Dominic put the spare rifle in his storage cube and went back to milling the parts for tomorrow’s orders. So far, everything appeared to be going well, and if they had finished arming the Regiment, then the front lines would soon be getting a reliable increase in firepower.
On the other side of the Palace, the Crown Prince strode into a meeting with purpose, not even caring that the door slammed open to announce his presence before the attendant was able to.
"Father, I have the information you requested. It is the Sorcerer making the rifles on his own. As you suspected, he has no issues comprehending magical blueprints. He just looks at them and makes the parts like any other common tool, except these are meant for war." He announced.
The King’s advisors turned to him in shock.
"You mean, he can turn out magitech rifles as if they were shovels?" The Defence Minister asked, but everyone simply ignored him as the King and his oldest son stared each other down.
After a few tense seconds, the King sighed. "That’s what I was afraid of. The veil doesn’t apply to dragons and their ilk. Magic is no different from math to them, and they will not fail if they follow the steps properly."
The others in the room looked horrified, but in the back, the twin Princesses smirked at each other.
They had been wagering on this fact since Dominic had produced ten rifles from spare parts in only a few days. They might not have been the highest quality weapons ever produced, but the magical power on them was reliable and uniform.
In his hands, craftsmanship meant nothing until it was so bad that the weapon failed.
But when a human artificer tried to produce a magitech weapon, every hand movement, every adjustment, every imperfection on the parts added up to the outcome. If they tried to just throw parts together and dunk them in mana oil, they would more likely burn the forge down than make a fully capable magitech weapon.
"What do we do about it?" The Defence Minister tried again.
"Well, he works for us, does he not? There was a reason that the Sorcerer put in so much work to try to gain an Apprentice’s position. Does anyone know what he wanted to ask of the Crown?" The King asked.
Princess Alexis cleared her throat, and her father spun in his seat.
"He was born in a Wavemates border village that was burned to the ground about a decade ago. He wants vengeance, and to bring the region under Cygnia’s control." She explained.
"A Sorcerer with nationalist sentiment?" One of the Nobles scoffed.
The Crown Prince chuckled, and the twins smirked at each other.
Before they could speak, the Crown Prince did. "I suspect that nationalism has nothing to do with it. His village was on the Wavemates side of the border. However, he doesn’t know the names or identities of the soldiers who burned his village to the ground.
So he’s willing to turn out mass-produced magitech weapons until every soldier who might have been at the massacre of his village is dead.
It’s not nationalism, it’s vengeance.
The Dragons might pretend that their actions are driven by some noble sentiment about maintaining stability, order or some other nonsense. But when you anger a dragon, they burn everything to the ground.
It’s in their nature.
A dragonkin Sorcerer just has a bit more patience."
Dominic didn’t really strike the Princess as the vengeful sort, but when they were under attack, he certainly didn’t cower in fear.
The King looked at the deployment map on the large table. "Ten years ago, at the former Wavemates border? Is that not here?"
The Crown Prince nodded. "Yes. We took it in the first week during an encircling action to force the Dagos army to go the long way around the river valley. It is now back under Cygnia’s control, but nobody lives there.
The whole area is barren and abandoned. It hasn’t been occupied since the fall of the Wavemates Kingdom."
The Agriculture Minister gestured to the location. "It’s actually been twelve years since the farms there were razed, and the army reports that Dagos never sent new farmers to work the area after killing the residents. Everything is fully overgrown, and no attempt has been made to clear the area.
They even found skeletal human remains in some of the residences, as well as three different battle locations.
But the manor house still stands.
The army received supplies there this week, and they have a battalion stationed in the Manor for defence of the region."
The King of Cygnia sighed. It seemed that nobody in the Dagos Nobility had actually cared about that land after the Lord working it had passed.
"Who was responsible for it before it was Razed?" One of the younger ministers asked.
The King cleared his throat. "It was a cold palace, for one of the Wavemates Regent’s imperial concubines and her family. When she lost favour, she was exiled to the border with her staff, and later brought her brother to her Manor after his branch of the family also fell from favour.
I believe that most of you knew the Earl, Second Cousin to King Wavemates."
That made sense to the other Nobles. It belonged to the Crown, and as nobody was using it, and nobody was sent to retake it, the property was forgotten by both sides of the conflict.
The Crown Prince looked at the map with consternation clear on his face.
"They went to all that trouble to raze the farms, kill the townsfolk and even the rural peasants, but left the Manor intact after killing the concubine’s family? That doesn’t make sense. Nobody kills off the peasants without a good reason." He noted.
Princess Alexis chuckled grimly. "They do if the residents aren’t human. The Concubine was a Techno Witch, her brothers were all Dragonkin mages of questionable lineage, and most of the locals were as well.
In fact, the Apprentice you were investigating today was apparently born to a member of the Concubine’s Family, though our records say that his mother worked as an Arcanist, not a Techno Witch."
The Crown Prince looked startled that she had looked that far into the Apprentice’s records, but realized that they had fought together, so the Sorcerer had likely provided much of that information himself.
None of them knew that she had seen him clearly healing from fatal injuries with draconic magic.