Heavy footsteps, the creak of wheels rolling over stones, the clatter of armor and weapons, and the occasional bark of an officer's orders wove together into a dull, oppressive marching symphony. It stubbornly seeped through the gaps in the carriage walls, threatening to distract the lone thinker inside this mobile office.
Diu Ni Leimu-or rather, Transport Minister Diu Ni Leimu-had long since grown accustomed to it.
His brain seemed to have been precisely divided into several independent compartments. One ear instinctively tracked changes in the rhythm of the march... It was a habit developed through his long command of the Holy Crusade Army, allowing him to confirm by sound that the troops were still marching in good order.
Meanwhile, most of Diu Ni Leimu's attention was completely absorbed in another, entirely different stack of documents before him.
Spread out to his left was an exceptionally detailed drawing, its ink still fresh: "Feasibility report and budget request for phase one of the double-track railway connecting Tavitsky and Suvano (revised draft)."
Lines crisscrossed the drawing, densely annotated with figures: gradients, curve radii, bridge load capacities, estimated earthwork volumes... Beside it lay a thick stack of calculation sheets covered in equations for sleeper density, rail specifications, and labor costs.
His right hand held a fine-pointed pen, swiftly adding annotations to a document titled "Kingdom Railway Corps development outline and wartime contingency plan."
The quill scratched softly across the paper, forming an odd duet with the metallic rumble outside the window.
"...Clause five: the Railway Corps' combat engineers must be given priority access to standardized, multipurpose road-building tools rather than traditional entrenching shovels... Damn it, did those idiots at the Quartermaster's Office even read my last memorandum?"
Muttering his complaint, he emphatically wrote "reaffirmed" beside the clause and underlined it twice with thick strokes.