Free Web NovelChapter 22: A Failed Authority
The chill of the Void slowly receded from the forefront of Caius’s mind, leaving behind a silence.
He didn’t visibly react to Ereba’s lethal threat.
His jaw didn’t tighten and his breathing remained perfectly slow.
He simply chewed the last piece of salted crust, swallowed, and kept his crimson eyes locked on the dim flickering shadows playing across the damp dirt ceiling of the dugout.
He knew exactly what the Goddess of Nothingness was capable of.
If Aurelia ever pushed her golden flames too deep... if she ever attempted to genuinely probe the abyssal core sitting in his chest, Ereba would not hesitate.
She would instantly erase the Villainess from the physical plane but for now, the delicate ecosystem of the dugout remained intact.
Across the cramped subterranean room, the freezing wind howling outside the leather curtain provided a dull roar.
The temperature inside the bunker hovered just above freezing.
The moisture in the air was so thick and frigid that every exhale from the six terrified new recruits formed tight white plumes of mist.
They were huddled against the far wall with their knees pulled to their chests.
They were starving, exhausted, and completely mentally shattered by their first ten minutes on the Carrion Front.
In the center of the muddy floor sat the remaining wooden supply crates Sergeant Vance had ordered them to drop.
There were four heavy, iron-banded oak boxes resting in the slop. Two contained the rusted, penal-issue armaments meant to keep them alive.
The other two were packed to the brim with dense, high-calorie military rations.
The heavy scent of roasted, salted meat and spiced root vegetables leaked through the wooden slats.
To men who had spent the last two weeks rotting in the deepest lightless dungeons of the imperial capital surviving on moldy gruel and dirty water, that smell was absolute torture.
It gnawed at their stomach linings even after they finished their own.
It triggered lizard-brain survival instincts that aggressively overrode the lingering terror they felt toward the blonde woman in the corner...
Slowly, the paralysis began to break.
One of the recruits pushed himself off the dirt wall.
He was an older man, his face heavily lined with premature wrinkles and a thick unkempt gray beard.
He wore the tattered stripped uniform of a disgraced Imperial Quartermaster.
He had been sent to the meat grinder for embezzling supply funds, but decades of logistical training were hardwired directly into his nervous system.
He looked at the two crates of food as he looked at the five other shivering recruits and did the math.
"Listen up," the quartermaster muttered.
His voice was incredibly hoarse, barely scraping past his dry vocal cords but it carried authority nonetheless.
The other five men slowly turned their hollow eyes toward him.
"The one-armed Sergeant dumped these and left," the quartermaster continued, taking a slow, cautious step toward the center of the dugout. freewebnovёl.ƈom
He kept his body angled slightly away from Caius and Aurelia’s corner, desperately trying to pretend the two anomalies didn’t exist.
"We are on the edge of the wastes as supply lines out here are dead. They don’t run regular caravans through the smog."
He reached the first food crate and rested his trembling, dirt-stained hand flat against the heavy oak lid.
"This is it," he stated grimly. "This is all the fuel we get... I ran the logistics for the Third Garrison before the Inquisition stripped my rank and I know how the Empire feeds its penal squads. They don’t. They give you a drop at the start of your shift, and they expect you to be dead before you need a second meal."
The scarred thug sitting nearby swallowed hard with his eyes completely locked onto the wooden slats. "So what do we do, old man?"
"We ration," the quartermaster answered immediately with his voice hardening.
He was desperate to establish a pecking order, a fragile hierarchy to keep the squad from descending into anarchy.
"We don’t know how long we’re going to be trapped in this hole before the sirens wail. If we gorge ourselves right now, we’ll be fighting the second wave on empty stomachs so we split the meat and the bread meticulously."
He reached into his tattered tunic and pulled out a small, heavily chipped iron dagger.
He wedged the dull blade under the heavy iron clasp of the crate, preparing to pry it open.
"Everyone gets an exact, equal share. We cut the loaves into sixths. We strip the meat down to the gram... We wrap the rest in our spare linens and we sit on it. Nobody takes a single bite more than their allotted share, or we all freeze to death from caloric deficit. Do you understand me?"
The five recruits nodded rapidly.
Their eyes were wide and completely fixated on the prize.
The logic was sound.
It was the harsh arithmetic of starvation in a warzone... Equal shares meant survival and equal shares meant order...
"Good," the quartermaster grunted, applying his weight to the dagger to pop the iron latch. "I’ll make the cuts. Line up and hold out your—"
He didn’t get to finish the sentence. freёwebnovel.com
From the darkest corner of the dugout, a shadow silently detached itself from the dirt wall.
Aurelia stood up.
She did not scramble to her feet nor did she grunt or use her hands to push herself off the mud.
She rose with the terrifying grace of an apex predator gliding through tall grass.
Her tattered mud-caked crimson tunic did absolutely nothing to hide the arrogant perfection of her posture.
The movement was incredibly subtle, but the impact on the six recruits was absolute.
The quartermaster froze, the chipped dagger slipping from his grip and falling into the mud with a dull thud.
The other five men violently flinched.
They scrambled backward on their hands and knees, practically pressing their spines directly into the damp dirt walls to clear a wide terrified path for her.
Aurelia did not look at them.
She did not acknowledge their fragile hierarchy, their desperate rationing plan, or their miserable trembling existence.
To her, they were entirely invisible... They were background noise... They were insects buzzing near the boots of gods....
She had just finished feeding Caius the last morsel of bread from her tin plate.
She had wiped her thumb against his lip.
Her mind had rejected the concept of him stopping at a single plate... Her beloved was a titan...
He was going to step back out into the apocalyptic smog and bleed for her once again so he needed to maintain his strength.
Aurelia walked directly up to the center of the room. Her heavy boots made soft wet squelching sounds against the freezing slop.
She stepped right past the paralyzed quartermaster. She didn’t reach down to unlatch the clasp and she didn’t ask for her "equal share" despite there being a crate next to Caius’s bed
She casually reached down and slid her pale, slender hands under the heavy iron handles of the first food crate.
These were bulk military supply boxes.
They were built from thick reinforced oak, bound in heavy pig-iron, and packed entirely to the brim with dense, salted meat, heavy root vegetables, and thick barley loaves.
A standard fully fed infantryman would need to brace his legs and heave with both arms just to lift one off the ground but Aurelia didn’t even bend her knees.
With a casual, terrifying display of the physical power that accompanied a high-tier imperial mana contract, she smoothly lifted the massive eighty-pound crate entirely off the ground.
The heavy wood groaned under her grip and she didn’t stop there.
She hoisted the first crate up, stacked it effortlessly on top of the second food crate, gripped the bottom handles, and lifted them both simultaneously.
She held a hundred and sixty pounds of solid wood and dense meat in her arms as easily as a woman carrying a folded silk gown!
Her breathing didn’t change and her slender arms didn’t shake.
She turned on her heel, her golden hair swishing slightly, and began walking directly back toward Caius’s dark corner.
She was taking every single ounce of food meant for the entire penal squad!
For a span of three long agonizing seconds, the dugout was absolutely silent.
The recruits were completely paralyzed by the brazen audacity of the theft.
Their brains stalled, entirely unable to process the visual data of a delicate-looking blonde woman casually walking away with a week’s worth of supplies then, the gnawing hunger in the quartermaster’s stomach violently overrode his ingrained survival instincts.
He had just established his authority.
He had just laid out the rules for their survival. If he let this woman... terrifying or not walk away with all their rations, he would lose control of the squad entirely.
They would starve to death in the dark before the monsters even breached the walls!
"Hey!"
