Orc Lord

Ugh, my head…

I felt like I’d just done something very tiring, so I'd like to just roll over and sleep a little longer, but a familiar voice convinced me otherwise.

“Wake up, baby.”

Whose voice is that?

My memory was quite fuzzy just after waking up. I opened my eyes, and someone was giving me a lap pillow. Their head was shading my eyes from the bright sun.

“Momma?”

I felt like it was her, but when my eyes adjusted I realized it was somebody I didn't recognize.

“No. Who are you?”

It was a woman: probably an evolved Orc, judging by the four tusks growing alongside her bottom teeth. She had bright red hair and skin, pointed ears, and a face that was largely human in structure. I've never seen this person before.

“No, baby. It’s me.”

That voice was smoother than momma’s voice, and the clothes and body were different, but the manner of speech was the same. Feeling surprised, I sat up. My head still felt like it was full of water, so I held it with one of my hands.

“So you evolved, huh?”

I quickly used Analysis on myself to find out how long I had been knocked out for.

Name: Vyra

Age: 113 days

F-fifteen days?!

As if on cue, my stomach let out a long growl.

“Fifteen days, huh? I'm glad I didn't starve before waking up.”

“Silly baby. I wouldn't just let you starve, you know?”

“Eh?” Well, it must be true. Even though I'm hungry, I don't feel like I've been starving for fifteen days. “You fed me in my sleep? Thanks. But, uh, how?”

It’s not like an unconscious person can chew their food, right? If she says she was chewing my food for me, I might throw up.

“Baby, I'll still be making milk until you're three months old.”

W-well, that answers it.

I decided to look for a change of topic, and my focus expanded a bit. The whole friggin city has gathered around. Except for my direct family: momma, father, Varoon, and Fiara, the rest are keeping a good distance.

“W-why is everyone gathered here?”

“That’s because the spell finally finished, so we knew you would be waking up soon,” Fiara smiled.

“The spell,” I titled my head, “finished?”

Varoon snorted. “Are you still asleep? Take a look around.”

When I passed out, I honestly thought the spell had failed, but it’s true: the entire city has been affected by my magic and Law. I had to fly a few dozen feet into the air to be sure, but it’s really everything. The wall turned into some dull greenish metal called Orichalcum, and it’s capped with a sparkly white metal called Angelite. There are towers placed at the sides of every entrance, so it looks like the wall there is a giant War Orc jaw with tusks sprouting up.

The city’s structure is more complex than what I originally drew up, with more buildings and alleyways than I could have figured out what to do with personally. It really looks like a proud city. The only thing lacking is the population.

Speaking of which, I thought I had seen a lot more War Orcs than I remembered, so when I landed I asked about what had happened while I was on standby. Apparently, everybody waited inside the city for me to wake up, and the war was put on hold. They only did the bare minimum as far as hunting went, and just lived off the food stores instead. Varoon and Irsha were in charge of rationing and they seem to have managed.

By the way, the storage building was changed considerably by my Law. It’s become a lot convenient and a little creepy. There are large bins to place food in, and those bins are connected to some kind of track system. There’s a short pillar in the middle of the room with a dent in the top. One of the Goblins discovered hidden panels that open up the floor and pillar. All there is there is a hollow rectangular space, almost like a ventilation shaft, but it caught Fiara’s attention.

She ended up tattooing magical circuits into the leather (using some needles and my blood) onto tanned Magic Beast leather. It was a simple pattern just to help the Magic Power travel. Then she laid it inside those hollow shafts and put Magic Power into the hole at the top of the short pillar. I could find out the effects just by trying it myself: it makes the bins move. I guess the wheels of the buckets are split in half between something that attracts Magic Power and something that repels it, so they rotate on their own just by supplying it. I can only seem to make them move one direction though.

Anyway, the bins disappear into a dark hole in the ground. Apparently, momma suggested they send a Goblin down there--since Fomors are too big to fit--with some warm clothes and a light spell to find out what was down there. The result? It’s a deep dark, cold spiral down into the earth and back up again. He said some blue dirt was lining the walls and that it was letting off frigid air, he also counted about two thousand bins total.

So basically, there’s a scary, giant, freezing pit below the storage building, but it’s extremely useful.

Anyway, once they found the hidden panels in one place, they started to discover them everywhere. Fiara had apparently made working teleportation devices just two days after I went into a magic-induced coma, so she devoted her efforts after that to making the devices built into the city infrastructure functional.

“A few only needed to be connected to the other components, but others required more specific CSPs,” Fiara told me. “For example, the poles lining the streets worked after adding a light spell pattern in the top.”

“The pole is called a lamppost,” I told her. “The whole thing with the light attached is called a streetlight.”

“Ah, I thought they might have a name already. By the way,” she leaned in close and started whispering, “I haven't pointed it out to anyone else, but those hollow slots in various places look like they’re meant to be slots for monster eggs.”

That self-charging magic propagating device, huh? Yeah, my ideal city would incorporate something like that. So this is the danger of blindly creating whatever you want. Using eggs to power the city will reveal their existence, but there are surely some things that won't function properly without them.

“I don't think it’s safe to reveal them, although it’s unfortunate.” I held my chin while frowning, but Fiara just shook her head.

“It’s not as simple as that, chief. The eggs can't be used as they are in the way the infrastructure requires.”

“Why not?”

“That’s because their slots are being placed in positions where Magic Power is supposed to be input.”

“So?”

“So, eggs can't discharge Magic Power.”

Oh! Now that she mentions it, that’s true, isn't it? The monster eggs work by cycling Magic Power between two magic cores and casting a predetermined spell during the transition. It was essentially an auto-caster, but it would run out of power if the Magic could leak outside.

The spells produced weren't full of Magic Power either; no spell was. Spells were a consequence of Magic Power, but not magic power itself. If Magic Power actually left a person upon using a spell, it wouldn't recharge. No, spells were very real physical phenomena.

For example, if you bash different things together, different sounds will be produced, right? The think of the sounds as the spells, and the objects being bashed as the spell formation. In that example, Magic Power would be “the ability to bash things together”; something like muscle strength. You might get worn out and need a rest, but given time you’ll be able to do the same task again.

“I see. Well, we’ll just leave that for later then. What else happened while I was gone?”

So next I heard about how chief Dagoran had moved into the city. When other War Orc chiefs heard about it, two more decided to follow him.

The food situation was looking a little dicey with an extra 400 War Orcs to feed, so the Goblins decided to move their thriving vegetable patch off of its cart and into the larger fields. They separated some healthy cuttings to give them more space to grow and fertilized the fields with Orc manure. The crops continued to grow and multiply until the previous crisis seemed to have been imaginary. Apparently, Orc manure works even better than the spell I cast on our old fields.

I tried out Fiara’s teleportation device to see the fields for myself.

“What’s this?”

“Ah, I tried nailing the stone tablets with the magic circuits engraved to the ground to keep them in place. I was worried they would be rejected and thrown somewhere, but this happened instead.”

The quartz walkway seemed to have absorbed the stone tablet into itself. It was now fixed perfectly in place and level with the surface.

“It absorbed it?”

Was this that thing where the city would try to improve itself? Did it somehow sense that the teleportation pads were something helpful?

“It did the same thing with these too,” Fiara stated, opening up one of the hidden panels in a lightpost. Inside, there wasn't any tattooed leather like I had been lead to believe. Instead, the leather was gone, and the magic circuit seemed to have been directly etched into the interior of the metal.

“The city seems to recognize three kinds of changes: damage, improvements, and neither. It repairs damage, incorporates improvements, and just ignores things which are neither.”

“Things which are neither?”

“A few Goblins moved their beds into each other’s rooms to not be alone at night, and the city didn't do anything about it. Then they knocked down the walls in their apartments and moved the beds closer together, to turn it into communal housing. The city cleaned away the debris and smoothed out the walls. They broke a window inside while goofing around, and the city repaired it.”

Active little buggers, aren't they? Anyway, I wonder how the city knows it’s been damaged and not renovated? The description said it doesn't have an ego, but does it have some form of intelligence?

After that, I went to see the fields. They were lush and thriving. I may even need to expand them soon. This is still the only place which hasn't been affected by my Law, so maybe I should… No, it can wait. I don't want to push myself too hard this soon after waking up.

“So what else happened?”

“Well, Lady Oolga asked for some magic tips from me, then quickly reached the third level and evolved. After that, she discovered Human spies observing the city and…”

Fiara told me what momma did, and I frowned. My wings tensed up, ready to fly me to her immediately, but I forced myself to think it over first. After a minute, I let out a sigh.

“I understand. I will go talk to her.”