Chương 34: 14-2.Marching, Beacon Fares, and Ancient Ruins

The instant I rode through that torn opening, the cold hit me like a bucket of ice water thrown directly at my face by someone who'd been waiting for this exact opportunity. The warm, oppressive stench of iron that had been sitting on my chest inside the nest vanished instantly, replaced by something emptier, colder, and infinitely less interested in human survival. The northern sky was grey as old bone. The ground was the color of dirty ice.

Distant snowfields and rocky ridges blurred together until the horizon looked like someone had soaked the entire world, crumpled it up carelessly, and flattened it back out without bothering to smooth the wrinkles. The wind had stopped, but that wasn't mercy—it had simply stepped aside, arms folded, waiting to see how long we'd last on ground that clearly didn't want us there. The moment we cleared the nest, the formation stretched out naturally. Forward cavalry took the lead. Supply wagons anchored the center.

Left and right flanks fanned into alert positions. Our three-person unit was guided into the left-forward position—close enough to the main body to receive orders, far enough ahead that Alvira's earlier words were beginning to acquire very concrete meaning.

"The first ones to see something. And the first ones to be seen." This wasn't a position of honor. This was where Fate sent its problem children. I adjusted my grip on the reins, pressing my half-numb fingers back against the leather. Matthews Raven rode in absolute silence on the outer flank, his presence as heavy and immovable as a walking tombstone.

Jessi rode on my other side, uncharacteristically quiet for once, her scarf pulled up against the wind—though the eyes visible above it were still restless, bright, and obviously plotting something.

"What?" I glanced at her.

"Nothing much," she said.

"I was just thinking—the way you straightened your expression when we rode out of the nest just now—" I have a terrible premonition.

"And?"

"You actually looked like a proper young noble." Before I could even process what might have been a compliment, she delivered the killing blow.

"Assuming we ignore the part where the wind immediately made you squint like a kicked puppy." Of course. This woman is constitutionally incapable of producing a complete, unpoisoned compliment. I kept my expression perfectly neutral, turned my gaze forward, and nudged my horse ahead. Snow cracked under the hooves with a dry, muffled sound. The wagon wheels began carving fresh ruts into the frozen road. Behind us, Nest No.

144 was shrinking—collapsing back into that dark iron skeleton embedded in the northern wasteland—while ahead stretched nothing but grey sky, grey-white snow, and a horizon that could be hiding absolutely anything. And precisely because there was nothing visible, it felt like anything could come crawling out. I drew in a breath cold enough to burn and tightened my grip on the reins. Just like that, the column left Nest No. 144 behind and moved deeper into the northern interior.

I would learn soon enough that the real problem was never the departure. It was reaching the halfway point and realizing there was no room left to turn back. When Valdorin had told us this journey would take three months at best and half a year or more at worst, I'd dismissed it as northern exaggeration. Like how old nobles in the capital say "we should have dinner sometime" when they mean "I hope never to see your face again in my lifetime." I was wrong.

Catastrophically, dig-a-hole-and-bury-your-own-face-in-it wrong. Because Valdorin hadn't been speaking figuratively at all. This so-called "border investigation legion" was nothing like the romanticized image I'd carried—hundreds of cavalry charging across sunlit plains with cloaks billowing dramatically, something out of a bard's tale.

The reality was a lumbering Frankenstein's monster of a machine, stitched together from cavalry, infantry, archers, engineers, couriers, and a supply train so agonizingly endless it looked like it would never stop coming. It wasn't fast. You could even call it clumsy. But once it started moving, it possessed a terrifying, grinding momentum that felt like it was dragging the earth itself along for the ride.

We hadn't been marching more than a few hours when I got my first education in how this beast kept itself alive. A courier came galloping hard from the rear, his horse's hooves carrying that specific clipped urgency that means the message can't wait. He passed through the column in sections, dropping orders without stopping.

"ALL UNITS HALT! PREPARE TO MAKE CAMP—!" I looked at the sky. The sun was still there. Tilting westward, yes, but nowhere near what any reasonable person would call evening.

"... We're stopping already?" Matthews was off his horse before I finished the sentence. He dismounted with the clean efficiency of someone who wasn't setting up camp so much as casually preparing to bury a body. The moment his boots hit snow, one hand took the reins while the other had already pulled his entrenching tool free.

"This is standard," the old soldier said, testing the ground with his boot.

"You'll get used to it."

"Get used to what? Eating dinner while the sun's still up?"

"Get used to the fact that if you don't start digging now, you'll spend tonight in the snow regretting you ever survived this long." He'd already found his spot. The shovel went in, and he started moving earth. I sat there for two seconds, watching him work, before the last scraps of my aristocratic dignity quietly abandoned ship. I dismounted.

"What are you digging?"

"Survival trench."

"... And how do you know there's going to be a blizzard tonight?" Matthews paused. He looked at the sky, then at the distant, wind-bleached snowline, then at his horse, which was snorting and shifting with obvious unease. Then he smiled. Just once. Brief. That particular veteran's smile I'd learned to hate on principle—the one that said, Take my word for it, or let your feet teach you the lesson tonight. I cursed internally and pulled out my own shovel.

In the northern borderlands, the greatest virtue isn't courage. It's the willingness to throw your pride in the snow and walk away. I'd barely broken ground when Jessi materialized beside me with the unerring instinct of a cat who has detected fresh trouble. She was carrying her own shovel, the metal reinforcement on her leather armor catching the flat light in cold flashes—though naturally, the first thing out of her mouth had nothing to do with survival. Love what you're reading?

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"Young master, you should dig that bigger." She peered into my shallow excavation with theatrical disapproval.

"Otherwise it's going to be very cramped when the two of us squeeze in there tonight." My shovel nearly ended up in my own foot.

"... Go away. Dig your own."

"So cold-hearted." She curved her eyes into crescents, clearly delighted by my reaction.

"I'm thinking of your wellbeing here. Look how tiny you're making it—if you wake up freezing at midnight, you'll just end up crawling over to me anyway."

"I would rather freeze into a solid block of ice."

"People who make absolute statements usually meet terrible ends."

"Then go share the wagon with Erina," I said, not looking up from my digging.

"Fair warning—Lucas snores. And I strongly suspect he recites ruin analysis notes in his sleep." Jessi's smile froze for exactly half a beat. Direct hit. She clicked her tongue and moved several paces away with visible reluctance.

"You're genuinely unpleasant sometimes."

"The feeling is entirely mutual."

"Hmph." That little huff carried the specific resentment of someone who hadn't gotten what they wanted. She started digging anyway, and watching her work brought an inexplicable sense of relief—the kind that probably just meant: if I actually start freezing to death tonight, at least there's someone nearby whose tongue is sharper than a knife but who probably won't just sit and watch me stop breathing. The legion made camp with terrifying efficiency.

While some of us were still excavating, supply wagons were already unloading cookware and canvas. Windbreaks went up. Fires were lit. Field kitchens assembled themselves from what appeared to be muscle memory. There was no wasted motion, no excess noise—just the numbing efficiency of people repeating a procedure they'd performed so many times it had stopped requiring conscious thought.

By the time my trench reached the minimum standard of "could theoretically house a living person rather than a corpse," cooking smoke was already drifting above the camp. Thin grey threads rising into the sky, catching the last westward light. Like someone had calculated the timing to the second. The sun went down at exactly that moment. I leaned on my shovel, looking at the camp blurred by smoke and failing light, and felt something unexpected: genuine respect for Valdorin von Eberswalde.

She wasn't commanding a march. She was racing the weather itself. And from the look of things, she was winning. After full dark fell, Matthews's prediction received personal endorsement from the northern borderlands. The wind came first. Then the snow. What had been merely cold during the day became something categorically different at night. This wasn't bad weather.

This was the entire wilderness waking up and deciding, without malice but with complete indifference, to remind you that your presence here was a temporary oversight—and the cold was simply nature's way of correcting administrative errors. I looked at my freshly dug trench and exhaled a long, white breath. From any objective angle, it still resembled an incomplete burial site. But given the howling storm outside, I clutched my black bread and the remainder of my dignity and crawled in.

It was marginally less lethal than the open air. That was the full extent of what could be said in its favor. I curled inward, pulled my cloak tight, bit into bread that had the texture of frozen timber, and found myself experiencing sudden, violent nostalgia for the communal stew back at Nest No. 144. At least that had been hot. At least it hadn't felt like eating winter with your teeth.

"Hey." A voice dropped from above. I looked up. Alvira von Rosenberg was crouched at the edge of my trench, watching me with the expression of someone studying a structural failure they'd been expecting. The blizzard raged behind her, snow settled on her shoulders. The cold had pushed color into her pale face—a faint flush across her cheeks, even the tips of her pointed ears touched with pink. None of this made her look any warmer.

"At this rate, the enemy won't need to bother with a night raid," she said, her tone landing somewhere between clinical assessment and personal contempt.

"You'll freeze to death in that hole before they get the chance." I clutched my bread and nodded with complete sincerity.

"Thank you for the forecast. I'll do my best to remain alive."

"Your best is irrelevant." She didn't pause. A small iron tin sailed down into my lap. I caught it with both hands. The metal was cold enough to have come straight from a glacier, the lid bearing rough scratches from hasty tool marks.

"What is this?"

"Horse fat," Alvira said with the delivery of someone reciting a field manual.

"Apply to hands and feet. Before sleep, remove boots and change to dry socks. Sleep in wet footwear, and your feet will be necrotic by morning. Treatment at that point is amputation." I held the tin for a moment, swallowed the first version of gratitude that came to mind, then said it anyway.

"... Thank you." She frowned slightly, as if I'd caused her mild personal inconvenience.

"Don't. This isn't special treatment." She shook the small cloth bag in her other hand. Several identical tins knocked together inside it with a muted rattle.

"Every new recruit gets one." She stood and walked away without another word. I sat in my trench, staring at the tin, genuinely uncertain whether to be more struck by the fact that this military unit delivered survival care with all the warmth of a medical liability notice—or more grateful that someone had thrown supplies at me before my feet actually fell off. The storm continued overhead. I closed my fingers around the iron tin and had the quiet, settled realization that this night was only the beginning.

What people called "a northern march" was going to be considerably less compatible with human life than I had ever imagined. That night was the worst sleep I'd had since leaving House Rosa. Cold air pushed through gaps in the trench in irregular waves. Snow struck my cloak with a dry, persistent hiss—like someone methodically pouring salt over me from a great height.

Farther out in the dark, wolves called across impossible distances, and beneath those sounds, something else howled—something I couldn't identify, something that communicated immediately that identification wasn't advisable. The northern wilderness was black without edges. When the wind moved, even the campfires—those small, stubborn assertions that order existed—flickered like they might be extinguished at any moment. In conditions like these, the mind refuses to rest honestly. I dreamed in fragments.

The long corridors of the Rosa estate. Those half-brothers who wore family shapes like predators wearing camouflage. The lamp beside my father's sickbed, swaying endlessly. His voice, lowered to barely a whisper, as if he feared being overheard by anyone still breathing. Then someone called me back.

"Young master. Time to get up." I opened my eyes to a pair of smiling ones. Jessi was crouched at the edge of the trench, dusted with snow, her nose and ears flushed pink with cold. Her mouth, predictably, showed no mercy.

"You looked absolutely radiant just now," she said cheerfully.

"Pleasant dream?" I pulled half my face into my cloak. My voice came out scraped raw.

"Jessi. It's still the middle of the night."

"Technically it's pre-dawn," she corrected with infuriating precision.

"Courier came through half an hour ago. You looked comfortable, so I decided not to drag you out of your ancestral burial plot immediately. We move in thirty minutes. I'd suggest starting now." I stared at her, too tired to address the burial plot comment. For a brief, irrational moment, I almost regretted leaving the luxury carriage behind. At least then I'd be failing to sleep on something padded, with the last shreds of noble dignity intact—... No.

That kind of reasoning only sounds convincing when it's too late to act on it. I climbed out of the trench with all the grace of something that had been disassembled and reassembled by someone working without proper instructions. Around the camp, figures were already moving—torches being lit one by one, amber light spreading across snow in ragged strips, tearing the pre-dawn dark into sections. Half an hour later, the entire encampment looked like an artificial daybreak. The legion formed up.

Horses were brought out. Wagons re-rigged. Night watch and departing soldiers passed in silence, the exchange as orderly and impersonal as a factory shift change. Nobody complained about the hour. Nobody questioned whether this schedule was designed for human beings. I worked my frozen fingers into my gloves and offered the northern legion's inhuman timetable my most sincere internal condemnation. Four hours later, the sky finally decided to acknowledge morning's existence. We had survived to see the second day.

What followed felt like someone had taken the exact same miserable day, folded it into jagged origami, and forced it down our throats sheet by sheet until we either adapted or choked. Wake up. Form ranks. March. Make camp. Dig trenches. Eat something that was technically hot but philosophically questionable as food. Curl into a ball and endure the night's blizzard. Then wake up again, form ranks again, march again. For nearly a month straight, we repeated this soul-crushing routine.

This season, no bandit with half a functioning brain cell would dare trouble a legion. Even if some creatively suicidal outlaw spotted our massive column—armored riders, archers, and an endless supply train—they'd make the entirely reasonable career choice to find softer, more human-shaped targets. Beast attacks, however, were considerably more democratic in their selection criteria, and far more frequent than I'd optimistically hoped.

They usually happened when some unfortunate soul decided the campfire was only a few steps away and surely nothing terrible could happen during a quick bathroom break. The first man dragged into the darkness didn't even get his trousers back up. After that incident, Valdorin von Eberswalde issued standing orders: nighttime relief missions required pairs. No exceptions. Later, an addendum was attached: everyone carries a stick. The reasoning was quintessentially northern. Not for fighting beasts.

For poking your own dignity when it started freezing solid. When I first heard that military directive, I sat in stunned silence for a very long time. Lucas Ponti immediately clutched his iron staff and launched into a vocal protest about how this was no longer an academic expedition but an active regression of human civilization. Matthews Raven gave him exactly one look and said, with the calm of someone describing weather: "You can go without one if you want. Just don't cry about it later."

Lucas found himself a stick without further argument.