Chapter 124: Return to Percvale After Victory

They rode.

Nobody spoke and nobody congratulated anyone. Darion didn’t shout anything about a job well done or what they had just pulled off. That could wait. Everything that wasn’t riding could wait until they were back inside Percvale’s walls.

The horses were something else entirely.

Valdenmoor’s stables had fed these animals properly, which meant they ran the way well-fed horses ran, with everything they had and no suggestion that they were thinking about stopping.

The ground disappeared under them. Trees on the roadside blurred. The wind hit Darion’s face hard enough that he had to narrow his eyes and lean forward into it.

He had ridden plenty since arriving in Percvale. He had ridden tired horses, horses that were surviving on reduced feed, horses that moved because he asked them to and not because they had any particular enthusiasm for it.

This was different. This felt like the horse had been waiting for someone to ask it to run properly and was grateful for the opportunity.

This horses ran like they wanted to run and do it fast, like it was an horse race.

They all moved like that. Fifty knights on Valdenmoor’s horses, spread across the road, no formation, just speed. Seren somewhere in the middle, her hair out behind her. The bags on the saddlebags full and heavy but the horses not caring.

Whoosh.

Zoom.

The road came and came and came and didn’t seem to shorten and then suddenly it was shorter, the landmarks he recognized from the outbound journey appearing and then gone, the distance compressing in a way that the walk out had never suggested was possible.

He thought about the carriage.

Garren and Aldric were in a carriage on the same road. A good carriage, two strong horses, moving fast, but carriages had limits that horses without carriages didn’t. The road was the same road but a carriage had to account for ruts and turns and the weight of what it was carrying and the stability of the passengers inside.

Even a fast carriage moved at a pace that fifty horses on an open road would catch and pass without much difficulty.

Garren had left before them. They would arrive after him. Not long after, but after.

Darion rode and let the speed be what it was.

The status screen appeared somewhere around the halfway point.

It just showed up in front of his vision, hanging in the air that only he could see, steady despite the speed and the wind.

[Congratulations — Successful Military Engagement]

[Over Two Thousand Enemy Combatants Eliminated]

[King of Valdenmoor Captured Alive]

[Enemy Treasury Seized]

[Enemy Agricultural Capacity Destroyed]

[Enemy Command Structure Eliminated]

[Attribute Points Awarded]

[Undead Inventory Expanded — Major Growth Detected]

[STATUS]

Name: Darion

Title: Baron of Percvale

Class: Necromancer

Rank: Acolyte

Territory: Percvale (Border Domain)

Territorial Resonance: Low (Starving-aligned — Improving)

[ATTRIBUTES]

Strength: 62 [+5]

Agility: 53 [+6]

Endurance: 60 [+5]

Vitality: 52 [+4]

Perception: 58 [+10] 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Intelligence: 83 [+10]

Willpower: 65 [+10]

[Knight Undead Inventory: 20/150] — [+100 Slots Unlocked!]

[Animal Undead Inventory: 10/70] — [+45 Slots Unlocked!]

[Skills:

Death Perception

Distant Command]

He read through it.

The three biggest jumps were intelligence, perception, and willpower. Ten points each, all three of them, which was not something that happened from fighting.

Fighting gave him strength, endurance, agility, the physical stats that went up when the body was pushed.

Ten points to intelligence and perception and willpower came from something else.

The execution of the planning. Weeks of it leading to the moment that it was executed.

The compounds from Vera, the approach route, the timing, the phases of the assault, the decision to capture rather than kill, the decision to spare the civilian population.

Every piece of it had required thinking through angles and variables and consequences that didn’t have obvious answers.

The system had apparently been tracking all of it and had decided this morning’s outcome justified a significant acknowledgment.

Eighty-three intelligence. He looked at that number for a moment...

Then his eyes went to the inventory.

One hundred and fifty knight slots.

100!

He had started with five. Five slots, five skeleton knights dug up from Percvale’s graveyard with a rusted shovel on his first afternoon as Baron. The system had expanded it incrementally as he grew, ten, then thirty-five, then fifty. Now one hundred and fifty, a jump of a hundred slots in a single notification.

The system had seen what he did with fifty and decided he had earned considerably more room.

Seventy animal slots too.

He was sitting at fifteen animals, all of them far short of the new ceiling.

He dismissed the screen and focused on the road.

Percvale’s walls appeared in the afternoon light, earlier than he had expected. The horses had cut the journey down to something that felt impossible given how long the walk out had taken.

The gates were open and the gate guards saw the them coming from a long way off and were already standing straight when Darion rode through.

Garren’s carriage was in the courtyard. He could see it from the gate. The horses were being untied by Wulfric, the animals steaming from the journey, which meant they had arrived recently, not long before.

Darion pulled up and his men... and women came in around him, horses slowing for the first time in hours, the animals finally deciding that the courtyard was a reasonable place to stop.

"Well done," Darion said. He said it loud enough to carry. "All of you. Proud!"

It came back in a wave. Cheering, actual cheering,

Whoo!

Even Seren made a sound, which for Seren was practically a standing ovation.

He dismounted and went inside.

Aldric was on the floor against the wall in the side room off the main corridor. Hands tied, feet tied, cloth removed from his mouth now but a guard at the door with a spear. He was awake. He looked up when Darion passed the doorway.

Darion didn’t stop.

He found Garren in the great hall. "Count what we took," he said, meaning the bags filled with coins. "Tell me the total when you have it."

Garren nodded.

Darion went upstairs and knocked on Vera’s door.

She opened it. She looked at him and read his face.

"It worked?" she said, not question, more like a confirmation.

"It worked."

She almost smiled. "I never doubted it."

"Aldric is downstairs," Darion said. "Tied up in the side room. I need the oath administered."

"Now?"

"Now."

They went down together. Darion stopped at the door, looked at the guard, and told him to wait outside. Then he summoned the wolf.

It appeared in the corridor, the green eye catching the torchlight. The guard outside had heard the sound of the summoning and wisely stayed where he was.

Darion untied Aldric’s hands himself. Then his feet. He stepped back and let the man sit up properly, which Aldric did slowly, working out the stiffness of several hours on a stone floor.

The wolf was between Aldric and the door.

Aldric looked at the wolf. Then at Vera. Then at Darion.

Darion pulled out the two chairs at the small table and gestured at the one further from the door. Vera sat beside Darion. Aldric looked at the wolf again and then walked to the far chair and sat down a heaviness, one of someone running on no sleep and a great deal of unwanted experience.

There was ten seconds of silence.

Then, aldric looked across the table.

"Why didn’t you just kill me back at my kingdom," he said. "Why bring me here."