Aureate Autarch rolled over in his bed. Beside him his wife slept soundly, but sleep continued to elude him.
He stood up, walking to the balcony and gazing out at the night sky.
Sleep had been distant ever since his father had died, leaving him as sole ruler of Tarchi.
His small kingdom was surrounded by enemies, and they would be watching for any sign of weakness.
He would need to meet with the Schnee representative tomorrow, after the official coronation.
His heart burned with hatred. He would have to cede even more of his country's mineral rights to those cold-blooded businessmen. But without more Atlesian weaponry, he couldn't stand up to his neighbours.
He clenched his fists.
They knew it too.
They were the reason for it, after all.
They had plunged the region into a war that could only be survived by giving them more and more land, more and more resources.
"Yes. And there is nothing you can do." Came a voice from behind him.
He spun, to find a robed figure behind him.
"Ha! So the Schnee have picked my replacement already, have they?"
The figure laughed, the sound shaking Aureate to his core.
"Let me change the emphasis. I meant to say that there is nothing YOU can do."
Aureate's mind raced. An assassin would have killed him without revealing their presence. A Schnee representative? Probably not. He was meeting with those anyway.
"No, I'm not an assassin. Not a Schnee either."
Could this man read his mind? A hunter then, with a semblance?
"I am not quite a hunter."
He could read his mind. Or at least his face to such a degree that the difference was meaningless. But what did he want? And what did he mean when he said there was nothing Aureate could do? Could he do something, then?
"Yes. In fact, there is a great deal I can do. But I don't intend to do it for free."
Ah, yes. The crux of the matter. Even if this stranger could help, merely replacing the Schnee would do nothing.
"You misunderstand. What I want is merely, to put it in crude terms, a cut of the profits. A small cut too."
This was new. This man was in a position where a small portion of the country's income would be little reward for what would need to be done to preserve the country.
"You cut straight to the heart of this issue. However, I intend to make Tarchi grow until a small cut will more than suffice. In exchange, I want five percent."
This was intriguing. Either the man was mad, or he was the greatest blessing Aureate could have asked for. But what did he mean by five percent?
"Five percent of EVERYTHING. The land, the taxes, the trees, the dust. Everything. Rest assured I will not insist on being paid in advance. Rather, if I do what I promise, you will set aside one twentieth of the rewards, for me to call for at any time for any reason."
For the first time since the "conversation" started, Aureate spoke:
"Very well. I will give anything for the safety of my people. But you forget: You promise a great deal. And you have no proof of your ability to provide any of it."
Again, the laugh came. The horrible sound tore at Aureate's ears.
"Your men are watching the borders, are they not? Camped a day from your southernmost border, one of your rivals has assembled a great army to crush you. Your men have yet to discover it's presence."
Ah. Jakku was making his move, then. Not a surprise, really, given the increased Schnee presence in his territory recently.
"Come dawn, your men will discover their corpses. Consider it a token of goodwill on our part, as well as the proof you seek."
Undeniable proof, too. And, depending on the means, an alternative source of weapons to shore up the defences.
"Indeed. Although I feel I must apologise in advance. Most of the equipment will be rather… wet. Choose some men with strong stomachs."
And with a rustle like a shifting sand-dune, he vanished.
Miles Certus looked down at his map.
He had almost reached the coordinates marked on it, which looked like they would be inside a ravine up ahead.
His spirit swelled with pride. He had been chosen to personally lead this scouting mission, which had been sent through secret channels by the king himself.
The eastern horizon was starting to brighten. They would need to hurry.
He nodded to his second, and the dozen dunehoppers sprang to life.
These curious vehicles, developed specifically for desert use during the Great War, resembled a motorcycle with wide tracks where the wheels ought to be.
They rode across the rocky foothills of the Conlis mountain range, eager to reach their destination before the sun truly unleashed its fury.
Miles estimated another five minutes' journey, when they turned a corner to find themselves face-to-face with a boxy military vehicle.
The men were well-trained. Knowing themselves to be in enemy territory (as well as borders could be defined in the desert), they did not hesitate. All dozen dunehoppers skidded to a stop, experienced drivers turning them as they slowed and ducking behind their machines for cover.
But no fusillade of bullets ricocheted off their vehicles.
No voices called to them to identify themselves.
After a minute's silence, Miles barked an order:
"Haller, go!"
Haller, the most heavily armoured of the group, began to slowly make his way towards the vehicle, ducking from cover to cover as far as he could before making the final 50-meter dash to the silent, unmoving vehicle.
He carefully picked his way around the vehicle to the far side, concealed from sight by the body of the vehicle.
An instant later, he leapt back around the corner and pressed himself up against it, rifle pointed back in the direction he'd come from.
Hands tightened on gun grips as his comrades prepared to provide covering fire for his dash back to the dunehoppers, but then he stood up and slung his rifle back over his shoulder.
He called back to the visibly relaxing men:
"All clear. But you need to see this!"
Dunehoppers were re-mounted as the party converged upon the vehicle.
The sand on the far side was stained red for a pace from the large side-door, which stood open.
The stench of blood not many hour old clung to the interior, which looked like a madman's dream of hell.
The interior of the vehicle had been reupholstered in its former occupants. At least a dozen men's worth of shredded corpses adorned every surface.
Miles and his men were veterans, hardened in war by years of service.
One of them barely managed to get his face-covering desert wraps off before he emptied his stomach on the sand.
The others were visibly shaken.
"Grimm?" asked one.
"Grimm would've trashed the inside. From what I can see, nothing's been touched 'cept…"
Miles pulled himself together. Their objective was unchanged, and the sun had almost fully risen.
"Mount and ride, men! Our orders have not changed."
All were glad to leave the gruesome spectacle behind.
Barely a minute had passed before they discovered the next horrific death.
A motorcycle lay abandoned at the end of a bloody line stretching almost a kilometre before disappearing around a large rock formation, a skeletal mess of blood and bone that had clearly once been a man attached to it by a few metres of chain.
The blood trail happened to coincide with the line Miles had plotted on his map as leading to their destination.
As the men followed the trail of bloody scraps carpeting the ground to its end, they came to a camp clearly intended to serve as an early warning of approaching danger, with a barricade and rows of sandbags obstructing their progress.
Ironic, how all the corpses were facing away from the defences, back towards whatever they were guarding.
This scene of slaughter differed slightly from the scene in the vehicle.
Each man had been killed with a single cut. Some corpses were missing heads, others had been divided into roughly equal sections from shoulder to opposite hip or straight down the middle.
One large vehicle was missing, the camouflage net it had once stood under now vacant. Nearby there was a gap in the line of six motorcycles.
"Okay, this is just disturbing. All these men dead, and not a single sign of an attacker, alive or dead." Haller said.
One of the younger members ventured: "Maybe they took their dead with them?"
"No, each bloodstain has a corpse on it. No extras."
Miles felt his men's morale droop. He glanced around for anything to lift their spirits. He realised something, though he himself wasn't sure of what it meant.
"Look, men. These men were clearly guarding something in that direction, " he gestured in the direction they had been travelling since they had left camp "from unexpected surprises coming from the direction we just came from. However, whatever or whoever killed them came from behind them. Some of them escaped in the first vehicle we saw, but at least one attacker gave chase. We didn't see whether that motorcycle we found was still operational, but I'll wager it ran out of fuel or something. These corpses aren't more than a day old, or they'd have started to bloat already."
He paused, and some of the men nodded, agreeing with his reasoning.
"Now, our objective comes straight from the palace. Since it lies behind this guard post, we will assume for the moment that our objective is what these men were guarding."
He paused once more, trying to find any gaps in his reasoning before deciding there weren't any obvious ones.
"Judging by the important nature of our objective and the short time frame we were given, I will assume that these men were, in fact, guarding our objective. The fact that only a handful of us were sent indicates, to me, that unless Command was unaware of these guards, they expected them to be dead."
Some puzzled faces met his gaze.
"I therefore surmise that these men were killed by someone unconnected to our military, but someone favourably disposed towards our nation. This unrelated force had some reason to kill these men, and felt they'd strengthen ties with Tarchi by contacting the King, or someone in the court, and asking if Tarchi was interested in whatever these men were guarding. The King then ordered Command to send someone to check if all these men were dead, us, and if they are I suppose a larger force will be sent upon us confirming their death to seize what they were guarding."
His men's faces brightened. Potential military gains for Tarchi, the death of Tarchi's enemies and a powerful potential ally? Nothing could be better for men as patriotic as these.
"So we should hurry, as the danger for us lies not in dead men but in the live men who may be coming." Stated Sophos, the oldest man in the group.
The men looked to Miles for confirmation, and he answered by leaping on his dunehopper and setting out towards their objective.
They reached it before a quarter of an hour had passed.
A wide valley stretched before them, with a river running through it.
Most of the valley was filled with an army encampment, though the remains of a mine of some kind occupied the remaining space.
Miles went pale at the sight of the hundreds of tents and temporary buildings that filled the valley. Such a force within a few hours of Tarchi's border? Then he realised the danger he and his men were in.
Even as he swung his dunehopper, the morning breeze shifted and he froze.
Blood.
The valley was saturated with the sanguine scent of death.
He turned his machine back towards the camp, pulling out a small but powerful pair of binoculars.
Nowhere was there movement to be seen.
Waving his hand for his men to follow him, he set off down the gentle incline of the valley towards the silent tents.
A handful of minutes later Miles and his men were staring, ashen white and with set teeth, at the nightmare scene that filled the camp.
Death was everywhere.
Dead men lay in heaps outside the tents, in the path between the tents and between the temporary buildings.
Much like the scene back at the guard post, all seemed to have been killed by edged weapons rather than bullets.
Looking around, Miles was sure that this camp had been intended for an assault on Tarchi. Tanks and personnel vehicles stood in neat rows, with numerous field artillery pieces.
Like all weapons war-torn central Vacuo, the weapons and equipment were old Atlas military surplus, most from back when the country had been called Mantle.
Miles fell into a chair inside one of the mess tents, where no bodies lay.
The scale of the slaughter astounded him.
At least two thousand men had been killed here.
And not a single body lay inside a tent or building.
In the armoury buildings, racks of weapons and ammo stood, clean and ready to fire.
In the administration buildings radio and computer equipment stood in pristine condition.
The dust-powered generators were in perfect working order, or so one of his men claimed.
Miles toyed with the encrypted communicator he'd been issued for the mission.
He didn't want to report.
He certainly wouldn't believe the report he would have to give.
He steeled his nerves and activated the device.
He gave his identifying code, and the codewords he'd been given.
Then he reported, in simple terms, what he and his men had found.