Sworded Affair

Chapter 92: Merchant of Death

"Back then, the Empire represented approximately a fifth of the world's Practitioners, a quarter of the Magi, and nearly a third of the Masters. Still a minority in absolute terms, but also the single largest polity in the magical world. To be fair to our enemies, they forged hasty alliances as soon as they realised we intended total war, but even so, our unity proved a decisive advantage in the early days of the war. The Empire's men and women all spoke the same language, followed the same protocols and ate the same kinds of food; logistics were standardised and benefited greatly in terms of cost savings due to economies of scale.

Our enemies, meanwhile, were trying to weld together dozens of magical traditions into a cohesive force, all the while dealing with centuries of accumulated rivalries and petty hatreds common between such communities. Overmind's presence on the battlefield only widened the gap in coordination: dividing herself into hundreds of fragments, she was present on every battlefield all at once; single-handedly guiding every offensive thrust and every defensive line, all while coordinating in real-time with her other selves across the globe at zero latency. That's hard to do even for a modern military, with the benefits of the internet and satellite communications. Back in the fourteenth century? It was unprecedented, and within the first decade of war the Empire conquered half the globe.

That's the second great benefit of the Western Tradition of magic, you see; as whilst our Masters and Magi do spend a great deal of time studying the world's mysteries in peacetime, they are not required to slumber in torpor, enter closed-door meditation or be summoned from an adjacent plane of existence. A few hours is enough time to set affairs in order, lock up their mansions and towers and head to the battlefield in an emergency. On the contrary, it took ten whole years before Spirit Severing cultivators emerged from their sects to engage us, mummified monarchs rose from their pyramids to take command, and the stars aligned to permit the stronger demons to be summoned into play.

With serious contenders now active, the Empire's progress slowed and eventually stalled, with the global conflict reaching a stalemate by the mid 1330s. We'd taken North Africa, North America, West Asia and the Middle East, but were struggling to push any further. At this point, with a fragile equilibrium established, I began to make my move. Until now, I'd stayed in England, using my precognition to blind enemy seers and ensure the survival of the Empire. All the while, my loyalists were producing a vast trove of weapons; weapons I now started offering to every side of the conflict, giving them hope of turning the tide in their favour.

Using dozens of suppliers and hundreds of pseudonyms, I flooded the market with enchanted weapons incorporating bound spells, weapons with limited uses but which could cast magic without draining mana from their wielder. Such bound spells are inferior by design, in comparison to a trained Practitioner, but many of those had died on the battlefield by now; in the face of serious manpower shortages on every front, my weapons provided the answer. They could be wielded even by an apprentice or even a trusted mortal servant; they needed no magic of their own, only good eyesight and common sense. Practitioners, Magi and even some Masters also began to carry my weapons, as they provided a useful backup weapon when their internal mana ran dry. These weapons appeared on every continent, tailored to every magical tradition, and they quickly became a smash hit.

By 1345, after three decades of grinding warfare; the vast majority of remaining Practitioners were involved in the conflict to some degree, and almost all of them had used my weapons at least once; only the very greatest never bothered, trusting fully in their innate abilities. All of this set the stage perfectly, when in 1346 I began my bid for Godhood. You see, it's common for craftsmen of all stripes to leave their signature on what they make. A painter signs his name on canvas, and a blacksmith engraves it upon his weapons.

Magical artisans are not exempt from this, and every weapon that ultimately came from me shared a common trait; a single character in one dead language or another, none of them younger than a thousand years. This character would glow faintly whenever the weapon invoked a bound spell, but otherwise did nothing. Each character was a piece of an immense formation, one that marked the soul of anyone who ever activated one of my bound spells, marking them as a point of manifestation for the single spell I cast in that entire conflict."

Saint raised her paw, waving it to mark out four corners of a square. Light filled the impromptu screen, displaying the spell in question by a means visible for those outside of the System, in what Emma noted was Edith's first ever concession to Elizabeth.

[Diluvian: All targets marked by the caster die, their bodies and any belongings on their person dissipating into a quantity of mana equivalent to their remaining lifespan, which the caster absorbs. Anyone who witnesses this death is marked, and triggers another cast of Diluvian.]

"Oh," Noah gasped, no stranger to the concept of exponential growth. "Oh dear."

"At the end of the day, there are only two hard requirements for divinity," Saint continued, managing an impressively smug smile for a cat. "Firstly, a domain over which they are to govern. For me, this was the System; a complete catalogue of all the magic I'd mastered over the centuries and carefully stored in the Apex within Scholomance, along with all the magic known by those caught in my spell, for in the moment of absorption their knowledge became mine. Secondly, enough power to force the collective unconscious and your predecessors to recognise you as a peer. This, I took from the consumption of over nine tenths of practitioners across the globe, sparing only those who stayed away from the war entirely or were confident enough to eschew my weapons.

All of this was planned and executed to perfection; but regrettably, the one element that I never bothered to foresee was the mortal impact of so much mana being consumed in a single act of death. The miasma from my ascension would linger for years afterwards, claiming nearly half the mortal population in Europe and significant portions elsewhere. The practitioners who remained would learn what had happened, but I understand most mortal populations instead put the blame on rodents."