Lucien woke before dawn, breath ragged, chest crushed by an invisible weight.
The dream still gripped him.
No spell circles. No chanting. No glowing runes.
Just a silent device—cold metal, wires, a core of refined ore—hanging in the air like a thought turned solid.
Then the sky broke.
The sun flared wrong—too close, too white.
Light without sound came first.
Shadows burned permanent scars into concrete. Buildings vaporized without falling. The air itself caught fire, hotter than any forge.
Then the shockwave.
The ground rippled. Cities flattened into gray dust. A nation erased in a single, godless instant.
Lucien sat bolt upright in the dark hut, fingers digging into the dirt floor until they bled.
"…That wasn't magic," he whispered to the empty air.
No mana surge. No divine backlash. No resistance from the world.
Just understanding—precise, merciless—turned into annihilation.
If humans did that without gods…
Then gods were never needed.
Outside, the goblin village began to stir under the first gray light.
Morning showed the truth Lucien already knew in his bones.
The village stood—but only just.
Stone foundations laid by eye, not level. Cobblestone walls dry-stacked, shifting with every step. Wooden beams swelling from damp, already warping.
Better than before.
Still doomed when truly tested.
Lucien walked the perimeter slowly, pressing palms against walls, watching how shadows fell, noting where mud pooled after last night's drizzle.
Semi-strong structures don't fail today, Yard's memory supplied. They fail the day the storm arrives.
The storm came early.
Five figures emerged from the forest path just past noon.
Dulled leather armor. Well-maintained weapons. Movements smooth, practiced.
Adventurers.
Lucien recognized the type from fragments of Yard's world—mercenaries with a guild contract.
They didn't bother hiding.
One stopped at the new wall and laughed. "Look at this. Goblins playing house."
Another rapped the stone with the flat of his sword. "No mana reinforcement. Just rocks piled by dirty claws."
From the watchtower Lucien had insisted on, he watched without expression.
A routine quest. Exterminate monsters. Possible "heretic" activity reported.
Not personal hatred.
Just a job.
The first attack was almost lazy—a basic firebolt that struck the outer wall with a dull thud.
Stone blackened. Hairline cracks spidered outward.
But the wall held.
The caster blinked. "That should've—"
Lucien raised a hand.
Goblins moved—not in a wild charge, but along narrow paths Lucien had marked in the dirt days ago. Not traps. Just angles. Dead ground. Lines of sight.
The adventurers advanced, irritation replacing boredom.
The heavily armored warrior stepped forward to breach the gate—
And the ground sloped subtly under his boot.
Not a pit.
Just enough tilt to shift his balance. Plate armor dragged him forward. He stumbled, crashed to one knee.
His companion rushed to cover him.
Both hit the same weak beam supporting an overhang.
Wood splintered. Stone shifted.
Balance broke.
Panic spread fast.
One tried a wind spell to clear the air—only to drive dust into his own eyes.
Another swung wildly at shadows that weren't there.
The fight ended in minutes.
Not because goblins overwhelmed them with strength.
Because the battlefield itself betrayed every assumption magic-trained minds carried.
When the two survivors fled, dragging their unconscious comrades, silence fell heavy over the village.
A young goblin stared at the cracked but standing wall.
"It held," he said, voice small with wonder.
Lucien nodded once.
"Barely."
That night the real storm arrived.
Rain hammered the canopy like thrown gravel. Wind screamed through the trees, bending ancient trunks until they groaned.
From the tower, Lucien watched water pool at wall bases, watched weaker roofs sag.
In the distance, he heard it—wood cracking, shelters collapsing, cries of pain carried on the gale.
At dawn, they came.
Not goblins.
Kobolds—draggled fur soaked through, carrying pups and wounded on makeshift stretchers.
Beastkin with crushed limbs.
Scaled creatures, horned ones, furred and feathered—every race the kingdom branded *monster*.
They didn't attack.
They knelt in the mud at the gate.
"We heard," a broad-shouldered kobold rasped, voice raw. "Your village stands when ours fell."
Lucien studied them from the wall.
Broken arms. Splinter wounds. Crushed ribs.
Not burns from spells.
Structural failure.
"How long did yours stand?" he asked.
The kobold hesitated. "…Hours. Then the beams gave."
Lucien stepped aside.
"Let them in."
There was no rest after that.
Lucien walked the growing settlement constantly—pressing walls, kicking at foundations, watching how new weight settled.
Cobblestone shifted without mortar.
Foundations sank without proper drainage.
Wood rotted from the inside out.
Unacceptable.
That night he dove deeper into Yard's memories—not skyscrapers this time, but the chaos of job sites.
Foremen barking orders.
Specialized crews.
Roles.
The next morning he gathered the sharpest minds he could find—not the strongest fighters, but the ones who noticed patterns.
A goblin who counted wounds instead of screaming victims.
"You," Lucien said. "You will learn to clean cuts and stop rot."
Another who always spotted which wall cracked first.
"You will record every failure. Mark what broke and why."
A third who argued every design change.
Lucien met his eyes. "Good. You will test them until they break—so we fix them before they do."
Confusion rippled through the crowd.
"No magic?" one asked.
Lucien shook his head.
"Observation. Trial. Correction."
Slowly, something new took root.
Healers learned to boil water and pack wounds with clean moss.
Scribes scratched tallies and sketches into bark sheets.
Builders began to question why triangles mattered—and then to demand more of them.
The settlement didn't become mighty overnight.
It became deliberate.
More refugees trickled in daily—carrying tales of collapse, seeking the place that refused to fall.
Lucien stood at the edge one night, watching new torches flicker among the trees.
If I make this place truly stable,
he thought, the world will notice.
His mind drifted back to that silent device. That false sun. That erasure of nations by human knowledge alone.
A single idea could end empires.
This village was only the beginning.
Lucien clenched his fist until knuckles whitened.
"This isn't enough," he said softly into the dark.
Behind him, goblins, kobolds, beastkin—all the forsaken—listened in silence.
"Magic won't stop what's coming."
Deep in his mind, the voice remained quiet.
But it wasn't smiling anymore.
It was waiting.