Free Web NovelChapter 23: Feeding Your Lover
The quartermaster snapped with his voice suddenly becoming loud.
He took a sharp aggressive step forward with his hand instinctively reaching out to grab her shoulder and stop her momentum but he stopped... He felt as though death was reaching for him! frёewebηovel.cѳm
"The Sergeant said that’s all the food we have! You can’t just take—"
Aurelia stopped walking.
She didn’t drop the heavy wooden crates, instead she stood perfectly still in the mud.
Slowly she turned her head over her shoulder.
She didn’t ignite her golden flames.
The dugout did not suddenly fill with the blinding light of the Sun God’s authority...
What happened was infinitely more terrifying.
Her glowing, piercing crimson eyes narrowed into absolute razor-thin slits of concentrated malice.
"You were saying..?"
The ambient atmospheric pressure inside the claustrophobic dugout violently plummeted.
It felt as though a massive and invisible physical weight had just been dropped directly onto the quartermaster’s chest.
The oxygen was forcibly expelled from his lungs in a sharp gasp.
It was the aura of a mass-murdering apex predator completely locking onto its prey!
For the entirety of her wretched isolated life, Aurelia Solis had been a caged weapon of mass destruction.
She had vaporized heavily armored knights in fractions of a second... She had incinerated massive Siege-beasts with casual flicks of her wrist...
She possessed a soul so deeply fractured, so heavily saturated with murder, that merely focusing her undivided killing intent on a fragile mortal was enough to trigger a total breakdown.
The quartermaster’s aggressive step faltered.
His hand, reaching out to stop her, trembled in mid-air. freewёbnoνel.com
It began to tremble violently with the muscles locking up in a state of involuntary rigor mortis.
"Ha... ha... ha..."
He looked into those glowing crimson eyes, and he didn’t see a woman.
He didn’t see a fellow penal recruit.
He saw the undeniable end of his own existence!
He saw his own flesh turning to ash with his bones scattering in the freezing wind.
The primitive survival instinct buried deep within his DNA screamed at him with overwhelming volume, completely bypassing his prefrontal cortex.
PREDATOR! RUN! SUBMIT! DIE!
The quartermaster couldn’t breathe as his jaw went entirely slack.
His eyes rolled back slightly in his skull, the whites exposing as his central nervous system completely stalled under the weight of her killing intent.
A sudden, warm, pathetic puddle instantly formed around his heavy leather boots.
The yellow liquid soaked rapidly into the freezing black mud as his bladder entirely released itself.
He literally pissed his pants in pure terror then his knees completely gave out.
Thump!
The quartermaster collapsed heavily into his own filth. His arms wrapped tightly around his head as he curled into a shivering ball in the center of the dugout.
He began violently sobbing, his chest heaving as he gasped desperately for air that his paralyzed lungs refused to process.
The other five recruits slammed their backs so hard against the dirt walls that the damp soil actually caved in slightly behind them.
They squeezed their eyes shut, whimpering like beaten dogs, entirely unwilling to even look at the monster that had just shattered their leader without lifting a single finger.
Aurelia stared at the weeping piss-soaked man on the floor for exactly one more second.
Her expression remained completely apathetic to his humiliation.
She slowly turned her head back around, adjusting her grip on the heavy crates, and continued her walk to the dark corner.
She reached Caius’s side and she gently placed the two massive wooden boxes down directly next to his makeshift cot, treating the cargo with infinitely more respect than she had treated the humans in the room.
Caius watched the entire interaction from the shadows.
He leaned back against the dirt wall with his arms crossed casually over his bare muscular chest.
He looked down at the weeping recruit in the center of the room, listening to the pathetic sobs echoing in the small space, and then looked up at the beautifulunfazed Villainess standing before him.
He let out a long breath.
"Aurelia," Caius murmured smoothly. "You could try to be a bit nicer. We don’t really need the entire dugout actively antagonizing us while we sleep."
Aurelia turned to look at him.
The terrifying malice completely vanished from her glowing crimson eyes in a fraction of a millisecond.
It was instantly replaced by a terrifyingly sweet and fiercely devoted smile.
"They are fodder, Dear Caius," Aurelia replied softly.
She didn’t say it with arrogance or forced cruelty... she stated it as a fundamental law of nature.
"The strongest eat first," she continued with her smile deepening as she reached down and popped the heavy iron latch of the top crate. "You are fighting for me... You are bleeding for me so you need it significantly more than they do."
She knelt down in the mud beside the crates, entirely uncaring of the filthy slop ruining her trousers.
She eagerly threw the heavy wooden lid back with the rich scent of hot salted meat instantly filling their small corner.
’Sigh...’
He didn’t argue with her logic and he didn’t try to enforce some misplaced sense of morality or fair rationing.
This was the Carrion Front.
Morality was a luxury that got men killed in the mud! Besides he wasn’t sure they would survive at all... He would still try to give them some rations later, he was a Villain not a monster.
He accepted the massive slab of meat she handed him.
Caius ate... He didn’t eat for pleasure as he chewed the tough salted military meat, swallowing it down in massive rapid bites.
Aurelia sat intimately close to him with her thigh pressed flush against his. She ate her own portion with significantly more delicate grace, her glowing eyes constantly flicking up to watch him chew.
A deep satisfaction radiated from her core... She was providing for her love.
When Caius had completely demolished half the crate on his own, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stood up.
It was time to assess the rest of the supplies!
He walked over to the remaining two wooden crates sitting in the center of the room.
He completely ignored the quartermaster, who had finally stopped sobbing and was currently shivering silently in his own urine, too terrified to move.
Caius reached down, gripping the rusted iron clasp of the first weapon crate.
SNAP!
He didn’t pry it open.
He just pinched his fingers and violently broke the thick iron locking mechanism off entirely using raw grip strength.
’I’ve really grown stronger... I can’t wait to get even stronger and once I get home, the first thing I’ll do is to break the hand of one of those fuckers.’
He threw the heavy wooden lid back with the hinges squealing in protest.
Caius stared down into the crate, his crimson eyes narrowing in disappointment.
Resting inside were messy, tangled stacks of standard-issue penal-grade combat gear.
It was somehow worse than the last one...
He reached in and pulled out a heavy bundle of iron chainmail.
He held it up to the dim light of the lantern.
The rings were thick, incredibly poorly forged, and already blooming with bright orange patches of corrosive rust. It felt heavy... at least forty pounds of dead weight.
It was a massive encumbrance that would provide zero actual protection against heavy trauma and would completely bottleneck a mortal’s agility.
He tossed the chainmail aside as it hit the mud with a dull heavy clatter.
He reached back in and grabbed one of the shortswords.
He gripped the hilt, testing the balance.
It was a pathetic blunt slab of cheap pig-iron.
The edge was heavily chipped right out of the box, completely unsharpened, and the cheap leather wrapped around the hilt was already fraying and slick with old preserving grease.
[Item Assessed: Standard Penal Infantry Blade]
[Quality: F-Rank / Absolute Garbage]
[Durability: Will catastrophically shatter upon contact with high-density obsidian armor.]
The Grimoire could access items? Regardless...
"Useless," Caius muttered under his breath.
