100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids-Chapter 373 - 372- Departing to Lord’s Manor

The word formed in her head and then sat there, finding no companions, no follow-on thought capable of joining it. Just: ’What.’

The town lay before her in the morning light, and it was not a border town. It was not even a particularly humble inner-kingdom town. It had the ’density’ of a city district — the compressed, layered quality of construction built in stages, each stage more ambitious than the last, the whole thing radiating a kind of upward momentum, a sense of ’intention’ that had no business existing two days’ ride from the northern tree line.

Glass in the shop windows.

An actual fountain in the central square, visible from here, water catching the morning light.

Children running between buildings with full cheeks and clean clothes, laughing at something, entirely uninterested in forty-three armored riders appearing at the edge of their town.

And behind it all — over it all — the tower.

Celestia had known about the tower. She’d received the reports. She’d read them twice and then set them down and gone for a walk and come back and read them a third time and arrived at the conclusion that whoever had written them was either lying, exaggerating, or needed to be checked for fever. The reports said the tower had appeared ’overnight’. One day: nothing. The next day: ’that.’ Stretching up past the clouds, dark stone that didn’t reflect light so much as consume it, windows at irregular intervals glowing with something interior that was not firelight.

She looked at it now, and she’d been a knight for sixteen years, and she had seen things that would strip color from ordinary faces, and the tower made the back of her neck prickle.

"Commander."

Her second, Ren — young, reliable, occasionally too careful — pulled his horse alongside hers. His eyes were doing the same calculation hers had done. She could see him running the numbers.

"I see it," she said.

"The town—"

"I see the town, Ren."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "It wasn’t in the reports."

"The town was in the reports."

"Not like ’this.’" His voice had the quality of a man trying not to sound shaken in front of his commander. He was mostly succeeding. "The reports said modest development. Significant growth for the region. The word ’modest’ was in there. Twice."

"The person who wrote those reports," Celestia said, with a patience she was performing rather than feeling, "has apparently not been here recently."

She moved her horse forward.

The people of Millbrook saw the battalion the way people see weather — it was coming, you could tell it was coming, and how you responded said something about your particular relationship with things that were large and unavoidable.

Some stopped. Stepped back to the edges of the road, the instinctive narrowing of space between oneself and a wall that people in settlements near military traffic had learned over generations.

Most kept going.

That was the second wrong thing.

Celestia had ridden into border towns with military columns before. The reactions she expected were specific: the work stopping, the watching, the children pulled inside, the merchants who found reasons to close their stalls, the particular stillness that a population under habitual anxiety produced when something armored and official came through.

These people moved aside. They weren’t hiding. They weren’t frozen. A woman with a basket of vegetables tucked it under one arm, stepped to the edge of the road, watched the column pass with the calm appraisal of someone watching weather they had decided to let happen. A group of men who had been repairing a roof stayed on their roof. Two of them waved.

’Waved.’

Celestia did not wave back.

But she filed it.

"They’re not afraid," Ren said, quiet.

"No," she agreed. "They’re not."

The implication of that settled over her as the column moved deeper into the town. Fear was normal. Fear meant the population understood what a column of Ktorian knights in full silver plate represented — the crown’s reach, extended, the kind of authority that arrived when local matters had exceeded local capacity to manage.

No fear meant the population had decided they were safe enough not to need to be afraid.

That required either extraordinary naivety — and these people did not look naive — or a sense of protection that wasn’t coming from the crown.

She looked at the tower again.

’What are you,’ she thought at it. ’And who made you.’

The official reports said the tower had appeared coincidentally at around the time the young Redwood heir had established himself in Millbrook. The phrasing was careful, diplomatic, the measured language of writers who had noticed a correlation and were professionally uncertain whether to name it a connection. The tower was a dungeon structure, spontaneously manifested — these things happened, rarely, in areas of concentrated magical resonance. The Redwood heir had had the luck to be nearby when it happened and had been shrewd enough to capitalize on it.

’He can read the future.’

The thought arrived unbidden, carried in on the back of a memory. Six months ago. A letter, delivered to House Ktorian through official channels, written in a hand she’d recognized immediately — the cramped angular script of a boy she’d last seen as a fat, miserable nineteen-year-old being bundled into a carriage at his father’s order, exiled to a dying edge town for some framed scandal that she’d found suspicious at the time and now—

’I cannot tell you precisely what is coming, Aunt. But I can tell you this: the Hartfield family has been moving against Count Redwood, and by the time this letter reaches you, Count Redwood will have been poisoned. You will find the antidote formula in the sealed section of this letter. I ask that you act on the count’s behalf, not mine. I expect no credit for this. I merely know, as I have always known, what happens next.’

She had read that letter twice.

Then she’d broken the seal, found the antidote formula — detailed, specific, written in the same hand — and sent it to Count Redwood with riders who rode hard.

The count had lived.

The Hartfield house had been dismantled. She’d done it herself, blade and mandate, the particular clean work of closing an account.

And Viktor’s letter had said one more thing, in the closing lines, so casual she’d almost missed the weight of it:

’You always want to see a thing yourself. I’ll have the east gate clear when you arrive.’

She’d thought, reading that, that it was the kind of thing a clever boy said to seem more impressive than he was.

The east gate was clear.

She pulled her horse to a stop in the town square.

The tower’s base was three hundred yards from the square’s north edge.

Celestia looked at it from the ground. Up close it had a quality she hadn’t anticipated — not threatening, exactly. Threatening was the wrong word. ’Purposeful’. Like it had been put here for a reason rather than having simply appeared. The dark stone of it didn’t have the rough-hewn quality of dungeons she’d seen — it had the quality of something grown, the seamless grain of material that had arrived in this shape.

"Ren," she said. "Numbers."

He produced the assessment ledger without being asked — good man. "Credit access for the tower entry is based on a system we don’t fully—"

"The notation," she said. "What’s mine."

A pause.

"...negative," he said.

She turned to look at him.

He had the expression of a man reading something he’d verified twice because he hadn’t believed it the first time. "The assessment notation shows — and I want to be clear that I am reading this exactly as written — a deficit value. Negative credit. As in, not merely insufficient to enter, but actively — negative." He looked up. "Which would imply that the tower’s access system has a record of, ah. Disposition. Toward the local population."

Celestia looked back at the tower.

The numbers were simple. A tower that measured your credit with the surrounding population before deciding whether to let you in. She had walked into this town at the head of forty-three armed knights and every person who’d stepped aside for her had done so with the calm of someone who had decided this was a minor inconvenience rather than a threat, and apparently that difference between ’fear’ and ’calm respect’ was something the tower could read.

And she, arriving with the authority of House Ktorian, with the crown’s mandate, with sixteen years of service and a history of actual, measurable good worked on behalf of actual people—

Negative.

Because she’d walked in here and the people had moved aside and felt nothing but the passive inconvenience of a large thing moving through their space, rather than the active appreciation of a thing arriving to help them.

Because this town had something watching for that difference.

She stared at the tower for a long moment.

Then she turned away from it.

"We’ll assess it later," she said. "The entry mechanism requires more study than we have time for right now."

"Commander?"

"We’re calling on the lord’s residence first." She turned her horse. "I need to speak to that brat óf a nephew who have surprised me enough to open up his skull to see his brain myself."

’!’

"Please, Commander, don’t do that, he is our young—" Before her aide could further add and clarify that as if he knew his commander could pull that off, Celestia intervened.

"Shut. Up."

"Y-yes... commander..."