Donovan was inspecting one of the many projects he had going when his ring vibrated. “Keep up the pace, I need this project done as soon as possible.”
The worker nodded obediently before hurrying back to his station. Once the man was gone, Donovan unhurriedly walked to his office. If the vibrating ring signified what it should, he was ecstatic. But it wouldn’t do to let others know that.
Once secure inside his office, he began chanting and weaving a spell that seemed to pull from the shadows in the room to form the spell circle. The words and gestures were unnecessary as he could cast the spell from his mind but it paid to practice. When it was completed, he pushed environmental mana into the spell and it collapsed into itself to form a glowing red rift that seemed to tear itself into reality.
“YOU WISH TO TRAVEL?” a grinding otherworldy voice asked inside his mind.
“I do,” he proclaimed, shaking off the creature's presence. He pushed thoughts of where he wished to go to the being.
“VERY WELL. STEP INSIDE.”
The drorgoth were one of the more dangerous species he had bonded under contract, but they did provide a few interesting abilities. One of them was the rift jump. With his other ways of travel cut off, he was forced to rely on them more often as his portal mage was busy with a more important task. He stepped inside the rift and found himself standing inside a magical bubble that tore through the surrounding landscape in a blur. Despite the speed the magical bubble was moving, it would take time to reach the destination.
Donovan had little to entertain his mind except watch the huge volcanoes in the distance as well as the black rock that made up most of the drorgoth’s landmass, obscured by the thick mist yellow mist of sulfur as it was.
The choaking sulfur mist that suffused this planet wasn’t enough to mask the towering spires and millions upon millions of inhabitants though. Most of whom were little more than slaves to the overlords. To the drorgoth, strength was everything.
If he were a religious person, this was as close to a depiction of hell as he could imagine. Knowing what he knew, the psychic bleed-through from this world was probably responsible for those depictions in the first place. Much like the stories of dragons, elves, and dwarves.
After what felt like hours his trip came to an end and the bubble he was traveling in attached itself to another rift. When he stepped through, he found himself standing inside the Golatian Empire’s throne room. That was one perk of the rift, it bypassed the real world and any possible measure to keep him out.
Two things quickly caught his eye as he looked around. The first was the corpse of the insufferable Lord Norman. And the second was the radiating orb floating near the First Prince. He put on his customary smirk when he spotted the filled soul trap. The two princes wouldn’t be able to see the change to the magical device signifying it contained a soul, but Donovan could.
“I take it you were successful?” He had honestly given these archaic nobles less than a fifty-fifty chance at succeeding in bringing down Lord Norman. He wouldn’t admit it out loud, but Lord Norman was a rather troublesome foe to deal with.
Instead of answering, the First Prince lobbed the trap his way. Donovan ignored the blatant act and caught the trap in his bare hand. Earning a momentary look of surprise from the First Prince. The smirk never left his face. Of course, he had taken precautions against the devices. It would have been the height of foolishness not to. So while it looked to be sitting in his open hand, it was in reality cushioned on a thin plane of force. One he almost always kept active.
He held the orb up in front of him and let out a soft chuckle. He had finally done it. Finally managed to get Lord Norman in a position where he could ‘negotiate’ properly with the man. Donovan couldn’t afford to have someone with Norman’s power running loose. Look how much damage the man had done to his plans already. He needed to put a collar on him so he could put the man’s talents to proper use.
Donovan’s celebratory thoughts were interrupted as a soft tapping sound intruded on the room. All eyes turned toward the doorway at the far side.
***
Norman strode into the throne room again, this time with a staff. He froze for a moment when he spotted an unexpected guest.
He wasn’t sure if that moment of shock was enough for Donovan to prepare a defense against the invisible Death Ray he sent his way, but he would look back on this moment many times and wonder.
A shimmering barrier exploded from Donovan where the spell had struck, falling like broken glass as the mana it was made from disintegrated as it absorbed his spell.
“You fucking idiots!” Donovan roared and took to the air. “I asked you to make sure of one simple thing before involving me, and you somehow managed to screw that up!”
“Watch your tongue, outsider,” The First Prince hissed as he started to gather his power again.
As the two bickered, Norman didn’t relent. Now that he finally had proof of Donovan’s interference, he wasn’t about to let the man go without a fight. But he also had the First and Second Princes to contend with. And while his previous attack had been meant to gauge their abilities, this time he wasn’t holding back.
But Donovan wasn’t caught off guard. The man had come prepared. Spells struck multiple layers of protection around the man, slowly whittling them away, yet it seemed futile. The man didn’t strike back, he only sniffed disdainfully.
“Your failure here has cost me dearly,” he directed his disgust at the two princes, completely ignoring Norman. “If you manage to survive, do not think I will forget this.”
Both men seemed just as mad as the Council Leader and sent powerful attacks at Donovan, but the man simply scoffed and gave a negligent wave of his arm. Whatever Donovan had just done, it had a powerful effect. Norman felt the disruption to the mana in the air from that single motion but his spells were unaffected. That wasn’t true for the princes. Both of their domains collapsed like soap bubbles being popped as the mana rippled chaotically through the room. This sent both men tumbling to the ground.
After temporarily disrupting the two men, Donovan turned toward Norman. “Do not think this is over, Lord Norman. I will get what I want eventually.”
Unable to puncture his defenses, Norman was not able to stop the Council Leader from tearing a rip in reality and sliding through it like the cockroach he was.
The tear closed a moment later, leaving him blinking in confusion. Soon his mind cleared and he was left staring at where the impossible crack had been only a moment before. He ground his teeth in frustration for allowing the bastard to escape but turned his fury toward the two others in the room. Both of whom were quickly recovering and drawing their domains back to themselves.
“You fuckers picked the wrong side to back. Time for round two.”
When the soul trap had touched his previous homunculus body, Norman had played along. It would have been quite different had he not tested that possibility back when he was creating the golems. If there had been even an iota of a chance that they had his true soul, he would have leveled the castle by detonating his mana. But he knew the soul trap could only capture the soul he used to animate the constructs. He was immune to the trap’s effects when using Command.
The only real issue was that once the soul was taken from the construct, the thing was on borrowed time. So he hadn’t been able to push the princes as far as he would have liked on the first go around. He knew he was likely to die at least once during this encounter. So he had built more than one of the bodies beforehand. And thanks to Grobert, they were all situated somewhere inside the city, ready to be activated.
As he avoided the domain attacks, Norman struck back with Mana Vacuum, Death Ray, Flaming Skull, and Lingering Death. He could afford to be wasteful in his spell casting because the mana was being provided by the reserves stored in the bodies and channeled through the staff.
Mana Vacuum had the most immediate effect on their domain and surroundings, so he quickly started forming a new spell to take advantage of that fact while he fought off the rather primitive magical attacks from the two princes.
That was one of the downsides he had learned about having a domain. Sure you had near complete control over your element within that area, but you were severely limited on the types of spells you could form. Any competent elemental mage could do what these two were doing and then some. The only difference was one needed to form the spell before using it while the Princes could just will it to happen. This fact also made them lazy.
As the fight raged through the room, more and more of the walls and ceiling started to take damage as attacks missed their mark or were redirected. Norman could already feel the strain on the body he was inhabiting. The conduit staff that Kalia had made for him, wasn’t designed to transmit this much mana. And he certainly wouldn’t risk the staff Saliu and Nolia had crafted for him here.
Eventually, the Princes realized he was weakening and struck a deadly blow, severing his head from his shoulders with a blade of wind.
***
Shaladi collapsed to his hands and knees, sucking in a ragged breath as he tried to recover some strength. When he looked over, Cadian wasn’t faring much better. Had he the energy, it would have been an opportune moment to end his brother once and for all. But the battle with the necromancer had lasted hours. And the room was almost completely destroyed.
He laughed and got up on shaky legs. “We, we did it,” he proclaimed. Then a clapping came from the doorway. When he looked up, his face paled.
“Round three.”
***
Cadian crushed the impudent man with a stone fist before collapsing back into the rubble of the castle. He knew he wouldn’t have long to rest and recover. This man… he never stopped, he could not be killed. It should be impossible, yet he had seen it over and over again as their fight dragged on and on. He hadn’t fought this hard since his time as the Imperial Servator of the Legion, before the fall.
His brother, Second Prince Shaladi had fallen the previous day, his days spent drinking and screwing not serving him well in this fight of attrition. And now his corpse lay somewhere buried in the remains of the White City. The castle had not contained the fighting for long, it had spilled outside and raged across the entire area, neither side concerning themselves with collateral damage. The First Prince because he was fighting for his very life, and the other because he simply did not care.
A shifting of stones got his attention and Cadian rose once more as the man called Lord Norman climbed over a pile of debris in the distance.
“Round twenty,” the man declared, not sounding tired in the least.
***
Norman was annoyed at just how resilient the First Prince was turning out to be. Unlike his brother, the First Prince’s element protected against most of his spells. Honestly, it was a bit of a surprise that the man hadn’t tried to flee through the ground. He certainly had the power to do so. It was the first thing he would have done if he was in the Prince’s place if he realized he was fighting a losing battle.
And the prince had to know this was a losing battle by now. None of the hundreds of soldiers or those with callings, that the man had ordered to defend him, were able to change the course of this fight. They were all dead, either struck directly or hit by errant blasts of deadly magic as the two decimated the area. They had no chance to survive in a fight of this magnitude. But the prince stubbornly persisted and Norman was forced to switch tactics once again. He was getting low on homunculi, but he was pretty certain the prince would run out of mana before that point. At least he hoped so.
When this fight was all said and done, he was going to have to collect those diadems both men wore. It was ridiculous just how much they improved their mana.
Shards of rock flew in Norman’s direction as the First Prince hurled a handful of broken debris his way. He ignored the incoming projectiles as his new Transmutation Shield reduced them to dust.
He fired back a Disintegration Beam. The spell tore a gaping hole in the armor around the prince but failed to hit its target within and the hole was quickly regenerated.
This went back and forth, much like it had for the last few days. Norman spent half his concentration on the fight, while the other half was rapidly testing new spell ideas in his mind. Once he found something that worked, he would deploy it to devastating effect, and the prince would quickly adapt or avoid the attacks.
Unlike the prince, however, he didn’t need to sleep, didn’t need to eat, or drink. There was only a matter of time before the prince made a mistake or a spell Norman created managed to finish off the fight. And it needed to end soon. He needed to go after Donovan.
He avoided the spikes of stones spearing up from the ground to impale him. The Prince was becoming predictable, and Norman hoped the spell he was working on would be the coup de grâce.
It took another few hours before he finally saw his opportunity. The prince stumbled slightly as a pile of debris shifted under him. Something that should not have been possible with the man’s domain. But it was clear he was flagging.
Norman didn’t hesitate upon seeing this opening. A modified Disintegration Beam struck out. The prince, despite his exhausted state, threw up a stone barrier to intercept the spell. Only this time the beam wasn’t stopped. The Mana Vacuum Norman had integrated into the spell tore through the protection and the stone armor around the prince like a bullet through tissue paper.
For a moment, there was silence. Soon that was broken as chunks of rock cracked and began falling to the ground.
Where once stood the towering stone form of the First Prince, now only a pile of rubble remained.
Norman slowly walked up to the man, who was somehow still alive, but his attack had struck true. A small hole, straight through where the man’s heart was.
He kneeled down next to the dying prince. The man coughed up blood and glared at him.
Norman just shook his head. “This is on you. Had you left me alone and not thrown your hat in with Donovan, you and your brother would still be alive.”
“You killed our brother,” the man managed to gurgle out.
“I did. Because he attacked me and wanted to harm my people. I won’t apologize for defending myself or them. But don’t worry… you’ll get to see him soon enough.”
The prince tried to grab Norman but his grip was feeble and soon his hand fell to the ground, still and motionless.
With a sigh, he stood and surveyed the destruction their fight had wrought. A good chunk of the White City was in ruins. Some even still burned in the background, the citizens and nobility alike having fled as their conflict escalated.
He could hardly blame them. The destruction was immense. It was on a level Norman never thought himself capable of. Norman sighed. He didn’t relish having to kill the princes but he knew if the problem was left to fester it would have been a much larger issue. Better to deal with it at the root.
Sure he could have dealt with it how Eugene and Grobert wanted him to. But they didn’t have the time or resources to wage a war against the Empire. Norman preferred a more efficient approach. With his plan, the remaining factions of the Golatian Empire would be left scrabbling to be the next Emperor. Going by what he knew of the politics of this region – something he wished he would have spent more time studying before the strike against the Gorfan – that could take decades to resolve. This way the Empire would be divided, instead of coming together if he had attacked in force. It also gave Normenia plenty of time to deal with any lingering issues.
He recalled himself from the homunculi for a moment, blinking as the testing room came into focus.
Grobert was nearby, resting his eyes in a chair. As soon as the old man sensed Norman’s return his eyes flicked open. “Is it done?”
Norman nodded. “Retrieve both of the princes' bodies if you can.”
Grobert nodded and teleported away. And for the first time in nearly four days, Norman stood and walked out of the testing chamber. Now that the Empire was no longer an issue, he needed to deal with Donovan and the Council.
Donovan was inspecting one of the many projects he had going when his ring vibrated. “Keep up the pace, I need this project done as soon as possible.”
The worker nodded obediently before hurrying back to his station. Once the man was gone, Donovan unhurriedly walked to his office. If the vibrating ring signified what it should, he was ecstatic. But it wouldn’t do to let others know that.
Once secure inside his office, he began chanting and weaving a spell that seemed to pull from the shadows in the room to form the spell circle. The words and gestures were unnecessary as he could cast the spell from his mind but it paid to practice. When it was completed, he pushed environmental mana into the spell and it collapsed into itself to form a glowing red rift that seemed to tear itself into reality.
“YOU WISH TO TRAVEL?” a grinding otherworldy voice asked inside his mind.
“I do,” he proclaimed, shaking off the creature's presence. He pushed thoughts of where he wished to go to the being.
“VERY WELL. STEP INSIDE.”
The drorgoth were one of the more dangerous species he had bonded under contract, but they did provide a few interesting abilities. One of them was the rift jump. With his other ways of travel cut off, he was forced to rely on them more often as his portal mage was busy with a more important task. He stepped inside the rift and found himself standing inside a magical bubble that tore through the surrounding landscape in a blur. Despite the speed the magical bubble was moving, it would take time to reach the destination.
Donovan had little to entertain his mind except watch the huge volcanoes in the distance as well as the black rock that made up most of the drorgoth’s landmass, obscured by the thick mist yellow mist of sulfur as it was.
The choaking sulfur mist that suffused this planet wasn’t enough to mask the towering spires and millions upon millions of inhabitants though. Most of whom were little more than slaves to the overlords. To the drorgoth, strength was everything.
If he were a religious person, this was as close to a depiction of hell as he could imagine. Knowing what he knew, the psychic bleed-through from this world was probably responsible for those depictions in the first place. Much like the stories of dragons, elves, and dwarves.
After what felt like hours his trip came to an end and the bubble he was traveling in attached itself to another rift. When he stepped through, he found himself standing inside the Golatian Empire’s throne room. That was one perk of the rift, it bypassed the real world and any possible measure to keep him out.
Two things quickly caught his eye as he looked around. The first was the corpse of the insufferable Lord Norman. And the second was the radiating orb floating near the First Prince. He put on his customary smirk when he spotted the filled soul trap. The two princes wouldn’t be able to see the change to the magical device signifying it contained a soul, but Donovan could.
“I take it you were successful?” He had honestly given these archaic nobles less than a fifty-fifty chance at succeeding in bringing down Lord Norman. He wouldn’t admit it out loud, but Lord Norman was a rather troublesome foe to deal with.
Instead of answering, the First Prince lobbed the trap his way. Donovan ignored the blatant act and caught the trap in his bare hand. Earning a momentary look of surprise from the First Prince. The smirk never left his face. Of course, he had taken precautions against the devices. It would have been the height of foolishness not to. So while it looked to be sitting in his open hand, it was in reality cushioned on a thin plane of force. One he almost always kept active.
He held the orb up in front of him and let out a soft chuckle. He had finally done it. Finally managed to get Lord Norman in a position where he could ‘negotiate’ properly with the man. Donovan couldn’t afford to have someone with Norman’s power running loose. Look how much damage the man had done to his plans already. He needed to put a collar on him so he could put the man’s talents to proper use.
Donovan’s celebratory thoughts were interrupted as a soft tapping sound intruded on the room. All eyes turned toward the doorway at the far side.
***
Norman strode into the throne room again, this time with a staff. He froze for a moment when he spotted an unexpected guest.
He wasn’t sure if that moment of shock was enough for Donovan to prepare a defense against the invisible Death Ray he sent his way, but he would look back on this moment many times and wonder.
A shimmering barrier exploded from Donovan where the spell had struck, falling like broken glass as the mana it was made from disintegrated as it absorbed his spell.
“You fucking idiots!” Donovan roared and took to the air. “I asked you to make sure of one simple thing before involving me, and you somehow managed to screw that up!”
“Watch your tongue, outsider,” The First Prince hissed as he started to gather his power again.
As the two bickered, Norman didn’t relent. Now that he finally had proof of Donovan’s interference, he wasn’t about to let the man go without a fight. But he also had the First and Second Princes to contend with. And while his previous attack had been meant to gauge their abilities, this time he wasn’t holding back.
But Donovan wasn’t caught off guard. The man had come prepared. Spells struck multiple layers of protection around the man, slowly whittling them away, yet it seemed futile. The man didn’t strike back, he only sniffed disdainfully.
“Your failure here has cost me dearly,” he directed his disgust at the two princes, completely ignoring Norman. “If you manage to survive, do not think I will forget this.”
Both men seemed just as mad as the Council Leader and sent powerful attacks at Donovan, but the man simply scoffed and gave a negligent wave of his arm. Whatever Donovan had just done, it had a powerful effect. Norman felt the disruption to the mana in the air from that single motion but his spells were unaffected. That wasn’t true for the princes. Both of their domains collapsed like soap bubbles being popped as the mana rippled chaotically through the room. This sent both men tumbling to the ground.
After temporarily disrupting the two men, Donovan turned toward Norman. “Do not think this is over, Lord Norman. I will get what I want eventually.”
Unable to puncture his defenses, Norman was not able to stop the Council Leader from tearing a rip in reality and sliding through it like the cockroach he was.
The tear closed a moment later, leaving him blinking in confusion. Soon his mind cleared and he was left staring at where the impossible crack had been only a moment before. He ground his teeth in frustration for allowing the bastard to escape but turned his fury toward the two others in the room. Both of whom were quickly recovering and drawing their domains back to themselves.
“You fuckers picked the wrong side to back. Time for round two.”
When the soul trap had touched his previous homunculus body, Norman had played along. It would have been quite different had he not tested that possibility back when he was creating the golems. If there had been even an iota of a chance that they had his true soul, he would have leveled the castle by detonating his mana. But he knew the soul trap could only capture the soul he used to animate the constructs. He was immune to the trap’s effects when using Command.
The only real issue was that once the soul was taken from the construct, the thing was on borrowed time. So he hadn’t been able to push the princes as far as he would have liked on the first go around. He knew he was likely to die at least once during this encounter. So he had built more than one of the bodies beforehand. And thanks to Grobert, they were all situated somewhere inside the city, ready to be activated.
As he avoided the domain attacks, Norman struck back with Mana Vacuum, Death Ray, Flaming Skull, and Lingering Death. He could afford to be wasteful in his spell casting because the mana was being provided by the reserves stored in the bodies and channeled through the staff.
Mana Vacuum had the most immediate effect on their domain and surroundings, so he quickly started forming a new spell to take advantage of that fact while he fought off the rather primitive magical attacks from the two princes.
That was one of the downsides he had learned about having a domain. Sure you had near complete control over your element within that area, but you were severely limited on the types of spells you could form. Any competent elemental mage could do what these two were doing and then some. The only difference was one needed to form the spell before using it while the Princes could just will it to happen. This fact also made them lazy.
As the fight raged through the room, more and more of the walls and ceiling started to take damage as attacks missed their mark or were redirected. Norman could already feel the strain on the body he was inhabiting. The conduit staff that Kalia had made for him, wasn’t designed to transmit this much mana. And he certainly wouldn’t risk the staff Saliu and Nolia had crafted for him here.
Eventually, the Princes realized he was weakening and struck a deadly blow, severing his head from his shoulders with a blade of wind.
***
Shaladi collapsed to his hands and knees, sucking in a ragged breath as he tried to recover some strength. When he looked over, Cadian wasn’t faring much better. Had he the energy, it would have been an opportune moment to end his brother once and for all. But the battle with the necromancer had lasted hours. And the room was almost completely destroyed.
He laughed and got up on shaky legs. “We, we did it,” he proclaimed. Then a clapping came from the doorway. When he looked up, his face paled.
“Round three.”
***
Cadian crushed the impudent man with a stone fist before collapsing back into the rubble of the castle. He knew he wouldn’t have long to rest and recover. This man… he never stopped, he could not be killed. It should be impossible, yet he had seen it over and over again as their fight dragged on and on. He hadn’t fought this hard since his time as the Imperial Servator of the Legion, before the fall.
His brother, Second Prince Shaladi had fallen the previous day, his days spent drinking and screwing not serving him well in this fight of attrition. And now his corpse lay somewhere buried in the remains of the White City. The castle had not contained the fighting for long, it had spilled outside and raged across the entire area, neither side concerning themselves with collateral damage. The First Prince because he was fighting for his very life, and the other because he simply did not care.
A shifting of stones got his attention and Cadian rose once more as the man called Lord Norman climbed over a pile of debris in the distance.
“Round twenty,” the man declared, not sounding tired in the least.
***
Norman was annoyed at just how resilient the First Prince was turning out to be. Unlike his brother, the First Prince’s element protected against most of his spells. Honestly, it was a bit of a surprise that the man hadn’t tried to flee through the ground. He certainly had the power to do so. It was the first thing he would have done if he was in the Prince’s place if he realized he was fighting a losing battle.
And the prince had to know this was a losing battle by now. None of the hundreds of soldiers or those with callings, that the man had ordered to defend him, were able to change the course of this fight. They were all dead, either struck directly or hit by errant blasts of deadly magic as the two decimated the area. They had no chance to survive in a fight of this magnitude. But the prince stubbornly persisted and Norman was forced to switch tactics once again. He was getting low on homunculi, but he was pretty certain the prince would run out of mana before that point. At least he hoped so.
When this fight was all said and done, he was going to have to collect those diadems both men wore. It was ridiculous just how much they improved their mana.
Shards of rock flew in Norman’s direction as the First Prince hurled a handful of broken debris his way. He ignored the incoming projectiles as his new Transmutation Shield reduced them to dust.
He fired back a Disintegration Beam. The spell tore a gaping hole in the armor around the prince but failed to hit its target within and the hole was quickly regenerated.
This went back and forth, much like it had for the last few days. Norman spent half his concentration on the fight, while the other half was rapidly testing new spell ideas in his mind. Once he found something that worked, he would deploy it to devastating effect, and the prince would quickly adapt or avoid the attacks.
Unlike the prince, however, he didn’t need to sleep, didn’t need to eat, or drink. There was only a matter of time before the prince made a mistake or a spell Norman created managed to finish off the fight. And it needed to end soon. He needed to go after Donovan.
He avoided the spikes of stones spearing up from the ground to impale him. The Prince was becoming predictable, and Norman hoped the spell he was working on would be the coup de grâce.
It took another few hours before he finally saw his opportunity. The prince stumbled slightly as a pile of debris shifted under him. Something that should not have been possible with the man’s domain. But it was clear he was flagging.
Norman didn’t hesitate upon seeing this opening. A modified Disintegration Beam struck out. The prince, despite his exhausted state, threw up a stone barrier to intercept the spell. Only this time the beam wasn’t stopped. The Mana Vacuum Norman had integrated into the spell tore through the protection and the stone armor around the prince like a bullet through tissue paper.
For a moment, there was silence. Soon that was broken as chunks of rock cracked and began falling to the ground.
Where once stood the towering stone form of the First Prince, now only a pile of rubble remained.
Norman slowly walked up to the man, who was somehow still alive, but his attack had struck true. A small hole, straight through where the man’s heart was.
He kneeled down next to the dying prince. The man coughed up blood and glared at him.
Norman just shook his head. “This is on you. Had you left me alone and not thrown your hat in with Donovan, you and your brother would still be alive.”
“You killed our brother,” the man managed to gurgle out.
“I did. Because he attacked me and wanted to harm my people. I won’t apologize for defending myself or them. But don’t worry… you’ll get to see him soon enough.”
The prince tried to grab Norman but his grip was feeble and soon his hand fell to the ground, still and motionless.
With a sigh, he stood and surveyed the destruction their fight had wrought. A good chunk of the White City was in ruins. Some even still burned in the background, the citizens and nobility alike having fled as their conflict escalated.
He could hardly blame them. The destruction was immense. It was on a level Norman never thought himself capable of. Norman sighed. He didn’t relish having to kill the princes but he knew if the problem was left to fester it would have been a much larger issue. Better to deal with it at the root.
Sure he could have dealt with it how Eugene and Grobert wanted him to. But they didn’t have the time or resources to wage a war against the Empire. Norman preferred a more efficient approach. With his plan, the remaining factions of the Golatian Empire would be left scrabbling to be the next Emperor. Going by what he knew of the politics of this region – something he wished he would have spent more time studying before the strike against the Gorfan – that could take decades to resolve. This way the Empire would be divided, instead of coming together if he had attacked in force. It also gave Normenia plenty of time to deal with any lingering issues.
He recalled himself from the homunculi for a moment, blinking as the testing room came into focus.
Grobert was nearby, resting his eyes in a chair. As soon as the old man sensed Norman’s return his eyes flicked open. “Is it done?”
Norman nodded. “Retrieve both of the princes' bodies if you can.”
Grobert nodded and teleported away. And for the first time in nearly four days, Norman stood and walked out of the testing chamber. Now that the Empire was no longer an issue, he needed to deal with Donovan and the Council.
