"Master Leonardo, how much longer can the new generation war mechs separate our guys from the others?"
Bookworm was asking perhaps for the first time about the safety of the Nameless Ten, who finished their job in a not-so-long timeframe, approximately ten minutes.
"In exactly five minutes, they will have reached their daily usage limit. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to find the metal alloy that could provide a longer period of use!"
Master Leonardo, who could only keep the circular caps with barrels from overheating or deforming under the might of the elemental energies for a period of fifteen minutes, looked sad.
"Don't you always say, Master Leonardo, that science creates huge impacts with small steps?"
Michelangelo, who had brought the blueprints to life and made it possible to fire from ten different barrels simultaneously, tried to console the man he took as a role model and saw as his savior.
"You're right, we will work non-stop without getting tired, without getting sad, without falling into despair, but first let's get those boys inside the castle. Will you open the gate?"
When his master made a request of him, Michelangelo did a backflip and dropped himself down from the walls. When he glided through the air and landed inside the castle, right next to the massive gate, there was no sound, no dust, or any reaction.
After advancing towards the gate with quick steps that were perfectly synchronized with his matte black metallic limbs, Michelangelo stepped on an embossing exactly the size of his hand, setting off the mechanisms that would trigger each other.
Gears turned gears, and within a minute, the heavy gate rose enough for an orc to comfortably pass through. Realizing that the gate beyond the battlefield, which they couldn't reach because of the elemental wall and couldn't see what was happening behind, had opened, the headquarters officers of the army fighting on the front line quickly relayed the news to Nikolay.
"I told her new weapons had appeared, but she didn't even care. Now you can report that we've lost one-tenth of our army!"
He wasn't so rookie as not to understand that the troops he sent had fallen into a trap behind the elemental wall that appeared in front of them, and the enemy opening the castle gates for the first time during the siege showed they had gotten the result they wanted.
The Golden Leaf Guild Siege Army, which had lost a not-to-be-underestimated number of soldiers, might have found the reinforcements to compensate for this, but in the southern part of the continent, right next to the border of the Hell Realm, irreversible events were taking place.
"Alator, tell me what I want to hear!"
When the female orc, whose green skin was painted the color of her hair, spoke by baring her sharp canines, the man, whose robe hadn't been exposed to a single stain, gave his order.
"Burn it!"
They were wiping the second camp they came across off the map, just as they did with the first one since entering the Mercenaries' Lodge. They burned everything to ashes without leaving a single piece of evidence, a single sign, or the slightest proof that would give away who they were.
"Blood God Nafız, we await your orders!"
When the Elemental Ten stood before her, Nafız sized them all up one by one from head to toe. Since she didn't leave the close combat to anyone else, all the filth of the war was on her, but the druids, whose robes were perfectly clean, had managed to kill almost as many enemies as she had.
"I guess this is what normalization is; however much you go to one side, only after going that much to the other side can you find the middle ground!"
It was no coincidence that such a death squad emerged from among the druids, who hesitated to even hurt an ant and were the flagbearers of pacifism by swallowing everything done to them. It was neither the first nor the last; over the years, thousands of druids would want to walk down this path that had been opened.
"I didn't quite catch that, ma'am!"
Even though Alator was a high-level druid in terms of perception and comprehension, it was impossible for him to know everything going through Nafız's mind. Just as Alyon and those who had been around her for years were already accustomed to, he too would keep up with Nafız's incomprehensible words in time.
"It wasn't anything important anyway. Let's get back to business; the previous camp belonged to the Turquoise Leaf Guild, so which unit did the soldiers you just turned to ashes belong to?"
The Leader of the Elemental Ten first took a step forward upon the question, then handed an object he pulled out of his interspatial ring to Nafız.
"The units in this region of the border are military teams formed as a mix of the Turquoise and Diamond Leaf Guilds. In general, everything we destroyed is the property of both guilds, but looking at this weapon that came out of their commander's belongings, I think we have destroyed the place known as the Diamond Leaf Guild camp."
While looking at the dagger in her hand, Nafız couldn't take her eyes off the scabbard adorned with small diamond pieces. As if to spite the pale silvery color of its hilt, this part of the weapon managed to sparkle even with a single beam of moonlight blocked by the leaves of the giant trees.
"I guess I should have left the job of searching everywhere in the previous camp to you too. I'll make a mental note of it, but if I forget, don't hesitate to remind me!"
If these words had come out of someone else's mouth, perhaps they might have seemed acceptable to those who heard them, but what the blood-red-haired orc said was like stealing a lion's meal from its mouth while it was tearing its prey apart. Despite this, Alator nodded, indicating he understood, trying to save the situation even though he knew it couldn't be done.
"You would definitely be Turkish, you know that? Even when given a task you're sure can't be done, pretending to try is our ancestral sport!"
When Nafız added a new one to her incomprehensible words, no one could make a sound, but the Blood God flared up like fire the moment her laughter ended.
"Then let's do something worthy of us. After destroying two small border units, let's go a bit inland and make some noise by destroying our first headquarters. Alator, you set aside the things I asked for before burning them, right?"
This time, the Leader of the Druids knew exactly what the female orc was talking about, and a breath later, ten mercenary uniforms were on the ground. The boots, the pants, the khaki shirts they wore underneath, the strange four-cornered hats on their heads, and even the low-level energy weapons were lined up side by side.
"Did you get the underpants and tank tops too?"
They were the only things missing, and the Blood God couldn't help but ask. She didn't look like she was mocking him either; Alator chimed in, thinking something was wrong.
"No ma'am, I didn't think they were important. Forgive me!"
Frowning after hearing the word 'forgive me', Nafız couldn't hold in her laughter, which sounded like a shrill scream, for more than five breaths. It was clear it would take a long time for the members of the Elemental Ten to get used to her sense of humor, and realizing this, Nafız continued talking in the style they liked.
"You know what to do. We're hitting the road in ten minutes, start getting ready!"
The night hadn't lived half of the hours it stole from the day and belonged only to itself, but darkness still reigned in the area covered with dense forests. While some of the creatures that showed themselves when the scorching rays of the sun were absent tried to find prey, and others tried not to be hunted, a group of ten people reached a place where the trees ended and barbed wire began.
"Who are you? Show yourselves!"
Ten people, practically surrounded by devices that made the three-pace diameter area even brighter than the midday sun, raised their arms. Some didn't have hats, some had khaki jackets covered in blood, and without exception, they all looked like they had just escaped death.
"It's us, the soldiers who managed to survive the camp of the E-2 border unit!"
Even though they noticed hundreds of weapons pointed at them, they didn't move; only an orc with his hands cuffed behind his back fell to the ground, unable to stand any longer.
"Who is that, what did you bring with you?"
A person whose snow-white skin was adorned with blood, dirt, and tiny flies flying everywhere in the forest stepped forward, and holding his hat that looked like it was about to fall off, he answered.
"An orc, we caught one of the orcs the T-1 border unit mentioned!"