Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons - Chapter 1047 - Taming the Wall - 3

The instructions on the board were almost diagrammatic, no unnecessary context, designed with the economy of someone who had written this kind of instruction enough times to know exactly which information was needed and which wasn’t.

What to watch for from position seventeen. When the shift changed and what the handoff looked like. What to do if the pressure exceeded the manageable threshold before the next rotation arrived.

The soldier also reading the new board at the same time as Ren had the age of someone who was also new but had been in the sector long enough for it to have become familiar, someone who had passed through the first year and come out on the other side with a working knowledge of how things ran. His name was Dunn. What Dunn knew about Ren was exactly what Vehn knew about Ren: that he was a weird name on the third shift list for position seventeen.

“First week?” asked Dunn, without taking his eyes off the board.

“First week,” Ren confirmed.

“Third shift has wind at the top of position seventeen,” said Dunn, with the neutrality of someone sharing useful information without attaching any judgment. “Not much… But cold.”

“Thanks.”

Dunn nodded and went toward his position.

Ren proceeded toward his.

♢♢♢♢

The wall from position seventeen of the third shift of the southwest barracks had a specific view that no official document described, because it wasn’t the kind of view that official documents considered relevant. The way the light of that hour reached the outer edge of the forest before the darkness of the territory took over, producing a space of about twenty minutes where the line of magic trees started, both things coexisted reflected on the shiny new wall, where what was inside the wall and what was outside it were briefly in the same light, before the transition completed and the territory became the light show the territory became at night.

The tamers who had spent enough time at that position knew that this was exactly the window when the creatures outside calculated whether the day was worth attempting. Watching the light change the way the soldiers watched it change, from the other side of the same boundary.

Vehn had been right.

The wall as an assignment was different from the wall as support.

When you came as support you arrived just as long as the fight was active, knowing you were going to leave as soon as it was not. Not only did that make the time go by faster… That knowledge was in everything, in how you held your attention, in what you permitted yourself to notice, in how the hours felt. When you were assigned, the wall was simply where you were now, and the hours had a different weight because there was no close departure point they were building toward.

Ren settled into position seventeen with the wind Dunn had mentioned arriving exactly as advertised, and waited for the light to finish moving the way it always finished moving.

The shift lasted its normal length.

Red Pathfinder.

It was close enough to his real name that Ren responded to it naturally without needing to process an intermediate step, which was exactly why he had chosen it. Aliases that required remembering they were aliases gave you away before the situation demanded it. The best cover was the one that didn’t feel like a cover… Or so he thought.

Vehn had written it in the list without any comment, which was exactly the normal procedure he had for all information he received and which Ren had already identified as a baseline characteristic of the sergeant rather than any indication of anything specific. Vehn was mostly quiet, processed, filed, and advanced on. It was a useful quality in a superior.

The first days passed.

Life on the wall depended enormously on which part of the wall you were on.

The sectors near the bridge had nearly direct access to the city center, which meant that vendors with real variety could reach them without logistical difficulty, and that the options available during a rest shift were broad enough for free time to have more than one way of resolving itself. Food, materials, small luxuries that had no business being as appealing as they were, the cumulative effect of available choice making the long hours feel shorter.

Before the wall expanded its perimeter to encircle the complete city, the exterior sectors had compensated for that lack of variety with local rarities that tamers with suitable beasts could source from the outskirts, circulating through an informal market that the officers ignored actively enough that the thing worked, the deliberate blindness of people who understood that the alternative was worse.

Now the wall was the city and the city was the wall, in the sense that the defensive perimeter coincided with the limit of what the urban structure encompassed. The city had grown into its own defense and the defense had become the city’s edge.

The practical effect was that soldier density per sector had dropped considerably, and the informal commercial exchange that made long shifts manageable was less agile than before, more distance between vendors and positions, less competition keeping prices reasonable, fewer options in the time between one threat and the next.

The southwest sector where Ren was assigned was among the worst for this. Simply the kind of sector where life during rest shifts resembled waiting more than living, the specific combination of isolation and routine that made hours feel exactly as long as they were.

The other part compensated.

The southwest wall was at least not boring in combat.

The creatures arriving at the sector in recent months were coming at a frequency that didn’t correspond to the cycles the wall’s records documented for that area. Not a dramatic difference, not the kind of increase that justified a higher-level alert or a formal anomaly classification. The difference between a frequency that made sense and a frequency that didn’t quite make sense but wasn’t far enough outside the expected range to be formally categorized as wrong.