A freezing gale swept down from the dark, jagged slopes of the Impassable Mountain Range, howling across the southern clearing of Border Town like a pack of starving wolves. It carried with it the bitter scent of upturned frostbitten earth, the heavy musk of eighty sweating men, and the sharp, unmistakable tang of burnt sulfur drifting down from the mountain testing pits.
Down in the wide training yard directly behind the newly cured concrete rampart, the rhythmic, synchronized thunder of raw leather boots striking hardened mud echoed off the stone walls like a giant heartbeat.
Fifty paces further down the line, where Master Karl van Bate's masons were reinforcing the wooden artillery platforms, the occasional dry, deafening crack of a flintlock musket being test-fired marked the tempo of the new era Prince Roland was forging in the dirt. It was a rough, industrial symphony of war and preparation—a brutal melody that promised survival only to those willing to bleed for every inch of frozen ground.
Leaning quietly against a stack of rough-hewn timber supply crates near the edge of the yard, a man with a weathered, scar-marked face watched the maneuvers in silence.
It was Trevor, one of the four veteran castle patrolmen who had survived the granary ambush forty-eight hours ago.
At thirty-two years old, Trevor looked like a piece of carved frontier oak. His skin was tanned dark and leathery by decades of biting northern winds, his knuckles were thick and calloused from years of gripping spear shafts, and a jagged old knife scar ran from the corner of his left eyebrow down to his jaw.
Beneath his boiled leather jerkin, Trevor could still feel the dull, persistent phantom ache of the wounds he had taken two nights ago in the drainage culvert beneath the central wheat stores.
They were nothing more than faint, pink lines on his skin now, thanks to the miraculous white light that had flowed from thirteen-year-old Miss Nana's small hands in the castle dining hall. Yet while his torn forearm tendons and cracked ribs had been knitted back together in minutes, the visceral memory of that underground slaughterhouse refused to leave his head.
Every single time Trevor closed his eyes, he was right back in that pitch-black, five-foot-wide stone tunnel, ankle-deep in freezing water and hot blood.
He remembered the suffocating stench of lamp oil and rust. He remembered Patrol Captain Greyhound dropping to one knee with his leather armor split open, and nineteen-year-old Brian slumping against the damp bricks with a broken spear shaft jutting out beneath his collarbone. Outnumbered two-to-one by eight hardened traitors who had taken Longsong silver to burn the town's winter grain, Trevor and Erik had planted their boots in the slime, snarling like cornered badgers as they prepared to sell their lives for a few more seconds of time.
And then, the ceiling had opened up.
It wasn't a fencing match, and it wasn't a knight's duel, Trevor thought, his calloused fingers unconsciously tightening against the wood of the supply crate as his dark eyes tracked the tall, broad-shouldered figure in the navy-blue doublet standing at the center of the yard. It was a force of nature.
In twenty years of patrolling the roughest taverns, mine shafts, and bandit trails in Graycastle, Trevor had never seen a human being move or hit like Commander William.
Without drawing the steel sword at his waist, the young foreign lord had dropped twenty feet straight onto the flagstones and dismantled an elite squad of armored killers with his bare hands. Trevor had watched with his own eyes as a single right cross turned a two-inch oak-and-iron buckler into flying splinters. He had heard steel-reinforced ribs snap like rotten twigs, watched two-hundred-pound veterans get hurled down the passage like straw dolls, and seen an invisible phantom in the dark slit the throats of the arsonists before a single torch could touch the wheat.
More than the terrifying, bone-crushing power in William's fists, however, one specific second from that night was burned permanently into Trevor's soul.
When the traitor spearman had lunged past Greyhound's exhausted guard to skewer young Brian on the floor, Commander William could have easily stepped aside and crushed the man's skull without getting a drop of dirt on his coat. Instead, a highborn scholar who sat at the Prince's right hand had thrown his own body directly into the path of a blade—taking a vicious cleaver slash across his own shoulder just to catch the spear shaft an inch from a common recruit's throat.
Earlier that morning, right after sunrise, Prince Roland had summoned the four tunnel survivors to the inner courtyard steps.
In front of Chief Knight Carter Lannis and the castle guard, the Prince had praised their refusal to abandon their post, awarded each of them ten silver royals, and officially named nineteen-year-old Brian a Knight-Squire—promising that the boy would be the very first commoner knighted in Graycastle once the winter campaign was won.
Trevor had clapped Brian on his healed shoulder until the kid's face turned bright red with pride. For a miner's son who had grown up eating black bread in the slums, wearing polished steel plate and riding under the royal banner of the Wimbledon family was a golden dream straight out of a bard's song.
Yet as Trevor stood by the supply crates and touched the spot over his ribs where his leather jerkin covered Nana's healing work, he didn't feel a single drop of envy toward the boy.
Brian is young, and he's got a clean heart. He'll look good in silver armor standing beside Sir Carter, Trevor mused, his jaw setting into a hard, resolute line as the freezing wind whipped his dark hair across his scarred forehead. Me? I'm an old alley dog. I don't know courtly manners, and I don't care about shiny banners.
All his life, Trevor had fought for two simple things: three copper coins a day to keep his stomach full, and the men standing to his left and right. His loyalty to the royal family had always been a distant, abstract duty.
Now, that abstract duty was gone, replaced by an iron anchor.
Prince Roland was building a grand future of stone walls and thunderous weapons for Border Town—and Trevor respected the Prince deeply for it—yet it was Commander William who had reached into the jaws of hell and pulled Trevor out with his own bleeding hands.
Pushing his shoulders off the timber crates, Trevor let out a slow breath of white vapor and stepped out onto the frozen dirt of the training ground.
Out in the center of the yard, the eighty militiamen of the First Army were currently split into four compact platoons, practicing rapid forty-five-degree formation pivots with fifteen-foot wooden pikes.
Prowling up and down the flanks like a two-meter bronze statue come to life was Deputy Commander Iron Axe. The giant Mojin warrior carried a thick hickory staff in one hand, his cold, yellow-brown eyes catching every slouching shoulder or dragging boot with ruthless precision. Under the military code Iron Axe and William had established three weeks ago, discipline during active drill was absolute. Breaking ranks or approaching the commanding officers without being summoned carried an automatic penalty of twenty laps around the outer perimeter wall with a fifty-pound quarry stone strapped to your back.
Trevor knew the rule better than anyone.
He didn't slow down by a single fraction of an inch.
What he had come out here to say couldn't wait until the supper bell. Inhaling a deep lungful of sub-zero air that made his newly healed ribs pull tight beneath his tunic, Trevor marched straight across the open lane between the first and second platoons, his heavy leather boots crunching loudly against the frost-hardened ruts.
In the front row of the nearest column, Krag—the massive former quarry bully who had had his teeth rattled by William on day one—spotted Trevor walking straight toward the officers and widened his eyes in alarm, making a frantic, subtle hand gesture for the veteran to get back before the Mojin took his skin off.
Ten paces away, Iron Axe stopped dead in mid-stride. The giant hunter turned his broad shoulders, his dark brow furrowing dangerously as his hand tightened around his hickory rod at the blatant breach of field protocol.
Ignoring the stares of the eighty recruits and the looming shadow of the Deputy Commander, Trevor marched right up to the wooden command platform, stopped precisely two paces in front of William, and snapped his heels together.
THUD!
Driving his leather-gauntleted right fist squarely against the left side of his boiled-leather breastplate in a textbook Graycastle military salute, Trevor raised his chin and spoke in a deep, gravelly voice that cut cleanly over the wind:
— "Lord William!"
William, who had been standing with his arms crossed over his chest watching Van'er adjust the elevation of the third platoon's pikes, turned his head slowly.
As his dark eyes landed on the scarred, wind-burned face of the patrolman standing at attention before him, the stern, analytical expression on William's face softened into a sharp, familiar smirk.
He remembered Trevor clearly. Down in that suffocating tunnel two nights ago, while Brian had been down on the floor with a pierced lung and Greyhound had been bleeding out from three different cuts, this stubborn bastard had been using his own bruised shoulder to bash a traitor's shield back, snarling curses through blood-stained teeth and refusing to yield a single inch of brick.
Before saying a word, William blinked once, mentally triggering the [BIOMETRIC STATUS INSPECTION] sub-function he had unlocked the morning before.
To the eighty recruits and Iron Axe, nothing in the yard changed. To William's retinas, however, the gray-and-brown medieval landscape was instantly overlaid by a crisp, neon-blue holographic frame hovering six inches above Trevor's dark hair.
[Target: Trevor]
Strength: 8 Speed: 6 Endurance: 12 Agility: 7 Intelligence: 6
William kept the easy smile on his lips, though behind his eyes, his gamer brain immediately dissected the five floating numbers.
Over the past twenty-four hours of scanning every miner, mason, and guard in Border Town, William had established a very clear baseline for human biology in this world. An average, healthy peasant who swung a pickaxe or pulled a river barge hovered between 5 and 7 across his physical stats, with an Intelligence of 4 or 5 due to illiteracy. Seasoned royal guards or promising recruits like Van'er pushed their best attributes to 8 or 9.
Trevor's Strength: 8, Agility: 7, and Intelligence: 6 already marked him as a solid, reliable veteran—a guy who knew how to read a street fight, keep his footing in the mud, and hit hard enough to crack a jaw in a tavern brawl.
Yet what made William's eyebrows rise by a fraction of an inch was that third line: Endurance: 12.
Twelve?! William whistled silently inside his own head. Hold on a second... even young Brian, who took four blades in the dark and just got promoted to knight-squire, only has an Endurance of 10! And my own base Endurance before I spend my new credits is sitting at 10!
For an ordinary, unenhanced mortal with zero magic and no noble bloodline workouts to walk around with a natural Endurance of 12 was a genetic lottery ticket. It placed this thirty-two-year-old patrolman just two points below a legendary superhuman warrior like Iron Axe himself. It meant Trevor possessed lungs like iron bellows, muscle fibers that processed lactic acid at twice the normal rate, and a bone density and pain threshold that allowed him to keep swinging a weapon long after three normal men would have passed out from shock.
Raising one hand slightly to signal Iron Axe to hold off on the disciplinary laps, William uncrossed his arms and stepped down off the low wooden platform until he was standing toe-to-toe with the scarred guard on the frozen dirt.
— "At ease, soldier. How's the body holding up?" — William asked, his voice warm and conversational as he gestured toward Trevor's ribs. — "I take it little Nana patched you up without leaving any leaks? That girl's got a healing talent that would make the high-level clerics in every RPG I ever played cry themselves to sleep out of pure envy."
Trevor didn't drop his salute, nor did he smile.
Two weeks ago, like every other commoner raised in Graycastle, the mere mention of a witch using magic on his body would have made Trevor cross himself in terror and ask for a priest. Yet after watching a polite, thirteen-year-old girl in a wool dress sit beside a blood-soaked table until midnight to save Brian's lung and knit Trevor's own sliced arm back together without asking for a single copper coin in return, four hundred years of Church propaganda had turned to worthless ash in Trevor's head.
— "An... 'R-P-G'? I ask your forgiveness for my ignorance, My Lord; I do not know that word," — Trevor replied evenly, his dark eyes locked steadily onto William's without a trace of noble intimidation. — "However, my ribs and arm are completely whole, thanks to Your Lordship's fists in that tunnel and Young Miss Nana's gift. Still... with all due respect, Commander, I did not break Deputy Commander Iron Axe's formation in the middle of morning drill just to give you a report on my stitches."
Trevor paused for half a heartbeat, letting the cold wind sweep between them.
Twenty feet away, the rhythmic thudding of boots slowed to a halt as Iron Axe lowered his hickory rod, watching the exchange with quiet, sharp curiosity. Behind him, eighty militiamen craned their necks, wondering why the scar-faced veteran from the castle patrol was staring down the Commander of the First Army.
— "I was wide awake in that tunnel two nights ago, Lord William," — Trevor continued, lowering his voice half an octave so that, at first, only William could hear the raw weight in his throat. — "I saw what you did to eight armored men in the dark with nothing but your bare hands. And I saw how a highborn scholar from the Kingdom of Dawn didn't hesitate for a single breath to take a butcher's cleaver across his own shoulder just to keep a nineteen-year-old miner's son from choking on his own blood."
William's smirk faded slightly, his dark eyes turning serious as he listened.
— "I know His Highness needs every pair of hands on the wall this winter," — Trevor said, his scarred jaw tightening. — "I know the First Army needs riflemen to fire those iron thunder-tubes, and spearmen to hold the trenches. I am ready to train with them. However... I came here today to ask for a different post. I wish to serve you directly, My Lord. I want to be your shadow."
William raised an eyebrow, genuinely caught off guard by the bluntness of the request.
Having spent his entire youth reading action manhwa and playing tactical games back in Brazil, William knew a major character recruitment event when one walked up and saluted him in the face. In the original novel, Trevor had simply been one of the nameless background guards who helped hold the line before fading into the growing machinery of Roland's modern army. Yet because William had jumped into that culvert personally, the butterfly effect had just handed him a die-hard loyalist with a natural 12 Endurance.
— "My shadow, huh?" — William murmured, testing the sound of it as a glint of genuine intrigue lit up his eyes. — "You're talking about personal close-protection?"
— "Yes, My Lord! I am asking to serve as your personal bodyguard and shield-bearer on the front line!" — Trevor declared, raising his voice back up to full military volume so that Iron Axe, Van'er, Krag, and all eighty recruits in the silent courtyard could hear him own his choice without a shred of hesitation.
Trevor finally lowered his right fist from his chest, letting both calloused hands hang open at his sides as he stood straight as a spear shaft before William.
— "I am a rough man, Lord William," — Trevor said, his voice ringing clear and hard off the concrete rampart behind them. — "I don't know how to read or write like Van'er, I don't have a noble family name, and I'm too old and ugly to ever look like a proper knight in silver armor like young Brian. I don't know the first word of the courtly codes of chivalry."
Trevor tapped two thick fingers against the center of his own scarred throat.
— "What I do know is that this breath in my lungs was paid for with your blood two nights ago," — Trevor swore, his dark eyes burning with a fierce, immovable conviction. — "You are a commander who leads from the very front of the mud. While you are crushing the king's enemies in front of you, someone needs to hold a steel shield over your blind spot so you never have to look back. If a traitor's blade or a monster's claw ever wants to touch a single thread of your coat again... it is going to have to rip through my dead body first!"
The declaration hung heavy and sharp in the freezing air of the courtyard.
Nobody in the four platoons laughed at the idea of an ordinary guard offering to "protect" a man who could shatter oak shields with his bare fists. There was such raw, unvarnished grit in Trevor's voice—and every man in the yard knew that a commander's blind spot on a chaotic battlefield was where heroes died.
Looking at the thirty-two-year-old veteran standing in front of him, William felt a strange, heavy warmth expand in his chest—a feeling completely different from the rush of spending System credits.
With an Endurance of 12, William thought with a surge of fierce respect, getting past this guy's dead body is going to be a hell of a chore for anything short of a tank.
Suddenly, a short, booming laugh broke from William's chest.
Stepping forward, William raised his uninjured left hand and brought his open palm down in a firm, comradely slap squarely onto the curve of Trevor's right shoulder.
THWACK!
Even holding back ninety percent of his monstrous Strength: 16, the sheer kinetic weight behind William's casual slap was like dropping an iron anvil onto the guard's collarbone.
The impact drove Trevor's boots half an inch deep into the crusted frost, making his knees flex and his back teeth clack audibly together inside his jaw.
It was a deliberate, unannounced physical check. An average recruit would have been knocked flat onto his backside in the mud with a dislocated shoulder.
Trevor didn't even grunt. Rolling his dense shoulder muscles instinctively into the force of the blow, the veteran exhaled sharply through his nose, locked his core, and absorbed the shockwave straight into the dirt without losing his posture for a millisecond.
— "A personal shield-bearer for the protagonist, huh? Yeah... I think I can definitely find a spot on the roster for that," — William grinned, his eyes shining with genuine approval before the humor abruptly vanished from his face, replaced by the cold, hard iron of theFirst Army's Commander-in-Chief.
William took half a step closer, invading Trevor's personal space until the guard had to tilt his chin up slightly to meet his gaze.
— "Before you celebrate, Trevor, make sure you understand what you just volunteered for," — William said, his voice dropping to a low, bone-chilling register that made the recruits in the front row swallow hard. — "Standing in my shadow doesn't mean holding a banner behind a tent while the militia does the bleeding. Whenever the line cracks, I am going to be at the exact center of the meat grinder—and if you are my shadow, that means you are jumping straight into hell right beside me."
William pointed a thumb over his shoulder toward the dark, mist-shrouded peaks of the Impassable Mountain Range.
— "In a few days, we aren't going to be fighting eight men with iron swords in a cellar," — William warned grimly. — "We are going to stand face-to-face against mutated Hybrid Beasts seven meters long, wrapped in shells harder than granite with tusks the size of broadswords. We are going to wade through packs of giant wolves spitting black, corrosive blood and boars heavy enough to smash down pine trees at a full gallop. That concrete wall behind us is going to be painted red and black before spring. If you want to carry my shield, the drills Iron Axe puts the regular recruits through starting tomorrow will feel like a warm summer nap compared to what I'm going to put you through. I am going to wring every single drop of stamina out of those lungs of yours until you wish you were back in the tunnel. Do you still want the job?"
Trevor didn't blink.
Fear was a natural instinct for any mortal man who had survived past winters on the border; only a lunatic didn't feel a knot in his gut at the mention of a seven-meter Hybrid Beast. Yet burning behind Trevor's dark eyes was a fire that completely overpowered the fear of death: for the first time in thirty-two years, the alley dog had found a cause and a master worth dying for.
— "I do not fear the mountain beasts, My Lord! I do not fear the black blood, and I do not fear the endless snow!" — Trevor rasped, his voice thick with the contained emotion of a battlefield warrior.
Taking one crisp step backward, Trevor didn't just salute.
In a single, fluid motion, the veteran patrolman dropped heavily onto his right knee in the freezing mud of the training yard, bowing his scarred head and planting his right fist into the frost directly in front of William's boots.
He didn't swear his fealty on a silk cushion inside a warm castle hall surrounded by perfume and tapestries. He sealed his oath right there in the frozen dirt and sweat of Border Town, in front of eighty silent commoner soldiers and the approving gaze of the southern desert's greatest hunter.
— "The only thing I fear in this world, Commander William," — Trevor vowed into the cold earth, — "is being too weak to stand as your wall when the storm hits!"
Looking down at the kneeling warrior in front of him, William felt the gravity of the moment settle squarely onto his shoulders.
Slowly, William raised his eyes from Trevor's bowed head, looking past the four silent platoons toward the twelve-foot expanse of dark-gray concrete stretching across the southern horizon.
Back in the main keep, Arthur was currently operating in the shadows—balancing the coal ledgers, calculating ammunition trajectories, and keeping the complex economic machinery of Border Town from stalling. Arthur was the silent architect of their survival.
Out here in the mud and the wind, however, William realized he was forging something equally unstoppable.
Through the blood he had spilled in the dark, the overwhelming strength of his fists, and the unbreakable devotion of men like Trevor, Iron Axe, and Van'er, the First Army was no longer just a collection of starving peasants working for daily copper coins and hot porridge. They were coalescing around him as a true, fanatical brotherhood—men who looked at William not as a temporary foreign advisor, but as an invincible war god worth following straight into the jaws of winter.
— "Then get up off the dirt, Shield-Bearer," — William commanded, his voice ringing out with calm, absolute authority as a single, pale snowflake drifted down from the leaden sky and settled onto the leather shoulder of Trevor's jerkin. — "Grab a heavy shield from the rack and fall in beside Iron Axe. The Months of the Demons are knocking at the gate, and we have a wall to hold."