Hunched over in these tunnels, I wasn’t certain if I could outrun the goblins as well as the kobolds. Even at day, the surface offered no escape. Retracing my steps, I stopped at the first open shaft filled with daylight. Instead of climbing to the surface, I tossed the Dark Room rope up the vertical shaft and withdrew into its safety. If I disappeared near the dungeon’s exit, the goblins might waste time searching for me on the terrain.

  The Deathless took nearly ten minutes to kill their quarry and follow me to the shaft. I watched and listened to them comb the area for me—squabbling and bullying one another as they searched.

  The chattering died when Rezan appeared.

  General Sturm gestured to the shaft. “Shoughmeats say no human comes out. But they see another lizard.”

  The king joined the others in sniffing the area, but his face betrayed no suspicion that I spied overhead. Rezan turned to his general. “Kill lizards first. Tell Shoughmeats they will be safe soon. Kesir shows anger at human invasion. We and we will find assassin.”

  Another goblin dropped into the tunnel, landing with surprising agility. Its Shoughmeat dialect sounded more broken to my ear, and I couldn’t understand him.

  Rezan responded in the same dialect, using unfamiliar words.

  When the passage beneath my clandestine perch in the Dark Room emptied, I remembered I’d left my magic lance sticking in Rezan. The Deathless would have pulled it out of him by now and likely kept it as a trophy or perhaps used it against the drax hatchlings.

  I regretted letting Fabulosa take the basilisk egg. It would have been the perfect opportunity to set loose. Aside from Mineral Mutation, I knew of no spell that resisted petrification, and I doubted any goblins knew such a high-level spell.

  I climbed into my bunk and waited for the search to cool down before renewing my flight from goblin territory.

  After a half-day wait, a long procession of goblins filed into the tunnels. The king’s hunting party seemed to have cleared the area of reptilian intruders. The goblins repatriated their holes in groups of various sizes, appearing in no rush. After an hour, the trickle of stragglers ended, making it safe to exit my sanctuary and begin my retreat across the surface.

  I crawled up to the vacant mountainside by late afternoon and assessed the area. Artifacts and debris lay everywhere, but nothing moved.

  I walked along the grisly tripods and inspected a pile of rocks I mistook for a cairn. Tangles of twine and netting formed the rocks into the shape of an oversized chair. I’d learned enough about goblin customs to know that Rezan had cowed the Shoughmeats into cobbling together a throne. Perhaps they built it as payment for exterminating draxes.

  Iremont still smoked in the southern sky, reminding me of my unsuccessful venture. Feigning a westerly course seemed unnecessary. Everyone knew I’d come from the south from all the sightings of my approach. With night coming, I only had a few hours before I needed to turn in and reset my cooldowns.

  After summoning him, Beaker circled overhead to assess the fragments littering the area. My pet didn’t dive or find interest in the goblins’ leavings to warrant investigation. His disinterest in the trash echoed my feelings about my self-appointed campaign to quell our neighbors. He landed nearby as if waiting for an explanation for our presence.

  I could have updated Greenie about my foiled assassination with my Switching Gloves instant message trick, but I decided against it. He and Rezan shared a bonded promise not to harm one another, and I couldn’t risk compromising Greenie’s side of the bargain. He hadn’t released the relics. Rezan was my problem.

  Part of my reason for keeping him in the dark revolved around my embarrassment over having lost half my equipment and alerted the orcs and goblins that something had happened on Iremont. I’d tipped off Rezan about my hostile ambitions and gave him a good dose of intel about my tactics.

  I’d learned much about the enemy, so my mission north wasn’t a total failure.

  What could I do but slink back to Hawkhurst and hope the goblins won’t find us?

  Fabulosa and Sune Njal counted Hawkhurst as a liability more than an empowerment.

  I focused on my positioning in the battle royale. I’d gained respectable ranks in combat skills, picked up an overpowered buff for fighting in foreign settlements, and explored plenty of dungeons. Perhaps I should forget about the relics, move on, and hope they wouldn’t haunt me in the endgame.

  But abandoning the fight didn’t sit right with me.

  The long walk home gave me plenty of time to plan.

  I combed through my inventory, looking for anything that might help against Rezan. The blue arrowhead of withering from Fabulosa’s first trip to Grayton gave me pause.

  Rezan’s level 16 status rendered him immune from its effects. If he rated 2 levels lower, I could quickly end my troubles with a simple jab. As a ghoul, healing wouldn’t do him any good. At best, I could turn one of his followers undead. It may have worked against kobolds, but a level 7 ghoul presented no danger to the Deathless. The king’s healing would vaporize ghouls.

  I counted three strategies against Rezan that I hadn’t tried. The first involved Greenie’s fraternal pact. If I could somehow trick the goblin king into harming Hawkhurst’s interim governor, he would become undone—which sounded like the forceful removal of their core, similar to how runes destroyed items.

  But putting Greenie in harm’s way wasn’t exactly the most honorable ploy. If he survived, I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t hold it against me. He hated his brother, didn’t he? A person could never be sure how deep blood loyalty ran in their veins.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Sune Njal called goblins uncoordinated and reckless, but he said they understood the long game—whatever that meant. I hoped Greenie would understand and forgive any strategies that used him as bait.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t exactly know how to pull this off. How could I trick Rezan into doing this? Thinking about this type of ploy left an unsavory taste in my mouth, and I resolved to leave it as a final resort.

  The second tactic revolved around Blood Drinker—ramping it up into a one-shot weapon, which involved attacking hundreds of goblins within a 24-hour window. But I headed to the wrong place for it. Even with my powers, hundreds of goblins could whittle me down to zero in minutes. Nor did I know how to make significant progress in ramping up my sword before news of my tactic might reach Rezan’s ears.

  The last way to defeat the goblin king involved the lump of darksteel I’d collected in Iremont. Rory and Fin claimed it to be more legendary than mithril. Their forges could bang out a weapon worthy of the celestial core in my inventory. This tactic meant relying on the smithy, which led me to Hawkhurst.

  Resisting the urge to destroy Rezan’s throne out of spite, Beaker and I traveled south. The trip home passed uneventfully, as any retreat could be. Veering beneath Iremont’s shadow, we saw no sign of orc or goblin activity on its slopes—nor did centaurs patrol the valley. We took an indirect route home, circumnavigating the jackstraw forest, and returned to Hawkhurst Meadow four days later.

  A group of Fort Krek guards met me near the tree line. As they veered toward me, I approached their patrol path.

  Ahmet, a soldier who survived Commander Thaxter’s foray into the forest, became the first citizen to greet me. “Welcome back, sir. How goes the goblin war?”

  The reclusive, defensive teenager in me resurfaced, and I cryptically shrugged off the question. “Some ups, some downs. Doesn’t your patrol go west?”

  Eren waved her hand. “We’re supposed to link up with the Silverview brothers. But we got a late start over Bernard’s new boots, so they can wait a little at the rendezvous. Besides, someone ought to escort the governor to town.”

  I almost pointed to my nameplate, which showed I wasn’t the governor, but NPCs didn’t see nameplates. Instead, I grunted noncommittally. Giving scouts an excuse to avoid their duty wasn’t something a governor-to-be should endorse, but I wasn’t sure if ordering them back on patrol would step on Yula’s toes.

  Eren ignored my evasive answer. “Did you make contact with the greens, sir? Is that their headquarters we saw go up in smoke? It seemed too far east to be a goblin hole.”

  Ahmet echoed his partner. “Will we see battle soon?”

  Despite the many days of travel, I didn’t know what to say to them. I couldn’t honestly answer without spooking the dwarves and ruining morale.

  A tingling impulse made me want to put a positive spin on my adventures. After a series of successes between the trade route, defeating vargs and Winterbyte, and solving Fort Krek’s problems, it seemed counterproductive to talk about setbacks.

  Recent events shook my confidence. The tingling felt like phantom limb syndrome from a recently removed ego.

  I wasn’t in the right state of mind to discuss neighboring threats—certainly not before giving the facts to the settlement officers. Maybe Greenie or Ally might know what to say.

  The pair eagerly awaited tales of fighting goblins, and I suppose it was natural for troops to be curious and friendly, but I had nothing positive to report, and it embarrassed me. We may have bonded over the ordeal in Thaxter’s madness, but they shouldn’t abandon their patrol to get fresh gossip.

  Spilling details in small groups shouldn’t be how I disseminated our settlement’s situation. I didn’t want to repeat the story to everyone who asked—and everyone would ask.

  They accompanied me into town as if I needed an escort. I stopped and gestured to the forest. “Guys, I’m giving my full report in the town hall—or maybe that’s something to disclose in the barracks. I don’t know—I’ll need to talk to the other officers about it. Until then, you’ll need to keep an eye on our northern border.”

  The two took the hint. “Understood, sir. We’ll get back to our route.” They ended the awkward pause with salutes and stopped following me. Fraternizing might be fun, but they had a job to do, as did I.

  My mood improved when I saw the barbican rising near the eastern edge of Hawkhurst Rock. Though cocooned in wooden scaffolds, the slate-blue three-story building looked finished, and the quarry in front of the structure showed the beginnings of a respectable moat. Inside the cavity, the quarry crew disassembled the support work they used for lifting granite blocks. The tower-like gatehouse looked big enough to shelter the entire town if we crammed in—including the animals. I couldn’t imagine how goblins might attack it.

  I made a mental note to get a tour as soon as the opportunity presented itself. To my knowledge, no medieval equivalents of hardhats existed, but that didn’t mean I wanted to get brained for snooping around a construction site.

  Beaker hadn’t followed me into the manor. He took to the air—hunting or pestering townspeople who catered to begging griffons. He knew that heading for the manor during daylight hours meant nothing more exciting than shuffling papers—a lesson I’d yet to learn.

  Ida’s eyes skimmed over notes on a piece of vellum as I walked through the manor’s threshold. “Yula wants to talk to you as soon as you get back.”

  “And good afternoon to you, Lieutenant Governor Ida.”

  “Greenie’s not here, in case you’re looking for him. He’s picking up survey stakes from the woodshop. He probably got pulled into another request for zoning.”

  “Hawkhurst has zoning issues?”

  “Everyone wants the same land—or at least to know where they can build. The moratorium on private housing has given people too much time to plan homesteads. Everyone wants to be close to town.”

  I groaned as I settled into my chair, feeling immense relief from a week of hiking. It had been too long since I’d indulged in the simple comfort of a chair. I stretched until I caught Ida leveling a stare in my direction. “Right, zoning—what are we doing about that?”

  “The proposal is right in front of you.”

  I poked at the vellums and parchments on my desk. When Charitybelle and I researched wilderness obstacles, I imagined man-versus-nature scenarios—never man-versus-paper. “I’m too tired to read, Ida. Can’t we pretend I’ve been busy all week and discuss this like normal people?”

  “My feet haven’t exactly been up on the desk.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “You never do.”

  “When have I ever… never mind.” The past few days hadn’t been going my way, and I didn’t have the energy to spar over minutia.

  Underneath the document pileup rested a large sheet of vellum diagraming Hawkhurst Meadow. Greenie had drafted the divisions blocking out space, but numeric notations in Ida’s handwriting listed names and numbers. Seeing our buildings in a town plan made us look more organized than we seemed. Greenie included the footprint for the great hall, placing it next to the manor, and seeing it filled me with optimism for the future.

  After studying the sheet, I still didn’t understand how this stopped everyone from wanting the same locations. “There’s no legend explaining these divisions. Are these supposed to be parcel numbers?”

  “Greenie and I determined price coefficients for plots. It’s a fair way to keep farmers away from the most valuable land.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Right now, everyone wants to settle close to the river. With the barbican and the great hall slated for construction, bricks and stone are at a premium. Bricks are too valuable for wells, so farmers want to draw from the river.”

  “Greenie wants to do a great hall next?”

  “We need clayworks to solve our brick problem.” Ida waved her hand as if to cancel out her last statement. “No, that’s not right. We need clayworks to make pipes for irrigation. Plus, we need a ferry slip—a tier 4 building. Otto and Gretchen can dock the ferry without Lloyd’s help, but everyone else drifts and spins in circles.”

  I grunted. I wasn’t so sure a great hall should be our next project. We still needed a temple to unlock the Holy Smoke blessing. Self-preservation took precedence over NPC convenience. If players or goblins approached, the ability to turn into a gaseous form allowed me survivability—the core tenet of the battle royale. A temple benefited me as much as Hawkhurst.

  I turned my attention back to the city plan. “So you and Greenie think these coefficients will stop people from arguing?” I wasn’t sure how coefficients worked and hoped I used the word correctly.

  “We’ll massage the numbers, but they should do the trick. I got the idea from my late husband. He worked for Arlington’s survey department. Arable land stood at a premium, and the city needed to redistribute riverfront property claimed by several nobles. The city’s standing army isn’t much to speak of, so the nobles risked civil war over landgrabs.”

  “It sounds like a no-win situation.”

  “It wasn’t. The city solved the problem by granting unlimited titles to nobles willing to develop the land. The motion carried and became the law of the region.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much of a fix. Wouldn’t landowners make ridiculous claims?”

  Ida nodded. “They did.”

  “Well, I don’t get it. Giving away the best land couldn’t have done the city any good.”

  “They learned a year later that square acreage determined taxes, not income—the larger the land claims, the more taxes they had to pay. The landowners had to sell their land to pay what they owed, paring down their claims to sustainable sizes.”

  “So Arlington took over the land through taxation instead of armies?”

  Ida nodded. “It was a very Arlington solution.”