Chapter 1052: Chapter 1052 - Taming the Wall - Leadership - 3
Ren’s leadership skills were growing...
Not dramatically, by a small margin, the kind that accumulated over multiple engagements into something the body noticed before the mind did.
The conversations at the barracks table at night had a component they hadn’t had before: comparisons of angles, adjustments in technique, the kind of technical exchange that happened when a group of people were learning something new simultaneously and each one was contributing what they had found in their own iteration of the problem.
The table had become a workshop without anyone deciding it would be one.
Also nobody had connected Red Pathfinder to Ren Patinder yet.
They had come close once, when someone mentioned the territory name change from Goldcrest and used the new name, and someone across the table said it was a strange surname but alike to one they heard recently, and Garret said it was the name of the tamer who had rehabilitated the territory, and someone else added that was the same one who had manufactured the lances the students used in the lower rings and who apparently also made these bows and made them very well, a genius.
Ren had been looking at his plate with the concentration of someone very interested in the distribution of his dinner.
"The bow guy is you, isn’t it," said Dunn. Now looking at Ren.
"No... I got help from Jessy a lady from the exchange warehouse who handled the distribution," said Ren. "I just connected the channel."
Dunn looked at him.
"Right. A fairly dense management class," said Dunn.
Then looked back at his dinner.
"Yes," said Ren.
The conversation moved toward another subject with the naturalness of conversations that didn’t need to be resolved in order to continue.
Ren kept looking at his plate.
♢♢♢♢
Day 2890 arrived with the inevitability that days had when they had been accumulating something for a long time.
The Mantis reached Gold 1 in the morning, before Ren’s shift at the wall.
Without fanfare, he was still concealing his beasts from those around him. But it was inevitable that some energy would escape, that the people nearby with sufficient sensitivity would feel the signature of a Gold-rank progression.
It was the kind of advancement that came with a qualitative difference that was harder to describe than to feel, not just a number moving, but a threshold crossed.
He finally had all his beasts at Gold.
The perception of speed and angle that the Mantis added to the system settled into another category, more stable, with the solidity of something that had matured rather than something that had grown quickly. The difference between a structure still finding its shape and one that had found it.
The Mantis’s contribution to the whole wasn’t big... But it was cleaner.
Ren noticed it in the first movement he made with his mana, all gold, no silver making a bit of an interference.
Then he stored it, because the wall was not the place to process system transitions contemplatively when there was a shift to cover and a concealment to maintain.
The analysis could wait. The shift couldn’t.
But he couldn’t hide his smile.
The hope the new level brought was very specific: with the Mantis at Gold 1 and the other two beasts at their current Gold ranks, maybe the combination was sufficient for what had failed in the ruins.
Since the last time he had a clearer sense of how much was missing, he had gained three sub-levels, practically one full level if he had been a conventional tamer. Maybe the margin of precision and control the new category added was THE margin, the difference between almost and sufficient required for statues at Sirius’s level.
Maybe.
After that he could go for the remaining unexplored ruins and the rest of the elemental dragons.
But again, that was for after... First was today’s shift.
♢♢♢♢
The morning shift had something different from the start.
Not in the way it had something different when there was more activity than usual, or when the sector was still processing residual energy from an incursion that took time to dissipate.
The opposite difference...
Nothing.
The mutant creatures that normally arrived at the southeast sector with the frequency documented in the records and known by the veterans well enough to recognize in their sleep were absent with that ominous absence of things that should be there and weren’t. Not quiet in the way things were quiet between incursions. Quiet in a way that didn’t correspond to any previous examples.
Ren extended his perception.
Nothing in the immediate range...
Nothing in the extended range...
The territory outside the wall that normally had that texture of distributed presence, the kind of thing a tamer with Ren’s sensitivity could read as "there is activity" without identifying each individual source, was still in a weird way that didn’t match anything in the pattern of recent weeks.
Garret had noticed the same thing in a much smaller radius, without commenting yet, which in Garret meant he had noticed it long enough ago to have verified it twice before deciding it was worth mentioning.
"Are you feeling it too?" Garret asked.
"Yes..."
"What do you think is happening to them? Maybe we have eliminated all of them already, haha..."
"I don’t know," said Ren, serious, not engaging with the light joke. "Yet..."
Garret processed the concerned "yet" with the attention he gave words that had implications that weren’t immediately obvious. Something in the way the word landed told him it wasn’t a dismissal.
But then Ren’s expression changed, the particular shift of someone who had just had an idea connect to something else that had been waiting for it.
Access to the wall’s construction-capable soldiers required captain-level or higher authorization, because they were critical for repairing damage during intense sieges, the kind of resource that needed a controlled request chain.
But Ren already had his small team and Garret’s captain rank, which was enough to use the general mid-level construction workers at discretion for minor infrastructure projects, even if not for the ones directly responsible for the wall’s structural integrity.
Still enough for the experiment he wanted to run.
