That night.

A bright, spotless moon hung in the sky, washing all things in a pale, quiet beauty.

Under the moonlight’s touch, even the dim shapes of the night seemed to take on an air of elegance...

"Fuck you!"

A voice suddenly ripped through the night sky.

"How come no matter how we throw it, you bastards always win? You cheating or what?!"

The elegant atmosphere vanished without a trace. Achir furiously hurled the die in his hand. The bone die bounced high off the tabletop, hit the yellowed oil-lamp shade overhead, bounced back down, spun a few times on the floor, and stopped on a number that was still nowhere near what Achir had guessed.

"Damn it, how have I not guessed right even once? I can’t even call big or small right? Cheating! You’ve got to be cheating!" Achir slammed the table in rage.

"Hey, Captain, you can’t just say things like that."

Across the old wooden table, a man with a huge black mole on his face waggled his brows and grinned.

"The dice are yours. Nobody could tamper with them. Besides, we’ve been playing this game a good while now. So when you used to win, that was just unbeatable luck, but now that us little guys finally win enough for a few drinks, suddenly it’s cheating? That doesn’t make any sense."

"Yeah, exactly!"

The big crowd squeezed in around them immediately chimed in.

"I think the captain’s just trying to welsh on the bet!"

"Captain, didn’t you say you were the ballsiest man in all Odense? So why are you trying to weasel out now?"

"You don’t get it. When the captain wins, he’s the ballsiest man around. When he loses, naturally he’s got the least balls of anybody... hahahaha..."

"Get lost, get lost, get lost!"

Achir shoved away the rabble making a racket around him.

"Who says I’ve got no balls? You bastards better quit talking shit, or I’ll punish all of you by sending you to scrub the stables!"

"Heh, Captain, you can’t scare us with that anymore. All the horses in the stables got requisitioned ages ago. That place is cleaner than your doghouse now. There’s nothing left to scrub."

The man with the black mole stuck out a hand with a shameless grin. "Come on, come on, pay up. A bet’s a bet."

"Damn it, I was wondering why my eyelid had been twitching all night. So this is what was waiting for me. Bad luck!"

Still cursing under his breath, Achir pulled out a few wrinkled bills and handed them over. Watching that smug bastard hold them up under the oil lamp and count them one by one with a self-satisfied look on his face made Achir’s heart ache with anger.

Their military pay had already been withheld for several months. They had been told it would be issued last month, but then the war broke out. Vast amounts of supplies and provisions had been diverted to the front, and low-ranking grunts like them, left behind to guard the interior, had no status to speak of. Who knew how much longer this money would be delayed now.

If not for the occasional merchant caravan passing through this checkpoint and paying tolls, he and his men might not even have been able to keep food in the pot.

"Damn it... I was saving that money for my next trip into town to see Miss Sandy."

Achir looked stricken.

The moment he thought of Miss Sandy’s lush waist, that shockingly springy skin, those python-long legs, and the suction force of a magic-powered water pump, a wave of heat rose straight into his lower belly.

Sure, Miss Sandy was already forty this year, but she still had plenty of charm left. Plenty of charm.

"Still going to see Miss Sandy? Captain, didn’t she practically drain you dry last time?" the black-mole man said with a snicker.

"Bullshit! I’m always the one on top, got it?!"

Achir glared, then braced both hands on the table and stood up. "Enough. I’m done screwing around with you idiots. Not playing anymore, not playing anymore!"

"The captain was just bragging about being on top, and now all of a sudden he’s gone soft?"

"I’m going on patrol!"

Achir smacked the bastard who dared tease him upside the forehead.

"The hell with all of you, slacking off this much. If the enemy comes, you won’t even know how you died!"

"What enemy would come here, Captain? You hit your head when you lost or something?"

The man was thick-skinned enough that the slap clearly didn’t hurt at all. He only kept grinning.

"This is the Kingdom’s interior. Who the hell would attack here? They’d hit the royal capital before they’d hit this place."

"That still doesn’t mean you can all slack off, you bunch of..."

Achir kept cursing, but in the end he still didn’t make these idiots, who were gambling during guard duty, pack up and return to their posts at once. He knew his men had a lot bottled up in their guts lately. Nighttime entertainment was one of the few ways they had to let it out.

They couldn’t go to the front and make a real name for themselves. They could only sit here guarding this checkpoint their whole lives, never getting anywhere, while their pay was still being withheld. Anyone would be pissed off in that situation.

"Keep it under control. Don’t let the higher-ups catch you. I’m not going to clean the stables for you idiots."

Achir put on his cap, picked up the oil lamp, and warned them.

"Got it."

A few of them answered perfunctorily, then immediately sank back into the bliss of this stolen slacker time, as if they did not care in the slightest whether some superior officer might come by for inspection.

Then again...

At this hour, no officer was going to come inspect anything.

Not even for show.

"Ah, seriously..."

Achir sighed, said nothing more, turned, pushed open the door, and went up the narrow stairs onto the city wall.

The cold night wind hit him immediately, making him shiver. He hugged his shoulders and muttered,

"Damn it, it’s already this cold and they still haven’t issued the winter uniforms up top? Are they trying to freeze us to death?"

...

The night spread like a sea. No one answered, just like those quartermasters who only knew how to roll their eyes.

Achir craned his neck and looked around. A few sentries by the wall were already leaning against it asleep. In the watchtower farther away, the soldiers up there were sprawled out too, apparently counting little sheep from their hometown farms in their dreams.

If they could fall asleep in weather this cold, then standing watch on the wall in the middle of the night really had to be mind-numbingly boring...

Achir shook his head and headed for the other side without waking them. They were not from his squad anyway, and as a squad captain he had no authority over them.

Of course... the most important reason was that he truly did not think there was any danger here. As he had said before, this was a checkpoint deep in the Kingdom’s interior. The Kingdom’s forces had already pushed into Imperial territory, so how could the interior possibly come under attack?

This fortress probably had not been attacked in over a hundred years.

"Hm? The wall’s warning formation isn’t active?"

Achir made his usual round. Aside from finding a bunch of soldiers secretly sleeping on the job, there was nothing much to patrol. But when he turned around, he discovered that the delicate circular plate at the very center of the wall had been shut down the whole time.

That was the activation device for the wall’s warning formation. Though this checkpoint fortress currently faced no danger at all, geographically it was still known as the royal capital’s "western gate," so high-end equipment like a magical warning barrier formation had still been installed.

Normally, the thing stayed active at all times. Anyone attempting to breach the wall would trigger an alarm immediately. It was far more useful than soldiers relying on their eyes alone, and to some extent that was one reason the soldiers here were so lax at night.

But tonight... Achir found that it was completely shut off.

"Not just tonight."

A soldier beside it rubbed his eyes and yawned.

"It’s been off for a week already."

"A week?"

"Yeah. Baron Gnar had it turned off. Said the magic-stone allotment from above has been reduced lately, so to save magical power, it got shut down."

"...That dead fat pig skimmed the magic stones again, didn’t he?"

Achir twitched at the corner of his mouth and cursed under his breath.

No matter how little magic-stone supply the higher-ups sent down, there would definitely still be enough set aside for nighttime warning use. But in checkpoints like this one, deep in the royal capital’s interior and under little real pressure to defend anything, the noble lords above siphoning off part of the supplies had long since become an unwritten "rule."

In the past, when the allotments were abundant, there would still be a little left over for night watch. Now that the allotments were no longer abundant, naturally not a single bit remained.

After all, whatever else had to suffer, the noble lords certainly could not.

"Hey, I think the voice stone you’re watching went off earlier."

Achir reminded the soldier.

To be stationed here, this man’s other duty was naturally to receive communications from the higher-ups at any time so the defensive formations controlling the wall could be activated whenever necessary.

And now, the voice stone in front of him was almost rolling off the table, clearly having vibrated earlier and shifted out of its original socket.

"Huh?"

The soldier picked up the voice stone. "Looks like it really did go off. Is the scheduled check-in this early today? It’s not even... even dawn yet."

Achir rubbed his chin and joked, "Then maybe it wasn’t a scheduled check-in? Could be something urgent."

"Haha, you really know how to joke around. I’ve been on this post for years. The most urgent thing I’ve ever received was that some count from above was coming to inspect the place!"

The soldier activated the voice stone and prepared to retrieve the recorded message. It was his job, after all... yet after fiddling with it for half a day, all that came ➤ NоvеⅠight ➤ (Read more on our source) from it was static and garbled noise.

"...orders from above... bzzz... as soon as possible... bzzz..."

"Broken?"

"No. Out of magic."

The soldier shook his head regretfully.

"That’s how these things are. Instant communication is convenient, but it has distance limits. The farther away it is within that limit, the more magical power it burns through. And it’s expensive too. Ordinary people like us can’t use it in daily life at all."

"So there’s only this one in all of Odense..."

"Yeah. Anyway, no time to talk. I’ve got to go find Lord Zefa to recharge it. Since the baron won’t provide magic stones, all I can do is hope he hasn’t gotten so drunk tonight that he’s sleeping like the dead. Otherwise we won’t know what this thing says until after daybreak tomorrow."

Still muttering, the soldier casually left his post just like that. He looked completely relaxed, plainly not the least bit concerned about whatever the voice stone contained.

After all, nothing important had happened for so long. This probably was not important either.

Another gust of night wind came sweeping in, making Achir instinctively tuck his neck even tighter.

"Damn it, this wind’s making me need to piss. I’ll go find a place to let one loose and head back fast. This shit weather’s freezing."

Naturally, Achir did not care about any of this either. It had nothing to do with his duties. For that matter, the only reason he even bothered patrolling at all was because he was at least technically a captain.

For pay this lousy, who the hell was going to worry about this and that? Achir turned and walked off. After looking around, he found a slightly more secluded corner, hopped up onto the battlement, and let fly into the empty night.

That feeling of a flood finally pouring out made him squint in relief. It felt as if Miss Sandy’s jade-soft hands were massaging his brain. The whole world blurred, as if he were soaking in warm water.

And then, right at that moment, he saw several flashes of light flicker in the gloomy woods outside.

"Huh?"

Achir jumped, so startled by the light that he hurriedly yanked up his pants. "What the hell was that?"

But when he tried to look carefully, there were no more flashes at all.

As if it had only been his imagination.

"Damn it, are my eyes going bad?"

Achir rubbed them. The darkness remained dense as ever. Forget flashing lights. There was not a single lamp for miles around.

"Guess I really can’t go see Miss Sandy anymore. Even my piss doesn’t go as far as it used to."

Achir gave himself a shake and thought that after he got back, he had better win back the money he had lost.

Of course, he was not planning to use the money he won back to see Miss Sandy. He had heard there was a widow in a nearby village with excellent medical skills. Maybe if he let her treat him, he could regain his former vigor.

Feeling very pleased with this fine plan for what to do afterward, Achir was just about to turn around when—

"Huh. No, wait..."

Rubbing his chin, he suddenly thought:

"The hell? I’m just a little drained, not brain-dead. How could I have seen wrong?"