Chapter 1094: A Power of Attorney
The telephone on Roland’s desk ran a thin wire south to Longsong Stronghold, and from there — technically — the line ended. The instrument wasn’t rated for the full distance to the Fertile Plains. What made the call work anyway was Leaf.
When she became the Heart of Forest, her awareness spread through the Misty Forest like roots through water — further and faster than Lightning flying at full sprint. The system was straightforward: Iron Axe’s adjutant called Leaf, Leaf transferred it to Roland’s desk, and the information arrived in roughly the time it took to blink. The wind-up telephone had become something else entirely. Roland hadn’t decided whether to feel satisfied or unnerved by how much of his infrastructure now ran on the patience of a single girl who spoke in other people’s voices.
“Everything’s holding,” said Leaf, in a pitch approximating Iron Axe’s cadence. Not quite right — the timbre was too light, and there was a faint whisper beneath it like wind through leaves — but the content was delivered with proper Iron Axe economy: no unnecessary words, declarative structure, one sentence per fact. “The demons tried to destroy the railway after the raid, as you predicted. No large impact on logistics. Without the spider demons, they can only work manually. They also had to withdraw before ‘Blackriver’ engaged. The damaged section was repaired quickly.”
“The armored trains held.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. They function as mobile strongholds — reinforcement, repair, fire cover. If we could station a ‘Blackriver’ at every waypoint —”
“You’re making it sound simple.” Roland turned the thought over. Two armored trains. The witches needed to produce every component of a freight locomotive, and the armored versions were heavier, slower to build, demanding in materials. Two was not a small achievement — it was close to the maximum the current production chain could deliver without stripping resources from something else. “Keep extending the defensive line. Target: ready for general offensive by midsummer.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
A pause. A rustle of leaves beneath the silence. Roland had to actively suppress the urge to tell her she could drop the nasal undertone — she was performing Iron Axe’s register with the dedication of someone who considered the imitation a craft problem.
“Any sign of a second mass attack?”
The question had been sitting with him since Nightingale had shaken him awake in the dark, her face unreadable, to tell him the front had taken a night raid. He’d spent the following hours in the particular tension of someone who knows bad news is traveling toward him at whatever pace carrier pigeons and telephone relays allow. By the time word arrived that the losses were moderate, that Edith had the situation contained, that the contingency plan had executed cleanly — he’d already run through six different versions of a worse outcome.
Night combat was its own problem set. Dark suppressed firing rates; his soldiers were trained to aim, and aiming required visibility. The solution — tracers — was still somewhere in the engineering backlog, dependent on chemistry he hadn’t fully worked out. He’d been planning to address it before the demons addressed it for him. The raid had been a reminder that the enemy was reading the battlefield faster than he’d credited.
They’d understood Sylvie’s detection range. They’d grasped the mechanical nature of firearms — angle, rate, reload. They’d spread into loose formation, moved quietly, timed it for maximum dark. The fact that they lacked artillery was the only reason the outcome had been moderate rather than catastrophic.
“No indicators of another night attack so far,” Leaf said. “Ms. Sylvie is running daily patrol of the railway approach — one to two hours, sometimes from the Magic Ark or the Seagull. The General Staff has two theories. One: the demons observed our countermeasures and have retired the tactic. Two: they can’t regenerate enough forces for a second attempt this quickly.”
“Neither one is comfortable.” Roland stared at the wall. A Senior Demon had been among the skirmishers. The Senior Demons of four hundred years ago had been commanders — kept behind their armies, protected, valuable. The Senior Demons he was fighting now went in personally. That was not a demotion. That was an evolution. And for the God’s Punishment Army, soulless and patterned, he could design specific countermeasures. For Senior Demons with varied individual abilities, the honest answer was that he didn’t have one yet. The universal approach — surprise them, overwhelm them, hit hard and early — was what he fell back on, and it was not the kind of answer that let him sleep cleanly.
“Keep Sylvie’s coverage on the approach corridor. Don’t let them find a gap.”
“Understood.” A pause. Then, in Leaf’s actual voice, like a window briefly opened: “Your Majesty, Iron Axe has hung up.”
“Right.” Roland exhaled. “Who’s next?”
“The Minister of Construction. Karl Van Bate.”
He frowned. Construction had resources, had manpower, had a workable schedule — he’d signed off on the projections himself. “Put him through.”
The voice that came through next was Karl’s in the same way the previous voice had been Iron Axe’s — structurally correct, slightly wrong in register. The twigs and leaves moving beneath the words lent it a strange music. She’s found a new hobby, Roland noted somewhere in the back of his mind.
The Minister’s report was brief. The night raid had moved through the workers the way fear moves through any large group — quietly at first, then all at once. Morale was low. Foremen were reporting slowdowns. The proposed remedies were shift rotations or family visits; Karl wanted the Administrative Office to coordinate whichever Roland preferred.
“Shift rotations won’t work,” Roland said. Not all of the railway workers were men who’d voluntarily chosen the front for a higher wage. Reshuffling assignments in that mix would create more friction than it resolved. “What about the family visits?”
“That’s the problem, Your Majesty.” Still Karl’s voice, still Leaf’s patience underneath it. “Over seventy percent of the workers are immigrants. Most have no family nearby, or none at all. Allowing family visits for the minority that do have relatives would give those workers an advantage the others can’t access. That could make the morale problem worse, not better.”
Roland turned that over. “Then how do we define family broadly enough to be useful?”
“There’s already a mechanism,” Leaf-as-Karl said. “The construction team asked every worker to complete a Power of Attorney when they were first assigned — naming one person who would hold authority over their affairs in the event of their death. That person is, by definition, the most important person to that worker. Not necessarily blood. Whoever the worker chose.”
Roland sat with this for a moment. A Power of Attorney was a legal instrument, not a sentimental category. But it told the truth about a person in a way that a simple question — who is your family? — sometimes didn’t. You could lie on a form that asked about relatives. You didn’t lie on a form naming the person you’d trust with your death.
“That works,” he said. “I’ll have Barov arrange it.”
Chapter 1094: A Power of Attorney Translator: Transn Editor: Transn
In Neverwinter, Graycastle.
Roland was sitting behind his desk answering a phone call from the front at Fertile Plains.
The word “front” was not actually accurate. Based on the decreasing rate of the reception, it was more a phone call between Neverwinter and the Longsong Stronghold than one between Neverwinter and the front. Without an extender, this was the farthest a wind-up telephone could reach.
Yet they could still go beyond this limit.
The simplest way was to ask Leaf to “forward” calls. When she turned into the Heart of Forest, she could control the entire Misty Forest with her mind and transfer information even faster than Lightning when she was flying at the speed of sound. The front personnel simply needed to call Leaf, who would then transfer the call to Roland. In that case, they could pretty much receive messages instantly.
“Everything looks fine for now,” Leaf replied in an unnecessarily low tone to mimic Iron Axe. “As you anticipated, the demons made several attempts to destroy the railway tracks afterwards, but their action didn’t really impact our logistics. Without the spider demons, they could only move the tracks manually. Moreover, they had to hurry off to avoid a direct clash with the ‘Blackriver’. Since there was no need to replace the entire railway, it didn’t take our engineer team long to mend the damaged section.”
“It seems that the armored trains worked.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. The armored trains actually function as a small stronghold. They play an important role in sending reinforcements and repairing the railway. I just wish there were more of them. If we could put a “Blackriver” at every station, that would be great.”
“You make it sound like an easy job.” Roland could not resist grinning over the phone. “Apart from armored trains, we also need witches to continue to produce freight trains. The two we have now is the best we can do at present. Keep expanding our defensive line. Hopefully we can get prepared for the general offensive by midsummer.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Leaf said in a muffled voice.
“Leaf, you can actually… skip the nasal sound,” Roland thought in amusement.
Roland continued on a cough, “By the way, is there still no sign of a massive attack from the demons yet?”
He had been quite restless since Nightingale had woken him up in the middle of that night, telling him that the First Army had encountered a night raid. His heart had been in his throat until Anna told him that the loss was moderate and that Edith had reassured everything was fine.
In fact, poor lighting had always been a big problem for the First Army. In a dark surrounding, their firing rate would be significantly compromised, and Roland had still not figured out how to manufacture tracers. The soldiers essentially had to rely on the witches’ instructions to fire. Roland had not expected the demons would launch their first voluntary attack at night. He was surprised to learn that they had not only developed a thorough understanding of the ability of Sylvie’s Magic Eye but also grasped the nature of firearms. He was also quite taken aback at the fact that they adopted a loose formation and sneaked in. Fortunately, the enemy did not possess a weapon as powerful as a cannon, and the First Army had carried out their contingency plan perfectly. Otherwise, the outcome of the battle could have been different.
“I haven’t noticed any signs that indicate the demons will attack us at night like last time so far,” Leaf said. “Ms. Sylvie is now putting one or two hours every day on patrolling the railway area which the demons must pass if they plan to attack us. She sometimes also spies on the enemy on the Magic Ark or the ‘Seagull’. At least, it’s safe for now.”
“What does the General Staff say about it?”
“They think there are two possible reasons. One is that the demons have noticed our change and can’t play their old trick anymore. The other is that the demons can’t assemble enough troops to have a second round of attack in such a short time.”
“Really?” said Roland thoughtfully. Apart from the demons’ remarkable learning ability, he was also very concerned about that Senior Demon acting as the skirmisher.
Indeed, this was not their first time meeting a Senior Demon.
Now he remembered after they had met the first Senior Demon at the snow mountain, they had encountered this particular type of Senior Demon four times. However, several hundreds of years ago, Senior Demons used to be commanders only. The Union would only have had a chance to kill them after the Blessed Army had slain all other regular demons. They had apparently lost their superior status over the past hundreds of years and started to participate in a battle more often than they used to. This was definitely not good news for them.
For the soulless God’s Punishment Army, Roland could still develop some specific tactics to tackle them. For a group of Senior Demons with various powers, he could literally do nothing about them but to cross his fingers.
Since there were no particular methods to fight the Senior Demons off, the only way Roland could think of now was a universal strategy, which was to catch the enemy unprepared and eradicate them with more powerful gunfire.
“The demons would definitely not allow us to prowl around the Fertile Plains. We should stay alert, making sure we leave them no chance.”
“Noted!” Leaf said while raising her voice. After the communication was over, she said with an abrupt return to her usual manner, “Your Majesty, Iron Axe has hung up.”
“Alright…” Roland heaved a sigh and asked, “Who’s next?”
“The Minister of Construction, Karl Van Bate.”
Roland was a bit surprised to hear the Ministry of Construction have problems, as they had already sufficient materials and manpower to carry out their projects. He thus said, “Transfer the call.”
“Your Majesty,” Leaf said whilst mimicking Carl’s voice this time. Although Roland could still somehow distinguish the difference, the rustling of the twigs and leaves made Leaf’s performance quite impressive. “The construction team has encountered some problems recently. I hope the other departments of the Administrative Office could help us.”
“It seems… Leaf has got addicted to this voice over job,” Roland thought.
The report from the Minister of Construction was fairly straightforward. The night raid had shocked many workers and resulted in a low morale among the workers. As many foremen had noticed their workers were slacking off, they wished to change the workers’ shifts or allow their families to visit them so as to raise their spirits.
Roland thought it was practically impossible to change everybody’s shifts since not all the workers were willing to trade their lives for a higher pay. As such, he steered the conversation to the second method. “Family visits? I remember more than 70% of the railway workers are immigrants who don’t have a family. If we allow family visits, those who don’t have relatives would feel bitter against those who do, which would then exacerbate the current situation,” Roland replied.
“I’ve thought about that, Your Majesty,” Leaf answered for the Minister. “The railway construction team once asked all the workers to submit a Power of Attorney, in which they named the person who will have the full authority to take care of their personal matters in case they’re killed in action. This
person must be very important to that worker and thus, in a sense, can be regarded as his family member.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Roland said after a moment of reflection. “Alright then. I’ll ask Barov to arrange it.”