Napoleon of Another World!

Chapter 9 - The Theft

"For someone with an empty stomach,

there is neither obedience nor fear."

From an early age I had dreamed of being someone important.

A valiant hero.

A powerful wizard.

An influential magistrate.

But I was only the miller's son from a small frontier town, and I had realized very early on how few chances fate had decided to give me.

I wasn't born with the Gift, so I couldn't be a wizard.

I could never afford membership in the Imperial Academy, so I could not become a judge or an official.

Only the hero's path remained, but even then I would have had to start from the bottom.

When I was still a schoolchild, I had told my parents that I would join the legions when I grew up, and they had nearly thrown me out of the house. Because on top of that, being a servant of the Empire wasn't a profession to be proud of where I grew up.

But I stubbornly had not lost heart, and in the end, my perseverance had been rewarded; after only a year of leaving my home to enlist, I was already a Decurion of the Fifteenth Legion "Invicta."

I had personally asked to be assigned to that task, so that I could return to my birthplace and have the opportunity to demonstrate to everyone that I could be a soldier of the Empire without denying or forgetting my origins.

As a Decurion, they had assigned me to the small fort outside Dundee. Officially, I was second in command, but since our Centurion liked getting drunk at the tavern more than doing his duty, I basically took his place.

Since the peace agreements with the Union of Patria forbade the presence of large garrisons in every region overlooking the banks of the Jesi River, we were only a small group of soldiers, but coming almost all from the territories of old Eirinn we felt comfortable, and we all knew each other.

Obviously, I didn't intend to rot away in that suburban garrison, and I was counting on putting myself in the spotlight at the first opportunity to get a new promotion as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, fate mocks us, and enjoys putting the toughest trials in front of us when they are least expected.

West Eirinn had never been the friendliest place in the world, and stockpiling after harvest to get through the winter was normal for us.

Daemon, whose guesses had almost never turned out to be inaccurate, had suggested putting aside even more food than usual, since according to some instrument he had built, the upcoming winter would be much worse than usual. Obviously, he had been right, and luckily for us the mayor had listened to him by giving orders to stockpile a mountain of food.

That same food that was now burning before our eyes.

The roar was so strong that it threw us all out of bed in the middle of the night, and when we arrived, we could only helplessly watch the product of so many months of hard work literally go to ashes.

The only consolation was that we managed to prevent the fire from spreading and save something, but when the sun came up, the barn and almost all its contents were gone.

Between the militiamen and legionaries, we spent almost an hour accusing each other of what happened under the incredulous, worried, and rightly hostile eyes of the inhabitants. Daemon called us all back to order.