Chapter 27: The Twelve
"We were twelve."
The Kobold’s voice was thin. Not weak — thin the way wire was thin. Tensile. Stripped of everything that wasn’t load-bearing. He spoke the common tongue with an accent that turned consonants into clicks and swallowed vowels whole, but the meaning came through clean enough.
Krug sat across the hearth from him. The fire between them popped and hissed, fed by reed stalks that Genesis Bloom had fattened into something closer to bamboo. Behind Krug, the camp carried on — the clatter of iron on the anvil, Vark’s voice barking formation drills, the high, clear laughter of hatchlings who were growing too fast for their own coordination.
The Kobold — the adults called him something that sounded like *Skrit*, two syllables bitten off at the end — hadn’t touched the food. The smoked fish and root-mash sat on the clay plate Krug had placed in front of him, untouched, cooling. Not refused. Ignored. The way a man ignored eating when he had something heavier sitting in his throat.
"Twelve," Skrit repeated. He held up his hands. Ten clawed fingers, spread wide, then two more tapped against his chest. "Three hunters. Four builders. Two mothers. Three young." He lowered his hands. "We lived under the stone ridge. Southeast. Five days walking. Deep forest, where the water runs black and the trees grow from the roots of older trees."
Krug knew the direction. South-southeast — the unmapped zone beyond Runt’s patrol radius, the dense swamp-forest that swallowed light and sound and spit back silence. He’d heard the old tribe elders mention it, years ago, in the time before the migration. Bad ground, they’d called it. Nothing lived there that wanted to be found.
Apparently the Kobolds had disagreed.
"The warren was old," Skrit said. "My builder’s father dug the first tunnel. His father dug the one before that. Three generations of good stone. Five levels. Air shafts cut to the surface, drainage channels to the aquifer, storage chambers packed with dried insects and smoked root." He paused. The amber eyes went flat — the way Grak’s eyes went flat when memory brushed against something it didn’t want to touch. "We were safe."
He said the word *safe* like it tasted wrong.
"The creature came in the wet season. When the water rises and the tunnel mouths flood and we seal the lower levels. We heard it first — not footsteps. Breathing. Deep. The sound you feel in your chest before your ears understand it. The kind of breathing that belongs to something too large for the space it’s in."
The adolescent — the one with the sharpened stick, the trained guard — was sitting three paces behind Skrit. Close enough to intervene, far enough to not crowd. His amber eyes hadn’t left Krug since the conversation started. Watching the priest the way a sentry watched a gate. Not hostile. Vigilant.
"It dug through our sealed tunnels in one night," Skrit said. "Three feet of packed clay and mortared stone. The barrier we’d maintained for twenty years. It went through it like water through sand."
His hand went to his flank — the place where Krug’s healing warmth had closed three parallel gouges and turned sepsis into scar tissue.
"Three claws. Each one as long as my forearm. Retractable — we never heard them until they were inside the wall. It didn’t roar. It didn’t growl. It moved through the tunnels in silence, and the only sound was the stone breaking."
He looked at Krug.
"It killed Tik in the main gallery. Morra in the storage level. We collapsed the connecting tunnel to buy time — twenty years of masonry, dropped in ten seconds. It was through the rubble before the dust settled."
The fire popped. A reed stalk split in the heat, sending a spray of sparks upward into the morning air.
"Nosk and Fenn held the nursery entrance. They lasted long enough for the mothers to get the young ones out through the emergency shaft." Skrit’s voice didn’t waver. It didn’t need to. The flatness was its own kind of grief — the tone of someone who had already screamed and was now operating on whatever was left after the screaming stopped. "They did not come out."
Five dead. Tik, Morra, Nosk, Fenn, and — Krug counted — one more unspoken.
"Reen fell on the second day," Skrit said, as if reading the math on Krug’s face. "The wound opened during the march. She bled into the mud and we couldn’t carry her and the young. I went back." He touched the scars on his flank again. "The creature was following us. I found Reen’s body. What was left of it."
Silence.
"It wasn’t eaten," Skrit said. "The body was whole. Placed at the entrance to a tunnel — a new tunnel, dug after we fled. The creature had moved into our home. It was nesting."
Krug absorbed this. The word nesting carried weight that most of the tribe wouldn’t catch, but Krug caught it. Nesting meant not hunting. Nesting meant territorial. Nesting meant the creature hadn’t chased the Kobolds because it was hungry — it had chased them because they were in the way.
Something was there that the creature wanted. Something worth killing twelve people and occupying a warren that had been built over three generations.
"What was under the ridge?" Krug asked. "Below the deepest level."
Skrit’s amber eyes narrowed. Not suspicion — surprise. The surprise of someone who’d asked themselves the same question and hadn’t expected anyone else to think of it.
"Stone," he said. "Old stone. Shaped. Not natural — cut. Corners. Edges. The kind of stone that someone put there on purpose, a long time ago." He paused. "My builder’s father found it when he dug the fifth level. He didn’t dig deeper. He said the stone felt wrong."
Ancient ruins.
Krug didn’t say it aloud. But he felt the bond pulse — a single, sharp beat from the presence above him, like a heart skipping at the sound of a word it had been waiting to hear.
The Voice had been listening.
***
Zephyr had been listening.
The information cascade hit his strategic brain in layers, each one stacking on top of the last like geological strata, and by the time Skrit finished speaking, the picture was already forming.
Layer one: a predator strong enough to breach fortified tunnels. Three-clawed, silent, intelligent. Not a random beast — something with purpose. Something that chose its territory based on criteria beyond simple food and shelter.
Layer two: ancient ruins beneath the Kobold warren. Shaped stone. Cut corners. Architecture that predated the warren by centuries or millennia. The builder’s ancestor had found it and stopped digging. Smart instinct — dumb decision. You didn’t stop digging when you found something old. You dug faster.
Layer three: the predator had moved into the warren *after* the Kobolds left. It hadn’t pursued them. It had stayed. Which meant the ruins — or whatever the ruins contained — were the actual target. The Kobolds had been squatting on top of something valuable without knowing it, and the predator had evicted them to claim it.
[STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT — Southeast Anomaly]
[Threat: Unknown predator — Class estimated at Elite or higher based on damage profile]
[Opportunity: Ancient ruins — potential dungeon or domain fragment source]
[Priority: HIGH]
[Recommended action: Scout deployment (Runt) within 7 days]
[Risk: Premature engagement with unknown threat]
Zephyr filed the assessment. Not today. Not tomorrow. He’d send Runt southeast once the Kobolds were integrated and the camp’s logistics had absorbed the population increase. Rushing intel operations was how gods got their best scouts killed.
He shifted focus to the immediate.
The seven Kobolds were now inside his territory. The system had processed their conversions — five Casual believers, two Provisionals. Forty-two total. The FP gain was marginal: seven additional points per day from the Casuals, one from the two Provisionals split. But the value wasn’t in the faith generation.
He pulled up Skrit’s full profile.
[Skrit — Kobold (Adult Male)]
[Role: Warren Leader / Burrow Specialist]
[Class: None (eligible for assignment)]
[Innate Trait: Burrow Specialist — Tunnel excavation speed +40%, structural integrity of dug tunnels +25%]
[Stats: STR: F | AGI: C | INT: D | PER: C | WIL: D]
[Faith Tier: Casual (1 FP/day)]
[Blessing: None]
[Blessing Analysis — Skrit]
[Available blessings:]
[— Fertile Growth (Domain: Life) — Health +20%, recovery +30%, fertility +40%, lifespan +15 years. Cost: 30 FP]
[— Reinforce (Domain: Forge) — Imbues objects with durability/weight proportional to conviction. Cost: Class prerequisite required]
Fertile Growth was the only blessing he could apply directly. It would keep Skrit healthy and extend his productive years — valuable for a specialist whose skills would take months to fully exploit. But it didn’t address the real gap.
The Kobolds were fragile. STR: F across the board. The entire racial profile was built around avoidance, not endurance. In a direct fight, a single Ironscale Enforcer would go through all seven of them without breaking stride.
What they needed was a blessing he didn’t have. A strength domain. A defense domain. Something that could shore up biological weakness with divine power.
He didn’t have it. Not yet.
File it. Next domain chest — if a physical enhancement domain appears, take it.
For now, Fertile Growth would do. He queued Skrit for blessing deployment — the Burrow Specialist was too valuable to lose to a random infection or a slow wound that his F-rank constitution couldn’t weather.
[Blessing queued: Skrit — Fertile Growth (30 FP)]
[Blessing queued: Pip — Fertile Growth (30 FP)]
The adolescent guard — the system had assigned the name *Pip* from the Kobold’s self-identification — was the other priority. Perception: B. Keen Ear trait. A natural sentry who could hear species by footfall pattern. Paired with Runt’s visual stealth capabilities, Pip could become the acoustic half of a two-man recon team that would give Zephyr sensing coverage he’d never had.
But that was future planning. Today was about shelter, food, and making sure forty-two believers didn’t fracture into thirty-five lizardmen and seven Kobolds.
He sent an impression through the bond to Krug: the eastern bank. Dense clay. Safe to dig. The image of the Kobolds burrowing — not as workers performing a task, but as people building a home.
Let them dig. Let them feel useful. Idle refugees become resentful refugees.
***
Grak watched the small ones dig and felt the headache coming.
Not the physical kind — though that was there too, a low throb behind his left eye ridge that hadn’t fully left since the morning the fire went gold and the hatchlings started talking in complete sentences. This was the other kind. The cognitive kind. The headache that came from watching the world rearrange itself faster than his understanding could follow.
Seven new mouths. Seven creatures who weren’t lizardmen, who didn’t speak the same language without effort, who were currently excavating a hole in the eastern embankment with a speed and precision that made every structure Grak’s tribe had ever built look like it was assembled by children playing in the dirt.
The Burrow Specialist — Skrit, the scarred one, the leader — directed without speaking. A hand gesture here. A click of teeth there. The other adults responded instantly, their claws cutting into the clay with a rhythm that Grak recognized from a lifetime of watching craftsmen work: the unconscious choreography of bodies that knew exactly what they were doing and had been doing it since before memory began.
Twenty minutes. That was how long it took them to carve the entrance — a smooth, oval opening in the bank face, angled upward at fifteen degrees, wide enough for two Kobolds abreast, reinforced at the crown with a packed-earth arch that distributed the load of the embankment above. Twenty minutes for what would have taken Grak’s builders half a day and a team of four.
"They’re fast," Vark said. The Ironscale Enforcer stood beside Grak, arms folded, watching the dig with the expression of a military man seeing a new weapon for the first time. Not awe — assessment.
"They’re small," Grak said.
"They’re fast and small. The tunnels are small. We can’t fit in them. The enemy can’t fit in them." Vark paused. "But they can."
Grak didn’t respond. He understood the military logic — he wasn’t stupid, despite what the new world kept trying to make him feel. Tunnels beneath the walls. Escape routes. Supply passages. Flanking corridors that let four-foot-tall Kobolds emerge behind an attacking force while the enforcers held the front. It was sound. It was clever. It was exactly the kind of thinking that the Voice in the fire seemed to breed in everything it touched.
But it wasn’t what bothered him.
What bothered him was the adolescent.
The Kobold’s name was apparently *Pip* — the guard from the swamp, the one Runt had observed standing watch with drilled precision. He was crouched fifteen paces from the burrow entrance, building something out of reed stalks and a length of vine.
𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦
Vark had asked him to demonstrate. The military commander’s curiosity had gotten the better of his discipline — he’d wanted to see what the Kobold trap-building capability looked like in practice. A simple test. *Show me what you can do.*
Pip had looked at Vark with those huge amber eyes — the careful, measuring gaze of a creature half Vark’s height evaluating whether the request was a threat — and then dropped into a crouch without a word.
Four minutes.
That was how long it took.
The snare was invisible. Grak had watched every step of the construction and still couldn’t see it when Pip stepped back. The trigger line — a single strand of vine, thinner than a claw-tip — ran across a natural game trail at ankle height. The catch mechanism was buried under a centimeter of mud, its jaws made from two curved reed stalks bent to spring-loaded tension and anchored to a buried root. The kill zone was a three-foot radius around the trigger, and anything that stepped on the line would get two sharpened stakes through the ankle before it felt the wire.
Four minutes. With materials scrounged from the immediate vicinity. Without tools.
Vark had tested it with a stick. The trap had fired perfectly — the stakes punching through the stick with enough force to splinter it — and Vark had stared at the broken wood for a long moment before turning to Grak.
"We need more of these," Vark said.
"We need more of *them*," Runt corrected from somewhere behind them, the scout’s voice materializing from a shadow that should have been too shallow to hide in.
Grak said nothing. He turned and walked back toward the hearth, his broad red-ridged tail sweeping the path behind him. The fire burned gold in the evening light, fat and warm and fed by reeds that grew taller every day in a camp that grew stranger every night.
More mouths. More races. More changes.
He sat by the hearth and watched the sunset through the palisade gaps. The Hydra’s gold eyes tracked him from the lake — three heads, six eyes, the quiet attention of something that understood more than it should.
"Collecting strays," Grak muttered to nobody.
He ate his fish. It tasted fine. Genesis Bloom had tripled the food supply and the smoked fish was fatter and richer than anything they’d eaten in the old territory, back when starvation was the default and survival was the ceiling.
He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t scared. He wasn’t even angry, not really — the anger had burned itself out weeks ago, replaced by something more complicated that he didn’t have a word for. The feeling of a man watching a river change course and knowing that the bank he was standing on would be underwater by morning.
Not drowning.
Just... moving.
From the eastern bank, the sound of digging carried across the camp. Rhythmic. Steady. The sound of seven small creatures building a home in borrowed earth, under a borrowed sky, for a borrowed god.
Grak finished his fish and did not look east.
***