Leon was in utter shock as he got away from Asiya’s estate as fast as he could without drawing attention. As he walked through the streets of the capital, he alternated between moments of shocked numbness, to anger, to abject sorrow, and back again. He didn’t know how he should feel, and his body was giving him no clues, either. Adrenaline continued to pump through his body, causing his limbs to feel jittery and weak, and his mind was clouded and unable to focus.
Ever since he’d come to the Knight Academy, he’d been sparring with Valeria. At this point, she was one of the people he most respected and liked in the whole Academy, but now…
Now, he knew that she was in some fashion related to the man who’d led the assassins to his home in the Northern Vales. She’d been right there in front of him for months, and he’d been unknowingly growing closer and closer to her.
He didn’t know what to do. Once he returned to the Knight Academy, he didn’t immediately return to the gorge even though the Snow Lions were preparing to return to their tower, but instead wandered the forest. His composure was gone, and he was sure that the excuses he’d made to get out of Asiya and Valeria’s presence had left them feeling insulted and suspicious. He couldn’t help it, though, and he wandered the forest trying and failing to regain some semblance of his usual stoicism. After an hour of fruitless wandering, he just found a secluded grove in the western hills where he wouldn’t be found and sat down in the shade, trying to work through his feelings.
He didn’t get far before the sun started to set, though he at least managed to calm down. So, with some apprehension, he finally started making his way back to the gorge.
As for the revelation about Valeria, he wasn’t sure what he should do about it—or even what he could do about it. For the moment, at least, he made his peace with not doing anything. But once he had the means and the will to start looking into his father’s killers, he now knew where to start.
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When Leon returned to the gorge, he found that both Castor and Alphonsus had stayed behind instead of heading into the city for the weekend, as did about two dozen Snow Lions. They had taken the day to pack up much of what they needed to bring back to the tower, while also making sure to lock up the caves as tightly as they could so they could be used again if the need arose.
Leon, feeling quite grateful for the opportunity to occupy his mind with something other than Valeria, jumped at the chance to help out, mostly by using what he had learned in the enchantment classes to help seal up the other entrances to the cave system. First, rocks and wood boards were used to block the entrances, then Leon carved enchantments into the boards that were similar to those used to fortify Legion camps and bases. When he was done, it should take any other unit several hours to open one of the cave entrances, but the Snow Lions would be able to do it in minutes.
Later that evening, the entire unit started to ferry some of their things back to the tower after returning from the city, with all one hundred and four Snow Lions heading back to their tower for dinner, rather than Leon leading a group to pick up the delivered food and bring it back to the gorge. They were accompanied by their Instructors, who spoke a little about what they ought to expect during the following weeks.
After all, Small Unit Tactics was over, and it was time to move on to one of if not the single most important class on the Knight Academy’s schedule: Heavy Infantry Training. This class was longer than the three-month Small Unit Tactics, coming in at just over four months. For the first week, the trainees would receive classes that taught basic unit formations, the flag signals, magical flares, whistles, and other such signals used in battle, as well as get issued their final piece of training gear: their shields.
After that, most of the rest of the four months would be spent out on the training field, practicing forming up and moving as an entire unit. There would also be other classes that would teach the trainees exactly what they would have to do if they were in larger units than a one-hundred-man company, but the time on the training field would take up the lion’s share of the time allotted to Heavy Infantry Training.
Following Heavy Infantry Training, there would be another month of classes dealing with the myriad creatures and monsters they might be deployed to hunt and fight—almost exclusively vampires, werewolves, and stone giants since practically all the rest of the dangerous creatures that once called the Bull Kingdom home had long been exterminated.
After the Senior Instructor finished laying out a road map that covered the majority of their remaining time in the Knight Academy, he left the Snow Lions to their business—that business being to finish the move back into their tower.
First, Castor ensured that both of their banners went into the ground floor shrine and were properly secured. It took him and a couple other second-tier nobles almost an hour to figure out the various mechanisms that locked the banners in place, but figure it out they did. No one was going to allow themselves to get complacent and leave an opening for a rival unit to steal their banner again.
Second, Alphonsus made sure the front door was as secured as it could be. It was boring work, simply testing the various locks that would buy the Snow Lions the time they needed to get armed and armored in the event of an attack, but Alphonsus took to this duty with an enormous smile on his face. It didn’t matter to him what his job was, he was just happy to be back in the tower and out of the dark dank cave he had been forced to sleep in for the past three months.
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Lastly, Leon took charge of the nightly combat training that the third-tier trainees made the rest of the unit take part in. He had them focus on simple motions repeated ad nauseum to build up the first-tier trainees’ combat muscles. This would not only help them become stronger fighters but also aid them in their ascension to the second-tier, something which five more Snow Lions had accomplished since their first trainee had ascended several months before.
The next morning, the Snow Lions woke up after having one the best nights of sleep in their entire lives. Their happiness at coming back to soft, warm beds after resting their heads in a cave for months was truly profound. They were so motivated from the night’s rest that they finished moving the last of their things out of the cave by lunch, none of them having gone into the capital for the day.
The following week’s classes were taught by the Senior Instructor in the first-tier common room rather than with the rest of the training cycle’s units. He drew crude diagrams on large sheets of paper for the entire unit to see showing exactly where they had to be and what they had to do when in formation and had the other Instructors demonstrating the signals they needed to memorize to move properly on the battlefield.
The most basic formation that the Senior Instructor focused on was a layered shield wall, with five rows of two squads—twenty men—each. This formation could be modified on the fly for more depth or width, but the Instructors wanted the trainees to get the basics down first before they started letting them modify their formations, so they stuck with the basics for that first week.
In the center of the first row was the Centurion who commanded the company and one of their Prefects; in the Snow Lions’ case, this was Castor as Centurion and Leon as the accompanying Prefect. The rest of the first row was made up of their personal squads, with the second-tier members posted on the flanks of the formation.
The other eight squads of the company made up the next four rows, with the squad commanders taking the flanks and their other second-tier mages directly behind the Centurion and leading Prefect. The second Prefect—Alphonsus for the Snow Lions—was in the last row, keeping an eye on the formation and making sure no one ran away while the other Prefect and the Centurion were leading the company into battle. As most other units had four third-tier trainees, they would have one more Prefect in the last row as well.
In a normal company, the Centurion would be of the fourth-tier, but that wasn’t much of an option for the ten training units in the Knight Academy, which was why it was up to the third-tier trainees to decide amongst themselves who would lead their respective units.
The Snow Lions’ Instructors almost literally drilled this information into their skulls, while Leon, Castor, and Alphonsus arranged where each individual squad would be in the formation. By the next weekend, every Snow Lion knew exactly where they had to be when in their standard company formation.
While these classes were being taught, the Snow Lions continued to have their food delivered to their tower instead of going to the dining hall. Consequently, none of the other units had any idea that they had returned, given that they had long since stopped watching the Snow Lions’ tower.
And so, when the other nine units gathered on the training field the following Monday to begin practical training, nearly all of them were frozen in shock when the Snow Lions came running out from the forest, Aemilius proudly waving both of their banners in front of the unit as they arrived on the field. After a few seconds, the others recovered enough to not simply stand slack-jawed at the unexpected development, but none had a stronger reaction than the Deathbringers. Many of the more hot-blooded first-tier trainees struggled to stay with the unit and not charge the Snow Lions. Fortunately, the second-tier trainees had far more self-control and kept them in line.
“They’re back?” Linus asked rhetorically.
“We can get out banner back! Let’s g—" started Actaeon, but he was silenced by a rebuke from Gaius.
“Not here,” he growled. “Save it for later, when there’s better opportunity.”
“But we still lack a banner! If we can seize ours again…” Actaeon tried to argue, but when Gaius glanced over at him, he stopped talking and left his argument unfinished. It was clear enough that Gaius had made his decision, and he wasn’t going to change it.
“Not like we can do anything now,” added Linus as the Snow Lions placed their banners on the wooden platform that held the other eight banners. The units weren’t allowed to seize banners if they were on that platform. This was a strictly enforced rule, as the Instructors wanted everyone’s minds focused on training rather than on stealing banners when they were on the training field.
“Later then…” muttered Actaeon as he stole another glance at the Deathbringers’ banner, waving just below the Snow Lions’ own.
The other units weren’t so in need of restraint as they didn’t share the Deathbringers’ recent history with the Snow Lions. The most ‘antagonistic’ unit apart from Gaius’ was Marcus’, and that was simply due to the ambush he had tried to spring on Leon. Given that it didn’t work and they hadn’t tried again, the relationship between the units remained largely unchanged, with none of the leaders of either unit harboring bad feelings about the other.
As a matter of fact, the opposite was true. Marcus had had absolute confidence in his ambush plan, and when Leon not only escaped but managed to turn the tables on him, he felt an enormous amount of respect blossom for the other man. So when the Snow Lions appeared out of the trees, Marcus smiled wide, greatly anticipating testing himself again against an opponent who had beaten him once before.
His reaction was mirrored in slightly different ways in both Alcander and Valeria, with both smiling but the former reaching for his weapon while the latter merely reverted back to her normal cold and emotionless exterior barely a second after the smile appeared.
“Hey, he’s baaack,” Asiya said, nudging her silver-haired friend with her elbow, being not satisfied seeing only a tiny smile on Valeria’s face.
“I-I can see that!” Valeria said, her slight stutter the only sign that her haughty and unconcerned tone wasn’t nearly as honest as it seemed.
For all the shock their return brought, though, the Snow Lions were remarkably calm, only taking a spot slightly apart from the others to wait for their morning training to begin. Though to say they were calm would be to remark solely on their outer appearance; many Snow Lions were relishing being the center of attention, though Castor, Leon, and Alphonsus had all given them incredibly strict orders to maintain their composure. They wanted to make a good impression, after all.