Desecration

Four Salivitian men and a woman walked into view.

They were all dressed in billowy linen shirts, long overcoats, some finer than others, wore loose trousers, and had sashes tied around their waists. They depicted what Ilyas thought actual scouts looked like from the Wasteland Crusador.

The only indicator of their allegiance was the silver helmets, each with an amber plume hanging from the back. The Salivitian helmet. They removed them and held them at their sides. Perhaps wearing them was a mere formality.

From a distance, their faces looked normal, but gazing intently at one of them, Ilyas felt a deep chill weakening his body.

There was an uncanny, unnerving wrongness to them.

They looked, dressed and behaved like humans, but an ordinary person like him could hear his instincts begging him to stay away from those predators.

When one focused solely on their separate features, they'd see nothing wrong, but when gazing at their faces as a whole...

'Oh. Oh shit.'

Ilyas tightened his grip on a branch to stop himself from shivering. 

As Alexander had predicted, four of the scouts loitered silently about the area, thoroughly surveying their surroundings. Meanwhile, their squad leader, a brawny man in his mid-thirties with trimmed black hair and a scruffy beard, peered intently ahead, as if sensing something amiss.

"What is it, Krug?" One of them called out. He seemed the charming sort: fine face, chiselled jaw and a permanent charismatic look in his narrow eyes. 

Krug, their leader, turned to him, sparing him half his attention and said, "Be quiet, Rum. Wait for me here."

Rum sighed and turned back to his group with one hand slipping under his garment and scratching his chest absentmindedly. 

The three others smirked and mocked him by putting their fingers to their lips. He sighed. 

Finding nothing else to do, and with their leader's orders to stay put, they decided to rest on the trail.

They lowered the large haversacks they were carrying and made a makeshift camp, as if unsure whether to commit to rest. 

The woman of the group shuffled closer to Rum, raised his arm, and forced herself into his embrace, resting her head on his chest. 

"Ever so cautious you are, Ferra," Rum cooed.

She giggled. "Well, Rummy, we have been working nonstop for a whole week, I say I deserve this at least." 

"Get in the bushes, you freaks!" Their lanky companion bantered. He had a mischievous grin on his face while watching the couple with a pear in his hand. 

Rum cocked his head at him and scoffed. "You cannot keep projecting your envy at us, Curt. Go show 'em your scars and the gals would be all over you in no time."

"We don't care for scars," Ferra purred. 

Rum turned to her and smirked. "Oh yeah? Then how come your fingers always-"

"Why are we getting so comfortable now?" The silent and glum Salivitian asked reproachfully. His eyes were fixed on Krug, who was near the Manor's gates, thinking contemplatively. 

Rum sighed, nudged Ferra off, and sat up. Ferra returned to her spot begrudgingly but got over it after a few seconds.

"Just a scout, Rye. Relax." Rum huffed.

Rye smiled wryly and rubbed his eyes. "And scouts carry information, you plastic-faced bastard." He reached out to one of the haversacks and retrieved a folded newspaper. "Runners. You can't catch them if they don't want to be caught. Blitzing back and forth between their Processions and their stakeout, letting them know our every move. Do you know how many losses we faced because of those slimy shits? Like it or not, they're the most powerful weapon they have." As he unfolded the newspaper, a piece of paper slipped from between the pages. Rye seemed to have already read it, as he barely paid it any mind before returning it to the haversack. 

Curt snorted. "Oh, yeah? Boss is a Runner too, then, is he not?"

Rye turned to him and raised an eyebrow. "And did he find them yet?"

Rum leaned back again, propped himself with an elbow, reached for another, much larger haversack, and untied it. "Who cares anyway? We're winning the war by far."

Ferra chuckled, "They call themselves the 'Retreat', how cute."

Rum nodded and added, "Our stomachs are always full; they only have one Congruent, that tricky silver bastard, but we have Sera, Yuros, Holden, Gordon, and our General is Harmonic. Let them have all the information they want, all it's gonna do is make them wet themselves before we come for them in the end."

In that moment, their Captain stepped into their camp, clenched his jaw in frustration and said grumpily, "He's staking us out, waiting for us to move on."

The other four stared at him, then burst into laughter. All except for Rye.

Krug sighed, then sat down with them. "We'll see how long he'll last. He either shows himself or dies waiting. Either way, our job is not to let him reach the Twentieth Procession."

Alexander, Cenric and Ilyas all twitched at Krug's assessment. Ilyas quickly turned to Alexander to gauge their situation, but saw only horror in those blue eyes. Something akin to primal fear and dread. Cenric held his breath; that was an anomaly in and of itself. They couldn't express much, so their slight reactions said a lot.

Ferra pouted and returned to Rum's side, hugging his arm, "Agh, that's no fun!"

Rum grinned, then looked about his surroundings. "You hear that, Runner!" He bellowed to the forest. "Be a gentleman and don't disappoint the misses! Come out, now, please!"

Curt retrieved a dagger and pointed it at Rum playfully, "Just take out the food, Rummy?"

Ilyas watched them intently while his guts churned with unbearable trepidation.

They felt... too human.

They felt imminent.

Their casualness and confidence were that of a group of fishermen on a boat, waiting for the fish to bite foolishly on the hook. 

They were bantering and resting, but Ilyas was the prey. He was their query. He was their sustenance, and they were waiting for him to feed them.

'Oh dear god. Oh dear. Oh shit. Oh Goddamit. I'm so screwed. We're screwed.' 

Rum finally took out his hand from the haversack with a long, large, bloody mass wrapped in parchment paper in his grasp. He laid it in the centre of their makeshift camp and gestured with his hands as if to say, 'My job is complete. '

The rest of the group attended to their tasks, preparing a fire and retrieving plates and spices from separate haversacks.

Ferra grabbed the bloody thing, unwrapped the parchment paper, and revealed something that made Ilyas retch. Thankfully, the brass mask forced it back in, but Cenric and Alexander already saw him lean over and clutch his stomach.

'Agh! What the...'

Ferra grabbed the knife Curt offered her and started skinning the human leg. 

It was white and had hairs here and there. Belonged to a male. It was severed from the upper thigh and included everything until the ankle. The foot was cleaved off. 

Ilyas forced himself to watch the scene, feeling utterly disturbed, disgusted and brimming with fear and anger. 

'How? How...'

Ilyas had already known what they were facing, but knew it only as a matter of fact. Now he understood and felt it. 

How others could treat their own kind's flesh like supper. A trivial matter.

How he wasn't at the pinnacle of the food chain, and that their hoarded intelligence was now democratised.

How he was stranded in the midst of it all, just as likely to be feasted on by a group of people who hadn't even killed him or known who he was.

How weak he was.

Ferra continued to slowly unskin the leg masterfully. Not much meat was removed with the skin, leaving the underside of the skin a very subtle shade of pink. Human fat hugged the thigh muscles and wiggled with each movement of the blade.

Ilyas wanted to retch again, but he stopped himself.

It was unwise.

The other Salivitians in the group were finished with their tasks and came to help Ferra carve out their favoured pieces of meat. They all seemed to favour those trapped between the fat and the bone on the thigh. 

Then, the cuts were given to Krug, who seasoned them generously with an assortment of spices. Salt, pepper, and others, Ilyas couldn't discern.

A pan was already on the fire, seething almost as much as Ilyas was. 

He hadn't blinked for a while. All he could do was chew over the fact that the Salivitian group was having a fun, lively gossipping session, while a slain fellow human was being carved and prepared, not finding peace even in death.

It was a desecration of an incomprehensible degree, and Ilyas was a witness to it. 

His eyes threatened to leave their sockets.

The seasoned meat chunks fell into the pan, and a sizzling sound echoed across the area; the smell...

Oh, the smell.

It stirred something blasphemous inside.

It wasn't supposed to exist.

It was the final straw. Alexander and Cenric seemed accustomed to this harrowing sight, so their only horror was knowing that they had to face these bastards in the end. 

Well, there will be no end.

Ilyas wasn't about to let them indulge in their meals and quench their hunger. He wasn't going to watch a human be eaten right before his eyes. He was weak, but he was also facing death in the eye for the third time this week. And from those experiences, he learned one thing:

He could either be pathetic and let things happen as they are, or he could do as his father and his guts told him. 

His mask seemed to want it, so why couldn't he?

'I see.'

The plan was there. The risk was constant. Their only way out was clear.

The guts to do so...

Ilyas had always been a pretty timid and sensitive fella. He'd blush easily, fret easily, scare easily, panic when faced with multiple gazes, and overthink when he assumed a stare was judging him.

However, he also felt indignant quite easily, and when the right strings were plucked, enraged quite easily. But the anger had to fight through many things to show itself, most gruelingly, his debilitating fear.

In this case, the anger finally surpassed the fear, and Ilyas stood up.