Chương 270: 54. Three Rivers Fortress 1

We got here first. So did Ignicia's six hundred dragoons. Add in the logistics train pouring in behind them—dragon handlers, archers, laborers, supply crews, and an entire ecosystem of military personnel whose exact job descriptions I still hadn't managed to sort out—and Three Rivers Fortress had officially been upgraded from "very busy" to "so busy that everyone looks two seconds away from picking a fight with the next person they see." But this wasn't the Dragon Kingdom.

This was the Kingdom of Eckhaus's own soil. So the entire fortress's attitude toward us could be boiled down to one sentence: Too afraid to offend us. Too afraid not to keep watching us, either. The patrol guards bowed whenever they passed us, but there was always something starched and stiff in the motion.

The granary clerks handed over every ration we were owed without complaint, but they counted each item with the kind of anxious precision that said, if I miscount and they decide to eat the whole warehouse, it's my head on the line. Even the escort soldiers assigned to guide us around spoke with impeccable courtesy, yet their footsteps always ran half a beat faster than necessary—as if lingering too close, too long, might get them swept into the river by a stray tail. It wasn't hostility.

It was something plainer, more honest: the simple instinct to survive. Because to this garrison, we weren't just three tidy characters that spelled "allied forces." We were a foreign column. One that arrived with dragons, with dragoons, with an unfamiliar chain of command, foreign banners—and, at the center of it all, a Fire Dragon Princess. Frankly, the fact that nobody had lunged for the alarm bell every single time we walked past already struck me as a remarkable show of restraint on their part.

Ignicia clearly read the room, too. She didn't say anything about it. But she noticeably reined herself in once we were inside the walls. Not the kind of restraint that meant swallowing her pride or forcing herself into false meekness—more like she'd traded her default assumption of this place is mine for something more deliberate: this place is on loan. She still shifted into dragon form to sweep the outer airspace, and a single pass over the ramparts was still enough to make a new recruit's hands shake.

But once she stepped into the fortress core, she mostly stayed in human form, walked the corridors she was meant to walk, met the people she was meant to meet—and even dialed back the casual cruelty of her insults by roughly half a notch compared to how she operated back home. Just half a notch, to be clear. The remaining ninety-some percent was still more than sufficient to make a person question their life choices.

That morning found me carrying two baskets of fresh flatbread and a bucket of hot soup—officially requisitioned, not "liberated," from the inner kitchens—on my way to the outer camp, when a string of thoroughly inelegant sounds drifted over from somewhere ahead. First, the dull thud of an axe biting into a trunk. Then the crackling crash of timber plowing down through branches. Then a man's voice, raw with exasperation:"Not that one! I said the straight one next to it!

Are you planning to build a doorframe out of that crooked piece of garbage!?" I stopped walking. There was something very specific in that voice. Not the roughness of a career soldier. Not the steady patience of a craftsman. And absolutely nothing resembling the enigmatic mystique you'd expect from a spellcaster. It sounded exactly like the pure, weaponized pragmatism of a man who'd been ground down—repeatedly—by budgets, deadlines, and colleagues who refused to listen to reason. I looked toward the source.

On a stretch of open ground on the fortress's southeast side—normally reserved for stacking lumber and staging equipment—an entirely new group had set up shop without my noticing. They weren't in standard-issue armor, nor in court mage robes. What they wore were thick work tunics and short capes, deeply unflattering but unmistakably built for labor. The colors ran to ash-blue and muddy green, hems tucked up tight, sleeves cinched at the wrist.

What hung from their belts wasn't crystal orbs or grimoires, but rulers, charcoal sticks, chisels, small hammers, metal pins, measuring tape, short blades—one woman even had a bundle of folding stakes and an ink-line box strapped across her back. If it weren't for the handful of staves tipped with embedded spellstones, I would have sworn, at first glance, that this was a combat engineering unit sent to build bridges and roads.

"That's the Mages' Guild," someone said behind me. I turned. Lei Lian. She'd walked up without a sound, helmet tucked under one arm, clearly just back from an outer perimeter sweep. The morning wind had tangled a few loose strands of black hair across her forehead, but the rest of her face was the same as always—hard and even as the flat of a freshly honed blade.

"... Those are mages?" I asked, entirely sincere. Lei Lian followed my gaze, expression unchanged.

"What did you think they'd look like?"

"I don't know. I figured they'd be a little more... mage-like."

"What does 'mage-like' mean?"

"You know. Long robes. Never watching where they walk. Dropping lines like 'the flow of the stars' or 'the whisper of the elements' every other sentence." Lei Lian was quiet for two full seconds. Then, with devastating calm: "Whatever you've been reading is probably not suitable reference material for a military construction deadline." Right. That single sentence ran a spear straight through every romanticized fantasy I'd been carrying around in my head.

I set the baskets down at the edge of the slope and simply gave up, settling in to watch. And watching was how I finally understood, for the first time, that army-grade transit gates aren't cast. They're built. Literally built—like constructing an obscenely expensive, extremely dangerous bridge that, if the angle drifts by half an inch, will cheerfully deposit you somewhere you never meant to go.

The Guild's advance team wasn't large—thirty-odd people at a glance, backed by a small contingent of local garrison troops assigned to hauling and perimeter security. But of those thirty, at least half moved like their boots were on fire. Two of them crouched in the dirt, using a charcoal-tipped pole and an ink line to measure the ground. Three more held wooden rulers against a board dense with notation, cross-referencing the angle between the fortress's inner wall and the southeastern outer slope.

Four or five people built far too solidly to match anyone's mental image of a mage had simply rolled up their sleeves and gone to work felling trees, while a woman mage beside them tapped a rune-etched metal awl along the grain of a freshly cut trunk, apparently checking its direction. But the most absurd part of all was the cleared patch of ground at the center. More than a dozen positioning stakes had already been driven into the earth, each wound in thread of a different color.

The threads weren't strung at random—they crossed and pulled taut against one another, tracing out a massive, intricate outline. From where I stood, it looked like the unholy offspring of geometry, religious iconography, civil engineering, and a recurring nightmare. I stared at it for a few seconds and felt a headache coming on. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"... Is that the array?"

"The outer frame," Lei Lian said.

"The outer frame?"

"The real core hasn't gone down yet." She said it the way someone might mention an extra pinch of salt in the morning porridge. Completely natural. I couldn't help turning to look at her.

"How do you know all this?"

"Spend long enough in the army, you see a few of these go up." She paused, then added, "Also, this thing is deafening every single time." As if to annotate her point exactly, two members of the Guild broke into a shouting match right on cue.

"I told you—shift it three inches east!"

"Shift it three inches and the load-bearing stake bites straight into the outer slope's subsidence!"

"Then add a second reinforcement ring!"

"Easy for you to say—who's carving the reinforcement ring, you!?"

"Fine, I'll carve it myself!"

"You carved half a diversion line crooked last time and nearly sent an entire squad into the marsh!"

"That was a ley-line eddy, not my fault!" I opened my mouth, then slowly turned back to Lei Lian.

"... Are we absolutely certain this thing is going to send people where they're actually supposed to go?"

"Not certain."

"Hey."

"That's exactly why they're arguing." A perfectly logical answer. Zero comfort provided. Right then, a new figure stepped onto the site. Ignicia. No formal armor today—just a dark, close-cut coat built for movement, belt cinched clean at the waist, red hair tied up high. The overall effect read several degrees less "princess" than usual, and several degrees more "I have no patience for stupidity today." The moment she appeared, the local garrison soldiers on-site snapped straighter on reflex.

As for the Mages' Guild— Maybe a third of them bothered to look up. The other two-thirds kept arguing, measuring, sawing—apparently having already settled, without discussion, that the question of whether the woman who could turn into a crimson dragon and crater a central courtyard was more important than the piece of lumber currently in their hands had one obvious answer: the lumber. I nearly laughed out loud. Ignicia clearly noticed, too.

She stood at the edge of the site, watching a middle-aged woman—sawdust in her hair, ink smudged across her cheek—walk straight past her without so much as lifting her eyes, carving knife still in motion. The corner of Ignicia's mouth twitched, just barely. Not anger. Closer to a wordless huh, so this kind of person exists.

"Who's leading this team?" she asked. The fortress liaison officer stepped forward at once, posture so correct it bordered on rigid.

"Your Highness, this is the Third Construction Squad, Public Works Division of the Eckhaus Mages' Guild. The advance-team captain is a man named Randall—" He didn't get to finish. The man who'd been shouting loudest whipped around.

"Who's calling f—" He froze mid-word, having finally spotted Ignicia. The expression on his face was a masterpiece—hovering somewhere between should I be kneeling right now and but my hands are still full of tools. Ignicia looked at him, voice level.

"You're the one in charge?" He blinked, then—as if suddenly remembering he still technically lived inside a kingdom with rules—tucked his ruler and notation board under one arm and offered a bow that was technically atrocious but entirely sincere.

"Randall. Advance-team captain, Third Construction Squad, Public Works Division, Eckhaus Mages' Guild. An honor, Your Highness." Standing on the slope, I mentally translated that for him: My apologies—I was busy screaming at people, and I've only just now realized how loud I was being. Ignicia didn't press him further. She simply swept her gaze across the site.

"How many days until this is finished?" Randall straightened without thinking.

"Assuming the fortress keeps timber and stone flowing on schedule—the outer ring stands in three days. The interior rune-work, seven. If the ley-lines hold stable, we can attempt a short-range test link as early as day ten. Between days twelve and fourteen, the long-distance main gate to the Eastern Wall should be fully operational." I listened, faintly stunned—not because I didn't follow him, but because I followed enough of it to realize, with total clarity, that this was genuinely an engineering project.

Not a miracle where someone waves a staff, tears a hole in space, and everyone claps. This was a group of people who had to survey the ground, calculate the slope, map the ley-lines, drive stakes, carve runes, assemble the frame, calibrate the phase—and then pray it didn't rain too hard, the materials didn't run short, and no idiot carved the core sigil backward. In short: building this thing was more like building a bridge than building a bridge itself.

Except the far end of this particular bridge wasn't across a river. It was the kingdom's Eastern Wall. Ignicia listened to the full report and gave a single nod.

"Don't make mistakes." For a split second, something pained flickered across Randall's face—the ghost of there's no such thing as zero mistakes in this line of work—before he swallowed it back down and offered something far more pragmatic instead.

"We'll do our best to keep the mistakes within a range that doesn't end with someone materializing inside a mountainside." I nearly choked. Ignicia accepted this without blinking.

"Good."... The fact that those two statements were somehow compatible was, frankly, terrifying. I must have been standing there a while, because Randall finally noticed me. His eyes flicked from me to Ignicia and back, a flash of purely practical, craftsman's curiosity in them—not gossip, just the instinctive filing of this person is still standing here and hasn't been chased off, so he probably serves some function.

"And this would be?" he asked. I opened my mouth to answer, but Ignicia beat me to it, entirely unhurried.

"Cedric." That was all. No title. No explanation. No account of where I'd come from. But the way she said it made something shift, subtly, across Randall's face—as if he'd understood, in that single instant, that this was a name that required no follow-up questions. Privately, I had to admit— being introduced like that was, inexplicably, kind of cool. Not that I let any of it reach my face. A man has to preserve some baseline of dignity.

Randall gave me a short nod, asked nothing further, and spun straight back around to keep yelling at his crew.

"Who told you to start cutting that reinforcement ring already!? I haven't finished revising the diagram!"

"You revise yours, I'll carve the spares!"

"You can't carve spares out of green wood!"

"Then go tell the sky to stop dropping fog on us!" A moment later, two workers hurried past carrying a freshly split beam, hauling it up onto the first outer-ring stake along the chalk line. Someone else immediately followed with a slender graving needle, tracing a draft of runic lines into the wood, inch by inch. Not one sweeping, cinematic spell—just slow, tedious, eye-straining labor. I walked down the slope, drawn in closer almost against my will.

The beam's surface had been planed smooth, exposing pale, fresh grain. When the needle pressed down, it didn't just scratch—it seemed to press a fine dusting of silver powder directly into the wood fibers. Each line ran narrow but interlocked with the next, branching like a river delta, or the layout of bone and blood vessel. At every junction, someone followed with a small hammer, tapping thin metal plates flush into the grooves. I watched for a long moment before I finally managed one sentence.

"... This is a lot more of a hassle than I imagined." Ignicia, who'd come to stand beside me at some point, let out a quiet snort.

"What did you think moved the kingdom's armies across long distances on short notice?"

"I genuinely thought a mage finished an incantation and a door just... opened."

"That kind of door is usually only good for sending one person off to die." Harsh. But undeniably educational. I watched a little longer before the real weight of the thing finally settled on me. The frightening part wasn't that it could send people far away. It was that it had to send many people, many supplies, many orders far away, as stably as possible, with the smallest possible chance of catastrophic failure. So it couldn't run on inspiration, the way a duel between mages might.

Couldn't run on luck, the way a drunk's boast might. It had to behave like a bridge. A road. A city gate. A supply line. It had to be built heavy enough, solid enough, that the next column of soldiers—carrying spears, slinging bows, hauling artillery—could step straight onto it without praying first. In other words: what I was looking at, for the first time, wasn't the romance of magic. It was magic, bullied by the military into becoming civil engineering.

And somehow, that made it more reassuring than anything mystical could have. Because it was ugly in a very reliable way. While I was still staring blankly at the timber, a Guild mage hurried past with an armful of pre-carved node panels, reciting numbers at speed.

"East ring, seventh node—two secondary channels, one overlay layer! If the southwest corner sinks more than half a finger's width, drive the second wedge immediately!" Someone shouted back from across the site.

"Got it! Set the seventh node down first, stop running with it—you drop that, we're all sleeping on the ground tonight!" Watching them scramble through the dust and shavings and chalk lines, I felt an unexpected laugh building.

"What?" Ignicia asked.

"Nothing." I looked out over the site—dust, wood shavings, ink lines, and runes all tangled together.

"I just suddenly feel like this is what actually going to war looks like." She didn't answer right away. After a moment, very quietly: "It always has been." I turned to look at her. She was watching the half-formed skeleton of the gate frame too, red hair stirring in the wind, her eyes deep and still—none of the usual edge that said she was one wrong word away from setting someone on fire. In that instant, it struck me that she was probably seeing far more than I was. Not a pile of timber.

Not a few dozen bickering mage-engineers. Not an unfinished transit gate. She was seeing the army that would pour through it fifteen days from now. The lifeline that would run from here all the way to the Eastern Wall. The first gear turning in whatever this war was about to become. And I, for the very first time, was only now seeing one of those gears clearly.

The wind came in from the southeast, carrying fresh-cut wood, damp earth, ink powder, and the faint smell of soup leaking over the lip of the bucket at my feet. I looked down at the bucket and the baskets I'd set aside and, apparently, forgotten entirely.

"... Well, damn." Ignicia glanced at me.

"What now?"

"I was supposed to be delivering breakfast." She looked at the bread, then at me, her eyes broadcasting one sentence with perfect clarity: You really are useless. I cleared my throat and bent to gather the baskets.

"Not my fault—this whole thing turned out way more fascinating than I expected. Not—fascinating's the wrong word. Impressive, maybe. No, that's not it either. Point is—""Shut up and go."

"Yes, yes." I picked everything up and started off toward the outer camp, only to glance back once more after a few steps. Behind me, the axe-strokes, the shouting, the measuring, the carving all continued. Stakes went in one after another. Guide lines pulled taut. Runes carved into fresh wood, stroke by stroke. It looked chaotic—but there was a skeletal order growing out of it, unmistakably.

And I knew that in a few more days, all this wood, stone, metal, and spellwork would fuse into a true gate—one built to swallow and disgorge entire armies. Once that happened, Three Rivers Fortress wouldn't just be a transit point anymore. It would become a throat, forcibly connecting the kingdom's entire rear to its front line. The thought made me want to see it finished. Assuming, of course, it didn't actually teleport someone into the side of a mountain.

Because at that point, it would stop being a military transit gate. It would become a large-scale mass burial project.