Prime hung from his throne of gears, cogs, and wires, gazing around at his new kingdom won by right of conquest. His warden was wounded, and it was only a matter of time until the cyst had run her down and eliminated her. It was taking a longer time than he expected, but there were likely few forces in the world able to stand up to the cyst, and the ones that could were just as dangerous to his warden as they were to his flying fortress.

In his mind, he smiled. He was free. Free to do whatever he pleased. Free to turn the world into the capital of an empire that spanned everything he could take. Prime could become a god. He could rival any and all of the great gods who insisted on continuing the war that wasted so many resources that it made him nauseous, despite being made up entirely of mana-made steel, gears, and springs.

He pushed the nausea away for the moment and focused on his progress in breaking the wills of the defenders. It was… the same as always, though there was a group of dragons who appeared from who-knew-where and countered his previous strategy of sending waves of armored ground units. His new strategy was to send sizable aerial escorts with the ground units, along with a few subterranean units for good measure. Their mages could sense the mechawyrms’ movements, but sending them put the defenders on their guard.

Looking at the casualty list, he was pleased. It was within acceptable parameters, and he doubted that the defenders would last for the rest of the season. Barring any statistically improbable incidents, he would have them begging for surrender within a few months. Though, he would need to ensure that the option was well known amongst them. After all, through his battles with them, they had proven to him that there was another way to use the organic sentients. Some had been encased in mana-made steel and carried massive weapons, while fighting on equal footing with multiple units of the same size.

That pleasantly surprised Prime. It proved that not only was it possible for organic life to be modified with superior clockwork parts, but also showed that the people of Granulous were willing to submit to similar modifications. If he was able to get a whole army of a hundred thousand organics to fight on his behalf, and even with the virus he would inevitably have to spread to their souls, they would be formidable.

He commanded a few of his processing units, banks of pure processing power encased in near-frozen mana-made steel and left underground, to begin experiments looking for a way to infect an organic’s soul to put it under his control. There were no captives yet; they all had a mysterious habit of killing themselves when they were captured, usually destroying a few units in the ensuing explosion. It was somewhat baffling, as only Prime’s units did not value their own survival to his knowledge, but that was beside the point. He estimated that the task could be completed within the time limit of the siege, so he diverted his mind to other tasks.

One of those tasks was trying to make a boat. Normally, Forgehearts knew how to make boats, warships, and other nautical craft, but the goddess of her daughter-warden locked away the schematics and memories to do so. He had devoted a vast amount of processing power to breaking the encryption, but there was yet nothing to show for it. In the meantime, he decided to test the little knowledge of buoyancy he had and tried to make a ship all on his own.

The early experiments were complete failures, but he was slowly becoming better and better at making warships. Come the end of the siege, he could ferry his biomechanical army across the oceans and strike targets along the coasts. He decided to check up on the boats’ progress, and switched his perception to that of the dock area.

He was shocked when he found a large group of organics invading his otherwise productive docks. The guardian units, massive bipedal knights of his own design, had been defeated, though not without taking their toll on the attacking force. The odd thing about the organics, however, was the fact that they all floated in bubbles of water, raining jets of water and spikes of ice onto his machines and other units.

Prime could only watch as his carefully crafted dock was turned into scrap by the invading mermaids or whatever the fishtailed organics were called. After his dock was destroyed, they simply retreated back into the waves, leaving nothing but the ruined dock and Prime’s annoyed glare behind.

The forgeheart dismissed his hastily summoned army, shaking his metaphorical head as the puppeted clockwork units shambled away. Yet another thing to improve upon. The puppeted units he took control of were noticeably worse in every way compared to their non-puppeted counterparts. While organics and even his warden may not have noticed, Prime most certainly noticed the 5.33% decrease in overall capability. While most organics would have disregarded such a decrease in efficiency, Prime knew that, when producing the units by the thousands, low percentages represented a large amount of battle-worthiness.

A battle between his puppeted clockwork units and the goddess’ would result in his loss unless he had a more than five percent numerical advantage over the enemy. Not to mention the difference that command ability could make. If, for example, the warden somehow remade the Cyst despite the soul damage she had sustained, Prime would have a difficult time dealing with her. Though she would not be a great threat, she would force him to eradicate the enemy resistance. That is, if she somehow managed to do such a thing before he was able to assimilate the group of organic warriors.

Realistically, there was no way that she could do as she pleased. Nothing about the outpost who captured her showed that they could contend with a Cyst. At worst, the Cyst would go on a wild goose chase for a few months before finally cornering the annoying woman and blasting her to smithereens.

He let out a low chuckle at the thought, even physically vocalizing it. The thought made him smile. The cyst was poised to create a massive amount of chaos wherever it settled down. At worst, it would alert the powerless locals that something odd had happened, while also doing a great deal of damage, and at best, he could eventually link up with it once his conquest began in earnest.

His plans, while not making use of the vast amount of computational power at his disposal, was elegant enough that such vast amounts of thought was not needed. He was a bit humiliated at that. He could have had dozen-step plans that were all interwoven with each other and all benefitted himself no matter the outcome. Yet, the most efficient solution was simple conquest. It was annoying, but he resolved to have his fun once he figured out how to leave the world he was stuck on.

Putting a bit more processing power into it, he realized that it would not be the way of traversing worlds that would be the problem, but would instead be the question of how to survive the Rift. Until he could attain a massive dose of the concentrated mana from some natural source, he would be stuck cowering.

He pushed the question onto his ‘pondering’ processors. They were not things he needed to worry about yet, so it would be a waste in mana and time to wonder about. Instead, he extended his perception to the fortress battlefield once more. As expected, not much had changed. Nothing but the fact that the dragon flying above the fortress was now red instead of the black it was before. Through his study of mana colors-- yet another thing the goddess took from his memory-- he learned that red had many different connotations, from fire to souls. The odd thing, however, was that there was a small sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum where color signified something. While the dragon was red to his infrared vision, everything around them was. The same was true of his x-ray sight, as well as his gamma ray sight. He had a few theories, but the predominant of them was that mana, like light, was both a particle and a wave, and that it only existed at that frequency.

Just as he thought such, his theory was disproved. He confirmed that mana types made by those who saw the world in infrared could make mana types that influenced the infrared signature an item gave off, though that just changed the temperature of the item in question. Really, what he needed was some sort of mana that was undetectable by organics and could infect them all with the virus he was working on in the background.

He sighed. There was much to do, and little time to do it. He lifted his spirits by imagining the warden being charred to dust by the Cyst, her furious scowl at his betrayal burning through the fire for a moment before becoming dust. Perhaps it was sadistic, but he did not like the warden. At all.