Chapter 368
Stepping out of the portal, Matt let out a deep breath.
That was less than ideal. They— no, he— had fucked up, but the only thing he could do was to try not to do it again.
Checking his calendar, Matt found that Cato had cleared some of his more immediate tasks, which gave him a few days before he and Liz needed to go check in on the worlds they had received in the last decade while they were away.
Their duchy had gone from a handful of planets to over a hundred, and they needed to follow up on the planets, their conditions, and how each noble they had put in charge was doing.
They could have just relied on their viscounts, counts, and marquess’s for such information but the point of touring their realm was to establish better connection with their nobles as well as familiarize themselves with their lands and that was best done going there themselves.
Still, checking in on others after their own failures felt like the largest, most hypocritical thing Matt could do at a time like this, but he tried to push those feelings away and focus on the task at hand.
After a brief check in with Titan’s Torch, Matt and Liz boarded their gift for finishing the Path, the Horizon class cruise ship and set off. Instead of letting themselves wallow in pity during their transit time, he and Liz sat down together and started going over practice scenarios and how they would solve them.
Some were as simple as a baron under their rule murdering a town for no reason, while others were far more complicated, like one of their baronies becoming the battleground for two Tier 45 businesses originating from the world that were trying their best to kick each other out. Both were incredibly unlikely historical events, but they had happened, so he tried his best to work out how he’d solve them. He didn’t want to copy the historical path for either incident, as they were at least partially infamous for how badly they had been handled.
Other scenarios were far more likely, such as a lower ranking noble flouting their orders or old feuds between lesser noble families flaring up. In theory, neither of those situations should have happened in a newly created duchy, but it inevitably happened as factions were created or old grudges from the nobles’ previous holdings surfaced.