Chapter 285 -278: The Ford
The Bellows and Bar, Iron Junction. An ordinary Tuesday.
The team claimed the oversized booth in the back of the bar, as Verrin was far too massive to squeeze in anywhere else..
That was the running joke and it had been the same for four whole months, ever since the system stripped them of their candidate titles and reclassified them as glorified fence-posts. Tallen made the joke again as they sat down, mostly because when your life drops four tiers in a single afternoon, you lean hard on load-bearing comedy.
Verrin squeezed his massive frame onto the bench end. Marrick fetched the ale. Sund sat with his back to the room, automatically scanning the entrance waiting for a boss fight that was never going to trigger.
Gate watch had ended at six. Three hours of daylight left, zero quests in the log.
"To the Junction," Marrick said, slamming the tray down. "The most heavily guarded railway siding on the entire continent."
"We intercepted a high-risk cargo today," Verrin deadpanned. "Barley."
"Was it actually barley?"
"It was barley. I inspected it thoroughly. I am currently the highest-leveled barley inspector in the Duchy."
"You are the largest barley inspector in the Duchy."
"Both statements are mathematically correct."
Kolt pulled up his character status in his mind, ignoring the greyed-out [Knight Commando Candidate] tag that sat like a insult at the top of his vision. He drank his ale slowly and let them talk.
This was the comfortable window of the evening. It usually lasted about ninety minutes—right up until someone’s passive debuffs kicked in and you found out whose mental stability was hitting zero.
Tonight, it was Wend.
It was almost always him.
Quiet through the second round. Nobody paid it much mind. Quiet through the third, and Kolt knew the crisis event was starting.
Wend stared into his cup, speaking to the wood grain:
"Six of you."
Marrick closed his eyes. "Wend for god`s sake plz don’t."
"Six elite-tier candidates, demoted to checking grain sacks because of my ankle."
"Wend—"
"You would have cleared the timer," Wend muttered, rotating his cup in precise, neurotic circles. "It wasn’t even fight. You had the speed. Verrin was carrying sixty pounds of extra kit and still had half a stamina. Sund hadn’t even stopped talking."
"I had stopped talking," Sund noted.
"You’d dropped your words-per-minute by twenty percent. That doesn’t count as stopping."
"Serrin had the emergency flare unclipped in under ten seconds," Wend said, his voice dropping into that dark, familiar rhythm. "Ten seconds. Zero hesitation. The Commander told us at the drop point in plain human speech: fire that distress sign and every single member of Team Six fails automatically. And you popped it anyway. For a torn ligament."
"Yes," Kolt said plainly.
"Why?"
"Because you were immobilized and we weren’t leaving a party member to rot on a freezing hillside." Kolt didn’t even raise his voice. "There wasn’t a tactical debate. There was a guy who couldn’t move, and a flare. I pulled the cord. If you’re looking for a profound philosophical justification, I don’t have one on me."
"Vance argued."
"Vance wanted to piggyback you eleven miles through a blizzard," Kolt replied, looking over at him. "Which was impossible and heroically stupid. I overruled him. The medic said four more hours in there would have turned your foot into black ice."
Kolt turned his mug. "So I made the call, the medic saved your leg, and somehow that logical outcome has given everyone at this table a permanent mood debuff for four months and made us friends."
Odric stared blankly at his knuckles.
"I still would have carried him," Odric muttered. "That’s the bug in my brain I can’t patch out. I know what the surgeon said. I know the math. And I still sit in my bunk at night calculating six guys, rotating shifts, three miles an hour... we could have pushed through." He took a heavy swig. "So either my empathy stat is broken, or I was too stupid to do basic arithmetic on that mountain. Four months in, and I hate both options."
"You were twenty-two," Kolt said.
"I’m still twenty-two."
"Then in a few years your level will go up, and you’ll stop over-analyzing the log."
The table went dead quiet.
"It was the correct call," Tallen told Wend. "We aren’t just saying that to keep your morale."
"I know it was." Wend pressed his palm flat against the sticky oak. "That’s the absolute worst part. If it had been a bad tactical error, I could be angry at someone. It was the right play and it ruined six careers, I’m the catalyst, and there isn’t even a villain to curse out."
The atmosphere loosened up after that as always once the worst emotions were vented out.
Sund pulled a set of loaded bone dice from his coat. Verrin began losing his daily allowance with legendary composure. Marrick launched into his infamous story about the Greyfell garrison corporal and the prize-winning goat. He had told it eleven times now; with every iteration, the goat became less of an animal and more of an mythical character.
"Do you think they’re back yet?" Tallen asked suddenly. "The Twenty-Five?"
"Rumor says they got deployed south," Marrick said, rolling a pair of fours. "Then again, rumor says a lot of things. Nobody actually knows what the main roster does. That’s the whole design of the unit."
"I’d like to know," Wend admitted softly. "Just to see what the actual questline looked like."
"You’d like to know," Verrin snorted, "and instead you get assigned with me and four hundred tons of raw barley."
"I’d like to know too," Odric said. "And I’d love for my brain to stop caring about it. It doesn’t. I assume this annoyance persists until fifty?"
"Sheds off earlier than fifty," Kolt offered. "Not completely. But it fades."
"Speaking from personal experience?"
"I applied for the Frontier Vanguard command when I was thirty-one. Got rejected. Spent two solid years being an absolute nightmare to my subordinates." Kolt spun his drink. "The obsession doesn’t stop just because you ask it to. Then one day a harder problem lands in your lap, and you realize you haven’t thought about the old rejection in weeks."
"And if no harder problem shows up?"
"Then you inspect grain," Verrin chimed in, "and get hammered on Tuesdays. Honestly, as far as life goes, it’s a solid job."
T
Just then the dispatch runner burst through the tavern door right around nine o’clock.
He stood in the entrance looking for the targets of courier delivery.
Sund’s eyes snapped up instantly. "Aggro."
The runner scanned the room, spotted the monstrous silhouette of Verrin, and marched straight over to the edge of their table.
"Selection Team Six?"
The dice stopped rolling mid-table.
None of them had heard that name spoken out loud in a hundred and twenty days.
"TEAM6 doesn’t exist," Marrick said, his tone instantly shifting to cautious. "Disbanded four months ago. We’re just seven guys maxing out our tavern time."
"Are you Kolt? Serrin Kolt?"
"I am."
"Commander Malen’s order," the runner rattled off, standing straight. "He’s at the Junction master office. He requires all seven of you tomorrow at fourteen hundred hours."
A suffocating silence fell over the booth.
"All seven?" Verrin repeated.
"All seven, sir. Read directly off an official roster." The boy paused, carefully verifying his dialogue script. "He specifically instructed me to inform you that this is not an administrative review and that you should not spend the entire night assuming that it is."
The runner waited to see if a response prompt would trigger.
It didn’t.
He turned on his heel and exited the bar.
The team sat frozen.
"That is 100% an administrative review," Tallen said flatly.
"He literally said it wasn’t."
"That is the exact line a commander uses right before he hits you with an administrative review!"
"Commander Malen doesn’t take a high-speed train to Iron Junction just to inspect a local gate watch," Kolt said, his voice dropping into a register that surprised even himself. "He’s a Peak Knight,commands the Duke’s personal vanguard. He doesn’t travel hundred miles for seven guys on a railway unless those seven guys are the entire objective."
Odric was staring at the doorway, his pupils dilated. "He used the squad tag. Not ’seven guards.’ Selection Team Six. Nobody has used that designation since the mountain trial."
Wend’s hands slammed flat on the table again. This time, his face wasn’t pale with guilt—it was flushed red.
"What if it’s about the something else,maybe flare?"
"It is entirely about the flare," Kolt said. "It’s the only notable event on our entire service record that anyone above a captain’s rank gives a damn about."
He looked around the table. Six pairs of eyes were locking onto the exact same realization, everyone trying desperately not to express hope out loud lest the someone notice`s and crush it out of spite.
"Alright," Kolt commanded, knocking his knuckles on the wood. "Nobody drinks another drop."
Verrin’s hand froze mid-reach toward his tankard. "Serrin—"
"Zero alcohol from this point on. Armor polished, boots buffed by dawn. Whatever is waiting for us tomorrow there, we walk in looking like seven elite knights, not a disgraced gate detail on a Tuesday binge."
Kolt stood up, slapping a heavy handful of silver onto the table to cover the tab.
"It might be a formal reprimand. It might be a dead end. But if it’s an opportunity, I am not letting us face it with a hangover debuff."
They cleared out of the tavern.
Wend was the last to leave the booth. He lingered by the table, staring at the floorboards until Kolt caught the door frame and waited for him.
"Serrin," Wend said quietly, his voice tight. "If this meeting is about the distress flare, and they’re coming down hard on us... I’ll tell Malen I demanded it. I’ll take the entire penalty."
"You’ll shut your mouth and say nothing of the sort," Kolt snapped, holding the door open into the cold night air. "If there’s an execution tomorrow, the responsibility lands on the guy who pulled the string. I fired it."
They marched back through the dark railway yard in total silence.
Nobody said another word.
And every single one of them laid awake in his bunk, staring at the ceiling, watching the clock tick down toward two.