Free Web NovelChapter 329: The Generals Men
The morning sun broke through the thick canopy of vines and overgrown trees, casting a fractured, golden light across the settlement of Bowral. Before the world broke, the town had been a picturesque haven of Victorian-style architecture and charming cobblestone roads. Now, the cobblestones were cracked and upturned by long-past earthquake tremors, weeds bursting through the seams, and creeping ivy climbed the ornate, faded facades of the old brick houses. It was a beautiful, slightly buggered ghost of the past, adapted for grim, post-apocalyptic survival.
Down an alleyway flanked by two crumbling Victorian storefronts, Maddie stood in the dry morning air, her teeth grinding as she looked toward the western ridge. She couldn’t see the grand manor house from here. It was completely blocked from view, privatised, and locked down by the tight, impenetrable circle of elite fighters, the lethal men Felicity strung along alongside her seven fiercely possessive husbands, men that should, by right, be Maddies.
Nobody in Bowral could get a glimpse of the fox. She was kept entirely hidden, wrapped in luxury within a fortress that Maddie believed, with every fibre of her being, should have been hers.
But the latest rumours drifting through the town’s dirt tracks had pushed Maddie completely over the edge. Everyone in the settlement already knew the blonde bitch was pregnant; word had travelled fast after Felicity visited a doctor in a town over the other day. But the exact details had just leaked out, hitting the local market like a bomb. She wasn’t just pregnant. She was carrying four cubs. Quadruplets. Two boys, two girls.
In a ruined world with a staggering ratio of ten thousand men to barely a hundred women, a historic pregnancy like that made Felicity more valuable than any resource on the planet. She already had two healthy cubs, and now four more were on the way. Maddie, who had only managed to conceive a single cub in her entire life, was sick with envy.
Forty of Maddie’s best males had just been utterly obliterated on the manor’s front lawn, vaporised into nothing by a single, terrifying display from just one of Felicity’s men.
Maddie wasn’t unmated, but in a base starved of females, she could have as many men as she wanted. She wasn’t a great beauty, but right now, she didn’t need to be. She just needed to be a woman who was willing to talk to the desperate.
"She’s a parasite, and she’s hoarding everything," Maddie hissed, her voice sharp and urgent.
She wasn’t trying to convince the Tiger General. The General was too smart, too seasoned, and respected the raw power of Felicity’s inner circle too much to interfere, and she suspected he was in love with the whore. Instead, Maddie had sought out the General’s lower-ranking, unmated guards.
Three tiger beast-men, rough-hewn and scarred, stood rigid against a rusted iron fence. Their ears twitched, their eyes locked completely onto Maddie. To these desperate, unbonded males who hadn’t been spoken to by a female in months, the mere fact that Maddie had walked down to their post to personally converse with them was an intoxicating, ego-boosting rush. They were hanging on her every word.
"Maddie," the lead guard rumbled, his striped tail lashing restlessly against his combat trousers. "The General gave them that perimeter. We’re supposed to guard the sector from a distance. The General said the fox is to be protected."
"Protected?" Maddie let out a sharp, venomous laugh, stepping closer into their personal space. She could smell the heavy scent of unspent alpha tension rolling off them. "You think you’re protecting a helpless female? Forty of my strongest fighters were murdered on that lawn. They were part of this settlement’s defence force, and they were erased like trash by a hostile, unhinged beastman who just rolled into town."
The tiger guards shifted uncomfortably, their expressions darkening.
"She is a threat to the stability of Bowral," Maddie continued, her voice dropping to a dangerous, conspiratorial murmur as she masterfully hijacked their protective instincts. "She has an entire squad of high-level males completely whipped, acting as her private army. She’s hiding away in that massive manor, hoarding the best house, and she’s pregnant with four cubs. Four. While the rest of you rot out here on the cobblestones, risking your lives on the border without a mate, she is keeping a small army of prime males all to herself."
The logic was entirely warped by her hatred, but to starved, desperate men, it tasted like a harsh truth. If a female were that fertile, that beautiful and kind, as the travellers from the other town had claimed, she shouldn’t be locked away by outside mercenaries. She should belong to the settlement; she should be shared, for the good of the world.
"The General has gone soft," Maddie whispered, her eyes flashing with pure malice. "If those males decide to take over Bowral from the inside, who is going to stop them? You? Your squads?"
"What do you want us to do, Maddie?" the lead guard asked, his claws subtly extending from his knuckles as his jaw tightened.
Maddie leaned in, the scent of her desperation and anger flaring, driving the unmated tiger men into a protective frenzy. "We can’t attack the manor directly. Those men are too coordinated. But they have to let her out eventually. When she leaves the perimeter, we isolate her. The tiger guards can detain her under the guise of an official investigation into the deaths of my forty men."
She gripped the lead guard’s armoured shoulder, her fingers digging in. "The tiger guards have a duty to protect women, yes? If we bring her into the settlement’s central holding cells, her husbands will have no choice but to obey and submit to our laws to get her back. And once she is stripped of her protection..."
Maddie’s face contorted into a dark, satisfied sneer. "...we take everything. The manor, the men, and the cubs. We show her what happens to outsiders who try to hoard the future of Bowral, and you men can finally have her, or me."
