Season 3 chapter 7
The Slaughter
The priestess began to hyperventilate. The heart monitor next to her bed started to beep faster.
"Because... after a few months... I just realized we forgot a very important, sacred statue of our God in the town," she cried, gripping the bedsheets so hard her knuckles turned white. "I sneaked past the federal checkpoints. I went back to my town."
She looked up at Kniya and Malesh, her face completely pale with absolute horror.
"And I was put in absolute terror when I got to know... they weren't renovating anything," she sobbed. "They were destroying all the houses. It was a controlled, massive military operation going on in the town! It was totally empty, and thousands of military officers were aggressively destroying the town from all sides with heavy artillery and bulldozers!"
Kniya's eyes narrowed. Destroying a holy city with heavy military equipment was not a renovation. That was a localized eradication.
"I quickly managed to run out before they spotted me," she continued, her voice breaking. "When I reached my new location, I told all the members of my town about this thing! They were furious! We all marched straight back toward the town, hundreds of us! We went to protest against the government to stop what they were doing to our homes!"
"That is a tactically poor decision against a militarized zone," Malesh noted quietly.
"The generals didn't even listen to us!" she cried. "They stood behind the barricades and said that this is federal government property now, and we had to go back! They were literally saying things like, 'This is the government property, and it is really not allowed for you to be here. You are no longer the owners of this property, and the government has evenly compensated you for this!' We were forced to move, but we refused to back down!"
She buried her face in her hands, her whole body shaking violently as she began to sob uncontrollably.
"Eventually... after a few days of protesting at the gates... they just started firing at us," she wept, the sheer trauma cracking her voice. "And some of the officers... they were even laughing while firing heavy machine guns into the crowd! Like they were absolute maniacs, or some kind of psychopaths! It was a really, really bad scenario for us... we all were so scared..."
Kniya and Malesh both felt a very rare, incredibly dark chill run down their spines.
"They started firing... and we all started running," the priestess sobbed into her hands. "My dad died during this. My mom also died during the protest. I saw them fall. I lost all my family members in the dirt. Only I managed to survive, and... and my little brother. He is in the subsidiary city. He is living all alone now... because everyone else in the protest died."
Kniya swallowed hard, his throat suddenly feeling incredibly dry. Malesh remained perfectly still, though he visibly swallowed a heavy gulp of air. The casual, chaotic banter they usually carried was completely dead. This wasn't a prank. This was a federal massacre.
"Okay... okay," Malesh said softly, his voice losing its usual cynical edge. "So you are the only one who survived that initial volley. And you ran to the highway. But the religious town you are talking about... that is literally seventy kilometers away from the fucking road. Which means they actively hunted you down for that distance."
"Yeah," the girl cried, looking up with bloodshot eyes. "They hunted me down with attack helicopters for forty kilometers straight through the dense trees! But when I eventually got out of their sight range, I managed to escape under the canopy..."
The Honorable General
"There is one more thing," she whispered, her voice growing incredibly weak.
Kniya leaned closer. "What?"
"When I was sneaking out of the town the first time... hiding behind the rubble..." she trembled. "There were some low-ranking officers. They saw me. I heard them talking. They were saying things like... 'Yeah, we can sell her to the black market. We can make huge money out of that. It's so fun. We can enjoy her first.'"
Kniya's stomach twisted into a violent, sick knot. He had literally just made a joke about selling her to the black market a few hours ago on the highway. Hearing it spoken by corrupt soldiers about to traffic a teenager made him want to vomit.
"But then... the General appeared," she explained, a flicker of profound confusion in her tear-filled eyes. "The General absolutely barked behind them. He didn't even yell. He just pulled out his sidearm and violently shot both of the officers right in the legs!"
"He shot his own men?" Malesh asked, his brow furrowing.
"Yes!" she nodded frantically. "He shot them in the knees, and he stood over them, and he screamed: 'What the fuck do you want, gentlemen?! This is actually not allowed! This is the entire Federal Army! We are evacuating this town under strict federal orders, which means we are not going to do this kind of degenerate shit!'"
She wiped her nose with the back of her trembling hand.
"The General... he had some kind of extreme tension in his head," she whispered, shivering at the memory. "I could see it in his eyes. He clearly didn't want to do this. He didn't want to destroy the town. But he had to. He was following absolute orders."
She collapsed back against the hospital pillows, her energy completely spent. She stared blankly at the ceiling, tears rolling silently down her temples.
"I don't know what they did to the bodies of my parents," she sobbed softly. "And I don't know how I am going to survive at this time... because I am literally broken from the inside. This is literally so wrong. My whole world is gone."
The only sound in the room was the rhythmic, steady beep of the heart monitor.
Kniya and Malesh stood at the foot of the bed. They didn't make a joke. They didn't bicker about hospital bills. They didn't say a single word.
Kniya looked at Malesh. Malesh looked at Kniya. They both took a very long, very slow, deeply exhaled breath.
The chaotic, childish billionaires were gone. The ruthless, untouchable titans of industry were waking up. The Federal Army had just massacred an entire civilian town in their territory for absolutely no reason. And someone was going to pay for it.
The Vice President's Interrogation
Time: 11:30 AM Location: Provincial Hospital, Emergency Ward
Kniya and Malesh were standing in silence at the foot of the bed when the double doors to the emergency ward suddenly burst open.
Filoska Vinten marched into the room, flanked by two heavily armed Kavilson corporate security officers. Her designer coat was perfectly pressed, but her face was twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated fury. She had been sitting in the Antrious Hub office all morning wondering where her bosses were, and when she saw a ten-trillion-credit hospital invoice briefly hit the corporate ledger before being canceled out by a massive bribe, she assumed the absolute worst.
"What the fuck are you two doing in here?!" Filoska yelled, pointing a manicured finger at Kniya and Malesh. She looked past them, seeing the young, terrified priestess sobbing quietly in the hospital bed.
Filoska's expression instantly darkened into pure rage. She marched right up to Malesh.
"What did you do to her?!" Filoska demanded, her voice shaking with anger. "Did you hurt this girl?! Why is she in a provincial hospital?! What the fuck did you two degenerates do to her?!"
Malesh held his hands up in a rare display of defensive surrender. "We did nothing. Please do not blame us for anything. We literally found her on the federal highway."
"I know that you did!" Filoska accused, completely ignoring his defense. "I know you guys! You two have zero moral compass! You did some degenerate shit with her! She is literally sobbing in a hospital bed!"
"Let me tell you one thing, Filoska," Kniya interrupted, his voice completely serious, devoid of any sarcasm. He stepped between Filoska and the bed. "I know we are bad people. We do bribing, we do corporate sabotage, we extort the Central Bank, and stuff like that. But we are not doing degenerate shit. We are not doing that. That is so highly illegal and disgusting. It is not like that."
Filoska paused. Kniya was a sociopath, but he rarely lied with such genuine offense. She looked at Malesh.
"Okay," Malesh stated flatly. "Listen to us, Filoska. You need to listen to us first. Do not interrupt."
For the next ten minutes, Kniya and Malesh stood in the sterile hospital room and relayed the entire horrific story. They explained the highway, the hazard suits, the Yatsua badge, the forced evacuation of the holy town in KDC, and the horrific military massacre ordered by the federal government.
When they finished, Filoska was completely silent. The anger toward her bosses was gone, replaced by a profound, heartbreaking shock.
She walked past Kniya and Malesh. She sat gently on the edge of the hospital bed and reached out, grasping the young priestess's trembling hands in her own.
"Don't worry," Filoska whispered softly, her voice filled with genuine empathy. "I am so sorry for what happened to your family. But we will fix this world for you. We will make them pay."
"How can we do that, Filoska?" Malesh asked from the corner of the room, completely shattering the emotional moment with cold, pragmatic logic. "It is literally not possible. We cannot fight with the fucking President of the Republic for that. It's literally not mathematically possible. We supply the steel for the army; we do not command the army."
Filoska glared at him over her shoulder. "Can you please stop using swearing words for a second? She is sobbing, her family is dead, and you are using words like that! You should not actually speak right now!"
"Okay, okay," Malesh sighed, crossing his arms. "Listen to me, Filoska. We cannot do this thing. We cannot replace the President. We cannot do a regime change in the middle of a federal term. It is literally not possible for us! We are billionaires, yes. We have massive infrastructure. But we are not that much powerful! The military has tanks!"
"But look at her!" Filoska argued, squeezing the girl's hands. "She is deeply in pain, and the thing the President did to her town is a federal war crime! It is so bad! We cannot just ignore it!"
"We are not ignoring it," Malesh clarified calmly. "But first, we have to handle the immediate logistics. We have to rescue her brother. While you were yelling at me, I already called my private extraction agents to basically locate and move her little brother to this hospital. Because she needs her brother right now more than she needs us declaring a corporate war on the capital."
The priestess looked up at Malesh, her eyes widening with a sudden burst of overwhelming gratitude. She tried to speak, but only a small sob escaped her lips.