Chapter 25: First Contact
Dawn cracked the sky like a slow fracture through grey stone.
Zephyr was already watching.
The seven signatures had drifted north through the night — slower than he’d expected, their pace degrading hour by hour as the injured one weakened. At 3 AM (or whatever the local equivalent was — he’d stopped trying to map this world’s time to Earth hours), they’d stopped entirely. Two hours of stillness. Then the cluster had reformed, minus one stationary signature, and moved again. Someone had been left behind. Then retrieved — the stationary signature rejoining the group after a fifteen-minute delay that suggested an argument had been had and lost.
They went back for their wounded. Discipline or sentiment — either one tells me something.
By dawn, they were close enough.
The expanded divine sense resolved them at two kilometers — the fog of war thinning from grey static to translucent haze, the biological signatures gaining shape, proportion, detail. Bipedal. Scaled. Small.
Very small.
The three large ones topped out at maybe four feet. The medium pair were shorter — adolescents, roughly proportional. The two small ones barely cleared knee height. And the injured one — one of the three adults — was being half-carried, half-dragged by the other two, its left side trailing a heat signature that read wrong. Too hot. The swollen, radiant warmth of infected tissue.
Zephyr ran the profile match.
[RACIAL IDENTIFICATION (Divine Sense — partial resolution)]
[Match confidence: 87%]
[Species: Kobold (Reptilian Variant)]
[Size: Small — average adult height 3’8" to 4’2"]
[Classification: Utility / Reconnaissance]
[Common traits: Tunnel engineering, trap construction, low-light vision, pack coordination]
[Combat rating: Low (individual) / Moderate (coordinated group)]
[Divine affiliation: NONE DETECTED]
Kobolds.
Zephyr leaned back.
In Theos Online, Kobolds had been the race that nobody wanted and everybody needed. They were small, fragile, and laughably weak in a straight fight — the kind of race that combat-oriented gods dismissed as beneath their divine attention. No war god wanted a four-foot-tall believer who couldn’t hold a sword without tipping over. No storm god wanted worshippers who scattered in a stiff breeze.
But the gods who built civilizations — the infrastructure gods, the economy gods, the ones who understood that an empire was built underground as much as above it — those gods *killed* for Kobold converts.
Trap specialists. Tunnel architects. The race whose entire evolutionary history had been shaped by the need to survive while being smaller, weaker, and more fragile than everything around them. They didn’t fight threats. They *engineered* threats out of existence. Pitfall traps with sharpened stakes. Collapsing tunnels timed to the footstep of a pursuer. Alarm systems made from trip-wires and hollow reeds that screamed when disturbed. The entire Kobold racial toolkit was built around one philosophy: *make the environment do the fighting for you.*
And tunnels. God, the tunnels. A Kobold warren was an architectural miracle — multi-level, self-ventilating, structurally sound despite being dug with nothing but claws and compacted mud. In Theos Online, a single Kobold settlement could produce tunnel networks that took human engineers months to replicate.
Seven Kobolds. Godless. Heading toward his territory.
What chased you here?
He didn’t have the answer yet. Didn’t need it yet.
He opened the handler bond — the connection to Krug — and sent a pulse. Not words. An image: the southern treeline, a direction, a distance. And a feeling.
Wake the scout.
***
Runt moved through the swamp like a rumor.
The Nightstalker passive did most of the work — sound absorption at 60%, thermal signature suppressed to ambient levels, footprints dissolving within seconds. But the passive only handled the physics. The rest was habit. Two months of scouting the perimeter had turned Runt into something between a soldier and a ghost: always moving, always lower than the vegetation line, always choosing the path that left the fewest traces.
He found them half a kilometer south of the territory boundary.
The depression was natural — a shallow bowl in the swamp floor where the ground dipped below the water table and the mud gave way to standing water ringed by chest-high reeds. Not a good camp. Not a camp at all, really. More of a collapse point — the place where seven exhausted bodies had stopped because their legs wouldn’t carry them further.
They were smaller than he’d expected.
Runt was the smallest adult in the tribe — compact, lean, built for speed rather than mass. These creatures made him feel large. The three adults were his height, maybe shorter, their frames narrow, their limbs thin but densely muscled in the way that suggested endurance over strength. Their scales were darker than lizardman scales — a mottled brown-green that blended with the reed bed so well that Runt almost missed two of them on his first scan.
No fire. They hadn’t built one — couldn’t, probably. The depression was wet, the available wood was waterlogged, and the reeds were too green to burn. They huddled instead. The two adolescents and the two young ones were pressed together in the center of the group, body heat shared, tails wound around each other in a knot that looked uncomfortable but efficient. The two healthy adults flanked them, awake, alert, their heads rotating in slow, mechanical sweeps that covered 270 degrees each.
Prey behavior. They were watching for something that hunted them.
The injured adult lay at the edge of the group. Runt could see the wound from twenty meters — a deep laceration along the left flank, starting below the armpit and running to the hip. Claw marks. Three parallel gouges, swollen and discolored, the tissue around them puffed with heat that Runt’s thermal vision rendered as angry orange against the cool blue of the swamp. Crude bandages — strips of bark fiber — had been applied and were already soaked through with something that Runt’s nose identified as infection before his eyes confirmed it.
Three days, maybe four. Runt had seen wounds go septic before. The injured village during the migration, the enforcers who’d taken cuts in the early days before the Forge Hearth’s iron tools replaced bone knives. This Kobold’s wound was past the point where rest and clean water would fix it. It needed something the group clearly didn’t have.
One of the adolescents — the taller one — was standing guard at the edge of the depression. Runt assessed the posture: back to a rock, elevated position, sharpened stick held at a diagonal across the chest, eyes scanning in a regular pattern. Left, forward, right. Pause. Left, forward, right. The rhythm was drilled. Not natural talent — trained. Someone had taught this adolescent how to stand watch, and the adolescent had practiced until it became automatic.
Discipline. Even when they’re dying.
Runt counted weapons. Two sharpened sticks among the adults. One among the adolescent on guard. A small pouch on the injured one’s belt — tools, maybe. The young ones carried nothing.
He watched for eleven minutes. In that time, one of the healthy adults rose, checked the injured one’s bandages, changed one strip, and returned to the perimeter watch without speaking. The entire exchange was silent — communicated through head tilts, ear rotations, and a brief touch on the shoulder that could have meant *I’m sorry* or *hold on* or both.
Runt withdrew. He moved north, crossed back into the territory boundary, and ran for the camp.
Krug was waiting at the gate.
"Seven," Runt said. "Small ones. Kobolds, I think — I’ve heard the old stories. Brown-green scales, big ears, short. Three adults, two half-grown, two hatchlings." He paused. Organized. "One adult is dying. Wound on the left side — claw marks, three parallel, infected. They’ve been running for days. No fire, no shelter, no food I could see. They’re scared of something behind them."
Krug listened. The staff pulsed in his grip — a slow rhythm that matched the heartbeat at the base of his skull, the bond humming with quiet attention.
"The adolescent on watch," Runt added. "He knew what he was doing. Trained. Not improvised."
Krug nodded. Not at Runt — at the air above him. At the presence.
"The Voice sees them," Krug said.
***
Zephyr had seen them. He’d seen them through Runt’s report, through his own divine sense, and through the system’s racial database. Now he ran the math.
Seven new mouths. Kobold metabolic rate was approximately 60% of a lizardman’s — smaller bodies, lower caloric needs. At current food surplus projections (boosted by Genesis Bloom), seven Kobolds would consume roughly the equivalent of four lizardman rations per day. The pantry could absorb that without blinking.
Conversion cost: negligible. Godless sentient beings who were starving, dying, and had no patron deity converted at the slightest display of divine power. In Theos Online, the conversion threshold for godless refugees was roughly ten Faith Threshold Points — the equivalent of a warm meal, a healed wound, or a single act of shelter performed in their presence. Feed them, let Krug heal their wounded with priestly magic, and the system would do the rest.
[CONVERSION ESTIMATE — Godless Kobolds (×7)]
[Faith Threshold: ~10 FTP per individual]
[Estimated conversion trigger: Priestly healing + food/shelter]
[FP Cost: 0 (healing performed via priestly divine magic — no divine expenditure required)]
[Projected return: 7 new believers at Casual tier = +7 FP/day]
[Net gain: Immediate]
Seven FP per day wasn’t much. It was a rounding error in the current budget.
But seven believers wasn’t nothing. Thirty-five to forty-two. Twelve percent growth in a single acquisition. And the FP income was the least interesting part.
He pulled up the Kobold racial abilities again.
[Kobold Racial Traits:]
[— Tunnel Engineering: Can excavate and reinforce subterranean structures at 3x the rate of human-equivalent races.]
[— Trap Mastery: Innate understanding of mechanical traps. Can design, build, and maintain trap networks.]
[— Low-Light Vision: Full visual acuity in near-total darkness.]
[— Pack Coordination: Group tasks performed 20% faster when 3+ Kobolds work together.]
[— Vulnerability: Low HP threshold. Poor combat survivability in direct engagements.]
Tunnel engineering. Trap mastery.
Zephyr’s killzone — the clear-cut strip around the palisade — was a surface defense. It stopped ground charges. It gave the enforcers line of sight. It was adequate for the current threat level and completely insufficient for what was coming.
What if the killzone had teeth?
Concealed pit traps along the approach routes. Trip-wire alarms webbed through the vegetation. Collapsing sections of false ground that turned an organized charge into a scattered mess. Underground passages connecting the camp’s interior to hidden exits beyond the walls — escape routes, supply lines, flanking tunnels.
Seven Kobolds couldn’t build all of that. But seven Kobolds could start. And if the Fertile Growth blessing accelerated their birth rate the way it had accelerated the lizardmen’s—
He stopped himself. One step at a time.
The immediate question was simpler: who to send.
Not Vark. An Ironscale Enforcer walking toward a group of terrified, dying refugees would trigger a panic response. The Kobolds would scatter into the swamp, the injured one would be abandoned, and the opportunity would dissolve.
Not Runt. The scout was invisible by nature — good for observation, wrong for diplomacy. You didn’t introduce yourself to potential converts by being the person they couldn’t see.
Krug.
𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎
The High Priest. The handler of a Divine Creature. The man who carried a staff that glowed with the warmth of a god’s attention and spoke with the quiet authority of someone who had been chosen, tested, and rebuilt from the inside out.
Krug was the face of the faith. That was the entire point of a Handler.
Zephyr sent the instruction through the bond. Not words — impressions. The image of Krug walking south. The feeling of an open hand, not a closed fist. The warmth of the hearth fire, extended outward.
Go. Show them what we are.
Through the divine sense, Zephyr watched the tribe’s anchor rise from the prayer circle, take the Shepherd’s Stick, and walk toward the gate.
Krug didn’t ask questions. He didn’t need to. The bond had told him everything: direction, distance, danger level, intent. South. Half a kilometer. Low threat. Recruitment.
He told Vark to hold the gate open.
Then he walked into the swamp, alone, staff in hand, the red gem casting a warm pulse across the grey morning mist. Behind him, the camp hummed with the accelerated rhythms of Genesis Bloom — reeds growing, insects breeding, hatchlings stretching into shapes that yesterday hadn’t fit them.
Ahead of him, seven strangers waited in a depression in the mud.
They didn’t know what was coming.
Neither did the god watching from above — not entirely. But he knew the math. And the math said this was the right play.