Displaced

Chapter 56

As Blake sat in the comfort of his quarters deep inside the belly of his fortress, watching thousands of people try to kill each other, he couldn't help but feel a twinge of guilt that the first thought to cross his mind was that it was a shame that Scyria didn't have popcorn. Though the view reminded him of the real-time strategy games he'd played as a younger man, Blake tried to keep in mind that these were real people fighting and dying thousands of feet below his flitter. Still, no matter how much he told himself this, he couldn't feel the same emotions and weight from a distance that he'd felt witnessing death up close. Perhaps Stalin had been right when he'd said that a single death was a tragedy, while a million deaths was a statistic.

A new haul of small cantacrenyx crystals had arrived from the mines, many of them just the right size to put in new flitters. This meant that he could finally create enough flitters to stretch a chain of them all the way to Crirada without having to sacrifice coverage of Otharia. As long as the flitters in the chain stayed within communication range of each other, Blake could now watch the goings-on in the Eterian capital with just a few second delay as the video feed made its way back down the chain to Otharia. He found said goings-on to be enthralling and set aside important work to watch whenever a battle started, like now.

What must have been several hundred thousand men and women assaulted the city of Crirada from all sides. At first, he'd likened the scene to a colony of ants swarming over the carcass of a dead rat, but that was actually not accurate. It better fit those videos of sperm surrounding an egg, each of them pushing as best they could against the egg's outer boundary, trying their best to be the first to make it through. So far, in the two days since Blake had started watching, no Ubran troops had been able to effectively pierce the Eterians' perimeter atop the wall. There had been many close calls, but every time the defenders would rally, sending what he believed to be some of their elite soldiers to stifle the Ubrans' progress. That, or they would sweep through with their giant death bears.

Blake had never seen anything like these creatures before. It was as if somebody had combined a bear and bit of tiger and enlarged it to be almost twice the size of a rhinoceros. He had no idea where they'd come from, how the insane people riding atop them kept them under control, or how the Eterians had managed to coax them to the top of a gigantic wall. All he could think about was how glad he was that they weren't native to Otharia. If he'd run into one of them while out in the wild after just arriving here...

Putting aside questions like how the defenders managed to feed such massive animals while under siege, Blake couldn't deny that these beasts were currently the MVPs of what he'd seen. The Eterians placed them in small groups of two or three around the wall and would hold them back in reserve when the fighting began. When a section of the defense was close to breaking, they'd mobilize the nearest unit of death bears and send them hurtling along the wall, their massive weight and armor allowing them to crash through the enemy marauders like a bowling ball through a mass of pins.

But no matter how powerful these monstrosities were, they couldn't change the fact that the Eterians were going to lose. After every skirmish, a group of hooded figures in animal masks would appear and take away the corpses of those who had lost their lives. While the "battlefield janitors" had been carting away more dead Ubrans than Eterians since Blake's recon drone had arrived two days ago, each dead Eterian was one less man or woman to hold the wall. Meanwhile, enough Ubran reinforcements to replace their casualties arrived each day. The end result was clear, the question was just how long it would take to the inevitable conclusion.

Unless he stepped in. And he wasn't gonna.

Blake knew it wasn't fair that so many people were dying while he just watched. He knew this full well. He just wasn't in the mood these days to care. Lots of things in the world were unfair, like the fact that the leaders of the Republic of Eterium, who'd sent assassins to kill him, would likely never directly pay for their crime. Well, somebody was going to fucking pay. While he didn't have the time or resources to hunt down a bunch of cowardly rich fucks he'd never met, who'd likely abandoned everybody else in Crirada and hidden themselves away elsewhere in Eterium, he didn't have to do so to make them rue the day they'd crossed him. All he had to do was sit and watch as they gnashed their teeth in anguish while the Ubrans stripped them of all their power and glory, knowing that he would have stopped this if only they'd never tried to kill him.