Free Web NovelChapter 20: Ahem!
"I don’t care who you were in the capital... I don’t care if you were a lord who stole from the Emperor’s coffers, a thug who slit a merchant’s throat, or a mercenary too stupid to read a contract... All of that died the second those carriage doors closed." freeweɓnøvel.com
Vance stopped in front of the weeping young noble, staring down at the boy with his single slate-gray eye.
"You are no longer men. You are no longer citizens of the Solis Empire. You are the mortar that holds these stones together and you are the ablative flesh designed to slow down the teeth of the Abyss."
Vance pointed a scarred, calloused finger toward the smoking ruined wasteland beyond the palisade.
"You hear that thunder? You see those flashes in the smog? That is the Pantheon doing the easy work but when the sky turns pitch black, when the ground starts shaking, and when the true Gore-Tide breaches that tree line... the Saints will not be standing in the mud beside you. The elite will not shield you. You will stand on that wall, you will grip your rusted iron, and you will bleed."
"Fuck you, you crippled old bastard!"
The harsh, aggressive shout completely shattered the heavy silence of the lineup.
A thick-necked thug with his face heavily tattooed with the black ink of a capital murderer, aggressively shoved his way to the front of the trembling men.
He glared at Vance’s blood-soaked stump with pure contempt.
"I ain’t dying in this freezing mud for you or the Emperor!" the thug spat with his fists clenching at his sides. "I’ll take my chances in the wastes... I ain’t taking orders from a half-dead cripple."
Instantly, the atmosphere changed.
An elite Imperial Guard, standing near the heavy carriage doors in his pristine silver armor, sneered with disgust as he stepped forward, his hand dropping aggressively to the heavy hilt of his halberd.
"Insolent filth," the Guard spat, raising the heavy weapon to strike the recruit down. "I will take your head for—"
"Hold, Knight."
Vance did not shout... He simply raised his remaining right hand with his heavy calloused palm remaining flat.
The Imperial Guard hesitated, his halberd pausing mid-air in sheer surprise that a penal commander would dare issue him an order.
"He belongs to the trench now," Vance grunted, his slate-gray eye locking entirely onto the thug. "The capital has no jurisdiction over the mud."
The thug puffed out his chest, completely mistaking Vance’s intervention for weakness.
He took a bold arrogant step toward the Sergeant, fully intending to push the one-armed veteran aside and march directly into the wastes; however he didn’t even see Vance move.
The veteran of the Carrion Front didn’t posture.
He didn’t roar either.
He simply reacted with the flawless muscle memory of a man who had survived a decade of slaughter.
SHING!
Vance smoothly drew the rusted iron shortsword from his hip in a singular, frictionless arc.
He stepped inside the thug’s guard, pivoting his heavy boots in the slop, and drove the jagged blade directly upward.
The rusted iron slipped flawlessly beneath the thug’s jawline and entirely through the roof of his mouth.
The thug violently seized with his eyes rolling completely back into his skull. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
"You think the wastes are empty?" Vance whispered coldly into the dying man’s ear. "You think you are the predator out here? You are meat."
Vance violently ripped the blade free.
SQUELCH!
The thug collapsed heavily into the black slop. His life was violently extinguished with a heavy pool of dark crimson rapidly spreading around his head.
The terrified recruits visibly recoiled as the unvarnished horror of their reality completely crushed whatever lingering hope they had harbored.
The one-armed Sergeant wasn’t a frail victim... He was an executioner!
"Do not pray for survival," Vance commanded ruthlessly, flicking the blood from his blade and completely breaking their spirits. "Pray that when the obsidian bone crushes your ribs, it does it quickly. Pray that you don’t get dragged screaming into the dark. Now, grab your gear and get into the dugouts. You have thirty minutes until your shift begins."
The line instantly dissolved into a scrambling mess of terrified men rushing to grab the heavy wooden crates of supplies dumped by the carriages but as the towering Sergeant watched the terrified new recruits stumble toward the dugouts, completely ignorant of the apocalyptic slaughter that awaited them at dawn...
Vance couldn’t help but pity them.
...
The Carrion Front did not experience mornings in any traditional sense.
There was no gentle sunrise piercing the horizon, no chorus of waking birds, and certainly no crisp refreshing dawn air to wash away the horrors of the night.
There was only a slow sickly transition in the suffocating smog, shifting from the bruised, pitch-black abyss of night into an ash-gray twilight.
The light did not illuminate... it merely exposed the endless miles of pulverized mud and smoking blackened craters.
Inside the damp dirt dugout, the air was freezing.
The permafrost of the eastern wastes radiated aggressively through the packed earth walls, carrying with it the foul smell of everything but in the darkest corner of the claustrophobic room, Caius was entirely untouched by the cold.
His physical vessel was practically a living furnace.
He was no longer the frail scrawny noble who had stepped off the penal carriage just days ago.
His shoulders were incredibly broad, tearing the seams of his ruined shirt and currently, that heat was exclusively monopolized by one of the most dangerous woman on the continent.
Caius was asleep.
His back was resting heavily against the damp dirt wall, his long muscular legs stretched out over the packed earth.
His breathing was incredibly steady and curled tightly against his left side, completely bypassing any standard concept of personal space, was Aurelia Solis.
The terrifying Villainess had her pale, slender arms wrapped securely around his thick torso.
Her face was buried deeply into the crook of his uninjured neck with her delicate nose pressed directly against his pulse.
She was clinging to him like a slave to their beloved master.
Her golden cascading hair, usually a wild halo of crackling, apocalyptic magic, spilled smoothly over his blood-stained shirt.
The horrific monster that had incinerated a man into ash the previous day was entirely gone.
In her place was a woman sleeping with an expression of fiercely devoted peace.
For her entire life, her sleep had been plagued by the terrifying subconscious fear that her cursed flames would violently ignite and destroy her own room but here, anchored to the single anomaly in the universe that did not burn, her fractured mind had finally found stillness.
BAM!
The heavy damp leather curtain of the dugout was violently kicked open.
The freezing, sulfur-choked wind of the trenches immediately howled into the small room, violently disrupting the stagnant air, accompanied by the sloshing sound of iron boots dragging through the mud.
"Inside, you miserable bastards. Move it..." Sergeant Vance’s rough gravelly voice barked.
Six men shuffled nervously into the dim dugout.
They were the fresh meat... the new penal recruits dragged directly from the deepest dungeons of the imperial capital to replace the fodder that the Gore-Tide had violently consumed.
They were loud, uncoordinated and reeking.
They carried heavy wooden crates filled with fresh iron chainmail, rusted shortswords, and tin plates stacked with hot, salted breakfast rations.
"Drop the crates by the table," Vance ordered, stepping heavily into the room behind them.
The Sergeant’s severed left arm was heavily wrapped in blood-soaked bandages, the white linen stained a horrifying crimson.
It served as a brutal reminder to the new recruits of exactly what awaited them outside the relative safety of the dirt walls.
Vance turned his slate-gray eyes toward the darkest corner of the room, preparing to wake his two surviving veterans however the towering Sergeant stopped dead in his tracks.
His jaw tightened. His solitary eye widened just a fraction and the six new recruits, following the Sergeant’s horrified gaze, turned their heads toward the shadows.
They expected to see grizzled scarred mercenaries... They expected to see hollow-eyed killers sharpening their blades...
Instead, they saw a scene that completely shattered their minds.
Sitting in the shadows was a heavily muscled, blood-stained young man with crimson hair, looking less like a noble and more like a slumbering predator and intimately, entirely cuddled against his chest, her slender legs tangled shamelessly with his, was a breathtaking peerless blonde Jade Beauty!
The new recruits stood frozen in slack-jawed shock.
Their minds violently rejected the visual data.
They were standing in the middle of a literal apocalyptic meat grinder, surrounded by miles of pulverized mud and beast corpses, and these two were casually sleeping like they were lounging in the silk-sheeted royal suites of the capital.
One of the recruits, a heavily scarred, thick-necked thug trying to desperately mask his mounting terror with crude bravado, opened his mouth.
"Well, well," the thug sneered with a filthy lecherous grin pulling at his scarred lips as his eyes raked greedily over Aurelia’s perfect mud-caked curves. "Looks like the veterans get some pretty high-class comfort out here in the—"
AHEM!
