“I can’t believe collecting Souls is this easy.” The twins now had twelve Souls saved up.

[Every sentient lifeform that dies within the Chessboard World will add a single Soul to your total. It is possible to farm Souls by growing the population within the Chessboard World to a certain extent. However, if I find that your actions are unproductive or apathetic, then I am authorized to remove this particular feature.]

Azra looked around the room for a few moments, before grumbling “Let’s get the hell out of here… It’s fucking gross.” He had absolutely no intention of wasting time or effort trying to clean up such a terrible mess. In fact, he even suggested “Maybe we should just burn this place to the ground? At the very least, leave the door open and let the animals have something to eat.”

“This is my home!” Yolanda yelled with her last bit of strength, before falling down into Henry’s huge arms and losing consciousness. She was obviously suffering from more than just the cuts and bruises on the surface.

The screen appeared again and Azra immediately saw his sister’s expressionless face. Then he asked “Hey Sis, can you see this girl? I think she probably has internal bleeding or something like that… Is it possible for you to help her at all?”

Yuri murmured “It likely isn’t that serious… Bring her to the bedroom in your keep. I will examine her condition there.”

“Wait, Cousins… What you said earlier about the villagers, let me handle it alone. I’ll cull out the troublemakers for you. I don’t want my mother to have to bear such a sin on her mind.”

In response to Henry’s suggestion, Azra shrugged and said “Do whatever you want. It would be kind of fucked up if you killed all the children too, but probably wouldn’t make much of a difference to us either way.” His sister also didn’t seem to care either.

After Yolanda was wrapped up in a warm winter coat, the giant man carried her back to the Silver Keep. Meanwhile, Azra simply teleported and instantly reappeared in the great hall. The first thing he did was remove the anvil, a workbench, some wooden chairs, tables, bookshelves, tool racks, and all the various tools that were required for blacksmithing. He also placed over a hundred pounds of timber next to the fireplace.

Then he teleported into the garrison and started transforming it into a woodworking shop. He dropped a few beds in both of those servants’ quarters, before heading down to the kitchen and filling it with tables, knives, eating utensils, firewood, pots, pans, counters, shelves and a decent amount of dried food. He even stored the bags of white rice that the twins had never gotten around to using, into the pantry.

By the time he was finished all of that, Henry had finally arrived at the Silver Keep with the unconscious woman in his arms.

***

“There will likely be many such injuries in the future. Thus, I must teach you the method to manufacture isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. Along with various other medical necessities.” Yuri was using what little liquor that was available in the kitchen in order to disinfect the lacerations all over Yolanda’s arms and chest. She also instructed “Although I would not recommend consumption of alcoholic beverages under normal circumstances, we currently lack the proper ingredients to create a decent anesthetic. Drink this.”

“Oh, okay…” Yolanda timidly followed the relatively tiny woman’s orders.

As Katia poured her a small glass of that whiskey, she grumbled “I can’t believe those crazy bastards actually tried to rape you! I used to babysit those four brats and they were always mischievous, but I never expected them to turn out so rotten! Poor Henry… Even if those kids deserved it, they were still his friends at one point.”

“It is rather unfortunate that those men were unable to control their sexual impulses and greed. Their archery skills would have been very useful. However, it is best to remove a cancerous tumor before it spreads to other organs. By directly eradicating the villagers who will be problematic, we will not need to be concerned about too much conflict within the Chessboard World. Our main priority at this moment… Is to build, train and outfit an army.”

Yuri casually spoke to the two women who she had never had any sort of interaction with before. Once all of the other lacerations were dealt with, it was finally time to suture the mutilated fingers. She murmured “I appologize, but I do not possess the necessary equipment required to reattach your severed digits. This will be quite painful, so I would recommend that you ingest more of that alcoholic beverage immediately.”

“Gah~!”

***

As Yolanda was downstairs screaming in agony, Azra was on the top floor. The amount of work that he needed to do was far more than he could accomplish on his own. Fortunately, he had an extremely useful little helper.

Ailyn was wearing her brown winter clothing. Although it had been somewhat stained by all of that blood, it had been washed off to a decent extent. There was no bleach or detergent, so it was unclear how ‘clean’ it really was. However, it would have been dangerous to make the Goblin work in that freezing garrison completely naked.

“Hold this for me.” Azra had already sanded down the tip of Unicorn’s horn and sent her back through the portal a few minutes ago. His main priority at the moment was to create windows. Of course, he didn’t have time to fool with making glass or even wooden shutters. All he really needed to do was measure the size of every small rectangular porthole, then he had to cut a piece of timber into a shape that would just barely fit inside.

It was important to insulate the entire building as much as possible in order to reduce the consumption of firewood. There was no shortage of trees in Yuri’s king territory, but it would be a while before there would be enough Ratkin to start harvesting them. In fact, it wasn’t really a matter of having enough of the critters. The problem was that it would be very difficult to teach or train them. Especially since the rodents don’t understand or speak any languages yet.

Next