CHAPTER 12 — “Echoes Below” #3
“We prepare. The village needs better defenses—not just against monsters, but against people. If Anton sends another team, a bigger team, we need to be ready.”
“How do we prepare for that? These people are farmers, craftsmen. Not soldiers.”
“They’re survivors. They’ve been surviving out here for decades with minimal support, minimal resources, minimal everything.
” I lean back, thinking. “They don’t need to become soldiers.
They need to become obstacles. Alarm systems. Early warning networks.
Things that slow down any force long enough for me to respond. ”
Mariella nods slowly. “Defense in depth. Make the village expensive to take, even if it can’t be held.”
“Exactly.” I study her. “You know military strategy.”
“I grew up in a palace surrounded by generals and tacticians. Some things sink in.” She picks at the remnants of her own breakfast. “My brother used to make me attend strategy sessions. ‘Education for a future queen,’ he called it. As if I didn’t know I was just there to be a prize for whatever alliance served him best.”
“His mistake. You actually learned something.”
“I learned a lot of things. Including how to recognize when I was being used.” Her smile is bitter but not defeated. “What about the dungeon? You said Floors 6-10 are different.”
“I had a dream. Or a [Soul Echo] vision. Something in between.” I share what the voice told me—about the mages who modified the dungeon, about its evolution, about what might be waiting at the bottom. “I’m not sure what to make of it. But I think the next floors are going to be… complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
“The kind of complicated that comes from two hundred years of magical systems interacting in ways nobody predicted.” I shake my head. “I won’t know until I get there. But I need to be stronger before I try. Level 15 isn’t enough for whatever’s waiting on Floor 6.”
“So we train. You level. We prepare.” Mariella stands, collecting dishes with practiced efficiency. “And we hope Anton’s scouts actually bought the false memory.”
“They bought it. The spell worked.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure about the spell. I’m less sure about whether they’ll stay bought. Memory magic isn’t perfect—strong emotional triggers can sometimes break through the modifications. If something reminds them of what really happened…”
“Then we’re back to running.”
“Then we’re back to fighting.” I meet her eyes. “I’m done running, Mariella. Whatever comes, I’m facing it here. On ground I’ve chosen, with people I’ve chosen, on my own terms.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment.
“Good,” she says finally. “Because I’m done running too.”
The next two weeks are a blur of training and preparation.
I can’t enter the dungeon while recovering from the [What Was Lost] backlash, so I focus on other things.
Village defenses, primarily. Working with Garrett to identify natural chokepoints, training willing villagers in basic alarm procedures, establishing signal systems that can alert the whole community in minutes.
Bram takes to it with enthusiasm that borders on obsessive.
He’s stopped asking about dungeon diving—apparently watching me stumble back from near-death experiences has taught him some caution—and started focusing on practical skills.
Traps. Fortifications. The kind of unglamorous work that actually keeps people alive.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐│ TRAINING LOG --- WEEK 3 │├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤│ brAM IRONWORTH ││ Level: 4 → 5 ││ Skills Unlocked: ││ --- \[Basic Combat Awareness\] Lv.
2 ││ --- \[Defensive Instinct\] Lv.1 ││ --- \[Trap Setting\] Lv.
1 (NEW) ││ --- \[Formation Fighting\] Lv.
1 (NEW) ││ ││ Notes: Student shows marked improvement in ││ tactical thinking.
Still too eager, but ││ channeling enthusiasm into productive work.
││ May actually survive his first real fight.
││ ││ GARRETT ANALYSIS: ││ "He's not hopeless anymore.
Give him a year, ││ proper equipment, and a dose of healthy ││ fear, he might make a decent guardsman.
" ││ ││ "Coming from the S-rank, that's high praise.
││ Relatively speaking." │└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Mariella helps with logistics—organizing supplies, coordinating schedules, managing the kind of boring-but-essential details that I have no patience for. She’s good at it, too. Better than me. There’s a reason royal children get trained in administration, apparently.
And Johnson… Johnson watches everything. Makes comments. Occasionally eats a rat that wandered into the cottage. He claims he’s “surveilling for threats,” but I’m pretty sure he’s just enjoying the chaos.
By the end of the second week, the village looks different. Not fortified—we don’t have the resources for real walls or watchtowers—but prepared. Hidden alarms. Evacuation routes. Emergency supply caches. The skeleton of a defense network that could buy precious minutes against a serious assault.
“It’s not much,” I tell Garrett, surveying our work from the hill above the village. “But it’s something.”
“It’s more than they had before.” He’s smoking a pipe, the tobacco sweet-smelling in the evening air. “More than most frontier villages ever get.”
“Will it matter? If the Empire really comes?”
“Depends on what they send. A small team, like those scouts? We’d give them trouble. Make it expensive. Maybe win, if we’re lucky.” He takes a long drag on the pipe. “A real military force? Company strength or above?” He shakes his head. “We’d buy time. Nothing more.”
“How much time?”