Chapter 29 (Patreon)

Harold ran.

The forest path blurred beneath Harold's boots, crushed leaves and packed earth flying by. Heat clung to his shoulders, but he pressed forward, each breath in sync with the mana flowing through his channels. The technique Hale had drilled into him lived in his muscles as surely as the sword at his hip. His will set, and his body answered.

Behind him, his expanded guard kept formation without speaking. Eight had become sixteen over the last months; the additional eight were chosen from the knights for their skill with mana and their chosen weapons. All were Tier 1, except for two who were Tier 2 Knights, based on Hale’s ranking guidelines. They ran with the same long stride. Armor was stripped to the lightest practical configuration, shields slung across their backs. The sound of them followed him in a steady cadence: boots striking soil, leather creaking, breath measured and disciplined. No one called for a slower pace.

The distance that had once taken more than an hour on foot collapsed before him.

He pushed harder.

Mana responded instantly. He drew it inward, then drove it into his legs in a controlled surge. The world narrowed to the path’s line and the pull of motion. Roots and stones resolved and vanished beneath him as if the forest yielded. Cold air sliced through the heat rising from his skin. Sweat soaked the linen under his leather armour, then cooled just as quickly.

He knew the measure by now. He had run through these woods so many times that his lungs and legs seemed to keep the time for him, each familiar ache marking progress. The memory of collapsing at the finish, bent and shaking, flashed through him as he vaulted a half-hidden root—but now the burn only sharpened his stride. Heat bit his shoulders, sweat trickled, and the old exhaustion was just another marker. The drills, the lean rations, hours in armor, and mornings slicing the air alone with sword and shield had all carved away what was soft. The weaponmaster’s silent stare had pressed him forward as surely as the weight of his own will. He pushed harder, feeling both the memory and the muscle answer.

The softness he had carried from Earth was gone, replaced with something closer to what he had gained in his latest years here. Just in an infinitely healthier way. Nothing worth having was ever easy.

A knight was expected to fight without a wall beside him.

So he had learned.

Alone in the practice ring at dawn and again in the rising light, repeating the same sequences until his arms trembled and his vision blurred, until the only thing left in him was the will to lift the blade one more time. He wasn’t using mana, and the dammed trainer didn’t care how tired he was. Many times, Harold cursed, ever summoning the man from the portal as he was corrected and heard the word he had come to hate.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Harold welcomed the exhaustion when it came.

It stripped away the edges of memories that lurked whenever he lingered. The scald of the cauldron. The stench of iron and burning flesh. The burden of decisions that never stopped reverberating. When he drove his body to its limit, there was no space left for them. Pain numbed in his limbs, settling deeper until it flattened into a distant throb. Effort, elemental. He thought: This pain, at least, was rational. It let him sift through the memories. Some didn’t sear as they once did. Time and effort dulled the edges.

Run. Breathe. Stride.

For ten minutes at a time, he could exist without the past. And for ten minutes more, he could delay thinking about Sarah.

He lengthened his stride, mana flaring through his legs again. The trees thinned as the ground began to rise toward the ridge where the scout program had its encampment. He knew the terrain now. There was the shallow dip where rainwater gathered, the fallen cedar that forced the path to bend, and the open ground where the wind always cut from the west.

Four months in Gravesend.

Three months of this.

He had grown stronger than ever on Earth. In some ways, he was stronger than in his first life here. Still, as the rise ahead signaled the camp’s approach, his hand found the hilt at his side, gripping it hard enough to bite leather into palm. The even rhythm of his breathing faltered for a beat, breath catching as anticipation crawled into his lungs. No amount of training could burn away his fear of what was coming.

She had done what he had told her not to do, but she had also succeeded in a task he told her to do.

The Landing needed adventurers who followed orders. It needed leaders who were not seen to bend the law for blood. It also needed people who would push for more. Some just wouldn’t allow themselves to fall into the order he was building. He had to make a place for them and give them freedom to operate under the shadow of the Landing.

He drove himself faster, as if speed alone could outrun the inevitability of it.

Ahead, the first signs of the encampment appeared between the trees—cut lines where underbrush had been cleared, the faint glint of watch points set high in the branches, a strip of smoke rising straight into the still air.

His guard closed the distance behind him without being told, their formation tightening as the run came to its end.

Harold did not slow until the final stretch, until the ground leveled and the perimeter markers came into full view. Only then did he let the mana cycle ease, his pace dropping from a sprint to a hard jog and finally to a walk that still carried the momentum of the run through his body.

His heart hammered against his ribs. Sweat ran in cold lines down his back. The world felt sharp and clean.

For a few breaths more, there was only the afterglow of effort and the steady rhythm of his pulse.

Then he saw her.

And the weight he had held at bay for ten minutes came down all at once.

The encampment resolved out of the trees in clean, practiced geometry. Low shelters stood where the ground sloped for drainage. A cook fire was dug into a shallow pit to keep the smoke thin. Lines of gear lay stacked in the same direction. Observation platforms rode high in the branches with their rope ladders pulled up. Someone had run a ditch along the western edge and lined it with sharpened stakes cut from green saplings.

It was good work.

He registered all of it in a single sweep, the way Hale had taught him—

—and then Sarah stepped into view, and the rest of the camp fell away as if it had never been there.

She stood near the edge of the cleared ground with the other graduates, bow unstrung in her hand, hair tied back in a rough knot that had half-come loose. Her stance had changed into something both more confident and more cautious. The restless motion she used to carry in every limb had been burned down into something more subtle.

Someone on the perimeter saw him and snapped upright.

“Hail the Lord of the Landing!”

The call carried, picked up by another voice and then another. Boots shifted. Backs straightened. The easy sprawl of a training camp vanished into formation by instinct more than command, and Elroy and Jenkins giggling behind him.

Harold didn’t hear any of it. He was already looking at her.

Her head turned at the first shout, and their eyes met across the open ground.

For a heartbeat, he saw her as she had been—mud on her boots back on Earth, laughing at something stupid he had said, all sharp edges and impatience. A thousand small memories of their time here together. When they escaped from their original village and survived on their own. Their amazement as they began to explore this world and its sights. How alive they felt when they found a new place or looked up to see some monster soaring gracefully above them. The blood and anger on her face when she saved him from a Velthari raid. Her disappointed look when he told her that he was quitting adventuring to be with his wife.

Then the present forced its way back in.

She had grown leaner and harder. The same months that had carved him had changed her, too. These past eight weeks have been hard on her. There was a new stillness in her, and he held the gaze.

So did she.

Everything else—the lines of scouts, the approach of his guard, the figures moving toward him from the command shelter—became distant and unreal, as if he were watching them through water.

He prepared for the conversation, feeling the weight of the orders he had given her and the punishment he had decided. Each word felt hesitant, hovering at the edge of his thoughts, as he struggled between authority and regret.

The memory of her walking away from him the last time, with that set to her jaw that had always meant she had already chosen her own path.

They both looked away at the same time, and the spell broke.

Harold drew one steady breath and let it out through his nose. The weight settled back onto his shoulders, familiar and heavy and necessary.

The Lord of the Landing stepped forward in his place.

“At ease,” he called, voice carrying cleanly across the clearing. “If you lock up every time I show up, Captain Hale’s going to start drilling me, too.”

The tension cracked. A few of the scouts let out short, relieved laughs as their stances loosened.

Hale came in from the side at his long, tireless stride, Garrick with him, dust still clinging to the hem of his cloak. Margaret stood a short distance back with Robert and Theo, mid-conversation.

Harold met Hale’s forearm first, the grip solid.

“Surprised you’re out here,” Harold said.

“I was part of this last exercise,” Hale replied. “We had to sell it.”

Garrick snorted. “Most of them did well, a couple of outstanding ones who are made for this.”

Harold turned to the line of newly graduated scouts before Hale could start listing deficiencies.

“Well,” he said, letting his gaze move across them, not lingering anywhere for too long, “Congratulations. You’ve survived the first iteration of the Scout Training program.”

A ripple of groans and dark laughter moved through the formation.

“Sir,” one of them said, “we’re not convinced he’s human.”

“He can disappear in the woods and reappear behind you without a sound,” another added. “Scared the shit out of me while I was looking for a place go.”

Garrick’s expression didn’t change.  But Harold could feel the smugness rolling off him.

Harold nodded in exaggerated sympathy. “Yeah. The trick is to train your nose. Centurion Garrick has this bad habit of not bathing himself.”

That drew a louder laugh.

He stepped closer, moving down the loose line instead of standing in front of it, forcing them to turn to keep him in sight rather than freezing under his attention.

“How was the class?” he asked. “And don’t give me the sanitized version, Garrick writes in reports. What sucked?”

“Getting an arrow to the knee,” someone said immediately.

“Walking into one of those spike traps.”

“No food.” One groaned

Hale stood there smiling, and most of the scouts stood there stoically.

Harold nodded at each answer. “That means you’re learning the right things. What did you take from it?”

A pause this time.

While one of the men who was quiet the first time stepped forward. "Well, sir, reckon we picked up the art of ghost-footin' in the thicket, learned quick how to spot if some bugger tramped through before us, or how to make it look like a whole warband had passed—ain't nobody catching Sawyer's trail if I lay it right. Figured out how to shoot and scoot, silent as a shadow, and how to patch ourselves up—or each other—when the forest bites back. Trap-making too, though Centurion Garrick calls mine 'Sawyer specials' on account of how they've got extra teeth. Mostly, what stuck was we had to think for ourselves when the heat was on, make choices before the shaking's out of our legs, and remember that the woods don't care if we're tired. Disciplined initiative, you called it. That's what we learned."

As he spoke, the nearest scouts shifted ever so slightly, bodies angling toward him, the group’s focus gathering around his words. Even Elroy, perpetually restless, stilled and watched Sawyer, the quiet leader emerging in the subtle lean of his fellows.

Garrick moved forward, speaking up, “This is Sawyer, and he is one of the best we trained. I’ll be recommending him for the Scout Century in the new Cohort.”

Harold nodded and shook the man's hand while thanking him. He kept moving, trading a few more words, asking names, forcing himself to remember them, clapping one of them on the shoulder when he mentioned a particularly miserable night exercise.

All the while, he was aware of her without looking.

The way she stood just slightly outside the cluster.

The way she spoke to one of the others, and then fell silent again. The way she didn’t once try to step forward. Even Mira, who was so much more outspoken, was subdued.

Margaret’s voice drifted over from where she stood with Robert and Theo, calm and precise as always, but he didn’t turn yet. He let himself stay here a few moments longer, in the easy space of shared suffering and dark humor, because the alternative was walking across that clearing and finally saying the words he had come to say.

He stopped at the end of the line and looked back over them.

“You did well,” he said, the humor easing out of his voice without becoming formal. “Scouts keep people alive. More than they’ll ever know. The Landing is stronger because you’re here.”

A few of them straightened at that, pride slipping through the exhaustion.

He gave them one last nod, and then, because he could feel the pull of it like a hand on his chest, his eyes went back to Sarah.

The scout who had taken the same training and come out the other side.

The space between them felt longer than the entire run through the forest.