Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 67: A New Beginning

The rest of the journey back was quiet.

No one was bracing for trouble anymore. They’d done what they came to do. Now they were just walking.

The night had faded into that grey half-light before true morning, the sky pale at the edges but not yet committed to sunrise. The road ahead was visible enough that they picked up their pace, no longer creeping along like they had on the way out.

Some of the knights were still angry about the young one who’d died.

You could see it in the way they walked, the way they didn’t talk about it. That death could have been 100 percent avoided.

They’d gotten their revenge fast though, which closed the immediate account, but a knight dead not too far from home at the end of a successful night didn’t stop being dead just because you’d killed the men who did it. The anger would settle eventually. These things did.

Darion walked at the front and thought about something he hadn’t thought about before.

He had killed people tonight. Actual people, not Bogoarts in a forest, or weird creatures. The village leader specifically.

Back on Earth, as Julian, killing had been in the category of things he had never come close to. He had lived a careful, unremarkable life that ended with a truck, not with anything he had chosen. Violence was something that happened in news articles and fiction, at a safe remove from anything he was personally involved in.

Here it was different. The world was different. A baron in a medieval territory surrounded by lords who took what they wanted from people they considered weak couldn’t afford to be restrained. Restraint was what had left Percvale declining for thirty years. Someone had to make the costs real.

He had been that person yesterday night.

Percvale’s gate appeared as the sun was properly rising, the walls catching the early light so they almost looked solid instead of crumbling. That was a charitable reading, but not entirely wrong.

The townspeople were already up. Maybe word had traveled ahead with the wind or something, or maybe they’d just been watching for the return. By the time the group came through the gate, citizens were lining the route toward the castle, and the noise started before Darion fully took notice.

Then they saw what he was bringing.

The goats came through the gate and the crowd reacted like a wave had hit them — twenty-one of them, healthy and loud, moving in that particular way of stubborn goats.

Behind them, fourteen cattle, much larger and calmer. Behind the cattle, the food stores from Gonnb’s huts, loaded onto whatever the knights could improvise.

And riding behind one of the knights near the middle, a young woman (Seren) in a tattered gown, looking at everything with careful attention, like she was assembling a picture of a new place from its pieces.

A man near the front of the crowd shouted, loud enough to carry: "This new Baron is like a messiah sent to us."

Someone else, right after: "Best Baron ever!"

Darion smiled. He raised a hand and waved as he rode through, which made the noise louder instead of quieter. He let it wash over him. He’d earned it, genuinely, and the people saying it had earned the right to say it by surviving what Percvale had been before he arrived. Their enthusiasm wasn’t misplaced. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

He kept riding toward the castle.

Seren watched from behind the knight she was riding with.

She’d known Percvale by reputation, the way most people in the region did . She had known it as the dying barony, the starving knights, the place that had been declining so long its decline had become its identity. A dead place, she’d called it when Darion asked, and he hadn’t corrected her because back then it would have been more hope than fact.

But now she was watching townspeople line a street to cheer for a group returning with livestock and food, and the cheering wasn’t desperate, it was people who’d been waiting for something to change and were seeing proof that it was changing. You could hear the difference if you knew what to listen for.

She looked at the goats.

Twenty-one goats weren’t a fortune. In a well-established territory, that was a modest holding, nothing special. But goats didn’t stay twenty-one. They’d have kids in the first season, and then more kids after that, and within a few years a starting herd of twenty-one became something that could feed a barony’s dairy needs and produce surplus for trade. The cattle worked the same math, just bigger.

You didn’t slaughter them. Not first, not while they were healthy and breeding. You fed them, you kept them, you let them do what animals do when given good conditions, and in two years you had a lot more than you started with.

She’d seen this done right and she’d seen it done wrong, and the difference between a territory that managed its livestock well and one that ate its breeding stock in the first hard season was the difference between solving a problem and making it worse.

She looked at the farmland at the eastern edge of the settlement as the group moved through the streets. It wasn’t a great sight even from this place. Pale and flat and bare from here, but she’d seen worse. She’d worked with worse. Stripped soil could always come back, soil to her had a long memory and more patience than the people farming it, it just took time and the right care.

With her, it took less time.

She looked at the Baron riding at the front, waving at his townspeople.

The group reached the castle gate. The crowd noise peaked and then softened as people started drifting away, the morning beginning to reorganize itself around the new reality of twenty-one goats and fourteen cattle and food stores that hadn’t existed in Percvale yesterday.

Darion was about to start kingdom building.