Building a Kingdom as a Kobold
Chapter 67: Apparently If You Say You’re a Nation, People Start Testing It

Chapter 67: Apparently If You Say You’re a Nation, People Start Testing It

I didn’t say "I told you so."

That would’ve been petty. And beneath me.

Also, I was too tired to form the syllables.

The scout sat across from me wrapped in a heat cloak, breathing like someone who hadn’t remembered to do it for several days. His fur was patchy with dust and caked salt. He hadn’t slept. He hadn’t eaten. But he’d made it all the way back from the elf outpost without dying, which meant he got soup and my full attention.

He looked up from the bowl. Eyes bleary. Voice low.

"She’s safe," he said.

"And the others?" I asked.

"Fine. Tired. Tinker’s trying to invent something with elven wires. I didn’t ask. Glare gave a speech. Cinders hit him with a spoon. Relay was learning new curse words."

That definitely sounded right.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.

Then the scout added, "But there was someone else."

We moved the conversation to a private corner of the relay chamber. No ambient flame pulse, no apprentices running messages. Just me, Hoarder, and the scout.

He pulled a charcoal nub from his belt pouch and drew the symbol in careful lines on the bark of my desk. Sharp edge, looped hook. No elegance. Just function. Like a brand, not a signature.

"Three figures," he said. "Didn’t speak the local tongue. Moved like mercenaries, but their gear was mismatched. No crest. No Guild mark."

"They spot you?" Hoarder asked.

Scout shook his head. "Not directly. I stayed two ridges up. But they weren’t hunting monsters. They were scanning the terrain. Mapping it. One had a recording node."

Hoarder’s eyes narrowed. Mine did too.

The scout tapped the edge of the mark again.

"One of them tagged a tree."

"Marked territory?" I asked.

"Claimed observation," he said. "Didn’t leave traps. But the fire-path we left behind? They were following it."

He hesitated. Then looked at me.

"I don’t think they’re from the Guild."

No. Of course not.

Because that would be too easy.

We reconvened in the back archive hall under the old node dome.

Embergleam was there, sleeves rolled, archive crystal in one paw. Stonealign had joined her with a stack of image rubbings. The mark was unfamiliar to both, but the structure of it—that functional spiral—resembled something from deep-archive trade glyphs. Merchant clan stuff. Smuggling code.

Not Guild. Not official.

More like... silent claimants. People who didn’t ask if your land was for sale.

Stonealign muttered, "They think we’re a gap. An unclaimed bridge."

Embergleam didn’t answer. Her jaw was tight.

I turned the rubbing over and looked at Hoarder.

"You said you’d seen something like this before."

He nodded. "One of the mercs during the siege. Not a frontline fighter. A handler. Watching. Adjusting runes. Had a metal plate with this on the underside."

I stared.

"And we missed that?"

"We were bleeding," he said. "A lot of things got missed."

Fair.

Still.

The pieces were sliding into place. And I didn’t like the shape they were forming.

I sat alone in my tent later and wrote three letters I didn’t send.

One was a message to the Sovereign, warning her. I couldn’t send it—no stable relay that far.

One was to the Guild’s southern node requesting clarification on non-affiliated faction movements.

And one was a note to myself: if this mark appeared again within Ashring territory, protocol would escalate.

I folded all three. Burned the second. Sealed the third. Hid the first.

Then I stared at the wall until my eyes stopped tracking flame-shadow movement.

At dawn, I called a closed meeting.

No runners. No advisors. Just the inner ring.

Splitjaw. Bitterstack. Embergleam. Stonealign. Hoarder.

None of them looked surprised to be summoned. That was worrying.

We sat in a ring near the rear forgehouse, inside the protective node-line.

I placed the rubbing in the center.

"This was drawn by the scout who returned from the elf contact mission."

Stonealign frowned. "Foreign?"

"Possibly. Likely unaffiliated. They didn’t approach. They tracked. They marked. No formal crest."

Embergleam murmured, "That’s worse."

Bitterstack narrowed her eyes. "So we’re being scouted?"

"Yes."

"For what?"

"For potential. For infrastructure. For flame-calibrated territory no one’s officially registered yet."

Splitjaw said nothing. Just stared at the mark like it might move if he blinked.

I continued, "We’re a minor nation. Legally unrecognized. We exist in a gap. That makes us... attractive. To opportunists."

Embergleam added, "They don’t have to burn us to take what they want. They just have to claim the idea."

And that was the truth, wasn’t it?

We’re not just in danger of being attacked.

We’re in danger of being used.

We argued. Quietly. Intelligently. Like good kobolds do when survival is on the table.

Bitterstack wanted to send a flare to the Sovereign. Splitjaw said no—the ripple could attract attention. Hoarder thought we should trap the upper paths. Stonealign countered we couldn’t prove it was more than a single team. Embergleam wanted to begin building a flame-node myth codex—something that would ground our identity harder in the system so no one else could overwrite it.

I listened. I measured.

Then I gave orders.

We’d tighten flame-node security. Adjust golem patrol paths. Keep cultural artifacts away from relay access points.

No system alerts.

No panic.

Just action.

And one phrase, as I dismissed them:

"They think we’re a resource."

No one corrected me.

They just left.

One by one.

And I stared at the mark again.

Like it might rewrite itself if I watched long enough.

---

The node flared again around midnight.

Not a rupture. Just a shift. Like the flame itself had inhaled.

I was awake—of course I was—and at the perimeter within three minutes, scroll satchel still half-unbuttoned, one boot half-laced. Bitterstack trailed me with a spear she absolutely wasn’t supposed to still be carrying off-duty.

Neither of us said a word until we reached the outer ring relay.

That’s when the system spoke.

But not to everyone.

To me.

[Observation Notice – External Non-Affiliate Party Detected]

[Monitoring Thread Active – Influence Potential: Unknown]

[Ashring Sovereign Status: Proximity Drift Engaged]

I blinked.

"Drift?" I muttered. "What the ash does that mean?"

The system didn’t answer.

It never does when it’s saying the important things.

Proximity Drift wasn’t in any of our system glossaries.

Closest we had was "influence bleed," a term the Sovereign once coined during a particularly chaotic lesson about myth density and why our rituals kept accidentally causing localized weather.

So I did what any kobold pretending to know what they’re doing would do.

I guessed.

"Proximity Drift" meant something about her resonance—about the way the Sovereign’s presence had started to affect our settlement structure—was... accelerating.

Spreading.

Maybe leaking.

Or maybe someone was pulling on it from the outside.

The kind of thing you do when you want to intercept a myth before it finishes becoming itself.

I didn’t like that thought.

I didn’t call a second meeting.

We weren’t in panic mode yet.

I just started writing instructions.

Security priority shift: active artifact containment.

Flame-node recalibration: restrict external resonance queries.

Node beacon trails: dimmed by one tier.

All outer patrols: route logs encrypted.

No speeches. No announcements.

Just maintenance of the narrative.

That’s what the system called it a few days ago.

Maintain the narrative.

It wasn’t about pretending to be strong.

It was about not letting anyone else write our shape before we finished doing it ourselves.

I found Embergleam in the east pit archiving firecloth dyes for the next ritual set. She looked up once, saw my face, and started packing without asking.

"Cultural surge protocol?" she asked, already sorting binding rings.

"Quiet one. For now," I said.

"Theme?"

"Survival as memory. Unity as architecture. Nothing grand."

"Functional myth anchor," she said.

We didn’t talk about what it meant.

But it meant: if they’re watching, let them see something worth fearing.

An hour before dawn, I walked the trench perimeter one last time before sleep.

The outer wall shimmered faintly—a product of the rerouted node lines. Flame-light softened the sharp edges of the mosscrete.

That’s when I saw it.

Faint. Scorched.

A glyph.

Pressed into the upper curve of the trench near the outer bend.

Not ours.

Not Guild.

Not elven.

Not dungeon-born.

Just one mark.

Deliberate.

Clean.

Claimed.

I didn’t shout.

Didn’t panic.

I climbed to the ridge, stared down at the mark, and felt my ears flatten slowly.

It hadn’t been there yesterday.

I was sure of that.

No breach. No breach alert. No heat trace.

But someone had placed it.

Someone who wanted us to know they could.

Someone treating us like territory.

Like a resource.

Like a thing that could be owned.

I didn’t touch it.

Didn’t burn it off.

I just turned back toward the inner trench and whispered to myself:

"They think we’re an asset."

Then I started walking.

Back to write the warning I’d been putting off.

Because if someone else was claiming our story—

We were going to have to write faster.