Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 57: The Problem

Garren leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment before answering.

"Small," he said. "A small roadside settlement, been there for a long time but never grown into anything significant. The population is somewhere between two and three hundred, maybe a little more in good seasons when people pass through and some of them stay, though that would be rare." He paused. "Warriors, if you can call them that, somewhere around seventy to a hundred. But that number is misleading."

"How so?"

"They’re not soldiers. Not trained ones or organized ones. They’re hunters, mostly. Men who have spent their lives in the woods and know how to handle themselves and a weapon, but there’s no formation, command structure worth the name and no training.

What they have is numbers relative to their size and the confidence that comes from knowing the terrain around them better than anyone passing through."

Darion thought about the three knights who had come back in their undergarments. Beaten badly enough that one of them was still holding his ribs carefully the next day.

They weren’t trained soldiers, Garren was saying. Only hunters and rough fighters who had looked at three knights from Percvale and decided they were easy.

They hadn’t been wrong actually.

"Why Percvale specifically," Darion said. "Is it just us or do they do this to everyone who comes through."

Garren’s expression was honest about the answer before he gave it. "Percvale has a reputation in this region. Has had one for years. It’s known as a dying barony with no food and knights who can barely stand up straight from hunger. There also isn’t a history of retaliating against anything after our fall.

If you were a village warrior on a road and a group of men from Percvale rode past with horses and meat and equipment, the question you’d be asking yourself isn’t whether you could take it. It’s whether there would be any consequences if you did."

"And the answer has always been no."

"The answer has always been no," Garren confirmed. "We’ve never retaliated against anything. Just one time things with the invasions. We hadn’t retaliated against the individual incidents over the years, nothing. At some point that stops being restraint and starts being permission."

Darion sat with that for a moment.

"How do they operate," he said. "The village itself. Do they have walls?"

Garren shook his head. "Nothing like that. Wooden fencing in places, the kind that keeps animals in rather than people out. The settlement is scattered, huts and buildings spread across the area rather than clustered behind any kind of defensive perimeter. There’s no real center to it, no structure that serves as a barracks or a headquarters. The warriors don’t sleep in one place, they sleep in their own homes the same as everyone else."

"Guards?"

"Rotating watchers on the outskirts. Some of them in trees, from what I’ve heard, which fits with the hunting background, men who are comfortable, elevated and patient. But it’s not a coordinated system. It’s informal to be honest. People taking turns watching the approaches and calling out if something comes that shouldn’t."

Garren knew a lot about Gonnb like he knew about pretty much all kingdoms surrounding Percvale.

Darion leaned forward slightly, his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor while he worked through it.

He had been thinking about Gonnb the same way he had thought about Valdenmoor. Same category of problem, same general shape of response.

The venomous undead had worked in Valdenmoor’s barracks because Valdenmoor’s barracks was a specific, predictable environment.

It was a single large building, soldiers sleeping in concentrated rows, a layout he had been able to observe through the perspective glass and map in his head before he sent the undead in.

The sleeping guard at the entrance had been practically a gift, but even without that particular luck, the structure of the place had made the infiltration manageable. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

It was a contained space with predictable positions and clear sightlines from outside.

Gonnb was the opposite of all of that.

Two to three hundred people spread across scattered huts with no centralized location.

Warriors sleeping in their own homes, distributed across the whole settlement rather than concentrated in one building.

Watchers at irregular positions on the outskirts, some probably in trees, which meant elevated and potentially with good visibility in multiple directions.

No single approach that gave him a clean angle on the majority of what he needed to reach.

Sending the venomous undead into Gonnb the way he had sent them into Valdenmoor’s barracks meant sending them into a sprawling, irregular settlement where he couldn’t predict movement, couldn’t map positions in advance and couldn’t rely on the targets being concentrated in one place at one time.

The perspective glass had given him Valdenmoor’s barracks laid out like a diagram. Gonnb would give him a scatter of lights in the dark and no reliable way to know who was where.

The same plan wouldn’t work.

He straightened up and looked at Garren.

"The infiltration approach I used on Valdenmoor," he said. "It worked because the barracks was a fixed structure with predictable positions. Everyone in one building, sleeping in rows, a single entrance I could monitor."

Darion shook his head slowly. "Gonnb is scattered from what you explained. Different buildings, no central concentration and irregular guard positions. I can’t run the same operation on a settlement that doesn’t have a single point to operate from."

Garren nodded. "The situations are fundamentally different."

"Which means the response has to be different."

He stood up and walked to the window.

He thought about what Garren had said. Percvale had no history of retaliation. That was the root of it.

The root of it was that Gonnb had made a calculation based on years of evidence and the calculation had said Percvale didn’t fight back.

That calculation needed to be wrong now.

The question was how to make it wrong in a way that was achievable with what he currently had, against a target that didn’t cooperate with the plan that had worked last time.