"My lord, how did you know they'd come through here?"

Simon asked from their position in ambush, genuinely baffled.

Five days now since they'd slipped into Holy Cross, and still no sign of their prey.

Derek remained confident and waited patiently.

"Back on our side, they're rats—anyone who catches them can do as they please. Over here, though, they can move about in broad daylight, plain as anything. Put yourself in their shoes—would you still be holed up out in the wild?" Derek shot back.

"No—I'd head straight for a town to rest up." Simon caught the logic at once. "So this is the shortest road to one."

Derek was certain: however careful a band of slavers might be, they couldn't keep it up forever.

Once they reached familiar ground, they were bound to lower their guard.

And that was his opening.

He placed the odds at nine parts in ten, at the very least.

A band of slavers might be vicious, might be careful, but they'd never carry real military discipline.

This was the best ambush ground he could have asked for.

His patience paid off, and Derek's prey finally appeared.

He pulled in every scout and set the whole company waiting behind a low rise of ground.

Beyond it stretched flat, open land with nowhere at all to hide.

Even the rise itself looked utterly unremarkable.

A spot like this couldn't have concealed many men to begin with.

Which was exactly why it wouldn't draw the other side's notice.

He knew he'd get exactly one shot at this, and he'd be fighting outnumbered.

His only advantages were surprise and discipline: trained men striking an unsuspecting rabble.

The slaving party turned out sizable indeed—a long column of captives bound hand and foot with straw rope, shuffling along at a crawl.

That alone kept their pace slow, though the slavers themselves numbered far fewer than Derek had reckoned.

By his scouts' count, the captives ran two to three hundred strong, while the slavers themselves came to no more than fifty at most.

Unexpected, and yet it made sense the more he thought about it.

With people looking out for them on the Locke side, real armed pressure while capturing slaves had never run high—this leg of the job read more like a simple escort run.

And with the most dangerous stretch of the journey already behind them, back on home ground, their guard had only slackened further.

Derek had prepared for the worst, but his prey proved even more careless than he had hoped.

Every warhorse under his men stayed dead silent, exactly as a warhorse should.

Derek led his horse by the reins, counting silently in his head, and eased his way up to the crest of the rise.

Just past the highest point, the long column came into view, curling around the base of the hill.

It was the only trail worn into the ground here—the far side of the rise, sheltered from the wind, must have made for good camping ground.

Derek swung up into the saddle, and the other riders mounted just as fast.

A tug on the reins, and he raised his long wooden lance.

"Charge!"

They hadn't even posted a single scout of their own. What came next was on them.

The sound of hooves erupted in the space of a heartbeat.

A dull, thunderous drumbeat, quick and dense.

Most of them hadn't even had time to react before twelve riders were already on top of them.

Cavalrymen with barely a year of training moved with the precision of seasoned veterans.

This was Derek's own first time leading a charge. The instant his lance struck home, a tremendous resistance shot back up his arm, and his whole body started tipping backward with the force of it.

He even watched the wooden shaft shatter outright—the impact more than the wood could bear.

Fortunately, he had practiced this exact maneuver countless times. His hand released the shaft by instinct, every motion precise.

Guided by his other hand, the warhorse cleared the obstacle light and quick.

He snatched his knight's sword from the hook at his side in one motion. The heavy blade sacrificed sharpness for sheer weight.

With his mount's speed easing off just enough, Derek swung the sword left and right, cutting down several men in the space of a breath.

He heard someone bellow, trying to rally a counterstrike.

But the riders coming up behind him tore through whatever resistance formed without the slightest trouble.

He met barely any resistance before his horse came to a full stop.

A squeeze of both legs, and he guided the horse through a wide arc, turning it around.

Only then, catching sight of it from the corner of his eye, did Derek see his riders all still there behind him—not a man lost, every one of them streaked in blood.

Behind the rise, his spearmen had already come around, landing a heavier blow still on the slaving party.

The captives, feet and hands still bound, were a mess of chaos—some flat on the ground, some trying to bolt, some simply colliding into each other in the panic.

Of the slaving party itself, barely half remained standing.

"The day's decided!"

Derek let himself relax. In the heat of the charge he'd forgotten to be afraid at all—looking back on it now, the rush of it hit him properly.

The cavalry looped back around, picked up speed again, and cut in past the flank of his own spearmen.

Even what little resistance the slavers managed to scrape together fell apart just as easily.

With more than half their number down, the surviving cutthroats were half out of their minds by now.

"We're with Ha—"

A man who looked to be some kind of leader tried to get a name out—Derek simply hurled his own knight's sword straight at him.

The heavy blade struck the man's skull and cut the sentence off mid-word.

Looking over what little remained of the slaving party, Derek's expression turned cold.

"No survivors."

The spearmen stepped forward, carrying out the order with grim, mechanical precision.

In no more than a moment, every last one of them was dead.

Derek had his men gather up the clothes and plunder and burn the whole lot to ash.

The bodies got dragged off by horse and dumped without ceremony.

A quick sweep of the field afterward, and nothing was left but the bloodstains.

"Fall back!"

Remote and desolate as the spot was, someone stood behind this slaving party—if the men didn't turn up for long enough, someone would eventually come looking.

But wild beasts ran thick out here; how much would be left of these bodies by the time anyone came was anyone's guess.

With the tracking methods of this age, whoever came looking would probably never trace it back to him at all.

Derek had his men herd the captives onward, cutting the ropes from their ankles and leaving only their wrists bound.

"We're soldiers of the Kingdom of Locke, here to set you free. This ground belongs to those Holy Cross bastards—trust me, you don't want to find out what happens if you run and get caught. So behave, come home with me, and wait for what comes next."

Whether it was the word "home" that struck a nerve, the whole way back went smoothly—not one of them so much as tried to run.

Derek marched the column straight to his mountain base and ran the first round of sorting right there.

The most obedient would be folded into the army, readied for the war on its way.

The truly stubborn ones—Derek was no saint—would simply be put to honest labor.

Whatever fate had waited for them in Holy Cross at those bastards' hands could hardly have been better than this. Derek felt not one flicker of guilt over it.

Two hundred and sixty-eight in total—some must have died along the way, or the count would have run closer to three hundred.

Two hundred-odd able bodies with nothing left tying them down—enough to raise two full companies.

Under ordinary circumstances, Derek would never have taken on feeding a force this size. Far too costly.

...

But war was closing in fast, and every bit invested now would pay back well beyond its cost.

So Derek settled back into the mountain base and threw himself into training once more.

This time, the intensity climbed higher, the discipline tighter.

Fortunately supplies ran plentiful—training at this pitch would have flattened men outright without it.

He made a deliberate point of cultivating the squires under him, teaching them the basics of military knowledge.

Formations, commands, tactics.

Even how to read the mood of the men, how to lift morale, how to respond when things went sideways.

On a regular schedule, Derek ran mock battles, splitting the squires into opposing sides and letting them war-game against each other.

A squire like Simon carried the title in name only by now—on the Panel, his class had already moved on.

Simon

Class: Knight, Level 9 (85/100)

Experience Pool: 0/100

The rest of the squires might fall short of that particular bar, but in raw combat skill and grounding in military basics, every one of them passed muster.

With a solid crop of capable hands under him, Derek could finally split his attention several ways, running production and training in multiple places at once from a distance.

He'd even taken to shuttling back and forth himself, a few squires in tow, moving from one site to the next without pause.

For the squires, this counted as training in its own right.

One day, in plain view of everyone, he set out from the mountain base once again.

This time, he left Simon behind to run things.

Before he left, Derek gave him a quiet word.

"Keep an eye out. Some of these new slaves are still stewing, I think. Ease up on watching them a little—give them room."

Simon had noticed the troublemakers among the slave-soldiers himself, in fact, but never imagined they'd actually risk anything.

"Surely the fools wouldn't try anything? They've seen what we can do, and the treatment here isn't bad at all—there's even a real shot at freedom down the line."

Simon simply didn't believe it. To his mind, the base treated its people well, thought of every angle already.

This, Derek knew, was exactly the kind of opening a man needed. Growth always came stitched together with mistakes.

"Remember this: plan for the worst, every time. If these men aren't satisfied even with treatment this good, doesn't that only make it more likely they'll stir up trouble? And strength has a way of scrambling certain men's heads besides—you can't assume everyone thinks the way a reasonable man would. Weigh the loss before you count the win. Get ready. Think it through properly."

Derek said his piece and left, Simon standing there deep in thought.

Simon took the warning seriously, even if some part of him still found it hard to credit.

Quietly, all the same, he made his preparations—and sure enough, the moment the base's watch appeared to slacken, someone's mind started turning.

"We need to go home. What's the difference between these people and the slavers? They're treating us like slaves just the same."

Someone had started spreading talk among the captives, angling to pull in a few hands to help.

After enough time living side by side, everyone knew well enough who nursed grievances and who was wavering.

With some targeted persuading, plenty of them started coming around.

"You've all seen how frightening these people are. Have you forgotten what happened to the slavers?"

"Hmph. They just trained a few days more than us. I'm not so bad myself these days."

Their progress, after some training, never came close to matching new recruits carried by the Panel—but their confidence had swollen enormously all the same.

In truth, the widening gap was itself exactly what had planted these other ideas in certain heads.

However you looked at it, men dragging the others down were bound to end up cast off as dead weight.

If they didn't gamble now, were they meant to just wait around to become cannon fodder?

Two days of quiet plotting, and they finally settled on a time.

Once the riot broke, could anyone else really stand apart from it?

If one man rioted, everyone would come under suspicion regardless—plenty more, they were sure, would wake up to that and join in once it started.

As for what came after the riot, why think that far ahead? Worst case, they'd just run home.

Word reached Simon quickly enough. These men had underestimated human nature all the same.

Treatment on Derek's side wasn't bad at all, and the base bristled with fighting men—not everyone was eager to die alongside a doomed plot.

Turning these fools into a stepping stone was a far easier road than joining the riot itself.

Simon heard the informant out and stood there dumbstruck.

His lord had called it right again.

After this, that lesson finally stuck in him for good.

And then... Simon, thoroughly furious now, made up his mind without mercy.

"If my lord hadn't warned me, we'd have paid for this one."

He soothed the informant with a promise: a squad leader's post, ten men under him.

Anyone who came forward willingly deserved a reward.

The rank and file might despise an informant. Those above them felt rather differently.

Deep in the dead of night, the band of conspirators slipped quietly out of the barracks, meaning to steal weapons and set the riot loose.

But they'd barely cleared the doorway before torches began flaring to life, one after another.

And then they saw the ring of fully armed soldiers already closing around them.

"Kill them."

Simon gave the order cold and flat, leaving them not the slightest chance.

He even had everyone else roused from sleep, made to watch and learn exactly what betrayal earned a man.

Back at the manor by then, Derek noticed the shift on the Panel—a handful of new names suddenly appearing.

"Something happened, it seems."

And with that, he let the matter go.

A small thing, nothing more.

Of the two manors the family had signed over, one had turned into a full-scale military camp.

The other into a blacksmith's works.

Beyond the people already living there, families of craftsmen and officers had been settled in as well.

Little Tru's own father, for instance, had become part of the manor now too.

Something to put a man's mind at ease.

It steadied the people under him, and it steadied Derek as well.

The Panel wasn't all-powerful. Should something go wrong, a change of heart could wipe a name off it at any moment.

Even if he caught it in time, that was still a loss.

But now, at least, the odds of any such reversal had been cut in half.

Around the same time, a third page opened up on the Panel.

The first page: his own personal panel.

The second: the army.

The third, now, was the manor—civil administration, more or less.

The function stayed the same throughout; this was simply a new way of sorting it.

Derek studied it for a while and found the farmers listed there too—a sturdier foundation than he'd realized.

Same land, three to five tenths more yield out of it—add that up over time and it was no small sum at all.

What mattered most to him now came down to two things: the army, and its arms.

With the whole Northern Province gearing up for war, the usual restrictions here had loosened considerably.

Otherwise, drilling troops on the scale House Ferreira now was would have drawn attention long before this.

The crown's own legions might well have come around for a look.

Nobles held the right to raise troops, sure enough, but the crown hadn't gotten where it was by being naive—raise a force within reasonable bounds and no one blinked, but a sudden lunge into full militarization begged the question of what, exactly, you were planning.

Derek even used the cover to train up blacksmiths on a much larger scale—nothing more than Level 4 or 5 needed, just enough to forge simple weapons and lend a hand to the master smiths.