Shaking the cobwebs out of her head, Len stretched indulgently for a second, then dragged herself out of bed. She had a lot on her plate today, starting with a meeting with Balar and spending a bit of time with Keseryn if she could manage it. The girl had mostly adjusted to her suddenly elevated station from prisoner/ward to semi-royalty in terms of freedoms and authority. Not long ago she'd been exiled and orphaned, so the newfound luxury was taking her a bit by surprise every time she really stopped to think about it. It was pretty damn delightful to observe, and Len took every opportunity she could to do so.

  Balar, meanwhile, had been rather grumpy of late. He'd been mostly resigned to the idea that after his grand scheme of installing her to the throne of his people, he'd be allowed to retreat into a comfortable exile where he wouldn't have to deal with politics. Instead, Len had demanded he stick around and serve her in an advisory role to provide useful knowledge of cultural landmines she might be stepping on and, often as not, as a useful patsy to throw all the daily management works onto. She'd become a great fan of delegating responsibility lately and he was a favorite delegate.

  It wasn't like everything could be pawned off on her newest underling. There was a tremendous amount of overhaul that the city needed. Even though it was theoretically a force that could be moved at a moment's notice, the place had been cemented for well over two decades. On paper, any house sled was expected to be maintained in full operational capacity by the family that owned it. In practice, life got away from people, if you spend the bulk of your life having no need to move your familial domicile, you tend to stop bothering with the minor upkeep details while dealing with whatever else was coming your way.

  This problem of decay was even more on display when one factored in exactly how many families had been banished under the rule of The Head. By clan law, he'd been able to claim those houses as his own to do with as he pleased. And what had he done with that largess? Gifted some of the nicer ones to favored underlings and just left the rest to rot. So many of those sleds were now little more than pits of filth at this point. Boarded up, ignored, nests for vermin that pestered others near them. It was a disaster. It was also something that Len had no real experience handling. In her past life she'd always been a fan of city-building games, many of which went so far as to include concepts of waste management and urban decay. Seeing it all laid out in a game was one thing, trying to resolve the issues in real-time? It was a whole other ball of wax and she got a headache every time someone came in with a new complaint or request.

  She'd known that things would be bad, how could they not be after years of a deranged jackass who opted to go by a title rather than a name whose only interest was maintaining his own power base while everything crumbled around him? Even then, she hadn't really imagined things would be THAT bad. There were the petty grievances of the former allies of the Head trying to vie for power even as she did everything she could to strip them of power. One of the few good things about the system as it was in place right now was that it'd take a marital feat to overcome her commands and so far there were no takers. She wasn't quite foolish enough to believe that she could handle any foe that the city had to offer, but she'd pretty solidly demonstrated her prowess and that was enough to keep them holding back at least for now. It didn't rule out the possibility of armed rebellion, but she'd taken quick steps to rearrange a number of the private troops for various philanthropic endeavors that kept them relatively dispersed for the time being.

  The biggest of those endeavors was drawing the various exiled citizens of her city-state back to her. She had a few connections to draw upon, the occasional contact that had been made with the exiles but it mostly came down to tracking the survivors and bringing them home. It was arduous work and she'd only been able to entrust so many to the task. Balar had a number of people he trusted to lead the various search parties, but it was still a herculean task that involved convincing people who'd been conditioned to run in terror from forces beholden to the main city.

  It wasn't exactly like they were without options on bringing people back, and word would spread, but it was going to take time that she wasn't at all confident that they had. Sure, she'd managed to chase Claymar's agent off with his tail between his legs for the time being, but that was a temporary solution at best, and one that was going to become a serious problem in the near future. For the moment she had the advantage that Claymar didn't seem to know quite what to make of her. She was something of an anomaly within the ranks of the Demon Army and that made any decent general at least a little nervous. Unpredictability could be a dangerous thing on the battlefield. Len still thought it was pretty ridiculous that he couldn't just be called back, but Astrid had made it clear that this wasn't an area where she had any power, they were on their own.

  For all that she kept landing herself in leadership roles since coming to this strange world, Len found herself utterly baffled by the politics of it all. Maybe it was just the fact that her sensibilities were from a much different era, but this all seemed a touch ridiculous to her. Granted, she'd seen her share of factional stupidity back home, and it wasn't like she'd been able to ignore the political realities of the day, but she'd been used to a certain level of military discipline and an armed forces that strictly obeyed their commander in chief. This stuff? It was taking some adjustment. As things stood, she was at least somewhat confident that if she martialed all her human forces, she could deal with Claymar's troops, but what she'd seen of the man was a schemer, a guy who'd find weaknesses his opponents didn't even know they had and slip a knife right through them. Frankly, if she hadn't ended up in charge of the Kelvach, she'd have probably been doomed to be swallowed up by his force after they'd cleared out the humans and she herself probably wouldn't have lasted long. One bullet dodged, only about fifty more heading her way.

  Of course, the more she looked at her OTHER problems, the idea of getting locked in combat with an aggressive force of Orcish raiders was almost preferable. As things stood, most of the city infrastructure was a joke, the actual forces of the city were either horribly understaffed or outright in ruin. She had no real way of answering all of the problems right away. Some of them were not only outside of her experience, but outside of the experience of anyone who remained in the city. She had no fucking clue how to maintain a proper tannery and the last one who had known had been exiled over a year ago. They had exactly two firefighters left, individuals with some small talent for water magics, they'd be almost useless if anything major broke out.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The only sectors that had gotten anything resembling regular upkeep had been the ones directly tied to food or entertainment. She'd noticed that the food stalls had been quite plentiful, and still meant to recruit that chef if she got the chance. It all just kept piling up on her. Each individual problem wasn't a complete disaster, but when you kept adding those up, the started to be an overwhelming horror show before you got even halfway through the pile. As things stood, she was basically just sticking her finger into the cracks in the dam and hoping that things would just somehow work out.

  She allowed herself, as had become her ritual, a good ten minutes of despair at everything facing her before she sighed, cracked her knuckles and got to work.

  "How many do we have today, Kes?" she asked the girl who'd become her de facto secretary in recent days. Child labor laws could be significantly less strict in dictatorships.

  Keseryn, the daughter of two people exiled by the former Head (and who'd been murdered by two of Len's own troops, but they did their best not to talk about that detail), poked her head out of the door to see what horrors awaited them. Her face blanched.

  "Do you really want to know?"

  "Nah," said Len with a heavy sigh. "Let's just get on with it."

  So saying, she motioned for Kes to let the first petitioner in. In a better system, there'd probably be a proper audience hall where she could just meet them one after another and be rid of them. Sadly, the current accommodations were more of an office setting. Thankfully, there were no particularly elaborate motions to go through. A simple greeting and a handshake were more than enough to get things started. The clan did put significant emphasis on grip strength, so each greeting was also a bit of a test of might, but Len was no slouch in that department so she came out ahead most of the time. The first petitioner was a large man who put a bit more effort into his shake than was, strictly speaking, respectful in Len's opinion, but she met him and sat down to listen.

  "You see, Head," he began, but Len held a hand up.

  "It's Lenore," she said bluntly. "None of that title crap, I'm not gonna be running around referring to myself in the third person or anything else ridiculous. Just leave it."

  "Very well... Lenore," she could swear that there was begrudging hesitation in his voice. "I have serious reservations about you allowing the undesirables back into our land. They were cast out because they were unworthy and it is unwise of you to humor them."

  "Listen Bob, do you mind if I call you Bob?"

  "My name is Kratus Mechnar."

  "Right Bob, let's get a few things straight. They weren't exiled because they were unworthy, they were exiled because you had a megalomaniac in charge who kept a select few assholes rich and cozy while letting your city crumble around you. I'm not interested in letting that continue."

  "But-"

  "More importantly, Bob, your objections to bringing these 'undesirables' back have nothing to do with the quality of personage within this humble city of ours, and everything to do with the fact that, as a devotee of the jackass formerly known as Head, you got to lay claim to quite a few family resources that you had no right to. Funny thing that I've learned about this city, actually. For all that your basic upkeep has fallen to ruin, your record-keeping is top notch."

  She placed a thick stack of parchment on the desk between them.

  "Turns out that you were granted the holdings of no fewer than twenty families, many of whom didn't actually do anything that offended the Head himself, they just ran afoul of you and he took care of it for you."

  'Bob' was beginning to grow pale as she continued. She didn't offer him even a moment's breath to rally a defense.

  "Turns out that if you're in good with the dictator in charge of a place you can get away with quite a lot. Only problem is that if that dictator falls, say to a fantastical Dark Elf Warrior Maid, suddenly all of that become a lot less secure."

  She let herself have the faintest hint of a smirk as she stared him down. She could practically feel his mind racing, trying to come up with something that he could use to maintain his position without losing everything. There would've been a time, not that long ago, where she'd have been a little too happy to utterly destroy this man in front of her. He'd lived for years as a parasite of society, preying on the weak at the behest of a monster. As she was now, though? That didn't quite sit well with her. The problem with finding yourself suddenly with the power to exercise any twisted whim you might imagine is that you come to realize the weight of that power. Well, that was the route she was going at least.

  "Relax, Bob, I'm not gonna kill you or anything that extreme. I'm obviously not gonna be letting you keep those extra sleds, but I'm not gonna leave you with nothing. The whole point of reforming things now that the jackass is gone is that I won't be a careless lunatic who just throws away anything that annoys me. You're going to help me, Bob. You're going to do your part to keep the rest of your friends from becoming too big a thorn in my side as I do what needs to be done to save this city."

  "And if I refuse?" it seemed Bob had a bit more steel in him than she'd given him credit for.

  "Well, Bob, that would be a bad idea. At my heart I'm a pretty generous person, slow to anger and not the sort to hold a grudge. That can all change if you make yourself too big a problem for me. I could spell out all the ways that I could make your life miserable right up to the point that I decide to take it, or I can leave it to your imagination. Either way, I'm sure you get the idea."

  "Err... quite," he said nervously. "I guess I don't have much choice."

  "You really don't," she said, offering him the sweetest smile she could muster. "Talk to Balar later about the specifics. We'll clear up exactly how much you've stolen from the people over the years and get it back to its rightful owners. Do be a dear and send in the next candidate."

  Dismissed, the man had no option but to retreat.