Free Web NovelChapter 37: Easy planning
The second day arrived with more energy than the first.
Ren stood at the edge of the cleared space and watched the lizardmen move through it with the kind of coordinated purpose that came from having done something once and understood it well enough to do it faster the second time. Frames were going up. Walls were being slotted into place. The groove-and-glue method had become second nature overnight, and what had taken most of the first day to figure out was now being executed in a fraction of the time.
"Huh," Ren said quietly. "They actually got good at this."
He shook his head and got to work alongside them.
The houses taking shape were functional but sparse, and spare wasn’t good enough if the goal was to build something worth defending. Ren had been thinking about it since the night before, turning over what he remembered from Earth about making spaces livable with minimal materials, and the answer he’d kept coming back to was simple.
Hammocks.
He found the vines first, long and flexible and stronger than they looked when braided together, and spent an hour demonstrating the weaving technique to three of the younger lizardmen who caught on with alarming speed. By midmorning, the first house had four hammocks strung at different heights from the interior beams, and the lizardman who tested the first one by lying in it went very still for a moment before making a sound that Ren had never heard a lizardman make before.
Something close to contentment.
"Yeah," Ren said. "Better than the cave floor."
Inside the cave itself, a separate crew was already at work. The raw stone walls had started coming down in sections, not demolished but carved, Ren running his claws along the surfaces to smooth the roughest areas while the lizardmen chiseled and shaped with the tools they had. Structural beams went in next, cut to length and fitted into notches carved directly into the stone, turning a natural formation into something that felt deliberately built.
It was slow work compared to the houses outside, stone being less forgiving than wood, but by midday the main chamber had changed enough that Ren stood in the center of it and felt the difference in the air, cleaner, more intentional, less like shelter and more like a home.
He was still looking at it when Remu appeared at his shoulder.
"They are ready for you," Remu said.
They had gathered in the largest completed house, which was the natural choice given that it was the only space currently big enough to hold everyone Ren had called. Remu stood to his left. Silas sat on his haunches to the right, tail moving slowly. The former chief of the lizardmen occupied the space directly across from Ren, and beside him stood three others.
The eldest lizardman in the tribe was a figure Ren had noticed but not properly spoken to before, old in a way that the others clearly respected, his scales carrying a dullness that came from age rather than weakness, his eyes sharp in a way that suggested the body had slowed down considerably faster than the mind behind it.
Beside him stood a female lizardman whose evolution had taken a markedly different direction from the males around her. Where they had grown broader and more heavily scaled, she had gone the other way, her features smoothing out into something that read as almost human from a distance, her scales finer and more closely set, her posture more upright. She watched Ren with an assessment in her eyes that felt considerably more calculated than the deference most of the others defaulted to.
The last of them was young, clearly, the energy coming off him barely contained, the kind of ambitious restlessness that didn’t know yet what to do with itself. He had followed the chief in and positioned himself slightly forward, as if proximity to the front of the room counted as participation.
Ren looked at all of them.
"Thank you for coming," he said, which got a slightly confused reaction from the young one who clearly had not expected a dragon to open with that. "We have forty hours before the first wave from the Calamity Orc arrives. I want to use this meeting to make sure we’re ready."
He laid it out simply and directly, the way he’d found worked best with this group.
The young, the old, anyone who wasn’t a trained fighter, they were to be moved to the deepest part of the cave before the first sign of the wave, and they were to stay there regardless of what they heard happening outside. No exceptions, no heroics, no young wolves deciding this was their moment to prove something.
The best fighters were to form a guard line at the settlement perimeter, not to stop the wave alone but to slow it, to create the kind of controlled engagement that let him work most effectively above and through it. Their job was to hold shape, not to win individually.
"I’ll be there," Ren said. "And with the Dominion Aura active, every one of you fighting beside me is going to feel the difference." He looked around the room. "We’re not losing anyone in this fight. That’s the goal, not just to survive it but to come out the other side with everyone still here."
The eldest lizardman spoke for the first time, his voice carrying the particular weight of someone who had lived through enough fights to know the difference between a speech and a plan.
"You speak of winning," he said. "What happens after we win?"
"After we win," Ren said, "the Calamity Orc knows what he’s dealing with. And then we have a real conversation about who runs this forest."
The young lizardman made a sound that was clearly suppressed excitement. The female one simply looked at Ren with that same calculated expression, and he had the distinct impression she was running her own assessment of whether the plan had holes in it.
He respected that.
"Prepare everyone," Ren said. "We have the time, let’s use it."
"Also, the three of you, after the war, I’ll give you names, I would have done that now, but I do not want to loose mana before the actual fight, so till then."
The young lizardman could barely hold himself when he heard that he would get a name.
They filed out, and Ren stayed in the house a moment longer, looking at the walls that hadn’t existed two days ago.
The system chimed.
[Major Settlement Advancement Completed]
[EXP Gained: 1,000]
[10x Multiplier Applied]
[Total EXP Gained: 10,000]
[Level Up! You are now Level 2]
[+4 to all stats]
[Level Up! You are now Level 3]
[+4 to all stats]
[STATUS]
[Name: Ren]
[Race: Chaos Devouring Dragon]
[Level: 3]
[EXP: 4,000 / 6,000]
[Strength: 260]
[Speed: 264]
[Stamina: 264]
