An iron ladle banged three times against the rim of a massive copper cauldron, signaling that the morning porridge ration had officially been served.
In the wide, muddy yard cleared out behind the castle barracks, eighty rough-looking men stood huddled in small, noisy cliques, slurping thick wheat gruel mixed with diced salt pork out of wooden bowls.
This was the raw material of Prince Roland's future First Army.
There wasn't a single trained knight or disciplined soldier among them. Half of the group consisted of broad-shouldered quarrymen and iron miners whose calloused hands were permanently stained black with coal dust; the rest were skinny dirt farmers, desperate dockworkers from the riverbank, and a handful of loudmouthed local hunters and tavern brawlers who had only shown up because the royal notice promised thirty copper coins a week and two hot meals of real meat every day.
Up on the second-floor stone gallery overlooking the barracks yard, Prince Roland leaned both hands against the cold parapet, looking down at the chaotic mob with a deep crease between his eyebrows.
Beside the prince stood Arthur, his arms tucked neatly inside the sleeves of his modern hoodie to ward off the draft while Chief Knight Carter Lannis stood two paces behind them like an iron shadow.
— "Look at them down there," — Roland muttered, shaking his head as two miners near the cauldron nearly started a fistfight over a dropped crust of bread. — "They have no posture, no concept of ranks, and half of them look ready to bolt over the fence now that their stomachs are full. Are you sure we shouldn't have Carter bring a squad of armed castle guards down into the yard to enforce order on the first day?"
— "If Your Highness sends armored guards down there with drawn spears, those men will stand in line out of fear of the executioner's rope, not out of respect for their officers," — Arthur replied calmly, his eyes tracking the two figures standing quietly at the front of the yard. — "A militia held together by third-party threats will shatter the moment the first Demonic Beast charges out of the snow. For a modern army to work, the recruits must believe that the two men leading them are the deadliest things on the battlefield. Let William and Iron Axe break the wild horses themselves."
Down on the packed dirt of the training ground, a raised wooden platform had been nailed together the night before.
Standing on the left side of the platform was Iron Axe.
The two-meter warrior from the Sand Nation stood as motionless as a bronze statue, his massive arms crossed over his leather tunic and his face completely unreadable as he looked out over the crowd.
Ever since the recruits had finished eating their pork gruel five minutes ago, ugly whispers and sideways glares had been spreading through the yard like poison.
At first, the townsfolk had assumed the giant Mojin standing near the weapon racks was just a hired laborer brought in to haul heavy logs. When they realized he was standing up on the command platform alongside the foreign instructor, the mood in the mud had turned sour fast.
Strolling across the yard straight from his conversation with Anna by the cement kilns, William hopped effortlessly up onto the three-foot wooden platform without even using the steps.
He planted his boots wide, hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his dark pants, and let his gaze sweep across the eighty dirty faces below him.
— "Alright, ladies! Put the empty bowls down on the benches and shut your traps!" — William's deep voice boomed across the open yard, bouncing off the stone walls of the barracks and cutting through the noisy chatter.
The murmuring died down slowly, though none of the men bothered to form proper lines. They simply stood in a loose semicircle, wiping grease from their chins and staring up at the tall young man in the strange, seamless black shirt.
— "First off, welcome to the castle," — William began, pacing slowly across the wooden planks with the relaxed swagger of a heavyweight champion who owned the ring. — "Every man standing in this mud right now passed the physical inspection yesterday. You have two arms, two legs, and no lung rot. As long as you stay inside this fence and do what you're told, His Royal Highness Prince Roland guarantees that your families eat wheat bread every night and your pockets stay heavy with copper."
A few of the starving farmers in the back nodded eagerly at the mention of food and coin.
Then William stopped dead center on the platform, his playful expression vanishing into cold iron.
— "However, make no mistake about why we are paying you," — William continued, his voice dropping an octave. — "You were not hired to dig ditches or sweep the Prince's stables. In less than three months, the Months of Demons are going to hit this valley. And this winter, Border Town is not running away to beg at the gates of Longsong Stronghold. We are going to stand on top of that new stone wall out south, and we are going to slaughter every single monster that crawls down from the mountain."
William extended his left arm, gesturing directly toward the giant warrior standing beside him:
— "My name is William, and by royal decree, I am the Commander-in-Chief of the First Army," — he declared clearly. — "And this man beside me is Knight-Captain Iron Axe, your Deputy Commander. From the moment you step onto this dirt until the sun goes down, his word is law. If Iron Axe tells you to jump, you don't ask why — you ask how high. If he tells you to run into a brick wall, you lower your head and start sprinting. Understood?"
For three full seconds, dead silence hung over the training yard.
Nobody shouted "Yes, sir."
Instead, an ugly, collective scowl rippled across the front rows of local miners and hunters.
Down in the front right cluster stood a bull-necked quarry foreman named Krag — a local bully standing six feet tall with a jagged knife scar across his cheek, flanked by four of his burly quarry buddies and a former caravan mercenary named Rolf.
Krag looked Iron Axe up and down, curled his lip to reveal yellowing teeth, and turned his head to spit a thick glob of brown saliva straight onto the wooden base of the platform.
— "Wait just a damn minute, Lord Instructor," — Krag called out, his loud, raspy voice carrying a sneer as he hooked his thumbs into his rope belt. — "We came up this hill to serve the Fourth Prince and fight for Graycastle. Nobody at the recruitment table told us we'd be taking orders from a filthy sand dog from the southern wastes!"
A loud chorus of rough laughter and angry grunts immediately echoed from at least thirty men in the crowd.
— "Yeah! Tell him, Krag!" — shouted Rolf, the ex-mercenary beside him, puffing out his chest. — "That desert bastard lives in a shack behind the graveyard skinning rats! My grandfather lost an arm fighting southern raiders at the border! I'll rot in the mine before I bow my head to a Mojin savage!"
— "Send the sand dog back to the kitchen where he belongs!" — yelled another voice from the middle of the mob.
Up on the second-floor stone balcony, Chief Knight Carter Lannis immediately rested his steel-gloved hand on the pommel of his longsword, his face hardening.
— "Your Highness, this is open insubordination against a royal appointment," — Carter said coldly. — "Give the word, and I will take four guards down there and hang the ringleader by his heels as an example."
— "Hold your position, Carter," — Arthur said softly without taking his eyes off the yard. — "Look at William's face."
Down on the wooden platform, Iron Axe hadn't moved a single muscle. The Mojin warrior's dark eyes were cold and distant, his jaw clenched tight as he endured the exact same vile insults he had heard every day since arriving in Graycastle.
Beside him, however, William was smiling.
It wasn't a friendly smile, and it didn't reach his eyes. It was the chilling, predatory grin of a man who had been waiting all morning for an excuse to take the gloves off.
Slowly, William stepped down off the wooden platform, his heavy leather boots sinking half an inch into the wet mud as he walked right up to the front row where Krag and his four friends were standing.
Even with Krag being a massive brute by local standards, William stood half a head taller, his broad shoulders filling out his black shirt with dense, lean muscle.
— "Krag, right?" — William asked, his voice remarkably calm and conversational. — "Saw your name on the quarry roster. You swing a twenty-pound sledgehammer all day. And your friend here is Rolf, former guard for the salt caravans."
— "That's right, milord," — Krag puffed out his barrel chest, thinking the young instructor in the smooth foreign clothes was backing down in front of their numbers. — "Look, we don't have a problem with you, Instructor. You're a gentleman of the court. Put Rolf here as your deputy instead of that tattooed stray dog up there, and the boys from the North Slope will work twice as hard for you."
— "Oh, I see. You want to talk about qualifications," — William nodded thoughtfully, tapping a finger against his chin before looking past Krag at the rest of the muttering recruits. — "How many of you agree with Krag here? How many of you think a man from Graycastle shouldn't take orders from a Mojin? Raise your hands. Don't be shy."
After a second of hesitation, nearly forty hands went up across the muddy yard, including Krag's entire group of quarrymen and hunters.
William looked over the raised hands and nodded once.
— "Good. I appreciate honesty," — William said, turning around and walking five paces over to the wooden weapon rack near the platform.
Picking up six heavy oak practice staffs — solid hardwood poles five feet long and as thick as a man's wrist, used for spear drills — William walked back and tossed five of them straight into the mud at the feet of Krag, Rolf, and their three biggest quarry buddies.
The sixth staff he tossed backward without looking; Iron Axe caught it out of the air with one massive hand, the wood slapping cleanly against his calloused palm.
— "Here is how the First Army works, boys," — William announced, raising his voice so all eighty recruits and the Prince on the balcony could hear every syllable. — "Out there on the wall, when a three-hundred-kilogram demonic boar is charging at your throat, it doesn't care which church you pray in or what color your skin is. It only respects strength, speed, and precision. So let's test your qualifications right now."
William pointed a finger at the five oak staffs lying in the mud:
— "Krag, Rolf, and you three big guys behind them — pick up those sticks," — William ordered, a dangerous glint flashing in his dark eyes. — "All five of you are going to attack Iron Axe and me at the exact same time. No rules. Hit us wherever you want. If the five of you manage to knock either one of us onto the ground — hell, if you even manage to stay standing on your own two feet for sixty seconds — I will personally give each of you ten silver royals, and you will never have to salute Iron Axe again."
A collective gasp ran through the eighty recruits.
Five grown men armed with heavy oak staffs against two men — and one of the two wasn't even holding a weapon!
Krag stared at the wooden staff at his feet and then up at William's empty hands, his scarred face twisting into a mix of greed and disbelief.
— "Ten silver royals?!" — Rolf blurted out, his eyes widening at a sum of money that equaled a year's wages in the mines. — "You're serious, Instructor? And if we hit you with these poles, the castle guards won't throw us in the dungeon for striking an officer?"
— "Up on the balcony!" — William shouted without turning his head, raising a thumb toward the second-floor stone gallery. — "Your Highness! Did you hear the bet?"
Leaning over the stone parapet above, Roland Wimbledon couldn't suppress a sharp smirk as he looked down at the five fools about to walk into a meat grinder.
— "I heard it, Commander William!" — Roland's voice rang out clearly across the yard. — "As Lord of Border Town, I witness the wager! None of the five men will be punished for striking my officers during this test!"
— "And what happens when we lose... I mean, if we lose?" — asked one of the quarrymen hesitantly, picking up a muddy oak staff.
William took a slow step backward to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Iron Axe, who had just stepped down off the platform into the center of the yard.
The cold smile vanished completely from William's face.
— "When you lose," — William said, his voice dropping to a quiet, bone-chilling promise, — "you are going to swallow your teeth, press your foreheads into this mud, and call Knight-Captain Iron Axe 'Sir' for the rest of your miserable lives. And if I ever hear the words 'sand dog' come out of a recruit's mouth inside these walls again, I won't use a wooden stick — I'll break both of your kneecaps and throw you into the Redwater River myself."
William beckoned the five men forward with two fingers:
— "Your sixty seconds start right now. Come get your silver."
Seeing ten silver royals practically dangling in front of their noses, Krag and Rolf exchanged a quick, vicious grin.
In their minds, no matter how tall Iron Axe was or how confident this foreign scholar acted, five strong men swinging heavy hardwood poles at once would overwhelm any two fighters in seconds.
— "Spread out! Rolf, you and the boys take the sand dog! I'll put the pretty boy on his ass!" — Krag roared, gripping his five-foot oak staff with both hands like a two-handed maul and charging straight at William's chest, while Rolf and the other three fanned out to surround Iron Axe from three sides!
Around the yard, the seventy-five remaining recruits pressed forward eagerly, shouting and craning their necks to see the officers get beaten into the mud.
They didn't even get to blink before the slaughter began.
Remembering Arthur's strict rule from the night before, William didn't touch a single drop of his Teleportation magic.
He didn't need to.
With Speed 11, Agility 9, and Strength 9 coursing through a body honed by thousands of hours of modern Krav Maga and kickboxing, the charging quarry foreman looked to William's eyes as if he were moving underwater.
Whoosh!
Krag swung the heavy oak staff in a wide, telegraphed horizontal haymaker aimed straight at the side of William's skull, putting all two hundred and twenty pounds of his weight behind the blow.
Instead of stepping backward out of range, William exploded forward inside the arc of the swing.
Moving like a black blur, William ducked half an inch beneath the whistling oak pole, planted his left boot deep into the mud right between Krag's feet, and intercepted the foreman's thick forearms with a double forearm block before the wood could build momentum.
THUD!
To Krag, it felt as though his arms had just slammed into a solid iron pillar.
Before the big quarryman's brain could even register that his swing had been stopped dead, William's right hand snapped up like a viper, grabbing the front of Krag's dirty wool tunic while his left palm drove upward into the underside of the man's jaw with the full kinetic transfer of his hips and shoulders.
CRACK!
Krag's teeth snapped shut with an audible clack that echoed across the yard, his feet lifting two inches off the mud as his eyes rolled back into his head!
Without letting him fall on his own, William pivoted on his heel, hooked his right leg behind Krag's knee, and drove the two-hundred-pound bully straight down into the earth with a brutal Osoto-gari takedown.
SPLASH—THWACK!
Krag's back slammed into the freezing mud with such violent force that a geyser of dirty brown water sprayed three feet into the air, knocking every single cubic inch of wind out of his lungs in a pathetic, wheezing squeak!
Time elapsed: two seconds.
Three paces to the right, Iron Axe was demonstrating why he had survived alone in the southern forests against Demonic Beasts for years.
As Rolf and the three quarrymen lunged at him simultaneously from the front and flanks with their wooden poles, the two-meter Mojin warrior didn't retreat a single step.
Rotating his hips with the terrifying, fluid speed William had admired at the cabin, Iron Axe spun the five-foot oak staff in his hands like a windmill.
CLACK! CRACK!
With a short, blinding thrust of the butt end of his staff, Iron Axe beat Rolf's lunge to the punch, driving the blunt oak tip straight into the ex-mercenary's solar plexus.
Rolf doubled over in mid-stride, his eyes bulging like a landed fish as he vomited up his morning porridge onto his own boots.
In the exact same fluid motion, without pausing for half a heartbeat, Iron Axe stepped to the left, letting the second attacker's wild overhead swing whistle harmlessly past his tattooed shoulder. Bringing the front end of his staff around in a short, snapping arc, Iron Axe cracked the wood across the back of the man's knee, folding his leg sideways, and followed up by slamming his massive leather-clad elbow into the chest of the third quarryman charging from the right!
BOOM!
Hit by the full weight of a two-meter desert warrior, the third man flew backward through the air like a ragdoll and crashed flat on his back into the mud ten feet away.
That left only the fifth man — a tall, lanky hunter who had hung back by half a step, hoping to jab William in the ribs while the instructor was busy dealing with Krag.
Seeing Krag already unconscious in the mud and Iron Axe dismantling three men at once, the hunter panicked, gripping his oak pole with both trembling hands and thrusting the tip desperately at William's throat.
William didn't even turn his full body around.
Pivoting forty-five degrees on the ball of his left foot, William slapped the incoming wooden tip aside with the back of his left hand, stepped straight inside the hunter's guard, and buried a textbook left hook deep into the soft spot right below the man's floating ribs — a classic liver shot.
Thump.
The hunter froze completely.
For one second, he stood still with his mouth wide open in a silent scream as his nervous system short-circuited from the agonizing shock to his liver. Then his fingers went limp, the oak staff clattered into the mud, and he crumpled to his knees, curling into a tight ball in the dirt while clutching his right side and gasping for air that refused to come.
Silence fell over the training yard.
Not the noisy, restless silence from two minutes ago — this was the absolute, suffocating silence of a graveyard.
Up on the second-floor stone balcony, Prince Roland slowly let out the breath he had been holding, a look of genuine amazement crossing his face as he glanced over at Arthur.
— "Did that even take ten seconds?" — Roland whispered.
— "Seven seconds, Your Highness," — Arthur replied calmly, glancing down at the second hand gliding across his wristwatch before tucking his sleeve back down. — "And neither of them even broke a sweat."
Even Chief Knight Carter Lannis, standing behind the prince, had his eyes slightly narrowed in professional respect. As Graycastle's finest traditional swordsman, Carter could have defeated five brawlers with wooden sticks just as easily — yet seeing the terrifying, stripped-down efficiency of William's unarmed strikes, where not a single millimeter of motion was wasted, sent a quiet chill down the knight's spine.
Down in the center of the yard, the seventy-five remaining recruits stood frozen like deer staring at two wolves.
Scattered in the mud around William and Iron Axe's boots, the five "toughest" men from the quarry and the taverns were groaning, wheezing, and writhing in agony without having landed so much as a fingernail on either officer.
Slowly, deliberately, Iron Axe walked over to where Krag was trying to push himself up on his muddy elbows.
Squish.
Raising his heavy leather boot, the giant Mojin warrior planted his sole squarely on the center of Krag's broad back, pressing the bully's chest and face right back down into the cold brown mud while resting the butt of his oak staff on the ground beside the man's ear.
Iron Axe didn't shout, and he didn't gloat. He raised his head and swept his dark, piercing gaze across the seventy-five pale faces standing in front of him.
— "Look closely at the mud on this man's face," — Iron Axe said, his deep, gravelly voice carrying to every corner of the silent yard. — "What color is it?"
Nobody dared to answer.
— "It is brown and gray. The exact same color that will cover every single one of you if you die out there on the snow," — Iron Axe continued coldly. — "Three winters ago, I watched a pack of demonic wolves tear apart a merchant caravan south of this town. There were nobles of Graycastle in silk cloaks, northern guards in iron chainmail, and southern laborers like me. Do you want to know which ones the monsters ate first?"
Iron Axe pressed his boot down an inch harder, making Krag let out a muffled groan into the dirt:
— "They ate the slow ones. They ate the loudmouths who broke formation. And they ate the cowards whose legs shook when they smelled blood," — the Mojin warrior stated, his voice ringing like iron against stone. — "The Demonic Beasts do not care if your blood comes from King's City or from the sands of the south. Inside this fence, under the banner of His Highness Prince Roland and Commander William, there are no miners, no farmers, and no Mojins. There are only soldiers who follow orders, and corpses waiting for the snow!"
Stepping up beside Iron Axe, William bent down, grabbed a fistful of the back of Rolf's dirty tunic, and hauled the coughing ex-mercenary up onto his knees right beside Krag.
— "Well, boys? The sixty seconds are up, and I don't see anyone standing," — William said coldly, looking down at the two ringleaders shaking in the mud. — "A bet is a bet. Unless the five of you want to get thrown out of the castle gates right now without a single copper coin to your names, I believe you owe your Deputy Commander a proper greeting."
Krag spat a mouthful of muddy water and blood onto the ground, his bruised jaw trembling as he looked up at the towering bronze silhouette of Iron Axe above him.
Every trace of racist arrogance that had puffed up the quarryman's chest two minutes ago had been completely beaten out of his nervous system, replaced by the primal terror a weaker animal feels in front of an apex predator.
Pressing both palms flat into the cold mud, Krag lowered his forehead until it touched the dirt in front of Iron Axe's boot.
— "F-forgive my stupidity... Sir!" — Krag rasped out, his voice shaking. — "I await your orders, Deputy Commander... Sir!"
— "We await your orders, Sir!" — Rolf and the other three bruised men quickly echoed from the mud, bowing their heads as low as they could go.
Iron Axe held his gaze on them for two more seconds before lifting his boot off Krag's back and stepping back onto the wooden platform.
— "Get up off the ground, wash the mud out of your eyes at the water trough, and get in the back row," — William ordered sharply, turning his attention to the rest of the stunned crowd. — "As for the rest of you! You have exactly ten seconds to form four straight columns of twenty men right in front of this platform! If a single line is crooked by the time I count to ten, everyone runs twenty laps around the outer castle wall before lunch! Move! One! Two!"
It looked as though someone had thrown a lit firecracker into a chicken coop.
The seventy-five recruits didn't walk; they scrambled over each other in a frantic rush, shoving their bowls onto the benches, grabbing the shoulders of the men in front of them to line up straight, and pulling their chins back while the five bruised brawlers limped as fast as they could to join the rear of the formation.
By the time William reached "Seven," eighty men were standing in four dead-straight columns in the mud, their chests heaving, their eyes locked straight ahead on the platform, and not a single man daring to whisper, slouch, or look sideways at the giant Mojin officer standing above them.
Up on the stone balcony, Roland smiled broadly, tapping his knuckles once against the stone railing before turning to walk back toward his study.
— "Well, Arthur, it seems your friend knows a thing or two about human management after all," — Roland said, genuinely impressed. — "With the two of them running that yard, I don't need to worry about the military anymore. Come on — while William teaches them how to sweat, we need to prepare for the trade envoy arriving from Longsong Stronghold."
Taking one last look down at the yard — where William and Iron Axe were already barking out the first synchronized count of jumping jacks to eighty terrified, obedient recruits — Arthur allowed himself a small, satisfied smile and followed the prince inside.
The poison of old prejudices had been lanced in seven seconds of blood and mud, and the true backbone of the First Army had finally begun to set.