Frostina was still thinking about it when we got back.
I could tell because she hadn't said anything since the mountain path, which for Frostina meant something was occupying the part of her that usually produced commentary.
She waited until we were through the gate.
"You could have ended it in two seconds." She said. "You didn't. I want to understand why."
I set the hoe down and looked at the head joint. Compromised at the neck, the way I had thought. Benneth was going to notice.
"If I end them in two seconds," I said, "the demon lord gets a report that says something in the northwest eliminated an entire column without effort. He sends a scouting force to understand what it is. Then a larger force to deal with it. Then it becomes a problem I'm managing instead of a border that's holding."
Frostina was listening.
"What I sent back was a column that encountered something it couldn't explain or quantify. Something that stopped them without magic, without urgency, without apparent concern for their numbers. With a farming tool." I picked up the hoe. "Fear of something you can't measure is more effective than evidence of something you can. They'll reroute. They'll argue about what was at that crossing for longer than it would take them to regroup from a defeat."
"Hesitation." Frostina said.
"Time." I said. "Amlada gets more of it."
She was quiet for a moment.
"And Branklore." She said. She had been listening to enough of my monitoring reports to know the map.
"Branklore is next." I said. "The center of Philantria. Anyone who controls it controls every trade route in every direction. The demon lord knows that."
I looked at the hoe head.
"I need to fix this before Benneth sees it." I said.
I repaired the joint, replaced the neck fitting, tested the weight and balance, and put it back where Benneth kept it.
Then I teleported to Branklore.
The throne room was in the middle of a war council.
I arrived at the center of it.
The reaction was immediate. Six guards with swords drawn in the time it took me to take one breath, blades leveled, the particular formation of men who have been trained for exactly this scenario and are running the training.
At the head of the table, a young king.
Twenty-three, from what I had gathered in the monitoring. He had taken a throne that his father's bloodline had lost to a hero's sword and had spent the past year building something from the wreckage of it. He had the particular quality of someone who had been through enough that surprise had a harder time reaching him than it did most people his age.
He looked at me.
Then he raised one hand.
The guards held.
"Step back." He said.
"Your Majesty, he breached the barrier without-"
"Step back." Same tone. Final.
They stepped back.
King Bryken looked at me across the table with the composed attention of someone doing a rapid assessment and not showing the results of it on his face.
"A seat." He said to the nearest servant, without looking away from me. "Bring one."
The advisors and nobles around the table looked at each other with expressions ranging from outrage to disbelief. One of them leaned toward the king.
"Your Majesty, this man appeared inside our most secured chamber without triggering a single ward. He should be detained and-"
"Can any of you do that?" King Bryken said.
The advisor stopped.
The king looked around the table. "Teleportation. Breaching our own barrier without triggering the alerts. Can any of you do it?"
The Royal Mage at the far end of the table shook his head slowly. "Even at my rank, teleportation isn't something a single mage can do unassisted. It requires a coordinated effort of at minimum four practitioners to send one person to a fixed location. What this man did..." He looked at me with the careful expression of someone revising their understanding of something they thought they knew. "Shouldn't be possible."
The room absorbed that.
The complaints didn't die dramatically. They just ran out of ground to stand on and went quiet.
The servant brought a chair and placed it at the table.
I sat.
King Bryken folded his hands on the table and looked at me with the directness of someone who had decided courtesy was more efficient than performance.
"What brings someone of your caliber to Branklore's council?" He said.
"Winterly has fallen." I said. "Singrael before it. Amlada's northwest border turned back an advance this morning. That buys time, not safety. Branklore is next."
The room stirred. An advisor across the table straightened.
"And you know this because." He said.
"Because I've been watching the demon lord's movements since the portal opened." I said. "Branklore sits at the center of Philantria. Every trade route runs through it or adjacent to it. The demon lord understands geography."
"If you've been watching the demon lord." King Bryken said, and there was something careful in how he said it, "then you know more about this situation than anyone currently in this room."
"Yes." I said.
A noble at the end of the table made a sound. "Your Majesty, we don't know who this man is or who sent him. If the King of Amlada thinks he can use Branklore as-"
"I don't work under the King of Amlada." I said. "I couldn't care less whether Amlada's royalty survives this."
The noble stopped.
"Then why are you here?" King Bryken said. No edge in it. Genuine question.
"Eryndor is in Amlada's northwest territory." I said. "If Branklore falls, Amlada follows. If Amlada follows, the northwest is no longer protected by the kingdom surrounding it. That's why I'm here."
"Eryndor." King Bryken said the name carefully, like he was checking whether he recognized it.
"It's not a place anyone can simply go to." I said. "That's intentional."
He held my gaze for a moment. Then he stood.
He was taller than he looked seated. He had the posture of someone who had grown into authority the hard way and wore it accordingly.
"You're asking Branklore to stand between Amlada and the demon lord's advance." He said.
"I'm asking Branklore to stand." I said. "I'll make sure it can."
The advisors erupted.
"We are not a shield for another kingdom-"
"This is exactly the kind of arrangement that destroyed us before-"
"Your Majesty, you cannot seriously consider-"
King Bryken didn't look at any of them.
He was still looking at me.
"What does Branklore receive." He said.
"Branklore stays standing." I said. "No demon crosses its border while the agreement holds. I'll reinforce the barriers personally. Maintain them."
"And in return."
"Branklore holds the line until the demon lord falls."
More noise from the table. I waited for it to run its course.
King Bryken let it run its course too, his expression unchanged, and when it had he spoke.
"A verbal agreement between parties of mismatched information is unreliable." He said. "Do you have something more formal in mind?"
"Yes." I said, and took the magic contract scroll from my item box and set it on the table.
He looked at it. Then at me.
"The terms are as stated." I said. "Reinforcement and barrier maintenance on my side. Branklore holds the northwest line on yours. Until the demon lord is no longer a variable."
His advisors were still talking. He wasn't listening to them anymore.
He picked up the pen.
He signed it.
The contract sealed with the faint glow of bound magic confirming both terms.
I stood and put both hands out, flat, and pushed the working outward.
It moved fast. Faster than anything I had built at this scale before, the barrier expanding from the throne room in all directions simultaneously, finding Branklore's borders and settling into them, locking into the terrain the way the northwest barrier had locked into the mountain ranges.
Layer after layer of it, the filtering equation running beneath, the monster core charging cycle activating automatically.
The throne room windows lit up as the barrier passed through the capital's walls. Outside, in the streets, the light ran along the ground and up the buildings and outward toward the horizon until the whole of Branklore sat inside something that hadn't been there thirty seconds ago.
The Royal Mage had stood up from his chair without deciding to. He was staring at the window with both hands on the table in front of him, reading the barrier's construction with whatever mana sensitivity his rank gave him access to and finding the result difficult to process.
The advisors had gone quiet.
King Bryken was still standing at the head of the table. His composure was intact. The composure of a young king who had survived enough to know how to hold a face while recalibrating everything underneath it.
He was sweating slightly at the temples.
He looked at the barrier light still running along the city's rooftops outside the window.
Then he looked at me.
"I made the right call." He said. Quietly. Not to the room. To himself.
"Yes." I said. And teleported back to Eryndor.