The aftermath of the tunnel collapse was swift and career-defining. Sergeant Hayes had been true to his word: his report labeled Bartholomew not as a madman, but as a "Field Instinct Specialist." Within a week of the incident, Bartholomew was promoted to Sergeant and immediately reassigned. The military needed his luck, but they knew better than to leave a diamond in the mud.
He was transferred to a higher-traffic, more vital sector—Battery Support Base Gamma, a nexus of Allied artillery just behind the main trench lines. He was still in the thick of the danger, but his new role was less about holding a shovel and more about stabilizing the volatile Aetheric weaponry that was becoming common.
His new D-Rank Gem thrummed with the increased Magic Power (MP: 75) and the solid resilience of his Endurance (25). But the success came with a terrifying psychological price.
The Stare (Early 1915)
The trauma of the tunnel collapse had cracked the door open. He now saw the world through a thin, strained veil. The faces of his comrades would occasionally blur into the faces of the men he saw die in the 1920s. He slept in fits, his dreams haunted by the smell of diesel and crushed rock. The sheer fatigue of containing 80 years of memory behind an 18-year-old facade was relentless.
He was determined to avoid any new triggers. The D-Rank threshold was safe for now, and he desperately wanted to conserve his sanity. His unit mates noted his unnerving calm and the persistent, far-off look in his eyes—The Stare—but they chalked it up to the shell-shock he had clearly endured.
This period, lasting approximately two months, was characterized by high alertness but zero spontaneous level-ups. Bartholomew was surviving through anticipation, not through trauma.
The Coded Assignment
His period of safe stagnation ended with the arrival of a special field courier—a wiry, silent man wearing the black and gold insignia of the Aetheric Intelligence Corps (AIC). The courier presented Bartholomew with a sealed, coded document. It was stamped with the unmistakable, discrete seal of Major Elias Vance.
The message was brief and clinical:
Sergeant Bartholomew, Report on Artillery Battery 4, Gun B, Latency Check. Assess structural stability of Type-IV Ammunition Shell Casings for high-charge firing sequences. Focus on microscopic anomalies. Return findings by 0600 hours.
It was a highly technical, seemingly random inspection request, well outside the scope of a front-line D-Rank mage. Vance wasn't asking him to fix a problem; he was setting a trap. He knew Bartholomew's mind held the schematics for every military failure of the next three decades, and this mission was designed to find a matching trauma.
Bartholomew immediately understood the grim implication: Vance believed there was a flaw in that specific ammunition, and he was using Bartholomew's mind as a glorified X-ray machine.
The Shell Casing Flaw
Battery 4 was a noisy, high-traffic sector. Gun B was an experimental, long-range piece firing high-charge, Runed Artillery Shells—the type designed to penetrate fortified Aetheric bunkers.
Bartholomew took his assignment, claiming he needed to perform complex structural runes on the ammunition casings to prevent 'micro-fractures.' He moved through the piles of ready-to-fire shells, his MP focused on performing a minute Logistik Scan on the metallurgy.
He found nothing—until he picked up a specific batch. They felt slightly off-balance, and his MP struggled to bind to the casing's metal lattice.
The trigger was set. The subtle dissonance in the metal was exactly what his past-life mind recognized.
The memory exploded: The 1938 Flawed Ammunition Disaster. A large-scale Allied offensive where thousands of high-charge artillery shells, suffering from this specific, microscopic manufacturing fault, detonated prematurely inside the gun barrels, killing the crews and obliterating entire battery positions. The disaster was a catastrophic logistical failure he had learned about decades after the fact, during his time in the asylum.
The terror was intense. This wasn't just his death; this was the mass, pointless death of dozens of men standing right next to him.
The Insight: The flaw could not be corrected structurally, but it could be neutralized by applying a micro-rune—a highly specialized, instantaneous counter-pressure array—to the base of the shell casing during firing. This required D-Rank power, but C-Rank precision.
The Action: Driven by the overwhelming vision of exploding gun barrels, Bartholomew moved with impossible speed. He ignored the pain of the flashback, drawing on his now-strong Endurance (25). He bypassed the complex, slow method. Instead, he used his limited MP to etch a hair-thin, counter-pressure micro-rune into the brass casing of every shell in the dangerous batch, channeling just enough Aetheric energy to stabilize the metal lattice. He worked frantically, his hands blurring with speed, completing the task just minutes before the command to load the dangerous shells was given.
He collapsed against the stack of corrected ammunition, spent but safe. The surrounding soldiers, who had seen his odd, frantic movements, only assumed he was a particularly dedicated, if eccentric, Sergeant.
The System Reaction:
[TRAUMA RESPONSE SUCCESSFUL: CATASTROPHIC LOGISTICAL FAILURE AVERTED. +120 EXP Gained.]
[EXP: 120/200 (Reached High D-Rank)]
[Magic Power: 75 \rightarrow 85]
Note: Specialized Technical Insight Unlocked.
He was not yet C-Rank, but he was nearly there. He had proven to Vance that his trauma could solve problems of a national, strategic scale.
The Waiting Game
Bartholomew reported back with a terse, two-word reply via the AIC courier: "Latent Instability Corrected."
Major Vance's response was immediate and private: a new, slightly higher-grade E-Rank Gem appeared discreetly in Bartholomew's locker, along with a note: "Good. Prepare for a command transfer in three months. The next failure is on a larger scale."
The trenches, Bartholomew realized, were now just a waiting room. Vance was not going to leave him to the slow grind. He would be moved onto the next major trauma, and it would be designed to give him the massive EXP injection needed for Rank C. The game was accelerating.