Kyle had hired a PMC to guard his property. The Steely Blades-about 30 men equipped with reinforced chainmail and lightly enchanted steel weaponry. He would of course fill in the rest of the guard with volunteers, but 30 was more than enough to act as a strike team for stuff Kyle couldn't be around for. Their leader was a sharp man named Carkh. He was a young man who had inherited the mercenary company from his father, who was killed during a commission guarding an Imperial Senator from assassins. He’d died with his enemy lying on top of him, blade directly through the assassin's heart.

  The company had just finished guarding a logging encampment from a wandering triad of nature elementals. It had been easy work, using fire arrows and a palisade wall.

  The company had been about to move east guarding a caravan, but he had promised them weapons and tens of deacons each.

  Kyle actually had context for the currency now. A meal could cost a few copper Imperials, smaller copper coins. A night at a nice inn cost about half a silver Tethrel. A single Deacon was more than most peasants made in a few months. It was 100 Imperials to a Tethrel, and 36 Tethrels to a Deacon.

  Most of the men weren’t exactly battle scarred veterans, but they all had decent experience. Many were soldiers who wanted more pay than the legions afforded, and were willing to face the danger that came with the money.

  All were pretty young, and Carkh himself was only 26. While that was a larger portion of a lifetime than the nigh-immortal Kyle could ever understand, the median lifespan was still around 60.

  He’d finished making his runs to the hoard, and was ready to inspect the properties.

  He and his new entourage of mercenaries walked out of the gate closest to the plot of land. He had bought their horses from them, and sold them to some merchants at a profit. He aimed to employ them long-term, after all. He had kept only a few horses for saltpeter production.

  The purchasing had been handled by the Collegium, and the property had been his within a day. The manor, accompanying farming communes, and adjacent buildings were all fully transferred to his name. House Jessek had officially acquired new property.

  He and his entourage had just reached the external farmlands of the manor. Fields full of the short grains and various mundane-looking vegetables that formed the backbone of peasant diets abounded. Every now and then, a pasture or fenced area for animals would pass them by.

  Interestingly to Kyle, most of the plants were earthlike but still quite alien-while the animals possessed only passing differences from Terran equivalents. Pigs and chickens, rabbits, even a small herd of cattle looked mostly traditional.

  The mercenaries behind him talked amongst each other, and cracked crude jokes about the occasional female farmhand they saw.

  The fields occasionally held a farmer here or there. They looked about as well fed as Kyle expected. Short, dirty farmfolk in surprisingly nice clothing. Kyle knew they grew a cotton-equivalent on the manor’s lands which must have been the source of the new-looking clothes.

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  Eventually, after hundreds of meters of farmland, they reached the main village of the compound. A collection of houses larger than the logging outpost he had passed through with the manor overlooking it on a small hill. The buildings were pretty nice, with stone foundations. He suspected that the larger general store building actually had a basement, probably used for meat preservation.

  Most people didn’t live in this small town, they lived in the scores of small farmhouses out amongst the fields and came into town for amenities and repairs at a blacksmith.

  An old woman surrounded by other wizened people awaited him in the main dirt paved square. She seemed to be pretty resigned to the situation, but the others looked pretty worried.

  “Welcome, Milord.” She bowed and said nothing else. When she had stayed bowed for nearly a minute, Carkh whispered to him, “You gotta tell her she can speak freely. Some nobles are really sticklers for traditions-only speaking when asked and all ‘at.”

  “You can speak your mind around me. No need for the decorum or tradition that you may be used to from past lords.” The group of elders all looked at him with a mixture of intrigue and hope. “If you speak truly, Milord, then we are most grateful. All that bowing was killing my back. Let me show you around the manor.” The woman took him up the hill, and pointed out the main buildings in the settlement.

  “That’s the baker, the mill is over the hill, the stone building is the blacksmith, and the granaries are spread out around the farmland. The altar and the temple to Vasavan are also behind the hill.” They walked in the front door, and Kyle asked them all to give him 10 minutes to get out of his armor.

  ———

  The process of equipping the suit was simple. The PAST armor had been designed to be put on incredibly quickly. Even someone not used to it like Kyle could just step in from the front panel and be running around in less than a minute.

  Getting out was a totally different beast. Without the help of a gantry and multiple robotic manipulators, it took up to 20 minutes. Kyle slowly removed piece after piece in the main living room he had commandeered for the purpose. Gloves, then helmet and chest plate, then finally he crawled out of the legs and left them standing in a rather silly configuration.

  Out of the armor for the first time in a few days, he did some gymnastics to balance himself on his own two feet. Cartwheels, splits, long jumps. All power armour shared a form fitting under suit designed for maximum interfacing with the sensory modules in the armor and for implants. Kyle’s was black and wrapped around his head, leaving just his face open to the armor's frontal plate.

  Kyle wasted no time in getting out of it. It was notoriously uncomfortable, and Kyle had turned off his entire sense of touch using brainstem implants. While he didn’t really feel anything, that lack of stimuli was uncomfortable in its own unique way.

  Quickly closing the curtains letting in the warm autumn-hmm, why are the seasons earth-like? This planet is quie a bit larger than earth according to my triangulations!- light, he stripped off the suit.

  He’d brought a sufficiently sophisticated outfit from Altrai he could change into. Linen undergarments, something similarly from earth, brown cloth pants with leather structural support at the ankles and hips, and a blue doublet with a fur overcoat. A few other random medieval pieces of clothing completed the ‘nobility’ ensemble. He’d had his surcoat made custom from a tailor in the crafts district: a Prussian blue thing with the league's spiral eye insignia emblazoned over it.

  Walking out of the building, he found a few more of the elders had gone home, understandably better things to do than wait for him to change. He called out to the mercenaries, who continued to laze about with nothing to do. “Follow me. I’ve got those weapons I promised you.”