But that was tomorrow.

But victory was hollow. As he stood on the battlement, breathing the cold air, a messenger arrived from the Empress. The message was a single line, written in elegant Calradic script:

Tonight, he had seventy tired men, a half-repaired ballista, and a bug where his wife’s dialogue still claimed she was “waiting in Marunath” even though she was standing right next to him.

He first noticed the difference at dawn. His engineer, a bitter Battanian named Corun, had stopped complaining. The battering ram, which yesterday had spun in drunken circles, now rolled straight and true to the gates of . The siege tower’s wheels no longer fought the terrain. Men climbed its ramp without hesitation, without that maddening stutter-step into oblivion.

Some things, even , could never fix.

“It’s... smooth,” Corun whispered, almost reverently.

“No,” Arenicos said. “We go north. The Sturgians are still running their v1.2.10 AI. Their shield wall still breaks if you whistle.”

“Don’t praise it,” Arenicos growled. “Praise makes the developer nerf something else.”

The response flickered in golden text:

campaign.get_balance_status

“Please, God, don’t let the next update break the inventory sort.”

He drew his sword, saluted the moon, and whispered the gamer’s prayer:

Today was .

Arenicos reined in his tired courser, watching his seventy battered Legionaries trudge through the mud. Just yesterday, these same men had failed to take a simple wooden keep near Poros. Their ladders had clipped through the walls. Two squads had frozen at the base of a siege tower, unable to find the invisible path upward. The Aserai horse archers—damnable, skirt-wearing ghosts—had kited his cavalry into a ravine like children chasing a goat.

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