Alash, now disguised as Captain Kayu, required two days of journey from the Capital City to the Roadwood Town. Unlike other traveler, Kayu rode a horse to the border town. Once he arrived on the border town, he was stopped by the guard on the town gates.
Roadwood Town had only 2 main gates. One gate faced the Woodforest Kingdom and called North Gate, the second gate was the one faced Rivermountain Capital City, called the South Gate.
Kayu was stopped by the guards on the South Gate. The guard leader walked to him and asked his identity or any identification proves. In the Kingdom, some bigger family would forge their own family medallion for identification purposes. Other wealthy families often fabricated their own medallion also. But for most of the commoners, they would get their identification letter from the city governmental offices where they were came from.
The identification letter could be issued by the governmental offices under Internal Affair Ministry for civilian. For soldiers, the army would issue the letter.
Similarly for students or teachers, the academy would issue the letter. Because there was too many type and institutions issued the identification letter, it would normally hard for the guards in every town to recognize an identification letter. As long as someone could produce an identification letter, normally the guards would glanced at it for a while and let them go.
The guard leader was a sergeant rank leader in the Army. He had 10 soldiers under his team. As usual, he took the letter from Kayu's hand and just gave cursory glanced to it before planned to let him go, but when he saw the insignia on the letter head, shocked appeared on the Sergeant's face.
That was the insignia of army headquarter. He read the letter and found out that the guy before him was a 100 man Captain Rank of the army Headquarter and he was such a young captain at that. The sergeant knew that the Captain before him should be one of the elite nurtured by the Army.
"Apologize Sir, we didn't recognize you before. Please have your letter back. I will send one of my men to accompany you to the army barrack." the sergeant saluted Kayu and gave back his letter. He yelled out to one of his soldier and asked him to brought Kayu to the Army Barrack of the Roadwood Town.
"At ease, it's okay for me. Just help me to take care of my horse." Kayu smiled and replied calmly. He then followed the soldier to the Army Barrack.
Roadwood town was not too big, it covered only 25 km square area. It was a simple squares town with walls surrounds it on the four sides. The main road stretched straight from the North Gate to the South Gate. Besides the main road, many shops, restaurants and stalls could be found.
The Army Barrack of the Roadwood Town was not located on the main road. It was located to the furthest west side of the town. The soldier brought Kayu to the barrack. Once arrived there, Kayu sent to the biggest office to meet with Second Commander Lodok. Kayu knocked the office's door. A heavy voices came from inside and asked him to came in.
"Welcome to the Roadwood, Captain." Commander Lodok shook Kayu's hand and asked him to sit on the chair.
"Thank you Sir."
"I got the letter from General Lembu. He asked me to take care of you while you were here. So, tell me what you want to do in here?" Lodok directly asked the main question without beating around the bushes.
"Commander, as you can see, I'm still young. I need more experiences; I believed General had informed you that I was worked as shadow guard before this. I need to experiences other post on the military." Kayu explained his motives to Commander Lodok.
Lodok kept quiet for a while. He withdrew some stack of documents from his table and flipped open some of it. Finally he took one of those papers and gave it to Kayu.
"Okay then, since you were trained as a shadow guard by the HQ. I believed your personal combat strength should be higher than average. You're official rank was Captain so I will deploy a hundred men soldiers under you. As for the assignment, read this paper. Take a rest for a day. Come and report back here by tomorrow morning."
Kayu stood up and saluted the commander before turned his body and dismissed himself. Outsides the room, the previous soldier who brought him to the commander's office was gone. A beautiful female soldier was there instead.
"Captain Kayu, I'm Sergeant Rumput from the administration department. I'll take you the your lodging." the female soldier introduced herself with cold and flat emotion on her face.
As an officer from administration department, she saw many times a descendant from wealthier family joined the army and provided with different treatment. She knew that the captain before her might only be one or two years older than her, but he already became a 100 man captain of the army.
She believed that his family should pay an enormous price to smoothen his career.
Rumput despised that kind of army officer. Without waited for Kayu's reply, she turned her body and walked away. Kayu was surprised; he wondered in his head, what kind of mistakes did he make that made the female officer in front of him give such treatments to him. After few steps, seeing that Kayu still stood on his previous place, Rumput's voice could be heard.
"Are you following or not?" Kayu shook his head and smiled bitterly before following this strange lady.
Soon, they arrived at the Captain rank lodging. A second rank commander such as Lodok would have at least ten captain rank subordinates. Thus in the barrack, there would be minimum ten captain class lodging prepared by the administration department.
Currently Lodok had only 7 captains working under him. Thus he had around 700 soldiers in total. Once Lodok received the letter from Vice General Lembu, the general actually deployed 100 soldiers alongside the letter to be the team under Captain Kayu. Thus the soldiers for Kayu had arrived few days before him on the Roadwood Town's barrack.
Kayu's lodging was located in the end of the previous 7 other captains. Since it was noon time, no captains could be found on their own rooms. Once Rumput brought Kayu to his room, she immediately dismissed herself and ran back to the administration office.