Chapter 236: Pleading
Jane was still inside the main building of the sub domain, getting the inheritance from her master.
Neil was about to go check when the notification arrived.
It came through his communication device, formal and sealed with the mark of a settlement warden.
He stopped walking and opened it.
The sender was Mantis.
The warden of Settlement Eight, two territories over, whose settlement sat closer to the phantom planet’s incursion paths than most.
The message was direct.
A wave was building.
Not the ordinary incursion activity that the settlements managed as a matter of routine, but something organised and large, the kind of buildup that a single settlement’s lords could not adequately address without support from outside.
Mantis was requesting that strong lords from neighboring settlements volunteer to assist in holding the wave when it arrived.
The estimated timing was within the week.
Neil read it through twice.
He stood in the courtyard of his domain with the message in his hand and the evening settling around him, and thought about the multiplying creatures Cynthia had told him about, and about the timing of this request against the timeline for the lost elven kingdom, and about the people inside the domain who would be here while he was gone.
There were a lot of things happening at once.
He put the message away and went inside to eat.
Neil came back through the gate as the last of the evening light was fading, and dinner was already on the table.
Everyone was there, the full domain population settled into the meal with the comfortable noise of a group that had been together long enough to have its own rhythm.
Jane had come out of her building, the conversation with her master apparently concluded for the day, and she sat across from Ileana with the quiet ease the two of them had developed, talking about something small while Fay moved around the table filling cups.
Bob and Rob had finally woken up and returned to the table looking considerably more human than they had that morning, though Rob still had the particular expression of someone whose body had not fully forgiven them for the past ten days.
Mob ate without contributing to anything, which was Mob’s relationship with dinner.
Leon sat at his end of the table with the composed attention he brought to everything.
Rin was beside Jane, her quick eyes moving around the table in the mapping way she had, absorbing the domain’s evening dynamic one piece at a time.
Neil ate and let the noise of it settle around him, and when the meal wound down and the table began to clear he stepped away and called Randy.
Randy picked up on the third signal, which meant he was awake but had considered not answering.
As lazy as always he is, Neil still wondered if it was an enemy in disguise or if he is doing it just for the love of the game.
"I got a letter from Mantis," Neil said.
"I got it too, haha what a coincidence, by the way it is night for me, is it the case for you too?" Randy said.
"Is it connected to what I think it is?" Neil rolled his eyes and didn’t answer his question.
Randy was quiet for a moment, how was he supposed to know what you are thinking.
Sigh, this kid is talking in riddles, randy sighed.
"The multiplying ones," he said. "Yes, that is what the buildup looks like based on the reports coming from that direction."
Neil thought about the projection Cynthia had shown him, the creature splitting cleanly into two perfect copies, both of them complete and immediately functional, the pulse inside each one identical.
"How bad is it over there right now?" he asked.
"Bad enough that Mantis is writing letters to every lord in neighboring settlements and apparently making personal visits," Randy said. "Which tells you everything you need to know about how bad it is, because Mantis does not ask for things."
Neil nodded to himself.
"Alright," he said. "That is what I needed to know."
He ended the call.
Ileana was already in the room when he came in, sitting on the edge of the bed with her hair loose, and she looked up when he closed the door.
He told her about the letter, the wave building at Mantis’s settlement, the creature type, the timeline.
She listened with the particular quality she had when she was taking something in fully before forming any response to it.
"Those creatures," she said when he finished. "The ones that multiply when killed."
"Cynthia mentioned them a while back," he said. "Looks like they have reached this region already."
Ileana was quiet for a moment, turning it over.
Then she set it aside the way she set things aside when they were real problems that didn’t require an immediate solution, her expression returning to the easier version of itself.
She reached over and touched his arm.
What followed was unhurried and warm and entirely theirs, and when they finally lay still in the dark with her tucked against his side and the domain quiet around them, everything outside felt exactly as far away as it was supposed to feel.
Morning came and Neil was up before the domain had fully woken, and the plan for the day was simple.
Training with Ileana in the open area outside the settlement, pushing the Field further, working on the giant form, making use of whatever time remained before Cynthia’s message arrived.
He had Magnar with him and Ileana was just pulling on her coat when the domain gate opened.
Randy came in first.
Neil read his expression immediately, the particular quality Randy’s face had when he was not happy about something he had nonetheless agreed to facilitate, and behind Randy came a man Neil recognized from the event, though the version of that man standing in his courtyard now was a different thing from the one who had presided over the tournament with the easy authority of someone entirely in control of their environment.
Mantis was still physically the same, broad and well-built and carrying the presence of a warden, but the settled confidence was gone.
What was there instead was something worn down and stripped back, the look of a man who had spent days doing something he found genuinely difficult and had come here as the latest iteration of it.
Randy looked at Neil with an expression that said he was sorry about this and also had not felt he could refuse.
Neil looked at Mantis.
"What do you want to talk about?" he said.
Mantis met his eyes.
Then he looked at Neil the way people looked when they were trying to read a strength level and finding nothing where something should be, the particular confusion of a perception skill hitting a blank wall.
His expression shifted.
He couldn’t see through it, Neil could tell that clearly, and the calculation behind Mantis’s eyes suggested he was arriving somewhere significant because of that absence.
"Please lend your strength," Mantis said. "We need it to fight those creatures."
Neil shook his head.
"I’m not strong enough to be useful against something like that," he said simply.
Mantis looked at him for a long moment.
The blankness where a strength reading should be was doing something to his assessment, visibly revising whatever conclusion he had arrived with.
He said nothing for a moment.
Then he spoke, and his voice had the flat and exhausted quality of someone who had already used all the versions of this conversation that came with any kind of pride attached.
"For now it is my settlement," he said. "My people, my lords, the subjects under my protection who have nowhere else to go."
He paused.
"But those creatures do not stop at one settlement’s boundary and they do not thin out as they move, they grow with every engagement."
His jaw tightened slightly.
"If they are not stopped now, the count will be too high to address at all within weeks."
Neil looked at him without changing his expression.
"That may be true," he said. "But that is not my problem to solve."
He glanced at Randy.
"Take him with you, Randy loves a good crisis if there is money in it."
Randy gave him a deeply unimpressed look.
Mantis stayed where he was.
He didn’t push, didn’t raise his voice, didn’t try another angle.
He just stood there with the expression of a man who had made his case with everything he had and was now waiting on the other side of it.
Ileana stood beside Neil and said nothing.
She had no particular feeling pulling her in either direction on this, and she made no attempt to signal one.
Neil had his own things to handle, his own people to protect, his own journey to prepare for, and the lost elven kingdom was not going to wait for a detour into someone else’s disaster.
He thought about the awakening ceremony.
The false synergy reading announced in front of everyone, the number that had closed doors and shifted how every person in that room looked at him, the complete indifference of all of them to what that announcement had done to his life.
Not one of them had questioned it.
Not one of them had come forward when things went wrong afterward.
The humans of this world had their own interests and they had made those interests very clear to him on the day it mattered most.
He had no debt to any of them.
He looked at Mantis.
"I’m sorry about your settlement," he said, and meant it in the neutral way that one meant things that were true without requiring any action. "But I have my own problems to deal with."
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