Muck POV
Muck was eating mythril slime cores. Normally, it wouldn't eat them before it became strong enough, but now—merely six months later—it would have to face a Transcendent. Battle experience urged it to upgrade itself as much as possible. Muck considered itself an odd creation; it could endlessly grow stronger.
As an undead slime, it could digest anything given enough time. From the hardest metals to the strongest dragons, anything it ate made it stronger. It didn't know the purpose of its creator, but it knew its will to live was the reason for its transcendence. Sum'gial's promise to it was a slime with an eye.
Muck perceived its surroundings through touch; it felt even the slightest differences. That was why it could read.
The types of slimes were endless—sand, acid, mythril, water, fire, wood—anything that existed in nature could become a slime.
Muck let any and everyone roam freely in the Slimewood Forest; the forest's ecology changed to adapt to the slimes. There were endlessly burning trees, acid lakes, and lightning-struck woods everywhere. That made this forest exceptional for its resources; as such, it would become the raw-material supplier for their alliance.
The lich would design the blueprints, and the goblin would make them. The frost-wight was their coordinator, which the goblin had insisted on. It knew the goblin's luck was odd; despite not understanding the reason, it would let nature take its course.
It wouldn't fight a battle for nothing, either; the lich had a dead dragon in his hands. That would become its reward for the battle. The promised eye slime would arrive in a month's time. It would wait patiently, as always.
Veyn'dor POV
Veyn'dor d'Veyn was teaching his apprentice, Phardar d'Veyn—not spells, but the thinking of an archmage. He wasn't training someone to surpass himself; replaceable people died fast in the Underdeep. He was having Phardar learn warding spells and how to alter them. Veyn'dor had been taught the same way; despite his father's studies in necromancy, he learned evocation.
He remembered the day he made that choice. Sum'gial showed him different ways of using the fireball spell. At first, Sum'gial showed a flicker of light and asked him what spell it was. When he answered, "a flicker of light," Sum'gial threw the spell as small as a candle flame. The ensuing explosion shook him to his core. Then Sum'gial showed him twenty different ways to use the same fireball: changing its size, changing its temperature, changing its shape, setting traps with it—the many variations seized his desire to learn.
"An archmage is the one who makes the spells flow according to his needs, not a spell-user!" Sum'gial had said, and Veyn'dor had followed those words ever since.
It was his turn to show the same to Phardar, the apprentice he had chosen.
He had never had the chance to use his most destructive spells before; the coming war between the Tower of Bones and his now-lich father, Sum'gial, would allow him to let loose any and every spell he wished.
Assassins, traps—even the previous commercial blockade on his father's Tower of Bones—were all his doing. He had nearly manipulated all of E'nathyr to sever his father's connections, turning accumulated favors into nothing.
How ironic: while some kingdoms had none, the small city of E'nathyr had produced two archmages—and those two would kill each other. He had no idea where the lich's phylactery was, but the magic he had created—Soulburn—would reach it regardless of distance or space.
Sum'gial POV
Ahr'zel kept summoning his subordinates to the library—the new clerks who would continuously put the library in order. He had considered creating undead librarians, but for undead to learn, the animated dead needed souls. He couldn't randomly summon a soul and expect it to be a good fit for the library.
The clerks Ahr'zel summoned had been trained by Hell's Resources Department; they were plug-and-use. Sum'gial would need to use the same spell that changed Ahr'zel's true name on every one of them. All the books in this library were enchanted or rare—another reason the work had to be done by hand.
The Hand of the God he possessed was a hot potato; despite countless years of study, it was useless. Experiments on it only produced twisted, altered things. Even the plagues that destroyed Jacob's town had been born of those experiments.
The attention of the Mushroom Queen and the greed of E'nathyr made leisure impossible. His OCD drove him to tend to the tower as soon as possible. Even with a war on the horizon, he would rather put the tower in order.
The commissioned eye, the legion arms, and his own army needed attention as well. They also went over the spoils to be gained while making their treaty.
The books, the tomes, the scrolls, and the blueprints would be sorted very quickly with the help he had gotten from Ahr'zel's subordinates. Once the bulk of the work was done, he wouldn't need this many devils under his control, but Ahr'zel was insistent on keeping every single one of them. They came to a compromise: eleven more devils.
His tower had other floors that could use supervision or stewards: the throne room, the library, the gate, the laboratory, the dungeons, the strategy floor, the warding floor, the information-gathering floor, the corpse storage, the geothermal energy engine, the dimensional research laboratory, the vault, and the forbidden vault.
He would have to make their cleanliness trait more prominent in all of them; that way, they would keep their supervised areas clean.
The problem with letting someone else do the summoning was that Sum'gial wasn't expecting a hulking, nine-foot-tall muscle-devil with horns and a squeaky voice, nor a cane-holding, distinguished-looking old man wearing diapers.
Ahr'zel was definitely holding a grudge against him. Joke's on him: thanks to twenty-first-century shenanigans on Earth, although they were absurd, they were still acceptable.
His OCD didn't trigger as much thanks to psychological desensitization on Earth, as well as Sum'gial's uninhibited nature.
Ahr'zel POV
Damn that lich. To hell with this urge for correctness; every second, every hour feels like I've fallen into the hands of the god of redemption. Even now, a crooked-standing book stood out to him while he was summoning a devil from Hell. He had never thought the urge for correctness would affect him this much.
He felt like he was growing his teeth again; he was so irritable he could explode at anything. To have at least a little revenge, he decided to summon the oddest bunch of devils he could think of: a muscular eight-foot devil with a squeaky voice, a distinguished-looking old man wearing diapers, an innocent-looking halfling with a venomous tongue, a muscular devil wearing a maid outfit—the oddest bunch under his control. But why was that damn lich fine with it?
A shelf was off by a finger; he held back the urge to tear the damn thing off the wall.
"When are we making our deal with the archduke and the king?" Ahr'zel asked irritably, his eye on the shelf once again.
"When you finish summoning your helpers and after we change their true names, of course," the lich replied, as if Ahr'zel's irritation were a small matter.
"Where are we making the deal, then?" Ahr'zel asked again.
"Preferably in the void; I don't want outsiders to discover the secrets of the Tower of Bones," Sum'gial replied lightly.
"You are a madman. At what price will you summon the archduke and the king of hell to the void?" Ahr'zel was even more irritable thanks to OCD.
"I plan on making a pocket dimension near Orbisar—a temporary place to be destroyed after it is used. Hell has its rules; neither the archduke nor the king can resist a summon with sufficient price. I have fourteen drops of a god's blood. I don't need to fully summon them; mere projections should suffice for this deal," Sum'gial answered.
"Let's put this aside for the moment. Why do you insist I summon noncombatants from Hell—whether macho-with-squeak or any other devil you've had me summon?" Ahr'zel voiced his doubts.
"I have enough combatants. In the corpse and soul storage room, there are over ten Transcendent corpses; with little effort I can easily have enough fighters. I need the devils' nimble hands in my tower, not more brutes to fight," Sum'gial replied simply.
"Where do you plan on using the power of the archduke and the king?" Ahr'zel asked, changing the subject entirely.
"You will find out when the time comes…" Sum'gial let his voice trail off.