Saga Of The European King

General Majesty had got everything running pretty smoothly in the castle that Mechanicus had built. They’d named it after him, so he was doubly obligated to do a good job. It was all organised. The guards had really complicated patrol routes, making it hard to sneak up on them, the alarm buttons weren’t too far apart and everyone knew exactly where the fire buckets were. It wasn’t a fortress that just anyone could break into. It was really hard to attack, too. It had mad fortifications. Mechanicus’ engineering corps had cut out a long, winding valley that led all the way to the remnants of the Forest of Dark Ice. Anyone who was going to get to the fort would have to come down that valley. Along the walls of the valley stood hundreds of guard towers. Mechanicus had fixed their clockwork so that they automatically fired arrows at bad guys and monsters, but not anyone who was affiliated with Europe. Two engineers were out in the valley at all times to repair the towers or, if necessary, to build new ones, or even upgrade the old ones to more sophisticated towers.

Mechanicus’ lab, deep with the fortress itself, was all abuzz with researching all kinds of new, awesome towers that could be built in the valley. Mechanicus himself was overseeing the most awesome ones that used the advanced science from the future. Mechanicus had not told anyone that he was from the future, not even the King. Everyone thought that his cybernetic parts were just ordinary magic. Mechanicus could go back to his own time whenever he liked, because his space ship was still in orbit and cloaked so no one could detect it. Even though he had been in Medieval Europe since he was a small boy, he had never felt the need to leave. He was personal friends with the King, who was officially the baddest badass in all of history. He had learned about the King in Future School. The King was a subject all by himself, like History, Future Maths and Being A Good Person. Mechanicus had aced all of his classes on the King. He was probably the best and youngest expert, in his own time, on the subject of the King. He had whipped up his own time-travelling spaceship just so he could hang out with him. This was no big deal. Almost everyone in the future could build a time-travelling spaceship. Mechanicus’ robot parents had called him up from Ceres-City just before he took his trip to tell him what a good idea it was. Nobody else had gone into the past to hang out with the King. They were all too intimidated. Mechanicus was cool that way.

When Mechanicus arrived in the Medieval age and met up with the King and built a fortress that helped everyone fight off all those birds, he had immediately realised that everything he knew about the King was wrong: The King was even more awesome than anyone in the future had ever dared to believe. Mechanicus was also double-thrilled to find out that he had been the one to have built the King’s famous wooden hands. He had always wondered who had done that. He hadn’t been very good at it on the first try – wood was extinct in the future, and much harder to work with than the materials he was used to, like the living metal you could talk to – but he made a new pair of hands for the King every year and got better at it every time. He had been working on the latest pair of wooden hands whenever he hadn’t been involved in building the fortress in the Chillinous Plains. The latest pair were so strong that the King would be able to punch a lion in half with them, if he wanted to do that.

Mechanicus was pulled from his work by an engineer in a red jumpsuit running into the lab. “Sir!” he said, “The towers have started firing!”
“Wolves!” shouted Mechanicus. What he meant was that wolves were trying to attack the fortress. Wolves were weak and pretty common, so they were the most likely candidate for the first wave of attacks from the Forest of Dark Ice. Mechanicus threw down the Bunsen burner he was busy with. It shattered on the floor. He pushed the engineer in the red jumpsuit aside and ran up the stairs to the Observation Deck. He wanted to see how the towers did against the wolves. Up the time he got up on the deck, the wolves were already dead from being shot to pieces with arrows. Mechanicus nodded very curtly. It was not a good thing, nor was it a bad thing. He grabbed one of the messenger pigeons from one of the nests on the observation deck. He wrote out a message, pinned it to the bird’s leg and threw it right over the edge of the deck. The bird flew over to one of the engineers at the towers. The engineer wore gloves so that he wouldn’t have to touch the bird directly. Even though Mechanicus had sworn that these birds were okay, a lot of people were still basically terrified of them. In Mechanicus’ time, birds could talk, drive cars and vote in all the elections they wanted to. It was pretty weird to him that everyone in Medieval Europe hated them so much. He knew why they were like that – the Bird Wars had really messed a lot of people up – but he still found himself getting irritated whenever someone got weird on the subject of birds.

The message on the pigeon said this:
“Get the gold from the wolves. Build more towers.”

Mechanicus watched as the engineer dropped the bird, ran over the wolves, looted their bodies for gold, then ran around building more towers. This first wave had been easy. The attacks would become fiercer with every successive wave. The next one wouldn’t be wolves – it would be bears or something harder to kill. They might be attacked by trolls within the week and up to boulder monsters by the end of the month. They needed so many towers, it wasn’t even funny.

Mechanicus swished around, doing a cool gesture with his cloak. There was a lot of work to do.

End Of Chapter 52