The blood-soaked body hit the ground like a burst sack of dough, making a damp, heavy thud.
The tent was still mostly silent. The officers gripping bayonets slick with dripping blood had red-rimmed eyes, their breathing ragged. Many of them had been loudly cheering the fiery rhetoric moments earlier. Marek Kolecki was not the first to have his throat cut—there had been plenty of other officers before him whose short-sightedness and obstruction of the Eternal City's work to educate the guerrillas had brought the same fate. Even knowing it was unlikely, Victor von Doom still hoped Marek would be the last officer killed by his own side. This was a crude method of pruning, one that could easily dampen the guerrillas' morale. Doom far preferred such people to die in battle, their deaths stoking the fighting spirit of others.
"Send an assault team to surround their camp—don't let anyone escape. The rest of you, keep your own men in hand. I don't want any mistakes," Doom told one officer. "I'll try to talk them down myself. Hold your fire if you can; enough blood's been spilled for one day."
"Yes, sir!" The man in the gray standard-issue uniform snapped a salute, then hurried out. The others followed Doom's hand signal and left the command tent in haste. Those who had taken part in the killing stood pale-faced, washing the slippery blood from their hands and bayonets in a basin before slipping away with heads lowered.
This was something they would carry to their graves, bound together by the shared guilt of murder, whispering to each other as they departed. Doom had hand-picked them before Marek's speech, conspiring with them under the lights and through shadowed messengers, ordering them to dissuade Marek from speaking—orders that had failed. They thought this made them trusted men. In reality, it was the opposite—they would die in the next battle, shredded by a bullet to the brain or gut or a mortar round falling from the sky. Their field promotions would go to others, officers young enough to have ideals, full of passion, steeped in the Eternal City's teachings.
Those new officers would form a battle line shoulder-to-shoulder with the Eternal City, never obstructing its education of the rank and file. After that, there would be no more obstacles to the Eternal City founding the Latverian Bank. More importantly, they would accept that "magic" was nothing more than a form of mental power explainable by science, rather than looking at Doom's supernatural feats with superstition. Summoning lightning to strike an enemy, twisting enemy cover—these all had tactical use, and they would welcome Eternal City-trained psychics into their order of battle.
Doom told none of this to the young men. He did not think himself skilled in intrigue, so he buried all his plans deep in his mind. Even the Eternal City's lecturers had left. He sat in silence for minutes before flicking his fingers to release a tiny spark. The orange-red ember floated down to Marek's corpse. The flesh instantly shriveled as though drained of all water.
A second later, blackening spread over the desiccating body, consuming clothes along with it. Over a full minute passed before only a man-shaped heap of ash remained at Doom's boots, with a few charred metal buttons mixed in. The tent reeked of scorched protein. Doom rose, lifted the tent flap, and let the smell of cold, gray rain sweep in, along with the sound of thunder on the horizon and the neighing of horses in the biting mountain wind. The wind blew away the scent of what had just been done.
He truly hoped there would be no more bloodshed today. Truly.
"It seems I chose my helper well," Solomon said, glancing down at a report beside his plate of bacon. "He's already unified Latveria's front—one that isn't so hostile toward the Eternal City. I'm very pleased. Stephanie can speed up the transports now. I'm looking forward to Latveria having a satellite reconnaissance center. Oh, Dana, can you get me today's report—the one on satellite surveillance of NATO bases? I don't believe for a second the guerrillas have no spies, and I don't believe NATO will wait for a formal declaration to start moving troops…"
What mattered to him wasn't how many lives Doom had spent on the task, but whether the front was solid. By now every Latverian noble—the so-called bourgeoisie—could smell the coming storm. More and more rural folk were heading into the mountains to join the guerrillas, families in tow. The Eternal City's first shipments of arms and ammunition into the mountains would soon be outstripped by demand, forcing many to fight with only live firearms—rifles, submachine guns, and heavy machine guns.
Still, the Eternal City's warehouses held many more freshly manufactured weapons, still wrapped in oiled paper.
"It's breakfast time, love." Bayonetta tapped the gold-rimmed china with her fork. Normally, breakfast here was light fare—never the sort of heavy meal that included smoked beef brisket. But for a witch and a magus who'd missed dinner the night before, the protein was just right.
"I promise, it's almost done." At Solomon's command, the fountain pen seemed to come alive, its cap flipping open before it dove at the blank space on the printed page, writing his arcane title. That signature meant dozens of tons of servers, nuclear generator units, and technical staff would be shipped to Latveria, with communications and spy satellites repositioned to meet the army's first steps toward digitization.
Soon, the Latverian war would truly begin. Forces training in live combat across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa would redeploy to Latveria, with the Eternal City's armored units moving in batches onto its plains. Doom's men would link up there. The golden eagle flag would fly between snowcapped mountains and black forests, treads and hooves crushing castles and trenches alike. Solomon himself would lead the Sisterhood, the Praetorian Constantine, and a Latverian regular army in holding the northern line against NATO incursion. If necessary, he would use the Eternal City's overwhelming air superiority to sweep into Europe's major military bases, wiping out NATO troops spending their weekends on drugs and debauchery.
"All done?"
"Of course. Now we'll see how Constantine's mission is going." Solomon took a sip of juice. "I hope he's quick about it. The Latverian battlefield won't be the same without him—and it would be a shame if he missed it."
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