The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 719

Dorian double cabin truck dropped the three of them at White Field a little after eight, the terraces already visible from the road, brown-edged and sunken where something had been eating the roots out from under them for weeks.

Dorian had brought two people. He introduced them without much ceremony — Kass, wiry and quiet, with a badger-shaped digger pacing low at his heel; Bram, heavier through the shoulders, his beast a hooded, dust-colored viper coiled loose around one arm like a bracelet that had decided to wake up.

"Citizen quota," Dorian said, by way of explanation. "They're behind on theirs too. Figured we'd knock it all out together. Sicen is team quota the more ithe merrier."

"Efficient," Alex said, and didn't ask anything else.

Kass's eyes moved once over Grim, cataloguing, then moved away too fast to be casual about it. Bram didn't look at Grim at all, which was its own kind of tell.

A farmer met them at the gate with the tired relief of a man who'd stopped expecting anyone to actually come. "North terraces are the worst of it. Moles first, if you can — they're taking the root systems out from under everything, and the crop won't hold past another week of it. Locusts are thick in the east hedge past noon, once the sun's warmed the grass."

"We'll start on the moles," Alex said.

The first burrow Grim found, he didn't bother digging out. He simply planted both front paws over the collapsed earth where the tunnel ran and brought one hardened swipe down through eight inches of packed soil like it was standing water.

The mole came up dead before it understood it had been found.

Kass's badger-digger, next to him, hadn't even finished orienting toward the same tunnel.

"Huh," Kass said, carefully flat.

Bram's viper flicked its tongue once, twice, and went very still.

Dorian's jaw tightened, and if anyone had been watching him instead of Grim, they'd have seen exactly how much that single motion cost him.

"We'll split up," Alex said. "Cover more ground that way. Meet back here at noon, tally what we've got."

Nobody argued. Dorian, Kass, and Bram peeled off toward the east hedge, murmuring to each other in the low, clipped way of men doing quiet math. Alex and Grim took the north terraces alone.

By noon, Alex and Grim had gone through forty-one mole burrows and hadn't lost count of a single one, because Grim hadn't stopped moving long enough to lose track. He worked the tunnels the way he'd worked the fence post — economical, unhurried, no wasted motion — and every so often paused just long enough to look back at Alex with an expression that had started to resemble pride somewhere around burrow thirty.

Dorian's group came back from the east hedge with six locusts between the three of them and a badger-digger that had gotten itself stuck twice.

"Forty-one," the farmer said, going over Alex's count with an expression that kept sliding between gratitude and disbelief. "In four hours. I've had crews of six take a week on less than that."

"Forty-one." Dorian repeated the number like it might shrink if he said it slower.

Kass didn't say anything. He was looking at Grim the way a man looks at a number that's gone wrong somewhere in his own favor.

“Lunch,” Alex said, ending the conversation.

They sat in the shade of the tree line and ate. The meal wasn’t comfortable, but the farmer’s wife had prepared it with clear care. The plain food told Alex the family probably didn’t have much, yet the woman still put effort into it. They might have been happy in their own way. It simply wasn’t food that suited his mouth.

Dorian only picked at his sandwich. Bram’s viper remained tightly coiled, tongue flicking toward Grim far more often than the badger-digger appeared to find necessary.

"You're not even tired," Kass said finally, like the observation had been sitting behind his teeth all morning and finally worked loose.

"No," Alex said.

"That's not — " Kass stopped himself, glanced at Dorian, and didn't finish the sentence.

Dorian stood up before anyone could ask him to. "East hedge again after lunch. Locusts'll be thick once the sun's up properly. We'll take the far tree line, work back toward you."

"Fine," Alex said.

He watched the three of them walk off, unhurried, and didn't think much of it until Grim's head turned, slow, tracking them the same way he'd tracked the fence post the night Alex taught him Bloodrend — not suspicious exactly, just attentive, the way a dog gets when something in a familiar smell has changed.

They're afraid of you, Alex said through the bond, mostly to see what Grim would do with it.

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