Ren had learned at some point that Seraphina and Jeannette had also been quietly scooped up and placed securely under Julius’s massive and now untouchable political wing.

The Prime Minister prince was actively shielding them from the desperate, scrambling politics of their declining aristocratic branches.

The girls now held quiet, comfortable, highly respectable positions within the administration, completely insulated from the ruthless marriages and unscrupulous maneuvers their families had intended to use them for. Seeing Cassia standing here on the Wall, holding a comfortable administrative post with direct access to Selphira as a patron, cemented that intelligence as an absolute fact...

Neither Matilda nor Cassia approached him to speak.

They were sharp, highly trained operatives now, and they knew it was foolish. "Red Pathfinder" absolutely could not be seen having a casual, familiar conversation with high-ranking emissaries from the inner castle.

That would instantly invite the exact kind of dangerous, probing questions their entire ’elaborate masquerade’ was designed to prevent.

In truth, the administrative audit was just a convenient front. They were primarily here to silently observe his development, take meticulous mental notes, and report directly back to Selphira. Later, during one of Ren’s subterranean excursions, the ancient matriarch would undoubtedly corner him and deliver another heavy lecture regarding his leadership progress.

And on the specific subject of "leadership," Ren remained exactly as profoundly confused as he had been on day one.

Because the simple, undeniable fact was that he had just earned yet another military merit badge simply by doing his normal, day-to-day job.

He was just too useful...

It wasn’t just the sprawling network of autonomous towers. It was the bows. It was the vast, newly unlocked arsenal of runic options he was quietly introducing to the armory.

The ancient crystal brain had injected his mind with the architectural insight required to generate the highly complex micro-runes. For months, Ren had possessed brilliant ideas for enchantments, but he simply hadn’t known how to physically carve them; the clumsy, acidic-blood etching method required vastly more surface area than a weapon like an arrow provided.

Now? Armed with the supreme, almost atomic precision of the new crystal-molding techniques, that physical limitation was completely gone.

He could flawlessly compress longer, layered effects into almost microscopic crystalline runes. He was effortlessly embedding them directly into the broadheads of arrows, weaving them also into the bodies of the archers’ bows, and layering them into the systems of the towers.

Every single upgrade he casually introduced made his sector’s equipment exponentially more lethal. And every single time the equipment proved its worth in blood, the legend of "Red Pathfinder, the Prodigy Installer of new tech", leveled up.

’Is this actually what leadership is?’

Ren quietly chewed on the question as he watched Cassia audit the supply crates, completely unable to find an answer that satisfied him. He didn’t feel like a commanding officer. He didn’t feel like learning to be a general. He just felt like a guy who continuously built highly useful things, and as a bizarre byproduct, the people around him blindly admired him.

He didn’t stand on crates and deliver roaring, inspirational speeches. He didn’t draw a sword and command glorious, bloody charges into battle. He didn’t inspire the troops with his booming voice. He simply looked at a tactical nightmare, engineered a quiet solution to fix it, and let the body count do the talking.

But as the cold wind whipped across the stone parapets, Ren realized something profound. Perhaps that was enough.

Because when a sudden crisis actually shattered the calm, when a siren blared, a massive mutant broke the tree line, and the entire sector had to violently respond in a fraction of a second, the men didn’t look at the screaming lieutenants.

They looked at him.

They listened to his quiet, clipped instructions without a single breath of hesitation. They immediately shifted their formations to exactly where he pointed. The grizzled, scarred veterans now inherently trusted a teenager’s instantaneous read of the battlefield vastly more than they trusted the heavily decorated officers who had served on the Wall for decades.

In those chaotic, blood-soaked margins between life and death, when the only thing that actually mattered was survival, Ren was the absolute center of their gravity.

And as far as Ren was concerned, if the men trusted him enough to follow him into hell when the fighting started, that was more than enough.

Everything else was just a bureaucratic label.

♢♢♢♢

Selphira had been aggressively dismantling military reports since long before the midday sun hit its peak.

The strategy room she shared with Julius for these periodic, high-level audits was neither grand nor ostentatious. It was a space designed strictly for efficiency. It featured a long, heavy mineral table, just enough stiff-backed chairs for the commanding officers, and a row of tall, narrow windows facing the castle’s inner courtyard.

At this specific hour, the sunlight sliced through the glass at a sharp diagonal, illuminating the dancing dust motes in the air and casting long, warm beams directly across the scattered stacks of parchment.

Selphira absolutely despised reading written reports.

She always demanded to receive these briefings in person, forcing the officers to stand before her one after another. Ink on a page was sterile; it only revealed exactly what a clever lieutenant had carefully decided to write down after editing out their failures.

But the face of the man delivering the news?

That told her everything the ink tried to hide. A sudden hesitation, a bead of sweat, a nervous shift of the eyes, those were the raw, unredacted truths she hunted for.

The sector commanders filed in, delivering their briefings in strict geographical order.

She was waiting for one specific file.

The report for the Southwest section, Red Pathfinder’s designated sector, it was normally thicker than the rest.

It was vastly longer and denser than any briefing regarding a mere second-tier sergeant had any right to be. And to Selphira’s mind, that glaring, ridiculous disproportion was the very first piece of critical intelligence.

The envoy delivering it wasn’t the local commander. He was a specialized liaison officer who had spent the last several weeks actively rotating through the Southwest sector, meticulously collecting data and cross-referencing the quiet observations compiled by Cassia and Matilda.