Ch. 67.5 – Interlude: The Söldnerklan

Terminology relevant for this chapter:

Söldnerklan = mercenary clanFeuerschwarz = "fire black(ened)"Soldatenweihe = soldier's ordinationWeihopfer = ceremonial sacrifice

***

When the nukes hit our Germany—from Cologne in the west to Hamburg in the north and Nuremberg in the south, past Berlin and all the way into Poland in the east—and the fallout threatened to ruin metropoles well beyond what today is marked as the German Deadzone, we reeled.

But the reverberations of the Great Restoration following the Second World War still rang within our memories, and much like the Dutch with their famous dams, we, too, are engineers at heart. The knowledge, the skills required to rebuild a nation, it was all still right there in our books and movies and the brains of our oldest generation.

And so, guided by their advice, we set to building the world's first ABC city. A great arcology, megacity even, designed to let millions survive through a nuclear winter, or against the hungry hunting of Antithesis maws, even against the chemical and radiological devastation dripping from the Deadzone.

I come to you from Nürnberg, known these days, dear guests, as Megacity Nuremberg. All English-like and fancy. There's a reason for that—we Germans ended up mostly not moving in, and instead it houses a true melting pot of ethnicities from around the world.

But I digress. It would yet take years before Megacity Nuremberg came to exist, and I do not wish to cut the story quite so short.

We had little time to prepare ourselves before the fallout would ruin our crops or the Antithesis would starve us. We rushed. Led by extraordinarily charismatic leaders, our populations moved out of the city entirely, to let our most massive construction machines work unhindered. And they did, 'round the clock, day and night. We expected to be done within the year—we needed to be done within the year.

But, to no one's surprise I'm sure, we overengineered the thing…just a little. Nine-additional-years-of-construction-required-overengineered. It turned out we would need ABC-proof homes before we'd get the city. That is how the suburban district of Nürnbergs Mähre came to be. Nuremberg's Mare.

The name is an homage to the nature of this district—it was where Nürnberg spent itself to create new life. Lives that turned out to be a lot less transitory than expected. It was where we reared our young. We actually lived quite well there, for several years. Surprisingly well, considering that we all but touched the Deadzone.

It…didn't stay that way, I fear. A corporation bought Megacity Nuremberg before it was done getting built. They shaped the project as they wished it—didn't destroy it, miraculously, but it stopped being for us, for the local Germans.

Finally…a particularly insidious influence infected the northern part of our district. No one noticed anything at first. People disappeared, but that was to be expected with the Antithesis knocking on our doors. Medicine was occasionally scarce, but the fallout ran us ragged, so that too, was thought to be natural. Crime rates showed a few strange blips, yet the investigations didn't often lead anywhere. But…well. We were busy with the largest project Germany had ever seen. None of us paid enough attention to be alarmed.

Then everything at the edge closest to the Deadzone devolved into hideous lawlessness with shocking speed. None of us down south knew why, but we could see it in the eyes of them up there, that they did.

And they were scared out of their minds. Equal parts frozen in fear and fleeing south. Perfectly happy to kill us and take our stuff, just to get away from…they knew who. We didn't.

We…defended ourselves, with guns and blades and nastier things. We built a wall to bisect the district. Our old ones didn't like that, not one bit. It did help, though. Our kids lived. Theirs…exited childhood early.

Officially, the entire district's name is still Nürnbergs Mähre. Nuremberg's Mare. We call the northern half Nürnbergs Schindmähre, these days. Nuremberg's Nag.

…The butcher's all it's good for. He lives there, too.

– recitation by Jakob Gutwohl of southern Nürnbergs Mähre

***

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

The clan leader's office was a small fortress of a room, with a single entrance located around a bend. That bend had a very particular shape—if one were to coat the walls, floor, and ceiling with a reflective finish and shine a laser on it, one would inevitably find that the beam always directed back at the source, no matter the angles.

That also applied to grenades thrown with sufficient force that they would have otherwise reached into the office proper.

The monster sitting in the office's single chair had every reason to employ such paranoia, seeing as he did rule his mercenary clan with fists made less of iron and more of quicksand, mixed with proverbial shards of glass filed down to the finest of hidden edges and coated with the most excruciating venoms, and cloaked in trapdoor tarps too well disguised for even the most analytical mind to detect.

His every decision bled his soldiers and tortured their misshapen souls to drive their rage ever higher into ambitious violence, but he was also sixty years old, and had been the head of his clan for four decades. None had his experience at playing people, and indeed, the house of cards he'd built himself was bonded with the bloody resins squeezed from the gristle of soldiers and victims alike.

Hengst Rheinschiffer knew the human mind and manipulated it with all the skill of a sadistic genius surgeon, and bent his clan's combined hatred and rabid ambition to his will. He'd built a kingdom right there, at the edge of the Deadzone where the Antithesis ruled, and yet not once in all the decades was it his members that had to suffer their attention. Who else could claim such administrative skill?

Yet he was but one man, and knew it, too. Mount as he may Nuremberg's Mare like his own namesake once mounted the suburb's, a man's reach always frayed more the further it went, and retaliation from those frayed edges might conceivably reach him before he could quite steer it where he willed it.

And so his office was a fortress, equipped with covert weaponry and designed to funnel all aggression back where it belonged: the hapless intruder. Constructed under the guidance of his deliberate hand and psychological genius, it drove that message deep into the subconscious of any who would knock upon his door and request entry.

Fear, and tread carefully in the presence of your betters, it whispered to them.

Hengst felt his blood sing with orgasmic pleasure every time he saw that deliciously shivering terror in their eyes, deep inside where they couldn't quite hide from it, where it controlled their every action and drove their violent rage and ambition every waking second—but never quite at him; the object of their fear-crazed worship too dangerous, too skilled, to risk angering.

A knocking against the office's entrance tore Hengst from his mental masturbation. The rhythm was that of his Second.

"Herein!" he bade even as his feet automatically placed themselves so he could dive below the table. The tension of a bow ready to be loosed rocked through his body as Kain came around the corner, and it wasn't until Hengst spied the two paper folders in his hands that he relaxed.

As always, Hengst stared his Second down before he acknowledged him. A smirk tugged on the corner of his mouth as he sawn the other man force his souldeep vitriol even further down to reveal that particular kind of stressed equanimity that marked those like Kain his best operatives.

The core of his mercenary clan, reliable enough that Hengst couldn't afford to waste them as he did the mere brutes. And they knew it. Knew how to buy their continued existence day after day. To be worthwhile to their master.

It was all that Hengst could do not to rub himself to a real orgasm.

"Report."

"Yessir," the Second said, handing the first of the folder to Hengst. "Preparations for the next Soldatenweihe proceed apace. We have located multiple suitable Weihopfer among the visitors to Megacity Nuremberg and are ready to begin planning their retrieval, sir."

Opening the file, Hengst took his time to study the dossiers inside. Four pairs of one woman and one man each, and each pair different enough that a number of tastes would be covered. "Only four, Second?"

"Sir, yes sir. There are a few others that we considered, sir, but they weren't ideal. Since the Weihe is six months away, we decided that there would be more opportunities for better suited Opfer, sir."

"And the boys?" Hengst asked as he got to his feet.

"Sir, nearly ready, sir."

"Show me."

"Yessir."

Kain led the way out of the office, skin crawling when he felt Hengst's breath across his nape. His brain conjured the fetid stink of carnivores, but he drew upon his experience to keep his shoulders relaxed. A part of him whispered about masking prey behavior and the implied helplessness needled his rage.

They exited into the first of the clan's circular collection of underground caverns, which had protected its secrecy and anonymity for the last thirty years. And stopped prying eyes from finding their lost children, from rescuing them from the conditioning and training.

Kain wanted to head left, into the hall containing the oldest of the trainees, those ready to have their mettle tested and their conditioning completed with the next Soldatenweihe, but Hengst headed right without a word and forced him to spin on his heel and catch up again.

The insatiable sadist found his joy in any and all power games, especially the ones that were pure pettiness. Cheap, easy, and yet so very effective—did they not force, time and time again, that same degrading pattern that grated against the soul? Indeed, good conditioning made reinforcement simple.

And so, once again, Kain kept quiet and forced himself to pretend everything was fine, and, once again, Hengst smiled to himself.

As the clan's master and his Second marched through the circle of halls, they passed by groups of boys in various stages of their training. The children were forced to endure pain every step of the way, always being screamed at, and learned to suppress any reaction to the petty, degenerate harassment from the drill sergeants and older trainees. Beatings, and worse violations, followed when they failed.

They were not here to be broken down and built up again as proper soldiers; they were here to be broken down and turned into vengeful, sadistic animals.

One hall was different. The path took them through the middle of it, bisected it with razor wire-tipped fences to either side. It was a beautiful cavern, soft light illuminating truly comfortable underground houses. There was no gate, no access, for any of the males living in this cavern—not even for Hengst himself.

It was the women's hall, and Hengst had designed it as the ultimate taunt to the boys. The contrast, the thing that brewed resentment like no other. The certain knowledge, witnessed and strengthened every day, that there was good in the world, paradise come true…and it would never, never be accessible.

Hengst quietly laughed to himself as he watched the girls play with each other. They were scared of him, but in that anxious, uncertain way that one might show a predator that had never attacked, had never even come too close for comfort. Another useful tool, for none of the boys could count themselves safe. But they saw it, in the girls' eyes they saw it. Safety. Sacred, blissful safety.

What a wonderful, pleasant, twisted lure. Fairness and love not for the boys. No, for them there was only Hengst. And he loved how they hated it, how it drove them mad with longing and frustration.

As they reached the next hall, one teenager tripped over the curb and stumbled onto the path. Hengst watched as Kain caught him with a knee to the face and a fist in his hair, and grinned when the Second channeled the frustrated ire from his helplessness against Hengst's pettiness into a hateful twisting of the boy's scalp, before he bodily threw him at his drill sergeant…who stepped out of the way and tripped the child before he could catch him, right onto the track the other trainees were sprinting along.

They knew not to avoid the fresh obstacle, and Hengst enjoyed the sound of screams and breaking bones as he moved on, passing hall after hall. Most were training and living halls, some housed various facilities to keep the caverns livable, to filter the toxic fallout from the Deadzone. It was always the ones like that boy, the weak ones everybody else used as the outlet for their rage and repressed vindictiveness that were forced to clean and handle the poisons. Hengst would call them useless, but then that would make him a wasteful leader, and Hengst was entirely too skilled.

The second-to-last hall was stuffed with electronics and machines, and the soldiers there were training themselves in the exploitation of modern gadgets. The walls, floor, and ceiling was covered with a metal mesh that kept any of the tools from communicating with the outside world—another measure the clan used to protect itself. And another trap that occasionally caught a rat among the trainees. Those too, Hengst found a use for.

The trainees needed victims to learn torturing, after all.

In the final cavern, the fifteen-year-olds were training in hand-to-hand combat. If they took care not to permanently disable each other, it had nothing to do with any left-over gentleness. It was pure, learned pragmatism. The clan couldn't cannibalize itself, after all.

Nonetheless, Hengst caught one person for each squad, typically the runt, who showed considerably more bruises and cuts. Fear in their eyes, the tenseness of the hunted. The scapegoat and victim. The ones everyone was subliminally trained to focus their hatred and vitriol on. Their evergrowing thirst for revenge.

Yes, indeed, Hengst ran a tight outfit, made no fatal mistakes, gloated happily, and never missed a good chance to pat himself on the back.

He truly did deserve it, after all.

"And the second file?" he asked after inspecting the boys in this hall. Young men, almost. One last step they would have to complete, in six months' time. It'd make them his thugs, or a rare few of them, even his operatives.

"Yessir," Kain answered and handed him the file. "Our contract in the city has detected an opportunity, sir. A corporation successfully kidnapped two freshling samurai, but apparently their holding facility failed to display some sort of prearranged signal. Now the brass are getting squirrely, sir—they figure the samurai broke out and don't trust that they won't manage to find them somehow, despite the total isolation of the prison."

Hengst smiled to himself. That delicious scent of weakness that heralded supersize opportunities was just entirely too intoxicating to ignore. "Which corporation?"

"Sir, we don't know yet. The contract will provide details once we've paid the advance, sir."

Chuckling, the clan leader reflected that that was why the contract was a contract, and not a pawn. Some people were in fact skilled enough to be business, rather than dominated, used tools.

"The samurai?"

"Sir, they're unknowns. Entirely new, and we don't know which city they were taken from, exactly. Too many possibilities to narrow down reliably, sir."

"Kainnn…" Hengst's voice squeezed through his teeth, viscous like blood mixed with tar. The reaction in his Second was immediate, even if carefully controlled through years of practice. The panic revealed itself in the widening pupils and the bleaching of the skin where it stretched itself across the younger man's bony features.

"Sir!"

"Yesss?"

"We do have one piece of possibly relevant information!"

"Which isss?" the monster almost whispered.

Kain carefully, gently flipped to the final page of the file. A photo of a condo's roof with a man standing on it, an abomination of a samurai weapon in hand, aiming upwards into the sky and shooting down swarms of Antithesis. Spysat photo, good quality, easy identification due to the man's uplifted face, even if one of his eyes was occluded by a scope.

Hengst's fist involuntarily crushed the spine of the folder. "There you fucking are, Aden…"

Kain froze like a mouse sighting a snake as his superior's gaze shackled his own. "Find him, Kain," Hengst hissed.

He saluted and barely managed to drag in enough air to respond, "Sir, yessir!"

"More information, Kain. More. I want it all…Kain. Every last bit, yes?"

"Yes! Sir, yessir!"

"Good."

Kain carefully held still.

Cruel, chuckling madness taunted Kain's own for the weak, fragile thing it was, until the monster finally dismissed him and Kain desperately fought the impulse to flee.

***