Read Novel Full Chapter 1145 - Taming the Wall - Avowal
Chapter 1145 - Taming the Wall - Avowal
Garret had watched a lot of fresh meat cycle through the Great Wall over the years.
The vast majority of them faded from his memory before their first rotation was even over. They all arrived exactly the same: either shivering with thinly veiled terror, or puffed up with suicidal, aristocratic arrogance.
And in either case, the boring yet grueling reality of the Wall filed them down until they were either molded into something moderately useful, or it violently discarded them into the mud.
Years ago, Garret had learned the hard way not to invest a single ounce of emotional energy into any rookie until he saw how their minds held up after their first month.
"Red Pathfinder" had been very different from the very first day.
It wasn't about his combat prowess, at least, not in the beginning... It was his brain.
The kid just understood things. If Garret pointed out a blind spot in the parapet's firing angles just once, the boy didn't just nod and memorize it. He instantly digested the geometry, quietly recalibrated his entire view, and casually fired back a tactical observation regarding wind-shear, he was asking to fix the parapet shape, and the problem that had personally taken Garret three agonizing years of freezing night shifts to figure out.
He lost the very first game of dice they played. And then he flawlessly, ruthlessly won every single game after that. Not because he had a lucky streak, but because it only took his terrifyingly quiet brain exactly two rounds to completely mathematically dismantle the system of the game.
And then there were the new logistical blueprints.
Garret vividly remembered the day the heavily sealed tubes had arrived from high command. He had unrolled the crisp parchment, staring down at the complex, overlapping schematics for the new autonomous towers. The margins were crammed with dense, erratic annotations that looked like absolute, illegible gibberish to the grizzled veteran. He had stared at the paper with the quiet, reluctant respect a man reserves for things he knows are vitally important, but fully accepts he will never possess the education to understand.
Red had read the schematics fluidly. Like a young man casually reading a grocery list.
The kid had leaned over the table, tapping his finger against the parchment, casually pointing out small structural flaws that wouldn't work on site. He softly muttered about what he would need routed differently in specific joints, digesting the impossibly complex logic behind every single drawn line as if he had literally drafted the blueprints himself.
Garret had just stared at him that day, a heavy, sinking thought taking root in his mind, a thought that was becoming uncomfortably frequent with this terrifying new generation.
'Nothing but prodigies. And I can't even begin to keep up.'
Kids bonded to weird plants and bizarre mushrooms who were suddenly breaching the Gold rank. Teenagers who effortlessly deciphered hyper-engineered castle tech over breakfast. The world was violently shifting under Garret's worn boots at a velocity his aging, veteran brain struggled to process. And sitting right at the absolute center of that terrifying paradigm shift were quiet, unassuming kids like Red, who made the mathematically impossible for him look like a boring Tuesday afternoon chore.
But seriously, could the kid be just a little less ruthless with the dice? Lately, after sending his family share Garret barely had enough spare crystals left over to afford a decent drink at the end of the week. It's impossible to get a bit drunk like that…
'That boy is going to go far,' Garret had thought to himself after losing his favorite game for the fifth consecutive time, staring at his empty coin pouch. 'Terrifyingly far.'
The quiet routine had settled over the sector. The men grew accustomed to the peace, and practically none of the fresh recruits struggled to adapt to the Wall this year.
The only real disruption was that Red was practically never around anymore.
Ever since high command officially hijacked him to construct those massive defensive monoliths in other sectors, the kid spent vastly more time vanishing into other places than he did standing guard in his own designated zone.
It felt like a hollow sting. Garret was just starting to genuinely enjoy teaching him people management stuff. He was just starting to look forward to having the quiet kid next to him on the long, freezing shifts, throwing dice on a wooden crate and passing down the gritty, to not die of boredom, unwritten survival rules of the Wall that absolutely no pristine castle blueprint was ever going to teach him.
But it seemed Red's impossibly bright future had simply arrived much faster than anticipated. Garret was left holding the exact same bittersweet bag every veteran holds when they finally find a truly promising rookie: he just had to stand in the mud and watch the kid ascend.
Yet, against all odds, Red still made the time.
Every single time the boy returned from the other work zones, even if it was dead in the middle of the night, even if he arrived wearing the pale, hollow exhaustion of a young man who had spent ten hours dragging heavy timber and carving runes into bedrock, he still sat down on the crate.
He still sat down to play. To deliberately lose the first match, and then systematically, politely bankrupt Garret for the rest of the weekend.
He still sat there in the freezing wind so he could teach him one more minor, gritty detail about the physical limits of a bowstring. About the subtle aerodynamic differences between the newly issued arrows. About exactly which fletching worked best for piercing armor, and why.
And when it was Garret's turn to teach, Red genuinely listened. He didn't just nod politely; he stared at the veteran's hands, asked piercing, highly specific questions, and absorbed the dirt-level knowledge. He entirely lacked the arrogant, rushing impatience of a prodigy who already believed he was vastly above learning from an aging grunt.
'Great kid,' Garret thought every single time he watched Red shoulder his pack and vanish back into the wasteland. 'Just a genuinely good kid.'
And Garret would turn back to face the dark horizon, returning to his shift, absolutely completely oblivious to how incredibly, hilariously small the world he had been living in actually was.
Garret's small, quiet world violently exploded on a completely average morning.
Red had received a flash-report and immediately launched himself into the sky to reinforce an adjacent sector, exactly as he had done dozens of times before. It was just another routine departure. Garret had barely even bothered to look up from polishing his bow.
And then, an apocalyptic nightmare crashed into the Southwest perimeter, a level of enemy Garret hadn't seen in the wall.
It wasn't a standard, screeching wave of Silvers. It was Golds… Dozens of them.
And leading the absolute center of the charge was a towering Platinum horror. It didn't hesitate. It didn't probe the defenses. It launched its colossal mass directly at the autonomous tower and violently shattered the wooden monolith before the defensive roots could do anything more than tear a shallow, bleeding gash into its armor.
Garret had fought in countless, bloody sieges throughout his long life. But staring down at the tidal wave of Gold mutants pouring over the splintered remains of their only real defense, surging relentlessly toward the naked stone of the Wall, a profound, paralyzing ice flooded his veins.
For the very first time in years, he felt the cold, absolute certainty of death. He had absolutely no idea how they were going to survive the next five minutes.
Then, Liora arrived.
She dropped from the clouds on the back of a massive avian beast, slamming into the earth and violently arresting the swarm's momentum. Towering, ethereal serpents woven from pure spiritual fire erupted from her dual-fusion, aggressively wrapping around the Platinum horror as if it were nothing more than a common stray.
Garret's jaw literally dropped. He stared in absolute, paralyzing awe at the sheer, unadulterated power. The Spiritual Tamer. The legendary aristocratic girl every single soldier on the Wall gossiped about. She was single-handedly grappling a monster that had just effortlessly snapped a monolithic tower in half. It was already vastly more mythological violence than Garret's brain was prepared to process before lunch.
And then, Red arrived.
Except, he didn't land like Red.
He fell from the sky like a localized extinction event. And the entity that touched down in the blood-soaked dirt absolutely was not the quiet, humble installation sergeant who lost at dice.
It was the master of a colossal, three-headed beast. A towering, white-jade monstrosity the size of a castle keep, radiating an oppressive, suffocating aura that physically squeezed the air out of Garret's lungs, something he had never experienced in his entire life. The three massive heads reared back and unleashed blinding, apocalyptic beams of pure light violently fused with incinerating fire.
The charging Gold-rank mutants were instantly, cleanly bisected. Dozens of them. They were sliced in half and violently burned from the inside out before their bisected halves even hit the mud. The entire vanguard of the swarm was erased in a matter of seconds.