Darian woke to the taste of iron and filth.
His mouth was full of it—mud, blood, maybe both. The world was a blur of shapes and shadows. A dull throb pulsed through his skull in time with his heartbeat. Everything ached, but nothing was broken. That was a mercy.
He rolled over with a grunt, the ground cold against his cheek. Damp straw and piss. He was in a tent. Not a real one—a patchwork of stolen cloth nailed together with bone pins and rusted hooks. It smelled like wet dogs and dying men.
He sat up slowly, his ribs flaring with pain. A bloodstained blanket slipped off his shoulders.
His head still rang with the commander's laughter. With the name.
Son of a Whore.
He touched the back of his skull—tender. Swollen.
"...Asshole," he muttered ."just you wait"
Rising slowly—and painfully—Adrian finally got a proper look at his surroundings.
The camp, if you could call it that, was a shambles. Half-collapsed tents stitched from patchwork cloth sagged in the mud. Smoky fires guttered in shallow pits. Everything smelled like sweat, blood, and something uncomfortably close to rotting meat.
The so-called army was worse. Peasants, mostly. Men too thin for their rags, boys too young to shave, and old bastards who looked like they'd crawled out of a grave by mistake. Pitchforks, butcher knives, rusted billhooks—anything sharp had been conscripted into the cause.
A few had real weapons. Spears, mostly. A bow here or there. Some men strutted around with a chipped longswords like it made them knights.
Far off in the gray light of morning, a castle loomed on a low hill—half-buried in fog. That, apparently, was the prize. The target. The reason this lot of scarecrows had gathered like crows around a corpse.
Adrian's stomach growled so hard it made his ribs ache.
It hit him—he hadn't eaten since entering this world.
He staggered forward, legs stiff. The camp was buzzing—some men sharpening blades, others praying, most just sitting in sullen silence, waiting for dawn and death. He passed a group gnawing on something around a guttering fire.
A squat man with a missing ear looked up as Adrian approached. His beard was crusted with dried soup. Or blood.
"You look like shite," the man grunted.
"I feel worse," Adrian muttered. "Got any food?"
The man reached into a sack beside him and tossed something flat and dense toward him. Adrian caught it awkwardly.
A slab of hardtack. Dry. Pale. It looked more like a broken roof tile than bread.
He eyed it.
"...Is this edible?"
"Not really," the man said, chewing his own like gravel. "But it won't kill you. Probably."
Adrian bit down.
Pain shot through his jaw.
He hissed, holding the tack away like it had personally wronged him. "You eat this?"
"Better than nothing," the man shrugged. "And better than the rats."
Adrian blinked.
"…There are rats?"
The man grinned.
Adrian chewed the hardtack like it was made of bricks. His jaw ached. His throat threatened mutiny.
He forced it down with some water, wiping his hands on his ragged shirt. Hunger dulled, if not solved, he wandered deeper into camp.
And the more he saw, the more uneasy he became.
The men weren't sharpening swords—they were straightening farming scythes. Some were binding planks together with rope to make crude shields. One was trying to hammer nails into the edge of a wooden spoon, presumably to make it more deadly.
Adrian stopped atop a low rise overlooking the edge of the camp. From there, he had a better view of the battlefield and, beyond it, the castle.
It wasn't massive. Maybe a hundred feet across at the base, old stone turned black by time and smoke. But it was high, solid, and sat on a shallow bluff with clear views in all directions.
And between the camp and the castle?
Open ground.
Adrian squinted.
Ladders.
They were building ladders.
A lot of them.
His stomach sank.
"You're kidding," he whispered. "That's it? That's the plan?"
Adrian blinked at him. "What do you mean you don't—are you blind? What about the siege weapons?"
The man stared at him, chewing something that might've once been food. "Siege what?"
Adrian gestured wildly toward the workers hauling planks and rope. "The machines. You know—battering rams, catapults, ballistae… anything that doesn't require us to climb a wall like suicidal ants?"
The man squinted toward the treeline, then gave a sharp bark of a laugh.
"Oh. You mean the ladders."
Adrian stared. "That's not a siege weapon. That's... a death sentence made of wood."
"Well, around here," the man said, scratching at his belly, "that is a siege weapon. You climb fast and stab faster. Or you don't come back."
Adrian looked back toward the castle again, slowly realizing something bone-deep and bleak.
They hadn't discovered siege weapons yet.
Not rams.
Not towers.
Not trebuchets.
Just wood.
And hope.
And ladders.
He exhaled slowly.
"...We're so fucked."
Adrian stood near the edge of camp, watching another ladder take shape like a coffin stood on end.
He squinted, muttered to himself."If the system rewards me for changing the world… then all I need to do is give these cavemen real siege equipment."
A grin slowly split his face. He turned on his heel and ran back toward the campfire circles.
A short time later…
A dozen filthy men and one wide-eyed boy huddled around him like he was selling snake oil. Darian stood before them, arms wide, voice rising like a prophet in the gutter.
"Listen. You don't need to climb walls and die one by one. What we need—" He pointed at the castle. "—is a battering ram. A big one. We build it, roll it in, smash the gates open. No ladders. No arrows in your ass. No dying like idiots."
They stared at him.
One scratched his head. Another spat into the fire. The largest one, missing half his teeth, frowned. "You mean... like a big log?"
"Yes! With wheels. And a roof."
A long silence.
Then came the laughter. Deep, rough, toothless laughter.
"A roof?! For a log?! What're we—carpenters?!""Oi, he's gonna build a wooden cow next!""Why not just climb like the rest of us, Lord Smartass?"
Adrian's face twitched.
By midafternoon, Darian stood in the center of the camp, wild-eyed and grinning like a prophet mid-epiphany.
"Siege weapons!" he declared to a loose gathering of bored peasants gnawing on roots. "That's how we break the walls. We build something big. Covered. On wheels. Something that hits."
A pause.
The men stared at him.
Someone snorted.
Another coughed into their hand, hiding laughter.
One scrawny bastard in a boiled leather vest tilted his head and asked, "You mean… just a big stick?"
"No, it's more than that," Darian insisted. "It's—it's got momentum. Force. You swing it or roll it and it smashes through gates."
"You seen it in a dream, too?""Why not just throw rocks at the gate, genius?""Oi, next he'll say we fly over the wall with wings made of goose feathers!"
They howled with laughter.
Darian tried to explain it again—momentum, impact force, structural weak points—but the more he spoke, the more it became clear:
He had no idea how to build one.
All he could picture was "big log go boom."
An older man leaned in, scratched his chin, and said, "So lemme get this straight. You want us… to drag a giant piece of wood, uphill, in open ground, toward a gate lined with archers…, without cover, and just hope it works?"
Darian hesitated. "Well… yeah."
More laughter. This time harder.
Darian stood in the middle of it all, still clutching his useless stick, still dripping with hope and sweat and the last shreds of his pride.
Then someone shouted from the back of the crowd, half-laughing, half-serious:
"Oi! Someone call the commander! The mad bastard's loose again!"
Darian opened his mouth to argue—then closed it.
And with a deep, tired breath, he muttered:
"Brilliant. It's the blind leading the deaf."