by Eric Ugland
I grabbed his wrist and pulled his arm out straight. I was about to break it over my knee when I finally realized what was going on, and stopped.
“You are learning, your grace,” Carpophorus said with a nod.
Then he smacked me on the other arm with a club.
“Not fast enough, though,” he replied.
Afternoon training, also known as getting the shit beaten out of me, had begun. This time, though, I felt like I could hold my own ever so much — I wasn’t getting absolutely beaten on every single spar at least. I focused almost exclusively on sword and shield combat, though there were several times where Carpophorus had me use shields alone. Sometimes a single shield, sometimes two shields. It wasn’t fun — even with two shields, the motherfucker still found a way to slip his weapons around my defense and wallop me. Every few minutes, my skin became a new abstract painting of pain. I had bruises and lumps and bumps, and blood ran out of welts and cuts and scrapes.
But I was learning.
Cool beans, you’ve leveled up the skill Swords (Lvl 25).
Cool beans, you’ve leveled up the skill Shield (Lvl 40).
And it wasn’t just my stats increasing; I had a sense for fighting now - I understood how to get my feet under me to accept a hit, how to move my body to turn the strikes away from me, how to look two or more moves ahead and set my opponent up. Granted, my current opponent was so much better than me that even when I set everything up perfectly, he still managed to smack me around. Every time I thought I had him, he managed to beat me down.
I must have done something right, because Carpophorus put up his hands, and said he needed to take a break. Then he assigned me some stances and forms to work through with the sword and shield.
So I didn’t get a break. I started working through the damn forms. I understood the point of it, the ability to drop into muscle memory when things got crazy. And yet, I was bored. I found my mind wandering through the events of the last few days. The princess, the kobolds, the night goblins, the ursus and the corrupted ones, and the whole damn Empire. How did I fit in with everything, and how would I start to fix some of this shit? Was the princess right about everyone planning for us to marry? I didn’t exactly see how that made sense. Perhaps in a more traditional monarchy, it might get me on the throne, but I wasn’t a great choice for that. On the other hand, perhaps the Emperor thought his buddy Cleeve was going to find a great heir for the dukedom, so it might have been a good plan on paper. They just needed somebody completely different. And I was me. Oops.
But this was a modified elective monarchy, so whether or not I was married to the princess made almost no difference at all. All that mattered were the votes I could get, and considering the princess wasn’t exactly popular, I didn’t think she would actually help my chances. Anyway, Nikolai wasn’t convinced the princess would make a great Empress, and he’d never been even remotely confident in me. It made no sense.
Then I realized something, and it rankled at my brain. Nikolai had said that a worm of that size hadn’t been seen in the Empire for a long time. And Harmut told me that worms weren’t from the same plane of existence as us. So how did the worm get there?
Something smashed into the side of my head, and I dropped to the ground.
I rolled to the side and got my knees under me, coming up into a guarded position, sword and shield at the ready. I tried to stabilize my vision enough to see straight.
Carpophorus stood in front of me, a grim frown on his face.
“You have to pay attention for this to be of any value to you, boy,” he sneered.
“Sorry, man, but I got a lot going on—” I started to say, but he just attacked me again, which was as valid a way of interrupting a shitty excuse as any.
He laid into me, and we fought back and forth across the grounds. It pissed me off that he’d taken advantage of me thinking. Especially because thinking was something I’d been neglecting for a long time. Here I was, finally getting a few neurons to fire, and then this asshole comes along to beat on me.
The rage gave me enough clarity that I actually stopped Carpophorus from hitting me. I even managed to control our fight enough that I kept him on his heels, pushing him around. Sure, I couldn’t land a blow on him, but he couldn’t hit me either. That was almost a total victory.
Somehow, during that fight, I realized what I’d been trying to figure out: the worm had come from somewhere, and it had bypassed a spot where it could have gotten an easy meal. It must have smelled us when it made the hole so close to where Harmut’s guys had been working. If it was just hunting, it’d have come up and snacked. So the worm was aiming for the kobolds. The only thing going after the kobolds were the night goblins. They had a dark god who gave them powers — powers that could certainly be used to do something like summon a big-ass worm to make a sneaky tunnel over to your enemies. Then you could avoid walking through the valley when you wanted to get fresh sacrificial victims. I needed to go the other way up the tunnel, see where it led. I was willing to bet it’d take me straight back to those night goblin motherfuckers.
Boom.
Carpophorus smashed his wooden training sword into the side of my face. My head spun so fast that everything blurred. I crashed to the ground. Out.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
I woke up to a face full of water. My two lutra buddies stood over me, laughing and holding buckets.
“Good training session, your grace?” Ragnar asked.
“It was fine,” I groaned, taking my time getting up. I shook my head to clear the cobwebs, and then looked around the open areas of Coggeshall. Carpophorus was nowhere to be found. “I guess practice is over.”
“That’s what Carpophorus said when you started drooling,” Ragnar said.
I’m sure I had a concussion, or a head trauma of some severity. But I’d healed already, so even though I had to wipe some blood off my ears and away from my mouth, I felt right as rain. And had to, once again, thank Mr. Paul for his boon.
“I need to talk to Nikolai,” I said. “You know where he is?”
“Oddly enough, he asked us to find you,” Ragnar replied.
“So that’s a yes.”
“You feeling up to moving?”
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
The two otter folk led me through the camp. People stared at me, looking more than a little surprised I was upright and on my feet. Clearly, my getting knocked the fuck out was already common knowledge, seeing me moving on my own recognizance was rather startling. I didn’t let on that I noticed — I just kept my focus on the two dudes in front of me and the problem I had to fix with Nikolai’s help.
As seemed to be the norm in the daytime, Nikolai was in his office, fiddling with papers. He looked up from his desk when I was escorted in.
“Training go well?” He asked.
“Carpophorus knocked the shit out of me,” I replied. “So, well enough I guess.”
“He does seem to be taking a rather stern dislike of you.”
“That’s dislike?”
“Is he using wooden weapons?”
“Yeah.”
“Once he starts with metal, you will know it has moved on from dislike.”
“Lovely. You wanted to see me?”
“You and the princess had a discussion — what about?”
“Originally, it was because I was looking to ditch Carpophorus and not get beaten down this afternoon, but it turns out she wanted to talk to me as well.”
“That much was obvious. Care to share the topics?”
“Might be private, Nikolai.”
“Was it private?”
“Not really. But why the fuck do you care?”
“Because the princess remains a variable we cannot control, and—”
“Who can’t control her? You and Wian?”
Nikolai leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I feel you are insinuating something, Montana of Coggeshall. Shall we discuss it openly?”
“Openly? You
mean getting rid of the small talk and just being honest for once? What a fucking idea.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Look, man, she’s got some ridiculous theory that she’s here to marry me so I can take the throne or something. I told her that’s bunk, and that you wouldn’t be stupid enough to go through with suck a cockamamie plan.”
“Totally ridiculous,” he replied. The way he said it made me doubt everything I heard from him. It made me wonder if it could possibly be true. “Why would we even do that?”
“You got me,” I said. “The girl is young and confused. Mostly, I talked to her about fear and growing up. I tried to get her to focus on helping out around here, to be less of a, well, drain.”
“You told her she was a drain?”
“No. I just said she could either go after the crown that was rightfully hers, or hop in and help. That unlike basically every other living being in this world, she could do whatever she wanted — she just needed to make a decision and go after it.”
“And then you jumped from the wall?”
“I jumped from the wall after she started flirting with me.”
He tapped a quill against his teeth, and took out a sheet of paper.
“Buddy, before you get started on whatever that is,” I said, pointing at the paper, “how about we have a little chat about the tunnel?”
“Which tunnel?” he asked.
“The worm tunnel.”
“You want to go back in and take a walk the other way.”
“I do.”
“No.”
“No? I’m the duke—”
“You are the duke. Which is why you cannot go on every dangerous mission. I have sent some of the Thingmen that direction. They will report back what they find.”
“I’m willing to bet they find a large group of goblins.”
“Agreed.”
“And they’re ready for that?”
“I know you think you are the lone man to face off against goblins within the Empire and survive, but we managed to fight those vermin for eons before you strolled along. The soldiers of the Empire are well versed in dealing with goblins. And in this, a purely observational scouting mission, I believe their skills will serve us better than yours.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Stay here and be visible so your people know their lord is ready to protect them from anything that comes. And then protect them when the time comes. The time for violence is invariably coming, and you are still our best weapon. I promise, there will be much for you to do. The killing is coming.”
Chapter Forty
Nikolai had a point. But I didn’t have to like it. I stood outside his office looking up at the sky wondering what to do next. The answer, of course, was to do what he told me.
Train. Be visible. Protect.
And so I did.
Over the next few days, I shot arrow after arrow into the targets, from farther and farther away. Then through more and more obstacles. From standing, sitting, laying down, being knocked down, jumping, even from horseback. I shot until my fingers bled and the bows broke. Until we had to replace the targets because they were so full of arrow holes they couldn’t stand up anymore.
I sparred with Carpophorus until he ran out of wooden swords. I sparred against multiple opponents, against overwhelming numbers of opponents, against ranged opponents. The ranged ones were the worst, because they peppered me with actual arrows. I grew to ignore pain more and more, because it was such a constant for me.
Hey-ho, let’s go! You’ve discovered an ability: THAT’S NOT PAIN. You’ve experienced pain. Real pain. Over and over and over again. Pain on top of pain. And you’ve managed to keep going, even when every fiber of your being is begging you to stop. You may block out all pain as long as you have at least 25% of your HP remaining. +2 Con.
I grew comfortable with the sword and the shield, to the point where I was overconfident. Then Carpophorus would beat me back down to humility once again, until I got a realistic view of how much I still had to learn.
After my martial training, I’d hop into hard work, pulling stone out of the mountain, helping build buildings, holding cattle and horses for our animal handlers, all sorts of high-strength applications got sent my way. It was nonstop — there was always something that needed doing. I honestly worked harder than I had in either of my lives: training, working, eating, and every other day, sleeping a minimal amount.
And all that time, our walls grew in height and thickness. We prepared for attacks, but nothing came. Outside our walls was stillness, and inside a flurry of activity. More buildings went up within the walls, and rooms kept opening up within the mountain. I got notifications left and right about new additions to the holding.
Huzzah! You have successfully constructed buildings in your settlement.
The following buildings are now operational.
Barracks
Barracks (1)
Barracks (2)
Barracks (3)
Gatehouse (Northern)
Farm (Underground)
Library
And so on. We were now getting some good bonuses and everyone was out of the longhouses outside. Our poxivity penalty was dropping, and that apparently had to do with people getting sick because they were living so close together. Most of the Coggeshall population was getting the Well-Rested every morning, which meant bonuses to gaining skill levels and XP, and that meant my followers were leveling up. It was pretty awesome. The library would give some more bonuses as soon as it had books in it, but, well, the shelves were pretty bare. I didn’t want to drop all the magical tomes I had there, just leave them on public display. It was a feeling echoed by all the magicians in Coggeshall. So I settled on the idea of finding books to buy later. Still nice to have. And the underground farm was pretty impressive, and was definitely something that would feed us in the long term, even though it mostly consisted of a wide variety of funguses, blind fish, and insects that were impressively gross.
Everything I saw indicated that we were on our way to building a real home, and even though there was a mounting sense of cabin fever, morale seemed high. Which might have partially been attributed to the morale bonus we got when Harmut and some of his worker bees mounted the banded worm’s head in the Cantina where everyone could marvel while they ate.
The Holding of Coggeshall has gained it’s first trophy: Head of a Banded Worm
Trophy Type: Mounted Head
Trophy Class: Rare, Dangerous
Location: Cantina, Interior, West Wall
Description: The severed head of an elder Banded Worm, preserved and mounted on a finished piece of oak.
Effects: Bonus to morale. Bonus to digging efficiency.
So that was cool. I started to get all sorts of ideas, really wondering what else I could kill and mount to get more holding bonuses, and I started to feel bad about not getting the heads or bodies of all the other creatures I’d killed. Though, to be fair, it’d have been tough to gather up much of the Agachnern. That was pretty much pulverized. And I took the wyrm’s teeth instead of the head. Oops.
And the wyrm skin I brought back from the matriarch and her children was finally tanned and ready to be used, and wyrm skin armor was being doled out to, well, basically everyone who needed it. It was amazing to see: people started clamoring to get some, because it acted like a uniform of sorts. There was a genuine feeling amongst the Coggeshallians: they wanted to belong. And maybe because they wanted to belong, and everyone wanted the uniform, this happened:
Coggeshall Cuirass
Item Type: Rare
Item Class: Light
Material: Ancient Wyrm Matriarch Leather
Armor: +42
Durability: Excellent
Weight: 13 pounds
Requirements: n/a
Description: Made from tough, flexible leather, the armor provides excellent poison resistance. As it is also intimately tied to the dukedom of Coggeshall, followers receive a bo
nus to fighting within the holding.
I also dove into the thing I hadn’t even realized existed: the hirð points.
The first step was moving through the menu systems until I found the Groups heading. There were other elements greyed out, but front and center was:
The Hirð of Montana Coggeshall
Hirð Leader: Montana Coggeshall
Hirð Members: Ragnar Helfdane, Skeld Woodingson, Nikolai Petroff, Tarryn Flynn
Hirð Talents: none selected
Hirð Points: 618
Then, below, were options on things I could spend my hirð points on. And there were a ton. Only two made sense, though.
Hirð Talents Available:
1. Share and Share Alike - Your hirð gains use one of your abilities. (1000 points)
2. Hit Harder - The more members of the hirð who are fighting together, the more damage you all do. (200 points)
I spent a long time trying to figure out where to put the points, because extra damage was always awesome, and two levels of that, provided that was an option, could really help us throw down. But eventually I realized nothing could possibly top giving my hirð access to my regenerative abilities. More than anything, that had kept me alive. So I decided to just keep saving up.
Then, on a brutally cold night, with wind whipping in from the west and snow threatening to fall, shit started going wrong again.
Chapter Forty-One
I stood on my balcony looking out on the world, letting the snow settle in my hair and beard. I had no shirt or shoes on and was enjoying feeling cold, considering I was prepping for a nice hot bath. I’d put in a long day — a series of days really — and I wanted to do something for myself. Also, Ragnar was pretty keen on telling me I stunk.
