One recruit finally stepped forward, unable to hold back any longer. "Sir, we trained our whole lives with our weapons. Why force us to—"
A punch cut his words short. The officer's fist drove into his face, and the recruit flew backwards, skidding across the snow.
Silence crushed the yard instantly.
The officer's voice rumbled like distant thunder. "When your blade breaks on the battlefield, when your spear snaps, when you are surrounded, exhausted, bleeding, will you stand there waiting for death because the weapon in your hand is not your favourite, or will you pick up any weapon you can find to survive?"
No one dared to answer.
His gaze swept across the rows like a predator. "Out there beyond these walls, adaptability keeps you alive. Complacency gets you buried under the snow." He looked over them all. "Today, you learn to fight however the battlefield demands, not however you prefer."
He nodded toward the soldiers still holding weapons, and they moved down the lines distributing the remaining spears and swords to whoever hadn't yet received one, the recruit who'd been struck down still pressing a hand to his bleeding lip as he accepted his own spear without another word of protest.
After that, he flipped open the scroll. "Assignments begin."
Names were called one by one as recruits stepped into squads destined for scouting runs, defensive rotations, and patrolling. Those chosen for the more dangerous rotations went visibly pale, several of them exchanging uneasy glances with whoever stood nearest before falling into formation, their earlier confidence visibly draining the moment their names and destinations left the commander's mouth. A few muttered quietly among themselves about which squads carried the worst reputations, trading half-remembered rumours about how many recruits from previous seasons had failed to return from certain assignments.
Others took the news with a kind of grim resignation, straightening their shoulders and marching off toward their assigned squads without complaint, having already accepted somewhere over the past several days that complaint accomplished nothing out here.
A minute later, the officer's voice rang out again. "Mo Xuan. Ironwind Barracks. Second-tier outbound patrol. Report immediately."
Mo Xuan stepped out of formation without hesitation, his expression unreadable.
As each name was called, sword users continued to be handed spears, and spear users handed swords in turn, the mismatched weapons feeling strange and unfamiliar in every set of hands forced to hold them. The balance differed from what they'd spent years growing accustomed to, throwing off instincts built through countless hours of repetition. Around him, many recruits looked visibly uncomfortable, some holding the unfamiliar weapon awkwardly, testing its weight with small, uncertain adjustments.
One young man nearly dropped his newly assigned sword, fumbling the grip so badly that a nearby officer barked at him before he embarrassed the entire cohort further.
The Ironwind training grounds were harsher than the barracks. Metal stakes lined the earth at irregular intervals, forcing recruits to watch their footing even in simple drills. Frozen dummies waited with cracked skulls. Recruits swung their weapons across the yard, each strike echoing as impact against wood and straw, carried flatly across the frozen ground.
At the centre stood Captain Jiao. Broad-shouldered, scar-lined, his presence felt like an entire battlefield condensed down into a single man standing still. Faint frost clung to his beard, and a long scar ran from his temple down to his jaw. He tightened a pair of heavy gauntlets onto his hands.
He looked up as Mo Xuan and the others approached. "You are the new ones." He said it flatly, his eyes quickly moving across each of their faces.
He picked up three heavy poles bearing the Ironwind flag and tossed them toward three of the new arrivals. "Carry that until sunset. If you drop it even once, do not come back."
They caught the poles, adjusting quickly to the awkward weight, the flags snapping stiffly in the wind the moment they were raised upright. One of the three, a lanky recruit, stumbled slightly under the sudden shift in balance, but recovered before Jiao's gaze settled on him.
Jiao watched the motion for a brief moment, his expression unreadable, then jerked his chin toward a squad of hardened patrol warriors already preparing their gear nearby. "Fall in. Learn by observing and surviving."
Mo Xuan and the rest joined the squad, the warriors' eyes scanning them from head to toe, cold and assessing. No one introduced themselves or asked for their names; out here, names only mattered once someone lived long enough to be worth remembering. This was the Northern Border. Only strength earned acknowledgement.
Before the patrol assignments truly began, the newly reshuffled recruits spent seven days under Captain Jiao's direct oversight, forced to adapt to unfamiliar weapons in conditions that left no room for complaint.
On the first day, Mo Xuan and the others were made to run without using their cultivation or soul power the length of the training ground with their new spears held overhead, the unfamiliar length of the weapon throwing off their balance every few strides until their arms burned from the effort of simply keeping it steady.
By the second and third day, basic thrusting drills and formation work replaced the running, veteran spearmen barking corrections at every recruit who still moved like a swordsman trying to force an unfamiliar weapon into a familiar shape.
Veteran spearmen corrected every misplaced step with curt shoves, forcing heels into place until the spear no longer felt foreign.
By the fourth and fifth days, sparring began in earnest, spear against spear, each recruit paired with another equally unfamiliar with the weapon, the resulting matches clumsy and inelegant compared with anything they'd have produced with their original weapons.
Mo Xuan lost more exchanges than he won that day, a fact he noted without any particular frustration, simply filing away each mistake to correct the next time the same opening presented itself. One veteran watching from the sidelines grunted to his companion, "That brat learns after making a mistake only once."
His companion merely nodded.
The sixth and seventh days repeated the same brutal cycle, drills bleeding into sparring, sparring bleeding into formation work. The spear no longer felt foreign in Mo Xuan's grip; something had settled into his grip, a working understanding of how the spear wanted to move rather than how he wished it would. His thrusts reached farther than his instincts had initially accounted for, and he'd stopped overcorrecting for a blade's shorter arc entirely, the spear finally feeling like an extension of his arm rather than a burden strapped awkwardly onto it.
At the end of the seventh day, Captain Jiao assigned Mo Xuan to the outbound patrol and others to other posts. He dismissed them without further ceremony, and the recruits filed back toward their tents in near-total silence.
By noon the following day, the squad reached the northern gate. Towering iron doors groaned as they opened, revealing an endless expanse of frozen wilderness stretching out beyond the stronghold's protection. The patrol stepped out. Snow crunched under their boots in steady, measured rhythm. The sky above hung flat and suffocating.
The world beyond the wall felt entirely abandoned by heaven, filled only with silence, wind, and the quiet snow drifting.
They walked steadily, the banner pole strapped across Mo Xuan's back and his spear held ready in hand, every sense sharpened to its fullest extent. His spiritual sense caught every flicker of motion at the edges of his awareness, every shift in the wind's direction, every faint tremor beneath the snow.
Hours passed in that same watchful silence, the squad's formation never wavering despite the monotony of the endless white stretching out around them in every direction. Occasionally, one of the veterans would raise a hand to halt the group briefly, listening for something none of the newer recruits could detect, before waving them forward again without explanation. No one spoke unless it was necessary. The silence itself became another formation—one maintained as carefully as their marching order, forged through countless patrols where a single careless word could mean death.
Hours passed. Snow thickened as the afternoon wore on, visibility dropping steadily until the soldiers ahead of him became little more than dark shapes cutting through the falling flakes, their outlines blurring at the edges every time the wind gusted hard enough to sweep loose snow sideways across the path.
Then he felt it.
A vibration. So faint it could have been nothing more than settling ice shifting somewhere beneath the surface.
Then another. Stronger. Closer.
Without a word, the patrol formed a defensive arc, the formation work from the past week finally proving its worth as spears lowered in near-perfect unison and eyes narrowed against the drifting snow.
The ground in front of them ruptured.
Beasts burst from beneath the snow, leaping upward with snarls that shredded the stillness apart. Ironhide Burrowers, thick plates lined their backs, their claws sharp enough to cut clean through metal, eyes glowing with a feral, hungry madness that promised no hesitation once they closed the distance.
Ten of them surfaced in a rough circle around the patrol's position, cutting off their line of retreat before anyone could react.
The attack came fast and lethal. Captain Jiao reacted first, stepping forward to meet the closest beast in mid-air, driving his gauntleted fist straight through its skull. A sharp crack echoed across the snowfield. The creature dropped to the ground like a boulder released from a great height.
Another lunged at him immediately. Jiao seized its horn, pivoted with brutal force, and slammed the beast into a third one closing in from the side. Snow burst upward in a violent spray from the impact, both creatures tumbling apart in a tangle of limbs and plated armour.