Chapter 618 — Front and Rear
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Inside the Lunburg base, Gao Yang met the royal soldiers that Suo Jilin had rescued.
Leading them was a man of medium build from the north, with short brown hair and a high-bridged nose. He had already shed his original battered armor and changed into the comfortable clothes the base provided. A trace of exhaustion still lingered on his face, but his spirits had plainly improved a great deal.
When Gao Yang stepped into the rather crude barracks, the knight who had escaped death at once rose to his feet. Together with the few somewhat dazed-looking soldiers beside him, he bent and bowed with a touch of nervous fluster: "My lord, I am Barnard Mitchell, from the royal capital. My soldiers and I are deeply grateful for your generous shelter..."
"Please, sit down, Mr. Mitchell. I have a few questions for you." Gao Yang gestured for the knight before him to be seated, then casually took a chair nearby himself. "First, allow me to introduce myself—you can probably guess. I am Gao Yang Cecil."
So this was the legendary knight—the man who, only a few years ago, appeared solely in tales of legend and the tomes of historians, and who had now returned from the realm of the dead to once again take up rule over the Southern Frontier.
The nobles of the royal capital held descriptions and conjectures about this Southern Frontier ruler in every conceivable variety. Most chose to keep their distance; a small number regarded him as a threat; a very few harbored the malice of conspiracy theorists. Yet almost everyone agreed on one point: this legendary pioneer did not fit his age. He carried the arrogance of the Gondorans, the roughness of a pioneer, the savagery of the first-generation nobility, and the unreasonableness of one who had risen from the dead—such were all the impressions that Barnard Mitchell of the royal capital had built up concerning Gao Yang Cecil within his social circle.
Mitchell briefly sized up the legendary duke before him with the least discourteous of glances, then lowered his eyes just as that appraisal was about to breach propriety, adopting a posture of one awaiting orders.
The pioneer hero before him wore no outlandish attire unfitting the age, nor did he exude any disturbing aura. He was just as the most orthodox histories recorded: tall, majestic, clad in armor, as though forever on the battlefield, his gaze sharp but not cold.
"Are you finding it comfortable here?"
This first question caught Mitchell somewhat off guard. He froze briefly, then hurried to reply, "Yes—thank you for providing such comfortable surroundings..."
There was clean hot water, tidy rooms, clothes, food, and precious medicine, and most important of all, safety—anyone who had just escaped death from a hopeless situation could hardly find fault with such conditions.
"Good." Gao Yang nodded slightly. "I would like to know the specifics of the 'crystal cluster infection,' and the final breakout routes of the northern legions..."
...
On the outskirts of Pompeii, a temporary camp.
Barbed wire and rapid-fire gun towers interlocked in layers. Fully armed soldiers kept watch over the surroundings from their posts. Inside and outside the camp, overt and covert magical monitoring and alert devices hummed away. Though the camp itself was not large, its astonishing level of protection made it a fortress armed to the teeth.
There was only one reason for such rigorous defenses: this was the site for researching godfiend contamination.
Deep within the camp, in a spacious, brightly lit laboratory, Kamael floated a dozen or so centimeters above the ground. On the platform before him, a cage composed of a shield generator and solid steel bars was firmly embedded in a reinforced concrete base. Within the cage lay the core purpose of this laboratory—
A crystal giant that had undergone complete mutation and lost all human cognition.