With Fukushi… gone—I was somewhat still blindsided by her sudden departure.
No, stop. Focus. Breathe. Still in control. One of the cutes is… taking time off. That's all.
I recentered, then turned my attention to the boulder that had pancaked my unwanted audience. Not to be confused with the perfectly welcome alternate audience. /wave minna!
The boulder probably weighed a few tons? Was that an acceptable form of measurement? Probably not. Anyway, it was a lot of stone. And it was more than a little in the way.
I backed up a good distance, then held up my finger and thumb, closing my left eye as I shifted until the boulder was just the right size to fit between my fingertips as I looked through only my open right eye.
“Aaaaaand… boop.”
I squashed the boulder in my field of view, then opened both eyes and smiled at my handiwork. Complete absence of boulder-sama.
Sure, the show wasn’t important. But what was important was not thinking about depressing thoughts. After all, I didn’t do depressive spirals. Anime-themed coping mechanisms fully engaged.
Anyway, before me was a startling lack of boulder. Just… smears that used to be a handful of annoying humans, all pressed into a small crater in the woodlands. I approached the edge of the smush zone and narrowed my eyes as I ran a few simple calculations.
After that, I shrugged and decided to wing it. Life was hard enough without a complex understanding of mathematics. There had been a servant of mine once who’d figured out the calculations that mattered, but I had developed a nasty habit of fudging the numbers until they worked for me instead of against me.
So I just ran with the usual.
I gathered the magic to weave a spell that probably violated a ton of laws and just about every moral compass I had never seen. In reply, the corpses began to stir as a purple light drifted around them, then locked them into place under my thrall. Their blood seeped back inside and the exterior reknit itself until they looked passably not-dead. That servant of mine had been a real necromancy nerd, but I had words with her for all the… grotesque appearances and smells.
Proper communication and about two decades of work, and we had figured out a fair method of mixing the right magics until we got minimally nasty necromancy. Bonus points went to the side effect that they could speak and remember things decently well.
““How may we serve—””
“Yeah, no. None of that. First, who sent you all to kill me? ”
There wasn’t even a moment of hesitation. They all spoke in unison: ““Duchess Meredith Andreas.””
That family again. Seriously, what a pain.
Making enemies sucked, and served to inflict me with a recurring villain for my story, but I had enough to worry about already. I didn’t need petty nobles sending their minions to the meat tenderizer. Trimming that family tree a bit more was almost on my to-do list.
I sighed and waved off-handedly at the mages-turned-undead. “Dig your own graves and do yourselves a favor by making things look neat.”
I had a road to fix.
The road was originally a dirt path that had been carved out and pressed into the soil by years of carts and ox hooves. Oxen, meaning the locals probably still used animals like cattle for labor, making their meat tough and unpalatable. Beef was probably at the bottom of the world-that-shall-not-be-named’s tier list of meats. Kinda happened that way when cattle were worked hard until the day they died.
More food inadequacies in the fantasy world. Wonderful.
I sensed a potential depressive spiral like a particularly deep pothole in the road of my life, and silently sidestepped it.
So the road…
One of my stray lightning redirections had scoured a multi-meter deep wound in the ground at an angle that ruptured the path in two places—one closer to the city and the other farther around a bend. Magic storms were no joke, and the road was like a war zone, criss-crossed with trenches.
“Hmm…” I played with my hair as I inspected the damage. “Right, I think I added some real character to this ecosystem. Let’s leave the damage, and instead try the bridge approach.”
I paced as I worked. And work, I did. Biting my lip, even. That was a sign I was going all out.
Except, civil engineer, I was not. Creation was apparently harder than demolition. By a fair margin, at that. Materials were a problem. Wood was right out. I had no idea how to treat and prepare wood to not rot or get torn through by termites. Metal was an option, though again, no idea how to get something that wouldn’t rust, since I would just be drawing raw iron or something from the planes.
That left stone. Stone was durable, and I could mostly shape it how I wanted. The question was how I’d get the best result. I had zero knowledge of joints or supports or foundations. I could just fill the space I need the bridge to be in, I guess?
So, I started with that idea. Not great, since that required a lot of precision, and my aim was… better with my fingers in the bedroom than it was with magic. Chaos being as chaos tended to be, after all.
It didn’t stop me from trying again. And again.
My issues were many and widespread. Gaps at the ends were an early problem. I ended up deciding that I’d fill those in after with whatever I had on hand.
Couldn’t do that, since the filling material was loose and didn’t like staying lined up. As soon as it packed down, there’d be a bump at each end. Cart wheels didn’t like those very much.
Ramps. Ramps were the answer, allowing the bridge to be longer than the gap I needed to fill.
I had regrets. I should’ve studied more on Earth’s engineering. A ten minute internet search would’ve been worth all the raw gold in the plane of earth. And yes, that was a lot of gold.
What I would’ve given for a good noose when I realized that water would become a big issue. One I didn’t understand or know how to predict. I just had a momentary enlightened thought that… it was another issue that would make me miserable.
Seriously, just kill me now. My hair’s long enough, you could hang me with it just fine. Why is this so hard?
So I did that thing Earthers did with pipes that ran from one side to the other. No idea what that actually did, but there had to be a reason.
Iteration was the mantra of the day, different shapes, different materials. My bridge needed to be aesthetic. Something I’d be content with bearing the name Singer Bridge or something.
How is making a strip of stone to stretch across a ten meter wide gap somehow harder than yanking enough soil to fill in this entire trench?! I just might lose it at this rate!
My seventh attempt at making a crossing was met with frustration as it leaned a few degrees off-center. Were degrees the right measurement? I told myself I could just leave it and nobody would notice… except I would know, and it would forever haunt me.
What if a couple was walking on the bridge, and it gave them the wrong impression that whichever of them was on the left was slightly taller than they really were? They might have romantic revelations that turned out to be completely wrong. Some women loved a taller partner. I’d know, I was the tall one.
I tousled my hair as I groaned in despair.
“Can’t do it. I can’t leave it like this.”
Turning back towards the west, I shaded my eyes as the sun dipped below the horizon. My whole evening had been a bust, and I had only worked on a single bridge, when I needed two.
I punched a tree, and it replied by dropping acorns on me like a fountain. I punched it again in retaliation. Seriously, though. How do people actually do this for a living?
Six seconds from a complete meltdown, I meandered into the woods until I found the crater, with a neat row of freshly dug graves. Unfilled graves. Just holes in the earth with a corpse laying in each, all laying with their eyes wide open and staring up into the sky.
Creepy.
I buried them with a thought, and left them there. Good riddance.
Maybe it was time to face the music. Rather, time to face the yandere. I could only delay my return for so long, slightly slanted bridges aside. I turned towards the city and almost took flight, but stopped.
Turned around, then shaved just the slightest layer off the left of the bridge.
I eyed it.
Then I took a slightly slimmer layer off the right.
It was level, but the bridge was slightly dipped from the rest of the road. Good enough… for a lesser being. Which means it isn’t good enough!
I dropped an unladylike number of F bombs in my head as I fiddled with the project until it was perfect. By the time I was done, both bridges were pristine works of art. Mostly. Because the soil beneath them wasn’t used to bearing so much weight in that area, which meant the stone would settle as the dirt compacted, making… none of it level.
“This project will be the death of me. I could work on this until the eventual collapse of reality, and I’d still never have a bridge that satisfied me. Civil engineers, I salute you. Thou hath defeated me.”
Then the sound of firecrackers reached my keen ears, and I froze, turning towards the castle as I saw dancing sparks streaking into the midnight sky.
Fuuuuck. Barely a minute past midnight, and this day is already out to get me.