Garret had watched a lot of fresh meat cycle through the Great Wall over the years.
The vast majority of them faded from his memory before their first rotation was even over. They all arrived exactly the same: either shivering with thinly veiled terror, or puffed up with suicidal, aristocratic arrogance.
And in either case, the boring yet grueling reality of the Wall filed them down until they were either molded into something moderately useful, or it violently discarded them into the mud.
Years ago, Garret had learned the hard way not to invest a single ounce of emotional energy into any rookie until he saw how their minds held up after their first month.
"Red Pathfinder" had been very different from the very first day.
It wasn't about his combat prowess, at least, not in the beginning... It was his brain.
