Before they could get back to doing anything productive, Benjamin had to rest. All of them did. Somehow, they’d managed to come through that tide of green blood without a single casualty, but as a result, everyone was exhausted. 

So he kept the breaches iced over, and once everyone had eaten and recovered the following day, Benjamin melted his tiny glaciers with fire spray so that those entrances could be more permanently sealed with stone. He’d expected them to be bricked up with stone and mortar, but it was only when they started closing them up with their strange stone magic that he realized he hadn’t seen a trace of mortar in the cavern.

Instead, the stone children sang together in a teeth-rumbling choir that made the bedrock go as soft as clay, and then they slowly molded it back to the shape it had been before in a process that had more in common with the potter's wheel or a bonsai gardener’s deliberation than any construction crew he’d seen before. No one said anything to Benjamin about the buildings he’d detonated with his crystal experiment, but the look in the eyes that the stone children gave him said plenty. 

Of course, on the flip side, Phosdan and the others were less angry than he thought they would be when it came time to tell them that he and his friends were ultimately to blame for this.

“Did you think that when you started to sack their plantations and kill their summoners, there wouldn’t be innocents caught in the crossfire,” Granitia asked. “Every fight with those bastards kicks up a hornet’s nest and a full-blown war.? Forget about it.”

“Honestly, I’m surprised this is the worst they’ve done,” Feldsparia agreed, “When they attacked the coast for the first time, they created tidal waves and—” 

“Don’t give them any ideas,” Granitia sighed. “We both know that as soon as they lose their foothold and the humans retake their cursed harbors, they’ll do all that and more.”

Benjamin filed that information away under 'end of the world' but otherwise said nothing. He and Raja helped them repair the damage as best they could by lugging rubble into neat piles to be melted back into the floor while Matt and Emma went on a second purge through the tunnels. 

They knew they’d never get them all, but once this was done, Benjamin planned to do another run through those caverns in a few days and purge them all with fire one more time just to be sure. 

He mentioned that he’d interrogated their ghostly prisoner to the stone children, but he spared them the gory details. He saved those for when he was alone at night with his friends. It was there that he told them that the same tool that shackled all of their souls had been intentionally crippled by the ones that installed it. 

“So theres is what… better than ours?” Emma asked. “In every single way? Then why are they losing so bad?”

“Not every way,” Benjamin corrected her. “They have access to thousands of spells and abilities that we don’t and can shift between them in ways we can’t, for starters. Some of those abilities are—”

“But you shift your abilities around all the time. Ours too. Isn’t that pretty much the same thing?” Raja asked.

“Yeah, I mean, I am, but that’s only because I’m hacking their system,” Benjamin said. “It's not something that’s normally allowable, and the only way I can do it is by editing the code of the spell each time. They just click a button and move their shit around.”

“So the Rhulvinairans can come back to life, they’re more powerful than us, and they can adapt to our strengths and weaknesses. They’re unbeatable, immortal monsters.” Matt said with a shrug. “I miss anything?”

“They have secret back doors into everything, and no matter how many of those I find and close, they’ll probably still find a way to get inside our heads and scramble our brains or trigger the self-destruct,” Benjamin smiled grimly, “But no, other than that - I think you just about covered it.” 

“Okay, so then what’s the good news?” Raja asked, with a hopeful expression on his face. “There is good news, isn’t there?”

“Sure,” Benjamin answered with a smile. “If we die, we’ll die together. Best news I got.”

Raja’s smile drooped, but the hopelessness of the line was enough to make Matt laugh. It started as a chuckle, but as it spread throughout the group, it became enough of a belly laugh that it echoed strangely off the cavern’s ceiling far above them. 

After that, they talked about the goblins, his bombs, and the other weapons he was only part-way finished with designing. He also told them his supposition about the prince's words and that the further they got from the frontier, the less well-equipped he expected the defenses to be, though he admitted that was a gut feeling more than anything. 

They all took advantage of the downtime to handle their level-up, too. Each of them had finally leveled up again in the short, violent conflict, though Benjamin noted he only actually achieved level 8 when he had immolated the flock of paper birds. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Finally, the day after that, Benjamin rejoined his hosts in their cramped workshop, where they got back to the literal drawing board. Only the designs on the bombs had been finalized, but they would be of limited utility. Though obviously effective, they were each only a single use, and once they left the caverns of Lasthome, Benjamin was not optimistic about his odds of finding any more fist-sized diamonds or rubies. They experimented with quartz crystals that he made with earth works, but they were of such inferior quality that they were closer to firecrackers than hand grenades or artillery shells. 

There was the slight problem of getting them to the enemy and getting out of range before the larger ones blew, but Benjamin had an idea for that, too. They could easily launch the things to try to breach a wall with a catapult or something similar, but that would make for the most expensive siege in history. He thought leaving them behind as traps might be a better move. After all, they knew the runes required to create a rift beacon, thanks to all the ones they’d destroyed, so it would be the easiest thing in the world to build those in a few strategic places and leave whoever came through the portal a nice welcoming gift in the form of a couple tons of diamond infused shrapnel.  

None of that was what they were focused on today, though. Today, they were trying to put the finishing touches on Benjamin’s Focus.

“You’ll never be able to pick this thing up, you know,” Jasparian told him. 

“That’s what they invented carts for,” Benjamin agreed as he studied the final drawing of the giant gilded bronze cylinder. Though he had some hopes that he might be able to miniaturize it someday, if he wanted to route the mana of his army through a single console, it was going to have to be pretty beefy, at least for now. 

Up until now, he’d made do, binding a single enchantment to whatever crude object he had around that could take the strain. What they were going to build here was a quantum leap beyond that, though. This was the product of a hundred intentional design decisions. 

The focus was a pair of nested cylinders with a patch panel and a water reservoir to assist with cooling. Each of those panels was going to be physically engraved with a ???

Given the temperatures that they projected this thing might run at when he was going full throttle, he expected that it would be somewhere closer to a steam engine than a true computer, but it would do for now. 

With this, he would no longer need to run the risk of channeling large-scale versions of his spells through his fragile soul. Instead, he would be able to operate at a scale that even the most powerful Summoner Lords they’d encountered to date would find challenging. 

But I’ll be tied to a wagon and basically a sitting duck while I do it, he sighed to himself. 

Still, that was what his friends, and hopefully his armies, were for. It was just like that cursed fox demon had told him at the very beginning of all this: mages needed a team, or they were dead meat.  

They debated the finer points for hours, adding more ridges here and increased depth to the carvings there as they went. It was all to increase surface area points, of course, but by the end, he had no doubt this thing was going to look far fancier than the barrel inside a barrel that he’d imagined initially. 

He was right, too. Once they’d decided on every detail and started working, there was little for him to do besides watch everything take shape. So he sat near the forges while they hammered the ingots into approximate size before taking them to their lathes and workbenches for more detailed work. 

While the stone children slaved away in slow motion, thanks to the hasten effects of his codex, he worked on the new spells he could use with what they were making. Benjamin wasn’t sure if it was because of everything that was going on, or this magical world, but no matter how much he  improved his intelligence, he never felt a lot smarter. What he did feel, though, was small. 

He’d been thinking too small this whole time. They all had, except for maybe Matt. His friend was using ferrous armor now to isolate himself from the effects of hostile magic since all the healing he ever needed would be inside his shell with him in the same way that he’d been using healing magic to augment martial abilities almost since the beginning. 

Why hadn’t Benjamin been doing likewise, though? He could see the rune patterns of his friend's spells, and he’d glimpsed plenty of spells on the character sheets of the men and women he’d freed, but for whatever reason, he had it stuck in his head that he needed to cast variations of the spells he’d purchased and that simply wasn’t the case. Those were just chains to bind him. 

He needed to do more with what he had, so he started trying to figure out what a mass healing spell would look like with Matt’s runes or if something like artillery was possible if he borrowed a few things from Raja. While he doubted he could make a whole army sneak the way that Emma was able to. A single jolt of hasten for a few seconds across his entire force at the moment two opposing forces met mid-charge could be the difference between life and death for dozens.

And now that he couldn’t simply get the other side to switch teams at the drop of a hat, a lot of people were going to have to die. Too many, honestly, but it was what it was. 

For the next few days, that was all he did. He watched his focus take shape, and he worked on his spells and waited for the time to pass. And then, eventually, more than a week after the four of them had arrived, it was done. His weapon had been created, and they were finally ready for whatever it was that was going to happen next.