The View from the Highest Tower
There is such a thing as inertia.
A person who has spent an entire lifetime moving in one direction finds himself completely unable to adapt when that direction is wrenched off course. All that remains is a deep, disorienting strangeness.
That was me right now.
What? Just rest? What the hell does that even mean?
As a child I had been busy trailing after my parents with the family cow. Once I grew a little older, I was busy cramming university material that refused to stick into my skull.
After that I entered the military through ROTC, got run ragged like a dog doing every job under the sun, caught the eye of a three-star octopus-headed general, and spent ages rolling around under him as something resembling an aide-de-camp.
"Shit-dog, you're heading to Cheorwon."
"Sir? Go back to my hometown?"
"No, you idiot. You want stars of your own, don't you? Then you've got to stamp through three or four maker divisions first."
While other people were leisurely drafting doctrine in their offices, I took on every task that came my way, crushed under a cheerfully overworked-to-death lifestyle—all because I had fallen for the sweet-talk of that three-star bald octopus uncle who kept laughing and calling it "achievements."
Back then, sleeping on the fold-out cot in the operations room felt more familiar than sleeping in my own bed at the official quarters.
Off work at 01:00. Back on at 05:00. A miraculous hundred and sixty hours of overtime a month felt like only yesterday…
And now they're telling me to do nothing and just rest?
To me, that was every bit as alien as being told, "From now on, try not breathing."
So I decided to get up out of the sickbed.
"Good heavens, Young Master! You mustn't get up yet!"
Sir Bearwolf was no longer in the recovery room, but the servants remained. The moment I left the bed they startled as if they had just spotted Nemo escaping his fishbowl. I shook my head and answered.
"Lying here all the time has me restless. I thought I'd take a light stroll."
"Then at least allow us to assign a guide."
"It's fine. What guide do I need for a walk around my own house… No—yes, let's do that."
I had been about to wave them off, but the look on the guide's face—which said that if I insisted, I might as well just cut open their stomachs—made me click my tongue and nod instead. On top of that, when they begged me to please speak more casually, I simply waved a vague hand. Remarkably, that too was a long-standing habit of this body's original owner.
This guy was born a formal-speech character or what?
Unlike me—who had formal speech glued to my mouth from bouncing around units crawling with time-in-service monsters ever since my rookie days, thanks to the schemes of that evil three-star octopus general—Logwell Wintershield, the original owner of this body, had been born into a natural class society and still used honorifics even toward people beneath him. Of course such a speech habit could cause confusion in a hierarchical society, but—
"Good heavens, Young Master! Please, speak comfortably to your inferiors!"
"Yes, yes. I'll do so once I'm comfortable."
This body's weak original owner's stubbornness was tougher than sinew. His flesh might not have been, but his spirit was more northern than most Northerners. In the end, after he pushed through with his own way no matter what anyone said, even with me possessing this unfamiliar body the people around me felt not the slightest awkwardness.
"Well then. Shall we go."
When you transfer into a new unit, taking a lap along the barbed wire is the iron rule.
If someone asked me what my specialty was, I would say it was the sense of smell I had developed from bouncing around various units at a younger age than most. After wandering this neighborhood and that, I got a rough feel for which way to go to find what. So this time as well, I moved my feet where my nose led me.
And the first destination was none other than the highest watchtower of the grand ducal fortress.
There's a honey tip I learned from the senior NCOs about the most important thing for working-level staff.
When you bounce around maker divisions, you meet time-in-service monsters who have been stuck in place for decades until you are sick of them. They do not possess the hundreds or thousands of tentacles that the three-star octopus general has planted in every unit, but at least when it comes to their own unit, each of them owns a root driven deep.
With a little exaggeration, practical work simply does not run without those men—and if they get even a little pissed off and turn uncooperative, that is when your military life turns into a pure nightmare.
Still, if you match their vibe reasonably, there is no one more reliable.
As people who had mastered every kind of bullshit for decades, they possessed the power to create something from nothing within their own exclusive domain. They could conjure supplies that did not exist and whitewash security violations that had occurred as if wiping them clean.
One day over drinks they would cackle and pass on their secret honey tips as if transmitting exclusive martial arts, and among those tips was a surprisingly common formula.
"Captain Heo, do you know what you have to do first if you want to suck the honey well?"
"What is it?"
"First, you have to be good at your job. Perfectly."
Surprisingly, that was what every single time-in-service old monster said with one voice. To suck the honey, you first had to know how to execute every duty of the post you had been assigned to perfection.
Just as a perfect score on the college entrance exam is impressive, but a zero is a realm even higher, the logic was that only by mastering every task completely could you slip between the cracks with incredible skill and suck the honey.
And the first step for that was—
Perfectly grasping the geography of the unit you have transferred into.
An independent unit stuck deep in a mountain backwater was like a living organism in itself. The barbed wire was the skin, the fuel facilities the blood vessels, and the supply warehouse the heart. But that alone was not enough for an organism to live.
Just as the five viscera and six bowels existed separately, and muscles whose names you had never even heard of occupied different parts of the body, there were departments tucked into some corner of the unit that made you go, They had something like that?
You had to know where those things were first.
When the stars from the cradle of stars visited subordinate units, they started with the command staff. When working-level people arrived at a unit, they each had their own know-how for grasping the unit's geography for a different reason.
Because there was no useless department in a unit—and only by mastering all their uses could you refine the ultimate bullshit. Therefore I, too, had created my own exclusive martial art to acquire that secret essence.
"First, I should head to the highest place."
I do not know about other people, but I had to see with my eyes, hear with my ears, and smell with my nose before I could grasp the work. Just like how my nickname was not Shit-Dog for nothing, I was the type who only got the framework locked in once I had slammed it into my head myself. So to grasp the terrain of the grand ducal fortress at a glance, I headed for the highest watchtower inside the castle.
And—
"Huff… huff… it's ridiculously high."
As expected, climbing the watchtower boasted a tremendous hell difficulty.
No elevators in this place…
For reference, this world seemed to be set in a Middle Ages where knights and mages, martial arts and magic still lived and breathed.
With mysteries like mana and the mages and Sword Masters who handled it existing, science had never properly developed, and instead of elevators the dozens-of-stories-high watchtower was laid with thousands of spiral stairs. Climbing them in this frail body was pure hardship—but somehow it was still doable. Because this, too, was familiar.
In units stuck out in the middle of nowhere, there were any number of outposts whose construction methods you couldn't even begin to guess.
Outposts installed at the end of unpaved roads so inconvenient even a military Retona had trouble finding them. To get there you had no choice but to run on two feet, and that was the secret to me—a working-level officer who was not Special Forces—always scoring special grade on the physical fitness test.
"Huff… huff… made… it."
When I finally managed to reach the top of the watchtower, the soldiers on duty spotted me and flinched.
"Sir!! On duty, nothing to report!!"
"Sir!! On duty, nothing to report!!"
"Yes, yes. Go… make yourselves comfortable."
Of course, soldiers who actually got comfortable when told to make themselves comfortable did not exist in this world. Watching them maintain their rigid postures even after my words, I shook my head and wiped the sweat from my forehead as I asked,
"May I ask a question?"
"Please inquire!!"
"Is this the highest watchtower in the castle?"
"Yes, sir! It is!!"
"Good. I found it well, then."
I passed them and headed out onto the lookout. True to a watchtower built to monitor the entire castle, the whole of the grand ducal fortress came into view at a glance.
Whoa. What a spectacle.
Perhaps because it was the territory of a grand ducal house said to wield power rivaling a king's within its region. Its size was vast, and within it people were living busily.
So this is the most developed place among the backward ones, is it?
According to the memories that surfaced, the North was a backwater among backwaters where people simply could not live. I had bounced around every kind of remote post, but I had never seen a place quite like this. Even my hometown of Cheorwon boasted an incredible snowfield in midwinter, but here it went a step further—a land of snow in the literal sense, with three hundred and sixty-five days a year of snowfields.
And a castle built right in the middle of that snow country.
A fortress that could never have been constructed without the mystery called magic, and at the same time a dwelling that could never have been maintained without the tough perseverance of the Northerners. Looking at the people living there, my heart beat strangely.
So this is my new duty station.
Say what you will, opening my eyes in a strange other world could not exactly feel welcome. I had closed my eyes after achieving everything I had wanted in my previous life, but that did not mean all lingering attachments could be wiped clean.
I did not know whether the life given to me now was a bonus, and I also felt a faint guilt at having pushed out this body's original owner's soul and taken his place.
With everything so chaotic, the sickbed had felt like a prison—so rather than lying there uncomfortably I had chosen to walk on my own two feet like this. When my thoughts grew complicated, nothing was as comfortable as burying myself in work.
And so, climbing to the highest place like this and looking over the inside of the grand ducal fortress at a glance brought so many thoughts.
"Do you all live looking at scenery like this every day?"
"Sir? …Ah, yes, we do!!"
"I see."
Scenery like this would inevitably become something people who saw it every day grew tired of. But I was not one of them, so I used an artifact with a function similar to a telescope and adjusted the lens toward the distant place.
"Is Asbil Village, where my older brother went, in that direction?"
"Yes, sir! It is!! But Asbil Village cannot be seen from here!!"
"So it seems."
The North was a vast territory—vast enough to receive a grand ducal title. Asbil Village was a place you had to ride for several days even on horseback. Even turning the telescope, the village was not visible. Instead, all that could be seen was a band of military force galloping on horseback toward it.
Already that far, huh.
Darius and the knights of the North, running on horseback instead of military Retonas to support the subordinate unit—no, the village. Looking at these people who lived tightly bound within a closed society, my racing heart seemed to whisper to me. And I could understand what the bastard was saying.
"It's nice. That this place is my un… no, my hometown."
"Sir? Ah… yes!! We are also proud to have been born in the North!!"
"Yes, we are!!"
Some misunderstanding seemed to have arisen, but I decided not to bother correcting it. Because right now I had made up a more important mind than that.
Heo Yi-geon. Every day I got run like a dog, and the moment I got used to it I would transfer to a new unit… but
Here it was different. Here there was no reason to go anywhere else. Then—
Isn't this place, more than any other, the perfect place to unfold my dream?
Managing my own unit. That was the wish I had dreamed of day and night.