Selphira had listened to every report...

The Northern sector was stable. The officer reported a sudden, violent spike in mutant activity during the third week, but it had been swiftly contained with zero casualties.

The Northeast was quiet. In fact, it was agonizingly boring. The commanding officer delivered his logistics report with a droning, flat monotony, sounding exactly like a man who hadn’t been forced to make a single, life-or-death tactical decision in the entire quarter.

Then came the East. There, the defensive rhythm had been fundamentally shattered. One of the new autonomous towers had been installed on their perimeter, and the local envoy seemed deeply, uncomfortably conflicted about it. He couldn’t quite decide if the flawless, automated slaughter was actually a blessing, or if relying on the wooden monolith was actively making his frontline Tamers soft and out of practice.

Finally, the reports shifted to the rift, the bridge checkpoints, and the inner sectors closer to the city center, where the only recent threats thanks to the new dome underground were merchant disputes, heavy commerce, and the creeping complacency of comfort.

Selphira listened to every single one of them with absolute focus. She never interrupted needlessly, but when she did speak, she delivered razor-sharp questions that stripped away any bureaucratic fluff.

She mentally cataloged every microscopic detail she needed to archive.

But beneath her mask of polite, terrifying attention, her mind was impatiently tapping its fingers.

She was waiting for one specific file.

When the report for the Southwest section, Red Pathfinder’s designated sector, finally arrived, it was physically thicker than the rest...

The quiet observations compiled by Cassia and Matilda.

♢♢♢♢

The liaison stepped up to the oak table. He cleared his throat nervously, gripping the heavy stack of parchment. As he began to read, his voice carried the distinct, baffled tone of a highly trained military analyst who couldn’t quite believe that the impossible facts he was currently reporting were actually considered "routine daily operations" in that sector.

He started with the towers...

The Southwest sector had violently transitioned from a zone of regular, bloody activity to arguably the quietest stretch of stone on the entire Great Wall.

It wasn’t because the enemy had simply ceased to exist. It was because the autonomous towers that "Red Pathfinder" had casually planted in the dirt were actively growing.

The envoy tapped his parchment, his voice dropping as he emphasized this specific detail for the second time: the wooden monoliths were systematically annihilating Silver-rank mutants before the creatures could even reach the shadow of the Wall. And terrifyingly, the structures seemed to physically harden and grow vastly more lethal with every single beast they processed.

The frontline Tamers in the sector were reporting twelve-hour shifts where they practically didn’t have to draw their bows.

"Some of the grizzled veterans," the envoy noted, a hint of cautious disbelief leaking into his professional tone, "have actually started complaining in jest. They claim their arms are rusting from lack of use."

A microscopic, amused smile touched the corner of Selphira’s lips. That seemed to be a recurrent observation from many sides.

Then came the logistics portion of the report. The equipment.

The sector’s standard-issue bows had been quietly, systematically upgraded with increasingly refined smaller runes. The gear flowing out of the distribution channels managed by "Jessy from the Patinder warehouse" was arriving in staggering quantities, boasting modular, lethal options that absolutely no common military workshop should possess the technological capacity to produce.

Regular grunts were suddenly walking the parapets equipped with anti-corruption light arrows. The envoy read the cold, hard numbers: the sector’s ranged interdiction capacity hadn’t just improved; it had multiplied exponentially.

Entire adjacent sectors were now frantically filing requisition forms, begging High Command for the exact same loadouts.

And then, the envoy finally reached the specific section Selphira actually cared about.

The people.

As the liaison officer began to read this portion, his posture shifted. His tone lost its crisp, mathematical edge. This was the hardest tactical metric to report because it couldn’t be quantified or score graded.

The soldiers of the Southwest sector spoke about Red Pathfinder with a deeply bizarre mix of absolute reverence and casual familiarity. They didn’t treat the boy like a distant, aristocratic superior. They certainly didn’t treat him like a fragile, untouchable prodigy.

They treated him like one of their own who just happened to be extraordinarily, impossibly useful.

They affectionately called him "The Installer".

He sat on wooden crates and lost crystals playing dice with Garret. He stood in the freezing rain and actually listened to Dunn complain about the parapet’s inefficient form. He memorized their names. He knew their exact shift rotations.

He knew exactly what logistical nightmare was currently stressing each individual guard, and he quietly solved those problems before the men even had to swallow their pride to ask for help.

But it was during the crises, the two massive, sudden mutant waves the envoy had personally witnessed during his rotation, that the true anomaly revealed itself.

When the eerie calm shattered, when the sirens blared and the entire sector had to violently respond to a lethal threat in a fraction of a second, the men didn’t look at their designated lieutenants. They all looked directly at Pathfinder.

They didn’t look at him because the military rulebook placed him in command. They looked at him because his tactical read of the battlefield was vastly faster, infinitely colder, and far more accurate than that of seasoned officers with triple his years.

Every single man on the southwestern Wall knew it, even though they had never formally spoken a word about it.

They seamlessly moved to exactly where he pointed. They blindly trusted his instantaneous judgment over their own survival instincts. And under his quiet, rapid-fire direction, both massive mutant waves had been utterly annihilated without a single claw scratching the Wall.

"The soldiers say," the envoy finished, pausing for a second as he struggled to find the proper military phrasing for a deeply emotional sentiment, "that they physically feel safer when he is on shift. I wouldn’t know exactly how to quantify that on paper, my lady. But every single man says it."

Selphira slowly nodded, her eyes dark and calculating.

"There is absolutely no need to quantify it," she said smoothly. "Continue."

Liora’s report followed shortly after...