GREED: ALL FOR WHAT?

She had 34 lamp bearers under her command three days ago. She just lost four of them in just one fight. There have been many such fights in the last two days.

In the previous two days of fighting, she had lost six of them. So of the 34 that she had, there are only 24 left alive.

This kind of loss needs a reason to justify it. Fortunately, she has a justified reason for it. That reason is that the dead lamp bearers had died protecting the people.

Be that as it may, she knows that the sudden attacks were not natural. She knows that someone is orchestrating the mutant attacks, and she can even guess who that person is based on the amount of resources needed to create rank 3 mutants and the amount of resources that will be gained if the lamp bearers are preoccupied or eliminated.

Right now, the lamp bearers are so busy that there is no one guarding the prison, and the number of people guarding the spirit spring and ensuring that 50% is given to the people has been reduced to one.

If the lamp bearers are pushed further, they will break. Once they break, they won’t be able to care about the spirit spring. If that were to happen, the Ivory family would be the biggest beneficiaries.

The Ivory family is also the most powerful force in the area apart from the lamp bearers and other divine organizations, so they have the resources and manpower to kidnap powerful godclads and force them to become mutants.

So she suspects the Ivory family for all that is going on, and she is sure that she is being tricked. Obviously, if the mutants were natural, they wouldn’t have appeared one after the other so quickly, and some of them would have appeared in Ivory Town too.

But no mutant appeared in Ivory Town. It is clear that the Ivory family doesn’t want to destroy their property. They only want to destroy the manpower of the lamp bearers.

She knows this much, so the solution is also clear to Captain Sheckel. All she needs to do is stay in the town and not come out, no matter how many people die.

That is the smart choice. But to her, it is not the right choice. So she is not going to do it.

Instead of doing the smart thing, she will walk willingly and headfirst into the trap that the Ivory family has laid out for her while hoping that the mutant attacks reduce and the reinforcement she asked for from out of town will arrive soon.

That is the best she can do. She can only hope that the Ivory family doesn’t have an endless source of mutants and that help arrives soon.

In order to boost the morale of her people, she decided to tell her subordinates about her plan. She thought that she owed them that much. After all, she is choosing to sacrifice them for the safety of the mortals.

She gathered the lamp bearers and told them her suspicion and her decision to continue trying to save the people. Her sergeants expressed support for her. So everyone else had to express support.

Legion went along with the display of loyalty and dedication while sneering to themselves.

Legion-1 said with a sneer, “To know that this is a trap and yet to walk willingly into it without a solution. I have only seen such displays of utter foolishness a few times.”

Legion-4 chuckled and said, “Don’t be so hard on her. She is just doing her job.”

Legion-2 didn’t accept it. He said, “It is better that she is willing to be foolish like this of her volition than to be compelled to do so because of her job. The former means she has some degree of freedom. The latter means that even though she is powerful, she is still bound by rules and obligations. That is just disgraceful.”

Legion-6 complained, “Not only is she disgraceful, she is also wicked. She didn’t ask us if we wanted to retreat or not. She didn’t even ask symbolically.”

Legion-9 laughed and said, “It is clear that she knows that if she asked us, we would want to survive, so we ask to retreat. Knowing her personality, she won’t do anything to those who choose to give up on the fight now.”

Legion-10 completed what he wanted to say. “She knows that the chances that we want to escape are high. So as not to give us a reason to retreat, she didn’t offer it in the first place. Truly wicked.”

Not every lamp bearer is a hero and a suicidal seeker of justice for the people. Even if there were some, their zeal for seeking justice must have taken a terrible blow after witnessing the death of ten colleagues in the space of two days.

Many of the lamp bearers would want to retreat to save themselves now. But their captain didn’t offer them that chance. She only gave them a reason to die while continuing to send them into the battlefield to die.

Legion honestly admires that about her. It shows that she isn’t completely stupid.

But they didn’t tell her about how they admired her wisdom. They kept their thoughts to themselves while following along with their suicidal boss.

Before going on their way to their next fight, Captain Sheckel first took them to the spirit spring of the village. She wanted them to have a drink and use it to recover their spiritual energy before their next fight.

Usually, no one is allowed to touch the spirit spring in a village other than the people of the village. It is because the supply of energy water in the spirit spring is too low.

The supply of energy water is just barely enough for the people of the village to survive every day. So there aren’t any noble families in the village taking a certain percentage of the supply.