Logs of seasoned northern pine crackled softly inside the stone hearth, spreading a drowsy, golden warmth across the small sitting room that stood in defiant contrast to the howling sub-zero gale rattling the castle's thick glass windowpanes.
Stretched out flat on her stomach atop a thick, shaggy black bearskin rug directly in front of the fire was thirteen-year-old Nana Pine. With her chin propped comfortably inside both palms and her wool-stockinged legs kicking lazily back and forth in the warm air behind her, the young healer stared unblinkingly into the dancing orange flames.
She was completely, utterly bored.
Even to a thirteen-year-old girl, feeling bored while locked inside a frontier fortress at the exact epicenter of a war against the deadliest winter abominations on the continent felt bizarrely out of place.
Two weeks ago, when her father and Master Karl van Bate had first brought her inside Prince Roland's castle after her healing gift awakened—and especially after her father had panicked at the gates on the morning the snow began—Nana had braced her small heart for a four-month nightmare. Having grown up listening to the older townsfolk whisper about the winter sieges of the past, she had fully expected the castle halls to fill up every afternoon with the smell of copper and the agonizing screams of mangled men. She had mentally prepared herself to spend her days covered in blood from dawn until midnight, pouring every drop of her milky-white light into torn stomachs and shattered bones to keep the soldiers of Border Town from dying on the tables.
Reality, however, had turned out to be almost comically anticlimactic.
Between the twelve-foot wall of solid gray hydraulic concrete designed by Prince Roland, the ruthless supply-chain efficiency and mysterious watchtower interventions of Count Arthur, and the sheer, bone-crushing violence of Commander William out on the ramparts, the southern defensive perimeter had proven to be an unbreakable iron curtain.
Over the past several days of relentless beast attacks, Nana had barely been called upon to heal a single human being.
Since sealing young Brian's punctured lung and stitching up Trevor's forearm after the granary tunnel ambush before the snow started, her most critical military "casualty" had been a nervous eighteen-year-old sentry from the western watchtower who had startled himself with his own sneeze, slipped on a frosty ladder rung, and sprained his left ankle.
Aside from that lone twisted ankle, her entire daily caseload consisted of the plump brown hens and gray pigeons kept in a wooden wicker cage beside the kitchen hearth—birds whose legs or wings Prince Roland had instructed the kitchen staff to lightly nick with a clean scalpel twice a day so Nana could practice draining and refilling her Magic Core in a controlled environment.
— "Peep, peep, peep..." — Nana murmured aloud to the fireplace, mimicking the indignant chirping of the fat brown rooster she had healed twenty minutes earlier before letting out a soft, airy giggle at the absurdity of her wartime service.
As the laugh faded, however, the playful curve of her lips softened into a warm, remarkably mature smile for a girl her age.
Being bored in the infirmary is the best thing in the world, Nana thought, resting her cheek against her folded arms on the soft bear fur as she listened to the distant, muffled boom of a flintlock volley echoing from the southern wall half a mile away. Whenever I have nothing to do in this room, it means the miners and patrolmen out there are still standing on their own two feet. It means fathers are coming home to the brick houses for supper, and nobody is bleeding out in the snow.
If the price for keeping every soldier in Border Town whole and breathing was her own afternoon boredom, Nana was more than happy to stare at the fireplace until spring.
Click-creak.
The heavy brass latch of the sitting room door lifted, and seventeen-year-old Anna stepped quietly across the threshold, pulling the oak panels shut behind her heel to block the cold corridor draft.
Having just come up from the backyard brick kilns for her late-afternoon break, Anna brought with her the comforting, familiar scent of warm clay, birch woodsmoke, and clean linen. In the soft glow of the hearth, her calm, soot-smudged face looked completely relaxed—bearing zero trace of the terrifying, untouchable "goddess of war" aura she had projected while hovering above the parapet with thirty-six white-hot steel needles orbiting her cloak.
— "You look just about ready to melt straight into that bearskin rug, Miss Nana," — Anna said, a gentle, sisterly smile warming her crystal-clear blue eyes as she walked over to the hearth.
Nana immediately rolled over onto her back and scrambled up into a sitting position, smoothing down the front of her warm wool skirt with both hands.
— "Anna! I am so glad you finally finished at the furnace!" — Nana let out a dramatic, long-suffering sigh, gesturing helplessly toward the four stone walls around them. — "I was getting so bored in here by myself that I actually started counting how many mortar lines Master Karl's masons used to build the chimney! Healing two chickens and a pigeon after lunch doesn't use up nearly enough of my Magic Power, and His Highness said I'm not allowed to go near the wall while the wind is blowing this hard!"
Anna let out a light, quiet laugh, pulling a low wooden stool over to the edge of the bearskin rug and sitting down beside the younger girl. tucked under Anna's right arm were a clean square of pale scrap parchment and a sharpened stick of drawing charcoal.
— "Having an unemployed chief medic during the Months of the Demons is a luxury no other town in Graycastle has ever enjoyed," — Anna said softly, smoothing the sheet of parchment flat across the low oak tea table beside the rug. — "Still, I know how long the afternoons can feel when you are locked indoors. Last night in the library, after I finished copying His Highness's boiler notes, Sir Arthur taught me a small game on a piece of scrap paper. He told me it is very popular among students in his homeland for passing the time and sharpening the mind. Would you like to learn how to play?"
The instant the name "Sir Arthur" left Anna's mouth, Nana's big eyes lit up like twin lanterns.
To the thirteen-year-old girl, everything associated with the two mysterious foreign lords from the Kingdom of Dawn—and especially the quiet, immaculate strategist who had rescued her workman friend Titus up at the North Slope Mine without even getting his gloves dirty—felt as though it were wrapped in a thrilling layer of storybook magic.
— "A game from Lord Arthur's homeland?!" — Nana leaned forward eagerly over the low table, her hands planted on her knees. — "How do you play it? Do you have to memorize difficult math formulas like the ones His Highness writes on the blackboard first?"
— "Not a single number required," — Anna smiled, lowering the tip of her charcoal stick to the top corner of the parchment.
With three quick, clean strokes of her hand, Anna drew a flat horizontal base, a tall vertical timber post rising from it, a short horizontal beam jutting out at the top, and a tiny vertical line dropping down from the end of the beam.
— "In Sir Arthur's country, this game is called Hangman," — Anna explained calmly.
Nana blinked twice, her bright excitement faltering for a second as she stared down at the unmistakable silhouette of an executioner's scaffold—the exact same wooden structure where Anna herself had stood with a hemp rope around her neck less than five weeks ago.
— "A... a gallows?" — Nana asked in a small voice, glancing up at her older friend's face to make sure it wasn't a bad memory. — "Isn't drawing a hangman's post a little bit grim for a parlor game, Anna?"
Anna didn't flinch at the drawing at all; to her pragmatic mind, charcoal lines on paper couldn't hurt anyone, and the gallows in the town square belonged to a past life that Roland, Arthur, and William had already burned to ash.
— "Sir Arthur possesses a somewhat dark, peculiar sense of humor," — Anna replied, defending the strategist with a faint, fond smile as she moved her charcoal to the bottom of the page and drew four short, neat horizontal dashes side by side (_ _ _ _). — "The rules are very simple, Nana. I have chosen a common four-letter word inside my head, and each of these four spaces represents one letter. Your job is to guess the letters one at a time. Whenever you guess a letter that belongs in the word, I write it into the correct space."
Anna tapped the tip of her charcoal against the empty air directly beneath the drawn gallows beam.
— "However, every time you guess a letter that is not in the word, I draw one part of a little stick-man's body hanging under the rope," — Anna continued. — "First the head, then the body, then the left arm, the right arm, and finally both legs. If I finish drawing all six parts of the man before you figure out the word, the patient is hanged and you lose the round."
Realizing that she was essentially acting as a doctor trying to save a stick figure from being executed by guessing letters, Nana's hesitation vanished, replaced by a delighted giggle.
— "Turning a word puzzle into a matter of life and death... that really does sound just like Lord Arthur!" — Nana laughed, rubbing her small palms together as her competitive spirit kicked in. — "Alright, I won't let my patient die! Four letters... Master Karl taught me that every word needs a vowel to hold it together, so let's start with the first letter of the alphabet! I choose 'A'!"
Anna's eyes crinkled warmly as she lowered the charcoal and neatly printed the letter above the third dash:
_ _ A _
— "A direct hit on your very first try," — Anna praised. — "You are off to a strong start, Doctor."
Puffing out her chest with confidence at how easy foreign games were, Nana tapped her chin with her finger. — "If there is an 'A' in the third spot, let's check the other common vowel right away! I guess the letter 'E'!"
This time, Anna slowly shook her head from side to side.
Leaning over the parchment, Anna drew a small, neat charcoal circle directly beneath the drop-line of the gallows—giving the condemned prisoner a head.
— "No 'E' in this word, I'm afraid," — Anna teased lightly, resting her wrist on the table. — "Be careful with your next diagnosis, Nana; the rope is already around his neck."
Nana bit her lower lip, her brow furrowing in sudden concentration as the simple charcoal game became unexpectedly tense. — "No 'E'? Okay, no panic, he still has five tries left... Let's try a strong consonant! What about the letter 'T'? Almost every word in the primer has a 'T' in it!"
Without saying a word, Anna lowered the charcoal stick and drew a straight vertical line downward from the bottom of the circle—giving the stick figure a torso.
— "What?! No 'T' either?!" — Nana gasped, half-laughing and half-panicking as she stared at the headless—now torso-equipped—victim dangling over the paper. — "Wait a second, he's already one-third of the way to the graveyard! Alright, let me think... if there's an 'A' in the third spot and no 'E', there almost has to be another vowel paired with it to make the sound! Give me the letter 'O'!"
Anna gave an approving nod, printing a clean 'O' into the second space:
_ O A _
Nana leaned both elbows on the low table, staring hard at the two remaining gaps on either side of O-A as the little gears inside her thirteen-year-old head spun at top speed.
Four letters, with O-A right in the middle, Nana mentally flipped through the vocabulary lists Master Karl van Bate had written on the schoolhouse slate before the winter started—testing sounds on her tongue. C-O-A-L? Wait, that starts with C and ends with L... R-O-A-D? G-O-A-T? What has everyone in the castle been talking about since yesterday morning?
Her eyes flicked toward the window where the distant musket fire echoed from the forest clearing, and a bright lightbulb went off behind her retinas.
— "Wait—is there an 'R' at the very end?!" — Nana blurted out, her voice rising an octave in excitement.
Smiling brightly, Anna wrote the 'R' into the final space on the right:
_ O A R
Nana didn't even wait to guess the last letter; clapping both hands together with a sharp smack, she bounced on her knees on the bearskin rug:
— "I know what it is! It's a B!" — Nana cheered, pointing her finger triumphantly at the first blank space. — "Like the big tusked monsters Commander William has been smashing off the wall all day! The word is BOAR!"
— "And the patient walks free from the gallows with all four limbs intact," — Anna laughed aloud, printing the capital 'B' into the first space to complete B O A R before setting the charcoal stick down. — "You solved that twice as fast as I did when Sir Arthur drew the first word for me last night."
Across the bearskin rug, the two teenage witches dissolved into bright, crystalline laughter—an innocent, carefree sound that filled the warm stone chamber and pushed back the suffocating weight of the apocalyptic winter howling just outside the glass.
It was nothing more than a simple children's game sketched with burnt willow twigs on scrap sheepskin; yet inside a world ruled by religious terror and monstrous slaughter, those four charcoal letters represented the exact peaceful, ordinary humanity that the men on the wall were bleeding to protect.
By seven o'clock the next morning, however, the cozy tranquility of the castle's upper sitting rooms felt a million miles away from the biting, frost-hardened reality of the militia training courtyard.
High above the eastern ramparts, the newly risen winter sun hung like a pale, heatless silver coin behind a thin veil of ice fog, doing nothing to thaw the crust of slippery white rime coating the packed dirt of the yard.
Out in the main square of the barracks, seventy men of the First Army were already halfway through their morning warm-up routine—dropping into synchronized sets of push-ups and burpees in the snow under the harsh, booming countdown of Deputy Commander Iron Axe.
Forty paces away from the main formation, however, tucked into the quiet leeward corner between the blacksmith's coal shed and the western armory rack, eight militiamen had been given ten minutes of leave before assembly and stood huddled together in a tight, furtive circle.
Thick plumes of white steam rose from their mouths and mingled in the sub-zero air as they shifted their weight from boot to boot, the atmosphere inside the small group thick with nervous anticipation.
Standing in that circle were Erik, the thirty-year-old veteran patrolman who had survived the granary tunnel ambush alongside Trevor; Dergus, the nineteen-year-old farmhand whose life William had saved on the parapet with a downward smash of his steel shield; Rick, Saldon, and Zuler, the three young quarrymen from the eastern sector whose names William had called out before his solo fight with the foxes; and three broad-shouldered, battle-tested front-liners from the central pike company named Hamlin, Svend, and Henry.
A month ago, these eight men had come from completely different corners of Border Town's bottom rung—pickaxe miners, mud-masons, wheat farmers, and low-paid town watchmen. Over the past forty-eight hours of blood, gunpowder smoke, and roaring monsters on top of the concrete wall, however, the furnace of war had melted away their old lives and forged them into a single mindset.
Standing at the head of the circle with his gloved arms crossed tightly over his boiled-leather breastplate to ward off the wind, Erik kept his gaze fixed across the courtyard.
Fifty yards away, standing near the open doors of the main armory with Trevor waiting quietly three paces behind his shoulder, was Commander William—currently inspecting a newly delivered crate of fifteen-foot ash pikes and testing the flex of the heavy wooden shafts with one hand.
For the past three days and nights, ever since Nana's white light had closed the刀 slashes across his ribs after the granary battle, Erik had been wrestling with a quiet, fierce conflict inside his own chest.
After Prince Roland had summoned the four tunnel survivors to the castle steps and rewarded them with silver royals, Patrol Captain Greyhound and nineteen-year-old Brian had naturally followed the traditional path of every soldier in Graycastle: they had pledged their personal ambitions straight to the Royal Family, dreaming of the day the Prince would tap their shoulders with a steel sword, grant them the title of Royal Knight, and hand them silver plate armor and a country manor.
For a poor patrolman like Erik, the word Knight had once sounded like the highest pinnacle of glory a mortal man could reach.
Yet every single time Erik lay awake on his straw bunk in the barracks at night and closed his eyes, he didn't see silver armor or royal banners.
He saw the pitch-black, oil-reeking stone culvert beneath the wheat stores. He heard the sickening crunch of an iron-bossed shield exploding under a bare fist, and he saw Commander William deliberately throw his own body in front of a poisoned spear to keep young Brian breathing—before watching that exact same man leap off a twelve-foot concrete wall yesterday to smash a one-ton buffalo and a wolf pack to pieces with his bare hands so his recruits wouldn't have to bleed.
Prince Roland was the brilliant, benevolent ruler designing their survival from the castle study, and Erik would gladly fight for the Prince's laws.
Yet deep in the marrow of his bones, Erik knew his soul didn't belong to a throne; it belonged to the war god standing in the mud by the armory racks. Trevor had already figured that truth out two days ago, stepping forward to become William's personal shield-bearer—and last night after lights-out, Erik had realized he wasn't the only man in the barracks who felt the exact same pull.
— "I froze solid up there yesterday," — nineteen-year-old Dergus spoke up suddenly, his voice trembling slightly with lingering shame as he rubbed his mittened hands together compulsively to stop their shaking. — "Right when that third wolf jumped off the dead bison's back and cleared our pikes... its red eyes and black fangs were less than a foot from my throat. My knees locked up so hard I couldn't even drop my pole to reach for my dagger. I was dead meat. And then Lord William crossed fifteen feet of stone in the blink of an eye, crushed its skull flat against my boots with his shield, and didn't even have me flogged for freezing in formation afterward. He just told me to hold his shield and keep my chin up. I swore to the old gods right there on the cement that my life belongs to him until the day I die."
— "You and me both, kid," — Zuler rumbled in agreement, the burly former quarryman's eyes wide with unhidden reverence as he glanced toward the armory. — "At sunset yesterday, I stood on the eastern merlon and watched him sidestep a charging demonic buffalo the size of an ore wagon and cave its whole ribcage in with one barehanded punch. If we don't plant our boots behind a commander like that, we don't deserve to carry iron spears!"
— "More than his fists, he actually knows who we are," — Saldon added fiercely, thumping a gloved fist against the center of his own chest as a proud grin broke across the young runner's wind-chapped face. — "Before he jumped down after those five foxes yesterday morning, he walked straight up to Rick, Zuler, and me and called all three of us out by our given names without looking at a piece of paper! Name me one highborn count in King's City or Longsong Stronghold who bothers to learn the names of mud-diggers fighting on his wall! Commander William remembers every single man under his banner!"
Beside him, Hamlin—a broad-necked former timber-cutter with a faded axe scar on his forearm—kicked a clump of frozen slush off his boot heel and grunted:
— "Alright, nobody here is arguing the 'why'—all eight of us already agreed in the bunkhouse last night that we want to join Trevor and form Lord William's personal shock squad," — Hamlin pointed out bluntly. — "The real question right now is: which one of us is going to walk over there and open his mouth? Because you can't just stroll up to a highborn lord from the Kingdom of Dawn who rips mutated stags' heads off with his bare hands and say, 'Morning, boss, we work for you now'!"
Instantly, Svend shoved his elbow into Saldon's ribs: — "Let Saldon do the talking! You're the wall's official field messenger, Saldon, and you talk twice as fast as the rest of us put together!"
Saldon's eyes bulged out of his head as he took a hasty half-step back:
— "Are you out of your mind, Svend?!" — Saldon hissed in panic. — "Sprinting up the stairs to yell 'The monsters are coming!' is a courier's job! Marching up to the Commander-in-Chief in the middle of the yard to offer him our lifelong blood oaths is a completely different animal! If he looks at me with those predator eyes of his, my tongue is going to tie itself into a square knot before I get two words out!"
— "Well, somebody better untie their tongue in the next ten seconds," — Henry muttered darkly, jerking his chin toward the main courtyard where Iron Axe had just barked the final count of push-ups. — "Because if we stand behind this shed clucking like wet hens when the assembly horn blows, Deputy Commander Iron Axe is going to strap fifty-pound quarry boulders to our backs and run us around the wall until our lungs bleed."
At the head of the huddle, Erik uncrossed his arms, letting his shoulders drop into the calm, settled posture of a man who had already faced death in the dark and knew his mind.
Looking around at the seven pairs of eyes fixed on him, the thirty-year-old veteran gave a single, decisive nod.
— "I'll speak for us," — Erik declared, his deep voice steady and clear. — "I'm the oldest man in this circle, and I stood beside him down in that granary culvert before any of you ever saw him fight on the wall. Fall in behind me in two clean files. Keep your backs straight, don't look at your boots, don't stutter, and salute like soldiers of the First Army. On me—march."
A collective breath of relief went through the seven men as their nervous shuffling vanished, replaced instantly by the crisp, disciplined muscle memory William had drilled into their bones for a month.
Forming a tight, two-by-four column behind Erik, the eight militiamen stepped out from the shadow of the coal shed and marched straight across the frost-hardened courtyard toward the armory, the heavy, synchronized thud-thud-thud of their sixteen leather boots ringing like a drumbeat across the quiet yard and drawing the curious glances of the nearby platoons.
Over by the open spear crates, William heard the cadenced approach immediately.
Pausing in the middle of checking the iron socket on a fresh fifteen-foot pike, the Commander of the First Army planted the butt of the wooden shaft into the frozen dirt beside his boot, crossed his arms loosely over his navy-blue wool doublet, and turned his dark eyes toward the approaching squad with a raised eyebrow. Three paces behind his right shoulder, faithful as a shadow cast on stone, Trevor shifted his weight and rested the oiled barrel of his flintlock musket across his collarbone, watching the eight men with sharp, veteran scrutiny.
Two paces in front of William, Erik called the halt with a single sharp nod.
All eight men snapped their boot heels together in the frost at the exact same millisecond, driving their leather-gauntleted right fists squarely against the left side of their breastplates with a unified, thunderous THUD that echoed off the armory wall:
— "COMMANDER WILLIAM!" — Erik's voice rang out like iron striking stone, without a single tremor of hesitation in the freezing air.
Out of pure habit, William blinked once as he looked over the two neat ranks—letting [BIOMETRIC STATUS INSPECTION] flash briefly across his retinas to confirm what he already knew about their numbers.
Every single man standing in this eight-man group possessed physical parameters at the very top of the commoner bell curve—with Erik, Zuler, Hamlin, Svend, and Henry all sitting at Strength: 8 and Endurance: 8–9, Saldon boasting Speed: 9, and even nineteen-year-old Dergus having seen his Endurance tick up a point from 6 to 7 after surviving the terror of yesterday's battle.
— "Morning, Erik," — William greeted the veteran, a faint, amused smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth as his eyes swept from face to face. — "Dergus, Rick, Saldon, Zuler, Hamlin, Svend, Henry... You boys look like you're marching up to the gallows. What brings the eight best fighters of my eastern flank over to the armory racks five minutes before assembly?"
In the front row beside Erik, nineteen-year-old Dergus felt his heart give a wild, triumphant leap against his ribs as the Commander casually rattled off his name without a second's pause; the boy's narrow shoulders squared so hard his leather jerkin creaked.
Holding William's gaze without blinking, Erik lowered his salute and spoke straight from the chest:
— "My Lord!" — Erik began, his voice carrying clearly over the morning wind. — "When His Royal Highness Prince Roland took us out of the slums and the mines a month ago, he gave us warm wool to wear, meat in our bowls every night, copper in our pockets, and weapons that spit fire and thunder. Every man standing here respects His Highness with all his soul! However... we are front-line soldiers, My Lord! We are the men who stand in the sleet and wash our boots in black demonic blood on top of that wall!"
Erik swallowed once against the freezing air, his weathered jaw setting like granite as he refused to look away:
— "Four nights ago down in that pitch-black drainage tunnel under the granary, when Captain Greyhound and I were five seconds away from having our throats slit by Duke Ryan's rats, it wasn't a royal decree that pulled us out of the grave—it was your bare fists, Lord William!" — Erik declared fiercely. — "Yesterday on the parapet, when Dergus froze in front of a leaping wolf, it was your shield that crushed its skull an inch from his gut! And all afternoon long, while the seven men behind me held the eastern pikes, we watched our Commander jump down into the deep snow on the end of a hemp rope to fight one-ton buffaloes and wolf packs alone, putting your own flesh on the line so not a single recruit under your command had to bleed!"
As the raw, unvarnished emotion in Erik's voice echoed across the quiet corner of the courtyard, the playful, teasing glint vanished completely from William's dark eyes.
Slowly, William uncrossed his arms and let his hands hang at his sides, his tall frame straightening into the immovable gravity of a battlefield general. Three paces behind him, Trevor's scarred face tightened with quiet, fierce recognition—knowing the exact path his old tunnel comrade had just chosen to walk.
— "The eight of us talked it through by the bunkhouse stove last night, My Lord, and we didn't march over here today to ask for extra meat rations or a warm post by the gate!" — Erik's voice rose, ringing off the stone walls so that even the recruits finishing their push-ups fifty yards away turned their heads to listen. — "We came here to ask your permission to stand right beside Trevor as your personal vanguard squad! We want to swear our pikes, our rifles, and our lives directly to your banner, Lord William! We don't care about noble titles or silver armor from the capital—we want to be your soldiers! Your iron hammer on the front line! Wherever you point your sword, we will charge without asking why—and the next time you jump off that twelve-foot concrete wall into the snow, all eight of us are jumping right over the stone behind you!"
When Erik finished speaking, a deep, expectant silence dropped over the armory yard, broken only by the whistling of the northern wind through the racks of steel-tipped spears and the heavy, ragged breathing of the eight men standing at attention.
William didn't answer right away.
Slowly, his dark eyes moved down the two ranks, looking deeply into each man's face one by one.
He saw nineteen-year-old Dergus, who had conquered the paralyzing terror of his first battle and was now staring back with eyes that would walk into hell rather than take a step back in front of his savior. He saw Rick, Saldon, and Zuler—three kids from the mud quarries who looked at him as if he held the sun in his hands. And he saw Erik, Hamlin, Svend, and Henry—hardened, calloused working men whose loyalty hadn't been bought with feudal laws or family crests, but earned in the dark through shared sweat, gunpowder smoke, and spilled blood.
Arthur can talk about spreadsheets and 'extras' all he wants, William thought, feeling a deep, surging warmth fill his chest that no amount of System credits could ever buy. Give me nine men like Trevor and Erik who will jump off a wall into a blizzard with me, and I wouldn't trade them for a hundred noble paladins from King's City.
Slowly, a wide, razor-sharp predator's grin spread across William's face—far bolder and more dangerous than his usual tavern smile.
— "A commander who rappels down walls on a hemp rope doesn't have any use for knights in shiny silver armor, Erik," — William's deep baritone rumbled across the frost, carrying the unmistakable weight of unsheathed steel. — "What I need are madmen who know how to spit in the face of a blizzard and laugh while they reload! If the eight of you swear your lives to my vanguard today, don't expect soft beds or easy guard shifts—expect to be thrown headfirst into the absolute worst meat grinder every single time the horn blows! Do you still want in?!"
— "THAT IS EXACTLY WHERE WE BELONG, LORD COMMANDER!" — all eight men roared at the top of their lungs in a single, deafening voice that made the frost shake off the armory eaves.
Letting out a booming, full-throated laugh, William turned his head half an inch and gestured with an open palm toward the scarred veteran standing three paces behind his shoulder:
— "Well, Trevor, looks like your monopoly just expired!" — William grinned. — "You're officially no longer the only lunatic following my shadow around this town!"
Lowering his musket barrel an inch, Trevor let out a rough, gravelly laugh and shook his scarred head:
— "Eight extra pairs of broad shoulders to help haul Your Lordship's forty-pound powder crates and spare shields up the ramp?" — Trevor replied dryly. — "You won't hear a single complaint out of me, My Lord. Welcome to the detail, boys."
Stepping forward, William raised his right hand and brought his open palm down in a heavy, ringing slap squarely onto the curve of Erik's leather shoulder—putting just enough of his Strength: 16 behind the blow to drive Erik's boots half an inch into the frozen mud and make his knees flex, sealing the pact with the exact same physical signature he had given Trevor two days ago.
— "From this morning forward, the nine of you are my personal vanguard—the First Squad of Border Town," — William decreed, his dark eyes blazing with the electric thrill of war as Erik absorbed the hit with a fierce grin. — "Draw fresh muskets and heavy shields from the rack and report to the central bastion! Prepare to sweat blood, boys—winter is just getting warmed up!"
Four hours later, as the pale afternoon sun began its slide toward the western peaks, the twelve-foot concrete rampart sang its familiar metallic song of war once again.
Stationed at the prime firing embrasure of the central bastion—flanked on his left and right by Erik, Zuler, and the newly minted members of William's nine-man vanguard—stood Trevor.
A vicious northern crosswind lashed at the folds of his thick gray wool cloak and pelted his scarred cheek with driven ice needles, yet backed by his natural Endurance: 12 constitution, the thirty-two-year-old bodyguard stood planted against the stone merlon with the immovable stability of an oak tree rooted in mountain granite.
Hanging heavy in the freezing air around his face was the sharp, acidic, sulfur-rich stench of burnt corned gunpowder—an aroma that, over the past three days of continuous combat, Trevor had come to love more than the smell of tavern ale or roast meat.
Clack-clack.
Wrapping his calloused right thumb over the curved iron spur of the flintlock hammer, Trevor hauled the stiff high-carbon mainspring all the way back to full cock.
Tucking the oiled walnut stock tightly into the pocket of his right shoulder, he leaned his scarred cheek against the cold wood and aligned his dominant eye down the long, dark iron barrel forged by Anna's fire.
Seventy paces out in the churned, blood-stained snowfield, just beyond the outer line of V-shaped spike trenches, three smaller, sleek-bodied demonic foxes were creeping low on their bellies through a drift—using the carcass of one of yesterday's dead buffaloes as cover as they tried to slip around the eastern stake barrier to flank the wall.
Exhaling half the air from his iron lungs, Trevor locked his pulse.
In that quiet heartbeat before the shot, the howling gale, the shouting of the pikemen down the walkway, and the freezing cold vanished completely; Trevor's entire world narrowed down to the tiny gray sliver of flint clamped in the jaws, the brass bead at the tip of the muzzle, and the dark skull of the lead fox seventy paces away.
His calloused index finger squeezed the heavy iron trigger.
Snap-fssss—KRA-BOOOOOOM!
The flint scraped a shower of white-hot sparks into the priming pan, and a fraction of a second later, the main charge detonated with a deafening roar that whipped a cloud of gray smoke across the parapet.
The heavy wooden buttstock kicked back savagely against Trevor's shoulder—a recoil that still made the younger marksmen stagger half a step if they didn't brace properly—yet against Trevor's Endurance: 12 frame, his broad shoulders absorbed the kinetic punch without shifting by a single millimeter.
Seventy paces out in the blizzard, the three-hundred-meter-per-second lead sphere cut straight through the crosswind and struck the creeping lead fox dead-center between its glowing red eyes—shattering its mutated skull like a clay pot and flipping the eighty-kilogram predator backward onto its spine in a spray of black blood, stone dead before its paws touched the snow.
Trevor didn't waste half a second admiring the kill.
Before the dead fox's tail even stopped twitching, the scarred veteran's hands were already moving in a relentless, clockwork blur that he had rehearsed until his thumbs bled.
Grounding the butt of the smoking rifle between his boots, he flipped the steel frizzen open, poured a measured pinch of fine priming powder into the pan, snapped the cover shut, and dumped a pre-measured paper cartridge of coarse black powder down the hot muzzle. Setting the greased linen patch and lead ball at the bore, he whipped the iron ramrod out of its pipes and drove the load all the way down until the rod bounced once off the breech, returned the rod, and brought the six-kilogram rifle right back up to his cheek in less than fourteen seconds—a reload speed that would have made the royal marksmen of King's City weep in envy.
Sighting down the barrel at the second demonic fox—which had bolted sideways in panic after watching its packmate's head explode—Trevor's battlefield instinct automatically calculated the lead distance and adjusted the muzzle half an inch to the right to compensate for the northern crosswind.
KRA-BOOOOOOM!
The second lead ball punched cleanly through both of the sprinting fox's front shoulder joints at sixty-five paces, sending the beast somersaulting head-over-heels into the snowdrifts as black blood poured from its ruined chest.
Lowering the smoking iron barrel from his shoulder, Trevor turned his head slightly and blew a thin ribbon of gray sulfur smoke out of the flash pan with a sideways, thoroughly satisfied grin.
In three days of live combat, the former alley guard who couldn't read a single word in a book had mastered Prince Roland's modern invention to a level that bordered on lethal art. Combining his unshakeable physical stamina under pressure with a veteran street-fighter's eye for distance, Trevor had turned himself into an elite frontier sniper.
Glancing twenty-five paces to his left toward the elevated wooden platform of the flanking watchtower—where the rhythmic, booming thunder of Deputy Commander Iron Axe's musket was dropping charging forest boars in the western funnel with terrifying, metronome-like precision—Trevor puffed his leather-clad chest out by an inch, feeling a surge of genuine professional pride.
— "Yeah..." — Trevor murmured aloud to himself under the howl of the wind, running a fond, calloused palm along the warm iron barrel of his rifle. — "No question about it. Right behind the big Mojin up in that tower... I am officially the second-best musket shot Border Town is ever going to see."
In an army commanded by legends, standing second only to a master hunter from the Sand Nation who had spent his whole life shooting recurve bows was a silver crown of prestige that Trevor was more than proud to wear.
Then, right as he reached down to his belt pouch for a third paper cartridge, Trevor's dark eyes drifted thirty paces down the upper concrete walkway to his right.
Down at the narrow corner where the eastern rampart met the rocky cliff face of the North Slope, a bold, three-hundred-kilogram demonic boar had used a pile of frozen snow and rock crevices to scramble halfway up the stone face, poking its jagged tusks over the crenelation.
Standing right above it was Commander William.
William hadn't bothered unholstering his flintlock pistol, nor had he drawn his broadsword. Moving like a dark-blue blur of pure hurricane force, the Commander simply stepped up onto the stone merlon, let out a booming, carefree laugh that cut right over the blizzard, and brought the heel of his iron-shod leather boot down like a falling meteor squarely onto the top of the boar's snout—pulverizing its skull and sending the three-hundred-kilogram carcass hurtling backward off the cliff in a single kick!
Watching the absurd, feline speed and god-like physical precision of the twenty-two-year-old master he had sworn his life to protect, Trevor swallowed his momentary sniper's ego and shook his scarred head with a wry, resigned chuckle:
— "On second thought..." — Trevor corrected himself quietly, uncapping his priming horn as he ducked his head against the falling snow to reload for the next wave. — "Better put myself down for third place on the roster. Because if my Lord ever actually gets bored of punching monsters and decides to pick up one of these thunder-tubes himself... I'd bet my whole winter pay he could shoot the wings off a horsefly at a hundred paces in the middle of a blizzard with both eyes shut."