Free Web Novel"The war to end all wars."
Pavela repeated the phrase.
She laughed.
The laugh was short and faint, a breathy sound escaping through her nose, like a polite response to a joke that wasn't funny.
"The war to end all wars."
She repeated it again.
She said it very slowly this time.
It was as if she was chewing over each syllable of the words, turning them over and over on her tongue, tasting nothing but bitterness and absurdity.
Igor's breath hitched for a moment.
He could hear it.
Her mood had shifted.
From anger, to something that had pierced through anger, reaching the place beyond it.
This was bad.
Anger he could handle.
Because anger meant emotion, emotion meant openings, openings meant leverage he could exploit. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
But now...
The anger had turned into a kind of disappointment.
No, deeper than disappointment.
It was the feeling of someone who had once believed in something, only to be utterly betrayed by that'something'.
"Do you know who first said that phrase?"
Pavela asked.
Igor didn't answer.
He wasn't sure if it was a question that required an answer.
Pavela didn't wait for his answer.
"It doesn't matter,"
she said, her tone suddenly flat.
"What matters is that everyone who ever said those words ended up creating more wars."
"Every time."
"Without exception."
The pressure from her foot hadn't changed, but the cracks around the dagger still emitted faint cracking sounds, as if the ground itself was slowly, irreversibly, disintegrating.
" 'Make everyone realize the cost' — that's what you said, right?"
"Make the cost too high to bear. Make everyone sitting in high places understand that continuing will lead to their own downfall."
"And then?"
"Then everyone will lay down their weapons, hold hands and sing, and live happily ever after?"
The alley fell silent for a moment.
"Do you believe that?"
Igor opened his mouth.
"I'm asking you—do you believe that?"
This time, there was finally some temperature in Pavela's voice.
But it was like a red-hot iron rod, precisely, without any superfluous movement, stabbing into the weakest point in Igor's rhetoric.
"The cost of war is never borne by those sitting in high places."
She said.
"The cost is borne by those who have never even seen what a high place looks like."
"It's borne by those who grow food in the fields, who tighten screws in factories, who buy bread on the streets."
"You increase the cost tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold, and it's still these people who die."
"And those sitting in high places will build a bigger house on the ruins, and tell everyone—'Look, this is the price of peace. We've achieved it.'"
"And then the next war will begin."
Igor closed his mouth.
He actually wanted to argue.
He had a bellyful of things he wanted to say—about how 'this time is different', about 'our more meticulous plans', about 'you don't understand the bigger picture now'.
But those words circled on the tip of his tongue, only to be swallowed back down by himself.
Because he suddenly realized she wasn't debating with him.
She was passing judgment.
Pavela's gaze had already moved past the back of Igor's head, landing on the darkness blurred by snowflakes at the end of the alley.
The snow was falling harder.
Following the tentative flurries earlier came real snowflakes, large and swirling as they fell, looking like countless tiny moths in the hazy yellow glow of the gas street lamp.
She thought of Kaldburg.
The snow there was much heavier.
Enough to bury a body completely in minutes.
She thought of her days in Kaldburg.
Of the soldiers huddled in tattered tents, relying on each other's body heat to survive the nights.
Of those who didn't make it to summer.
She could no longer clearly remember their faces.
But she remembered the postures in which they died.
Curled up, like shrimp, fingers dug into the frozen earth, lips purple, eyes half-open, pupils covered with a thin layer of frost.
Those people also wanted to go home.
Those people also wanted a peaceful life.
Those people were also told, 'Just endure a little longer. When that time comes, everything will end.'
And then they died.
They waited for nothing.
Pavela thought of Victorian again.
She thought of the day of the commercial district explosion.
Shattered glass, screams, the smell of gunpowder.
And the civilians lying in pools of blood.
Those people had nothing to do with the war.
They were just shopping.
Buying bread, picking out clothes, buying candy for their children.
And then the bomb went off.
And then they became 'the cost'.
Became a negligible number in some grand narrative.
She glanced at the corpse nearby again.
A young man, around twenty years old.
Wearing glasses.
The blood on his neck had stopped flowing, congealing into a dark red jelly-like substance in the cold air.
He was also 'the cost'.
An information broker, a young man making a living in the gray areas, probably dreaming of his future just moments before.
The next moment, his throat was slit, lying in an alley, becoming another stepping stone for the 'war to end all wars'.
Pavela suddenly felt very tired.
A heavy weariness welled up from the depths of her soul.
She once thought that leaving the battlefield would be enough.
Leaving the Punishment Camp, leaving Kaldburg, leaving that blood-soaked permafrost defense line, finding a safe place to hide, living a peaceful life.
She had done it.
She had become Pavela von Schwartz.
She had a home, a sister, friends, a soft bed and hot tea delivered punctually to her bedside every morning.
She thought she could finally stop being involved with war.
She admitted, during those days in Victorian, she had gotten a little lost.
The warm fireplace, the soft bedding, Eleanor's tea, Victoria's letters, Cecilia's quiet companionship, Irene's bright smile—these things were like a thick layer of cotton batting, insulating her from the outside world.
She began to think that maybe the war really had nothing to do with her anymore.
Maybe she really could just hide under the wing of the Schwartz Family, be a well-behaved adopted daughter, and live out her life.
No more killing, no more scheming, no more waking from nightmares in the middle of the night.
Go shopping, eat cake, listen to Victoria's nonsense, watch Cecilia turn pages in a book, come home and have Eleanor ruffle her hair.
How wonderful.
And then the bomb in the commercial district went off.
That day, the cotton batting was blown apart.
The war had caught up.
It always catches up.
Even if not in the form of artillery shells and mechs, but in more insidious, more pervasive ways.
In the form of a commercial district explosion.
In the form of votes in parliament.
In the form of a corpse not yet cold in an alley.
In the form of the mission this young man under her foot was carrying out.
In the form of a high-sounding excuse like 'the war to end all wars'.
War doesn't let you go just because you run away.
It changes its face, puts on a different mask, reappears in your life in a way you never expected.
From the soldiers dying on distant battlefields.
To this informant brutally killed in a nearby alley.
No one can remain untouched.
This was something she had always known, deep down.
And now, standing in this dark, snow-filled, blood-scented alley, she was just confirming it once again.
Pavela withdrew her gaze.
The crimson light was slowly fading from her pupils, like a receding tide, being gradually covered again by the pale gray-blue.
But what that light left behind did not disappear.
The cracks in the ground remained.
The dagger was still embedded in the rubble.
The back of Igor's head was still under her shoe.
She spoke.
Her voice wasn't loud, but each word was like a frozen pebble, clearly striking against Igor's eardrums.
"The Fire of Freedom and I had an agreement."
"To stop the war. Not to create more wars, not to 'end' slaughter with an even greater massacre. To stop."
"You should understand the meaning of that word."
Igor didn't move.
He didn't even dare to breathe.
"But you chose another path." free𝑤ebnovel.com
Snowflakes landed on her eyelashes. She didn't blink.
"So from now on, consider that agreement void."
"I will end this stupid war."
"In my own way."
Her voice lowered slightly on the last few words, carrying an unyielding weight.
Like a nail being irreversibly hammered into wood.
"If you intend to stand in the way—"
She didn't finish the sentence.
But Igor understood.
Every snowflake in the alley understood.
"So I'll ask you one more time."
"What is the objective of the Fire of Freedom's operation in Eisenburg?"
The alley fell quiet.
Snowflakes fell on the two of them, on the corpse, into the cracks in the rubble-strewn ground.
Igor understood.
This was her last question.
If his answer didn't satisfy her again...
She would definitely kill him.
What ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ to do?
Talk, violate discipline, possibly be purged by the organization.
But don't talk, and die right now.
He closed his eyes.
"...The Royal Knights Academy."
"Our real target is the Royal Knights Academy."
"The operations here are just cover and preparation for that."
"There's something in the sealed underground area of the academy."
"The higher-ups want us to retrieve it."
The pressure from her foot was still increasing.
She wasn't satisfied yet.
Igor swallowed a mouthful of saliva mixed with dust.
"I don't know what it is, specifically."
"I only know the codename."
"The Sleeper."
