Of course we do some preparations as the time (and the enemy army) marches closer. I give everyone in my party an item enchanted via a casting of Refuge (it’s a spell that enchants an object to grant a one-time error-free teleport to the caster's “abode” - which is a heavily fortified tower, at the moment, in my case) - and as it's my spell, it should still work without the dungeon. It's a panic button, basically. I also drop Call Construct on each of the Adamantine Golems. Waste not, want not, after all. If they happen to get crushed by the collapsing dungeon, they'll be fine shortly after I pull them back out.

And of course, I unlock the dungeon long enough to get Oscar and the two Adamantine Golems inside.  They don't get XP, but oh well.  I also stock the walls with more summoned creatures. The Summon Golem spell supplements my mindless minions while Summon Nature's Ally IX gets me Storm Giants to act as beatsticks with their swords, and artillery with their oversized arrows. I could summon more Trumpet Archons with Summon Monster IX, but they'll be a lot less useful once I shut down the dungeon.

And, of course, I keep things going on the economic front.  It takes a few weeks for my directly hired harvesters to collect all the food Oscar made… and I do start on selling access to the diplomatic plane I built for harvesting purposes. A silver for as much food as you can carry… and the non-magical nature of the place means that folks with bags of holding and such don't have a meaningful advantage over everyone else; it's all knowledge of plants and how much strength you have: Simple backpacks and sacks rule. Carts, pack animals, and wheelbarrows are barred for now. I'll let them in eventually, but I want to start with the folks just feeding themselves and their families.

I don't slack off on the political front, either. The coming battle, my obvious combat effectiveness, the giant wall from nowhere, and my seemingly limitless army of magical creatures (which is actually pretty close to accurate…) get me my ‘in’ to politics, and yes, soon enough I'm officially the leader of the seventh noble house of Brasilia. Apparently this requires I have an heir. Well… one's on the way, and David's in line until then.  Also, we're now known on the streets as The Foodlords.  Which… works, I guess? We're selling it cheap….

And the sale of food, and control of a few gates to the city, has a nice effect: I do, indeed, restart trade with other cities (although admittedly, I had to plant some rumors to make that work, plus negotiate a bit with the other noble houses to get them knock it off with the confiscation stuff).  Iron is (for now) much less expensive here, which makes it a staple of their exports. Food is currently cheap due to my business (and yes, people resell), but textiles start coming in, which were decidedly lacking before.  It's nice to see people wearing better clothes.

But, of course, time marches on. And soon enough, I'm looking at the army with this me's eyes, from up over the city with Wanda. It's mostly humanoids; I roughly estimate their forces at ten thousand each of pikemen and archers, plus about a thousand armored knights on horseback, and an associated baggage train and camp followers. They're well equipped too - they have about a hundred each of catapults, ballistae, and siege towers (basically towers on wheels, with walls of thick hide, intended to provide cover while people climb up on the defender's walls). They have less mundane forces as well - centaurs, minotaurs, hippogryphs, pegasi, harpies… I'm not seeing anything higher end, like Dragons, Giants, or medusa… no golems either, come to think of it. I do see what's probably a contingent of mages… they'll be quite useless, shortly. And… ah, they're setting up camp. I watch, and soon enough, the entire city is surrounded. Which is fine: We do not have any meaningful supply lines to cut off.

They do, however, have more soldiers than this city has people. That would be worrisome, if I weren't a dirty theoretical optimizing cheater.

But I don't strike yet.  I need this city to realize just how deep a hole they've dug with the deities, so that they'll be willing to actually accept the rules I'll be laying out. Honestly, this invasion is probably going to accelerate my timetable considerably - it will make a nice combination of show of power on my part along with the consequences of their actions. Nothing like a good scare to get people to move.

Sadly, they delay the festivities, by doing a sensible thing: They send a single messenger under a white flag to the gate.  As luck would have it: Not mine. Pity: I could have just told him off to trigger the attack immediately. Ah well.

Wanda's doing the work of keeping everyone up to date on troop movements, and I simply wait for David to report in on the results of the parley. I need the battle to commence, at least for long enough for everyone to know it's quite real… before I end it very abruptly.

I take a moment to update David, 《If the demands of peace amount to little more than cleaning up the city's act, then go ahead and vote to accept, as that's the end result I want, so it'd be a nice shortcut. If the demands include meaningful tribute, vassalage, or anything worse, please decline the offer at this time. I don't want to be stuck paying out forever or anything, and I have a show of force planned.》

I get a chuckle back, 《They cannot demand so little. An army like that is EXPENSIVE, and they'll need to pay the troops. They literally can't demand anything less than everything.  And here he is…》

He pauses for a while, and I wait patiently, 《... and that's exactly it. Complete surrender is the demand, with the understanding that they'll take everything and sell everyone as slaves, burning whatever is left… not that anything here will burn, except coal. The idiots… now for talks…》

I wait a bit longer, and David gives me the final report, 《Well, I got them to avoid accepting. Barely. It was a narrow vote, though. Try not to delay too long, eh?》

I chuckle back, 《Hope springs eternal. I figure on hitting them when they actually engage. I want my opponents viscerally frightened about what I can pull off when I'm angry - and for that, they need to fear what I end for them.》

《They already do. The only real reason they didn't accept now is that most of them think they can run away successfully during the actual fighting, and take much of their riches with them. The cowards.》I roll my eyes at David's words... not that he can see, but it's reflexive.

《They're not dragons,》 is my only reply.

《Definitely not,》David agrees.

We wait… and wait… and wait… I end up covering for Wanda twice so she can drain her milk tanks before they attack...  at dawn, of course.

I was planning on waiting until they actually reached the walls… but I can see and hear ridiculously clearly from here: Guts spilled from arrows, people's skin bubbling as my masers hit them, the screams of the dying… no, just… no. So I make my move at first blood:

《Oscar, it's time.》 He knows what he needs to do. We planned this.

While he works, I cast Mythic Time Stop, to give myself hours to do my portion of this mess.  Technically, it doesn't stop time: It speeds me up to the point where everything else seems to be stopped… but generally, the distinction is petty. It prevents me from doing things to people directly while it's running… but I can do anything to the terrain or myself, and can engage in summoning.

Things are a lot quieter now. Completely quiet. I'd probably be able to hear my heartbeat, if I had one. But I know what I need to do: I start by casting Superior Invisibility on myself (it’s from the Spell Compendium: Invisibility, but also works against other senses, AND beats See Invisibility, Glitterdust, Faerie Fire, and Invisibility Purge, AND doesn't end when I attack someone). I also make sure I have both Chain Spell and Wish via my floating feats from spells. I then start making Time Clones of myself: A few hundred of them, and directing them to spread out so the entire enemy army is covered.

Once I am satisfied that there's enough of me, I let the Time Stop expire, and have my copies spam Chain Spell and Persistent Spell on Wish for a Chained and Persistent Trap the Soul.  Normally, that's a waste: But Wish makes a nice flex spell if they need something, and I don't pay components anyway. Trap the Soul, despite the name, traps a single target permanently in a gem.  Chain spell means we can hit an extra huge number of people per casting (one per caster level, to a maximum of twenty extra targets, although the secondary targets have a reduced difficulty for making the save), and Persistent Spell means they have to make the save twice to get out of it… and each clone can cast that five times per round, affecting twenty one soldiers per casting… if they're grouped up enough (chain spell comes with a thirty foot limit on secondary targets). They're not usually perfectly dense, of course, and one in four hundred makes both saves.

But I can make an arbitrarily large number of my copies, enough that each soldier can be a target at least twice in the first round after I let time resume. Which means only one in a hundred sixty thousand of the rank and file manage to avoid getting sucked into gemstones… and they don't have that many. In seconds, the field is empty of everyone but the dead and my copies, who deposit the nearly thirty thousand soul gems in my crafting plane.

Of course, I always knew the rank and file soldiers were going to be the easy part.