirmishers. By the time the group reached the final skirmish line, they had been reduced to a mere hundred. A different alert sounded.

"Spell cannons are to stand down, you are given special permission to proceed with the firing test," the sergeant said. "Kill them all for me," he added with a savage grin.

Cato grinned back.

"Firing," Landar said distantly, focused on the stone. The Iris observers leaned forward, as if to catch every last moment.

With a massive flare of magic, a quartet of Swords appeared practically instantly around Landar, hovered in place for a short moment before blasting off at the group of zombies struggling across the last stretch of open ground to the slope of the main fortification. The distance was too great to control the Swords much but Landar could still set them to project forwards in a straight line.

Even before the Swords reached their targets, Landar had already fired another two more bursts of four Swords each. Then the first set arrived, scything down the zombies in rows, scoring finger wide lines into the loose soil of the final ditch.

Seeing the success, Landar focused even harder, changing her control parameters. Instead of four Swords, a single large Sword appeared, spanning tens of meters in length. Instead of flying off instantly, Landar let it build up power from the stone.

And when she set it loose, Landar controlled the blade of force from the emplacement, sending the deadly edge skimming at knee height down the slope. Most of the zombies of the group were kneecapped, only a few on the edges escaping the doom blade.

Seeing that the Sword still had power, Landar whipped it back and forth across the formation. And that was the end of the group.

As the Minmay Guard stomped out into the grounds to burn the zombie parts, the Iris came forward to examine the device.

"A very useful device," Yan noted, "being able to draw as much power as is available would make us more powerful than ever. "

"There are still limits to the amount of power that can be drawn," commented an older Iris man.

"It is far too high to worry about and I am sure Cato can improve on the device. This is still a prototype after all. "

"And yet without the need for power, how will we be useful? Should we not be worried about the Inath Federation taking all our stones?"

And Yan stepped in again, "and you know very well that summoning stones are not so easy to use. Even in this case, Landar used her Swords to fit the situation, not merely imitating a spell cannon. "

Landar was clearly not used to her father defending her. Or in Cato's opinion, she had never seen him do this in front of his peers before.

"Who is that man?" Cato asked her in a whisper as the older Iris and Yan continued their polite verbal sparring.

Landar eyed him for a moment then sighed, "that's the cousin of Chi, who is the main opposition to father. I guess that's why father is arguing so hard, they're enemies after all. "

"I believe he is actually doing it for you. "

She looked at Cato, then back at the two men surrounded by the rest of the Iris observers, all standing around the ignored device. "Maybe. "

Progress at last! Cato smiled to himself as the woman next to him just watched her father fight his own battles.

The arrival of the flight from the northwards direction was unremarkable, but when Ka landed with the scroll in hand and a report of finding humans to the north, the Northern Fort seemed to boil over with curiousity.

He gave his report to Erin first. Ka described how far north his flight had found the river, almost a full day's flight from the forward scouting position, itself another day's flight from the Northern Fort. He filled in the growing scraps of map that the humans used to mimic the way the Elka saw the land. His report on their contribution to the battle with their bombs drew a sharp look from the commander and the reception Ka received from the northern humans put a grave expression on her face.

Erin treated him to some refreshments, cookies were luxury in this military fort, one coveted by all, and considered the scroll with its mysterious writings. Ka couldn't read it, it wasn't like any of the scripts of the landbound. And from Erin's frown, she couldn't read it later.

Then the leaders of the various groups of the army here turned up one after another. Each one of them wanted Ka to give a report and he talked until his throat was hoarse, even with the water and sweet drinks on offer. And then the scholars arrived and Erin had enough, she shoved out everyone trying to crowd into her office.

"All right, so everyone here has heard the report," Erin gave Ka a respectful nod. He bowed back and took a seat in the corner, glad that he didn't have to report again. "Thoughts?"

"What was their dress like?" Cato looked to Ka, "you mentioned that the army had metal armour but what else did they wear? Did you manage to see any stitches on the clothes?"

Ka nodded, "their clothing was thick, heavier than these fabrics you wear. I did not pay too much attention to their clothes, though I don't think I saw any sewing. "

"The stitching style we found on the zombies conceal the seams on the inside of the clothing, that lends evidence that these people are related to the zombies that attacked Fort Yang. "

"A good point, but hard to say without samples," Erin noted.

"Their reaction to an elka was not good," noted the division commander for the Ektal humans, "trying to capture an ally in battle, considering the suspected sacrificing. I am not sure these people are peaceful. "

"And yet the soldiers who met with Ka first seemed friendly and wanted to establish communications. Despite the language difficulties. " Another commander added. This one, Ka did not recognize.

"They just want substitutes for their sacrifices!"

"And speaking of these sacrifices, just how does it work? If we could have a counter to the zombie aura, we would be far safer in battle. I'm not saying we should sacrifice ourselves but we do have stored magical power. Cato, any ideas?"

"It's impossible to tell at this stage. It might be possible they have artifacts like summoning stones? Unless their magical knowledge is far more sophisticated than ours. "

"What about this?" cut in yet another voice. The man held up the scroll that was given to Ka by the Northerners.

"Their characters must have diverged since we lost contact, but since their language is similar to Tsarian, we might be able to decipher it by comparing their words to older records. I shall arrange for copies to be sent to the Queen Amarante and to the Iris. "

"And their weapons?"

"Enough!" Erin shouted over the rising hubbub. Her glare sweeping across the room of excited commanders plunged the place into silence. "There is little point speculating on the tiny amount of information we have. The northerners might be hunting anyone for sacrifices or there was some miscommunication involved, we cannot tell unless we ask them. That is the topic we need to consider. Do we try to contact them or not?'

"Of course we should contact them," Cato replied. "Their population is almost certainly the source of the zombies. We need to defend them so that more of their people do not turn into monsters to attack us. "

"Unless they are hostile, which they might be. How can we send anyone to contact these northerners if there's a risk they will just capture and sacrifice our people?"

"We'll have to send a large escort with the envoy. Perhaps even a whole division. "

"Too many people will run into supply problems. A division of infantry would march far too slowly and will have to fight off attacks on their way north. "

Erin tapped her table warningly, "we're getting too far ahead. Let's come back to the original question, we need to decide if we want to contact these northerners. We can work out the logistics after. "

Ka looked around the room as she paused. The commanders of this landbound army were divided, he could see.

"I expect each of you to return and consider this tonight. We meet here again at dawn tomorrow, in case anyone thinks of anything clever. " She dismissed the commanders with a wave, her exasperation quite clear to see.

Erin turned back to Ka as the people filed out of her office, "Ka, thank you for your service. Whatever the result, your decision to help the northerners and to try to open contact was the right decision. You gave them a good first impression of us and that is valuable. "

Ka nodded to her as she dismissed him as well. Now to repeat all this for Cato. He sighed, what was an elka willing to do for a blood debt?

The next day, Ka received his orders to lead a full flight northwards, escorting the envoy along with a company of Minmay Guard.