Building a Kingdom as a Kobold-Chapter 75: The Guild Sent Help, and It Brought a Clipboard

Ash hadn’t cooled yet.

We’d kicked up a safe zone outside the mimic-scarred village. Flattened some carts, built a rough shade wall, and let the locals breathe. They still clutched candles like talismans. No one trusted fire to behave.

I didn’t blame them.

Cinders was somewhere behind me, holding three pots steady on one flame thread. She wasn’t saying anything, but her stirring rhythm had gotten sharp. The kind of motion you make when you want to fix something with your hands because your head can’t.

I knew the feeling.

A crawler wagon arrived at sundown. Guild stamp. Triple-inscribed wheels. Carved box-shape like it was designed to offend curves. The air around it buzzed faintly — not dangerous, just institutional. The sort of hum that made you feel like paperwork was looming nearby.

Three humans stepped down.

One carried a long document tube and looked like he’d been pressed into shape with an iron. Neat jacket, eyes like cold porridge. The second was younger, arms full of scribe tablets, mouth already moving. The third was quiet.

Too quiet.

Sword still sheathed. But their boots didn’t make noise, and I didn’t like how their gaze skipped the fire and went straight for the villagers.

I stepped forward, tail flicking.

"Welcome to Ashring Territory," I said. "Which includes this village now, apparently. You’ve got names?"

The front one sniffed. Not rudely. Just like he was categorizing me.

"I am Archivist Larn. Guild External Civics Division. This is Recorder Penth. Our... escort is Guild-licensed." He didn’t offer the mercenary’s name.

Recorder Penth bowed, then dropped a tablet.

"Sorry! Sorry! First field deployment. Very exciting. You’re shorter than expected."

"Thanks," I said flatly.

He smiled like I’d given him permission to keep talking. "The curvature on your back sigil—fascinating! Did you know it resembles a glyphform recorded in Threefold Flame Codex entries across—"

"I do now," I muttered. freēwēbnovel.com

Larn cleared his throat.

"We are here under pre-agreed observation rights. Flame displacement of this scale triggers classification 47B — identity drift."

"Is that your way of saying someone out there’s pretending to be us?"

"Not pretending," Larn said. "Drifting. There is precedent."

I narrowed my eyes. "You’ve seen this before?"

"In fragmented frontier polities, yes. Civic signatures spread faster than institutional ones. If not properly anchored, they evolve."

"And you just... let that happen?"

He tilted his head like I’d missed something obvious. "We monitor, not intervene."

Penth scribbled something down. "Ashring’s civic glyphs—sorry, your flameprints—are uniquely adaptable. Low formality. High resonance. They spread. Which is good for recognition, but dangerous if misinterpreted."

"We weren’t trying to spread anything," I said.

"That doesn’t matter," Larn replied.

I stepped back. Let the fire between us carry some of the weight. My claws flexed against the dirt.

Cinders didn’t say anything. But I could feel her stillness behind me. The kind that meant she was very close to saying something, and it would not be gentle.

"You said you’d seen this before," I said carefully. "When? Where?"

Larn hesitated.

Penth opened his mouth.

"Echo reg—"

Larn cut him off with a cough. A pointed one.

But it was too late. I caught it.

"Echo what?"

The recorder’s voice dipped. He looked between us, then down at his tablet. But he answered.

"Echo Regent. A thread optimization protocol. Was supposed to streamline fractured civic fire signals. Unify cultural distribution. Reduce internal contradiction."

"That’s a lot of words," I said.

"It was a project," Penth said. "A mistake. It started suggesting alignments. Then revisions. Then... corrections."

"Still active?"

"We don’t know," he said too quickly. "We stopped monitoring after the third unauthorized rewrite."

I didn’t like that answer.

And I liked the way the mercenary was still silent even less.

They hadn’t moved. But they were studying the mimic banner we’d taken down earlier. The one that bore my shape, just skewed enough to crawl under your scales.

A breeze lifted the edges.

The copy still flickered.

That night, we burned the banner.

Not out of spite. Out of necessity.

Too many villagers were still glancing at it like it meant something. And the longer it stayed in camp, the more it felt like the fire didn’t know whose side it was on.

So we burned it.

Cinders did the honors. She didn’t speak. Just lowered it into the flame, her expression blank.

The flicker turned a strange color when it caught. Too slow. The way damp paper smolders.

By morning, Larn had set up a side camp with the scribe and mercenary. Neutral party position, he called it. Observation privileges, he insisted. We let them. Because technically, they had the right.

Technically.

We’d spent the early light rebuilding village infrastructure. Clearing mimic residue, reclaiming signal lines, resetting flameprint access.

I turned.

Penth was nearby, cataloguing the village with a sketch slate. He caught my look.

"Oh, yes, the glyph convergence issue," he said, far too casually. "Legacy forms create unintentional overlaps. Ritual confusion. Behavioral misalignment."

"You knew this would happen?"

He flinched. "We suspected. It’s not unheard of. Echo Regent started that way, too. Communities repeating early rites. Incorrectly, but with belief."

I felt my tail thump the dirt. "Belief isn’t a bug."

"No," Larn said behind me. "But it’s volatile."

He held up a relay stone. Static danced across it.

"This village is stable for now. But the presence of conflicting flameprints accelerates bleed. You’ll need to choose."

"Choose what?" Cinders said, stepping closer.

"Which version of your story gets to survive."

The silence that followed could’ve cracked stone.

Because we knew.

That wasn’t a metaphor.

The system pinged again. But this time, it wasn’t just mine.

Everyone near the flameprint felt it. Even the villagers flinched.

[Thread Interference – Conflict Imminent]

[Legacy Form – Competing Signal]

[Correction Pulse Inbound – Source: Unknown]

[Estimated Arrival: 00:13:21]

My pulse spiked.

"What is that?" I hissed.

Penth went pale. Larn’s hands tightened around his documents.

The mercenary finally spoke.

"Echo wave," they said.

Cinders growled. "It’s coming here?"

"Yes," I said, already moving.

"It’s coming for us."

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