Read Novel Full Chapter 1138 - Taming the Wall - Incidentally - 5
Chapter 1138 - Taming the Wall - Incidentally - 5
Liora's was a flawless, rock-solid briefing. It was the report of a brilliant young woman executing an excellent job in her own sector, growing into a formidable leader in a way that was highly legible and deeply conventional.
It was exactly the type of aristocratic leadership drilled into noble children from the moment they could walk.
Liora inspired her troops. She coordinated them with flawless military doctrine. She naturally projected that heavy, undeniable 'aura' that inherently commanded respect and signaled to everyone around her that she was meant to be followed.
Her report was precisely what Selphira had expected from a granddaughter of her caliber and character. On any other day, Selphira would have dedicated her absolute, glowing attention to every single syllable of it.
Today, however, Selphira found her mind helplessly anchored to the previous report.
She listened to the praise regarding Liora with only half her brain, allowing the other half to relentlessly chew on the enigma that was Ren.
Because Ren was the anomaly that completely ruined the equation. He was the chaotic variable that violently broke the mold. He was a puzzle she had been turning over and over in her mind without finding a satisfying resolution.
Liora was a leader that Selphira had carefully raised and molded. That was clear, and it was a source of profound pride.
But Ren?
Ren was something else entirely, and Selphira still hadn't figured out the exact political or militaristic vocabulary to name it.
♢♢♢♢
When the final report concluded and the heavy oak doors clicked shut, Selphira was left completely alone in the strategy room.
The afternoon light had shifted, falling in long, horizontal golden bars across the empty chairs.
She let out a long, quiet sigh.
Ren was genuinely, profoundly impossible to guide.
That was the inescapable conclusion Selphira finally reached after chewing on the problem for the entire afternoon. The realization had been quietly orbiting her thoughts for a long time, but only now, in the quiet solitude of the room, did she allow herself to fully articulate it.
The boy was weird. He was genuinely, fundamentally weird.
The entire elaborate psychological framework she and Victor had so meticulously designed to prepare him, forcing him to serve from the muddy bottom, making him learn the crushing weight of command, ensuring he earned the troops' loyalty before claiming his throne, was structurally flawed.
It relied on a false premise. Their master plan assumed there was a standard, historical "mold" of a leader that Ren needed to be forcefully squeezed into so that his overwhelming power wouldn't alienate him from humanity.
But Ren simply did not fit into any mold. He violently shattered them without even realizing they existed.
Selphira leaned back in her chair, and a slow, genuine smile spread across her ageless face.
Perhaps that was actually a magnificent thing.
Ren didn't need to learn how to be a leader in the conventional, aristocratic sense. Perhaps it was his inherent nature, or the brutal, starving slums he had crawled out of. Perhaps lacking a noble birthright had hardwired his brain this way.
His sheer, unadulterated way of being was a magnetic force that naturally pulled common people into his orbit. Sooner or later, everyone standing near him independently reached the exact same conclusion: it was heavily in their best interest to shut up and listen to him.
Not because he aggressively imposed his will. Not because he shouted orders or demanded respect.
It was because, at his absolute core, Ren fundamentally looked at the world as a series of problems, and he obsessively focused on giving people the exact tools they needed to solve them.
A grizzled veteran's draw weight was slowing down? Ren quietly handed him a custom-engineered runic bow. A bloody sector was buckling under constant mutant incursions? Ren built them a self-sustaining, autonomous meat-grinder. A rookie guard was struggling with a complex firing angle? Ren delivered blunt, unadorned, mathematically perfect geometry advice.
Ren looked at humanity, saw inefficiencies and suffering, and he ruthlessly solved them.
And that was the vital key Selphira had been blind to, simply because she had spent centuries swimming in the toxic, performative circles of the high aristocracy. Ren genuinely, deeply cared about fixing the problem.
He didn't care about the honor of a noble house, and he absolutely did not care about the geopolitical 'gossip' surrounding his actions.
His concern wasn't a calculated political performance. It wasn't a manipulative leadership technique memorized from a dusty military manual. It was raw, unadulterated, and genuine… And the soldiers felt it in their bones.
Common men, no matter how uneducated, could instantly taste the difference between an aristocrat feigning interest for morale, and a boy who genuinely, obsessively cared about ensuring they survived the night. They might not possess the vocabulary to articulate it, but they felt the difference with Ren. And they responded to that quiet, obsessive care with a fierce, unbreakable loyalty that absolutely no formal military hierarchy could ever manufacture.
Sitting alone in the golden light, Selphira considered another, highly amusing possibility.
With the brutal honesty she only permitted herself in perfect solitude, she wondered if Ren even did these things out of conscious, moral goodness…
She knew the boy intimately enough by now to understand that his primary, driving engine was curiosity. He was insatiably, dangerously curious.
Perhaps, to Ren's hyper-active brain, every single person's suffering was simply a brand-new challenge. Perhaps human struggle was just an intricate puzzle his autistic-coded mind absolutely refused to leave unsolved. It was just another way to feed the ravenous curiosity that propelled his entire existence.
To Ren, a veteran at a tactical disadvantage wasn't a tragedy requiring pity; he was a broken equation that needed to be balanced. A defensive sector drowning in mutant blood wasn't a heavy logistical burden; it was a fascinating architectural question:
'How do I automate this defense grid before these exhausted men make a fatal error?'
But ultimately, Selphira decided, brushing a stray lock of hair from her face, the internal engine didn't matter in the slightest.
Whether it was driven by pure, angelic goodness, insatiable academic curiosity, or, most likely, a chaotic, inseparable tangle of both, the result was exactly the same.
Ren solved people's problems. The people felt it. And that people followed him to the gates of hell.
That was undeniably a form of supreme leadership. Even if it looked absolutely nothing like the political doctrines she had taught for centuries, maybe simply because "flawlessly solving every single problem" was a physical impossibility for any normal leader.
Selphira rested her head against the high back of her chair and stared up at the stone ceiling for a long moment.
She knew exactly what she was going to do.
The very next time she caught him hiding in her subterranean vault, frantically training that apocalyptic, three-way fusion that literally vibrated the air out of the room and rivaled Dragarion's monsters in sheer mass, she was going to tell him exactly this.
She was going to order him to completely stop worrying about "learning how to be a leader."
She would tell him that he already was one. In his own twisted, socially awkward, entirely unique way, he had mastered it. And the absolute best tactical maneuver he could execute right now was to simply continue being exactly who he was.
A soft, wicked chuckle escaped her lips.
She wondered how the boy would react when she officially told him that the social experiment was over, and that he was finally free to use his real name on the Wall again.
He would probably freeze. He would stare at her in complete, unbroken silence for a long moment, violently processing the implications... And then, he would completely ignore the importance of the moment and ask her a lateral question about experimental runic conductivity, or awkwardly ask how Liora and the girls were doing.
Selphira laughed aloud, the sound ringing cleanly in the empty strategy room.
Yes. That was exactly what he would do.