The Storm King - Chapter 773: Chief of Magical Research and Development

As he left the Hexagon, Leon was practically buzzing with excitement. He couldn’t help it; he still didn’t trust the Director—the thought that the man might still be in bed with vampires that wanted Leon and Xaphan dead still flitting through his mind—but being placed in charge of Magical Research and Development was a position of such power and influence that Leon was excited in spite of his misgivings.

All of Heaven’s Eye’s researchers would be at his beck and call. Effectively endless resources awaited him, and he could utilize those resources as he saw fit. There were better ways this could’ve been resolves, he was sure, but it was hard to imagine them in light of his new position.

For now, though, he was torn on what to do next. Being placed in charge of an entire branch of Heaven’s Eye was a monumental thing, and he had no idea how to handle it. In short, he needed help, and he wasn’t quite sure where he should look first to find that help.

The first person he thought of was Emilie. His mother-in-law had spent more than a decade now as Chief of Acquisitions, and he was certain she could help him out with getting on his feet with his new duties.

The second person he thought of was Elise. She was quite skilled in administration, and with some of his other retainers, he thought that he might be able to take care of a few things more easily…

The third person was Narses, but after thinking on it, he decided to simply return home as quickly as he could. Most of the rest of his retinue was already waiting for him right here, having not left after the unexpected end to Narses’ attempt to arrest Rufus, so after linking up with them and having them head toward the tower that was now his, Leon took off into the air. He was breaking the law by flying, but right now, all he cared about was getting home as quickly as he could.

—

“This is incredible,” Elise said, and not for the first time as she looked around the office.

Rufus’ office, now hosting Leon, his family, and his retinue, was an opulent place. Marble and gold was the name of the game, and rich red carpets and furniture made of exotic materials like Heartwood, turtle shell, and ivory.

It wasn’t exactly to Leon’s taste, but fixing that wasn’t even close to first on his to-do list.

He, Elise, and most of the rest of his retinue were going through Rufus’ personal documents with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Elise and Talal were the two most taken with the task, and Elise in particular was reading through papers with a look of unabashed glee on her face.

“Find something interesting?” Valeria asked, clearly taking the opportunity to look up from her own stack of paper.

“Rufus had quite a few personal accounts,” Elise explained with a look of magic glee in her eyes. “They’re not exactly ‘legal’ accounts, and it wouldn’t be too much trouble to take them over for ourselves…”

“How much?” Leon asked, his own patience strained from reading through Rufus’ personal correspondence. Most of it was Rufus telling his department heads to get along, or to deal with the funding they’d been given, unfortunately. He’d been hoping for progress reports and the like.

“Billions,” Elise replied, and Leon froze, then slowly turned his head toward his wife. Elise nodded furiously. “Many billions. And they’re ours now.”

Leon, his eyes wide, slowly looked away from Elise and let his gaze drift over the rest of his shocked retinue. He could barely even comprehend that much wealth, let alone that it was now his. At the very least, as he took in the mildly envious looks of his people, he knew what he could do with some of it.

“We’ll have some accountants go over it,” he said, “and once it’s been cleared, I think a bonus of all of you will be in order. Maybe ten years’ salary, at least?”

Rufus’ former office practically shook as Leon’s retainers cheered. However, that good cheer quickly cooled as someone knocked on the door and rather arrogantly forced their way in without waiting for an answer.

“What is the meaning of this?!” shouted the man. He appeared rather long-in-the-tooth, with short white hair, a few prominent wrinkles, and a face that reminded Leon of a weasel.

“Who are you and why are you bursting into my office?” Leon growled as he let his eighth-tier aura spill forth, his killing intent slamming into the man who’d so rudely barged in. The seventh-tier weasel froze in place, his eyes going wide.

“Y-Your office?” he gasped under the weight of Leon’s aura.

“Yes. Answer my questions now.”

“I am… I am Ephialtes!” the man gasped. “The… Vice-Chief!”

“Oh,” Leon whispered as he narrowed his eyes. “Appointed by Rufus, were you?”

Ephialtes frowned and shuddered as Leon refused to let his aura abate. But after several long seconds of defiant scowling, he eventually nodded.

“All right,” Leon said. “Talal, are you looking for a promotion?”

The Samarid barely reacted for a couple seconds, Leon’s words clearly needing time to process. However, as he slowly turned his head toward Leon, his eyes widening, his aura roiling as exactly what Leon was offering him became clear.

“Leon…?” he murmured in confusion. “Are you…?”

“Offering you the job of Vice-Chief? Yes, yes I am.” Leon smiled as Talal did his best impression of an air-drowning fish for a moment. “Look, Talal, I need people I can trust. Someone without any respect for proper decorum, like this guy whose name I’ve already forgotten, isn’t that. Someone appointed by Rufus, like this guy whose name I’ve already forgotten, isn’t that. Guy whose name I’ve already forgotten, you’re fired. Leave.”

Leon restrained his killing intent just enough for Ephialtes to suck in a breath of air and straighten himself out.

“This… you can’t do this!” the weaselly man shouted.

“Well, that’s awkward because I’ve already done it,” Leon replied. “Talal will have you escorted as you grab your personal affects and then depart the building. I’ll give you twenty minutes.”

Talal, still clearly reeling from what Leon had just done, could only nod and dumbly stumble out of the office, Ephialtes furiously following him. Leon dimply heard Talal organizing some of the guards outside to follow through on what he’d just ordered, and the guards doing so. Fortunately, even though the Director had yet to make an official announcement, he’d given Leon all the required paperwork he needed to ensure that the security and other essential staff of the building knew who was now in charge.

Ephialtes simply hadn’t yet gotten the memo, having been absent from the tower until seemingly just now.

“That was nice of you, Leon,” Elise whispered. “Talal’s done good work for us, it’s good to see him rewarded, despite the circumstances of our meeting.”

“Nice, and practical to boot!” Gaius agreed. “Talal’s proven himself a good man. Maybe a little arrogant in those early days, but good nonetheless.”

“Exactly,” Leon said. “He’s managed our affairs magnificently. I think for dealing with my horse shit, that he deserves a little compensation. So long as he doesn’t revert to how he was back in Akhmim, I think having him as a trustworthy Vice-Chief will only be to our benefit.”

“You’re only trying to foist off your responsibilities onto him, aren’t you?” Alix observed with a wry smile.

“I’m delegating,” Leon corrected with a sagely look. “I’m terrible at administration, let’s not beat around the bush about that. Talal is great at it. So, I just have to let him do what he does best, while I provide ‘direction’ and ‘solve disputes’, as the Director put it. And use Heaven’s Eye for my own personal ends, but that’s just a perk, isn’t it?”

“Practically what Rufus was doing, anyway,” Elise added. “Though, I think there’ll be less outright corruption with us in charge, right?”

“Just new management with new priorities,” Leon replied. “Not getting rich, but advancing our power and understanding of the universe. Now, where were we?”

As he turned his attention back to the correspondence, he could practically feel the disappointment and dejection in his retinue as they had to do likewise. There were a lot of papers here, and it would take quite a while to sort through.

—

Leon’s decision to appoint Talal to the position of Vice-Chief immediately began paying dividends. Since it was just Rufus and Ephialtes who were now being replaced, there wasn’t much paperwork that needed to be done quite yet. That would soon change, of course, but in less than a day, the Director made the public announcement that Leon was taking over for Rufus, and Talal had ensured that the announcement was heard throughout the tower and that the various labs and other holdings that answered to Leon’s position checked in.

By the next day, Tlaal had already gotten a summarized report of all of what all of the various departments in the Magical Research and Development branch were doing, and who was appointed by whom, and the various resources at Leon’s disposal.

The first thing that had to be done was a check-in with the department heads. Leon himself had to take charge during that meeting, but fortunately, it was a quiet and bureaucratic affair, though no less exciting for those reasons. The department heads had to come in and essentially present themselves before him. However, given that nearly all of them had been appointed by Rufus, Leon didn’t bother to remember most of their names, knowing that Talal, even without his explicit instructions, would fire most of them. Even with Rufus dead, Leon wasn’t going to continue to staff the most important positions within his branch with those who owed the dead Rufus any favors, connected as they might to vampires.

There were quite a few projects that Heaven’s Eye was involved in, and Leon was very disappointed that he simply didn’t have the time to immediately dive into the details of any of them. He still had Red down in the Pegasi States to go and pick up, and he needed to check in with Tikos and Helen on the status of the thunder wood.

He trusted Talal to see to those aims, and to overhaul the branch’s bureaucracy as needed, or whatever else a Chief of Vice-Chief of a branch of Heaven’s Eye was supposed to do. For now, he just had to focus on his own projects.

On that note, he made the introductory meeting short, and left Talal in the tower to begin consolidating power while he returned home.

—

“So, how’re things going?” Leon asked as he entered Helen’s workshop. As was usual for the past few weeks, she, Elise, and Tikos were busy pouring over the thunder wood with many stacks of papers nearby filled with notes regarding its technical properties. Leon was actually rather surprised with just how many notes had been taken, and a quick glance at those closest had his eyes crossing. They were dense and so far beyond the base fundamentals of nature magic that he could barely make heads or tails of it.

“They’re well going,” Tikos responded, filling the air the scent of sweetness.

“Yeah!” Helen enthusiastically replied. “With Tikos here, we’ve been able to conduct tests on this thing far better than anything I could’ve done on my own! Honestly, even in just these few weeks spent studying it, we’ve done the work of years without our new friend!”

“Kind, you are very kind,” Tikos responded.

“Leon,” Elise breathed as she slid closer to Leon and gave him a quick hug. “Did things go well at Heaven’s Eye?”

“Things are going at Heaven’s Eye,” Leon vaguely stated. “Too early to say.”

“Understandable,” she replied as she directed him towards several enchantment arrays inscribed upon large sheets of spell paper covering two nearby worktables. The arrays were dense and detailed, but he could see multiple gaps where the arrays were incomplete. “I need your help,” Elise continued. “With Tikos’ help, we’ve been formulating a few hypotheses about how this wood managed to trap lightning within it and how its properties changed as a result, but figuring it out completely isn’t that easy given all of our relative lack of knowledge regarding lightning magic.”

“And that’s where I come in,” Leon said with a smile. He wouldn’t say that he was the most knowledgeable about lightning magic on the plane, but in his more arrogant moments, he figured that he had to be pretty close to the top at this point.

“Yes,” Elise replied. “Let’s go over this in as much detail as we can. If we’re lucky, we might be able to send you south with a few enchantments to test.”

“That would be… delightful,” Leon exclaimed as calmly as he could, though his heart thrummed with excitement at the prospect of figuring this riddle out so quickly.

He spent the entire rest of the day locked in Helen’s workshop going over the enchantments with Elise.

—

“Anything interesting in there?” Nestor asked as Leon stared at the reports in his hand, as he’d been doing for several hours.

Talal had been hard at work in the tower over the past day, and had already gotten rid of two of Rufus’ lackeys. It was hardly the purge that Leon had been expecting, but it had only been a day.

Still, a day had been more than enough time for Talal to have comprehensive reports on the big projects that Rufus had been sponsoring drafted and sent Leon’s way. For now, Talal would continue to see to the bureaucratic affairs of Leon’s new position, but Leon was far more interested in these reports, and had dove into his soul realm to look them over with Nestor upon receiving them.

Unfortunately, Leon hadn’t been too willing to read them aloud, and without his hands, Nestor couldn’t exactly read them himself, so Leon had quickly altered his plans and simply read them himself, only asking Nestor a few pointed questions as he made his way through the stacks of documents.

“A few things,” Leon replied. “There were a dozen ‘big’ projects that Rufus had initiated, but only three that really pique my interest. The rest are just the usual fare that large organizations like these generate. Important, to be sure, but not what I’m looking for.”

“Give me an example.”

Leon indicated the report he was reading at the moment and explained, “This is research into Hesperidic Apples and seeing if their effects of aiding mages in ascending through the tiers no matter what tier they’re currently at can be replicated artificially. The research was relatively promising for the lower tiers—up to the fourth-tier—but since it has no relevance for me, it’s less interesting than some of the other reports.”

“Helping a mage to reach the fourth-tier artificially is hardly anything to turn your nose at,” Nestor observed.

“True, but given that up to the fifth-tier, ascending through the tiers involves absorbing magic power and adapting your power to its use, there already exists many alchemical solutions to that problem.”

“Those come with sideffects, like creating flaws in your body’s adaptations that make a mage weaker than they should be. What about the results of this research?”

“Inconclusive so far. Not enough time for thorough testing. But I’m not saying that this research is pointless, all I’m saying is that there are other things I want to prioritize. And so far, I’ve found three ‘big’ projects that Rufus was working on that align with my interests.”

“Only three?”

Leon nodded in confirmation. “This one,” he said as he picked up a particularly thick report, “is one that attempts to create some kind of armored vehicle in the style of the horseless carriages that can act as a platform for large Lance-like weapons. As far as I can tell, they managed to get a prototype of such an armed vehicle running, but its power requirements are so great that it’s not yet been made practical.”

“Interesting,” Nestor said with some appreciation. “Such vehicles aren’t unheard of in the Nexus—our Clan even had quite a few, though they weren’t particularly suited for the job of taking over this plane, so they were left behind.”

“Really?” Leon asked in mild disbelief. “An armored vehicle bearing a Lance, and you left it behind?”

“They’re powerful and heavily armored, but slow and, as you’ve just indicated, require vast amounts of power. We didn’t anticipate running into any challenges that they’d be more suited to handle as opposed to a powerful mage, and we were correct.”

Leon sighed, but didn’t press the issue. He’d get a better understanding of just what Heaven’s Eye had managed to create when he returned from the Pegasi States. For now, he simply moved on to the second report, this one much thinner than the last one.

“This one has to do with golems, as far as I can tell. To my understanding, a golem frame is created with complex enchantments, but it’s powered, animated, and given its driving will with a wisp, a semi-intelligent sentient creature made of magic that a post-Apotheosis mage can create.”

“Correct in essence…”

“Well, Heaven’s Eye was attempting to create something like a golem using only enchantments. Again, it ran into power problems and the fact that the enchantments had to be impossibly complex.”

“Of course,” Nestor said with a derisive snort. “Wisps are by far the better option—for a golem to be even remotely animated by just a simple power source and enchantments, the enchantments have to be so incredibly small, fine, and detailed as to be essentially impossible. Not entirely impossible, of course, but it would require an enchanter of staggering skill and post-Apotheosis strength, at which point, using a wisp is simply the better option.”

“These were the problems this research team was trying to solve,” Leon said. “Miniaturization of enchantments and how to power the damn thing.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Do you notice the theme so far, Nestor?”

“That it’s weapons or automatons that can be slaved to you that have interested you so far?”

“I mean, sure, if you want to put it that way—I wouldn’t, but that’s beside the point—the problems faced so far have been twofold: intricacy of enchantments, and power requirements. I believe that if the miniaturization of enchantments problem can be solved, then the enchanters we already have are skilled enough to put something together that’ll work. More concerning are the power requirements: they’re staggering for their purposes.”

“As would be expected. Lances and golems eat power like you wouldn’t believe, and in the case of the former, are typically only installed on large weapons platforms like arks or sea ships where they can easily be fed massive amounts of power from what those large vessels already have.”

“But we already have a solution for that, don’t we?”

“Do we? Funny, I don’t seem to recall you studying how to forge power crystals or refine Titanstone…”

“No, dead man, I’m talking about thunder wood!”

Nestor went quiet for a long moment, then whispered, “You know, that might actually work. Using thunder wood in place of power crystals could be feasible. We’d need better data on how much power thunder wood is capable of generating, though.”

“Which means we need more thunder wood, which, thanks to Tikos, I’m on track to getting fairly soon.”

Leon let that statement hang in the air for a long moment before he gloatingly said, “Does it sting that in a matter of weeks, I’ll have the answer that your subordinates failed to acquire in the years they had that piece of thunder wood?”

“I know what you’re getting at, Leon, and I’d prefer if you just moved on,” Nestor said, his voice emanating from his ruby like it was coming through clenched teeth.

Leon smirked, but again, didn’t press the issue. Instead, he grabbed the last project that had piqued his interest. It was a larger report than that of the golems, but not quite as extensive as that of the armored vehicle.

“Blood magic,” he said with some distaste. “This right here is a surface-level report on their progress studying blood magic. Given what they were trying to do, I’d figure I’d read up on it, and found a few interesting tidbits. For one, it seems that Heaven’s Eye might’ve discovered a more efficient method of communication than comm stones through the use of blood resonance.”

“Ehh, ‘more efficient’ to a degree. Such a method is risky because it relies entirely on a mage staying alive and dedicating themselves to a purpose. Comm stones that don’t rely on a mage using their blood to resonate are the more reliable choice, which is why they’re the standard, not blood resonance.”

“That makes sense. What about this potential method of locating someone using their blood? That raised my eyebrows a bit, I have to admit.”

“It’s possible, and quite frequently used in the Nexus. I can’t say anything more than that without a more detailed explanation, though.”

“I’ll try and get one, then,” Leon said. “Do methods like these work on those who’re related to the one who’s being tracked? For instance, could I take blood from a son and use it to locate… oh, I don’t know, say, his mother?”

Nestor sighed, then admitted, “Yes, it’s possible. More possible with a few extenuating factors, like if the two share an awakened Inherited Bloodline. I don’t know how a conflicting Inherited Bloodline might complicate matters, though…”

“Just something to experiment with, I guess. For now, I think some of these others projects can be put on hold, at least, and have their researchers diverted to more… immediate tasks.”

“Like what, boy? What tasks could you possibly have for them? What tasks could you have in mind that might make best use of their skills? Do any of them even have the necessary skills for what you have in mind? Keep in mind that ‘researchers’ typically have fields of expertise—you can’t just take one studying golems and put them in a team researching demonology. That researcher’s field of expertise simply won’t be of any help, and they’d be almost worthless in that role.”

“Well, if you give me a chance to speak, dead man, then I might tell you. I was thinking of putting some time in researching arks, investing more heavily into automated armor—less than a golem, but more than lifeless armor—and get some fresh eyes on some of my weapon and armor designs.”

“So you’re going to turn this civilian infrastructure into your personal military research complex?”

Leon shamelessly smiled. “Yes.”

Nestor’s ruby flickered for a moment, and Leon could almost see the man’s look of surprise at his admission.

“I’m an eighth-tier mage, Nestor, and with Tikos and the Hesperidic Apples, it’s looking like I’ll be heading for Apotheosis relatively quickly. So it’s best that I start preparing to reach the Nexus now rather than later.”

“A wise choice, I suppose,” Nestor admitted, though it sounded like he really didn’t want to.

Leon just smiled as he turned back to the reports. He wasn’t quite done, and while it didn’t seem like there was going to be any more current projects that he was interested in, he still wanted to read them all before heading south to pick up Red.

He hadn’t even left yet, but he was already buzzing with excitement about what to do when he returned to Occulara.