Boundless Family Upgrades For The Deadbeat Lord

Raymond was silent for a few moments and then asked. "And there are no local troops helping them?"

Boris gave him a look that said Raymond already knew the answer.

Northern Zulor wasn’t completely devoid of nobility, but the region was fragmented into poor baronies, isolated villages, minor estates, and half-abandoned towns separated by huge distances of barren land.

Most lords possessed little more than a few dozen guards, badly maintained roads, and enough food to keep their own people alive through winter.

The royal capital had never treated Zulor as economically important enough to justify heavy investment.

It was an exile region, a dumping ground for disgraced nobles and unwanted officials. Ifone impoverished village disappeared beneath a Beast attack, the kingdom barely noticed.

Raymond slowly straightened.

For the first time, that political neglect bothered him for reasons that had nothing to do with his own inconvenience.

"How many settlements are north of us in total?"

Boris scratched his beard. "Depends on what you count. Proper towns? Only a handful. Villages and permanent hamlets? Perhaps two dozen within a few days’ travel. More if you include scattered hunting camps and seasonal settlements."

Raymond stared at the map.

If the situation continued worsening, the eighty-seven people from Marden might be nothing compared to what was coming.

He tapped one finger against the table. "Something doesn’t make sense."

Edran looked at him. "My Lord?"

Raymond pointed toward the migration paths Boris had roughly drawn several days earlier. "You told me the Winter Migration follows established corridors. The herbivores move down these paths, predators follow themand settlements survive by staying out of the way."

"That’s correct."

Raymond moved his finger from one destroyed settlement to another. "Then why are villages being hit in completely different directions?"

Nobody answered immediately.

Raymond continued. "Marden is northwest. Greymill is northeast. Darlow is farther east. Reth is west of the normal corridor. If the animals were simply following the usual migration routes, they shouldn’t be scattering across half of northern Zulor."

The older hunters exchanged uncomfortablelooks.

Edran finally spoke. "They shouldn’t."

Raymond’s eyes narrowed. "What are you thinking?"

Edran hesitated before answering. "I think there aren’t proper migration routes anymore."

The room went still.

Boris frowned deeply.

Edran pointed toward the Blackridge foothills shown at the top of the map. "During a normal winter, the herds movesouth because they’re looking for food. They travel steadily. Predators follow the weak animals. But everything we’ve heard from the survivors is different. Herds are breaking apart. Some are running east. Others west. Predators are appearing nowhere near their normal territories. Some beasts are moving during the night without stopping to feed."

Darric added quietly, "The group from Darlow said they saw Snowback Bison run straight through a stone fence instead of going around it. They weren’t grazing. They weren’t migrating normally. They were panicking."

Raymond remembered the dead Silver-ranked Whitecrest Panther.

The claw marks.

The broken trees.

The Frostfang Wolves appearing weeks too early.

A cold feeling settled in his stomach.

"They’re not moving somewhere."

He stared toward the northern edge of the map.

"They’re moving away from something."

For several seconds, the only sound in the room came from the fireplace.

Then Raymond straightened and immediately shifted into the practical mindset that had kept Althoff alive since the day he arrived.

"Fine. We can’t solve whatever is happening inside Blackridge from here, and I have absolutely no intention of marching into those mountains to satisfy my curiosity. What we can do is stop being blind."

He looked toward Boris. "How many Bronze Knights can we dedicate to reconnaissance without weakening the town?"

Boris thought carefully. "Eight comfortably. Twelve if necessary."

"Use eight for now. Split them into four teams of two."

Boris nodded.

Raymond continued. "Each team gets at least one local hunter who understands the terrain. No scouting group travels deep into Blackridge. I don’t care howinteresting the tracks look. Their job is to map Beast movement, locate refugee groups, identify blocked roads, and return alive."

He pointed toward four positions on the map. "One team northwest toward Marden’s old route. One north along the main migration corridor. One northeast toward Greymill and Darlow. One west toward Reth."

Boris studied the markers. "And the Silver Knights?"

Raymond looked at him. "We use them as anchors."

Boris’s eyebrows rose slightly.

Raymond moved three larger markers ontothe map. "Two stay in Althoff permanently. I want one pair stationed near the northern gate and another pair rotating between the western and eastern approaches. If a Bronze scouting team finds something too dangerous, they don’t fight. They retreat toward the nearest Silver position."

Boris nodded slowly.

"That’s workable."

"Good. I don’t want heroic last stands in the wilderness. Scouts gather information. Knights protect people. Nobody gets rewarded for dying dramatically."

Lily looked up from her notes. "What about Reth Village?"

Raymond’s gaze returned to the western marker.

That was harder.

He wanted to help.

But sending soldiers across winter wasteland to rescue a trapped settlement while he barely understood the scale of the migration could easily become another disaster.

"Reconnaissance first," he decided. "If they’re still alive and there’s a route we can safely open, we help them evacuate. I’m not sending half our military into an unknown Beast concentration based on one hunter’s report."

Boris gave a firm nod. "Understood."

The meeting lasted another hour.

By nightfall, the first reconnaissance teams were already being organized.But Althoff’s problems weren’t limited to the wilderness.

The population had climbed again.

[ Total Population: 1,914 / 5,000 ]

Raymond stared at the number the following morning while Lily presented the latest food projections.

His first instinct was satisfaction.

His Family Grade population requirement was filling much faster than he had ever imagined.

His second instinct was considerably less cheerful.

They were now feeding seven hundred and fourteen more people than when winter began.

The original 111-ton harvest had looked enormous when divided among twelve hundred citizens.

Add preserved meat, beans, livestock products, and the remaining emergency grain, and Althoff had entered winter with a comfortable reserve.

At nearly two thousand people?

The calculation changed not drastically but enough that Raymond could no longer ignore it.

He sat behind his desk running through the figures while Lily waited patiently. "If this continues, our food surplus disappears before the fourth month."

Lily nodded. "Not immediately, Young Master. But if anotherthousand people arrive, we will need to adjust the ration plan."

Raymond rubbed his chin. He didn’t want to reduce portions.

Most of the population was still recovering from malnutrition. The entire point of winter had been to feed them properly, not return to starvation rations because the Beast Migration dumped half of northern Zulor at his gate.

Which meant he needed more food.Fortunately, the Blackridge Mountains kept sending it toward him on four legs.

Raymond called Boris back to the office before lunch.

The captain hadn’t even removed his coatwhen Raymond pushed another document across the desk.

Boris looked down at it. "Hunting quotas?"

Raymond nodded. "We increase them."

Boris frowned. "My Lord, I already told you we shouldn’t provoke the major herds."

"We don’t." Raymond tapped the parchment.

"Same rules as before. Stragglers, wounded animals, isolated males, small detached groups. But I want more hunting teams operating whenever the migration gives us a safe opportunity."

Boris read through the numbers. "This is a significant increase."

"So is the number of people eating dinner."

That ended the argument.

Over the next several days, the northern roads became the busiest part of the entire territory.

Bronze Knights departed in fast reconnaissance teams with local hunters riding beside them.

Silver Knights established rotating positions around the approaches to Althoff, acting as response forces whenever scouts encountered predators.

Boris’s ordinary guards began training with the former village defenders arriving among the refugees, while Darric Cole took responsibility for organizing new volunteers into basic watch rotations.At the same time, hunting parties followed the safer edges of the migration.

Ironhorn Elk.

Snowback Bison.

Large mountain goats.

Several other herbivorous Magic Beasts Raymond hadn’t yet bothered learning the names of.

Only selected animals were killed.

But even a few carcasses produced hundreds of kilograms of usable meat.

The processing yards ran late into the evening.

Leatherworkers stripped hides.

Butchers separated meat.Children collected smaller bones under supervision.

Mana Cores were cataloged and locked away.

The preservation artifacts quickly became some of the most valuable pieces of infrastructure in the entire town.

Althoff was surviving. But Raymond could feel the strain beginning. Communal longhouses that had once contained empty sleeping spaces were filling rapidly.

Food warehouses were being opened more frequently. The clean-water lines remained stable, but queues around distribution points grew longerThe blacksmiths had more repair requests than they could handle.

Marianne’s registries expanded every morning.

Lily had begun organizing households by district simply because the old population lists were no longer practical.

The town was growing too quickly. And not because Raymond had attracted settlers with prosperity but ecause the world outside his walls was collapsing.

One evening, Raymond returned to the administrative hall after inspecting the newest refugee shelter and stopped in front of the northern map.

Boris’s scouts had begun adding colored marks based on their reports.

Red for predator sightings.

Black for destroyed settlements.

Blue for known refugee movement.

White for confirmed herbivore herds.

Raymond stood there for a long time.

The original migration corridors were almost impossible to see beneath all the newer markings.

Red arrows spread east.

West.Southwest.

Southeast.

Across roads.

Across villages.

Across territories that should never have been touched during an ordinary winter.

Raymond slowly folded his arms. There were no migration routes left on the map. Only arrows pointing south.