Norman appeared in the middle of a small copse of trees. After looking around, he found a helpful sign pointing in the direction of the array. He sighed and tromped forward. This was the seventh array he had visited and four of the previous ones needed to be fixed due to earthquake damage. One had to be completely rebuilt because the ground split open where it had been placed, breaking the entire array.

One out of six working arrays was not a good start. They were going to need to protect the arrays from the quakes. Which meant more sensors and more mitigation towers.

As he neared the seventh array, he could feel the pull of the mana siphons. It was a good sign, but it didn’t mean the array was fully functional. He felt a similar pull when he visited the third array, only to find it distorted by the movement from the ground. That may not have become an issue if they had found large flat expanses of solid rock for setting up the arrays. But rocks like that were kind of rare. And the time it would take to flatten out a suitable area of rock to create a space like that just wasn’t worth it.

Another option he considered was to have the dirt under the array compressed into stone. Similar to how the walls and buildings in Ashvale were built. Although he wasn’t sure he could spare an earth mage to make that happen. For the time being, they were stuck with dirt.

Norman quickly inspected the array. There were only a few pieces he had to move back into place but most of it was undamaged. Thankfully the arrays by design were rather redundant. A normal spell or array would have simply failed if a symbol or connecting piece was knocked out of place.

That didn’t mean they could just leave them alone and hope for the best though. The arrays may be redundant, but they also had to be perfectly optimized to reach their full charge in the allotted time. But with a project this large, there were bound to be failures along the way. All of the researchers during the design phase knew this, which is why the plan accounted for additional arrays as a built-in tolerance for failure.

Norman wasn’t sure of the exact number, but it was something like fifteen percent of the total arrays could fail after the point of no return and the spell would still function. That might seem like a lot, and it was. But that number still amounted to less than two thousand arrays. Those few thousand arrays were the difference between success and failure. That meant they needed to keep nearly ten thousand arrays from having a critical failure for over nine years or they were all fucked. And he only had forty-two to check on right now.

It was going to be exhausting work.

He finished the array repairs and headed back to the teleporter to visit the next one in the line.

***

It took Norman the better part of a week to check and repair all of the arrays. Only three had come out of the quake undamaged. Four had to be completely rebuilt, and one he had to have a group of technicians bring in a whole new array. The section of the ground the array sat on had caved into a massive sinkhole, burying most of the pieces. It simply wasn’t worth digging through the debris at the bottom to recover the array components when it was faster to build a new set.

When he returned to Ashvale, he spent some time with his wife and Princess.

He stroked Princess’ head.“We’re going to need mitigation layers around the arrays,” he stated with annoyance.

Kalia sighed. “That bad?”

“Worse.” He told her about what he found.

“I’ll let Saliu know to change the placement priority. At least we won’t need too many for the arrays.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well,” she stated, “They need to be placed far enough away from the arrays so they have time to lessen the seismic tremors. But the arrays are significantly smaller than a town, so they can be placed quite a bit closer, which means we need less of them. We could also get away with only four sensors at the cardinal directions but I think we should up that to eight just to be on the safe side.”

“Since we aren’t trying to protect an entire zone,” Norman commented.

“Exactly.”

“How many mitigation towers will we need?”

“Thirty-two at a bare minimum. I would like to do sixty-four, but let's see if thirty-two will keep them safe first before we commit to any more.”

He winced at the number of towers. That was nearly two thousand additional towers and that number didn’t include any construction going forward. And they were working at capacity as is. He had a few ideas on how to relieve some of the workload but he wasn’t sure if it would work.

After his chat with his wife, he went to see Grobert.

“How are the repairs coming?” He asked as he stepped into the Chief Advisor's office.

The man didn’t even look up from some paperwork as he spoke. “If you are referring to the teleporter to Grothlosburg, it's back up and running. Why?”

“I was hoping to ask Barthus if there were any stone or earth mages that were sitting in their crypts waiting to be processed.” With a city and population the size of Grothlosburg, there were always bound to be a few skilled people dying from either natural causes or accidents.

“Eh, don’t bother,” Grobert grunted. He reached for a drawer on his desk and pulled out a clear rectangle that Norman recognized.

The man tossed the gron tablet to him and Norman barely caught it.

“Took this the last time I was there. Unlike the civilian models, this is still linked to the network, even here. I assume you can figure it out from there?”

Norman nodded and tapped on the surface, activating the object. He sat in a chair across from Grobert as he quickly scrolled through the bland interface until he located the information he was looking for.

One thing nice about the gron was that they kept meticulous records. He scrolled through the lists of dead, quickly seeing who was still around and who was marked as processed. He wished he had access to this back when he was robbing the corpses. Then again, it probably wouldn’t have helped. There didn’t appear to be any location or identifier marking to show where these bodies were located in the crypt. And he didn’t recall seeing anything while he was down there.

How was he supposed to retrieve and revive these people? He looked up at Grobert. “Any idea how to get these people?” he pointed to a list of seven dead gron stone and earth mages he had located.

Grobert just rolled his eyes and pressed on the picture of one of the gron. A new window popped up asking for a location.

“Wait… You’re not saying I can just teleport them here, are you?”

“Of course you can. Why wouldn’t you be able to?”

“… I thought our network and the Grothlosburg one were separate?”

“They were. But I fixed that. I wouldn’t want to transfer anything living across that tenuous link, but goods and corpses should be fine.”

With a shrug, Norman selected Ashvale as a location. The icon of the dead gron vanished from the death registry. He repeated this with the other six and handed the tablet back to Grobert.

“I should probably get down to the teleporter station. I’m sure there are going to be some confused guards.”

***

Adding the extra seven mages to the production turned out to be the right call. Not all of them were happy about being revived and put back to work but they did it without complaint. A lot of that probably had to do with Norman’s promise to vaporize them once the work was complete.

It was an odd promise to make, but he agreed to it for the three who wanted to go back to being dead after the work was finished.

It took a few weeks to get them up to speed but eventually, their production was back on track. They even started increasing output to the point Norman sent one of the mages out to prep array sites. He hoped that compressing the ground would leave it less prone to damage during the quakes.

***

Eight months later, the next quake struck. Norman was off assembling an array by himself when it hit, so there was no warning. One minute he was standing there piloting the homunculus, the next he was lying on the ground as the world tried to do its best rendition of a maraca. All he could do was hold on until the quake subsided.

When it finally ended, he stood up and brushed himself off. Then he groaned as he saw the damage to the area. The compressed dirt had buckled and heaved, making it impossible to build on until it was fixed. But that wasn’t the real concern.

The quake was earlier than predicted by four days.

He had specifically come out here to try and get this array built ahead of that deadline. And a day later, the earth mages would have come through and positioned the towers.

The array being damaged was annoying, but of more concern was the inaccurate prediction. After the last early event, he had spoken with Admiral Barnes. His people had updated their prediction models and with it, two years were simply wiped from the timeline. If this trend continued, would they lose another year? More?

Their margin for error was shrinking fast. The original estimate had been fifteen years, with the last change, that shrank to thirteen. If this new change lopped off another year, that left them down to twelve. Technically eleven because over a year had already elapsed. And they were only halfway done deploying arrays. It was estimated that another year would be required to get the remaining arrays in place.

That meant they had a year or less of wiggle room. And it wasn’t like he could increase production anymore. He had tried. Every week he scoured the gron obituary to try and snag more mages for the cause. It was slim pickings.

He sighed and walked over to the teleporter. When it didn’t activate, he cursed. Of course! It would be just his luck that the zone he was in got cut off.

After releasing his Command spell, Norman opened his eyes in his real body. He stood and his joints protested at not having been used in some time. When he glanced in the mirror, he winced. His body had decayed quite a bit during his absence. He sucked down a potion and went to take a shower before heading out to notify Grobert of the disconnected teleporter.

The man was not going to be happy, he was probably working harder than most people since he had to establish teleporter lines and keep them all operational. Which was a real struggle when new chunks of land kept plopping down and breaking them.

Unfortunately, the enchanters were too occupied with producing arrays and towers to further dig into gron magitech.

When he arrived at the Ministry, he found Eugene, but no sign of his Chief Advisor. “Where’s Grobert?” He asked as he stepped up to the Commander.

The big guy was a veteran of managing the quakes by now, so Norman didn’t bother asking about how that was going.

“He said he was going to check the lines.”

“I should have guessed.” Of course, the old fart would know to check the lines after a quake. Now he just felt stupid coming here. “Any sign of trouble?”

Eugene shook his head.

Ashvale had finally gotten its own mitigation towers. But going by the intensity of the last quake, they may need to double up the towers sooner than expected.

That wasn’t the trouble Norman was referring to and Eugene knew that. He was referring to the still-missing Donovan. How a man with that large of an ego simply managed to vanish was beyond him.

It was like he had turned into a ghost, which was a real concern considering who his son was. But even if that were the case, there should have been some sign of the man or Vincent. Even someone as paranoid as Toby had left small signs. Norman should know, he had a wraith successfully track the brother-sister pair down and monitor them.

At least until they tried to sneak a group of mind-controlled soldiers into his territory. His countermeasure spell fried both of them along with their ‘army’ as soon as they crossed the border so they were no longer a concern. Norman wasn't even aware they died until a week later when a report came across his desk. He felt no sympathy when he saw the report and filed it away like all the other paperwork.

But not a single sign of the former Council Leader could be found.

If he didn’t know any better, he would have assumed the man left this plane of existence. Given what he knew and suspected of the man it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. But Norman doubted he had left. Donovan did not seem the type of person to simply give up. To hide and wait, sure, but not give up.

That left Norman in a perpetual state of high alert for the last year or so. Not a fun experience. But he knew that the moment he let down his guard, the man would pop up like a weed.