Seravelle Continent, Wrath Domain, Northwest Territory, October 5, 2026
The march had taken six days.
For six days, twenty thousand men moved through domains until they reached scorched terrain. They marched some more and found a land that hadn't seen a human column in over two centuries, and the land let them pass without incident.
Narkals were absent. Ther was Just the occasional territorial beasts that had wandered too close and paid for it with their life and, subsequently, their meat.
That was the one mercy the last war had provided.
Billions of Narkals had died in the final battle… mostly by the Twin Soul's last strike, an act of annihilation so thorough that it had left the surrounding territories genuinely sparse for the first time in living memory.
The beasts that remained were another matter. They were as ferocious as ever; more territorial, perhaps, having spread into corridors the Narkals no longer occupied. But twenty thousand battle-hardened men who'd spent months surviving the siege found individual beasts more interesting as protein than threats. By day three, the column had developed an informal hunting rotation that required no ordering.
Ashen had watched this develop with satisfaction.
'Feed them enough times on the march and they won't notice when you ask them to do the same thing once we settle.'
Lucia hadn't come since she was more useful in Paradise, where she could manage the merchant contacts they'd established at the Assembly party and monitor for any news that would surely not reach where he was going; but that left him a bit lonely… so he amused himself with his inner thoughts for most of the march.
⁂
The Northwest Territory finally revealed itself on the morning of the sixth day.
Ashen saw it from the ridge first… a strip of land that would have been perfect to build a fortress if normally. It was pinched between a river on its western face and a mountain's lower slope to the east. The river was wide and moving fast enough to be an obstacle. The mountain behind functioned as a wall he hadn't needed to build.
Unfortunately… The land between them was dead. Like every other stretch in this forsaken place.
Whatever had once grown here had stopped two hundred years ago when the Narkals came through, and nothing had replaced it. The soil was pale, and the remains of trees that had been dead so long they'd calcified.
But Ashen took it nonetheless. It was the best defensive place he found, anyhow. He would choose it over any less unprotected but equally dead land.
"We will stop here." He ordered, and that order moved down the column.
By nightfall, the first tents were up and the initial patrol routes had been walked. Fires burned in a spread pattern rather than a cluster… this was another thing the siege veterans had absorbed without being taught, because a clustered light was a target and a spread light was a perimeter.
⁂
While his men were carefreely barbecuing their caught prey while they laughed and drank over the campfire, Ashen had to rack his brain to decide their next move as their lord and leader.
After a night of thinking, he was able to boil his situation down to three realities.
Monsters killed settlers. It wasn't even a question of if or maybe, but when. Because settlers who didn't know the land, and those who hadn't spent years developing the specific instincts of a soldier, died in Seravellian territory at a rate that made the concept of civilian expansion delusional. Until the land was actively controlled and fortified, no one outside his twenty thousand was safe here, and possibly not even them.
The second reality… Empty land produced nothing. Two hundred years of abandonment had left the soil inert. There were no crops, no infrastructure, or supply lines except the ones he'd brought. Even the river required purification before the water could be drunk. The mountain was cover and nothing else yet. Every resource he currently had was finite and counting down.
Twenty thousand once-criminal soldiers would not feed themselves on his prestige.
He had watched the way they looked at him since the days they fought together. The men he'd kept alive through the siege, whose freedom he'd effectively secured, who followed him willingly into nowhere because he was the closest thing to a competent authority they'd encountered in years… That was real… That loyalty was real.
But it was also conditional, just like any other loyalty, which meant it had a practical floor beneath it. Strip a man of food and shelter, and he stops being a follower and starts being a threat. They would do a clean one-eighty, and he wouldn't even be able to blame them for it.
'Everything from here must generate revenue,' Ashen concluded, standing in the dark outside his tent. 'And none of it can compromise my control over them.'
His thoughts jumped to the merit he'd arrived with.
There were one hundred thousand points leftover after the Assembly's rewards. Of course, it wasn't normal currency but merit points.
Merit functioned as an elevated catalogue, giving access to services and supplies that regular points couldn't buy regardless of how much of it you had. Employing pathwalkers privately, bulk military acquisitions, specialized army formations… Things that moved at the scale he needed to move.
He'd spent most of it before arriving.
Thirty-five percent had gone to food and fast-yield agriculture that Seraphine recommended he take in the last Absentia. She argued that those were the only seeds and soil amendments that could actually produce something within a season, assuming the land could be made receptive.
Twenty-five percent went to material for basic infrastructure, such as wells, granaries, and the components that could turn the camp into something that could sustain itself.
Ten percent to monster-hunting tools and weapons. The number was low because the army already had its own equipment, and arming twenty thousand men twice over was a waste.
He'd also left fifteen percent with Lucia in case she found skilled laborers and as funds for settler incentives when word of the territory started spreading, and he needed to attract people who actually knew how to build things.
That left fifteen thousand points.
It was enough to survive on, but not meaningful enough to build anything worthwhile on.
'I have to start earning before the food runs out,' he thought. 'I have four months… Probably three if I'm being honest.'
⁂
After all was said and done, Ashen started with security.
It wasn't an obvious first choice given the circumstances. There were twenty thousand soldiers in relatively quiet territory—the Narkal population was still recovering, and the beasts were manageable. Of course, there was also no hostile human force within marching distance. Security felt like something he could address second.
But Ashen had lived long enough to understand a simpler principle: life started where people felt safe. Not where people were safe, necessarily, but where they believed they were. A man who felt exposed couldn't farm. A man who was afraid slept badly and worked poorly and looked for exits.
If he wanted twenty thousand men to function as settlers and builders rather than just soldiers waiting for orders, he needed the camp to feel like a place worth defending before it was actually a place worth defending.
The psychological math was more important than the tactical math, at least for now.
He pulled out roughly three thousand men, choosing those with offensive Thema and the ones who'd shown in the siege that they could hold a line under pressure. They became the permanent garrison.
Officers were drawn from their ranks, posting rotations, and a clear chain of command. Their job was to patrol and maintain the perimeter.
The remaining seventeen thousand became labor.
He gave them militia status rather than civilian status, which meant they carried weapons while they worked, allowing them to contribute to the camp's protection as a secondary role. It was a distinction that he had to make… former Pit men were not civilians in their own minds, and asking them to act like civilians would have produced friction he didn't need.
The first labor directive was fortification.
The army of laborers started with chokepoints first. The land between the river and the mountain had natural choke points where the terrain narrowed, and those needed to be controlled before anything else.
Earthworks went up quickly… ditches cut, spoil piled into crude ramparts, while spiked pits were dug in the likely approach corridors that any large beast would use. Thorn-hedges were planted in the gaps between pits. Kill-traps in the known monster corridors Ashen had identified from three days of careful scouting.
The temporary alarm systems came after as he waited for Alice to deliver on her promise. They put some signal fires on the ridgelines, with horns at intervals along the perimeter. Eventually, even watchtowers at the elevated points were constructed, each with a posted man who could see approaching movement before it reached them.
⁂
Food was the problem he couldn't fully solve yet.
The land was dead. That wasn't a metaphorical phrase, sadly. The soil had a nutritional value that wasn't far from packed gravel after two centuries without cultivation or organic matter cycling through it.
He'd known this from Cornelia's warning and confirmed it when the advance scouts found not a single edible plant in the entire scouted area, and accepted it because he had no choice but to accept it.
Cornelia had tried her own purification efforts on a section of the Wrath Domain's borderland before abandoning the project. The reclaimed stretch hadn't been worth the cost of keeping soldiers on it to die while protecting the farmers. She hadn't had the right tool.
Ashen did.
…Or he hoped so.
He just had to wait for it to arrive.
Seraphine had promised two weeks.
Of course, he trusted her promise, which meant he had approximately two weeks of waiting before the land could be made receptive to the fast-yield seeds he'd brought. The four months of food supplies gave him a buffer, and if the hunting stayed productive, which the beasts' persistence in the region suggested it would, he could allow himself to relax on this front for now.
In the meantime, the laborers needed something to do that wasn't just sitting in camp, becoming paranoid and idle. He solved that with the new project he cooked up.
Build a wall.
The full perimeter of his intended fief was enormous and far too large to fortify properly in any reasonable timeframe, but a long foundational wall could be started while the Narkals were still absent. He would be a fool to stay idle alongside his thousands of laborers for two whole weeks and waste this window of peace.
'Build what you can while the wolves are sleeping,' he thought. 'Before they wake up and remember they're hungry...'
The wall went up in sections, starting from the river anchor and working eastward toward the mountain base. The laborers moved in shifts… some on wall construction, some on the fortification work, some on hunting to supplement the food stocks. The garrison rotated through patrol and escort duties as the construction pushed further from the camp's center.
The territory still didn't look like much.
A dead land and a pale sky… but the sound of men working had brought a sliver of life back to it.
⛧ ⛧ ⛧
Clockwork Alice ~