Inheritor Of Magic: The Magi King

And so, with the price settled for her help, the design team started to modify the Inscriptions to accomplish the same general effects with Faerie Magic.

Some of them the Faerie just left alone, either unable to modify them, or not needing to modify them since the Witches could use the arrays, like the ones on the motor, but others were completely different by the time that she was finished.

Janet looked at the new set of inscriptions in the new tome she had created for the occasion and sighed. "You know, witches can't use most of these either. They're Fae Magic, so no matter what, we need either a Demon or a Fae to help create the buggies."

The Faerie shrugged and circled around Wolfe's head to dust him with glitter.

"Well, that's just part of being a Witch. Your magic isn't really intended for things like this, you're supposed to be the friendly, tending the creepy cabin in the woods people, not the weapons of mass destruction people." She giggled.

Ann smirked at her Familiar. "And who might the weapons of mass destruction people be? The Demons?"

The little Fae looked at her as if she were a bit dim, then shook her head.

"No, not them. The demigods are the mass destruction people. I swear, they're all born with the strength of their deity parents, but no functional brain cells. Just being around them is likely to get you injured. They might be the only group that gets kicked out of Faerie faster than the Demons."

Wolfe laughed at her animated rant as the Faerie flitted about in front of his face, spreading dust everywhere as her wings and arms made grand gestures to express her dislike for the Demigods.

"Fortunately, there are none in this world, so we don't really have to worry about them coming to bother our Fae friends." He joked.

"They'd better not show up. If they show up, I'm blaming you." The Faerie insisted.

With the completed book in hand, the witches now had a way to make the new vehicles with either a Demon or a Fae assistant, greatly increasing the number of teams that could work on the project, and the total number of vehicles that they could create in a day. With the plan to make them available to large numbers of scouts, and as a defensive military vehicle, they were going to need a lot of them before the United World Army started moving their way.

While Wolfe and the Faerie were arguing about the likelihood of Demigods suddenly showing up in a world where they had never been seen, a few more scouts had come together with bad news. The numbers of both enhanced monsters and new Cursed Talismans in the southern regions were on the rise again.

"We cleared the whole region around the lake only three days ago, but we found two more of them today." The scout explained.

"I found one more in the river valley as well, and I pass there every day." Another one added.

"Yeah, my team found two more along the southern side of the green area, near where the spell is advancing. They definitely weren't there last week." The third scout added.

Ann frowned as she recorded the news. "It seems like they've found a new batch of curse makers after the last ones died of mutation, or were retired from service. We are going to have to keep sending the Fae Familiars out with the planes so that we can find them from further away. It's a lot of ground to cover, and not on the route to the villages, so it will slow down deliveries a little bit, but we will do what we can."

"They just don't give up. There aren't even that many monsters in the area for them to be enhancing. This isn't part of their summer grazing range." The first scout complained.

Wolfe looked at the map where Ann was recording the data and noticed that the pattern was the same as the first time. It was all spots where monsters should gather, but without actually checking on the number of monsters in the area.

The southern and western regions closest to the Coven borders were the winter grazing areas for the Monster Packs. The witches were months early in placing out the Cursed Talismans, and it was unlikely that many of them would remain when the monsters arrived.

"I think that they're dropping them blind again. These aren't being placed by the army that is in the field near the Eastern borders, they're being portal dropped by someone with a map on another continent. See how they're almost exactly where the last ones were? They're just repeating the pattern on the off chance that we've destroyed them all.

They should know that we're destroying a lot of them because the caster will feel the backlash, but I doubt that they can pinpoint which one it was, or they would have started attacking our scouts by now." Wolfe commented.

"What do you mean?" The mouse kin scout on his right asked.

"If they knew which ones we were destroying, they would know where we were. Even when we destroyed them only a few kilometres from the army, they didn't send a team out for us. They have cast so many of them that they don't know which one is which, so they only know how many of them are gone. 

If you start searching for the talismans in new areas, you will likely find some spots that have two Cursed Talismans close to each other soon. That will be the new one and the one that we missed last time." Wolfe explained.

The Fairy let out a string of curses that ranged from highly creative to completely incomprehensible as her speech rate sped back up to Fairy standard, but from what Wolfe could understand, it seemed that she did not have a high opinion of the foreign witches.

"How many are they going to throw away? These all need Second and Third Rank witches to cast, the curse won't advance a monster stronger than the caster. Even a few dozen will cripple them for life, so how many witches do they have to throw away like this?" She finally asked once she calmed down enough that the others could understand her again.

"For all we know, they could have entire cities full of higher ranked witches. We never thought to ask how many witches were in the population or the army when we had the visitors here. But we can ask the deserters when we get back to town." Wolfe suggested with a sigh. 

He hoped that the number was much lower than the worst-case scenarios that had come to his mind. These Witch Saints were insane, ordering people to their deaths just to make stronger monsters.

"Then I suppose we should head back into town and get the information that we need before we make plans for more buggies. The scouts are going to need them to get to all the Talisman locations before we have another influx of monsters." Janet recommended.

"Alright, someone call for the boat. Ann, please let us know right away if there are more reports of new Talismans, so we know how bad the problem is getting."