"Indeed. Best when I won't be needed for battle for at least a fist or two - Graven Ashe protects, but the wounds still take time to close properly."

"Healing magic only does so much? Well I should hope I'm not going to leave lasting damage..."

"Deep damage doesn't heal easily; it helps, but even with it, some things take rest."

"Well, soon enough."

Time for sleep? And then more marching. Ugh, marching, she needs a truck. Or airship. Those are both far off, sadly.

He nods.

And the next day they're up again. The path isn't straight, and the scenery is bleak - stone bent like trees from abrasion, rust everywhere, broken armor and weapons embedded into rock like it was grown there. But not much changes, other than the stormwall at Sentinel Stand getting incrementally closer.

They stop as the sun sets. It's not far now

"We'll be there tomorrow. Evening, probably. There's an actual camp, scrap-metal lean-tos within haphazard walls but much better than nothing."

Nothing quite feels real after stomping over this alien landscape, in the intense wind, for a full day. In silence, aside from the scream of air.

"I'll be glad for it. Much as I talk about being willing to endure... It's easy to boast, isn't it..."

"In my experience, any hardship starts out easier to bear, and becomes worse as your resolve and energy drain away. Eventually, it levels out, but whether that is merely ceasing to get worse, or if you learn to deal with it and make it easier to handle, is hard to predict."

"That's what training sergeants are for," one of the Iron Walkers adds, "Force you to get through the awful parts and see if you learn to deal with it. If you don't, better to send you home before you get to the war."

"Training, eh? Didn't have that luxury, it was keep together and work hard or die, and maybe die anyway. And at least it's not bloody cold. Just loud. And windy." Why is she TALKING about this, ugh. She shakes her head.

"If your training only did that, that was a piss-poor sergeant anyway," Barik replies to the other guy. Back to Walta, he says, "Not worth training for this; Kyros and fortune willing, this bitch of a storm will be dead within a fist. End of the span at worst."

"You can never do everything. I'm gonna try and stuff my ears with something to sleep..."

And one more day of marching through this desolate place.

It gets flatter as they get closer, and the gusts don't get more common but one does pick up and keep going for over an hour.

But then, they get over a small rise and they can see the camp poking its walls over the next rise.

"So that's the final product! Seems damn useful! Welcome to our staging camp; slightly less awful than bare stone."

Okay, game face time.

"Not final at ALL! Merely a starting point for something bigger and better! And a camp I assume is very temporary- So I'll bite down the urge to try and improve it."

He laughs, "Of course, I should stop underestimating you. And yes, this shouldn't be needed more than a couple days longer. We bring the spearhead up through the wind tomorrow, second pass brings the rest and some alchemics that will breach the walls later in the day. Then we carry out the execution."

Yeah.

She'd been trying not to think about that.

She lowers Tallboy once she finds a niche for it.

"I'll defer entirely to you on what I should do- I won't promise to be especially useful in open combat, the biggest thing Tallboy is missing is a bow or gun and I still haven't really got the hang of sigil-casting - might never will, if it never seems like the best use of time. Though I wonder what alchemics you've got cooked up, that sounds intriguing."

He doesn't look at all hesitant about it. (Because he isn't. This is one execution he is going to conduct with satisfaction.)

"That's the Unbroken's work. I and mine carried out the plan, but they did the planning. Captain Mattias! Come meet the Lightning Smith!"

A slim but muscular man with dusty bronze-and-leather armor and brown hair comes over.

"Engineer Waltana, correct? I heard what you're doing by the Ocean Spire. It should do a lot to help my country recover after we beat this thing. Captain Mattias, leader of what we're calling the Citizen Unbroken."

"Captain Mattias." She nods firmly as she starts unstrapping. It's a good strategy to repeat names, makes you remember them. "Yeah. Metal, work to be done, and most importantly safe travel. I have high hopes I can improve things for many people- As soon as I can get my own workshop fully kitted out, I have many ideas. The Unbroken? Aspirational."

"Historical. Stalwart's never lost a war, not in centuries. Even after the Edict we adapted and kept fighting - well, until Fatebinder Kohl negotiated a ceasefire. Us and Disfavored want this Edict over and the Regent punished for not ending it sooner; I'm hopeful the Regnal Unbroken in the fort will stand down, but we'll beat them if we have to."

"-More Kohl's expertise than mine, though I really ought to learn more history. If I want people to actually use my shiny ideas, if nothing else. I hear there are alchemical explosives? I promise I'm in dead serious mode now, no wild smithing at all, but I am quite curious."

"The wallbreaker, yeah. We're keeping it in a deep covered pit over that way, for obvious reasons. I don't understand how it works myself; I know we consulted some Sages, so it's probably magic, but there was some mining involved as well."

"Lots of things are magic. Saying 'it's some kind of magic' is like saying 'it's, you know, stuff and things'. Though if you want to break a wall, digging under it and piling up bombs is certainly a way to do it... England had a whole corps trained for it, the royal engineers, sappers division..."

She frowns. Curiosity, or exhaustion and disdain for the wind and desolation? Hmm.

Curiosity wins. She won't touch it. Just have a look.

"I know we're supposed to take a bucket of water up against the walls, then mix the two separate parts into it - they're volatile alone but much more together. But it's not far if you want to examine it."

Lantry has sharp ears and could guess what Walta would be asking about. "I'd like to come along, if you do."

Yeah yeah, they don't trust her not to go wild, which is stupid but it'd be petty to object- Wait actually he's probably just curious if she can make sense of it-

"I think I would like to have a look. I'm not familiar with anything exactly like what you're describing, though plenty of things only really react in water..."

Once she gets a closer look at a bag of little pellets and a some sort of thick oil, her eyebrows raise. "This is ammonia, it's crop fertilizer. Or... Nitrated ammonia, technically? You can make bombs from fertilizer? It wouldn't be burning exactly- Huh!"