Eastern battlefield.
The knights were all holding their breath, especially after constantly hearing that Baron Henderson had now become one with the noble lords. Every knight longed to be next.
The knights who knew Baron Henderson felt it even more deeply.
They discovered that after becoming a baron, Henderson had changed far too much. In the past, he had been the sort who would split even a silver coin before spending it, but now he no longer even cared for anything that was not a Gold Coin.
During this period, the knights took turns going to Oren City to sort and transport supplies, treating it as a brief respite from the war with the elves. Naturally, they could feel the name of a man who had crossed class boundaries echoing by their ears.
They heard that this battlefield baron had already begun buying up apple trees on a large scale, intending to turn them into a source of wealth. In the future, his fortune would be calculated in Gold Coins.
There was also tax collection—collecting taxes from Sellan Town, handing a portion to the king of Andara Kingdom, and keeping the rest for himself.
All of this made the knights understand the gap between knights and nobles all over again.
Especially after hearing that the kingdom had begun learning from the Empire by establishing a lordship system between barons and knights, while Baron Henderson had been incomparably lucky and skipped that stage entirely.
He was not even a lord but a baron. The gap this left in the knights' hearts was immense, and they secretly hated themselves for not having had such good luck on the battlefield back then—killing several Elven Rangers at the level of Sky Knights and breaking through the enemy formation.
The effect of a benchmark was