Chapter 166.5 – Interlude: The Söldnerklan Feuerschwarz II

Terminology relevant for this chapter:

Söldnerklan = mercenary clanFeuerschwarz = "fire black(ened)"Vorhut = vanguard

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Industrial textile mills found widespread use only by the early twentieth century. Before their rise, beggars would resort to patchwork clothing, layers of cheapest straw-stuffed lining. Cast-off bedding reworked, patched cloaks.

After the spread of cheap, industrial textiles, true patchwork mostly disappeared among the beggars: ready-made clothing became available, often reinforced with scraps from tailoring. Sharply rising rates of literacy birthed mass amounts of newspapers, which, being a very good insulator, replaced straw stuffing overnight.

Synthetic textiles became common in the latter half of the twentieth. Outer wear became so cheap that the art of patching up old clothing was rapidly lost. Discarded coats were found everywhere, and discarded industrial carpeting made for convenient flooring. Architectural efforts saw a massive boom in the building of great bridges and overland routes, and their shadows welcomed the destitute.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first century brought fast fashion and thrift stores. Even a global second-hand clothing trade. The squatter's choice of insulation began to include packaging plastics and increasing amounts of old tent canvas. Abandoned tunnels, condemned houses, and unused sewers—better hidden from the public eye—became the new preferred place of residence for the homeless. Cars, or vans, for others.

These days, in the middle of the twenty-first century, the non-citizen's clothing and cover consists of a mix of usually defaced cast-off corporate uniforms, coats and jackets with half-broken e-waste controlling equally dysfunctional thermofoil layers. Tents are made most often from polymer tarps scavenged from shipping districts; stiffened to resemble prefab polymer slabs with carcinogenic injections of aerogel insulation foams. The availability of secure housing varies extremely from district to district and tends to reflect local gang culture.

– Excerpt from Historia Pauperum, one of the more reputable and meticulous history-keeping blogs in 2054. This blog is focused primarily on the lives of the poor.

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Headquarters of mercenary group Söldnerklan Feuerschwarz, undisclosed location within the suburban district of Nürnbergs Mähre, Megacity Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany

Three days have passed since Kain's report to Hengst Rheinschiffer, which included a snapshot of Aden stationed upon his condo. Much did change. Much didn't.

Foremost, Hengst, the genius sadist, the monster wearing human skin, had been reduced to stewing in his frustration the entire time. The uncertainty of whether Aden was or wasn't part of the Protector's Vorhut kept nagging at him.

If he was, he was beyond the Klan's reach. If he wasn't, Hengst would be able to pull strings. Ensnare the brat. Make the prodigal son feel all kinds of at home, until he'd learn to toe the line again.

Hengst would have to restart the boy's training. Break him again, then force him to exceed every last one of those Hengst would use to break him. Worthless bastard of that Korean Luder he may be, he still bore Hengst's own blood. It wouldn't do for him to be anything less than the strongest of his mercenaries. Their next god.

It was the thought that Aden might be a samurai, and therefore too powerful for him to touch, that kept the Klan's master from being done with the topic.

Three days. Unforgivable.

Knock-knockknock. Kain. Finally.

Hengst didn't even notice as his body tensed and readied itself for the inevitable betrayal and violence that would follow. It probably wasn't going to be today. Tomorrow, unlikely too. But some day. He was ready for it, habitually.

"Herein!"

The gaunt, deceptively sallow frame of his Second rounded the corner. Both hands visible, holding a pair of paper folders again. No visible weapons. Knives sheathed in over-skin holsters, hidden beneath sleeves, locking straps applied in his presence. To keep the Klan's master from punishing him on principle.

Hengst laughed internally at this sign of the man's wretched fear of reprisal, but after a moment's consideration, decided to wait whether the report would warrant showing his amusement outwardly.

A good operative lasted longer if he was occasionally given exception from the disdain his master showed everything and everyone. Considering his Klan's training methods, he couldn't afford to be…careless with those good operatives. They were rare.

They'd also seen enough of the outside world to understand that they wouldn't be able to feed their needs out there. Not without popping up on a lot of radars. His radar. The Klan was their home…and their prison. They couldn't quite use their own rarity for protection, not the way they so very much wanted to. But just enough that it kept him from destroying them, and kept them quelled. The smarter ones, at least—which were the core of his most useful cadre, by definition.

As always, Hengst prioritized spearing the man's very attention with his gaze. Kept him dangling, even if, this time, he didn't smirk his soul-deep condescension at the Second's practiced wrangling of his bestial vitriol.

The missing smirk relaxed the man, and Hengst carefully controlled his impulse to cow him. To exert additional pressure to seal the void of power.

It went against his very nature, was an insult to his superiority inherent and earned both, but Hengst was no struggling stratetician. He had long mastered the cutting of the flesh to save the bone.

"Report."

"Yessir," Kain said, placing the first of the two folders before Hengst and opening it. It was the weekly write-up, the first page titled Food Vaults. They were part of the Klan's public governing of the northern half of Nürnbergs Mähre—and entirely disconnected from the Klan itself to preserve operational security. "The expansion of the plantation caves is finished, sir. We should see the increase in sales soon."

"Complications?"

"Sir, none, sir."

Hengst demanded nothing less. The subterranean farms were mature technology. Failure to set them up smoothly would have been an embarrassment.

"The workers?"

"Motivated, sir. It took barely twenty minutes for the new volunteer patrols to form, and less for their family members to start working in the vaults, sir."

"Next."

"Yessir," Kain said and turned the page. The public-facing munitions factory. "The production of the Workhorse carbines was increased to match the expansion of the caves, and the new patrols are already outfitted and have been inducted by some veteran patrol."

Hengst smiled with ugly satisfaction. The patrols had turned out to be one of his best strokes of genius. Antithesis wandered day and night into the several-kilometers-wide strip of terrain between Nürnbergs Mähre and the Deadzone. The non-stop patrols kept them out of the district itself, and any fresh nests from settling. A dizzying number of short trenches and simple traps pinned the no man's land in place, and thus kept his Klan safe from Antithesis aggression, and thereby, samurai attention.

The munitions factory, which conveniently hid his Klan's complex beneath, produced a lighter version of the old AK-47, the Workhorse Karabiner. A simple, extremely reliable carbine. The cartridges were custom too, which meant they were produced only in his factory. Terribly cheap to produce, but still powerful enough to take out the single digit Antithesis, especially if the members of the patrols worked together.

That, in turn, bred a culture, especially in this ghetto of a district. The culture stayed loyal to the weapons supplier, which meant Hengst's project was self-maintaining. All he had to do was to keep the trickle of guns and cartridges flowing, pay the patrols in food stamps, let the family members of the patrols work in the public plantations, which they did for free because the caves were the safest place in the district, and sell the excess produce to generate legitimate funds that didn't need laundering and wouldn't generate unwanted attention.

He really was too good of a leader.

"Next wave of expansions?"

"Sir, in preparation. We will need to take out the Langkurz Brüderschaft soon. Their food production would infringe on our expansion, sir."

"Launch a smear campaign. New patterns."

"Yessir."

Next page. Cultural indoctrination of the district remained stable. No new wannabe-icon gathering the gangs under his banner, no threat to the status quo. No samurai—their attention was needed elsewhere along the Deadzone; and with Nürnbergs Mähre taking care of its own bit of the alien influx, they had never needed to look closer.

And that had been the final page of the first report. Hengst returned to staring down his Second. After a second's consideration, he decided that this adequate completion of routine tasks warranted no additional reward. The scorn rose behind his eyes again, poking and prodding at Kain's lesser spirit.

The Second reacted as he always did—with the well-practiced, silently desperate equanimity that kept him safe from the monster's more physical sadism. Kain laid the second folder on the table, and hated that he was glad for the moment to loosen his laryngeal muscles again, lest the stress showed itself.

Hengst saw it anyway, and chuckled to himself.

"Sir, this contains everything we were able to find on Aden," Kain spoke with all the fake composure he possessed; glad, deep down where he didn't have to admit it to himself, to have such an impactful distraction.

Indeed, Hengst's eyes instantly snapped to the folder, dismissing the very existence of his Second. In an unusual forgoing of any further mindgames, the Söldnerklan's master grabbed the folder and opened it himself. He even failed to notice that his body relaxed slightly.

Kain was too well conditioned to so much as twitch for his knives at the perceived chink in the monster's armor, and by the time he consciously thought of doing so, the moment had passed anyway.

To the inside of the cover, Aden's familiar spysat photo was glued. A near mugshot, seeing as the blackhaired brat was aiming upwards, roughly in the direction of the spysat that had caught him.

Aden's face was alive in combat and Hengst could almost see his eyes flicking from target to target, seeing everything and analyzing the field. It seemed that the two decades he hadn't been around the Klan weren't enough to dull him.

Of course they weren't. He was of Hengst's own blood, after all.

The next pages showed a few more photos, all from the same engagement. The timestamps were quite apart, several minutes each, but that was to be expected. The weather report showed near constant rain over New Montreal, and dirty, cloudy skies hid much.

Yet there was plenty to interrogate some questions. In the first picture, Aden's hunting rifle was a modernized version of an old model, with an updated-but-mundane scope. In the second, the scope had been switched out for some kind of auxiliary abomination of a submachine gun. Tracers were piercing a cloud of model Ones.

The balance seemed all off and Hengst would bet that the unevenly distributed forces from firing that attachment had caused damage to the rifle itself. But it was samurai gear, and newly gained.

The other pictures showed more gear acquired. Grenades from no visible stockpile. Some sort of autonomous spear-shaped delivery devices for those grenades as well as small bombs. A slim, powered exoskeleton. Hengst thought he'd heard of suits of that description—medical aids used by extremely high-end mercenary outfits to retain the usefulness of their most experienced members even after injury. That was the kind of outfit he planned to rob one day.

The final photo displayed a series of cratered Antithesis drop tubes, and the local cloud cover had been entirely torn open. The tubes had been taken out either by large-bore incendiary artillery, or more samurai ordnance.

Constantly updating gear implied the direct presence of a samurai, rather than mere access to one, and Aden showcased the only possession of such in the pictures. To think he was not the samurai would be folly.

All in all…it painted a picture Hengst mostly didn't like, but that made him proud nonetheless. Of course Hengst's own blood had been given that level of power. It was no surprise at all.

Hengst knew he himself would already have been chosen, if he didn't have the Klan to project his skill and power. It made sense that Aden, who lacked the support of such an organization himself but had Hengst's excellence as his birthright, would be given that of the Protectors instead. The boy had always displayed particular skill in solo or micro-cell missions.

Halfway through the file, photos of a more investigative nature replaced the spysat shots. The side of a building showed a massive, multi-meter hole through the wall. The building was the same one Aden had been stationed atop in some of the previous pictures.

"Who?" Hengst demanded. His training of his subordinates was good enough that he didn't need to specify.

"Sir, local private investigator, sir. Standard contract. Reliable enough to not go blabbing, but not much more."

No matter. It would have been a waste to pay extra to protect the Klan's inquiry against a potential samurai, anyway. Better to have gone to no remarkable lengths that would stand out in a sea of similar efforts by literally every outfit across civilization.

Unfortunately, it meant that the Klan hadn't a way to dig into the circumstances with the hole. It was clear that Aden wasn't home. No damage aside from the hole had occurred to his flat. The wall had been broken from the inside out, which possibly implied a voluntary, if destructive, egress.

Hengst snorted. Other outfits would be more careless in their own investigations, which his Klan could exploit unnoticed for better information.

He turned another page, and a black, vitriolic rage consumed him.

Kain

It pulsed from Hengst like an aura so strong it was tangible to Kain, who was well conditioned from a lifetime of abuse to read Hengst's emotional state. The Second froze automatically, his subconscious too scared to even breathe. Then, those finely honed reflexes that had made him the Second took over, and deep fears gibbering in the recesses of his soul or not, Kain was nonetheless present to consciously witness his leader's assertion of control before his violent impulses might unbalance him.

"Kainnnn…" Hengst's face was utterly demonic. A red rictus of acidic hate and white-knuckled strangulation. "Why is a picture that looks like her in my folder?" he asked. Squeezed through his teeth, like gristle beaten with a tenderizer.

There, another opportunity to destroy the monster had been missed. But Kain was numb to the loss, had been for more than twenty years, and simultaneously hated himself for his continued lack of action. Too used to suppressing his more predatory reflexes around his master to actually be able to use them against him.

Nonetheless, the personification of sadistic glee pinned him with its eyes. It was like a fist of boiling blood and rotten intestines closed around his throat. Kain's brain retreated into the fog of fear. His shoulders found the old sag, from way back during his training, and his mouth opened on autopilot.

"Sir, we think that's Ade—"

He didn't really pay attention to his own words. His entire being was consumed with not existing, and dreaming of his own fist around somebody's throat. Squeezing like he was being squeezed. There was a tiny kernel of frustrated hatred that kept him warm. Kain hated, hated that this monster could strangle him with nothing but his eyes. He would learn to do it, too. Then he'd be safe from it. He just had to understand how to make it happen.

Ah, no. The fist around his throat was real. It was tight enough to hurt. He hadn't even noticed.

That was power, too. Kain would take that for himself. Somehow.

Suddenly the fist let go and let him breathe again, but the demon's face was still right there, staring him down.

"Explainnnn…" it demanded in a voice so quietly furious that Kain had to strain to hear it. Actual blood trickled from the cracked corner of its maw.

"Sir, the hunting rifle, sir. In the glass crater, sir, on the picture on the next page, sir. It's the same one, sir, if destroyed, sir."

Ah, he was babbling a bit. But then the master hadn't been so…irate in such a long time. He'd let it catch him off guard. Let it get to him. Kain knew he'd hate himself for that, in a few moments.

The twin holes glaring their fury at him kept his eyes captured even as the monster's hands blindly turned the page. It was another few dying seconds before the master turned his hellish gaze away to take in the next set of photos.

Hengst

Hengst found himself insulted by more pictures of the disgusting creature borrowing the face of the whore he had once called his fiancee.

And indeed, there was the rifle, what was left of it. Strangely fitting, that. Equally as broken as the hopes he'd held for his son to inherit his Klan one day.

So the bastard had chosen her blood over his own. Rage thrummed through Hengst. A deep will to destruction that he clamped down on with all the perfect self-control he had gained over the years.

Putrid, wretched thing. Fine. He would reject the whore's bastard with the same decisiveness he displayed everywhere else.

It merely meant that he would finally go ahead on making another heir.

Still fighting the rage at the desecration of his own blood, the potential and future he had gifted his ex-son, he continued paging through the remaining stills. The little whore wasn't alone. She had another samurai, one that seemed to specialize in mechanized forces. Drones and walking tanks of some shape. The pace at which the two bitches were accumulating gear was…worrying. And galling. Deeply, deeply galling.

It meant they were truly beyond the reach of Hengst and his Klan.

He realized he would have to pull out of what should have been an exceptionally lucrative contract those CEOs from America had offered the mercenary world. The two whores were too strong to go after, and the personal nature of the quarry would complicate things the very moment the bastard so much as smelled the Klan's involvement.

That rankled so very much that Hengst needed several moments to restrain various impulses to command assaults of various nature. It was an insult to everything Hengst stood for. Everything he had preserved successfully through the Antithesis Apocalypse, even built upon. He, the great man and incomparable genius, who had used what little his own father passed down to such great effect that he all but owned hundreds of thousands of people across a city-sized district. All without them so much as realizing it.

Suddenly, he laughed in sheer disbelief. The ignoble fuckers. The absolute, depraved pieces of shit that were that whore and her bastard son. Daughter. Bastard daughter, she was now. Fine. Fine, fine. Very fine.

Three times now he had faced such a challenge to his self-control.

When that whore had first betrayed him. He had barely managed to recover his son, then. She'd still gotten away and it had taken a great deal of focus to not waste resources he needed elsewhere on a hunt for her.

Then, twenty years ago, the son had betrayed the Klan as well. But he'd done it with such skill that Hengst had had to respect it. Accept it, after a fashion. A mark of competence, and it was acceptable that his own blood sought perfect independence. Even among the now-leaders among his subordinates, those who'd been around back then had signaled silent awe.

Another reason the Klan wasn't strong enough to go after those two. Hengst seethed in rage, but wrestled the anger down all the same.

And now, the third challenge. That bastard, the bastard he had respected even despite the betrayal, had rejected his blood, and thus Hengst's fatherhood. Unthinkable, unacceptable. It was not something he could ever forget or set aside.

Yet Hengst couldn't do anything about it. Oh how he wanted to. Couldn't. It would destroy him. His Klan.

Wiser to spawn heirs anew. Multiple this time, to be sure.

Fine.

He would accept this third and ultimate challenge to his own self, too. Win it.

Indeed, he had already won it. He merely needed to stay the course.

That was easy for one such as him.

He was the perfect leader, and a perfect leader wasted not. Not even his rage.

If he couldn't direct it where it was deserved, then he merely needed to find another suitable target for it.

Say, a competing food supplier, perhaps? It would allow him to become…personal in his violence.

Yes. Yes, that would do.

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