“This is the last one?” Norman asked.

Saliu flipped the page on the clipboard he was holding and scanned down it with his finger before tapping it. “Yes, this is the last one we are scheduled to build.”

He wanted to sigh in relief, but he restrained himself. It had been a rough two years. And the last collapse, less than five months ago, had been brutal. A full ten percent of the arrays, not just the ones Normenia had built, had to be repaired.

This was despite the fact that mitigation towers were in place. That quake was also earlier than estimations again by a full day. A running theme that nobody was happy about.

“What about the other groups?”

“The only group that hasn’t completed their arrays yet is the Gorfan.”

“Of course not. What did they do now?” Norman asked in exasperation. The Gorfan were not well-liked by their neighbors, and the past two years hadn’t improved those relations in the slightest.

He hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to their activities, busy with his own, but he had heard the highlights. Highlights like bombing cities out of existence near where they were going to build the arrays, executing entire populations that refused to allow them to build, and other such atrocities. It was almost like they were using this tragedy as an excuse to get rid of their opposition.

There had been efforts to lean on the Gorfan, specifically Mylara, to curtail these actions. But there was only so much that could be done. And so much people were willing to do. There was a worry that meddling too much would anger them. The thought was if the rest of the nations leaned on them too much, the Gorfan might simply stop helping or actively try to hinder the deployment of arrays. And that would put everyone at risk. Of course, the Gorfan knew this and dragged their feet through the entire project. Not enough to actually cause the project to fail, but enough to keep people worried.

Norman didn’t believe it for a moment. It was a power play, simple as that. The Gorfan were in the same boat as everyone else if this project failed. They wanted everyone to think they were in control.

“How far behind are they?”

“Not enough to make a difference anymore,” Saliu replied tersely as he rested his hands behind his back. “…There have been rumors of other nations willing to get rid of them once this threat has passed. Perhaps the Gorfan are aware of these rumors and this is why they are choosing to act out?”

“It doesn’t matter. They are only hurting themselves by acting like this. But enough about them, let's move on to other issues.”

“The mitigation towers?” Saliu asked knowingly.

Norman nodded.

“Production has ramped up since the arrays were completed. But not as much as we would have liked.”

“What's the problem?” With the earthquake intensity increasing, this was not welcome news.

“There isn’t one. We simply overestimated how much more we could produce once the arrays were complete. They were two completely different construction methods. The arrays required no input from earth or stone mages and that’s where most of our manufacturing capacity comes from for the towers.”

Norman didn’t much like Saliu’s lecturing tone, but they were both frustrated and the man was right.

“Alright, do the best you can, we need these additional layers of protection for the arrays as soon as possible.” The jorik man nodded before walking off.

One layer of protection simply wasn’t enough to curb the increasing severity of earthquakes anymore. The last collapse-triggered quake registered as a 5.0 after it made it through the towers. The one before that was only a three.

Nobody could say why the quake intensity was increasing but it was. It wasn’t like anything like this had ever occurred before. In the end, it didn’t matter why it was happening, they just needed to stop it from damaging the arrays.

Once that was done, then they could increase the protection around the cities. The choice to prioritize protection over the arrays was something he had made long ago. A few hundred destroyed homes or dead was a drop in the bucket if the arrays failed.

Besides, it was too late to do anything else. There was already growing concern that the arrays wouldn’t charge in time. Norman could admit the timeframe was going to be close. There was also the likelihood that all of the participants in this grand scheme would lose contact with one another in the coming years.

There simply wasn’t time to keep rebuilding transportation routes. There was also a resource shortage. And nobody had time to go digging for new minerals.

Norman’s Transmutation spell helped, but it was slow. Far too slow to keep up with the demands Grobert kept insisting on.

***

It took another year, and surviving through two more collapses for the additional layers of protection to be put in place for the arrays.

The Gorfan had also finally completed their work. A fat lot of good that did. Their feet dragging had reduced the margin of error for failed arrays down to five percent. It would have been closer to nothing if the other nations hadn’t stepped in to offset the Gorfan’s lack of motivation.

This unexpected outpouring left those countries even poorer, and it meant they needed to keep a closer eye on the arrays. Normenia wasn’t excluded from this assistance but their coffers didn’t suffer nearly as much.

Thinking back on it, this might have been Gorfan’s plan all along. Keep their main competitors busy and broke so they could continue their expansionist ways without repercussions after this threat was over.

It was infuriating to think a country would rather use this opportunity to maneuver itself into an advantageous position during this looming crisis rather than actually help prevent it. But it fits with the Gorfan’s previous underhanded tactics.

But that wasn’t his or Normenia’s concern anymore. The fact is, the Gorfan Princi- sorry, the Gorfan Union as it was calling itself now, was further away than the Empire had been before they started placing arrays. Honestly, he didn’t even know where the Empire was anymore. There had been so much expansion thanks to the collapses that he couldn’t keep track of all these places. The only lines of teleporters Grobert maintained now were to and from Grothlosburg, the Alacala, the Commonwealth slash California, and their arrays which were spread across multiple zones to keep them from overlapping. And even that was stretching their resources.

He turned his attention back to the manufacturing of towers. There was no intention to stop making more of the towers, but they did slow down to allow people to finally get some much-needed rest. Just because his people were undead and tireless, didn’t mean they didn’t get burned out. His people had worked non-stop since this project began. And he couldn’t be prouder of what they accomplished.

He gave the all-clear to the workers and headed home.

The first thing he did upon seeing Kalia, was hug her. She reciprocated the gesture and they just stood there for a minute, basking in each other’s embrace. It had been eight months since they last saw each other. Far too long to go without seeing your loved one but it was unavoidable with the current problems. The demands on each of them for the last year were too much for them to even sit down and have a meal together.

The two stared into each other's eyes, a knowing smirk growing on his wife's face. Norman quirked a suggestive eyebrow and she nodded. With a smile of his own, the pair headed upstairs.

***

After a rather lengthy round of bedroom fun, Norman handed his wife one of the pills to kill herself. When she didn’t immediately take it, he looked over at her.

“I wanna have a baby.”

“…” Norman’s mind went completely blank at that simple statement.

He had never pictured himself as a father. Hell, he hadn’t ever pictured himself as married, or leading a country of undead either, but life didn’t seem to care much what he thought.

“Are you sure?” He asked.

She nodded tentatively, her eyes starting to go red and moist.

“What’s wrong?’ He asked, hugging his now crying wife.

She wiped the tears away and sniffled. “Am I being selfish by wanting a child when the world is falling apart?”

He kissed his wife behind her ear as he held her from behind while they lay on the bed. “Only if the world was actually ending,” he spoke softly. “But we made sure that won’t happen.”

She managed a laugh through her sobs.

The pair lay like that for the next few hours, just comforting one another. Kalia knew the same things Norman knew, so she was aware of the possibility that all their efforts were for naught. He didn’t need to remind her of that though. There were times he wished he could forget that ominous fact himself.

***

Norman kicked at the destroyed pieces of the array, his anger spiking. He took a deep calming breath. Once he wasn’t a boiling pot of rage, he took in the site with a more clinical view.

The idiots who had attacked it were lying in pieces around the array. “That’s what you fucking get for messing with five years of stored energy. Fucking morons,” he muttered.

He had known back when they were coming up with this idea, that dumb people would eventually surface. But even he hadn’t predicted the scale of this cult of oblivion's actions.

They viewed the end of the world as a sign of God’s displeasure. Even though the group was made up of multiple species who all had differing gods and religions, they somehow all came to the same conclusion. Saving the world was against their god’s will. Norman had long ago stopped believing in gods. If they existed, they either didn’t care or couldn’t help. Or worse, they wanted this to happen.

Thankfully the cult was found early. Nobody was in the mood at this late stage in the project to sympathize with these idiots. They and their cohorts were quickly rounded up and dealt with. Unfortunately, it wasn’t before they did some damage.

It wasn’t enough to fuck everyone else over, but it had come close. There was now only a one percent buffer on the remaining arrays. And there was no way to actively defend them at all times. He didn’t have time for this bullshit. He wanted to spend time with his pregnant wife and son Caleb who had just turned four a few months ago. Instead, he was out here dealing with this shit.

For a moment Norman very much wanted to resurrect these idiots and torture their souls for the rest of eternity.

He didn’t do that. He did resurrect them though. This ensured they couldn’t get resurrected somewhere else to cause trouble later. Then he trapped their souls and burned away any evidence of their existence.

He may not crave vengeance, but he had learned painful lessons to never give an enemy a second chance if he could prevent it.

After dealing with the four cult members, Norman cleared up the remnants of the array. There was still a lot of gold in the surviving parts. Gold that was very much needed back home.

As he stepped back through the teleporter, he could hear the noise of the city even through the thick stone walls of the building. He handed the spell anchor to one of the guards on duty. “Get this to the Chief Advisor.”

The man saluted and hurried off. The gold would help Grobert maintain the teleportation network.

He stepped outside and was met with a wall of noise and a very crowded street. People did their best to avoid him and his guards, but they still had to push through the mass of undead to get anywhere.

Ashvale had exploded in size over the last few years. Deaths due to illness, disease, or even just from the collapses. Then there were the people who wanted to become undead because of the perks.

Ashvale didn’t just accept anyone and everyone, those days were long since over. But even being choosy, they were now bursting at the seams. His small town now housed over a hundred thousand undead and maybe five thousand living. To say Ashvale was booming would be an understatement. People flocked to the prosperous city. And why wouldn’t they? It had all the amenities of a major city with a small-town feel to it still. Crime was also almost non-existent with the guard, Death Knights, and Wraiths keeping an eye out for trouble.

The significant growth did mean people were squashed in a bit more than he would have liked but that was unavoidable at the moment. To help alleviate the press of bodies, some people were building houses outside the walls. It had been discouraged, but there was nobody available to really stop the quickly thrown-together shacks. Some were so bad they collapsed during the last quake. But he simply couldn’t spare the earth mages to help expand the city or fortify those homes. Not until after this crisis was over at least.

After two hours of navigating the packed streets, he finally made it home. Kalia greeted him with a kiss.

“How did it go?”

He sighed and recalled his armor.

“That bad?” She asked.

“It wasn’t good. But I don’t really want to talk about it. Where is Caleb?”

She rolled her eyes and rubbed her growing belly. “He’s off playing with Princess and the others. That boy has no fear.”

Norman chuckled and rubbed his wife’s belly. “Takes after his mother.” It was true, his son was fearless. The boy had started climbing as soon as he could get his grubby hands around a tree and even when he hurt himself, he only cried for a moment before picking himself up and trying again.

She smiled and slapped him lightly. The pair held hands as they walked into the courtyard. There he saw Caleb screaming in delight as he rode Dante around like a horse while the other two hellhounds gave chase.

He could only shake his head at the absurdity of it all.

Dante took a hard turn and Caleb was sent tumbling off his ‘mount’. The boy rolled along the dirt but quickly picked himself up. His son looked a bit odd wearing a small suit of Bone Armor, but it kept him from getting injured too badly.

“Daddy!” the boy squealed in delight as he saw Norman. He raced over as fast as his four-year-old legs would take him and hugged his leg.

Norman picked up the rambunctious boy. “You’re not being a menace to Princess and the others, are you?”

The boy shook his head vehemently making Norman smile.

“Ahem,” A quiet voice intruded on their time.

Norman turned to face his long-time assistant Jacob.

“It is time for dinner, Lord and Lady Ashvale.”

Before Norman could reply, Caleb squealed in delight and managed to wiggle out of his arm. The boy dropped to the ground and ran toward the dining room.

Kalia shook her head. “I swear, the only thing that boy loves more than playing is eating.”

Norman chuckled in agreement as they followed the trail of their son.