Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 225: Chapter 225: The Broadcast (1)

Chapter 225: The Broadcast (1)

The convoy came home at noon.

GROAN.

The northern gate opened for a line of transports hauling nine iron cages on open carts, and behind the carts walked ten people who had been dead for six weeks.

It was the time for the ultimate reveal.

Draven walked at the front with his hood down and his face bare in full sun. Aegon walked on his right in dented armor.

Bram came behind them in the back of a wagon with his left arm strapped across his chest and Sella sitting beside him refusing to let anyone else change the dressing.

The crew on the gate saw them.

By the time the convoy reached the second checkpoint the word was already ahead of them. Word travels faster than men.

By the third, there were people in the street. Curious about the hearsays.

No announcement was made. No bells were ringing. Nobody had ordered them to assemble. The word moved so fast that all it took was twenty minutes for the streets to get crowded throughout the Vanguard spires.

Half of them had attended the funeral at the Central Plaza.

They were shocked to see the people who were dead marching through the streets.

Then, somebody started shouting, cheering and it was only a matter of time that the whole street was cheering.

Lady Logcheville was standing on the steps of the Eastern Administrative Hall. She had known about it all, but kept it to herself for the bigger picture.

Aegon came up the road in front of the crowd. Her hands covered her mouth as she was filled with joy and pride.

Beside her, Seraphina Vance was making no sound whatsoever.

Nobody had briefed Bram’s parents.

So Mr. and Mrs. Stonehelm learned that their son was alive from a crowd.

They had closed the shop, because everyone was closing shops. They had walked down toward the transit road with the neighbors to see what the noise was, and Mrs. Stonehelm was still holding a flour towel.

She saw the wagon before she understood what she was seeing.

Bram was sitting up in the back of it with his arm strapped and half his shirt cut away and a bandage running from collarbone to hip.

He was alive.

Mrs. Stonehelm went straight into the road.

Bram got out of the wagon very carelessly as he stumbled while doing it.

She hit him hard enough to stagger him. She got both hands on his face and then his shoulders and then his face again.

She was saying words that were not entirely words. Mr. Stonehelm arrived a second later and simply put his arms around both of them and stood there with his eyes shut.

"Oh dear Lord," Mrs. Stonehelm said. "i thought you were dead!"

"I know, Mum."

"I thought I lost you forever!"

"I’m sorry!"

"Oh my God! You are bleeding through the bandage."

"A bit."

She hit him in the chest, which cannot have helped, and then went back to holding onto him.

The whole road had stopped. The transports had stopped. Nobody was moving anything anywhere, and Halvers, standing on the lead wagon, did not give a single order to fix it.

By evening the reunions had scattered across the city.

---

In a narrow house in the Vaelmont quarter, a woman named Cersi Vaelmont opened her door to her son and did not say anything at all for a long moment.

She had buried a husband on a false charge fourteen years ago. She had been moved out of the Capital in the back of a Vanguard transport with a boy who would not stop asking where his father was.

"You went out through that gate three days ago," she said finally. "I saw it with my own eyes! The whole convoy of your funeral! My son was dead! Do you think this is a joke?!"

"Mother."

"Don’t!" She held up a hand.

"I am angry beyond belief! And you know the reason for it! There is nothing you can do to make up for this! Yes! I understand that you had a mission and had to keep it a secret!"

"Moth-"

"I said NO! Do not interrupt me! You will listen to everything I say today! Lucien Vaelmont! You will hear it!"

Then she pulled him inside and shut the door. It was time for some maternal love.

---

In the outer wards, the Sunshine Orphanage went entirely out of control.

Nyx got as far as the front gate.

A small girl with pigtails saw her, screamed, and ran back inside without a word.

And a few seconds later, the doors came open and roughly twenty children came out of them at once.

She went down under the third wave.

"I knew you weren’t dead!," a boy was yelling from somewhere around her knees.

Max, who was eight and had once challenged a Storm Sovereign to a duel over her honor, stood back from all of it with his arms folded and his jaw set, going red.

"I knew," he said.

"You did not."

"I knew." His voice cracked in the middle. "I told everyone. I told Godmother. I said Big Sis does not die, she is too annoying to die."

Nyx Vespera sat down in the dirt of an orphanage yard with a child on each arm and could not get her voice to work properly.

---

The Lord Commander’s war room did not celebrate.

They put one of the cages on the table.

Lord Tokks bent over it with a glass and read the stamping out loud, letter by letter, while a clerk wrote.

"Foundry mark is Bastion One central works. Crest is Senate procurement, not military. Serial is nine digits, and it is sequential, which means there are eight more like it and they are all on that road out there."

He straightened up.

"There will be a requisition form for these. There will be a transport manifest. And both of those documents have a signature at the bottom, because that is how the Capital has done business for a hundred years."

"Can you get them?" Helion asked.

"Not from here. But somebody in that building can."

Helion said nothing, and Draven said nothing either. Both of them thought of an old woman with a cold cup of tea.

The prisoner took four hours.

He gave up nothing under pressure, which Draven had expected. He gave it up talking, eventually, out of contempt, which Draven had also expected.

Fanatics do not break. They boast.

The important part came sideways.

"You think you found us," the Cultist said, smiling with a split lip. "You think we crawled into their little patrol like rats in a grain ship."

"Did you not?" Helion asked.

"We were given the slot."

The room went still.

"Two positions on the handler roster," the Cultist said. "Signed off. Cleared through their own procurement, with their own paper. We did not sneak past anybody’s guards, Commander. We were walked past them."

He laughed, and it turned into a cough.

"Your Capital has a door in it. It has had a door in it for years. And the man who holds that door is not one of us, that is the beautiful part, he is one of yours. He simply prefers us to you."

That was the last useful thing he said. Just like a crazed fanatic. He was high on the clouds by the way he was speaking.

He would not give a name. He genuinely appeared not to know one.

"Keep him," Draven said afterward. "Alive, isolated, fed. He does not know who arranged it but he knows how the arrangement works. In three months that will matter more than a name."

"Agreed," Helion said.

"There is a condition on the warning I received," Draven said, when the room had emptied.

Helion looked up.

"She asked for no retaliation. Not on the fleet, not on the yards, not on any Capital asset. She was not buying safety. She said if I turn her warning into a reprisal then she has not prevented a war, she has only chosen who starts it."

"And you agreed?"

"I refused."

Helion raised an eyebrow.

"I told her I could tell her what I intended," Draven said, "but that I do not command Bastion Seven, and I was not going to sell her a guarantee I cannot deliver."

Helion was quiet for a moment.

"That was the right answer," he said. "Sit down."

He turned the cage on the table so the serial faced up.

"I am not going to retaliate."

Draven waited.

"Not out of mercy, and not for her," Helion said.

"Because retaliation is precisely what Vast has been fishing for since the day I made that broadcast. He needs Bastion Seven to strike a Capital asset in front of thirteen Bastions. The moment I burn a fuel yard, I am not a Commander defending his people, I am a warlord who attacked the government of humanity. And every neutral Bastion on this continent takes a step back from me."

He tapped the iron.

"So I am not going to attack them."

"Then what?"

"I am going to publish."

He let that sit.

"Their entire operation depended on nobody being able to prove anything. Beasts wander. The Wildlands are dangerous. There is no court on this continent that would call it anything else." Helion’s voice did not rise at all.

"That was their plan, and it was a good one, and it required exactly one thing to work."

He looked at the cage.

"That nobody would be standing there holding the cage afterward."

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