The camp felt different now.
The announcement of the county-wide rankings had lit a new fire under the recruits. Everyone, including me, had their eyes locked on one number: 100. The top hundred would go to Fort Darrow. That meant faster leveling of our classes, better resources for cultivation, and, if we made it, maybe even a comfortable retirement.
But we weren’t ranked by sparring victories or who looked the most impressive swinging a weapon. We were rated on how well we performed our actual duties. Drills, formations, endurance runs, sentry rotations, logistical assignments, everything that made a soldier, not a duelist or knight competing for noble approval.
After all, we were being shaped into soldiers, not champions of a tournament.
Sergeant Tharn didn’t care about scores. What he did care about was survival.
In the first week, he began weaving survival training into our regular routines. The morning runs didn’t stop. The marching drills remained. But now, between those familiar demands, we were learning wilderness survival. Quick, brutal lessons delivered with a sharp tone and no room for error.
“If you trip in the dark, you die.”
“If you camp in the wrong direction, you freeze.”
“If your fire attracts beasts, you bleed.”
He didn’t raise his voice like Varik had. He didn’t need to. The way he spoke made the lessons stick deeper.By week two, we were outside the walls again, but not for a single overnight drill like before. This time, we stayed in the wilds for nearly two full weeks.
Drills continued as normal: formations, footwork, and weapon basics. But they were wrapped in survival training.
We were taught how to set snares using wire loops or sharpened sticks. We learned to identify predator behavior in broken tracks and brush patterns. One morning, Tharn pointed to a set of prints and asked what was wrong. Only one recruit noticed the double-back trail, a predator circling prey.
Our own final northern post was Dunvale Fort, an elite crag fortress that sat like a crown on the kingdom’s edge. Most soldiers never even dreamed of seeing it.
But it was the west that finally made Tharn make sense.
One of my weekend trips to the city library brought me to a dusty old surveyor’s ledger. Inside were the topographical records of the Broken Highlands, the Western Front.
It was worse than I’d imagined. Sheer cliffs, fractured plateaus, and sudden ravines that swallowed whole caravans. The weather there didn’t change; it attacked. Wind so sharp it tore canvas, rain that froze mid-fall, and creatures that moved like ghosts across the jagged terrain.
That’s where Tharn had trained.
The book named the Duke of that region: Severian Morthas Vallentis, a former general of King Rex Magnus Aurellius and one of the kingdom’s few Tier Seven-class holders. A man feared not just for his skill, but for his Death Affinity. It all made sense now, the scars, the silence, the bone-deep practicality.
One night, during a quiet watch shift, I turned to Leif.
“You notice how Tharn doesn’t shout like Varik?”
Leif gave a slow nod. “Doesn’t have to. When someone says, ‘Dig your trench or freeze,’ you don’t argue. You dig.”
He was right.
The pressure wasn’t loud anymore. It was constant, like wind or hunger. Tharn didn’t push us with fear. Nature did that all on its own.
And through all of it, I kept studying.
Every rest day, I returned to the library. I memorized stream routes, trade paths, migratory flows. Learned where the rivers flowed from the northern peaks, how they forked west toward the forest or curved south into farmland. Every fort was built atop natural defenses, cliffs, rivers, and hills. Every one of those placements meant something. If I could understand the terrain, I could understand the war we were being trained for.
I wasn’t the fastest. Wasn’t the strongest.
But if knowledge gave me even one more way to survive, I would take it.