LORD OF THE MYRIAD DOMINION

Chapter 13: The Weight of Loyalty

Riven waited until the following morning before he touched the Hero Summoning Stone again. Not out of hesitation — he'd made that mistake once already with the gauntlet and wasn't interested in repeating the pattern — but because a decision this size deserved a full day's rest behind it instead of the tail end of a Dungeon clear. Day Nine started the way every day since the Grace Period had started: a status check first, everything else after.

[Lord Hall (Level 3)]

[Development Level: 34]

[Population: 161]

[Gold: 3,730]

[Collapsed Forge: Repair Complete]

[New Building: Giant Forge (Sub-Space)]

The Blacksmith unit had wasted no time. What had been rubble and cracked stone in the Ashen Vault's second chamber now stood finished, according to the notification, though Riven hadn't walked back through the archway yet to see it with his own eyes. A second production building, sitting inside claimed land, costing him nothing but a day of a single unit's labor. He made a note to inspect it properly once the morning's real business was finished.

Elarys found him at the edge of the yard, where the permanent archway to the Sub-Space stood open against the grey stone beyond it. "You're doing the summon here instead of at the Lord Hall."

"The Barracks interface doesn't care where I stand," Riven said. "But if this works the way I think it will, I'd rather have the space to build a third Barracks close to where the Giant Forge already sits. No sense making a Giant Hero walk halfway across the territory to reach the one building suited to whatever they end up doing."

"Efficient," Elarys said. "Also convenient, if it turns out you're wrong about the Affinity holding."

"I'm not wrong about the number," Riven said. "I might be wrong about what it means. Those are different kinds of mistake." He pulled the stone from his inventory, black-veined and heavier than its size suggested, humming with the same low resonance every meaningful item in this world seemed to carry. "Only one way to find out which."

[Hero Summoning Stone — Consumed]

[Secondary Race Slot: Giant Selected]

[Racial Affinity: 85 (SS)]

[Summoning Sequence Initiated]

The stone dissolved into light the moment the sequence began, threads of pale gold gathering above the dead grass ring where the Dungeon had first appeared, weaving together into a shape that grew taller than either of them by the time it finished forming. When the light cleared, a woman stood where the threads had converged — easily seven feet tall, broad-shouldered, skin the color of weathered granite with faint veins of paler stone running along her arms like natural seams. She wore no armor yet, only simple travel clothes the System always seemed to provide, and she looked around the yard with the calm, assessing patience of someone used to sizing up a structure before deciding whether it would hold weight.

[Hero Summoned]

[Name: Brynhild]

[Race: Giant]

[Rarity: Epic]

[Hero Potential: A]

[Hero Talent: Management]

[Starting Skill: Hidden — Requires Further Analysis]

Riven ran Identification the instant the notification cleared, the same instinct that had governed every discovery since the Ethereal Space refusing to wait even a second longer than necessary.

[Identification Activating...]

[Target: Brynhild]

[Bloodline: Giant (Pure)]

[Loyalty: 85% — High, Not Absolute]

[Notable Trait: Innate Construction Mastery — crafting and building speed scales with the scale of the work, exceeding standard racial bonuses at large construction thresholds]

"Eighty-five percent," Riven said, tracking the number against what he'd expected — the exact figure the Affinity panel had promised. "It held. Exactly where the Affinity said it would."

Brynhild inclined her head toward him, the gesture unhurried, deliberate in the way everything about her seemed to be. "You're the Lord." It wasn't quite a question, though it carried the shape of one.

"Riven," he said. "And you're the first test of a theory I only confirmed yesterday."

"Then I'll try not to disappoint the math." Something in her voice suggested she'd meant it as dry humor rather than genuine concern, and Riven decided he liked that better than the alternative — a Hero who treated her own summoning as a solemn occasion instead of simply the start of a job. "Eighty-five isn't nothing, Lord Riven. Most Giants who leave the old strongholds for a System Lord's service don't manage that kind of standing on the first day. Most don't manage it at all."

"You know something about how Affinity usually works, then," Riven said. "More than I expected a newly summoned Hero to know before I've explained any of it."

"Some of it comes with the bloodline," Brynhild said. "Not memories, exactly. More like instincts that already know the shape of the System before I've had to learn it myself." She flexed one broad hand, testing the movement the way a craftsman tests a tool before the first real use. "I imagine that's true of most Heroes, in one form or another."

Elarys, who'd been watching the exchange with the same quiet attention she gave everything new, spoke up. "It's true of me too. Though I'd guess yours came with fewer surprises than mine did."

"Fewer bloodlines competing for the same body, certainly," Brynhild said, glancing at Elarys's wings without any visible reaction beyond simple observation. "I've heard stories about Fallen Angel hybrids. Didn't expect to meet one on my first morning."

"Word travels fast for someone who's been alive for less than five minutes," Riven said.

"Instinct, not memory," Brynhild reminded him. "The System hands a new Hero enough context to be useful immediately. It doesn't hand us everything." She turned back toward him, and for the first time her attention sharpened into something closer to genuine interest. "What is it you actually need built, Lord Riven? I didn't come out of that stone to stand around discussing bloodlines."

Riven almost smiled at that. Directness, from a Hero he'd known for less than a minute, aimed squarely at the one question that actually mattered. "A Giant Barracks first. Then the Giant Forge in the Sub-Space needs a proper crew instead of sitting there freshly repaired and empty. After that—" He glanced toward the wall, toward the towers, toward every structure his territory had accumulated across nine days of careful, deliberate growth. "After that, I want to know exactly how much faster Giant-scale construction moves compared to everything I've built so far. If the difference is real, it changes how I plan every building from here forward."

"It's real," Brynhild said, with the flat certainty of someone stating a law of physics rather than an opinion. "Dwarves work well with small, precise things — tools, jewelry, fine ironwork. Giants work well with anything meant to hold weight. Walls. Towers. Fortresses. The bigger the structure, the wider the gap between what a Dwarf crew manages and what a Giant crew manages, because a Dwarf's hands were never built for the kind of load-bearing work a wall this size actually needs." She looked past him at the perimeter wall, assessing it the way Riven imagined she assessed everything — structurally, without sentiment. "Your wall's solid. It could be better. Give me materials and I'll show you exactly how much better before the day's finished."

[Giant Barracks: Construction Available]

[Cost: 300 Gold, Stone x50]

"Build it," Riven said, and the notification resolved before he'd finished the sentence.

[Giant Barracks Constructed]

[Gold: 3,730 → 3,430]

[Unit Summoning Available]

[Angel Barracks: 10/day]

[Fallen Angel Barracks: 10/day]

[Giant Barracks: 10/day]

[Total Daily Summon Capacity: 30/day]

Thirty units a day, up from twenty just yesterday morning, and a Hero standing in front of him whose entire specialty pointed directly at the one area of his development that had been growing the slowest — infrastructure that needed manpower and materials instead of the fast, replaceable wins Hordes and Dungeons had been handing him. Riven ran the number twice, the way he ran every number that mattered, and found nothing about it that needed second-guessing.

"Summon your first batch," he told her. "Ten Giants, straight from the Barracks. I want a crew on that wall before the day's half over."

"Already ahead of you," Brynhild said, already turning toward the newly built Barracks with the unhurried confidence of someone who'd never once doubted the outcome of a job she hadn't started yet.

[10 Units Summoned]

[Race: Giant]

[Loyalty: 85%]

[Gold: 3,430 → 3,420]

[Population: 161 → 171]

Ten broad-shouldered figures filed out of the Barracks behind her, and Riven watched them fall into rough formation without needing to be told, the same unhurried competence radiating off every one of them that their Hero had carried since the moment she'd finished forming. No hesitation, no confusion about purpose — just a crew that already understood, on some instinctive level baked into their bloodline, exactly what work was waiting for their hands.

"Eighty-five percent loyalty," Elarys said quietly, watching them go. "Not Absolute. You're aware of what that means, long-term."

"I'm aware," Riven said. "It means I earn the rest instead of assuming it. Same as I've earned everything else so far." He looked toward the wall, where Brynhild was already directing her crew toward the first section she intended to rebuild from the foundation up, gesturing with the easy authority of someone who'd clearly done this exact kind of work in some life or instinct the System had given her. "Fifteen percent isn't a flaw in the plan, Elarys. It's the part of the plan I still get to work on."

She didn't argue the point, and Riven didn't expect her to. Three races now stood inside his Barracks system — Angel at a hundred, Fallen Angel sitting unexplained and untouched at sixty-four, Giant freshly summoned at eighty-five and climbing toward whatever ceiling waited if he handled the relationship as carefully as he'd handled everything else since the Ethereal Space. He turned back toward the wall, toward a Hero already three sentences into instructing her crew on exactly how much stone a proper foundation actually required, and let the morning's work begin in earnest.

By midday, the difference was impossible to argue with. Brynhild had chosen the same section of wall the Ashmaw Devourer had cracked two days earlier — repaired since, but only to its original specification, the same stone laid the same way it had been laid during the Grace Period by units without a Giant's instinct for load-bearing work. She had her crew strip that section back down to the foundation entirely, over Riven's initial instinct to simply reinforce what already stood.

"Reinforcing bad bones just delays the next crack," she told him, when he asked why she hadn't taken the faster route. "Rebuilding from the base costs more time now. It saves you the next three repairs."

[Wall Section (Rebuilt): Structural Integrity +65% vs. Standard]

[Construction Time: 4 Hours (Giant Crew) vs. Estimated 14 Hours (Standard Crew)]

The gap between the two numbers was wider than Riven had let himself expect even after Brynhild's confident promise that morning. A tenth of the time, most of it spent on preparation rather than the actual raising of stone, and a wall section that could likely have shrugged off the Devourer's corrosive strikes without losing a single percentage point of integrity.

"If that scales the way I think it does," he said, "every wall on this territory gets rebuilt before the next Horde arrives. Not patched. Rebuilt."

"It scales," Brynhild said. "Better on towers than on flat wall, if I'm honest — more weight to distribute, more places for a Giant's instinct to actually matter. Give me the Watchposts next and I'll show you numbers that make this look modest."

"Tower's next then," Riven said. "Both of them, one after the other. I want the whole perimeter at this standard before I decide what to build past it."

[Development Level: 34 → 37]

[Watchpost Upgrade Path Available: Grand Watchtower]

[Unlock Condition Met: Development Level 37]

[Upgrade Quality: Dependent on Assigned Resident Skill]

The notification arrived almost as an afterthought to the morning's real progress, but Riven filed it against everything else he already knew about how buildings worked in this System — no Blueprint attached to this one, because it wasn't a new building at all. It was the Watchposts themselves, waiting for the right hands to turn them into something better. Get the work right, and the tower upgraded on its own merit. Get it wrong, and he'd be looking at a weaker structure than the one he'd started with, or no structure at all. Another problem for another day, sitting neatly behind the ones he'd already solved before breakfast — and one he already knew exactly which Hero he'd hand it to.

Elarys landed beside him as the second wall crew began their own foundation strip, wings settling against the midday warmth. "Three Barracks," she said. "Two Heroes' worth of instinct working the same problem from different directions. You built this in nine days."

"Nine days and one very fortunate Racial Affinity roll I didn't even know I had until yesterday morning," Riven said. "Don't credit the plan for the parts that were luck."

"I'll credit the part where you noticed the luck instead of scrolling past it," Elarys said. "Most Lords wouldn't have gone back over the full Affinity panel in one morning. You went back over it because that's what you do."

Riven didn't answer that one directly, watching instead as Brynhild's crew hauled the last of the old wall section's rubble clear, making room for a foundation that would, if the numbers held, outlast everything the Ashmaw Devourer had managed to do to the one before it. Nine days in, and the territory he'd built already looked nothing like the empty ninety-seven kilometers he'd woken up to on his first morning in the Myriad Dominion. Whatever came next — another Horde, another Dungeon, another number on an Affinity panel that only made sense once he'd gone back over it — he intended to meet it the same way he'd met everything so far.

By building faster than anyone expected, and trusting the numbers to tell him where to look next.