Kyle’s slow campaign on the mountain ranges was progressing nicely. Once every miner was armed, as well as a 3 to 1 miners to guards ratio, monster attacks had mostly stopped. Kyle still had to stay and kill the big players in the area for a week or two, but once they were dealt with, Kyle could go back to the city and continue to grow the industry using the nanofactory.

  With more coal, iron, lead, copper, sulfur, manganese from the mines and limestone from the quarries, the Industrial Revolution took off. Kyle even had to start building housing around the city. The available jobs and merchant networks had secured a much needed flow of migrants to man the latheworks, foundries, and ammunition factories.

  New goods had been added to the markets, like paper and glass. Kyle also started production of primitive cement, although clay was common in the area. Bricks would remain the best method of construction for a while. Guano also abounded in the mountains. They not only allowed for Kyle’s critical food production industry, but also could be used to provide the nitrates in gunpowder.

  The miners mostly just pulled double duty on that. With good cots, a large base camp, a basic steam-powered and heated plumbing system to allow for some hot showers, modern worker protection and reasonable shift timings, their production was tremendous.

  Kyle also made a few steam-powered jackhammers. They weren’t as convenient as they sounded, and had to be moved on carts. Still, with well cared for workers and some steam-powered equipment, they could match any need for resources Kyle’s industry had.

  Only a few things pressed on Kyle’s mind. For one, the extradimensional forces that were clearly aware of him and had contacted him long ago. The second was building a bureaucracy befitting of the League.

  ————

  Walking into his administrative cottage, he found the 40 or so employees of the agency hard at work organising the census or dealing with his taxes. The bureaucracy of the city was incredibly simple, due to the combined factors of the people’s high loyalty and Kyle’s brute-force method management. His basic suit AI could handle a lot of the calculations.

  His head of finance, an aging man by the name of Basileus, sat at a larger desk at the back of the room. The man had been hired in the first month of the settlement, and had carried a lot of the early bureaucracy on his shoulders before Kyle had hired accountants for him. “Ah, Kyle, come in! I was just about to leave to give you the report.” Kyle had once again put his armor away to be more approachable.

  “Yes, yes. How have things been? Have we broken even yet?” The man smiled and brought up a sheet of paper. “This paper is truly amazing… oh, yes, the finances. The steel tools are selling incredibly well, and profits are only increasing. Even with the low prices, the profit margin is immense. Textiles and other goods are picking up as well.”

  Grabbing another piece, he continued. “Thanks to that new fertilizer, we’ve finally stopped importing food. Many raw resources still have to be carted in, especially timber, but the new mines should fix a lot of that. I’ll say, the way you run your mines is revolutionary. It’s almost as if treating your workers well makes you more money. We’ve essentially broken even.”

  Kyle nodded happily. Time to get going with his plans for world domination.

  ————

  Altrai was a relatively boring place. There was coal and a lot of farmland nearby, so the tiny village had eventually turned into a town. Kyle’s plan for conquering it was as such.

  The main thing was to minimize disturbances on a larger scale. There was only one family of nobles in charge of the city, who delegated through a council of prominent tradesfolk. If he could take control of one of those two bodies, then he would have thousands more workers to mine, build new factories, and work in them.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  People would adapt quickly. All it would take would be one or two harvest cycles with his new methods, and the jobless sons and daughters would flood to the city for work. That was how industrialization happened-new farming tech meant less farmers needed, and the promise of factory jobs pulled thousands of excess people in from the countryside.

  He would collect the tradesfolk, a tiny portion of the city's population, and give them a chance to submit. The masses would be fine with his new shadow leadership, but the middle class might cause problems if he slaughtered their guildmasters.

  It would be simple. The hardest part would be getting the stubborn farmers to use his new techniques, but there were plentiful examples from his own lands. The operation had already been planned out. Administrators were set to be empowered, cultists and gangsters set to be purged, guards set to be replaced. Once the corruption had been rooted out, the town would mostly be his.

  ————

  Kyle had been working on a pet project of his. The steam-powered tank was considered impractical at best due to the danger of steam boilers in combat. However, using some basic enchantments, the boiler could be reinforced. Bariyon had come in and done the runework.

  In an unused barn, the machine of war sat. It looked almost identical to a Mark 1 British tank, the father of mechanized warfare. The tracks around the main body were much smaller, however, as the thing was more of a mobile gun platform than a trench-crossing tool.

  A thousand men with rifles was well and good, but artillery had long ruled the battlefield. The gun was in the same place on the tank as the St. Chamond tank, another precursor tank. A 10 pounder firing canister or solid shot.

  The tank was incredibly strong and could pull massive loads in testing, and had decent speed. Thankfully, without any effective anti-tank weapons possibly on the whole planet, the steam boiler would be safe and reasonable.

  The tank was a bit more like the St. Chamond than the Mark 1, a bit like the main body of the former and the treads of the latter. Someday Kyle would have to siege a city, and he envisioned brigades of these things knocking down the walls and destroying formations of the Veskayan legionaries.

  It was a good vision.

  ———

  Sneaking into Altrai had been easy. The armor had good cloaking systems, using light-bending gravitic plating. The most impressive feature was an array of tiny laser weapons that would blast anyone who looked at him in the eyes. They would get a nasty migraine, and in 95% of cases, they forgot about whatever they had seen. The suit ai handled the targeting.

  Deftly climbing the walls and crossing the rooftops gently, he approached the small palace in the center of the city. House Caltagar was small, poor, and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Even if he killed them all and put himself in the top position, little would change.

  He’d fabricated a batch of Agent 818 using the nanofactory. A powerful knockout agent that temporarily deactivated mitochondria in critical cells, it would knock a person out for nearly a full day reliably. Tossing a small canister of it in the guardhouse was easy enough, as all the guards had been inside for a shift change.

  Walking through the small gate and crossing the poorly maintained courtyard, he entered the manor. Most of the servants had finished their work and gone home. A single maid fueling some torches and fireplaces was easily scared into submission; she had enough common sense to follow the orders of an 11 foot tall titan of steel.

  The office door of the head of the family was easily removed from its hinges with a vibro-blade. The man, one Losus Caltagar, had been sitting behind his desk inspecting a small jewel when Kyle had burst in. He was a fat and mostly bald man, with a few strands of black hair on his greasy scalp.

  “Wha… who… GUARDS!” Kyle simply shook his head. “I’ve already dealt with them. You and I are going to have a… friendly discussion, shall we say. Here’s how things-” before Kyle could finish his sentence, the man sprang from his chair and smashed a glass pane on the shelf next to his desk. A blast of purple light emanated from it a moment later.

  A portal of the same purple light formed in front of the desk, and out from it stepped a man in plate armor wearing a golden mask, carrying a shortsword. “Why did you break the comms crystal? Oh, that’s why. And who might you be?”

  Tiredly, Kyle responded, “Nothing you need to worry about.” Rather than listen to the man's monologue on why he had to protect the noble, Kyle pulled out his revolver from its holster and pulled the trigger.

  Less than 5 seconds after the man’s arrival, he fell to the ground with a bleeding hole in his throat. Kyle turned his gun on the noble. “Any other emergency backup or shadow organizations to call on? No? Well then, as I was saying before I was rudely interrupted…”