-Johan Anderson-
After lunch, Hiroshi excused himself to return to the mountain of documents waiting for him. I could see the exhaustion on his face, but when I offered to ease his workload, he simply shrugged. "Part of the job," he said before heading off.
Takeshi and I shifted our focus to another pressing responsibility—inspecting the military training grounds I had neglected for too long. The area was far busier than it had been when I first led a mere 24 soldiers. In the past few months, aggressive recruitment and modernization had bolstered our numbers to over a thousand.