If I am honest, right now I should be up there confidently assisting the soldiers. Shamon doesn't need my help, but the man certainly needs me to boost the morale of the soldiers. A confident leader can always pass on that confidence to his soldiers.

  The events of the last couple of hours have shaken me more than I would like to admit. Weakness is not something that you show to your underlings. They will begin to lose every bit of their morale.

  Shamon is coming down right now. I can see the man's mana descend in the room. (In the fort, it is easy to differentiate his mana from the ambient mana.)

  “Captain, the patrols have come bearing news.“, he speaks, his voice serious enough that I know we are in deep shit. The man begins his customary bow.

  “Well, get on with it. Do you need to follow the protocols now.“, I speak to him getting a bit annoyed.

  “The enemy has three troops acting as a reinforcement.“, he speaks, careful not to show any reaction to my words. "Right now their leaders are out there barely keeping all the troops under control."

  “Seven troops. They are not going to be easy to fight.“, I speak “but they do not have any of their leaders. Three troops leaders and one injured leader should not be able to control such a large group right.“

  “Well, we do have a couple of hours.“, he replies. “But I did not complete my report. The troop leaders are whipping their grunts into a death trance.“

  “Now what is a death trance?“, I am seriously not in the mood for learning right now. I am shaking, a mixture of exhaustion and adrenaline. It is a wonder that I am on my feet at this moment.

  “Well, to explain that, I will have to discuss the troops a bit. As I have explained to you before the troop leader can force his commands onto his creatures.“ He replies. “This ability works in a pretty insidious way, you see. It is like a whisper at the back of their mind, telling them what to do. They say that most of the time the creature is not even able to tell that it has been commanded.“

  “Well, I know, you have explained it to me before.", I reply, feeling my irritation grow.

  “Well, the death trance is like making the whispering into screaming. Right now these creatures are not able to think about anything else other than breaching the fort. They will throw their bodies at the wall if they have to achieve their goal.“, he speaks. “This means that the troop leaders will not need to direct their soldiers at all. It is a strategy that they rarely tend to use because any troop that they force into a death trance dies within the week.“

  "So it means that they will be able to fight as well.", I speak, beginning to understand the man's fear.

  "Well, they are pretty unlikely to fight. The death trance consumes a lot of their power.", he replies. "They would be pretty easy to kill if they were to enter the battlefield. In a week there is a pretty good chance that they will join the battlefield though."

  “Well, can you hold against the creatures for a week then.“, I reply. “I just need to complete one inscription and then we don't need to worry about the troop leaders.“

  “All I can say is that I will try. Let's just say that a creature in the death trance has a kind of passion that you won't be able to find anywhere else.“, he replies, getting ready to leave. “This is not going to be easy is all I will speak on this. I will shore up the defenses now then.“

  "Before you go, how exactly do you know so much about the ice beasts and their creatures.", I ask.

  "I have been fighting them since I was a young man barely able to use his sword, captain.", he replies. "You can learn a lot about your enemies when you have fought them for so long."

  The man disappears before I can question him any further. he leaves the room, leaving me pondering on my screw-up today. I guess I can justify it in a thousand ways, but however intense the attacks were before, things are going to be much harder. Even now Shamon does not realize one thing. The enemy has not yet made a move knowing that I am of the legion. Whatever move they have made, it had to have been made a while ago.

  While their reaction up till now has been pretty extreme, it will be nothing compared to the hell that they are going to be throwing at us now. A snowlord coming to attack us is now a guarantee. The only question that is left is when.

  I guess that I should now speak about the progress that I have been making with the inscription process. I have failed in making the string of water.

  I had thought that I would have been able to pull it off. I did manage to inscribe the spell without any mistakes for six days. At the last minute, I made a mistake in the runes that were meant to decide the string's size. (Let's just say the string would have been larger than this fort and making it would have wiped all our reserves.) The single mistake almost burnt the formation for me. I guess that I should explain what burning a formation means.

  If during the inscription process, one of the runes were to destabilize just as I start the inscription, it could cause that spot to be burned. Essentially the spell will be inscribed into the formation core, but with a couple of wrong runes on it that would make it useless. An example of this is, let's say you inscribed a fireball spell but got the temperature rune wrong. The fireball created wouldn't be hot enough to heat a bucket of water.

  In the worst case, it can create a chain reaction capable of causing the entire formation core to explode on my face. Even in the best case, That would mean that I would essentially have only nine class nine spells in the thing. If that were to happen then the only thing that I would be able to do is to just change the formation core, which would be quite impossible at this moment. The class eight spell that I am inscribing needs all ten spells to work. (Certain formations can make do with a lesser number of spots as well. This is not one of those.)

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  I have given myself a week. I will have to push myself to achieve this inscription. I will have to be more careful doing this though. This time, I will not ignore my rest.

  With the exhaustion that I am feeling, a single day of rest will not be enough but that is all I can give myself at the moment. Any more and I simply won't have enough time to inscribe also.

  At the moment, I am seriously considering if I should just run away from this place. I could take the soldiers and run away to the frozen peak. I would certainly be in a pretty bad position, but it feels like it is going to be better than my present situation.

  I can only consider this if the enemy troops do not catch up with us. If they do, the fort is the only thing that we will have left. Otherwise, these creatures outnumber us almost eight to one now.

  Fuck, I can feel the exhaustion creep into my mind. The adrenaline of the last hour has begun to fade. Even now, I can feel my mind struggle to remember the runes that I need to craft. What would have taken me a minute at my peak, now feels like it will take me ten. I cannot risk inscribing now.

  The funny thing is that I have put myself in my present situation. I cannot blame anybody else. After all, I have been explicitly warned from trying to inscribe two spells back to back like this more than once.

  The exhaustion caused by the first spell would more than guarantee the inscription of the second spell would fail. I just could not help myself. With a completed ballista it would have given me an edge that would have more than guaranteed that I would be able to deal with the troops. There is the nasty surprise as well, but I shouldn't think about that now. Trying to implement it now will be stupid.

  Well, I have to try and sleep now regardless of how wrong it feels to me. The problem is who will tell my head that? Even now I find myself imagining what the retribution of the snowlords will be. All of these actions they have taken without knowing my identity as a part of the legion.

  The snow tribe is one of the many forces that has sworn to destroy the Iron Legion and it seems to be one of the more passionate ones at doing that. There seems to be quite a bit of history between the two forces. Something that I am not allowed to read up on.

  Every single soldier who is trained in the battle arts of the legion is also taught from a diverse and varied group of battle styles. They can make use of these arts to hide their presence. The problem is due to how easily recognizable the legion's battle arts tend to be. All of our enemies tend to be on an active lookout for the soldiers of the legion. It certainly does tend to make our work much harder.

  That is why we have been trained to hide our identity every moment of our life that we are outside of the hex mountain. This is true even if we are sleeping as well (especially if we are sleeping). Such a slip would mean death. Let's hope Eron isn't reading this log. The bastard would gloat a bit too much on this to my liking.

  Well, as for why the legion tends to be such a hated figure. Well, part of that is due to the black mountain and part of it is just due to the legion. The black mountain uses the legion to wipe out any other force that they deem to be a threat to them.

  Publically, their primary duty is to ensure that nobody breaks the hexmountain treaty. For this, they have about the same access that a scholar would have. They also handle the work of defending magical ruins in contested areas and assign ownership for when the scholars do come.

  Secretly, they are charged with destroying any force that has tried to cultivate their own "scholars". They have also destroyed any force that has tried to compete with the black mountain in the business of knowledge.

  This is to the point that our enemies call us the “mad dog of the scholars“, that the black mountain throws at its enemy. This mad dog then proceeds to rip you into pieces.

  When you tend to attack people without a solid enough reason, it tends to leave quite a bit of bad blood with them. Well, bad blood would be wrong. It would be more equivalent to a death promise at least to the level of the death trance that Shamon just described.

  Still, the major problem with the legion has been the fact that they are absurdly good at their task. They have a nearly hundred percent completion rate at exterminating their enemy. Every single force they have been sent to destroy has been crushed to fine powder. Such kind of perfection does tend to breed quite a bit of fear in every force.

  After all most forces can never be sure if the single legion soldier passing through their lands, is a soldier doing a routine inspection. He could also be a scout planning the attack path of the legion. It is this fear that drives our enemies into action. After all, you can never tell when the black mountain will decide you to be an enemy and release their mad dog on you.

  Yet the worst enemies to the legion you can find are among the tribes. Why that is the case, I have no idea. When I was in the legion, I was not allowed to read their history and when I got out, there was no way that they would let me read their history. Some things even the scholars know not to be curious about. All I know is that there is a lot of bad blood between the tribes and the legion.

  I guess that I should speak about the tribes someday. The problem is even I know so little about them. All I know is that the tribes don't mind destroying entire towns to hunt the legion.