Chapter 14: Another Civilization(1)
The Spawn Pools were the Green Court’s northern border fort disguised as a nursery.
On the surface, it was what it claimed to be — a sacred breeding ground where the frogmen’s egg-clutches incubated in warm, mana-rich pools blessed by the Golden Mother. The water was green-gold, suffused with Demeterra’s vitality, and it produced hatchlings that were larger, healthier, and more aggressive than anything the wild swamp could breed.
But the surface was a polite fiction.
Below the nursery pools, carved into the clay shelf that supported the wetland, was the garrison. Three hundred soldiers of the Western Patrol, organized into six companies, rotating through a cycle of guard duty, foraging, and training that had been running uninterrupted for forty years. Supply lines stretched south to the Green Court’s agricultural heartland, carrying dried fish, grain, and the fermented lotus wine that the frogmen drank like water.
Gulk’s team arrived on the third day, as planned.
They came in from the north at dawn, moving through the outer patrol ring without challenge — the sentries recognized them by their gait before they were close enough to identify by face. Frogman scouts had a particular way of moving: low, smooth, with the languid efficiency of creatures who understood that speed and silence were not opposites.
Gulk reported to the commandant immediately. He did not eat. He did not rest. He did not stop at the pools to check on the hatchlings, which was the first thing most soldiers did after a long patrol.
The commandant noticed.
"That bad?" Commander Voss asked.
Voss was old. Not aged — old in the way that trees were old. She had been the northern commandant for twenty-two years. Her skin had darkened from the vibrant green of youth to a deep, mottled olive that looked like swamp stone. Her throat sac rarely inflated; she had trained it to stillness decades ago, the way soldiers trained their flinch reflexes out of their bodies. The only tell she had was her right hand — the one missing two fingers from a long-ago border skirmish — which tapped her knee when she was thinking.
"The Toad Lord is dead," Gulk said.
The tapping stopped.
Voss sat in her command nest — a shallow depression lined with dried moss, positioned at the top of a mud ramp that gave her a clear view of the garrison below. Around her, four junior officers sat on their haunches. Behind them, two scribes held sharpened reed-sticks over sheets of bark-paper, ready to record.
"Repeat," Voss said.
"The Toad Lord is dead, Commander. Killed. The carcass is on the mudflats in the Green Basin. At least sixty percent consumed."
The junior officers shifted. One of them — a young captain named Brek — let out a low croak of disbelief.
"By what?" Voss asked.
Gulk described the Hydra. Three heads. Oil-black scales. Crimson eyes. A creature that radiated foreign mana — not Demeterra’s signature, not Valdor’s, nothing in the Western Patrol’s records.
"A chimera," Voss said. Not a question.
"I believe so, Commander. It was not natural. The mana signature was synthetic — manufactured. As though something had built it."
"Built it," Voss repeated. The two-fingered hand resumed tapping. Slower now.
"There is more," Gulk said. "A settlement. Lizardmen. Thirty to forty individuals, including juveniles. They have walls, structures, and a priest."
"A priest." Voss’s voice was flat. Deliberately empty of inflection.
"Carrying a divine artifact. Red gem. Unfamiliar signature. Not the Golden Mother. Not the Breaker."
The room went very still.
The scribes stopped writing. The junior officers looked at Voss. Brek’s throat sac pulsed once, involuntarily.
"A new god," Brek said.
"Perhaps," Gulk said carefully. "The evidence suggests divine activity independent of any known deity. The chimera creation. The artifact. The settlement’s construction patterns — they are using the Toad Lord’s remains as building material, which implies advanced planning or divine guidance."
Voss didn’t react. Not visibly. But the tapping accelerated.
In the silence, Gulk added the detail he had saved for last.
"The lizardmen were the ones from the northern desert. The settlement’s demographics match the population we displaced eight months ago."
Now Voss reacted. Her eyes narrowed.
"The ones from the raid?"
"Yes, Commander."
Eight months ago, a routine population management operation had cleared a lizardman village at the northern edge of the Green Court’s expansion zone. The operation had been standard — the kind of territorial housekeeping that Demeterra’s doctrine mandated when indigenous populations threatened agricultural output. The lizardmen had fled into the waste. They were not expected to survive.
They had survived. They had found the Green Basin. They had settled it. And something — some unknown divine power — had armed them.
Voss was quiet for a long time.
"This goes above me," she said finally. "The Toad Lord’s death changes the territorial map. The northern basin was a buffer zone. Without the Toad Lord, it’s open ground."
She looked at Brek. "Draft a report for the Green Court. Mark it priority. Include Scout Captain Gulk’s full debrief."
"Response recommendation?" Brek asked, reed-stick poised.
Voss considered.
"Observation. Double the northern patrols. No engagement until the Court responds." She looked at Gulk. "How many warriors could they field?"
"Eight. Perhaps ten, if the juveniles are armed."
"Against a company?"
"They would last minutes, Commander."
"And the chimera?"
Gulk paused. "The chimera killed the Toad Lord. I would not send a company against it without siege support."
Voss’s mouth thinned. "Then we wait. The Golden Mother does not move carelessly, and neither do we."
She dismissed them. Gulk bowed — the shallow, functional bow of a soldier, not the deep prostration of a worshipper — and withdrew.
As he walked through the garrison, past the rows of sleeping quarters and the weapon racks and the training pools where young soldiers practiced their spear forms, Gulk thought about the lizardman with the glowing staff.
He had been small. Thin. Built like a scholar, not a fighter. Standing among the ruins of a camp that had been crushed by a creature the size of a hill.
And he had been standing. Not crouching. Not hiding. Standing upright, staff planted in the mud, directing his people with a voice that carried across the wreckage.
They should be dead,* Gulk thought. *By every rule of survival, they should have died in the desert eight months ago. Instead, they found a swamp, killed a god, and started building walls.
He passed the nursery pools. The hatchlings splashed and chirped in the warm water. Fat. Healthy. Safe behind three hundred soldiers and a goddess’s blessing.
The lizardman hatchlings had been safe behind a mud wall and a priest with a stick.
The comparison bothered him in a way he couldn’t quite articulate.
He shook it off and went to find food.
***
The report left the Spawn Pools at noon, carried by a relay team of three runners who would pass it south through the message-chain until it reached the Green Court’s administrative center — a journey of five days at relay speed.
Gulk didn’t know what the Green Court would decide. He was a scout. Scouts reported. The hierarchy decided.
But he knew the variables.
The Green Basin was valuable land. Abundant water. Rich soil. High mana density. Without the Toad Lord suppressing the ecosystem, it would bloom within a season — new prey species, new resources, new expansion room for the Green Court’s growing population.
The lizardmen were an obstacle. Small, weak, but divinely supported. The unknown god was a complication, and Demeterra did not tolerate complications in her territory.
The chimera was the wildcard. A weapon of unknown capability, unbound to any faction Gulk recognized. If the unknown god could create one, could it create more?
These were the questions the Green Court would ask. Gulk knew the answers wouldn’t be gentle.
He ate his ration of smoked fish and lotus root, cleaned his spear, and slept.
In his dreams, the lizardman priest stood in the shallows, holding his glowing staff against a sky full of fire.
Gulk woke before dawn and didn’t sleep again.
***
Back in the Green Basin, the tribe worked.
Day 55. Ten days since the Toad Lord fell. Eight days since the Frogmen were spotted.
The camp was transforming, and not just in structure.
The wall circuit was now complete — a full perimeter of packed mud reinforced with toad-bone plates, standing twice the height of the original and anchored with deep foundation posts that the hatchlings had placed with uncanny precision. The gate on the south side was a pair of toad-bone slabs, each the height of a grown lizardman and the width of two side by side, set on ironwood pivots that Vark could close with one hard shove.
The training had intensified.
Vark ran three sessions a day now. Morning: shield wall drill. The enforcers had carved shields from the Toad Lord’s shoulder blades — heavy, curved plates that interlocked naturally when pressed side by side. The formation was tighter than anything they had managed with bark shields. Not because the warriors were better, but because the material was better. The bone shields *wanted* to lock together.
Afternoon: spear work. The ironwood spears had been refitted with toad-bone tips — ground and sharpened on flat stones until the edges could split a reed lengthwise. They were heavier than stone points, harder to throw, but the penetrating power was incomparable.
Evening: stealth patrol. Tor’s specialty. Three scouts at a time, rotating through the outer perimeter in overlapping arcs. They moved through the reeds like the water itself — silent, invisible, tireless. Tor had developed a system of calls: a short chirp for "clear," a double click for "contact," a long whistle for "retreat." The language of prey becoming predator.
Krug watched it all with the detached eye of a commander who knew his army was too small for the fight that was coming.
He sat by the rebuilt hearth — the fire was alive again, relit from the last ember coals that the potter had saved in a clay pot during the flood — and counted heads.
Twenty-four adults capable of fighting. Six true enforcers under Vark. Eighteen others who could hold a spear but had never used one against anything that fought back.
And twenty-four hatchlings. Too young for combat. Young enough to die if the walls fell.
Against what? A scouting party of five Frogmen had made Krug’s blood run cold. The Frogmen who burned their village had been a hundred strong, and that had been — as Grak never tired of reminding them — just a raiding party. Not an army. A chore.
The math was simple and fatal.
"Priest?"
Runt sat beside him. The small scout had grown in the months since the desert — not in size, but in solidity. He was still the smallest adult in the tribe, but his movements were certain now, his eyes steady. The desperation that had defined him was gone, replaced by a quiet competence that Krug valued more than any muscle.
"You are thinking of the frogs," Runt said. Not a question. He could read Krug’s silences better than most could read his speeches.
"I am thinking of numbers," Krug said.
"Bad numbers?"
"All numbers are bad when you are small."
Runt poked the fire with a stick. Sparks rose, bright and brief.
"When I was a hatchling," Runt said, "my mother told me a story. A beetle in a web. The spider was big. The beetle was small. The beetle did not try to fight the spider. It bit the web. The web broke. The spider fell."
Krug looked at him. "Your mother was wise."
"My mother was eaten by a sand-cat," Runt said, without sentimentality. "But the story was good."
Krug looked at the fire. At the walls. At the lake, where the Hydra’s silhouette rippled under starlight.
We cannot fight the spider. But perhaps we can bite the web.
He didn’t know what the web was. Not yet. But the thought lodged in his mind like a seed in fertile soil, and he tended it through the long watches of the night.
***
Zephyr wasn’t sleeping either.
The interface glowed in the darkened room. He had dimmed every window except the two that mattered: the tactical map and the Hydra’s status panel.
[Chimera Protocol: Hydraboat Variant]
[HP: 78% (Regenerated)]
[Status: Feeding — Late Stage]
[Saturation Progress: 81%]
[Aggression: LOW (Docile Phase)]
[Estimated Saturation: Day 60 (+/- 1)]
Eighty-one percent. The Hydra was gorging — methodically consuming what remained of the Toad Lord’s skeleton, cracking the massive bones open with its jaws to get at the marrow. The biomass was integrating, stabilizing the creature’s wild genome increment by increment. Each meal extended its lifespan by fractions. Each meal brought it closer to the saturation threshold.
He pulled up the timeline he’d been obsessing over for the last three days.
[Day 55 (Today)]
• Hydra Saturation: Day 60 (estimated)]
• Hydra Lifespan Remaining: 20 days]
𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖
• Frogman Scout Return to Outpost: Day 53 (completed)]
• Estimated Green Court Response: Day 63-67 (based on standard bureaucratic model)]
The numbers were tight. Razor tight.
If Demeterra’s people moved at standard speed, the Frogman response force would arrive somewhere around Day 65. The Hydra would reach saturation around Day 60. That gave him a five-day window to execute the Divine Binding Protocol before the enemy showed up.
Five days.
Unless they move faster. Unless Demeterra is more aggressive than her profile suggests. Unless, unless, unless.
He opened the binding protocol for the hundredth time. The requirements stared back at him, unchanged.
[Active Chimera: ✓]
[Willing Mortal Vessel: Pending]
[500 FP: Current — 830 FP (Available)]
[Chimera Saturation State: 81% — Day 60 Estimate]
The faith counter had been climbing. Slowly, painfully, like a wounded animal dragging itself uphill. The rebuild, the toad-bone harvest, the small victories of reconstruction — each one had nudged the tribe’s belief a few points higher. Not through miracles. Through *evidence*. They could see the walls getting stronger. They could feel the shields getting harder. They could eat the meat they’d carved from their dead enemy’s body.
Faith through utility. Not flashy, but durable.
[Faith Generation: 14 FP/day → 18 FP/day]
[Casual Believers: 9 → 12]
[Devout Believers: 2 → 3 (Krug, Runt, Potter)]
The potter had ticked over to Devout. Zephyr had watched it happen in real-time — the moment she finished her rebuilt kiln and fired the first successful batch of toad-bone-reinforced bricks. The system had flagged the conversion with a quiet notification:
[Believer Upgrade: Potter (designation) → Devout]
[Reason: Achievement-Based Faith (Crafting Milestone)]
She hadn’t prayed. She hadn’t witnessed a miracle. She had built something with her own hands using the tools the Architect had provided, and the success had converted her more thoroughly than any sermon.
That’s how you build a religion, Zephyr thought. Not with fear. With results.
But results took time. And time was the one resource he was running short on.
He checked the map one more time. The southern approach was clear. No green dots. No movement. The Frogmen were gone, but their absence was somehow worse than their presence. An enemy you could see was an enemy you could plan for. An enemy you couldn’t see was imagination’s fuel, and imagination was always more generous with threats than reality.
He minimized the map and pulled up the Hydra’s behavioral forecast.
[Predicted Behavior at Saturation:]
[• Aggression: Minimal (Post-feeding lethargy)]
[• Territorial Range: Reduced (Nesting instinct)]
[• Physical State: Peak biomass. Genome decay begins Day 65.]
[• Window for Divine Binding: Day 60-65 (5-day window)]
Day 60. Five days from now.
He closed his eyes. The decision was already made. Had been made since the moment he’d read the protocol requirements. There was only one mortal in the tribe with the Willpower rating to survive the binding attempt. Only one mortal whose faith was absolute enough to satisfy the "Willing Vessel" requirement.
Krug.
The Priest would have to walk into the lake, unarmed, and touch the thing that had given them nightmares for two weeks. He would have to trust the Architect with his life — not metaphorically, not spiritually, but literally, placing his hand on the jaw of a predator that could swallow him whole.
And Zephyr — who had spent the Priest’s entire existence viewing him as a game piece, a "unit," a dot on a map — would have to trust that the dot had enough faith to hold still while three heads full of needle-teeth decided whether to accept him or eat him.
The acceptance threshold in the protocol wasn’t guaranteed. It depended on the Chimera’s temperament and the vessel’s conviction. If Krug wavered — even for a second — the Hydra would reject the bond and attack.
Can he do it?
Zephyr pulled up Krug’s profile.
[Name: Krug]
[Class: Acolyte of the Forge]
[Level: 3]
[Willpower: S (Iron Will)]
[Faith Status: Devout]
[Active Skill: Reinforce]
[Passive Skill: Structured Mind]
S-rank Willpower. Devout faith. Structured Mind — the passive that gave him resistance to fear and mental status effects.
On paper, he was the perfect candidate. The only candidate.
But paper didn’t account for the fact that Krug had spent the last ten days watching the Hydra tear flesh from a corpse. Paper didn’t account for the nightmares the tribe muttered about when they thought the Priest wasn’t listening. Paper didn’t account for the doubt that Zephyr had seen flickering behind Krug’s eyes when the Priest looked at the lake.
He doubts me.
The realization was uncomfortable. Not because it was new — Zephyr had seen plenty of NPCs lose faith in Theos Online. But those were pixels. Those were scripts. Krug’s doubt was *earned*. The Priest had watched his god summon a monster that demolished his camp, killed his warrior, and now squatted in his lake like a malevolent roommate.
Doubt, in that context, was rational.
And Zephyr needed him to override rational thought with faith.
Five days.
He saved the timeline, dimmed the monitor, and stared at the ceiling.
Five days to make a doubting priest believe enough to die for me.
The room was quiet. The monitor hummed.
No pressure.