There's No Love In the Deathzone (BL)
Chapter 645: Side Story 2. Dance of Flame and Shadow - 4

Chapter 645: Side Story 2. Dance of Flame and Shadow - 4

"Haa...I feel so stupid," Agni muttered while burying his face in his hands.

He let himself drown in another self-deprecation moment for five seconds before raising his head again. In front of him, lying on his bed, was the son of his older, dead colleague. A young face, barely out of adulthood, looking even younger while sleeping calmly instead of glaring and barking like a mad dog.

Trying to face a wraith with just two beginner daggers and his wit; how foolish, an amateur mistake at its finest. And it made Agni realize something that punched him in the gut.

"Fuck, he’s just a kid."

Agni exhaled heavily. Of course, he was just a kid. The first and last time he saw the kid before was when he was just joining Nolan Hertz’s squad. The kid was...ten, probably. Hadn’t even awoken yet. He never saw the kid again because the squad kept being sent to secluded areas, and they were rarely in the main base.

Leaning back on his seat, Agni took a deep breath and slowly calculated in his head. If the kid was twenty now, he would be...fifteen when his father was sentenced to the Borderland. After five years of rarely seeing the old man, he had to face another four years of absence before the old man died.

The kid’s father died before they could see each other again. They couldn’t even meet during the unfair court-martial, so the last time the kid saw his father should be...six years ago.

"Haa...I shouldn’t swear too much," Agni sighed again, probably for the hundredth time that day alone. "But what should I do with this kid?"

He let out another sigh and got out of the room, slipping into the headquarters’ emergency stairs and lit up a cigarette. Laying his back across the staircase, Agni took a moment to close his eyes and let memory take him back to where everything went wrong. The point that brought the boy to this reckless decision.

Was it the moment when they were sent to the Borderland? No, if he had to trace it back, he might as well started the moment Nolan Hertz accepted the promotion to lead a special squad instead of staying in the main base doing desk work.

Should he choose to stay back, he wouldn’t have to be sent here and there and trapped in that damnable mission. But that wasn’t who Nolan Hertz was. He didn’t want to stay inside an office. He wanted to get out and save more people from dungeons.

And so, he chose the promotion.

Agni was twenty-five when he got recruited to the squad. Later on, he realized that the squad was a ragtag group of outcasts, and the leader was someone the Major leading their battalion disliked. Something about being a rival in the academy--Agni wouldn’t know.

He didn’t come from the academy. He was awoken when he was twenty-one, and only went through the government short course before taking the tower’s trial. He had to take a debt to afford the cost of the journey, and because his debtor was the government, he had to serve in the military to pay for it.

Perhaps that was why he was getting ostracized. Someone who came from outside of the recognized system, had nothing but debt, but also better than the others in his company. A recipe for hazing, honestly. Only if Agni wasn’t a hotblooded berserker who would bark and bite back when he was attacked. After going through many useless punishments, the higher-up gave up and threw him into this ’special’ squad.

It wasn’t bad, though. For Agni, these outcasts were better than his previous colleagues. They bonded fast through their shared ostracization under the lead of someone who was too passionate for his own good.

Nolan Hertz, knew everything about raiding but nothing about politics. Nothing about keeping himself safe even though he had a family. Agni used to think the man was foolish, and he still thought the man was foolish, although it felt kind of bad saying it after he was dead.

"Fuck--if you know you have family, you should make a choice that prioritizes them, you dimwit!" Agni hissed along with the smoke billowing in the narrow corridor. "Even if you’d get bored to death, you should have just stayed."

If he could turn back time--no, if he could only appear in Nolan’s dream ten years before...

He should have told the man not to take the exilement-disguised ’promotion’--even though the man wouldn’t know him at that time. Or if he was too late for that, he should have told the man not to take that damn mission.

Yeah, that damn mission that plunged them into a nightmare.

"The damn border again?!" Agni had grunted when the mission slip came. The squad was in its fifth year, and two-thirds of the missions they got were always located in the farthest point, the most secluded area.

"Why are you calling it a border when it’s only at the orange-zone?" Nolan chuckled. "What are you going to call the Borderland, then?"

"That place is basically the Deathzone, Captain," another squad member smirked. "And that orange-zone is basically just a step away from the red-zone."

As usual, Nolan just gave them a smile that was both soft and firm. "You know how it is; no guilds want to take care of a mere yellow gate with not much profit. Getting there probably costs more than what they could gain from the dungeon."

The other squad members groaned and whined, but that was just for fun. They already knew their Captain’s personality and had long accepted that the man was kind to a fault. They weren’t the only squad formed for dungeon missions, but somehow, they always got the most problematic ones. Of course, most of it was because of the Mayor’s hatred for their squad, but it was also because Nolan couldn’t say no to a mission that impacted people’s lives.

Seeing that this dungeon appeared in the middle of a small town on the outskirts, they already knew the Captain would be very stubborn about it.

Thinking back to it, Agni should have been whining more. He should have thrown a tantrum or two, causing a fight so half of them incapacitated and the squad couldn’t go was also an option.

Agni laughed and choked on the smoke of his cigarette. That was a bad joke, considering half of them literally got decimated on that mission.

The mission was botched from the start. Whether it was a false reading or an anomaly, the yellow gate turned into a red one, and they had lost half of their squad when they managed to escape the gate. At that point, the city only evacuated the area around the gate since it was only a yellow dungeon.

Immediately, Nolan called the main base to ask for support. In an emergency, the military could use a group teleport scroll to send their personnel to a faraway place, although it was very costly to do so. But the lives of the whole town were at risk, so the Captain thought it was worth the cost.

Or so he thought. The major didn’t think so.

[Just put a barricade around the city, let the dungeon break, and bomb everything]

"What?" Nolan was understandably flabbergasted. "But the evacuation is still underway, Sir! There won’t be enough time until the dungeon break!"

[That’s why I said barricade, you idiot! Who said to let them out? You need something to make those bests busy while the airstrike is on the way!]

At that moment, Agni had no idea if it was a serious order or just something to set the Captain up. Even an idiot like him knew it forced Nolan to choose between people and order.

Only...it was never a choice for someone like him. Nolan Hertz would always choose the people. And...well, what outcasts like them would do except help this helpless leader of them?

They set up the barricade, but only around the already evacuated area. While they were still evacuating the whole city, they also set up traps and got ready to face the beasts, ignoring the Major’s order.

It was a gruesome fight, and more of their comrades were lost. But they did it. Agni had no idea how, but they did it. He felt like dying, but they did it. For the whole thirty years of his life, he never felt that proud of himself. Finally, for the first time, as he saw the faces of the citizens crying in relief, he could understand the Captain’s choice.

For about an hour, while grieving for their comrades’ lives, they also tasted what it felt like to be called a Hero.

Yeah, just for an hour.

When the major found out, he sent military police instead of praise. The four of them, the only four that were left, were thrown into prison and charged with negligence of duty by causing a dungeon break, as well as insubordination and failure to obey orders.

After the loss of many lives, shedding their blood, sweat, and tears...they were treated as criminals instead of being hailed as a hero. Of course, the insidious order of bombing the place without evacuating the citizens never came forward. Their reputation as outcasts made their defense stamp as lies. The residents of the town, who had called them heroes before, suddenly turned against them.

Bribes? Threat? Agni had no energy to think about it because the damn court sentenced their Captain to death. Not even life imprisonment. Death. Perhaps to prevent any retrial in the future.

Agni had no idea what came onto him at that time, but he pleaded to lower the Captain’s sentence by taking the blame, saying he was the one who forced the Captain to make that choice.

Somehow, it worked. Instead of the death sentence, they were exiled to the Borderland. The Captain was tied by the contract to stay in the Borderland for as long as the Deathzone still stands.

Or until his death.

Which, unfortunately, came faster than any of them could predict.