What gave the impression of a mighty fortification when approached from the south turned out to be a scattering of hovels surrounding an old stone fort with a few facilities haphazardly attached to it. A road ran north through the last gentle passes before it reached the southernmost Remerrin farmlands.

  In the direction of the mountains Ioha followed the great wall, higher than the fort itself, from where it anchored itself to one mountainside almost a hundred metres to the other. A deliberately small gate, defended by a portcullis and a drawbridge, led to a walled off killing zone and a second portcullis. With a smirk, Ioha guessed that a fair number of mages had spent exhausted nights after making this outer defence come true. He couldn’t see it from here, but sloping earthworks and ramparts ended in a wide, dry moat on the northern side of the wall. Nanami’s mages complained after digging a few dozen metres of ditches outside their camp on the other side of the mountains, so the defensive works here must have taken ages to build.

  On the other wide of the wall, up the slope, Ioha saw groups of soldiers and adventurers busy with butchering carcasses. They might represent great wealth, but this world was not game like enough for dead monsters to butcher themselves and leave a tidy stack with loot to collect. The work was dirty and dangerous, and Ioha’s abilities in that department only ran in the pathetic one digit range. It was enough to understand what had to be done, but nowhere enough for actually doing it. Some day later he’d have to train on blobs, and eventually spiders, to learn how to do it himself shredding the carcass.

  He rested his hands on the parapet and looked north.

  Along the road, mages from the raid erected barns. They were to be temporary. A procurement patrol had already left to buy clay and limestone. An ironic mix of Remerrin, federation and Isekai troops were busy building what they said were brick kilns. Their shared interest in construction eradicated any qualms about nationality within a few hours, but now they viewed anyone who didn’t see the importance of building houses correctly with a shared dislike and suspicion just as strong.

  Ioha sighed and left the wall. Yesterday, he got roped in by someone who understood how his defensive killing zone worked. His career step from protector of the line to construction worker was more or less instant from that point on, and he had to spend one hour a day shredding stone with his razor blades and another heating up the first kiln to be finished. It wasn’t too bad. The unexpected work forced him to put effort into controlling his abilities, both when it came to shaping his zone of killing and how much destructive force to use. His reward was a few abilities, mirroring his understanding that there were options between no protection at all and slaughter everything that came within his maximum range.

  Two hours later he had produced a fair amount of stone dust and gravel of different dimensions. When he mastered his razor blade abilities better, he was to create shingle. One construction specialist was adamant that all gravels weren’t created equal.

  Heating up the kiln turned out just as mindbogglingly boring as the day before, and Ioha felt a great deal of relief when he was replaced by a woman who arrived with dead eyes and slumped shoulders. She had made an equally grand career climb from B-rank mage to brick burner. In difference from him, she had to spend three hours every day at the kiln.

  Ioha opened his display on his way to the cooking area. A battery of patently useless abilities had single digit points, and now he was able to pick the relevant book to look up information on minerals and bricks that he still wouldn’t understand even after he had read it. Well, they weren’t entirely useless. At least now he understood that brick-making involved more than buying rectangular red blocks, and that there were different kinds of bricks for different usage. Maybe it would make him a better buyer in the future.

  More interesting was how the Remerrin soldiers took a lot of civil engineering for granted as part of their mission. The same could be said for both Rede and Verina, and to Ioha it looked like the federation was the power where they had lost the insight that a soldier was a person with a varied set of abilities and not just a killing machine on two legs. You could, Ioha mused, call it the Remerrin way of doing things.

  “Daily duty done?” a voice asked from behind when Ioha picked up his food.

  He didn’t turn. The voice belonged to Harvali, and with perception abilities climbing every week, Ioha heard that the question had been directed at him. “I guess it counts as training,” he answered as he sat down with his plate and mug.

  Ioha downed some water and spooned up a mix between gruel and soup. It tasted better than it looked. He filled up with another spoon and waited for Harvali to ask his real question.

  “Two more days, maybe three. Can you burn aura for half a morning until then?”

  Ioha grinned. Harvali didn’t know how much aura Ioha had at his disposal. Much, much more than merely excessive, since Hanna, their personal aura teacher last winter and spring, pushed both him and Ai to their limits. “I’m fine. Besides, I’m only on duty for two hours a day. The mages work three or four hours.”

  “Only? They are C and B -rank mages, and they have trained aura control.”

  Strange. I believe Hanna said the third and fourth years did as well. No, she hadn’t actually said that all of them did. Third and fourth year strategy and logistics students, but she never specified that in detail. I’m an idiot! How much can I tell him? Ioha decided to risk it. “Ai and I got special training. We’re using aura in a dangerous way, Hanna said. She forced us to train aura acquisition and control.”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Ah, so you have a large aura for a swordsman?” Harvali asked.

  Ioha nodded. Master class aura counted as a large aura for a swordsman. It probably counted as a large aura for a C-rank mage as well.

  “Sir Terendala, what does your status display look like?” Ioha asked. He could just as well change the topic to one just as intrusive.

  “Mine? Depends on when I use it. A tactical map that’s useful for the problem I have to solve at the moment.” Harvali scratched his chin. “It’s not a good description, but it works.”

  Dynamic status display? No wonder, he’s seen as a tactical wonder boy. “I expected you to be angrier at the question?”

  “Why? I have to know how my subordinate officers think. We’re working together on this mission. We should know about each other.” Then Harvali grinned. “Yours?”

  Ioha grimaced. Well, he had opened the can of worms. He leaned back and emptied his mug, gulped down another two spoonfuls and started describing how to use spreadsheets in fantasy land – in great detail. When he was done, Ioha had finished his food, and Harvali’s eyes had glazed over.

  For Ioha this confirmed what he guessed but hadn’t verified. Everyone saw status displays in their own way. Harvali just belonged to the brilliant people who realised that knowing how someone else saw them was useful information in itself. An easy conclusion. Ioha belonged to that category himself; you didn’t find product development easy unless you have an almost instinctive understanding of user and customer reactions.

  He rose to a more upright sitting position. Somewhere in the background, a distant roar found its way to the cooking area. It belonged to the hapless mage. Tomorrow it would belong to him for an hour. You didn’t superheat air without producing a lot of noise, and listening to the continuous, monotone thunder only added to the boredom. He, at least, had trained as a cat. He could turn on and off his personal climate control at will to produce a minimum of variety to the deadening work.

  “Sir Terendala, why did we buy clay from Remerrin? Couldn’t we just have dug it up here?”

  Harvali smiled. “Maybe. I don’t know anything about clay, but probably.” Then he turned serious. “We’re not buying clay. We’re buying horses and wagons.” Then he smiled again. “Well, and hiring mages for the real construction work.”

  Ioha had already guessed about the wagons. Civilian personnel was a surprise, though. “So it looks like we’re buying construction materials, but we’re really moving all the loot out of here.”

  “Good boy.”

  “No boy of yours.”

  Well, Harvali didn’t officially know that Ioha was ten years older than he looked, but someone from a position of power, like the Terendala eldest, was bound to know about the age discrepancy for those who gated here. Isekai didn’t really keep it a secret.

  “Why the secrecy?”

  Harvali looked at Ioha. “Money, or rather, enough money to run an entire domain for a year.”

  Ioha nodded. Enough money to start a war over. With the local commander being loyal to his king, behaving like an arse notwithstanding, no one outside their camp should know about the battle a few days earlier. “How do we keep the secret when the Remerrin mages arrive here?”

  This time, Ioha received a toothy grin. “We don’t, not really at least. We just grab everything useful for transports, load them and vanish.”

  Ioha couldn’t see how that would work. “Can’t they just run away and sell the secrets?”

  One of Harvali’s men arrived with a kettle and poured water for them both. Ioha had a sip while he waited for Harvali to answer.

  “They’re town mages,” it came. On average, they don’t have the stamina for a long march. Combat mages are trained differently.”

  Ioha had to settle for that explanation. It wasn’t watertight in any way, but it had to do. He suspected that what Harvali hadn’t said included the arriving personnel becoming prisoners disguised as workers, at least until the wagon train left the fort. “How many days until we return south?”

  Harvali grinned. “Most of us will return south, but not all?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll learn,” Harvali laughed. He rose and left Ioha with an entirely new question.

  Ioha never got the answer to his question, but the following few days he repeatedly got his arse handed to him during what some jokester labelled as leisure time. If he ever believed he had displayed great strength during the battle, both Harvali and Derina quickly taught him the error of his thoughts. Canadena, commoner knight and their princess, might have been the best of the first years. Harvali and Derina were the best of the graduates.

  It took a full two days for Ioha to increase anything but his self-healing and regeneration abilities, but those he pushed by three or four points more or less across the line. That was the polite way to describe how utterly unable he was to defend himself against their attacks.

  Harvali simply smashed right through his shields until Ioha planted his standard, and using the battle standard for training was simply stupid overkill, since Harvali never employed his own strongest abilities.

  Derina, well, he moved between Ioha’s defences at a speed too fast for Ioha to follow. Almost instant casting of shields and grids suffered from a key flaw. Almost was simply not fast enough. Ioha trudged on and was rewarded with a few points in danger sense. While he no longer aspired to become a cat, he still needed to master at least some of the abilities associated with them, or else he’d never be able to defend against a cat. His speed casting abilities also gained a couple of points, which was good, but not nearly enough to prevent Derina from moving between Ioha’s magic defences.

  During the third day, Ioha finally stopped increasing his self-healing abilities against Harvali. Even if the shields didn’t hold, Ioha learned how to replace them faster than Harvali could destroy them. As with Canadena, an eternity earlier, Ioha managed to trap the cat once, and once only.

  During all of this, wagons arrived with materials, almost every mage got roped into construction and processed monster loot moved from the field of battle and onto the wagons. After that, Ioha finally got his answer to his question.