"My lord, this is our latest revision of the knight's gear."

Little Tru's face had gone red with excitement as he walked Derek through it.

A full set of standard knight's armor, finer even than the one gifted to Baron Ferreira.

With the smiths' skill risen and their numbers grown, what came off the line now was simply better work.

Not true heavy plate yet, but from the warhorse to the rider, nearly everything was sheathed in steel now.

The joints were reinforced with leather, balancing protection against flexibility.

The warhorse, too, wore a layer of chainmail barding now, tough enough that an ordinary blade could hardly mark it.

"A full set runs past twenty gold in cost alone. It takes a master smith working with seven or eight others, about half a month for one complete set. Right now we can only spare two crews for it, so output's a little thin."

"Put it on me. Let's see."

With his squires' help, Derek strapped it on piece by piece—even with his body as it now stood, he felt a hint of real weight.

The chain links clinked at every joint when he walked, though never loud enough to grate.

He worked through a few motions, then drew his knight's sword and swung it once.

Flexible enough, though certain techniques would surely suffer for it.

But the added protection let a man shrug off danger he otherwise couldn't—and that, if anything, only sharpened the sense of menace he carried.

"With an Elite Knight's constitution, you could wear this round the clock without trouble. Short of blunt trauma from some heavy weapon, ordinary light arms would struggle to do you real harm."

Derek weighed it all and came away certain it was worth every coin.

Set against true heavy armor, where a single piece alone might run past twenty gold and a full suit past forty—

—and one he had no real use for yet regardless, since scarcely anyone could actually fight in it.

Derek shed the armor, thoroughly pleased with Little Tru's recent work.

"Design a set for heavy infantry too. Keep the weight around this same mark."

"Heavy infantry" here meant no more than leather layered under iron, but for this day and age, it counted as a standard nobody had ever reached before.

Derek meant to forge a spearhead of true elites—something that could shift the balance of an entire battlefield.

He laid out a fresh round of tasks for Little Tru and the rest, stockpiled a further batch of weapons, and used trade with the outside world to bring in more resources besides.

Then he went to check on the horses, gathered in through every channel he could find.

Most of what he bought were poor-quality draft horses; common-grade riding horses came in only rarely.

Warhorses might be hard to come by, but poor-quality draft stock was everywhere.

The North itself had some real capacity for breeding warhorses, and plenty of culled or aging stock circulated among the common folk as a result.

This side of the operation ran entirely on his most trusted men—let the secret slip, and it would spell serious trouble.

Derek checked the Panel every single day now, making certain nothing had gone wrong.

With this round planned out properly, Derek had settled on Northern stock specifically for his horses—good endurance, strong load-bearing, decent speed, decent sprint.

A breed with something of a name already; even raised up in quality, a poor Northern horse kept those same traits intact.

He now kept over a hundred head, with around ten rotating out every month, sold off as Fine-quality warhorses.

A portion he held back, meaning to raise them further still, toward something finer yet.

This scale had already pushed his manpower to its limit.

Any more, and setting aside whether he could even keep watch over it all, the risk of exposure would only climb.

A single horse, fed decently, ran three silver a month in feed—call it two gold a year, at minimum.

But a draft horse fetched three to five gold at most; the margin ran thin, and the risk sat right there alongside it.

Cut the grain ration and lean harder on pasture grass, of course, and the cost dropped to a third of that.

For a Northerner, there was still a margin worth chasing in it.

For Derek, though, cost was the lesser concern. He could shoulder any number he liked—what he couldn't guarantee was safety.

So, reluctantly, he let the matter rest there.

If anything, it only sharpened how badly he needed ground entirely his own—ideally somewhere the crown's reach ran thinnest.

The barbarians fit every requirement perfectly.

Derek was building up his strength for exactly that, ready to hit the barbarians hard when the time came.

Last, he made his way to the other manor.

By now, the place had turned entirely into a training ground.

Baron Ferreira had made good on his word—not only sending half the family's soldiers here, but most of the cavalry and retained knights besides.

Eldest brother Marco stood in command of them, drilled to a sweat under the tutelage of Derek's own squires.

And beyond the standing regulars kept on year-round, a fresh batch of militia joined the ranks every week.

The strong got folded straight into the army; the rest got sent back to their fields.

Over the course of a few months, the baron had built up a force past three hundred strong.

Even without Derek's help, he could have trained up a force respectable enough on its own.

And forces like this one were rising up across the whole North—every noble house, great and small, drilling their own, right down to the sons of well-off households and merchant families alike.

Word of the coming war seemed to have spread on its own by now; every soul in the North was getting ready for it.

Derek watched for a while, flipping through the Panel as he did.

Most of the family's soldiers had already surfaced on it—plainly, they'd accepted Derek's men as their commanders.

A few of the knights had even climbed to Level 5 or 6, solid enough by any measure.

The family's own long-serving soldiers sat at about the same level, while the fastest of the new recruits had already reached three or four.

And that was with Derek deliberately easing off—left unchecked, the progress would have run faster still.

This revealed a small secret of the Panel to Derek.

Banked EXP shrank the moment you leveled up. He'd once toyed with a shortcut along those lines—stockpile a hundred points, say, and cash them in once the level was already high.

That hope had just died on the spot.

Eldest brother Marco was training hard too, and Derek found his level not half bad—better than he'd expected.

After allocating his brother's points properly for him, Derek waited until the session ended before walking over.

"Derek. How long have you been here?"

Marco took the handkerchief a squire handed him and wiped the sweat from his face.

Out here, he'd long since stopped bothering with noble decorum—whatever felt right, he just did.

"Just got here myself a moment ago. You've come a long way, brother—Father would be genuinely startled to see this."

"It's your training that's the real weapon here. Honestly, where did you dig up these men of yours? Their level looks stronger than the family's own knights."

These men were on the cusp of Elite rank, far beyond what the retained knights of an ordinary country noble could match.

"It's not about talent. It's the hours put in, plain and simple. My squires train harder than you do, if you look closely. Stick with it a few more years, brother, and you'll be right there with them."

Derek steered the topic away, and Marco found the reasoning sound enough.

By his own observation, the training regimen his third brother's men went through really did run brutally hard.

The two of them let the subject drop there.

Then Marco let a piece of news slip out. "I hear the King's already issued the mobilization order. Once spring planting's done, they say the South and the Central region have already started raising legions, getting ready to march north."

Raising troops only after the planting was done wouldn't set back the fields any.

No kingdom could afford to treat its grain supply lightly.

By the time they finished dragging their feet through raising the legions and finally marched up to the North two or three months later, the autumn harvest here would be nearly upon them.

...

Plenty of time still, by then, for the royal army to launch an offensive and lock the situation down before the snows came—the barbarians, for their part, would never counterattack in winter.

Clearly, the great nobles understood the practical demands of the campaign and had not lost touch with reality.

Even Derek never once considered that this might fail.

In a sense, ever since the days of the Holy United Kingdom right up through the three kingdoms it had split into, no one had ever thought much of the barbarians.

The common view among the nobility held that the barbarians had only pulled off their theft by catching the kingdom split and vulnerable.

Now that the three kingdoms had settled into a new balance, each knew well enough that wiping the others out was no easy business.

So most eyes had turned toward the barbarians instead.

After all, the barbarians held no small share of the old kingdom's land and people.

And land, to a noble, was the very foundation of power.

Whatever Marco had let slip, plenty of nobles surely knew it by now already.

Mobilization in the South and Central regions meant the Northern Province's turn was coming fast.

As the crown land sitting closest to the barbarians, it was bound to carry the heaviest weight in this fight.

Nobles who'd lost their family lands back then finally had their chance at revenge.

Derek could already see the great stage taking shape ahead.

Train. Train harder, faster, now.

Derek threw himself into it with everything he had—no room left now to worry over drawing attention.

And in the climate as it now stood, moving a little too boldly wouldn't raise any eyebrows anyway.

Weapon and armor prices had risen considerably across the market.

Word of the coming campaign against the barbarians kept spreading, wider by the day.

Titled sons, merchant households, even ordinary city folk had all started getting ready.

Derek had begun stockpiling supplies well ahead of the rest, but even he soon ran into trouble.

"We're burning through iron ore too fast."

Little Tru came to Derek to air the complaint.

With the blacksmithing crew grown so much larger, consumption now ran past ten times what it once had.

The refined steel, in particular, burned through even faster.

A full suit of knight's gear, weighing in at some tens of pounds finished, might chew through close to a thousand pounds of raw ore to make.

What Derek had stockpiled, added to House Ferreira's reserves, still fell well short of what they needed.

Even trading weapons back for a little more, the ore available on the open market stayed painfully thin.

The kind of shortage where money simply couldn't buy your way through.

Gold in hand or not, there was nowhere left to spend it.

House Ferreira had never been a smelting family, and owned no mines of its own.

Even among the wider family, few had ever touched a business like this one.

He worked what connections he had, but none could scrape together enough raw material either.

The trouble ran straight back to the source.

The families holding the ore itself were tightening supply on purpose, angling for a fatter margin off the shortage.

"If nothing else works, I'll take some men and just take it from them."

A hard glint crossed Simon's eyes. He'd climbed up from the very bottom, and however much polish he'd picked up since, none of it stuck at moments like this.

Truth be told, some small part of Derek was tempted—but he shot the idea down almost as fast as it came.

With the whole North sharpening its blades right now, soldiers everywhere, the crown's grip stronger than it had ever been—only a man with something badly wrong in his head would dare stir up trouble at a time like this.

Hadn't he seen how thoroughly Lloyd himself had settled down these days?

Bandits across the region had all but vanished, terrified of becoming the army's next practice target.

"Put together a list of every family that can supply ore. I'll call on them one at a time and see if I can pry loose some share of it."

Derek put his connections to work at once, hunting for anyone he could get a foot in the door with.

The Northern Province's circle only ran so wide; press hard enough on enough people and a connection would surface somewhere—it didn't need to do much, just needed to exist.

His trading hadn't been for nothing either; introductions turned up before long.

And so, one house at a time, he went calling.

The families sitting on the mines proved courteous enough, even if they wouldn't part with much.

One house offered a single cartload a month; another handed over a few carts in one go and called it done—polite refusals, both of them, dressed up as generosity.

After the whole circuit, nothing was truly solved. Added together, it looked like a fair amount, and still wasn't enough to keep pace with what they burned through.

And his own bargaining chips didn't help much—weapons and armor were the one thing these families never lacked. Anyone who held a mine already had smiths enough of their own.

As for warhorses, Derek simply had too few to spare for trading resources on that scale.

"This won't do. At this rate, every last bit of stock runs dry inside a month."

Derek's patience was fraying fast, and just as he was on the verge of doing something reckless, good news finally arrived.

"Families holding mines aren't common, but there are more than you'd think. The big mine owners on the market won't sell—but there are smaller ones too. With ore prices running this high, someone's bound to be willing."

This came from Baron Ferreira himself; a lifetime of seeing how the world worked had left him knowing a back road or two.

Beyond the landed nobility, even a few merchants carrying court-granted titles held mines of their own.

So Derek set out to call on them, one by one.

Some of the smaller sites might run dry after a year or two, and the ore quality varied wildly.

But Derek wasn't picky. Even a cart or two a month, he'd take it.

In the process, he discovered an entirely new mine.

House Garcia: another landed baronial family, though unlike House Ferreira, the current Baron Garcia had gone into royal service and now carried a viscount's title alongside it.

The viscountcy wasn't hereditary, but it spoke plainly enough to where the man stood.

House Garcia counted among the newer families rising up—before now, its standing had likely run about even with House Ferreira's.

But recently, a sizable vein had turned up on their land, and ore had started coming out of it.

Already a family with both power and standing, House Garcia had shot overnight into the most sought-after name around.

But precisely because the mine was so freshly discovered, House Garcia's own foundations ran thin—nowhere near enough smiths to speak of.

A patchwork of mediocre smiths scraped together from here and there could never unlock much real value.

As a skilled trade—one everyone made a point of guarding jealously, at that—it took a good two generations of effort before any real results showed.

So Derek called on them, with real hope of securing a fresh source of ore.

But once his calling card had been sent in, no word came back for some time.

Derek waited three full days before a servant finally came to invite him in.

Being a family so newly risen, House Garcia's seat was nothing more than a manor house—it didn't even have a castle of its own yet.

The manor was properly fortified, ringed even by a tall wooden palisade, but for all that it couldn't quite shake an air of shabbiness.

Adrian bristled at it—a family like this daring to keep them waiting?

Derek smoothed the mood among his own men. They were the ones asking for something here; whatever anger they felt, they'd have to swallow it.

But once he saw who'd actually come out to meet him, even Derek felt his temper rise.

"Javier Garcia?"

Once the introductions were done, it was plain enough—this wasn't the man actually running House Garcia's affairs at all.

Viscount Garcia wasn't even present. Business of this weight should have brought the heir to the table, not some second son.

The man's manner was arrogant as well, his contempt plain to see.