Chapter 216: SkunkWorks

September 10th, 625

867 miles northeast of the Capital, just 133 miles outside of the Whetted City. 

I stood within a newly constructed village, many warlocks, summoners, and knights running around and carrying out a myriad of tasks. 

Next to me was Shadowbane, not far from us a group of armored soldiers from the Raven Family getting a tour from one of our summoners. 

I gave her a smile, “Thanks for the help, Shadow. Please make sure the Chief gets my appreciation.”

“I will. Although with all the security measures you have in place, I’ll need help just delivering the letter.” 

“Heh, I’ll get you a summoner. Unfortunately not even I am exempt from the processes. It’s a necessary policy though.”

I looked around at all the security guards setting up perimeters and guard posts. There were also patrols out beyond the village keeping an eye on things with magic sensors. 

This place was known as Wonderland, and it was a brand new testing site for experimental weapons and technology. Sawn had taken my advice some months ago and decided to make a dedicated testing ground in secret. 

Shadowbane was here because the Raven Family was hired as a security force. Off the record I knew they were independent of the Kingdom and I wanted them as a third party, knowing they wouldn’t be swayed by the covert powers of the Crown, especially after I had my run-in with the 3rd Claw. 

In exchange for their services, besides getting paid, they were also going to get priority dibs on our products like the planes. Sawn also made a deal with them for materials like metals since they were rich in that industry. 

It all worked itself out and now I had a reliable ally to keep checks on everything and everyone who went in and out of this place. 

Not that there should be many people coming and going. Part of the plan was to have all of our head designers and enchanters move their families here and take up residence here for the foreseeable future. It was the price to take this job, and while some didn’t, many did. 

After making sure Shadowbane was set up to return to the Whetted City, I left for one of the many facilities, arriving at a large office. 

Inside there was the team of 26 individuals I had been given. They were almost all of the best enchanters and summoners that Sawn Industries boasted. 

Two days ago I was made the Director of the Advanced Development Program, a new sector of Sawn Industires that handled bleeding edge classified projects. My work had already changed the world and Sawn agreed with me that we needed a new level of security for the stuff I was about to make. 

Elemental Crystals were great, but almost as important as being able to make them was being able to deliver them. The things I would soon be designing would multiply the efficacy of those catastrophic weapons, and I wasn’t interested in more leaks. 

I also didn’t allow the threat from the 3rd Claw to deter me. I would implement the most thorough security I could so that neither they nor the Church could sneak out the information. 

Even further, I had been inspired after our fun time that night and went on a spree of digital development, creating a new “online” repository for enchantments and knowledge. It was covered in layer after layer of security that only I knew how to crack. I hadn’t finished it yet, but it would be implemented soon. After that, I would have little to worry about regarding keeping designs out of the wrong hands. 

“Is everyone here?”

“Yes sir.”

Boris walked over to me, nodding in affirmative. He flipped through a clipboard in his hands. 

“The last one came a few minutes ago.”

“Good.”

I nodded, looking across everyone in the room. 

They all went silent and turned to me, waiting for my words. Everyone here was older than me, some by many decades, some by just 10 or 20 years. There were those with white hair and those who looked even younger than I did. 

I took a breath before speaking. 

“Good day, everyone. I am John Cooper, your new Director. You all are now a part of the Advanced Development Program, codenamed SkunkWorks. In this program, you all will be responsible for inventing, building, testing, and implementing the most advanced and dangerous weaponry and technology this world has ever seen. Everything you do here will be shrouded with the utmost secrecy, the specifics of which you’ve already been detailed on when you signed your contracts.

“For the foreseeable future, this is your home. For the foreseeable future, you will eat, sleep, breathe, and shit SkunkWorks. What we are doing here is not simply creating profitable tools to sell to the Kingdom or Church. We are all here to develop the worst weapons mankind can conceive of in order to wipe out the monsters vying for our extinction. 

“You all will be the spearhead whose efforts will change the course of the war. My planes, and the bombs currently being dropped from them on the front lines, have already changed the situation for the better. I have friends who are only alive because of those things. There are bases that now rely on my technology to hold off armies of hundreds of thousands. 

“But even those planes won’t be able to compare to the devastation we will invent. The weapons that come from this place will redefine warfare. The machines of war that we build will be even more important than entire bases of soldiers. We will multiply the combat power of the entire Kingdom tenfold. And while you may not become famous, I’ve made sure that you all will walk out of this place rich when it comes time to do so.”

I glanced at a few pairs of eyes, finding the spark of excitement and motivation. I was giving these people not just to opportunity to build whatever they could dream up, but a blank check and no red tape. There would be no limits here and these inventors loved that.

With the centuries of industrial knowledge in my head and some modern guidance, we’d make machines of destruction that would teach the Scourge what fear was. They will be slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands and they will have no human blood to show for it. 

I smiled, overlooking the warlocks and summoners, “Pretty soon, numbers will be rendered obsolete. When that happens, we will take the fight to the Scourge, purge them with fire, and take back our land. You all will be the people who make that happen. Just remember that it is not an impossibility, and I will show you the way forward. Now, everyone get to your workstations and set yourselves up. I’ve got some designs to get us started, and I have no intention of delaying our progress.”

They all rushed to different areas of the building, booting up screens and Nodes. 

“We’re ahead of the curve. No need to wait for the enemy to catch up.”

……

…

Through the rest of the month of September, I buckled down with SkunkWorks and managed to get four things out. 

The first was the classified repository. It was effectively a website that the warlocks and summoners here could access, and all sensitive designs and technologies were uploaded in their entirety. 

I also created a system that locked down every workstation in the village. Every Aerial, every Node, every screen had my systems ensuring that nothing that shouldn’t be accessed by someone couldn’t be. Nothing could be transmitted beyond the village no matter what, and with physical security, nobody was getting in or out without several people knowing about it. 

On top of everything, my encryptions could be found on just about every single enchantment that ever went into the repository. Even if someone managed to sneak one out, it couldn’t be used without knowing how to decrypt the entire enchantment first. 

Layers upon layers of security and trust-proof designs. While I didn’t believe it was entirely traitor-proof, it was damn close to it. 

Beyond that, there were two weapons that we developed rather quickly thanks to their simplicity. 

The first was artillery. I designed a type of Howitzer that fired shells which contained armed Elemental Crystals. Upon impact, the crystals would detonate. The hardest part about this was making the propellant that launched the shell. 

I couldn’t use anything chemical like gunpowder. That would require setting up an entirely new industry. I had to make do with what we had so I just used the one available tool we had already made. 

More explosive crystals. 

Nothing like an explosion to propel another explosive device. That’s how all firearms worked anyway, and the propellants didn’t have to be all that powerful to produce more than enough force to get a shell miles away. The hard part then was making them uniform, ensuring all propellant was the same so as to ensure accuracy. Then I had to write another text on how fielding artillery worked and how to operate everything, as well as how artillery groups had to communicate with scout groups to verify effective fire. I also had to make a system of grids so that artillery teams could strike at targets beyond visual range, which required making new maps, accurate maps, and making a system for aerial scouts to use to build those maps. 

It was all convoluted. It felt like I was introducing the entirety of modern warfare to this primitive nation, and yet I hadn’t even scratched the surface. There were so many systems that would need to bend to my own rules that it wasn’t feasible to implement everything anytime soon. The military would likely need several years to properly adapt to the new weapons and teach soldiers how to use them effectively across entire theaters. 

The war was progressing now, and I didn’t have several years to let the Kingdom slowly acclimate. That’s why, although I made the designs, wrote down the systems in text, and devised everything necessary to implement artillery into the military, I didn’t push for it. My focus shifted from there to the next thing we made. 

Tanks.

The issue with tanks, and why Steeds dominated, was the mobility. Power scaling often dictated that if you couldn’t kill something in a reasonably short amount of time, you probably had to run from it because the enemy was so hopelessly overpowered that no amount of firepower would threaten them. You were a pig to the slaughter. 

So big heavy hunks of metal weren’t ideal unless they were very heavily armored, which made them prohibitively expensive. And if it was very heavily armored then it was probably heavier than normal which demanded a drive shaft that could move the thing, and the normal method to turn wheels wasn’t that good. Thankfully though, I had made the Mana Engine, solving that problem and therefore solving the mobility problem. That meant we could introduce tanks to the field of battle. 

They would be far more reliable and far more armored than tanks from Earth, and not just because of the power scaling. Like with the planes, these tanks wouldn’t need engine bays, and ammo could be stored within storage crystals. Knights could lift shells easily which made manual loading far faster. That meant these tanks were just giant guns on armored treads. 

So I made them big and cool. 

4 inches of steel would be enchanted to an Authority 9 standard. There would be two 120mm main guns in the front, and the inside of the tank would be big enough to comfortably house 8 people. One person would sight, fire, and turn the main guns, one person would drive the tank, two people would be the loaders, and four people would man four turrets around the tank. 

It was big, it was bulky, and it was heavy. Without the need for an engine bay the entire interior could be utilized. It was as tall as a Steed, several times wider, and it would dominate the battlefield. I could already imagine a whole battalion of armor steamrolling through thousands of Scourge, unleashing hell and nothing able to do a damn thing about it. 

It was a beautiful thought that I was determined to make reality. And to do it in a more timely manner, I told Sawn that he should probably outsource the construction of the tanks to the Whetted City. They would make money that way and we would have less of a load on our already massive plate. Sawn still had his hands full manufacturing planes and went on a hiring spree because of it. He didn’t also need to worry about tanks. 

He agreed and started writing up the deals as I assigned some people to adapt the Howitzer tech to the main guns. I also implemented environmental control systems and other miscellaneous niceties that would ensure the crew couldn’t be burned out or something like that. 

Finally, the last thing I had the team start working on was missiles. 

Planes needed more weapons. The turrets Sawn Industries was famous for weren’t good at extreme ranges. Therefore, I decided to start making missiles. 

This was both simpler and more complicated. It was simple in the fact that I simply had to make a metal tube fly with an explosive crystal inside of it. The hard part was making it fly where I wanted. For that, I had to delve into another field I had touched upon when messing with the data repository for the workstations. 

Programming, and the sensors that could be programmed. 

There were such things as magical sensors but they weren’t amazing. Precision was an issue and that demanded complexity and data. Aerials were the first step toward computerization magic, and Sawn had long ago given me the full schematics for them. 

I knew how they worked. In the end it was nothing but a bunch of instruction sets. I could use that for other things, so I adapted the tech in order to not only make some magic sensors, but guidance systems. 

The main guidance system would follow a beam of mana, almost identical to a laser guidance system. That, in turn, required a special tool as well as a way to mount that tool to a plane. It would also demand a co-pilot who could control the laser, which would demand another model of plane. 

That wasn’t the only kind of missile though. There were big ones, small ones, dumb ones, smart ones, hellfire ones, high explosive ones, and more. I made enough variants to cover a variety of situations, primarily crowd control and close air support. They could also carried by helicopters and missile launchers designed for them, because there was no way I was going without an Apache. 

Needless to say, the SkunkWorks team had a lot on their plate. I was able to give the general designs as well as the core enchantments, but it was their job to refine, build, and test everything to make sure it worked like we wanted. It would probably take several months to get all of these projects into the field, but it was worth the wait. These weapons, as I had said many times, would change the way war was fought. 

It would, of course, also change the power dynamic between the Kingdom and Church, but that was a price I was willing to pay. It wasn’t like I wouldn’t give the Church my designs either. As soon as Luna came back to me with a promise from the Church that they wouldn’t get me killed by openly fielding my work, then I would send everything. 

As the person with the highest clearance and knowledge of how everything worked, I naturally made myself admin and left backdoors in several places throughout every system I created as well. I could transmit and delete anything I wanted to without anyone being the wiser. 

Now, it was all about timing. I set everything up nice and neat for SkunkWorks to work on while I went back to the Treehouse. Unfortunately, I was still under contract to fight. Not that I didn’t think it was good for me. Getting back out in the field was a good way to keep track of things and keep me on my toes. Life in the Capital was peaceful. It was easy to get complacent and lazy. 

I needed to keep sharp. I needed to keep reminding myself about what I was fighting against, garnering inspiration for more weapons. 

I was getting close to Authority 7. Although I had gotten distracted more often than not, I was diligent and about to finish comprehending the next advancement formation. After that, I’d start cultivating power and develop my next Spark. 

I was looking forward to it, and the battlefield was a good place to exercise my Psyka with machine gun fire.

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