Seravelle Continent, Wrath Domain, Northwest Territory, November 21, 2026
Ashen stood on the wall and looked at what a month had built.
Instead of just tents and perimeter defenses, the settlement had gained more structure now.
Five completed granaries stood near the camp's center. A central market square had been cleared and paved with flat stone, surrounded by guard posts and equipped with basic stalls that were already seeing regular use.
The former pit's inhabitant peddled the results of their hunting and foraging there.
Around the square, workshops had gone up in small structures to repair and craft new equipment from the material of the hunts.
A mill sat near the river's edge, in preparation to process the grain that would have taken ten times the labor to grind by hand. One of the former prisoners turned out to be a master blacksmith and was responsible for that one.
The general look of the place had finally shifted from a military camp to something closer to an actual settlement. Even the crude wall had been completed around the full perimeter
Beyond the walls, the farmland stretched along the river in a patchwork of green that still felt slightly surreal given what the land had looked like a month ago. The crops were growing well, the irrigation channels doing their job, and the hundred men with purification Thema had managed to keep the water supply clean enough that disease wasn't a present concern.
It looked like somewhere people could live.
As to how the settlement could stay so peaceful even though it was situated in such a dangerous land, it was mainly thanks to two people.
One of them was Alice, who had been busy recently.
Her scouting network was already operational across the territory. They consisted of flying constructs that moved in predetermined patterns above the perimeter. They looked like small, bird-shaped machines and were equipped with cameras, heat sensors, and mana detection arrays. Those sensors fed constant data back to a central observation room she'd set up in the keep, where holographic displays showed the territory's surroundings in real-time coverage.
Underground, a second layer of stationary constructs had been installed in a ring around the settlement's outer boundary. They monitored mana signatures passing overhead, flagging anything that registered above baseline and sending alerts when something large or numerous approached.
The observation room was manned in shifts by hired security guards from the former soldiers Ashen had pulled from the garrison who showed aptitude for the work and didn't mind spending hours watching holographic readouts. Any abnormality triggered a cascading alert system, and the guards notified the garrison officers, who mobilized response units depending on the threat scale.
It wasn't perfect coverage, but it was significantly better than relying on watchtower sight lines and hoping the sentries noticed something in time.
Ashen was still looking at the settlement when Sabrina materialized at his side.
He'd gotten used to her doing that, so he didn't startle.
"Master." She inclined her head, acting with formality of someone who had served in this capacity for decades rather than weeks. "The approaching Great Beast horde has been eliminated. Their corpses have been deposited at the processing yard for skinning and butchering."
Ashen's expression went briefly awkward.
He'd been trying to get comfortable with the "master" title for the better part of a month, and it still sounded wrong every time she used it. He was her temporary assignment, not her lifelong lord, and the devotion in her tone made him wonder if she had even internalized that distinction.
At first, he tried to match her formality and failed. His tone came out too warm… 'Having a third Step powerhouse as your maid is pretty hard too, haah…'
If someone heard his complaints, they would have tried to strangle him…
"Thank you, Sabrina. I appreciate it." He paused, then added, "I'm sorry I haven't been able to properly compensate you for your services until now."
She shook her head immediately. "Payment is unnecessary, master. I am yours. You may use me as you see fit."
"..."
"As for compensation… didn't you already pay sufficiently by saving our Sin Lord's life?"
"Right," Ashen said.
He couldn't find a retort to that, though something about the way she'd stated so confidently that she was 'his' sounded strange to his ears. He couldn't identify what, exactly, 'I'm just overthinking this, right?'
'...right…?' The constant twitching of his lips told another story, though…
Sabrina waited a moment to see if he had further orders. When he didn't, she bowed once and dissolved back into the shadows.
Ashen stayed on the wall for another minute, then turned and descended the stairs.
He had a meeting to prepare.
⁂
The dreamscape council hall materialized around him the moment he entered his own sleep.
The white walls rose. The pillars followed. The clouds gathered overhead and let the sun through in those familiar shifting columns. The table and chairs appeared last, and Ashen sat at the head, watching the Greek letters etch themselves into the stone backrest above him.
He pulled.
Lucia appeared to his left first, already composed, her gaze moving across the room in the brief moment it took her to orient. The letters above her chair formed smoothly.
Alice came next to his right, directly after, and she seemed to be already used to the summoning from her calm reaction.
Seraphine appeared beside Lucia last, her arrival accompanied by the particular brightness she always brought with her. She looked around the hall, smiled at the sunlight falling through the cloud gaps, and leaned back into her chair with a smile.
Ashen saw everyone settle and started, "Good evening, everyone. I trust your sleep was mercifully dreamless… though I do apologize in advance if I interrupted something sweet."
"Hello, Ash~ Hello everyone~" Seraphine was the first to return the greeting, "It was alright, you don't have to feel bad about something so small!"
"What she said." Lucia nodded in agreement.
Alice didn't bother to confirm the same sentiment a third time; instead, she asked, "Late night work session?" Alice asked, studying the territory map. "Or did something go wrong?"
"Neither." Ashen laced his fingers together on the table. "It's just… We're hitting a wall. I wanted to talk it through before it becomes a problem we can't solve."