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.” Thıs text ıs hosted at 𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹✦𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖✦𝓷𝓮𝓽 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. Terrain reading became part of our daily routine. We studied where frost gathered early, where the wind screamed through cliff passes, and where the moss was thickest on trees. He taught us to listen for the absence of sound. To find running water by smell and slope. Which roots to chew, which berries would make your gut bleed. And every night, we were expected to mark what we’d learned. Each of us carried a small wooden field slate etched with a crude grid. Before lights out, we had to draw a rough map of the area. If you forgot? You redrew the terrain from memory in front of everyone. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Camp drills returned too. This time with fail/pass evaluations based on trench depth, tent alignment, and watch rotation accuracy. A crooked fire pit or a poorly aligned tent could mean a failed mark, or worse, latrine duty with full gear. By the end of the second week, we’d stopped arguing about who lit the fire or who set up the camp. Tasks got done with minimal words. You just knew your role, and you performed it. It wasn’t discipline through fear anymore. Stonegate’s location made every lesson from Tharn feel vital. It stood as the last true bastion of civilization before the northern wilds. Beyond it lay the frozen ridgelands, a harsh, broken expanse of cliffs, hidden burrows, and permafrost. The farther north you went, the fewer trees you found. Pine gave way to bramble, and bramble gave way to stone and ice. The beasts migrated through mountain passes, following warmth, prey, or sheer instinct. Some were chased from deeper wilderness by stronger predators. Others just followed the blood. To the northwest, about fifty kilometers from Stonegate, the treeline of the Untamed Forest began. Thick, tangled, and nearly impassable, the forest marked the edge of the known world. The only military presence in its shadow was Fort Darrow, standing just thirty-five kilometers from our barracks. Darrow was said to be the first line of contact, where Avalon met the wild. North of Stonegate was Frosthallow. What I had once dismissed as “barbarian land” was a real kingdom, harsh, militarized, and deadly. Their border fort, Ironmaw, was a place of legend. It was said that every soldier stationed there was an Initiate or higher class. 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.” 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.