The day after the funeral, the camp transformed.
The silence of mourning was replaced by a different kind of din. It was an ugly, messy sound, the sound of brute force and desperation.
'CRACK!... THUD!... ROOOOARRR!'
Kael was on the main path, his iron spear now a baton of command. At his feet, twenty Legion soldiers, stripped of their bronze armor (armour), sweated and cursed under the midday sun. Their hands, more accustomed to swords than shovels, were bloody and blistered. They were digging.
They were digging the foundation for Seiko's new wall.
"Deeper!" roared Kael, slamming the butt of his spear against a rock. "Seiko said a stone foundation, and that is what we will give him! Move those rocks!"
A prisoner, a large man with a sergeant's insignia tattooed on his arm, stumbled and fell, spilling his basket of dirt.
"I... I can't go on," he gasped, his body shaking from the effort. "We need rest. Water."
Kael approached him. By his side, Acies materialized from the shadows, his arm-blades glowing with a cold light. The Bisharp moved with a terrifying fluidity, his yellow eyes fixed on the fallen prisoner. He made no sound. He didn't need to.
The sergeant shrank back, his defiance evaporating.
"Water is for those who work," said Kael, his voice low and raspy from throat pain and the loss of Oran. "Seiko offered you redemption, not comfort. Get back to work. Or you can discuss your conditions with him." Kael nodded toward Acies.
The sergeant scrambled to his feet, grabbed his basket, and went back to digging with an energy born of panic.
Iris watched from a distance, a basket of medicinal herbs in her hand. Her face was worried. She saw Kael, a man she had known all her life, a protector, turned into an overseer. And she saw the Earth People, her own warriors, acting as guards, their new iron spears in hand, watching other men.
'This is necessary,' she told herself, repeating Seiko's mantra. 'It is progress.' But it felt like something dark and fractured.
While the camp echoed with the sound of pickaxes against stone, Seiko was half a mile away, in a place where near-absolute silence reigned, broken only by the constant roar of the river.
He and Tyla stood on the bank of the swift mountain stream. The air here was cool and smelled of wet stone and ozone. At their feet lay the carefully disassembled pieces of the three Klinklangs. The red cores, now dormant, were wrapped in cloth.
"It is perfect," said Seiko, more to himself than to Tyla.
"What is perfect, Seiko?" asked Tyla. She was exhausted from the night of work and the tension of the autopsy, but her eyes shone with curiosity.
Seiko pointed to a spot where the river narrowed between two large granite boulders, creating a natural bottleneck that accelerated the water to a terrifying speed.
"That," said Seiko. "Power."
He knelt on the muddy bank and began to draw with a piece of charcoal. Tyla knelt beside him, as she had done in the forge.
"Tyla, what is work?"
The question took her by surprise. "It is... digging? Forging? Moving things?"
"It is all of that," Seiko nodded. "But at its root, it is energy. To swing a hammer, you use the energy of your muscles. To heat iron, we use the energy of wood turned into charcoal. To win the battle, we used the chemical energy of berries and tannin."
He drew a circle. "Everything is energy. But muscle tires. And charcoal gets consumed. We won the battle, but we lost four people and depleted our supplies."
He pointed to the river. "The river doesn't tire. The river doesn't sleep. And it doesn't ask for payment."
He drew a wheel with paddles inside the river. "This is a water wheel. The water pushes the paddles. The wheel turns. Simple."
"Like a cart wheel, but sideways," said Tyla, understanding.
"Exactly. Now," he drew a shaft coming out of the water wheel and connecting to a smaller circle. "This shaft turns something else. This is where the 'magic' comes in."
He unwrapped one of the Klinklang cores. The red metal orb was cold to the touch.
"The Bronze Commander thinks this is a gift from his God. It isn't. It is a machine. A very clever machine." He took a piece of copper wire they had salvaged. "The core is full of magnets, or something very similar. And when you spin wires, like this copper, very fast around those magnets..."
He paused, searching for the word. He couldn't explain the physics of electromagnetic induction to her. Not yet.
"It creates a different kind of fire. An invisible fire that runs through the copper. We call it... electricity."
Tyla's eyes went wide. "Electricity? Like a Pikachu? Like the Zebstrika we saw on the plains?"
"Exactly like them," Seiko smiled. "But controlled. The Legion used this machine to make gears spin and fight. We will use it for something else. Tyla, what happens when the sun sets?"
"It gets dark," she said, as if it were a trick question.
"Exactly. And we stop working. The miners can't see. The builders can't build. The guards can't guard. The day ends."
"But with this..." said Seiko, touching the core. "We can make the river give us light. We can make the river move our forge hammers. We can make the river move a saw to cut wood."
'We can have a factory running 24 hours a day,' he thought. 'We can have the Industrial Revolution in a year.'
Tyla gasped. The scale of what he was proposing hit her. "Seiko... that... that is..."
"It is the next pact," said Seiko. "The Iron Pact gave us weapons. The Knowledge Pact gave us a purpose. But this..." He put the charcoal on the drawing. "This is the Energy Pact. This gives us the power to do it all."
"But... how?" asked Tyla, her voice trembling with excitement. "This is wood. And the gears... how do we connect everything?"
"With precision," said Seiko. "The forge was brute force. This is brains. The water wheel must be balanced. The gears must mesh perfectly. And the core must be protected from the water."
He stood up. "You are my best smith, Tyla. Now, you are going to be my first electrical engineer. I will teach you to measure. I will teach you to calculate gear ratios. But first..."
He looked toward the camp, toward the distant sound of pickaxes.
"We need wood. Lots of wood. And we can't ask Kael to divert his men from the wall."
"But who will cut it?" asked Tyla.
"We will," said Seiko. "And Acies. And you will recruit the wounded who can work. And the prisoners who know carpentry."
Seiko looked at his drawing in the mud. A water wheel, a generator, wires... it was the blueprint for a new world.
He turned toward the camp. The sun beat down on the prisoners as they dug. He saw Commander Valerius, the man who bore his father's name, throw a rock onto a pile, his face covered in sweat and humiliation.
Seiko's knowledge of history reminded him of the great works of antiquity. The pyramids. The Great Wall. Roman aqueducts. All built on the backs of men like these.
'The captives,' he thought, the reality of his decision settling in. 'Progress. But at what cost.'
"Tyla," he said, his voice suddenly harder. "Watch the tools. I'm going to talk to Kael about the prisoners' rations. If they are going to build a wall... they are going to need more fuel."
The engineer had dreamed. Now, the leader had to manage the human machinery that would make it come true. And that, Seiko realized, was the most complicated machine of all.
[A/N: I took a few days off for some rest and vacation, so sorry for not updating. I'll be posting more chapters right now. Since I've been away for several days, I'll be uploading 11 chapters in a row this time. But on Patreon, I'll keep the usual 10 chapter advance, just like I originally planned. You're all welcome to check it out. I hope you have a wonderful day, afternoon, or night. patreon.com/Nemryz]