>>5313600Your hurry to join the Bastard in his morning drills with the kobolds, eager to see how they are progressing—and the Bastard, for that matter! He really does seem more poised and confident, DRACONIC even, when he is standing tall before a line of kobolds drilling group skirmish and flanking tactics.
“They’re naturals,” he notes as you approach, turning only long enough to give you a bow of respect before returning to his charges. “I think they might be more experienced than us, at least in large-scale warfare. While our people have been sending out Infiltrators, assassins, individuals… The kobolds have been living together, fighting alongside each other, in teams.”
“How many kobolds does it take to equal a single member of the Master Race, though?” you ask quiet.
The Bastard laughs quietly, and shrugs.
“If it takes two, even three, these hundred kobolds in this mountain village could destroy our forces—even WITH our missing membership returned. They have pitifully little in the way of subterranean fungus-crops, or livestock—they live as raiders and hunters, exclusively. They are warriors.”
That gives you pause.
“Why DO they follow?” you ask. “Just because I am—because WE are dragons, as they see things?”
The Bastard nods, then stops and shakes his head.
“They have lived here in isolation, but they have never stopped telling the tales. They live now in a village of a hundred—almost all of them cousins, their numbers ever thinned by predators, by battle with their neighbours, by famines and cave-ins. They remember when they thrived in throngs of THOUSANDS, Dragonborn. Just like us… They remember the old times.”
“But they are free now,” you note. “Or… Were so, before we arrived, or before Hapo and Hako played their little joke as ‘Dragonwrought’.”
“A kobold does not wish to be free,” the Bastard observes. “A kobold wishes to serve strength, and to be rewarded and recognized for service. They do not compete for individual glory, but rather for recognition... And recognition as a family unit, as a clan, is better still.
And so you watch as he drives them, harangues and bullies them… And rewards them. Every word of praise drives the kobold on the receiving end to strive harder, to redouble efforts, and the others stare in envy, even as they regard you both with lasting wariness. They recognize your authority... But they do not yet trust you.