Chapter 960: Hero (3/4)

Chapter 960: Hero (3/4)

Staring at those glaring lines of text, Ashin felt dizzy and nearly collapsed into his chair.

"This is... too much!"

Just like long ago, he threw the newspaper onto the table, but the emotion clogging his heart was not anger but desolation.

Kunal stood beside him and said in a deep voice.

"Boss, the assassin who killed Rashi is named Udi. He is a mid-level officer in the Stormtrooper Intelligence Office and was highly valued by Rashi... According to our investigations, he used his position to pass a lot of information to his family."

After Rashi died, Shawa asked them to help. Kunal took the core members of the Assassin Gang who had previously withdrawn from West Sailport to assist the authorities in doing things that were inconvenient for them to do themselves.

Like liquidation.

This kind of work couldn't be done by insiders; only outsiders could do it, and coincidentally, the Assassin Gang had ties with Rashi.

That Udi was an orphan, but the people he contacted were not. One of them had even taken his whole family and fled to Jingalun Port ahead of time.

However, the Assassin Gang didn't let him ashore. With just one word, they had the boatman trick his entire family into going to Banana Head Bay.

That was Assassin Gang territory.

Kunal didn't even use torture; with just one sentence, he made the man confess everything—

'Confess and your debts die with you; refuse and you'll pay. Old and young go into dog cages; wife and daughter serve guests on the boat at ten gallons a time until they die.'

The man knelt immediately upon hearing that.

Honestly, Kunal had never done anything so extreme. The boss always told them to act with dignity and not go too far. But thinking about what those traitors to Bharata had done made his blood boil, and he might just cross his own bottom line.

Fortunately, those people's faith wasn't that strong. After all, the truly faithful wouldn't have set a fire and run; they would have died for their cause.

A flash of cruelty passed through Kunal's eyes, and he lowered his voice to continue.

"Boss... should we take out that Udi?"

Ashin looked up at the ceiling, closed his eyes to think, and after a long while shook his head.

"No need. If he still had value, Shawa wouldn't have let him go... Since Rashi said to let him live, let him return to the Heavenly Capital and see with his own eyes the good deeds he's done."

Zayed would never admit to ordering the assassin, after all, the blunderers of the Moon Tribe Resistance had already jumped forward to claim credit, each eager to take a bite of Rashi's flesh and become the hero who nipped the 'Great Moon King' in the bud.

After much thought, that guy would have no good end back in the Heavenly Capital anyway. Why do Zayed that favor?

To die as a traitor in a self-satisfied fantasy—that ending suits him better.

Isn't he a traitor?

As for the Moon Tribe Resistance, Shawa would deal with them himself.

That guy had just lost his father; killing only 1,500 people wouldn't stop him.

But this was the right thing to do.

Bharata was not Stonewall City. Without a bloodbath, even the Bharata people themselves wouldn't be convinced; they felt that an incomplete purge was no purge at all. And now it seemed it was indeed incomplete.

Besides, Shawa still had to deal with Zayed, who was marching north.

That Groff was holding 800,000 troops in Lion Province, eyeing them menacingly, and could mobilize another 800,000 at any time!

And Mammoth State's effective forces were already less than 600,000—they couldn't withstand another backstab.

Only this 'True Great Moon King' chosen by the Mammoth people could block the 'True Lowell' chosen by the Bharata people.

Thinking of the fate of the Bharata people afterward, Ashin closed his eyes, unable to bear opening them to look.

"Close the door behind you. I want to be alone for a while."

Kunal nodded silently, turned and left the study, gently closing the door.

"...If I had known you'd end up like this, I would have at least forced you to stay and drink until we were both dead drunk before you left."

Alone in the study, Ashin could no longer hold back. He wailed aloud, covering his face with his hands.

That was the regret of his life.

He had ordered a whole table of dishes for someone, but that person looked down on him as a rat and left after barely eating a few bites.

At the time, he was actually glad.

It was best that this Great Moon King looked down on a rat like him who schemed in the gutters.

If a dignified emperor were to mix with a rat like him, using bad men to govern the good, watching a scoundrel like 'Vikram' discipline his own subjects without a word—that would be the real disaster.

Not to mention Rashi looked down on him; he himself looked down on himself. If it weren't absolutely necessary, he wouldn't want to engage in those gray-area dealings at all.

But he had no choice.

That day, dark clouds pressed over the city. Pairs of gray, furtive eyes stared at his back, pushing him—the weakest of them—to the front, hoping the 'Iron Men' would shoot him dead and draw blood.

And when the 'Iron Men' didn't kill him but even gave him a gun, those greedy eyes then hoped he would slip up or dash himself against the wall, so they could pounce and strip him bare.

He had no choice but to go all out, and then he rocketed all the way to his current position.

The governor's mansion of Nihaq was not far from his doorstep, but the duke who lived there had never once glanced at him.

And Rashi was the moonlight that he, hiding in the sewers, could see without even looking up.

That guy was certainly no saint, but he had his own shining points, and that was why Ashin had been supporting his cause all along without expecting anything in return.

He even repeatedly warned his men to mind their manners and maintain dignity... also hoping that one day he could sit gracefully before that Moon King, chatting and laughing over a shared drink under the moon, without being seen as a stain on the general's life.

And Rashi did not let him down. Despite the disdain and finger-pointing from everyone, he carved out a future in Mammoth Province that none of the little rats had ever seen!

They were almost there!

The emperor was driven away, the Velland people were gone!

But just as the utopia of their dreams was about to be realized, it collapsed in the final moment!

Ashin could no longer contain his emotions. Frantic, he wanted to tear the whole study apart.

"...I fucking... shouldn't have let you go north! Why bother saving those seeds that deserve a thousand cuts! Let them die! Let them kill each other to their hearts' content! Let their corpses fill the reed marshes of the Eternal River!"

"I ruined you! Aaah!"

Kunal had been standing guard at the study door, eyes closed and silent, as if in meditation.

He didn't listen to what the boss was doing inside, nor did he want to. He stayed like that from day until dawn.

When the door opened, he saw that Ashin's eye sockets were dark, and he couldn't help but feel a pang of sympathy.

He didn't feel sorry at all; he only felt it was unfair for his boss.

"Boss..."

Ashin patted him on the shoulder and whispered a few instructions in his ear.

Kunal was first stunned, then his eyes grew brighter, and a fierce glint gradually appeared on his scarred face.

That little rat who once controlled tens of thousands with a single bullet—now some people thought he couldn't even lift a knife.

Just like that day in the rain—

His boss was back.

"As you command."

Kunar clasped his fists, then strode out the door, loosening the tie that choked his neck with his index finger.

Asin watched his retreating figure, his face a mask of indifference.

He realized that as long as he didn't treat those people as people, but as donkeys fitted with nose rings to manage, everything became far easier.

You just had to lead them with a carrot, then whip their backsides hard, watching them cry one moment and laugh the next, cheer and then raise a ruckus.

But once you treated them as human beings with kindness—

That was when things went terribly wrong.

They would "turn the heavens upside down."

They would want to rip people open and see what's inside.

That night, he understood only one thing.

They had gone around in circles, proving through their actions that they deserved this suffering.

Including himself.

The fault lay not with the students, nor the teachers, nor even the various classes caught up in it.

They had merely taken a thousand pillars as their core and evolved a set of underlying logic that served the law of the jungle.

This underlying logic was that the worse a person was, the better their fate; the more bottomless their depravity, the higher they climbed.

Based on this logic, they had developed a series of theoretical tools more complex than animal behavior.

The former was the unchanging Way, the latter the ever-changing arts; together they built an invisible cage, and what the Family Society had was at best a mere art.

Without breaking this cage, not only would the Alliance's ideology be useless, even aliens from tens of thousands of light-years away coming to do charity would be useless—any advanced thought would be transformed, based on that core "Way," into the "art of controlling people."

As for being "devoured" by aliens, that was another matter entirely.

After all, when their very existence vanished, even if the spiritual cage persisted, it would lose all meaning.

But the Alliance was clearly unqualified to play the role of those aliens.

For one, they didn't eat people; for another, if they truly became one, who knew who would assimilate whom.

Obviously, the Alliance had already recognized the problem, and even some conservative factions within had begun to sound the alarm, like the body's immune system rejecting nutrients it cannot digest.

And precisely because of this, even if a god descended from heaven and slaughtered the Family Society from top to bottom, it would be to no avail.

Either the Federation would become another Family Society, or Absac would be forced into becoming the next Zayed, or his successor would be more sinister and cruel than Zayed and Yanush combined…

This was not some ethereal thing like fate, but a far more naked and real civilization.

Perhaps someone knew how to solve this problem, but he was tired, and he was not the man for the job.

He was just a fucking rat that happened to stand a bit higher and piss a bit farther.

What Shawa lost was a "father."

He had lost both his "mentor" and his "hope."

He no longer wanted to fund those pathetic wretches; even if they won, they would just be the next Family. He also didn't want to think about such distant matters—that was an ending he would never live to see.