Chapter 3: The Road to Marlstone
The first wagon crested the ridge at midday.
Eight total. A merchant caravan in loose formation — four goods wagons heavy with covered loads, two supply wagons, two escort wagons carrying guards. Approximately twenty-four armed men distributed across the convoy, most of them looking bored enough to suggest the journey had been uneventful so far.
I stepped out of the treeline with my hands visible and my posture deliberately nonthreatening. The guards noticed immediately. Crossbows came up. The lead wagon slowed.
"Hold."
The command came from a man in his late fifties, gray-bearded and broad-shouldered, riding a draft horse alongside the lead wagon. His clothes were practical but well-made — a merchant who'd done well enough to afford quality without being ostentatious about it. His eyes scanned me with the calculating precision of someone who assessed risk for a living.
"Traveler," I called out. "Looking for passage. I can work for it."
The merchant exchanged glances with his nearest guard. A silent conversation conducted in raised eyebrows and subtle nods. Then:
"Name?"
"Garrett." The lie came easily. Too easily. "I'm a builder by trade. Had supplies, had coin, had a horse. Bandits got all three about a week back. Been walking since."
The story was thin. I knew it. The merchant knew it. But it was the kind of thin that desperate people told, and desperate people were common enough on frontier roads to be unremarkable.
"Step closer."
I obeyed. The crossbows tracked my movement but didn't fire. Up close, the merchant's assessment grew more detailed — taking in the rough clothes, the blistered hands, the lean frame that spoke of recent hardship but not starvation.
"You said builder."
"Yes."
"What kind?"
"Structures. Walls. Foundations." I gestured vaguely. "The parts that keep buildings standing when everything else wants them to fall."
The merchant's expression shifted slightly. Interest beneath the skepticism.
"We've got a wagon with axle trouble. Lead wagon. Been creaking since we crossed the last river. My people say it'll hold until Marlstone. I say they're optimistic."
"Mind if I look?"
He waved a hand. Permission granted.
The lead wagon was a disaster waiting to happen. I could see the stress fracture the moment I crouched beside the wheel — a hairline crack running through the axle mount at exactly the angle that would maximize failure under load. Another day of travel, maybe two, and the whole assembly would shear apart. The wagon would drop. The goods would scatter. The journey would stop.
"Architect's Appraisal."
The system responded without an AWL cost — passive skills were free. An overlay materialized across the axle, highlighting the fracture in vivid red and suggesting repair points in calming blue. The structural analysis was precise enough that I could describe the failure mode to the last millimeter.
I stood. The merchant was watching.
"The mount's cracked. You can see it here—" I traced the fracture line with one finger, "—and here. Two more days of travel and you'll lose the wagon. Maybe the load. Maybe the horse, if it falls badly."
The merchant's eyes widened slightly. He crouched, squinting at the line I'd indicated.
"I don't see anything."
"The crack's internal. Surface looks fine. But the load distribution's shifted — you can feel it in how the wheel wobbles under weight. The fracture's propagating."
Silence. The guards watched. The other drivers watched. I felt the assessment happening in real time: either this stranger was useful, or this stranger was lying, and only time would tell which.
"Can you fix it?"
"With the right tools, yes. You've got a smith's kit in one of those supply wagons. Probably a spare iron brace. Some heated resin for binding. Two hours, maybe less."
Another long pause.
"Do it," the merchant said. "You make it hold until Marlstone, you've got passage and a meal. You make it fail, you're walking."
Fair enough.
I got to work.
The repair was straightforward once I had tools. Heat the damaged section to relieve stress. Insert supporting braces at the load-bearing angles the system highlighted. Seal with resin, let it set, test under gradual weight. The process was methodical. Almost meditative.
The merchant watched the entire time.
"You know what you're doing," he said when I finished.
"The crack wasn't hidden. Just needed someone to look for it."
"Most builders wouldn't look for it."
I shrugged. The motion felt natural now. The body was adjusting to my habits, or I was adjusting to the body. The distinction mattered less with each passing hour.
"Doren." The merchant extended a hand. I shook it — his grip was firm, calloused, confident. "Caravan master. Forty years on these roads. You've earned your seat."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet. We're headed to Marlstone."
The name meant nothing. My meta-knowledge covered the major players — the Re-Estize Kingdom, the Baharuth Empire, the Slane Theocracy, Nazarick — but not every backwater town on every frontier road.
"What's in Marlstone?"
Doren's expression darkened.
"Rebuilding. The town took a bad raid six months back. Lost the outer wall. Lost a lot more than that. They're desperate for anyone who can stack one stone on top of another."
"A damaged town. Desperate for builders."
The pieces clicked together with an almost audible snap.
"They hiring?"
"If you can deliver, they'll hire. If you can't, you'll starve with everyone else." Doren climbed back onto his horse. "We move in ten. Find a seat on wagon three. The driver's name is Fenrik. Don't touch the cargo."
I found the seat. The driver — a wiry man with nervous eyes — said nothing when I climbed aboard. The wagon lurched forward. The repaired axle held.
The journey to Marlstone took five hours. I spent most of it listening.
Caravan talk was unguarded. Drivers gossiped with guards. Guards complained to each other. Information flowed freely in both directions, and I absorbed it like a sponge filtering water.
The Re-Estize Kingdom's eastern border was plagued by bandit groups — refugees from the Katze Plains, where undead activity had been increasing for decades. The Slane Theocracy maintained a presence in the region, ostensibly to guard against demihuman threats, but everyone understood the real purpose was intelligence gathering. Marlstone itself had been a prosperous waystation before the raid; now it was a skeleton of its former self, kept alive by stubborn residents and desperate hope.
Nobody mentioned YGGDRASIL players. The last "strange beings" anyone remembered were centuries dead. The Eight Greed Kings were legends. The Six Great Gods were myths. The world had settled into a comfortable mundanity where the most dangerous threats were bandits and monsters and the occasional power-hungry noble.
A comfortable mundanity I knew wouldn't last.
"One hundred years."
The number repeated in my head like a mantra. One hundred years until Ainz. One hundred years to build something that could survive the Sorcerer King's arrival. One hundred years to transform from a Level 2 nobody with a handful of stat points and a cracked-axle repair into something that mattered.
The timeline was impossible. The math didn't work. The power differential was insurmountable.
But the system didn't care about what was impossible. It cared about what I built.
Marlstone appeared at dusk.
The town sprawled against a hillside — a low cluster of timber buildings and stone foundations huddled behind a wall that was missing its northern section entirely. The gap yawned like a wound, forty meters wide, with scaffolding and temporary barricades filling the space where proper defenses should have stood.
"There's your opportunity," Doren said, pulling his horse alongside the wagon. "Town council's offering work and lodging to anyone who can help rebuild. Coin if they ever get the treasury sorted. Mostly they're paying in gratitude and shelter."
"That's enough for now."
He laughed. "You sound like a man who's been hungry before."
I had. Just not in this body.
The caravan rolled through Marlstone's intact southern gate as the last light faded from the sky. Guards waved Doren through with familiar respect — he'd made this run before, clearly. The streets beyond were quiet but not abandoned. Faces appeared in doorways. Children watched from windows.
A town trying to survive. A population that needed what I could provide. A broken wall that screamed for reconstruction.
The system's minimap expanded as I entered the settlement. Building icons materialized. Population indicators flickered. The interface was already mapping the infrastructure, cataloging resources, identifying weak points.
"This is where it starts."
Doren pointed toward a building near the center of town — a tavern, or what passed for one. "Council meets there tomorrow morning. Tell them Doren vouched for you. Show them what you showed me, and they'll find you work."
"Thank you."
He nodded. Started to turn away. Then stopped.
"Garrett."
"Yes?"
"That axle repair. It wasn't just fixing a crack. You saw something the rest of us missed." His eyes were sharp in the fading light. "Whatever you're running from, whatever brought you here looking like three days of bad road — if you can do for Marlstone what you did for my wagon, there are people here who'll owe you their lives."
He rode away before I could respond.
I stood in the street, watching the caravan disperse, and felt the weight of a borrowed body and a stolen century pressing down on my shoulders. The town needed walls. The people needed protection. The system needed construction.
Somewhere northeast, a hundred years in the future, Ainz Ooal Gown would wake in the Great Tomb of Nazarick and begin his ascent to godhood. The Floor Guardians would mobilize. The world would bend.
That was then. This was now.
The tavern door was open. Light spilled onto the muddy street. Voices murmured inside — tired voices, worn voices, voices that had lost too much and held onto what remained.
I pushed through the door and stepped into my first real conversation in this world.
"I'm looking for work," I said to the room. "I hear you need a builder."
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