Chapter 49: War Sight

With his authority deepened, Koda could finally learn his own lordly arts. Some of them would greatly inspire and strengthen his warriors just by his presence.

Because of that, he would no longer be only the man behind the lines, sitting on a throne and directing his army from afar. He would walk the scorched ground of the war he had made, in person.

For a man who loved war, that was the best news of all!

The throne began to show him the lordly arts he could now learn...

---

Four lordly arts unfolded in Koda’s mind, carried by the throne itself.

The Artisan’s Legacy. The Nurturer. The Gold Digger. And War Sight, a gift offered to him alone.

He could take only one.

The first three matched the foundations every lord valued most: building, farming and mining. They were the basic arts offered to every new lord whose authority reached its second depth. Each one permanently raised the speed of construction, the ripening of crops, or the output of mines inside his land by five percent.

The last one was different. It was a gift the throne chose according to a lord’s land and the nature of his people, and it usually strengthened the traits of the lord’s own kin, from how fast they bred to how well they fought.

Yet most lords never chose it early on. In the beginning, a lord ruled only one race, and the age of lords had taught everyone the same lesson in countless wars. The strongest armies were built from many peoples. Naga fighting beside fishmen and mermaids as a sea coalition. Orcs, trolls and minotaurs forming tribal hosts. Dragon riders ruling the whole sky.

Even the legendary lords rarely had one dominant race. Each people served its lord in the field where it was strongest.

So new lords usually put their effort into the three basic arts.

But Koda was an exception.

He had no plan to keep developing his land for now. And by his own judgment, his territory’s output was far from stable. Having just taken Grimstone, he was draining it dry. His demons were strong warriors, but poor at gathering resources.

The only ones who could provide steady output were the demon slaves his horde had captured.

So instead of wasting his choice on raising an unstable yield, he decided to strengthen the demons’ fighting power, so they could capture even more slaves.

"The unique art is called War Sight? I wonder what it does."

He reached for War Sight in his mind and took it as his first lordly art.

The throne seemed to hum beneath him.

Then, a knife-like pain tore through his eyes. A mass of darkness flowed up from beneath the Abyssal Throne and wrapped itself around his face.

The instant it touched him, Koda felt his eyes vanish.

The darkness had eaten them!

He did not panic, though. Less than a second after that bizarre moment, new eyes began to grow. Countless strands of flesh writhed out of his hollow sockets, and mixed with a great deal of blood, they formed his new eyes.

Crimson eyes, with long, thin pupils like a snake’s!

"..."

Koda wiped the blood from the corners of his eyes and opened them again. Then he fell silent.

The world he saw was completely different from before.

"Are these... numbers?!"

The tallest point of the Hatching Pool stood at 4.74 meters. Its lowest point... The time left before the next hatching...

The moment his gaze touched the Hatching Pool, every detail of the structure appeared before him.

And not just the structures. When he turned his eyes toward the workers around Grimstone, the real details began to appear.

Squad 17 was advancing at 3.1 meters per second, with 95 centimeters between one warrior and the next, then 36 centimeters...

The imp a Taskmaster was about to eat had little life left. Once it was devoured, the Taskmaster would gain a trace of strength and a good deal of fullness...

A winged Lesser Demon was hurling its curved blade at a fleeing slave, and the blade would strike in 1.7 seconds...

The ground beneath the western storehouse had sunk 0.01 centimeters from a tremor. Something was digging along a vein nearby...

One imp in Squad 85 was ready to evolve. It had a ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent chance of becoming an ordinary evolved imp, a vanishingly small chance of becoming a new Imp Matriarch, and an even smaller one of becoming a Primal Blood Demon...

On and on it went.

A flood of messy but real facts replaced his old way of seeing. Things nobody had ever told him, things no one could have known, now stood in his eyes as plainly as the color of the sky.

Then it settled.

War Sight. With the help of the abyss, he could now see his warriors and their surroundings far more clearly.

To Koda’s surprise, the art he received did not strengthen his warriors directly. It strengthened the lord himself.

That was extremely rare in the age of lords. Most lords already followed a path of their own, and arts that enhanced the lord’s own body often clashed with it. So the throne rarely offered them.

"There is an art like this!"

Koda looked around in excitement. The endless stream of facts made his head feel heavy and swollen.

But that small price was nothing compared to what he had gained.

Because with War Sight, he had become something truly frightening.

Now he could see every detail of a battlefield. He could see every change in a war with his own eyes.

The wind high in the sky. The shifting of the ground. The fallen warriors. The movement of the lines...

Even the faintest change in the atmosphere or surroundings could not escape him.

They could not escape those eyes of his, now the eyes of...

An Abyssal Lord!

"Get to work!"

"No slacking!"

Crack!

Crack!

Crack!