Grease-stained linen rustled softly in the shadow of the barracks mess hall as a young militiaman named Tod shoved half a loaf of wheat bread and two thick slabs of salted pork underneath his wool coat.
Hunching his shoulders against the evening chill, the former quarry worker cast a nervous, darting glance toward the stone archway of the courtyard, praying nobody had seen him bulge out his tunic before heading home for his weekly night off.
Thirty paces away on the raised wooden walkway overlooking the yard, Chief Knight Carter Lannis narrowed his eyes.
— "That is the fourth man from the third platoon I have caught stuffing mess rations into his coat in the past ten minutes," — Carter said, his gloved hand resting firmly on the pommel of his longsword as he started to take a step toward the stairs. — "In the King's army, pilfering garrison stores during a winter siege carries a penalty of twenty lashes. If I do not make an example of one of them now, half the kitchen larder will walk out the front gate by midnight."
— "Leave him be, Chief Knight," — a calm, measured voice spoke from two paces behind his left shoulder.
Carter stopped his boot halfway down the first step and glanced back.
Standing under the overhang of the slate roof with his hands tucked neatly into the wide sleeves of his dark-gray wool tunic was Arthur. Beside the strategist, the two-meter-tall frame of Deputy Commander Iron Axe stood as still as a pine tree in the snow, his dark eyes watching the recruits file out through the outer gate.
— "You instructed Iron Axe and me to ignore this last week as well, Lord Arthur," — Carter said, a sharp crease forming between his brows. — "With Commander William away in the mountains, maintaining camp discipline falls on my shoulders. Allowing soldiers to smuggle meat out of the barracks sets a terrible precedent."
— "They aren't stealing from the storage cellars, Carter. They're saving half of the portions served onto their own wooden plates during the week," — Arthur replied smoothly, stepping up to the wooden railing beside the knight. — "Look at where Tod is heading right now."
Down at the end of the muddy lane, the young recruit hurried past the gate sentries and practically sprinted down the slope toward the outer shanties.
— "Tonight, Tod is going to sit down by his family's hearth and pull fresh wheat bread and roasted pork out of his coat while the snow howls outside," — Arthur continued, a faint, calculating smile touching the corner of his mouth. — "His younger brothers are going to smell real meat cooking, and the neighbors sharing the wall of his shack are going to smell it too. Tomorrow morning, how many able-bodied men on that street do you think are going to show up at the recruitment table?"
Iron Axe let out a low, rumbling grunt of agreement across his crossed arms.
— "Four families near the old graveyard asked me yesterday if the Prince was still taking names," — the Mojin warrior said quietly. — "When a miner sees his neighbor's children with fat cheeks in the middle of the Months of Demons, you do not need town criers banging drums in the square."
Carter remained silent for a moment, watching the last group of off-duty soldiers disappear down the hill with suspiciously round stomachs under their coats.
Arthur's quiet "word-of-mouth" tactic hadn't just worked; it had turned the town upside down.
Back during the first enlistment drive a month ago, Roland and William had practically had to bribe desperate quarrymen and starving dockworkers with promises of copper coins just to scrape together eighty men who weren't too terrified of demonic beasts to hold a spear.
This week, the second phase of recruitment had looked like a festival.
The rumor that soldiers in the First Army ate meat every single day, slept in heated stone barracks, and had enough food left over to feed their wives and children had swept through Border Town like wildfire. Not only had the slums emptied out every young man with two working arms, but even blacksmiths' apprentices, merchant clerks, and second sons from the wealthier cobble-paved streets on the eastern side of town had stood in the freezing mud for three hours just to get their names written down.
Out of more than four hundred applicants, Arthur had personally signed the papers that afternoon to bring two hundred fresh recruits into the barracks.
And before Carter could even finish processing that number on the walkway, rapid, slip-sliding footsteps echoed from the castle stair tower behind them.
— "Lord Arthur! There you are!"
Assistant Minister Barov came puffing out onto the covered balcony, his fur-lined hat slightly crooked and a thick stack of parchment ledgers clutched against his chest like a shield. The old bureaucrat's cheeks were flushed pink from climbing the steps, and his breath came out in frantic white clouds.
— "Tell me my clerks made an arithmetic error on the quartermaster's requisition sheet!" — Barov burst out, waving the top parchment in front of Arthur's face without even bothering to bow to Carter. — "Two hundred?! You signed the intake warrants for two hundred additional militiamen this afternoon?!"
— "Two hundred and four, if we count the four wagon drivers from the lumber yard," — Arthur corrected mildly.
Barov looked as though he were about to have a stroke right there on the frost-covered floorboards.
— "Do you have any idea what tripling the size of the garrison overnight does to the royal treasury's monthly balance, my lord?!" — Barov cried, his voice jumping an octave as he tapped a ink-stained finger against his ledger. — "Double meat rations! Winter wool uniforms! Leather boots! Plus weekly copper wages for two hundred and eighty men! Why in the name of the gods are we draining our silver reserves to hire two hundred extra mouths when the wall is already finished and the demonic beasts haven't even attacked the ramparts in four days?!"
Seeing his opening, Carter stepped in from the other side, lending a soldier's weight to the minister's complaint.
— "For once, I find myself in agreement with Minister Barov's caution, though for different reasons," — Carter said seriously, turning his full attention to Arthur. — "Our original eighty men only reached their current level of cohesion because Commander William and Iron Axe drove them to the edge of collapse every afternoon. These two hundred new recruits do not even know how to march in step, let alone load a flintlock musket under fire. Putting untrained civilians on the wall next to veterans doesn't strengthen a defense line—it creates panic when the first monster roars."
Arthur looked from Barov's sweating face to Carter's stern frown.
Neither of them was wrong, based on the information they had.
To an old-school accountant like Barov and a traditional royal knight like Carter, Border Town's only job right now was surviving the winter behind its twelve-foot concrete wall. And for a purely defensive siege against mindless animals, eighty riflemen rotated in shifts was more than enough.
What I can't tell either of you right now, Arthur thought, keeping his dark eyes completely unreadable behind a mask of polite calm, is that our winter defense is already won. These two hundred men aren't being trained to shoot wolves from behind a wall.
They were being recruited to march out through the front gates when the snow melted and crush Longsong Stronghold in an open war.
If Arthur stood on this balcony tonight and announced to Assistant Minister Barov that Prince Roland planned to declare war on Duke Ryan—the supreme ruler of the western region—in less than eight weeks, the old minister would probably faint dead away over the railing. Word would leak through the castle servants within an hour, and half the town would pack their bags in sheer panic.
— "Your concerns are noted, gentlemen, and I have already accounted for both," — Arthur said, his crisp, steady voice cutting cleanly through the cold air. — "First, regarding the treasury: Minister Barov, the second trade caravan from Willow Town arrives by barge at the end of the week to purchase our surplus high-grade iron ingots and fine glassware. The silver from that single contract covers the new military payroll through the first month of spring with thirty percent to spare."
Barov opened his mouth, blinked twice as he ran the numbers in his head, and slowly shut his jaw.
Arthur turned his gaze to Carter.
— "Second, nobody is handing our limited flintlock rifles to raw recruits tomorrow morning, Chief Knight," — Arthur explained evenly. — "Until the new workshop finishes mass-producing firearms, the two hundred newcomers will be drilled by you and Iron Axe strictly in physical stamina, marching discipline, and battlefield logistics. Whenever the warning horn blows, their sole job is to march to the base of the ramparts as a support corps—hauling ammunition crates, clearing wounded, and pre-measuring powder charges so the first eighty marksmen never have to stop firing."
Carter frowned slightly, chewing on the tactical logic of that arrangement. Having two dedicated loaders and supply runners behind every rifleman on the parapet would nearly double their rate of fire without risking a rookie dropping a loaded gun.
— "A dedicated support and logistics reserve..." — Carter murmured, giving a slow, grudging nod. — "That is workable. Provided they stay off the firing step until they know which end of a barrel points forward."
— "I leave their weekday discipline entirely in your capable hands, Chief Knight," — Arthur said, offering both men a polite nod before stepping past them toward the staircase. — "Now, if you will excuse me, Anna is waiting in the rear courtyard. We have a machine to put together before supper."
As Arthur walked down the stone steps and crossed the covered passage leading toward the rear workshop yard, the smooth, unshakeable confidence he had just shown Barov and Carter faded into a deep, quiet frown.
Reaching inside his wool tunic, he brushed his thumb across the cool sapphire glass of his wristwatch.
Five-fifteen in the afternoon.
Once he was out of earshot of the guards, Arthur let out a slow breath that turned into a cloud of white mist in the freezing dusk.
Two hundred and eighty men, he calculated silently, his boots crunching across the gravel path as his Intelligence 14 mind ran the cold, unforgiving numbers of the upcoming spring campaign. Even if every single one of them learns to shoot straight in sixty days, the math against Longsong Stronghold is still ugly.
Unlike Border Town, Longsong Stronghold wasn't a neglected mining camp at the edge of the world. It was the military heart of Graycastle's entire western frontier.
From the tax ledgers and military maps Arthur had studied in Roland's office, he knew the Stronghold sat behind three-meter-high walls of solid cut granite built over generations. If Duke Ryan called up his household knights, the private guards of the Six Great Families, and the city's standing garrison, Longsong could march more than twelve hundred armored soldiers onto the field—including heavy cavalry that could cover three hundred yards of open ground in thirty seconds.
In a classic medieval battle—or even an early gunpowder skirmish—taking fewer than three hundred former miners into a head-on war against twelve hundred seasoned troops was suicide.
And we can't rely on magic to decapitate their command structure either, Arthur reminded himself grimly.
Two weeks ago, when he and William had first discussed how to handle Duke Ryan, William had casually suggested sending Nightingale into Longsong Stronghold to slit the Duke's throat in his sleep.
Nightingale had shot that idea down in five seconds flat.
Every major lord and wealthy family in the Four Kingdoms knew witches existed, and the paranoid ones bought insurance. By making "generous annual donations" of gold royals to the Church of Hermes, powerful nobles like Duke Ryan acquired God's Stones of Retaliation to wear under their collars and hang above their bedposts. If Nightingale walked into a bedroom protected by a Church medallion, her Mist World would collapse instantly, leaving her trapped in the middle of fifty elite guards.
That meant Border Town had to beat Duke Ryan's army the hard way: in the open field, steel against steel, lead against iron.
Yet as Arthur approached the glowing brick chimneys of the backyard workshop, he was honest enough with himself to admit two massive problems sitting right in their own camp.
The first problem was Arthur himself.
Back on Earth, he had managed corporate departments, analyzed supply chains, read dozens of military history books, and sunk thousands of hours into grand strategy games. On paper, he knew how Napoleon used artillery and how nineteenth-century logistics worked.
Paper, however, didn't bleed.
Arthur had never once stood on a real battlefield while iron cannonballs tore men in half, horses screamed in the mud, and smoke blinded the horizon. As the granary tunnel incident had painfully taught him a week ago, when chaos broke loose in real time, a spreadsheet couldn't swing a sword.
And the second problem was the exact flip side of that coin: William.
Arthur stopped just outside the wooden doors of the new machinery shed, glancing back toward the distant silhouette of the southern defensive wall.
Ever since William had jumped off that parapet on a rope and beaten two monstrous hybrid beasts to death with his bare fists in front of the entire garrison, something dangerous had happened to the morale of the First Army.
They weren't afraid anymore.
In fact, they were far too relaxed.
Whenever Arthur walked past the firing line during morning inspections, he didn't see the tight, nervous focus of citizen-soldiers fighting for their lives; he saw young men laughing, bragging about how many wolves they were going to bag, and treating the winter siege like a hunting game because they believed their "Lord Commander" was an immortal god of war who could fix any mistake with his fists.
Complacency is a killer, Arthur thought, his jaw tightening. Shooting slow, predictable animals from the top of a twelve-foot wall is target practice. When Duke Ryan's warhorses charge through musket smoke while crossbow bolts rain out of the sky, blind faith in William won't stop a panicked recruit from dropping his ramrod.
Since Arthur wasn't a battlefield tactician, and since he couldn't rely on three hundred green soldiers holding their nerve in a close-quarters melee against a thousand knights, there was only one solution.
He had to make sure the enemy never got close enough for a melee in the first place.
He needed to put a weapon on that field so loud, so destructive, and so utterly terrifying that it would shatter the medieval army's spine from half a mile away before a single knight could even draw his sword.
He needed modern rifles—and above all, he needed field artillery.
Pushing open the heavy timber door of the backyard shed, Arthur stepped inside out of the wind.
A wave of dry, metallic heat washed over his face, accompanied by the low, rhythmic hiss of coal fire and the sharp smell of hot machine oil.
Sitting right in the center of the stone floor, bolted down onto a massive foundation of cured gray concrete, rested the true heart of Border Town's survival: Steam Engine Version II.
Even at a single glance, the difference between this machine and the crude, leaky prototype they had thrown together two weeks ago was night and day.
The first engine had looked like a patchwork monster—held together by crooked iron rivets, clumsy hammer marks, and linen-and-tallow rags stuffed into the joints to keep the steam from blowing the lid off.
Version II looked like a genuine piece of nineteenth-century industrial machinery.
The thick cylindrical boiler and the heavy cast-iron piston housing gleamed with a smooth, uniform dark-gray finish. There were no jagged weld seams or bubbling slag pits anywhere along the pressure chamber.
Standing beside the main drive shaft with her sleeves rolled up past her elbows and a smudge of black soot across her nose was Anna.
The eighteen-year-old witch had her right hand extended two inches from the base of a heavy brass valve fitting. Now that she understood atomic vibration and had passed her Day of Awakening without a scratch, her control over her fire had reached an astonishing level. Instead of a wide orange flame, a needle-thin jet of pale emerald fire no wider than a quill tip hissed from her index finger, penetrating deep into the microscopic gap between the two metal plates to fuse the iron together from the inside out.
Arthur stood quietly by the door until Anna closed her fingers, extinguishing the green jet as the seamless joint cooled from white-hot to dull gray.
— "Good evening, Mr. Arthur," — Anna said, turning her head with a small, calm nod as she wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. — "The final seal on the high-pressure intake pipe is finished. Not a single wisp of steam will leak through that joint now."
— "Looking at that weld, I'd say you just put every master blacksmith in King's City out of a job, Anna," — Arthur said, stepping over to the workbench with a genuine smile before glancing up at the top of the engine assembly. — "And how is our new mechanical brain behaving?"
Anna's clear blue eyes lit up with that quiet, unmistakable spark of pride that only appeared when they talked about physics and machinery.
She pointed a soot-stained finger toward a strange, vertical contraption mounted directly above the main steam valve.
Connected to the engine's spinning flywheel by a leather drive belt was an upright iron spindle. Hinged to the top of that vertical rod were two scissor-like metal arms, each ending in a solid, fist-sized sphere of cast iron.
To any medieval peasant or castle guard who peeked inside the shed, it looked like a bizarre iron weathervane or a child's spinning toy.
To Arthur and Roland, it was the single most important invention of the Industrial Revolution: James Watt's centrifugal governor.
— "His Highness tested the linkage with me twenty minutes ago," — Anna explained, her voice steady and crisp as she traced the mechanical path in the air. — "It works exactly as the two of you calculated. Earlier, when the fire under the boiler burned too hot and the flywheel started spinning too fast, centrifugal force threw the two iron spheres outward and upward. As the arms rose, they pulled the sliding collar up the rod and automatically partially closed the throttle valve, cutting the steam flow until the speed dropped back to normal."
She shifted her finger downward.
— "And when the pressure dipped and the wheel slowed down, gravity pulled the two iron balls back toward the spindle, opening the valve wider to feed more steam into the cylinder."
Anna looked back at the iron spheres with genuine wonder in her eyes.
— "We don't need a worker standing here with his hand on the lever anymore, Mr. Arthur," — she said softly. — "As long as there is coal in the firebox and water in the tank, the engine regulates its own speed without human hands."
An automatic negative-feedback loop, Arthur thought, nodding in deep satisfaction as he reached out to touch the warm brass linkage.
Without a governor, a raw steam engine was wild and erratic—fine for pumping dirty water out of a mine shaft, where uneven strokes didn't matter, yet useless for precision manufacturing. If a cutting tool spun too fast one second and stalled the next, it would snap the iron bits in half and ruin every part on the bench.
Now, with Version II maintaining a rock-steady revolutions-per-minute count all by itself, they could finally move to step two.
Arthur walked five paces across the stone floor to the long, heavy oak timber frame that Master Karl's carpenters had bolted onto the concrete slab next to the engine.
Laid out across the workbench beside the frame was a row of newly cast iron gears, drive shafts, and heavy clamping brackets delivered from the castle smithy an hour earlier.
Picking up one of the toothed gear wheels, Arthur turned it over in his hands and let out a dry, quiet chuckle.
By twenty-first-century standards, the gear was a war crime against metallurgy. The teeth were slightly uneven, the cast iron was full of tiny air pockets, and any modern factory inspector on Earth would have tossed the whole batch straight into the scrap bin.
Yet after Anna had spent the morning using her high-temperature fire to heat-treat the surfaces, smooth out the worst burrs, and coat the iron in boiled linseed oil to stop rust, these ugly medieval gears were strong enough to change the way wars were fought on this continent forever.
Setting the gear into the housing box at the head of the timber frame, Arthur looked toward the open doorway where two castle guards stood on duty.
— "Bring the heavy iron bar stock in from the cart," — Arthur called out. — "And fetch Prince Roland from his study. Tell him the boring mill is ready for its first cut."
Ten minutes later, the heavy wooden doors of the shed were pulled shut against the evening snow, and Roland stepped eagerly up to the bench, his royal tunic already stained with charcoal dust from his afternoon drafting.
Locked tightly into the iron clamps on the right side of the oak frame was a solid, unpierced cylinder of high-grade forged steel, four feet long and two inches thick. Facing the center of that solid steel bar, connected directly to the steam engine's flywheel through the new reduction gears, was a hardened, fluted drilling rod tipped with high-carbon tool steel that Anna had tempered to maximum hardness.
— "Everyone step back two paces from the lathe bed," — Roland ordered, his gray eyes gleaming in the lantern light as he reached for the main clutch lever. — "Anna, give me a steady four hundred degrees under the main boiler!"
Stepping up to the brick firebox, Anna extended both hands and sent a smooth, continuous sheet of green-orange fire roaring beneath the water drum.
Within three minutes, the pressure gauge needle climbed into the working zone.
Roland threw the iron clutch lever forward.
CHUG—SHHHHH—CLACK! CHUG—SHHHHH—CLACK!
Steam roared through the copper intake pipes. The massive five-hundred-pound flywheel groaned, turned half a revolution, and quickly picked up speed. Above the valve box, the two iron spheres of the centrifugal governor began to spin like a blur, rising smoothly outward until they locked the engine into a steady, rhythmic, unstoppable thrum that vibrated right through the soles of Arthur's leather boots.
Turning the handwheel on the side of the oak frame, Roland slowly cranked the spinning steel drill bit forward until its hardened tip met the center of the solid iron cylinder.
SCREEEEEEE—SHHHHHK!
A high, metallic screech echoed through the shed as the steam-driven bit bit straight into the cold steel.
Roland poured a thin stream of lard oil over the contact point from a tin can. Smoke hissed up in a white curl, and then—smoothly, relentlessly, without a single stutter of the flywheel—long, bright silver curls of shaved steel began to spiral out from the center of the solid bar, dropping onto the stone floor with a soft clink.
Standing beside the bench with his arms folded, Arthur watched those silver ribbons of steel pile up with a cold smile of pure triumph.
Up until five minutes ago, making a single musket barrel in Border Town had been an agonizing bottleneck. A local blacksmith had to take a flat plate of iron, heat it in a coal forge for hours, and hammer it by hand around an iron rod to weld the seam shut. It took a skilled smith three full days to hammer out one barrel—and because hand-welded seams always had hidden weak spots, one out of every four barrels cracked or blew up during test firing.
This machine turned that entire process on its head.
Instead of wrapping flat metal around a hole, they simply cast a solid bar of seamless steel and let the steam engine bore a mathematically straight hole right down the middle.
With this single horizontal drill running twelve hours a day, Border Town could turn out fifteen flawless, seamless gun barrels every single day.
Even better, once the smooth hole was bored through, all they had to do was swap the drill head for a hooked cutting bit that rotated slowly as it pulled back through the tube—carving spiral grooves into the inside wall of the barrel.
Rifling, Arthur thought, watching the machine chew through another inch of steel as if it were soft pine wood.
A smoothbore flintlock musket was only accurate to eighty or a hundred paces before the round lead ball started wobbling in the air. A rifled barrel spun the bullet like a top, doubling the effective range to two hundred and fifty paces.
And sitting on the floor in the back corner of the shed, resting on heavy wooden rollers, was the next job waiting for this exact same boring machine: three thick, six-hundred-pound solid bronze and cast-iron cylinders nearly five feet long.
Cannon barrels.
— "Look at the stability on that spindle, Arthur!" — Roland had to shout over the rhythmic chugging of the piston and the hiss of the drill, his tired face lit up like a boy's as he checked the brass calipers against the shaft. — "Zero wobble! Once we mount the larger boring head on Friday, we can hollow out the first six-pounder field cannon in two days flat!"
Arthur nodded, stepping closer to inspect the clean cut.
In his mind, he could already see the spring battlefield outside Longsong Stronghold.
Let Duke Ryan march a thousand armored men and six noble banners out onto the plain. Let his knights polish their shields and hang God's Stones around their necks.
Before those knights even got within five hundred yards of Border Town's infantry line, a battery of six-pounder rifled cannons would open fire with explosive shells and canister shot. No superstitious feudal soldier on this continent had ever heard the roar of an artillery barrage, and no shield wall in history had ever stayed standing when solid iron balls started bowling through ten ranks of men at a time.
The industrial machine was finally shifting into high gear. They had the concrete wall, they had the two hundred and eighty men, they had the governor, and within a month, they would have the rifles and the cannons.
Yet as Roland turned back to adjust the oil drip and Anna crouched down to feed another shovelful of coal into the firebox, Arthur's gaze drifted away from the spinning iron gears toward the high, narrow glass window of the shed.
Outside the steamed-up pane, the last bruised purple light of dusk had vanished completely, swallowed by the howling white darkness of the northern blizzard.
Unconsciously, Arthur reached into his tunic and touched the bezel of his watch again.
Six days, he thought, a tiny, persistent knot of tension tightening behind his ribs despite the warmth of the workshop. When are you going to walk back through that gate, Will?
Before William had marched off into the snow with Nightingale, the two of them had shouted some ugly, bitter things at each other in that third-floor hallway. William had called him a cold-blooded coward who treated living people like numbers on a spreadsheet; Arthur had called him a reckless idiot who had wasted their strategic credits on personal muscle.
Even after the granary ambush had forced Arthur to swallow his pride and admit that William's strength had saved their lives, the two of them hadn't had a chance to properly clear the air before William left for the Impassable Mountain Range.
Strategically speaking, Arthur knew how much rode on William's trip.
If everything went according to the original timeline's pattern, bringing Nightingale back alongside Wendy and Lightning would hand Border Town two priceless assets. Lightning could fly high above the clouds where no arrow could reach, acting as a living reconnaissance satellite to track every troop movement out of Longsong Stronghold; and Wendy's wind manipulation could drive river barges, ventilate deep mine shafts, and scatter enemy arrows.
More than that, watching Anna fuse steel joints with her bare hands right in front of him made a much hungrier ambition burn in the back of Arthur's mind.
Coal and iron alone took Earth two hundred years to master, Arthur reflected, watching the emerald reflection of Anna's fire dance across the spinning iron balls of the governor. Here, a single witch's power can skip fifty years of metallurgy in an afternoon. If Will actually managed to talk sense into that camp and brought back a dozen witches with different abilities—or even half the Association—our production capacity wouldn't just grow. It would explode.
Still, underneath all the cold calculations about troop numbers, factory output, and reconnaissance witches, the quiet worry tapping against the back of Arthur's skull wasn't about logistics at all.
Up on those freezing northern peaks, surrounded by blizzards, hybrid monsters, and a fanatical cult leader like Cara, his hot-headed best friend was out there without artillery, without an army, and without Arthur there to stop him from kicking down the wrong door.
— "Don't do anything stupid up there, partner," — Arthur murmured under his breath, his voice completely drowned out by the roar of the steam engine and the shriek of hardened steel cutting into the future.
There were still nearly two months of ice and snow left before spring broke across the western frontier. As long as the chimneys of Border Town kept smoking and William made it back down that mountain alive, Duke Ryan and the old world wouldn't know what hit them.