Chapter 106: Mad Shrike (VII)

Humans were truly contradictory creatures. They suffered through the meat grinder of the battlefield, swearing to the heavens that they would never command another skirmish again, yet their mental state inevitably deteriorated the moment a truce was declared.

If all-out war was a cruel, snowballing roguelike, then the rising tide of bandits and petty rebellions during this brief ceasefire was an endless, mind-numbing extermination quest. Zero technical skill required. Just pure, agonizing grind.

There were always Sarkaz who refused to take a side, foolishly imagining they could play both ends against the middle and continue their old business of highway robbery in the gray zones just as before.

Even someone as famously gentle as Theresa couldn’t sit still. She had taken to wandering the outskirts, catching whatever small mercenary outfits she could find and personally persuading them to surrender. It had to be said that the Lord of Fiends’ charisma was essentially a cheat code; almost everyone she met reached instant enlightenment. Even the most hardened, defiant Sarkaz veterans became flustered with excitement at the thought of the Lord of Fiends personally inviting them into the fold.

Tabo, on the other hand, found the entire process utterly exhausting.

He clearly possessed far more deterrence on the battlefield than she did. He could scare illiterate Sarkaz mercenaries into wetting their pants with a single cold stare. Yet, when it came to the actual surrender phase, these same Sarkaz somehow found their courage. When Theresa spoke, it was all “the Lord of Fiends changed my life.” But when Tabo stood before them, they suddenly felt compelled to dump their entire tragic backstories on him—endless, tear-jerking tales about an alien mother, a gambling addict father, and a rusty knife picked up from the ruins of a broken home.

Every person had their own obsessions and ideals. Every single one of them tried to use their unique personality and their shared disregard for life and death to make him yield. They expected sympathy, even if they had just murdered the informant he had spent weeks planting, or blown up the supply factory he had stayed up all night improving.

The first one or two times, Tabo could still muster the energy to offer earnest advice. But after the fiftieth time facing the exact same sob story, his heart had completely flatlined.

In the brutal process of Kazdel’s rebirth, people were dying every single second. No, Sarkaz were dying.

“Banshee Squad, maintain incantation output. Ascalon, slip into their blind spot. The leader is retreating through the tunnel to your right.”

It was just another bandit nest of fewer than a thousand people. Tabo no longer had a shred of patience left to listen to their grievances.

Whatever tragic reasons they held in their hearts, the fact remained: the textile base that was about to produce Babel’s first batch of winter coats for the army had been burned to the ground. Someone had to pay the price.

The trust among these Sarkaz mercenaries, bound together by nothing but the promise of loot, was laughably fragile. With the bulk of their forces consisting of Bloodfiends who lost their minds at the sight of gore, their formation shattered the moment casualties crossed the fifty percent threshold. Their leader had already abandoned his men and started sprinting for the exit just as Ascalon’s shadow descended upon him.

Ascalon frowned slightly. Her small frame dissolved into a blur of dark Originium Arts, clinging to the shadows as she wove through the chaotic, screaming crowd. She slipped past panicking adults twice her size, closing the distance with terrifying silence.

The mercenary leader was fast. For a brief second, he nearly vanished from her line of sight into the gloom of the tunnel.

But as he ran, human instinct betrayed him. He subconsciously threw a glance over his shoulder to see if he was being followed. He froze for a fraction of a second.

That single moment of hesitation was all Ascalon needed. Her blade flashed through the dark, severing his neck without a hint of hesitation.

“Doctor, the target is eliminated.”

A child no higher than his waist materialized from the shadows behind him. She held a severed, blood-soaked head in both hands, her face entirely devoid of expression.

Tabo displayed no surprise. He reached out, gently patting her head. “Good work, Ascalon. Stand down and rest.”

He casually dug into his coat pocket, fishing out two cubes of crude synthetic sugar derived from Originium Slug extract. He popped one into his own mouth and fed the other to the child, a quiet gesture meant to wash away the overwhelming copper stench radiating from her gruesome trophy.

The battlefield was quickly swept. The dead leader’s pockets were cleaner than his face. Just as Ascalon assumed they had found zero intel, Tabo suddenly reached into the inner lining of the corpse’s coat, right over the heart, and pulled out two crumpled, bloodstained slips of paper.

The handwriting on the first slip was childish, yet painstakingly neat:

‘Father, we won again! I’m now serving under a completely insane Commander! Didn’t you always say ideals can’t put food on the table? We’re really going to unify the Sarkaz this time!”Our Commander is a mysterious guy who always wears a hood… I can’t explain it well in a letter, but if you ever see him, his unique aura is something you’d definitely recognize at first sight!”Finally, the Commander promised to issue us new uniforms soon, but I don’t know when they’ll arrive… the weather is getting a bit cold.’The writing on the second slip was crooked, aggressive, and hideously illegible:’You stupid brat, I’ll figure something out about the clothes. Don’t you dare come back until you’ve made something of yourself! I’ve recently joined a massive mercenary group, and I’m living quite the life out here!’

Tabo stared at the text. So the man’s grand solution to keep his son warm was to pillage the exact Babel Textile Factory responsible for manufacturing his son’s winter coats.

Tabo’s expression remained entirely deadpan as his fingers closed, crushing the two pieces of paper. He opened his palm, letting the unsent letter mingle with the discarded sugar wrappers. The wind caught the scraps, scattering them across the blood-soaked ground where they would soon be trampled into the mud by the advancing Babel forces, never to be read again.

“The edges of that letter are rough, but the paper quality is almost identical to our internal stock. Someone connected to the Paper Mill supplied him with this.”

His voice was terrifyingly calm, adopting the measured tone of a professor as he crouched down to walk Ascalon through the logic. “How did a low-level thug like him, who didn’t even know where this batch of supplies was being shipped, pinpoint the exact location of a closed factory under our heavy security?”

Ascalon processed the variables for a moment before her eyes widened slightly. “Is someone from Babel… using him?”

“Exactly,” Tabo replied, a sliver of dark approval in his voice. “Someone is using the hands of roaming mercenaries to sabotage our reconstruction progress.”

He pulled up his tactical terminal, expanding the holographic map to display the entirety of Kazdel. “We currently operate three Paper Mills, and this highlighted zone is the primary area of mercenary activity. To prevent information leaks, we established strict search checkpoints here, here, and here. For this man to possess enough of our requisitioned paper to distribute to his mercenaries, he definitely smuggled out more than just a few sheets. Passing through those military inspections with that much contraband would be nearly impossible.”

The influence zones of the three Paper Mills overlapped with the mercenary activity grid at exactly six points. Tabo’s fingers danced across the screen, drawing prominent red lines that severed three of the main roads. Only two locations remained that could be accessed without triggering a Babel security sweep.

He zoomed in on the remaining grid, overlaying the blind spots with a detailed structural map. Two buildings illuminated on the screen: a medical clinic and a dilapidated bar.

This time, Ascalon didn’t need him to guide her to the answer. “It’s the bar.”

Mercenaries carrying a guilty conscience and stolen Babel intel would never dare step foot inside a hospital controlled by the Lord of Fiends’ forces.

Far away, on the other side of the desolate wasteland.

Hoederer and Ines moved rapidly toward the borders of Kazdel, handling the treacherous landscape amidst the constant threat of mercenary ambushes. As they cleared a rocky ridge, they noticed a young Sarkaz girl trailing silently behind them.

Her face was caked in so much dirt and ash that her original skin color was entirely indiscernible. Her small hands were wrapped in a death grip around the hilt of a sword that had belonged to their recently fallen companion. She stared up at them, her expression taut with a desperate, cornered tension.

Hoederer stopped. He fell silent for a long moment, sizing up the nameless Sarkaz child who clearly had nowhere left in this rotting world to go. He spoke first, his voice gruff but not unkind.

“You know what it means to pick up another person’s sword in Sarkaz custom, right?”

The nameless girl nodded once. She gripped the oversized blade even tighter, refusing to let the tip lower. She had no other choice.

Picking up a fallen comrade’s blade meant inheriting their weapon. It meant inheriting their name. And, above all, it meant inheriting their hatred.

Hoederer hesitated for a fraction of a second, but ultimately turned his back, allowing her to follow in their wake.

“From now on, your name is W.”

“We’re heading to Kazdel. Keep up.”

[Rhodes’s Note:

Enjoying the operation so far, Doctor?

(This daily grind literally pays the landship’s rent! 🙇‍♂️):

Massive thanks for reading and supporting the operation!]