That night, they slept in a market square that had never seen any use because the only buildings that were large enough for them to fit in were ornate and ceremonial, and they had no business turning them into sleeping quarters. At least there in the square, complete with little stalls and wagons, it felt like a diorama or a set rather than a tomb, and Benjamin was grateful for that when the lights of the city slowly dimmed to near-perfect darkness. The end result made the walls and parts of the ceiling look like a vast starfield, and that was almost pleasant. 

Well, that was where they tried to sleep anyway. His friends talked late into the night about what they were going to do to the next sorcerers that crossed their paths. It was a conversation that was well past bloodthirsty, though there were some funny moments. 

Raja kept making jokes about a movie called Snow White, and when Matt finally had enough and asked him to explain it, his only response was, “Look - how can we be in a city with seven dwarves, and you need me to explain to Snow White to you, man? The shit writes itself!”

Benjamin didn’t disagree at all, but he mostly tuned it out. Instead, he lay awake in his bedroll, staring at his codex interface and trying to decide the most likely way that such a spell would have worked and how much mana it would have cost. These weren’t just theoretical questions, either. He would love nothing more than to build magical smart weapons that could selectively target his enemies because, right now, the alternative was carpet bombing. 

Benjamin really only had like three ideas for building new secret weapons, and he was fairly sure that none of them were far enough out of the box that they couldn’t be anticipated by his enemies. He could build magic items with crystalline cores to store an excessive amount of mana the way that Arden’s city defenses had done to build some massive bombs, he could build devices to sniff out the unencrypted commands that the Rhulvinarians issued and use that information to co-opt some measure of their own forces, and he could build a sort centralized network interface that would let him conduct the mana of an army like it was an orchestra rather than a bunch of individuals. 

The first two were so simple he could do them himself, but the third one… well, in any model he tried to code, the mana demands just amped too much to be of any good. It was one thing to cast gale shield and use it to deflect missile barrages or use a modified chains of ice spell to try to stop any sort of artillery the mages had, but to do anything serious, he was going to need to build a central focus that was at least a little stronger than his poor broken soul. 

Benjamin had a few points left. He could get an ability or a new spell, but he held off. He wasn’t sure exactly which rune structures he was going to need to copy. It would be better to wait until they were further along in hardware development. For now, he just looked at the spells he already had, willing some inspiration to strike from the way the runes linked together. What was some advantage he could give to his men when the time came?

He wouldn’t get any answers tonight. That would have been okay, except that he spent half of the time in his dreams slaving away at answers with impossible solutions, and the other half-remembered how easily Arden’s defenders had repelled the waves of men that had been sent to attack them. Only in this version of events he was on the wrong side of the walls and sending hundreds of his own men to their deaths as he tried and failed to reach the walls. 

When he finally had enough of those, he sat up from his fitful sleep, but with no clear indication of whether or not it was day or night, he merely sat there until someone else stirred. Eventually, the lights of the city began to brighten, and together, they made their way up to the Great Hall to figure out the plan. 

At that point, everyone was served warm bread or hot stones, depending on their preferences, and then they got to work. Matt was going to discuss weapons with their chief smith, Regolin, to see if anything could be done to improve their bronze blades to steel. He was just as young as the rest, but because of either fighting or industrial accidents, there were chips and gouges that had been repaired with burnished gold, giving him a veined, marbled effect that the rest of his kin lacked. 

Emma was going to discuss the overall history of the conflict, both recently and in the decades before their arrival, with Phosdin and Granitia to see if they might find some new strategies amongst the very long memories of their hosts. Benjamin was going to work with Jaspric and Feldsparia to finalize his designs, which left Raja to do some hunting. “I’m getting claustrophobic down here in the dark and just want to stretch my legs a bit,” he told their hosts. Truthfully, though, they all felt bad that the stone children were making food for their guests that they weren’t even capable of eating. 

“Three hundred-year-old magical beings have better things to do than bake bread,” Emma had said so succinctly earlier, “So either you’re going to go look for something we can roast, or I am.”

That had decided it. They were here to get a real, tangible benefit for the cause they all cared about, not be freeloaders. So, each of them went off to do their own thing. For Benjamin, the hardest part was dealing with the absolute certainty of the two artisans he’d been paired with. Every idea he brought up was shot down. They knew exactly what stresses a given material could take thanks to the testing they’d helped the Rhulvinarians so long ago.

No matter what he proposed, Feldsparia piped up with, “It won’t work,” or “I don’t care how thick you make it, that much power is going to make it explode.”

It wasn’t until he described the simple bronze rod that he’d poured so much power through to create the ice bridge that allowed them to escape from Arden that he finally got their attention. According to their math, such a thing shouldn’t have worked, but it very clearly did. This was enough to finally get them to engage, and they dived into the equations with both feet. 

For the next few days, his ideas were no longer crazy; they were just difficult. While everyone else checked in on them occasionally, the three of them schemed, and more than that, they tested. The stone children had stockpiled a vast array of metals and alloys for lack of anything better to do over the last few decades, and they tried running different amounts of magical energy through different materials and thicknesses. They did this with and without ornamentation, with and without water, and with and without any other factor that they thought might play a factor, and it turned out that all of them did, to some degree. 

The Summoner Lords made their magic items very pretty, for prestige as much as anything. Benjamin doubted that the Prince he’d killed so recently would have worn the most powerful armaments in the world if they clashed with his outfit on a given day. It turned out that beauty played no part in how quickly it took a given piece of bronze or gold to melt under the strain of a specific spell. What did matter, though, was surface area, and in the case of many decorative elements, that amounted to much the same thing. The more twining ivy leaves that you carved into an object, and the more braided herringbone chains you attached, the more you increased the surface area. 

Benjamin was unsure if the Rhulvinarians had known this at one point and forgotten or if it was just a happy accident. None of them knew why it worked, but it very provably did, and that was all that mattered. And when you added water to the mix, it worked shockingly well. 

“Human machines, not magical ones, but the kind that burn fuel… like the car I told you about, they often use water for cooling,” Benjamin explained to them at one point when they were doing experiments to understand the cooling property of water versus other similar liquids like mineral oil. He didn’t know why Matt’s SUV needed water for its radiator, but he’d seen that information in the owner's manual on their most recent trip, and he dutifully passed that information along. 

After a couple days of testing it looked like his crazy ideas weren’t so crazy. His simpler ones were harder to test. They had to find some way, though. He couldn’t just charge up a 200-karat gemstone and hope that it exploded when they launched it at the target. 

In the end, after a little trial and error, they resorted to building hand grenades and dropping them into an underground chasm a few miles away from Lasthome. It was a spectacular little show, to say the least, and on their second and third rounds of testing, they invited others to come and watch the light show as they tested a variety of different stones and various rune combinations to build a predictable delay into them. 

The result was a brilliant explosion that was a combination of everything. The blasts took on the vivid colors of the rubies and emeralds that they used, as well as the elemental effects of the mostly fire spells that Benjamin used to activate them. The result was an underground fireworks show full of violet pinwheels and bright red starbursts like the world had never seen before. 

After all the equations on chalkboards and discussions of optimal ridge patterns, it was a nice break. It was practically celebratory, but all too soon, they were back to their little workshop as they returned to the hard problems. 

As Jaspric said on more than one occasion, “Making things blow up is easy; it's making them not blow up that’s going to be really hard.”  

Still, despite the fact that it felt like they were going at a snail's pace, they’d made great progress for only a week of focused effort. The three of them were in the middle of discussing the specifications and trying to calculate what the minimum weight could be when an earthquake struck. Instantly, conversation ceased, and Benjamin looked to Feldsparia and Jaspric for guidance as to what they should do while dust fell from the ceiling. 

“Earthquakes happen sometimes,” Jaspric explained. “It’s a perfectly normal natural process. There are any number of reasons that could cause—”

He stopped talking as a bell began tolling and echoed through the caverns to a cramped workshop that they’d managed to wedge themselves inside to try to design what it was he needed. 

“What does that mean?” Benjamin asked. “Is there a fire, or are they just—”

“It means we’re under attack!” Feldspaira said as she stood and moved to the door to grab her crossbow and darted out of the room with surprising speed for a person made of pure stone. Jaspric followed right behind her, but Benjamin was slower. He maneuvered as best he could through the hallways, but they were just a little too small for him to hurry. He needed to, though. He was sure this was their fault somehow. They’d brought the fighting to these people, and somehow, he was going to have to fix that or die in the attempt.