LORD OF THE MYRIAD DOMINION

Chapter 4: Weapon Mastery

By midday, the empty field near the Lord Hall didn't look empty anymore.

Ten units worked in shifts. They cleared stone. They pulled up roots. One Fallen Angel unit had made herself the leader of the group. Nobody asked her to. Riven watched from a short distance. His Talent hummed quietly in the back of his mind. He decided not to interrupt. Absolute Loyalty didn't mean these women couldn't think for themselves. It just meant they didn't waste time arguing about who was in charge.

[Development Level: 1 → 3]

He glanced at the notification and kept walking. Small numbers. But steady ones. That was exactly what he wanted.

Elarys found him near the riverbank. Her wings stayed folded against the midday heat. She carried the wrapped blueprint fragment in both arms, careful, like it might still crumble.

"It won't tell us much more," she said. She set it down on a flat stone between them. "I asked one of the Fallen Angel units. She knows old scripts, somehow, from wherever her memories come from. She thinks it's a Special Building Blueprint. Past that, we need materials neither of us has."

Riven crouched beside it. He let his Talent pass over the fragment again, hoping for more detail than it gave him in the forest.

[Identification Activating...]

[Target: Weathered Blueprint Fragment]

[Restoration Requirements: Unknown — Partial Data]

[Probable Category: Special Building (Non-Upgradable)]

Still locked, mostly. Whatever this thing had been before time and roots got to it, the System wasn't ready to explain. Not until he found what it needed to become whole again. He filed the frustration away. Patience wasn't something he'd chosen. Life had beaten it into him early. Maybe, for once, it would actually pay off.

"We'll figure it out," he said, standing. "For now, it's safe here. That's enough."

He turned to a more urgent problem: dinner. Nothing said he couldn't hunt during the Grace Period. Hunting fed his people. It also gave his units experience. Forty units couldn't live on Barracks rations forever. And every kill made now was a kill that mattered later, once real Hordes started arriving on their own schedule instead of his.

"Take me to whatever's making noise near the treeline," he told Elarys. "If it's dangerous, I want to know before it's a problem. If it's not, I want it in a cooking pot."

She almost smiled at that. It was the first real expression he'd seen on her face all day. "That's a very practical way to think about monsters."

"Everything's a resource until it proves otherwise," Riven said. "Some things just bite back."

They crossed the field together. Five Fallen Angel units fell into step behind them without being asked. The treeline swallowed them, and the air cooled and thickened, the same way it had that morning. It didn't take long before his Talent caught something moving through the underbrush — low, quick, four legs, a heat signature that pulsed slightly out of rhythm with its footsteps.

[Identification Activating...]

[Target: Unknown Creature]

[Species: Ridgeback Boar (Juvenile)]

[Threat Level: Low]

[Suggested Approach: Direct Engagement]

Riven passed the details along in a low voice. The units moved fast but calm, cutting off the boar's escape routes before anyone drew a weapon. It didn't take long. One clean strike from the lead unit's blade, and the creature dropped. Threat level: low. It lived up to the name.

[Unit EXP Gained: 1]

[Requirement: 10 EXP per Level]

Riven turned the notification over in his head. One kill. One point of experience. Ten points needed before that unit saw any real growth. Slow, by design, he realized. Not built to reward reckless slaughter. Built to reward steady, repeated fights against things a unit could actually handle. A Lord who threw untrained people at anything that moved wasn't building an army. He was burning through loyalty one funeral at a time.

"We'll need a lot more of these," he said, mostly to himself. Ten kills per level. A hundred levels per Tier. Forty units, each needing that grind on their own. Not glamorous work. But exactly the kind of work seven quiet days were made for.

They found two more boars. They also found a small nest of what his Talent labeled, not very helpfully, as Burrowing Grubs — Threat Level: Negligible. Easy kills. They spread a thin trickle of EXP across the five units with them. Riven made a point of rotating who struck the final blow each time. It would have been easy to let his strongest fighter clear everything alone. But that would leave four units standing still while one climbed ahead of them. He had no interest in building an army with one sharp point and four dull edges.

The last fight of the afternoon wasn't so simple. His Talent flagged it before anyone saw a thing — a heavier heat signature, moving through dense brush near a shallow ravine. Its outline was bigger and steadier than anything they'd faced so far.

[Identification Activating...]

[Target: Unknown Creature]

[Species: Iron-Hide Boar (Adult)]

[Threat Level: Moderate]

[Suggested Approach: Group Engagement — Avoid Frontal Charge]

Moderate was enough of a jump from Low to make Riven hold up a hand before anyone could move on instinct. "Flank it," he said quietly. "Nobody takes the front alone. If the Talent says avoid the charge, we avoid the charge."

The five units split without hesitating. They circled wide through the brush. Riven and Elarys held back, watching from a safe distance. The boar broke cover with a low, furious grunt the moment it sensed the flanking units closing in. Tusks lowered. Thick gray hide rippling with every stride. For half a second, Riven's stomach tightened. A mistake here wouldn't just cost gold or a wasted day. It would cost someone their life. Permanently. No undo button waiting on the other side.

The units didn't give it the chance. Two darted in from the flanks the moment the charge locked onto a straight line. Their blades found the gaps in its plating. A third drove a spear into its exposed side from behind. It went down loud, thrashing — but clean. No injuries on their side, past a torn sleeve and a bruised shoulder that healed into a wince instead of a wound.

[Unit EXP Gained: 3]

[Achievement Unlocked: First Moderate-Threat Kill]

Riven exhaled slowly. The tension left his shoulders all at once, and only then did he notice how much of it he'd been carrying. "Good work," he said. He meant it plainly, without the flourish some part of him thought the moment deserved. Plain words seemed to land better with people who'd never had much reason to trust flattery. "That's exactly how I want fights like this handled. Nobody's expendable here."

The unit who'd taken the spear position bowed slightly. Her expression stayed unreadable, but her posture eased, just a little. As close to visible relief as Absolute Loyalty seemed to allow.

The light started slanting low through the trees. The day was running out faster than Riven wanted. He called the hunt to a stop, satisfied with the haul, and turned to a different problem on the walk back.

"Training," he said. "It's not the same as combat, is it?"

"No," Elarys said. "Combat earns experience. Training earns mastery — how well a unit uses what they already have. A unit with full experience but poor weapon skill still fights worse than one with less experience and sharper technique. Most new Lords ignore it. It doesn't come with a number climbing in front of them the way combat EXP does."

Riven filed that away fast, turning it over on the short walk back. Ignored. Invisible. Unglamorous. That was exactly the kind of thing that, in his experience, usually meant underpriced and therefore valuable. If most Lords skipped training to chase the visible EXP number, then any Lord who ran both systems side by side would end up with subjects who hit harder per swing than their raw levels suggested. Same principle as the iron deposit. Same principle as choosing Elarys over a Hero with a cleaner combat rating. The things nobody else valued were exactly where an edge was hiding.

"Set up a rotation," he said. "Half the Barracks trains while the other half works or hunts. Rotate every few hours so nobody's stuck doing only one thing. I want every unit gaining both kinds of progress before the Grace Period ends. Not just the kind that shows up first."

Elarys studied him for a moment, wings shifting slightly. "You think like someone who's already lost something by not planning far enough ahead."

It wasn't a question, and Riven didn't treat it like one. "I've spent my whole life reacting to plans other people made without asking me," he said simply. "I'd rather be the one asking the questions this time."

She didn't push further. But something in the way she nodded told him the answer had landed somewhere it mattered.

By the time they reached the Lord Hall marker again, the sky had turned deep orange. The clearing near the marker looked flatter and wider than it had that morning. A second group of units, the ones clearing ground, had already stacked neat piles of stone and timber near the edge of the work site. Ready for whatever came next.

[Development Level: 3 → 6]

[Territory Status: Stable]

[Grace Period: 6 Days Remaining]

Before the night fully settled in, the units gathered near a low fire pit someone had already dug and lined with stone. The boar meat cooked slow over the flames, and for a while nobody spoke much. Riven sat among them instead of apart from them, plate balanced on his knee, watching gold-armored units trade quiet words with iron-armored ones like the split in their Barracks meant nothing at all once the work was done. He hadn't expected that. He'd half-assumed two racial lines born from opposite bloodlines might keep some distance from each other, at least at first. Instead they passed food back and forth without a second thought, and nobody seemed to find that strange except him.

"They don't see the split the way you might expect," Elarys said quietly, settling beside him. "They both come from me. Whatever separates Angel from Fallen Angel out in the wider world, it doesn't separate anything in here."

Riven filed that away too, another small piece of her that didn't fit the warning label the System had slapped on her back in the Ethereal Space.

Riven looked out over the progress. He felt the same quiet satisfaction he'd felt the night before, but something in his chest had shifted since then. Less like relief at surviving the first day. More like the early, careful shape of actual confidence. He had forty loyal subjects. A growing pile of iron and timber. A hunting route that fed both his people and their growth. And a mystery buried under a tree, waiting for the day he had the materials to solve it.

"Six days," he said aloud, mostly to hear the number said out loud instead of just read off a floating screen. "We're not wasting a single one of them."

Elarys took up her position near the treeline as the light faded. Nobody had to ask her to. The same quiet competence she'd shown from the very first moment he'd chosen her over every warning label the System threw at him.

Riven took one last look at the fragment resting near the Lord Hall, its faint markings catching the last of the sunset light, before he turned in for the night. Even as sleep pulled at him, he was already thinking about exactly what kind of building deserved to rise from something that old.