Chương 278: 57. Dire News 1

Once Three Rivers Fortress found its rhythm, it became genuinely difficult to notice where the days went. Wake up in the morning to someone in the outer camp nearly hurling a wooden bucket at someone else over forage allocation, artillery shelter access, and wyvern water priority — all at once. Midday, the Mages' Guild's "carpenters who also happened to be mages" would be screaming at each other on the transit gate worksite loud enough to suggest they were seriously considering using each other as structural fill.

By evening, I still had to make a trip to the main tent and run through whatever friction had nearly turned into open conflict that day, before small irritations had a chance to fester into something worse overnight. In short: busy. Busy enough that I occasionally wondered whether Olivia and Ignicia had quietly, jointly, and without any formal announcement, converted me into some kind of military utility unit specifically designed to run toward fires.

And it was somewhere in the middle of all that busyness that something finally surfaced — something large, something basic, something I really should have asked much earlier, but somehow hadn't managed to actually put into words until now. It happened that evening. I'd just come back from the Mages' Guild worksite. They'd been at it again — a full round of shouting over whether the southwest outer ring's load-bearing stake needed a second reinforcement ring or not.

One side insisted that skipping it would cause the whole thing to lean; the other insisted that adding it would push back the schedule; and the argument had nearly devolved into "whoever moves their carving knife first loses," which was possibly the most childish resolution to a structural engineering dispute I'd ever witnessed.

By the time I'd finally coaxed everyone back into functioning work mode, I was already carrying a revised diagram someone had shoved into my arms with a "take this to the main tent while you're at it." I set the diagram down on the table. And the question that had been sitting at the back of my skull finally refused to stay there. I looked at the fortress map on the table. Then at Ignicia, sitting off to one side. Then at Olivia across from her.

"Actually," I said, "there's something I still haven't quite figured out." Olivia was reviewing a freshly delivered outer-camp deployment ledger. She looked up at my voice. Ignicia was leaning back in her chair, charcoal stick in hand, already wearing the expression of someone braced for whatever dim question I was about to produce. I cleared my throat and asked it anyway.

"Why, for a campaign this significant, did King Valerian III only send Olivia?" The tent went quiet for a moment. I frowned, because the more I thought about it, the more reasonable the question seemed.

"If you were just escorting grain shipments, or coming to oversee logistics, that would make sense." I spread my hands.

"But surely there should be an actual general somewhere? Even if not some legendary commander — at least someone whose job it is to shout 'Charge!' or 'Advance!' at the critical moment?" That earned two entirely different reactions. Ignicia blinked first. A genuine blink. The kind that meant she genuinely hadn't expected me, in this place, at this hour, to finally be asking the question that apparently everyone else had already long since stopped waiting for me to ask. Then— She laughed.

Not a polite, face-saving laugh. A clean, unsparing, and entirely undisguised you're only just figuring this out now? laugh.

"... What's so funny?" My expression went flat.

"Nothing." She reined it in enough to speak, though the corner of her mouth stayed lifted.

"I just think you're remarkable sometimes."

"That doesn't sound like a compliment."

"It isn't." Right. Familiar. Very on-brand. Olivia's reaction, on the other hand, was entirely different. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! She didn't laugh.

She simply closed her eyes for a brief moment, raised one hand to her temple, and produced an expression that was subtle, controlled, and yet entirely genuine — the particular suffering of someone who has just realized they need to explain something and cannot identify a starting point that doesn't make the other person look slow.

"My lord..." She let out a small, quiet breath, and even her voice carried a trace of something almost helplessly gentle.

"There are times I genuinely don't know what to do with you." The look she was giving me made my skin prickle slightly.

"... Don't make that face first. I have a bad feeling about what comes next." Olivia lowered her hand, looked at me, and spoke with a composure that bordered on surgical.

"You are the supreme commander." I blinked.

"... What?"

"I said," she repeated, enunciating clearly, "you are the supreme commander. Have you truly not realized?" Something in my brain seemed to catch on something for a moment. Not because I hadn't understood. Quite the opposite — I'd understood perfectly, and that was precisely why every instinct I had was trying to reject it.

"But I know nothing about fighting a war," I said, almost immediately. This wasn't deflection. This was a fact. I could read a map. I could follow the logic of supply lines and transit nodes. I understood, at least in principle, why Three Rivers Fortress was only running because a great many people were working themselves to the bone to keep it upright. But that was entirely different from being a supreme commander. I didn't even feel like someone who could lead troops into battle.

Before Olivia could respond, Ignicia snorted. There was even a trace of something unmistakably smug in the sound.

"Which is exactly why we're here." She tapped the eastern theater map with her charcoal stick, and the corner of her mouth curved upward slightly.

"The main front — Alvira and I will handle that." Olivia nodded, as if confirming a division of labor so obvious it barely needed saying.

"Logistics are mine." I looked from one to the other and felt a sudden, absurd sensation. Not because they were wrong. Because they were too right. So right that the "this can't be correct" forming in my head hadn't even fully assembled before reality had already stepped on it. I sat in silence for two seconds, then finally asked the one question that actually mattered.

"... So what exactly am I supposed to do?" I laughed a little at myself as I said it. Not because it was funny — more because when reality has slapped you in the face enough times in a row, you start to genuinely wonder whether you've been placed in the center seat purely for decorative purposes.

"Should I just drag a chair up to the city wall and brew a pot of tea?" Ignicia looked at me and, unexpectedly, smiled. Small, but unmistakable — and carrying a very specific undercurrent of actually, that image suits you rather well.

"Not entirely out of the question," she said, drawing it out.

"After all, until the Blazing Scale Wall is breached, there's nothing for you to do anyway."

"Is that meant to be reassurance or an insult?"

"Depends how you choose to take it." Olivia was even more direct. She didn't hesitate at all before delivering the follow-up.

"If my lord is willing, he's also welcome to assist me with logistics." I looked at her. She looked back at me. Eyes warm, tone correct, manner almost sincere. But I knew perfectly well. If this woman actually pulled me into logistics, the rest of my foreseeable future would consist entirely of ledgers, grain wagons, camp layout charts, and a perpetual mountain of numbers that never quite balanced. In some ways, that was even more terrifying than the front line. I let out a long sigh and leaned back in my chair.

"... All right. I think I understand."

"Understand what?" Ignicia asked. I looked at her, then at Olivia.

"I'm probably not the person who's supposed to shout 'Charge.'""Obviously not," Ignicia answered, without mercy.

"If you ever tried to stand in the front rank and actually yell that, I'd pull you back myself."

"Then what exactly am I?" This time, it was Olivia who answered. Her voice was quiet. But it didn't waver.

"My lord — the artillery corps has its own commander. The longbow companies have their own officers. The infantry columns, the river transport teams, the construction crews: each has someone leading their own section." She set her hand at the edge of the map and looked at me steadily.

"But who moves first. Who falls back. Which unit advances. Which holds. When to shift position. When to open the gate. When to send the dragoons up — the name that goes on that order, at the end, is yours." I didn't say anything. Because this time I had genuinely understood. And precisely because I understood, I could feel the weight of it settling over me, slow and wordless. So there was no shortage of generals. The generals each commanded their own section.

And I was the one commanding the position that connected all of those sections together. I very much wanted to take back the bit about the chair and the tea. Because it was now fairly clear that even if I sat down, the tea was never going to stay warm long enough to drink. The tent was quiet for a moment. Eventually, Ignicia was the one who broke it.

"That said, don't overthink it." She tossed the charcoal stick down onto the table, her tone a shade lazier than usual.

"When it actually comes time to break through the wall, tear open a line, punch through a formation — the front end of that isn't your job."

"For some reason, that sentence did absolutely nothing to make me feel better."

"That's your problem." I was just about to reply when a sound broke in from outside the tent — footsteps, more chaotic than usual, and coming from more than one direction at once. Not just running. More like a large number of people converging on the same point simultaneously. Olivia looked up first.

"The worksite?" Ignicia was already on her feet.

"Test activation. Today." I blinked, and then it clicked. Right. Today was the day of the transit gate's first short-range test activation. I'd spent the past several days at that worksite watching them survey ground, carve runes, fit reinforcement rings, fell timber, press in metal inlays, and scream at each other over load-bearing stakes and phase-channel grooves — and in all that busyness, I'd nearly forgotten that the whole point of it was this. If everything before had been assembling the skeleton of a door.

Today was the day to find out whether it could actually come alive.