The smoke and gunfire had cleared. Bandits lay dead in the snow outside the foundry. Their corpses quickly glazed with a layer of frost as the last vestiges of warmth left their physical remains.
Meanwhile, inside the foundry, Brooke was facing an increasing crisis of faith. Her employees, their families… Her people were losing the will to continue the struggle.
And it was completely reasonable. The ranks of their security personnel had thinned, the bandits kept coming, wave after wave to provoke, test and aggress.
What little in terms of firearms and resources they had left was quickly running out. Food and water were disappearing by the day. All of this compounded into a single terminal event.
She sighed and shook her head, looking over the ledges that were increasingly in the red. Not for income earned through production and commerce, but through lives lost and resources spent on their daily survival in this frozen apocalyptic world.
