His Royal Highness encouraged him to train hard and he also reaffirmed his idea that he belonged to the militia and now Van’er would continue to fight for His Royal Highness as a member of the regular army.
…
Iron Axe quickly announced today’s first training program: Field training.
At the beginning Van’er felt very disappointed, it was once more running for training. Even during the Months of Demons if the weather was good enough they always had to run. After breakfast, they checked the weather conditions and then they had to run two laps around the town unless there were large snowflakes falling from the sky, then they would abort running training. According to the saying of His Highness, this exercise was good for the muscles and allowed their bones to thaw so while defending the city walls their movements wouldn’t become stiff and unable to use the pike.
But when the soldiers ran out of Border Town, Van’er immediately felt the difference between this new and the old training program.
At this point, the snow on the field was still far from melting, after three months of uninterrupted snowing, the snow reached up to their knees. Calling it running wasn’t the right word, instead, it was better to call it crawling through the snow. The team suddenly broke into many small groups, after each step they needed a lot of strength to take another step.
There was no doubt that this special training of struggling through the snow was certainly an idea of His Highness. Van’er had already figured out the goal of His Royal Highness. At this moment any protest would become invalid, they were only able to go through with this training until the end.
During the whole morning, they had to struggle through the snow. So when the team returned to the town, Van’er was satisfied that he couldn’t feel his own legs any longer.
The snow which got into their boots had already turned into water, even standing in the sun, most people were still cold and trembling. The huge physical exertion exacerbated the chill, even Iron Axe felt unable to eat. He announced the dissolution of the team, and delayed the lunchtime for thirty minutes so that everyone could dry their boots and replace their pants.
So everyone was very pleased when they later heard that the afternoon training was canceled.
Of course, they didn’t know that Lightning had supervised the whole field training — this was the little girl’s daily training regime: Learning to precisely control her magic to fly with uniform velocity. When she later reported her gathered information to Roland, the latter nearly fell from his seat.
The total distance traveled throughout the morning was four kilometers.
A few days after the victory celebration, Roland finally undertook the great farming project.
A constant dripping sound could be heard from the direction of the windows when he was sitting in his office, it sounded as if it was raining non-stop. It was the sound of the melting snow.
When he visited the countryside for New Year’s, he laid in front of the window most of the time, watching the long ice prisms which hung under the roof turn transparent and then into droplets, which then fell down. At the moment he hadn’t had the time for such leisure. However, writing down plans for the future while simultaneously listening to the voice of earth’s recovery was also very pleasurable.
According to the information gathered from the previous years, the snow would need about one week’s time to melt, but the road between the Border Town and Longsong Stronghold would at least need one month until it was usable again. It took so much time after the snow melted since the road was built out of mud and also didn’t have a drainage system
Roland could already imagine it, if he wanted to defeat Longsong Stronghold, the first thing he needed to do, was to build a road between the two cities which was usable by carriages even during heavy rains.
But now the problem with the highest priority was still the issue of the army’s reconstruction. Without a reliable and mighty army, it would be impossible to defeat the forces of the Longsong Stronghold with his outnumbered troops. Transferring the militia into the regular army was only the first step. The specific preparation of establishing the new rules, discipline, reward and punishment system turned out to be a big headache.
Although as a child he had played land battle chess, however, he had already long forgotten all the previous teachings. Roland, after some thought, simply decided to make up his own plans. Anyway, as the creator of the new army, even if he implemented unreasonable things, no one would discover it anyway.
