The smell of sweat and fear from thousands packed tight inside the castle like fish in a basket was almost nauseating, but Aprilia kept the fear bubbling inside her in check.

  This time her worry wasn't just for herself and her family, but also for Jack, and everything that the Cha had built under his guidance. They had been together for only a few weeks, but she couldn't imagine life without him anymore.

  She was distracted from her prayer for Jack’s safety by the sound of someone shouting from outside the castle.

  The crowd waited with it’s collective breath held. The guard atop the gatehouse turned to them and shouted, “The boys are safe! And our soldiers as well!”

  Some youngsters cheered. Others smiled. Relief swept through the crowd of thousands in waves of chatter and sighs. The gate creaked, as it’s bars were removed and it was pushed open. People began spilling out, desperate for a lungful of fresh air.

  As soon as the crowd thinned, Aprilia bee-lined for the messenger, who was being escorted by the guards, away from the concerned family members of the soldiers. The guard looked her over and allowed her into the first bastion, that was used as the meeting hall. The Elders were already present. She bowed to them. Hyde and the pious Weber looked at her disapprovingly, but she couldn’t care at the moment. Her focus was on the messenger, who relayed the details to them.

  Her heart clenched at the words “knights from Nanon.”

  She had hoped to never hear that name again, even though she knew contact with Nanon was not just inevitable but necessary. The Cha needed seeds, cattle, horses; resources they simply didn’t have, while Chadom didn’t border any other nation. Jack could call himself selfish all he wanted, but she knew he would risk himself to ensure a better future for his people, and she could not stand the thought of losing him. She was no warrior, but that didn't mean she was useless. What could she do to help Jack and her people?

  ---

  The next day, we had the loot hauled back to Cradle, while I and my six guards pressed on further to visit the far end of the forest. It was a few kilometers long and unfortunately for us, became only wider the farther we went. Luckily, a mountain jutted towards the shore near the Treacherous Bog, pinching the forest, so it was only half a kilometer wide when it met the desolate landscape.

  Aside from mountains to one side and cliffs plunging into the ocean to the other, all the eye could see was a vast bog. Shades of brown and green dominated the landscape, with nothing bigger than a bush growing anywhere. We all grimaced, as a terrible all pervading stench attacked our nostrils. We walked a bit further into the Bog, where our pace slowed down to a crawl as our boots sunk in the muck. As I balanced to save myself from almost slipping in the mud the tenth time, I could see why it was called Treacherous, and we were on the more stable route mapped by the brigands.

  Still, I smiled despite the horrible stench. “The perfect place to set up a kill zone.”

  “A kill zone?” Lothar asked.

  “A place where we decide who lives and who dies, and should be the only way to enter our lands.”

  “How?”

  “Three trebuchets with a range of… two hundred meters. They will obliterate any slow moving enemy group, which they all will be, thanks to the Bog. Also, bunkers for a platoon every forty meters placed in a concave arc, and a whole lot of traps in front, leaving only a narrow safe passage for entry into our lands.”

  “I'm guessing us soldiers will be building all this?” Ethan said dejectedly.

  “Yes, but there are plenty of loose stones, dirt and trees nearby. Do a good job or you will have no one else to blame if you die at the hands of the enemy. General Lothar?”

  “Yes, Commander?” He snapped to attention when I used my formal tone.

  “We need to raise a unit of Frogmen: soldiers who specialize in amphibian terrain. Pick a dozen soldiers who are most familiar with the Bog. Work with them to build some hidden depressions surrounding the only path we will leave for our new friends, and come up with other ways to make their advance hell.”

  “Sir!”

  Tired from all these revelations, I went back to Cradle and spent some time reassuring an anxious Aprilia we would be fine. I took her on her first horse ride to watch the sunset on the beach.

  Looking at the fishermen’s netting, I had an idea. I took some of the netting, and began attaching pieces of rope and strips of rags to it.

  “What is this?” she asked curiously.

  “It’s called a . Makes it very hard for enemies to spot a hidden soldier.”

  She looked at it skeptically.

  “Come to the Bog Watch with me. I’ll show you.”

  “No, thanks. I don’t want to see that place ever again,” she said, shivering.

  I hugged her and distracted her with the tedious work of building more suits. The scars of the Cha’s suffering would take a generation to heal.

  Lothar and the Frogmen looked at me just as skeptically when I explained the ghillie suits’ purpose.

  “Turn around,” I ordered them, put on a ghillie suit and hid myself in the Bog.

  “Turn around!” I yelled. Even from the distance I could see their eyes searching but failing to find me. I raised my crossbow and shot a bolt above their heads. That changed their mind about the suits’ effectiveness. The Frogmen quickly took to them and turned their camouflage training into the Red light Green light game.

  I assigned three horses each to the limestone quarry, the iron quarry, the logging camp and the newly opened peat quarry, and four were rented to the farmers, with the threat of taking them away if any of them was hurt. They were too important a strategic resource to risk, but we also desperately needed to increase our output of stone and wood if I was to ensure Chadom’s well-being within a year.

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  One horse was assigned to each major outpost, namely West Point, the Bay, East Gate, and the newly named Bog Watch, for messengers.

  Six were to remain at Cradle, so they could deliver wagons full of fresh soldiers wherever needed. It was essentially a rest posting for them, as we didn't have grain to feed the poor beasts. Only Lothar and I got personal mounts, and he quickly took to it like a natural.

  I worked with Aramid and Kovar to build a small prototype trebuchet. Thanks to the work of an enthusiastic professor on Earth, I knew how to .

  The ratio between the projectile arm and counterweight arm had to be 3.75:1, with the sling holding the projectile being just as long as the arm, while the counterweight, which should be free to rotate, should be 133 times heavier than the projectile. Never thought watching engineering videos would one day save my life.

  The prototype worked beautifully. It had far longer range than the common design, so ours would be short enough to blend in with the forest. The craftsmen began working on a full-scale version, with a range of two hundred meters, enough to rain death upon anyone unwelcome approaching our border.

  The captured horses turned out to be as big of a boon as I had expected, as the work on the castle’s stone wall accelerated. Still, an old problem resurfaced, along with a new one: lack of food and clothing.

  I noticed that most people were wearing ratty clothes. They had fled with one extra change of clothes, but months of hard labor had been, well, hard on them. What they had would not be enough for the winter. We were also barely keeping ahead of starvation, as all the hard work required a lot of calories.

  We had run out of grain and the harvest was still weeks away, so our food was limited to fish, shellfish and seaweed. I had put a halt on hunting as I was worried we had already done irreparable damage to the local ecosystem, by stripping it of everything we could eat.

  So I decided to covertly visit the Nanon kingdom to buy cloth, grain and other essentials before we became embroiled in a war.

  ---

  The freshly trained Frogmen were sent on their first mission, which was to scout the route to Nanon. Once we received their signal, me and my guards followed the path on four horse drawn wagons.

  It took us five days to cross the Bog, with the wagons occasionally getting stuck, even with the purpose-built wide wheels. By the time we reached the other side, we had become immune to it’s stench and the mud that clung to us.

  The only people to receive us on the far side of the Bog were the Frogmen, as nobody wanted to live near the stinking landscape. It was kilometers of wild forest, undefended and unpopulated. We left the Frogmen hidden in the forest, and rode to the closest settlement, which was the village of Hinterfeld.

  From there, Wenik, a soldier who used to live in the nearest town, Wolfenwacht, and I traveled the ten kilometers to town and bribed the guard to get inside. It was a bustling town, full of merchants hawking their various wares and trinkets and the stench of filth clinging to every street.

  “Where can we buy cloth in bulk here, Wenik?” I asked my companion.

  “From the weavers, Sire. They have a shop nearby.”

  “Why don't you go investigate that while I look for other items?”

  “My lord, bolts of cloth for three thousand people is a very large order. They will get suspicious if I go there myself, and will just kick me out when I ask for that much,” he explained slowly, as if I were a dim child.

  “Right. Lead on,” I said, chastened. I had forgotten cloth was absurdly expensive in pre-industrial times and produced in very small quantities. There were no ready made clothes, other than the third hand ones sold by servants of the rich.

  “Welcome,” a man greeted us as we entered the small shop full of incense.

  “I'm Sir Sigzarl of Finstermoor, and I need to buy quite a bit of cloth,” I wasn't very good with names, so I morphed the name of the first prick I could think of.

  “Of course, my lord. How many people are you trying to clothe?”

  “Around three thousand.”

  His eyes nearly popped out of his head.

  “Do you have enough to fulfil an order that size? I need it within a few days.” I asked haughtily.

  “I... I think we might have that much in our warehouse. Please let me confirm.”

  “If you're worried about payment, it’s not an issue. I will pay you promptly,” I said, jingling my heavy coin purse. “If the price is right.”

  His lips cracked into a smile in response. Far too many noblemen were tight-fisted misers when it came to paying for anything other than their own luxuries.

  “It is a pleasure to do business with a judicious person such as yourself,” he said, smiling. Judging by his selection of words, he definitely did business with the big wigs. I recalled that as an ex-Viscount, I was once one of those bigwigs. Good thing he didn't recognize me. I hoped my handkerchief on the mouth trick would be enough to fool anyone who might.

  After a fair bit of haggling, we settled on an eye watering price that ate through most of the money I had brought with me. I offered to pay half of the price upfront and the shopkeeper was so happy, he readily agreed to deliver the bolts of cloth to Hinterfeld on guarded wagons within two days, just as I wanted.

  Next, we bought a cartload of grain to alleviate our food security issues and a few sacks of flax seeds, so we could produce our own oil and cloth fibers. I sold a few pieces of jewelry I had on me, taken from the brigands, and bought some brass with it, for a special project.

  I was counting my lucky stars that everything had happened without incident when I found my eyes drawn to a strikingly beautiful young woman sitting in a stationary coach. Suddenly our eyes met, and a hazy memory slammed into me. Her lying in bed, naked and flushed, hair spilled like silk across the sheets.

  “Jack? Jack Nobart?” she called, narrowing her eyes.

  “I’m afraid you have the wrong man, my lady.” I said, tugging Wenik towards a nearby alley.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” she raised her voice as I began walking away. “Jack!”

  Great. Jack was a womanizer and now his past was coming to bite me in the ass. I was trying to recall more of his memories, when I found our path blocked by some thugs.

  “That’s a hefty coin purse you’ve got there. Care to share some?” said the head thug, with a lilt in his voice.

  I looked around and noticed we had walked deep into one of the poorer parts of the city. Two thugs were in front of us and two in the back.

  “I was trying to stop you from going deeper, Sire, but you were lost in your thoughts.” Wenik complained.

  “Sorry about that.” I apologized. “Can you handle your two?”

  “Yeah,” he grinned. “I grew around these parts. I know how to handle a bunch o’ scrugs.”

  No sooner had he finished, when the thugs lunged at us, daggers and cudgels in hand. We drew our own in turn and responded. I would have been scared, well more so than I currently was, if I hadn’t practiced such scenarios while training the soldiers, and if I hadn’t been blessed with immense strength. Strength, as it turns out, also made you fast.

  Still, I wasn’t going to risk getting hurt by fighting two guys at once, so I threw my dagger at one guy, then promptly kicked the other one, who was idiotically tracking the dagger, square in the gut.

  He collapsed instantly, while the other dodged my throw. It gave me an opportunity to grab his arm, which I did and squeezed hard, eliciting a cry from him. His weapon fell from his hand, which I let go and promptly kicked him in the gut as well.

  I picked up one of the daggers, turned around and threw it at the guy who was still fighting Wenik. He tried to dodge and slipped in the process. While Wenik kicked him in the chest repeatedly, I retrieved my steel dagger.

  “You good?” I asked Wenik.

  “Yes, Sire,” he said between breaths.

  “Then let’s get out of this hellhole.”

  I finally released the breath I had been holding once we left the city. We went back to Hinterfeld on our seed laden wagon, with bated breaths, but no one intercepted us.

  We stayed in the village, making some stories about our origins to the villagers and spread some coin around to keep them appeased. I also had my soldiers buy the top soil from their barns.

  We took possession of the two shipments in the next two days, and promptly began our miserable journey back to Chadom.

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