The suffocating shift in his aura acted like a physical slap to their faces.

The girls completely stiffened.

The heavy alcohol buzzing in their veins temporarily evaporated under the weight of the Lord’s authority.

Brida dropped her mug.

Tamsin stood up straight. Hell even Thora jumped off the table, entirely abandoning her perverted jokes.

They didn’t ask questions and they didn’t complain.

All of them, moving with the highly trained precision of an elite military unit, instantly ran entirely out of the Keep and marched directly toward the heavy stone Garrison across the courtyard.

Silas walked out of the Keep, completely ignoring the freezing rain hitting his dark shirt.

’What a day...’ He thought as he crossed the courtyard with his heavy boots squelching in the tiles.

He reached the massive iron double doors of the Warlord’s Garrison.

Silas pushed them open and stepped inside the torch-lit hall.

He stopped just inside the threshold.

Seventy heavily armed women were perfectly arranged in neat immaculate military rows across the stone floor.

The exact second his boots hit the stone, every single one of them completely dropped to one knee.

They bowed their heads in absolute, unquestioning perfect unison.

The heavy clatter of their steel armor echoed loudly in the massive hall.

"Welcome back, my Lord!" the women shouted in perfect synchronization. "We hope you did well on your highly successful expedition to the land of the Lords!"

Silas thinned his lips. He completely ignored the formal rehearsed military greeting as he raised his right hand.

He pointed a single accusatory finger directly toward the back of the massive hall.

Silas pointed exactly at the Warlord Barracks window that had now been healed by the automatic restoration spell.

"Who did that...?" Silas asked with his voice becoming a low terrifying rumble that completely filled the silent hall.

Nobody moved and nobody breathed.

"I just dropped over a million Spirit Credits entirely on high-end civilian clothing, enchanted uniforms, and raw materials for this specific unit," Silas stated coldly, pacing slowly in front of the kneeling rows. "I bought expensive gifts for every single one of you."

He stopped pacing as he stared them down.

"If the exact person that did that does not voluntarily come forward right now," Silas threatened. "Then I absolutely will not give all of you the gifts I bought."

The threat hung heavily in the air.

There was a tense agonizing silence for exactly two seconds.

Then, the ruthless reality of female solidarity in the face of withheld gifts kicked in completely.

Several aggressive shouts echoed from the third row.

"It was her!"

"She did it!"

"Don’t take our gifts, My Lord!"

The girls completely pushed Gunnhild violently forward.

The tall heavily muscled Vanguard member stumbled awkwardly out of the neat military formation, falling directly onto the open stone floor directly in front of Silas’s boots.

Gunnhild held her ground on her hands and knees.

"Traitors..." Gunnhild muttered bitterly under her breath, glaring back at her supposed sisters in arms who had completely sold her out for a new gift.

But she couldn’t blame them, if she were in their position, she would do the same.

Gunnhild slowly turned her head.

She looked directly up into her Lord’s cold golden-ringed eyes.

A massive guilty blush spread entirely across her scarred cheeks as she offered a weak pathetic smile.

"M-my Lord..." Gunnhild whispered, frantically trying to play it off. "What a completely random, entirely unexpected coincidence."

Silas didn’t smile nor did he blink. To Gunnhuld, he looked very scary.

"Gunnhild," Silas stated with his voice completely flat. "You have exactly ten seconds to logically explain yourself. Why did you completely destroy my reinforced window?"

"M-my Lord..." Gunnhild whispered with her voice cracking as she desperately tried to play it off in front of the assembled ranks. "What a completely random unexpected coincidence."

Gunnhild flinched hard.

The heavy steel plates of her shoulder armor clattered together.

She pressed her forehead directly against the cold damp stone floorboards, bowing her head in a rapid frantic gesture of submission.

"I am so sorry, my Lord!" Gunnhild cried out as her voice echoing off the high ceiling of the hall. "I was practicing my heavy spear thrusts in the upper corridor, and my palms were slick with sweat! My grip slipped on the shaft! It flew right through the reinforced glass! I swear on my life, it was a training accident!"

Silas stared down at the kneeling woman.

He didn’t actually care about the physical window.

It was a pane of glass.

The territory had already spent five seconds channeling a basic restoration command to seamlessly bind the shattered fragments back together before he even walked across the muddy courtyard.

The material cost to his territory was literally zero but Silas wasn’t just a guy playing a fantasy video game.

He was the Sovereign of a standing army of seventy heavily battle-hardened female women currently operating in an active death zone.

’If I let this slide without a formal punishment, every single one of them is going to think I’ve gone soft,’ Silas analyzed with his jaw tightening. ’Give a frontier mercenary an inch of leniency, and next week they’ll be conducting full-contact sparring matches with battleaxes inside my newly upgraded kitchen. Order requires consequence...’

He didn’t draw his greatsword.

Instead, he deliberately let the unsuppressed terrifying power of his Mythic Gold Core ignite inside his chest.

His blue eyes began to glow with a brilliant golden luminescence.

WHOOSH!

The atmosphere inside the Warlord’s Garrison violently shifted.

The ambient temperature plummeted by ten degrees in a single second.

The crushing gravity of his sovereign aura flooded the hall like a tidal wave of liquid lead, pressing down on the shoulders of every woman present with an undeniable suffocating weight.

The flames flickering on the wall-mounted iron torches physically bent away from him, cowed by the pressure.

Gunnhild swallowed hard.

The audible gulp echoed loudly in the dead silence of the hall.

Her throat felt like it had been coated in dry sand.

Behind her, sixty-nine elite women of the Vanguard rigidly locked their muscles.

They felt the crushing density of his mana bleeding into the room.

They knew Gunnhild was undeniably cooked.

In the third row, a young shieldmaiden squeezed her eyes shut beneath her helmet and silently recited a prayer for her comrade’s departing soul.

"I apologize again, my Lord!" Gunnhild stammered wildly.

She began rapidly kowtowing against the stone floorboards, slapping her forehead against the rock over and over again like a terrified disciple in a cheap xianxia cultivation novel.

"Please spare my life! I will pay for the glass with my next five years of operational stipends!"

’I don’t even pay you!’

"You simply cannot break territory property and walk away, Gunnhild," Silas stated coldly, stepping down from the threshold and walking slowly toward her kneeling form. "Even if the structural damage was instantly healed by magic... Actions have physical weight."

He reached down to his waist.

With a slow deliberate movement, he unbuckled the heavy reinforced leather belt that came tailored with his dark Earth-made trousers and pulled it cleanly free from the waist loops.

Clack!

The sharp metallic sound of the iron belt buckle echoing in the silent Garrison made Gunnhild’s scarred cheeks flush a blinding shade of nuclear crimson.

’What is my lord thinking...?’

Her eyes widened in panic as she stared at the strip of dark leather in his hands.

Remarkably, Silas’s trousers didn’t drop an inch.

’Thank god for Tier 3 Auto-Fitting enchantments...’ Silas thought, mentally noting the incredible convenience of his recent system upgrades.

The magical weave seamlessly hugged his hips, keeping his gear securely locked in place without needing manual support. ’That’s quite a lifehack if I do say so myself.’

He doubled the heavy leather belt over in his right hand, giving it a sharp experimental flick.

Snap!

"You will simply be whipped on the ass," Silas ordered flatly with his expression entirely lacking any warmth or hesitation.

Gunnhild blinked.

Behind her, the other sixty-nine women blinked in synchronized bewilderment.

Their mouths dropped open slightly.

Silas stood there, holding the folded leather strap, looking down at his trembling spearwoman with a look of mild annoyance.

’What?’ Silas thought, genuinely irritated by their collective scandalized stares. ’Why are they all looking at me like I just suggested a public execution? This is exactly how my dad used to discipline me growing up back on Earth... tch.’

His mind drifted briefly to his old man.

His father had been quite a bastard growing up in the city... a hard, uncompromising man who didn’t believe in time-outs, emotional counseling or long-winded lectures.

When Silas broke a window or got into a street fight, out came the leather belt.

It was rough, it was rudimentary, and it was quite literally the only form of domestic correction the man knew how to apply.

To Silas’s warlord brain, the logic was sound.

He wasn’t going to execute his own elite soldiers over a broken window.

He wasn’t going to throw them into a damp, freezing dungeon and waste their stamina regeneration.

A sharp physical sting to the backside was immediate, super effective, left zero permanent combat damage, and sent a crystal-clear message to the rest of the barracks.

Gunnhild knelt on the stone floor with her heart hammering wildly against her ribs like a trapped bird.

Her entire body broke out in a hot feverish sweat.

’How does my Lord know I like getting whipped?!’ Gunnhild’s thoughts shrieked, taking a massive degenerate left turn that would have completely horrified her Sovereign if he could read her mind.

Unlike the other girls in the Vanguard who had complicated, romantic, or highly emotional reasons for falling in love with him... like Kaelia admiring his gentle reassurance, or Eluned obsessing over his mana signature... Gunnhild didn’t have much of a complex reason at all.

She was a simple frontier warrior born in a world governed entirely by the laws of survival.

From the moment she could hold a spear, she had been taught one truth: submit only to the strongest apex predator in the room.

She wanted him purely and simply because her Lord was truly the strongest biological organism she had ever laid eyes on.

’And besides!’ Gunnhild thought with her breathing turning shallow and ragged as a thrill of excitement shot down her spine. ’In an army of seventy women constantly fighting for his personal gaze, getting disciplined in front of everyone is a fantastic way to garner his undivided, exclusive attention!’

"Spread yourself and hug the ground," Silas commanded, pointing the folded leather belt at the floorboards.

Gunnhild didn’t hesitate for a microscopic fraction of a second.

She immediately threw herself forward, flattening her chest and shoulders directly against the cold stone floor.

She aggressively thrust her muscled leather-clad hips high into the air, presenting her backside directly to her towering Sovereign with enthusiastic military precision.

"I did my Lord!"

Silas stepped up behind her.

He raised his right arm, bringing the doubled leather strap down across her rear with a practiced swing.

SMACK!

The sharp crisp sound of leather striking leather-reinforced canvas echoed violently across the cavernous Garrison.

"Ahn~!" Gunnhild let out a high-pitched breathless moan with her toes curling rigidly inside her iron boots.

Silas frowned slightly.

He raised the belt again, adding a fraction more force to the swing to ensure the disciplinary message landed properly.

SMACK!

"Mmmh~! Harder, my Lord~!" Gunnhild begged out loud with her hips actively bucking backward to meet the strap. "Please punish your disobedient spearwoman!"

Silas froze with his arm raised in mid-air.

Behind Gunnhild, the entire kneeling formation of sixty-nine Vanguard warriors had turned a collective blinding shade of scarlet.

Several shieldmaidens slapped their gauntlets over their faces, staring at their comrade in scandalous shock.

Silas stood motionless with a massive drop of sweat sliding down the side of his face as his right eye physically twitched.

’Is every single woman I summoned from this gacha pool a complete, unrepentant degenerate?’ Silas wondered, genuinely appalled by the situation as he slowly lowered the belt. ’I try to run a disciplined military structure, and they turn it into a weird roleplay session. I can’t win.’