After that core meeting which decided the future direction of Blackwood Fortress, the entire territory seemed to have been injected with an invisible yet powerful will! Pleasure and slackness were thoroughly banished, replaced by a nearly fanatical, goal-oriented busyness!
The winter snows still raged, but no matter how biting the cold wind was, it could not cool the soaring enthusiasm within Blackwood Fortress! The entire territory was like a giant beast hibernating in the harsh winter—not roaring to the heavens, but silently bowing its head to lick its wounds, quietly sharpening its claws and teeth, ready to tear thru the spring!
Change began first on the huge parade ground of the castle, which had been swept clean.
This place became the melting pot for the newly reorganized "Wolf Guards"!
More than two thousand Werewolf Warriors were, for the first time, stripped of the loose groups they were familiar with—those bonded by tribe and valor—and were forcibly broken up and reorganized into "Squads" of ten and "Companies" of one hundred!
As soon as the morning horn sounded, the bell-like roar of the veteran Goff would echo punctually over the parade ground:
"Get moving, all of you! You bunch of lazy bones, do you want to have your heads cut off by the enemy while you're still in bed?!"
Goff, this veteran who had crawled out of mountains of corpses and seas of blood, had a simple and brutal training method! There were no complex theories, only the most practical battlefield techniques! He personally carried a heavy wooden shield to demonstrate to the newly promoted squad leaders and Centurions—how to form a small shield wall using the simplest and most effective movements in a chaotic fight, and how to use shoulder strikes to break the enemy's formation!
"Look closely!" Goff slammed his shield hard, knocking a tall Centurion back repeatedly. "The shield is not for you to block with; it is for you to smash with! Use its edge to smash the enemy's face, and use its face to break the enemy's bones! You are a whole, not ten individual idiots!"
However, for the Werewolf Warriors who were accustomed to free-for-all combat, adapting to such strict discipline and formation coordination was far from easy!
In the early stages of training, the entire parade ground was a chaotic mess!
When a squad of soldiers practiced advancing, they often tripped over each other due to inconsistent paces; when two company formations simulated combat, they would often forget the formation while fighting and revert to individual duels—the scene was chaotic, causing Goff to fly into a rage, his cursing incessant!
And whenever this happened, Anna would appear like a ghost!
She always stood quietly to the side, holding a long hardwood staff used as a ruler in her arms, her eyes cold as blades, accurately capturing every detail of the mistakes:
"Third squad, fifth warrior, your spear is three inches higher than your companion's! On the battlefield, this height difference is enough for enemy cavalry to tear a hole in your line!"
"Seventh company, left-wing shield bearers, the gap between your shields is wide enough for a wild boar to crawl thru! Do you intend to use your own bodies to meet the enemy's charge?"
Her voice was not loud, but it reached everyone's ears clearly, more chilling than Goff's roar!
Once someone failed to correct their mistakes repeatedly or openly challenged discipline, Anna would walk forward without hesitation—the hardwood staff would whistle thru the air and strike the offender's back or legs heavily, making a dull thud:
"Crack!"
"Twenty lashes! Let this teach you what discipline is!" she announced expressionlessly!
Under the deterrence of Anna's iron-fisted methods and Goff's tireless teaching, this newly formed Wolf Guards began a painful yet effective transformation! The squad leaders and Centurions also gradually established their authority thru repeated drills and selections—they began to understand how to command their squads and how to maintain basic formations on the chaotic battlefield thru simple commands and flag signals!
On the parade ground, chaotic howling was gradually replaced by uniform shouts! That disorganized charge also began to coalesce into streams of steel composed of shields and spears, possessing great impact!
If the parade ground was a melting pot for building muscle, then the vast, boundless snowfield specially designated outside the castle was the whetstone for the sharp blade that was the "Wolf Riders Vanguard"!
Hask scoffed at the refined formation training of Goff and Anna:
"The soul of cavalry is speed and impact!" he roared arrogantly to the three hundred Snow Giant Wolf Cavalry under his command. "Formation? Our only formation is to become a black, unstoppable arrow that pierces the enemy's heart!"
His training, like his personality, was full of wildness and madness!
Three hundred Wolf Cavalry, und-red eyes and declare its awakening to the whole world!