Emon's first appraisal

The heavy carriage wheels rolled over the frozen ground on the outskirts of Blackpine Fief, making a monotonous crunching sound.

Special Envoy Priest Emon pushed open the carriage door and stepped down slowly, holding his Ashwood Staff.

A biting wind swept toward him, carrying the lingering stench of charred remains and making his robes snap and flutter.

Emon had expected a border territory that had only just crawled out of Blood Moon Season to be a scene of utter devastation.

The carnage was real enough. The enormous craters and fire-blackened trenches still lay around the outskirts.

One glance was enough to tell how brutally the battle during Blood Moon Season had been fought.

Yet order had swiftly returned, and the craters were being filled and tamped down with rough but remarkable speed.

Damaged caltrops, twisted iron stakes, and ruptured pipelines had not been piled beside the road like rubbish, either. Auxiliary soldiers were sorting them and hauling them away in batches.

The monster remains that would often pile into stinking mountains of corpses elsewhere were almost nowhere to be seen here.

Stacked in the square were harvested bones, stripped armored hides, raw blood, and crate after crate of recyclable materials.

Farther away, newly built temporary barricades, scaffolding erected by combat engineers, and repaired slowing ramps were already back in place.

Emon's scrutinizing, critical gaze faltered slightly at the sight.

He followed Shien along the main street toward the Inner Fortress, everything he saw along the way flooding into his mind.

Veterans missing arms or legs were not slumped against walls waiting to die. They simply sat silently in the cold wind, holding whetstones and scraping them again and again along the rolled edges of silver-plated spears.

Several auxiliary soldiers pushed wheelbarrows laden with stone past them, meeting a carriage carrying