Shien through Emon's eyes

The wheels ground over frozen muddy ruts with a teeth-grating crunch.

Special Envoy Priest Emon sat upright in the sheltered shadows, his hands folded over his rough Ashwood Staff. His gaze passed the gently swaying lantern and rested on the silver-haired boy opposite him.

Several days had passed since they left the Tear Knight Governor's Residence.

Ordinarily, once a young man who had seized authority over half a defense zone at fourteen escaped his supreme commander's scrutiny, some of the restless excitement of wielding such power was bound to show.

Yet four days of travel through wind and snow had worn this seasoned Church bureaucrat's initial judgment to pieces.

Emon recalled the scenes of taking in twenty thousand refugees along their route over the past few days.

Seated on horseback, Shien had coldly surveyed the ragged criminals and refugees and immediately ordered them divided into groups.

The twenty thousand had been broken up and reorganized on the march, then swiftly forced into a simple but stringent set of rules. In the blink of an eye, they became the front line's cheapest scavengers.

Broken bricks in the ruins of the old defense zone, half-rotted monster carcasses beneath the frozen earth, rusty nails—anything useful was dug out with their bare hands and carried on their shoulders.

The overseers did not even carry whips, only work-point ledgers tied directly to rations. Work earned a bowl of hot wheat porridge; idleness meant starving in the wind and waiting to die.

Refugees who had merely been waiting to die by the roadside were forcibly fed into an invisible set of gears, moving forward mechanically and desperately.

Now, in the special envoy priest's mind, the boy across from him was certainly no empty shell who had fooled the governor with a few pretty words.

He truly