Read Novel Full Chapter 1148 - Taming the Wall - General
Chapter 1148 - Taming the Wall - General
The official commendations arrived exactly as the rising sun hit the stone of the Wall. It was inevitable.
Ren received the formal dispatch in front of the entire sector. High Command had issued a sweeping, open merit, explicitly recognizing him for the annihilation of the high-tier mutant strike force that had crashed against the Southwest perimeter.
Liora was recognized as well, though her commendation carried a slightly quieter tone. She was officially decorated for stalling the Platinum horror and containing the breach until Ren could arrive. It was a classic reality of military history: the world always possessed a much longer memory for the man who delivered the killing blow than for the soldier who held the shield.
Anyone with two functioning eyes who had stood on that Wall knew the truth, if Liora hadn't fearlessly plunged into the meat grinder the exact second Ren called her, the sector would have been a slaughterhouse before he ever returned.
But as expected it was the name "Ren Patinder" that was currently echoing like wildfire through the barracks.
Liora, for her part, didn't care in the slightest. She wore her quieter merit with absolute aristocratic indifference and celebrated her future husband's gains.
And tucked directly beneath that combat commendation was the administrative bombshell. High Command finally, formally acknowledged the creation and sprawling installation of the autonomous towers across all ten sections of the Wall.
It was no longer possible to brush the wooden monoliths under the rug as a "minor logistical detail" or a localized castle experiment. The sheer, mathematical reality was undeniable. Practically the entire perimeter of the sister cities was now heavily fortified by Ren's autonomous towers. Sector after bloody sector, the constructs had systematically choked the life out of the mutant incursions.
They were actively saving thousands of lives, bleeding the mutant swarms dry, and relieving the exhausted frontline Tamers of countless hours of grueling patrols and combat.
When the military brass finally sat down and calculated the absolute totality of the boy's impact, the sheer volume of high-tier beasts exterminated, the logistical miracle of the tower network, and the fundamental, tactical transformation of the kingdom's entire defensive doctrine, the rewards owed to Ren were simply astronomical.
So, rather than delaying the inevitable for another bureaucratic cycle, they ripped the bandage off.
They officially handed him the title of General.
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Ren still had a massive amount of learning to do, and Selphira knew it better than anyone.
Magnetically drawing people in, ruthlessly solving ground-level problems, earning unbreakable loyalty without even trying, all of that came effortlessly to him. It flowed from his core so naturally that he didn't even recognize it as a specialized skill.
But there were other, darker elements of leadership that were absolutely not intuitive.
These were the brutal skills a commander only learned through time, blood, and catastrophic failures. The logistical nightmare of mobilizing massive troop formations that can't avoid losses. The toxic, fragile politics of negotiating with rival commanders. The freezing, isolating weight of making a singular tactical decision that no longer doomed a mere platoon, but condemned a section.
Selphira inherently trusted that Ren would learn these things on the fly. The boy learned absolutely everything fast on the fly. In a world full of chaotic variables, his terrifying adaptability was one of the few absolute certainties she clung to.
However, there were certain stubborn traits he harbored that deeply unsettled her.
Sirius had recently filed a classified report detailing Ren's absolute, unyielding stubbornness regarding casualties. Specifically, his terrifying refusal to leave a single prisoner behind, even in tactical scenarios where sacrificing a few captives was the most efficient, safest route to victory.
In a grueling, protracted war, that specific brand of bleeding-heart obstinacy would inevitably cost the lives of highly trained soldiers who possessed vastly more tactical value than the people being rescued. Selphira knew this in her bones. She had fought wars for centuries. She knew that in a General, that kind of rigid idealism was a glaring, bleeding weakness, a flaw that another commander like Selthia would eventually learn to ruthlessly exploit.
But Selphira also knew that this exact idealism was fundamentally woven into the fabric of who Ren was.
If she forcefully ripped that stubborn morality out of him, she risked destroying the exact magnetic core that made the common people follow him so fervently.
So, Selphira made a gamble... She would leave the grounding process in the hands of his consultants, a standard operating way for any high-ranking military official. Lin and Zhao would always be standing right behind his shoulder, ready to aggressively press him on the cold reality of mission priorities.
And if their pragmatic voices weren't enough, he had his future father-in-law, Sirius. He had the princes. He had Selphira herself if needed be... He was surrounded by a hardened inner circle perfectly capable of pushing him toward the brutal voice of reason when reason was required.
Though, deep down, in a quiet, hidden place in her soul that the ancient matriarch would never, ever admit out loud, she desperately wanted the boy to keep winning.
She wanted him to violently bend luck and causality to his will, forcing his impossible ideals to stay afloat without paying the bloody price. She secretly yearned to live in a world where Ren never actually had to sacrifice a single soul, simply because his brilliant brain could always manufacture a miraculous, impossible third option.
But this wasn't a fairy tale. This was the real world, and Selphira had lived in the dirt of the real world for far too long. When a boy carried the weight of humanity's survival on his shoulders, there always had to be a cold, reasonable voice whispering in his ear.
Even if it was only there so the idealist had a wall to push against.
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Down in Ren's sector, Garret's boisterous interference continued to flawlessly smooth over the awkward transition.
Instead of growing stiff and distant upon hearing about the monumental promotions, the soldiers of the Southwest perimeter exploded with genuine joy. They loudly congratulated him. They slapped his back hard enough to bruise… their hands.
And then, to Ren's absolute, paralyzing horror, they started calling him "General Pathfinder".
The title wasn't even strictly official yet on the local level, as it required a formal pinning ceremony that High Command hadn't actually organized yet.
The soldiers did not care about the bureaucratic protocol in the slightest.
This became the immediate problem, or rather, the garrison's brand-new favorite pastime.
Ren was profoundly, visibly embarrassed by the title.
Every single time someone shouted it across the courtyard, his shoulders hitched toward his ears. He visibly cringed, shrinking into his uniform. And the moment the grizzled grunts discovered that there was a completely legal, unpunishable loophole to violently mock the most powerful entity on the Wall, simply by respecting him too much, they exploited it without a single shred of mercy.
It was a completely new, highly evolved form of military bullying.
It consisted of exaggerated, sweeping bows, crisp salutes, and booming shouts of, "Yes, my General!" and "Whatever you command, my glorious General!"
The men were absolutely delighted. They had discovered that you could brutally bully a living weapon with sheer, weaponized respect, and they laughed into their fists every time Ren's face burned red.
Garret, naturally, was the absolute worst offender of them all. He had been the one to initially shatter the ice, and he firmly believed that gave him the sovereign right to abuse the joke first and loudest.
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The following week, a standard troop rotation brought Li to the Southwest wall.
Li, Chen's grandson, and Ren's childhood friend. It was the specific, unbreakable kind of friendship forged in the dirt, long before the brutal realities of the world decided who was going to be filthy rich and who was going to starve.
And, through the bizarre, tangled coincidences that the Wall was infamous for producing, it turned out Li actually knew Garret. They were distantly related through the marriage of one of Li's cousins. It was one of those messy, sprawling family connections that neither man could perfectly map out, but it instantly generated a comfortable, foul-mouthed familiarity between men.
So, they sat down on a pair of wooden crates and started rolling the dice.
Ren was currently out on a deep-zone patrol, which meant he was the absolute perfect subject for their conversation. Garret, who now proudly considered himself the primary custodian of the General's local legend, was eagerly preparing to brag. He wanted to talk about the kid's impossible achievements, their close friendship, and how he, Garret, had been the one to accept the boy long before anyone knew who he was.
But Li accidentally beat him to the punch…
It started because Li was casually leaning back, gazing inward over the parapet, staring down at the sprawling, concentric rings of the city.
"I actually used to live right down there, you know?" Li commented, his voice carrying the relaxed tone of a man entirely unaware he was holding a live grenade. He pointed toward a cluster of crumbling, dilapidated roofs visible in the hazy distance. "In one of those half-collapsed shacks. It was the absolute poorest district in the city. The extreme outer edge of the slums."