The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects: Volume 8

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7183-3146-4
Verlag: J-Novel Club
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

Reihe: The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects

When Dias's old friend Goldia visits the village, he comes with an important reminder: Every respectable domain always has a respectable guesthouse for its high profile visitors. Dias sets about building the best facilities Iluk can offer, but he doesn't even get the time to appreciate his work before some of those visitors show up to use it-one a representative of Princess Helena, the other a representative of Princess Isabelle! Can Dias navigate the prim and proper world of noble etiquette? And how will he react to offers of...marriage?!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fuurou

Weitere Mitwirkende

Kinta

Lim, Hengtee

Leseproben

That said, with Klaus and his folks at the border station and Sahhi and his wives watching the skies, we were sure to receive word the moment a visitor neared the village, so I wasn’t expecting any surprises. In any case, all of that protection meant that I could go about my work without a care, and so I watched the twins as they raced off and I got to my usual tasks, which meant pulling up water from the well and organizing all of our inventory and such.

It was pretty much just another day in Iluk, but there was noticeable difference, and that was the addition of the new military steeds and the eiresetter residents. We’d had to put up more yurts and extend the stable, and it was all that little bit more lively than usual. Oh, and I guess I should also mention my new hand axe, which was hanging from my belt in a leather sheath.

The hand axe was more convenient than my battle-ax, and I could use it very much like a makeshift knife of sorts. At present I had no real need to make use of it as a throwing weapon, but it was mighty well suited to that too. The hand axe couldn’t repair itself like my battle-ax could, and that meant I had to be more careful about it getting chipped. Still, with Narvant and the cavekin making sure it was always sharpened to a razor edge for me, I didn’t have to be careful.

At the same time, the hand axe was designed as a throwing weapon. Using it that way meant it was inevitably going to wear out, so I wondered if maybe it was better to use it with the understanding that eventually I was going to break it.

In any case, I was thinking about that very thing when Uncle Ben walked over to me with Narvant, a bunch of dogkin, and a horse pulling a cart. I squinted my eyes to get a better look at them while Uncle Ben called out.

“Figured we’d build a hut where our water supply starts,” he said. “I asked Narvant here to get things ready while you were away on your vacation.”

“Oh. Uh...a hut?” I replied. “At the water supply, you say?”

“Yep,” said Uncle Ben, pointing to the north. “We’re putting it out there so we can protect the water that runs along the side of the village. We’ve got the wells, sure, but the stream is an essential part of life here; we need it to wash both our clothes and ourselves. We’re going to do some building at the stream too—set it up with some masonry work to ensure the water isn’t blocked by mud or falling stones...and we’ll put a hut out there while we’re at it.”

He continued, “With the hut out there, we’ll have the dogkin start making the area between the hut and the village a part of their regular patrols. That’ll help to stop any wild animals from sullying the water. That said, it’d be unfair to the local wildlife if we kept them from their drinking water, but I figure we can settle that by building another one of them reservoirs or otherwise a branching stream.”

“Huh, I see...” I mumbled.

“Looking after your water sources is a part of good governance and flood control,” Uncle Ben continued. “We really should have been on top of it a bit earlier, but there was a lot of other work we had to see to, and we had our hands so full that we’ve had to put off the water work until now.”

“Once we’ve got the hut set up, we’ll set about using more stones to build a new storage location. Apparently there’s ice up in the mountains that still hasn’t thawed, so the dogkin are going to help us make a stockpile of the stuff.”

“A stockpile of ice...? But why?” I asked.

“We can use it during the summer to help cool things. I figured it would be fine if we just had enough for ourselves, but Hubert and Ellie want to gather a whole heap of the stuff because we can sell it in Mahati, where it gets incredibly hot. So we’ll put some of the stockpile aside for just that purpose. If all goes well, we’ll stockpile ice during the winter for selling the following summer.”

“It’s one thing if it’s just for us, but we’re going to sell it too?” I wondered. “Is that even feasible? Won’t it all just melt on the way to Mahati?”

“That’s what I thought, but Hubert brought up something really interesting. He said that when you wrap ice up in baar wool, it melts a , but it actually arrives almost entirely intact. So not only can the wool keep things warm, it can also trap the cold. Hubert’s thinking that we wrap the ice in wool and leather because we can sell that along with the ice. And look, even if it all goes belly-up, it’s just ice. We won’t lose anything at all if it melts on us, so why not give it a shot?”

I answered, “Yeah, that’s a fair point. If it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t sell, and in that case we just keep what ice we gather for use here in Iluk.”

After mulling it all over I nodded to myself, convinced by Uncle Ben’s reasoning. Uncle Ben was satisfied that he’d told me enough and sauntered north together with the dogkin and Narvant.

I was admittedly a bit worried, but it turned out that Uncle Ben had already given the matter a lot of thought. He’d asked Sahhi and the other falconkin to scout the area in advance, and so they were only going to take a route that the falconkin were certain was safe. If it so happened that there wasn’t a safe route to the source of the stream, then the work would be put off until a later date, or otherwise they’d just ask me to slay whatever monster it was that was getting in the way.

Seeing as Uncle Ben had it all sorted out, I stopped worrying. He had Narvant with him and a bunch of dogkin too, and even Uncle Ben himself had the magic sword I’d given him. I figured they’d be...mostly fine, so long as it wasn’t a dragon that blocked their way.

So there I was, watching Uncle Ben and his entourage heading off north, when Sahhi and his fiancées—Riasse, Bianne, and Heresse—came flying towards us at incredible speed.

“Stop!” Sahhi shouted. “Head back! There’s dragons back there! Dragons!”

My shoulders slumped at those words. I just couldn’t believe how perfect the timing was that monsters that needed intervention would show up right when they wanted to set out. I heaved a great sigh and gave my head a scratch. I knew things were about to get troublesome, so I shouted out to Sahhi.

“What type of dragons?! Tell me it’s not flame dragons out there!”

“No, they’re wind dragons! Five of them! They’re not coming this way, but they’re all hovering around to the north near the mountain!”

“Hmm...”

Wind dragons weren’t especially strong—in fact, they were far more fragile than the other dragons I’d faced. I was pretty certain that I could take them out even with just my hand axe. At the same time, the last time I’d fought wind dragons, I’d been cut by them, and those cuts had given me a fever that had knocked me flat.

I’d made it out of that thanks to the twins giving me some sanjivani, but it was a stupid idea to go into battle expecting them to have another herb ready and waiting for me. Even so, wind dragons were dangerous, and I couldn’t just leave them to their own devices.

I was considering my options when Narvant suddenly looked at me with a sparkle in his eyes. He’d been silent this whole time, but all of a sudden his booming voice filled the air.

“Aha! Dragons, is it?” he cried. “Looks like it’s finally time for that armor we built! Young Dias! You’re coming with me! We’ve finally finished your armor and we’re going to march to my workshop to get it so you can march straight back out here and take on those wind dragons! You’ll beat them to dust and you won’t even have a scratch to show for it, I guarantee it!”

Narvant didn’t even wait for me to reply. He immediately spun and started striding towards his workshop. I glanced at Uncle Ben and Sahhi and all the others, who had decided to take a break at a nearby yurt, and before I chased after Narvant I gave them all a look they would understand.

In terms of weapons, I had my battle-ax and the hand axe that Neha had given me. I held the big axe in both hands, and the smaller one was snug in the sheath that Alna had made for me. In terms of armor, I had the full body armor and helmet that Narvant and the cavekin had crafted for me. That was the whole of my equipment, and it was how I was going into battle with the wind dragons.

Narvant had taken my old armor and used it as a base for building an entirely new set, and it ended up being a completely different thing. It covered and protected my whole body, and it was an incredibly tough, solid piece of work. Usually when armor was especially tough, it was also stiff and heavy and hard to move in, but that wasn’t the case with my new armor. I could run, I could crouch, and I could bend over and it never felt awkward. No matter how I moved, the armor shifted smoothly and quietly around me, as though each of its parts were an individual living creature. I was straight up flabbergasted by how well crafted it was.

The reason the armor all moved so smoothly was on account of the snake scale style construction that Narvant had shown me some time ago. Various metal plates which folded neatly over one another were held in place by rivets, which controlled just...