🔊 TTS Settings
Chapter 26
That autonomous squad was extremely large. The total number of members ran into the dozens, and among them there were seven of Pascal’s children alone.
There was even a rare healer. A nineteen-year-old girl with a peculiar way of speaking, Sera Pascal.
“Your hair’s like dried rose petals. Your eyes look like cherry candy. A little red fox! Huh? Why does this one only have one eye? A one-eyed eagle!”
She tended to their wounds, which had festered because they’d wandered the ruins without receiving proper treatment.
They also met another of Pascal’s children who possessed the unusual ability to handle summoned creatures: an eighteen-year-old quiet boy, Is Pascal.
“Hi, juniors. Did you happen to pick up any seeds in the ruins? Want to trade them for something of mine? My flowerpot happens to be empty right now…”
The group quickly became close with the existing Pascal’s children. Moreover, the people in this autonomous squad seemed accustomed to Pascal’s children.
Rita thought she would be able to live well here.
It was a vain hope.
She began to sense something was wrong when missions were being assigned.
“You guys are skilled, so something like this isn’t hard for you, right?”
“This should be easy for Pascals.”
The level of missions given to ordinary squad members and those assigned to Pascal’s children were different.
“We bought food supplies! It’s nice to visit the city after a long time, but whew, it was heavy—nearly killed me.”
“The city? Even if Pascals go to the city, it’s hard for them to trade properly. You’d be lucky not to get scammed. We’ll handle the trading, so you just do what you’re good at.”
“What’s this, you only caught this many monsters? You even got injured? That’s disappointing. We completed all our trades exactly as planned!”
“Sorry, but we’ll have to reduce your allocation this month. You didn’t meet the mission targets. Those are the rules of our squad, so there’s nothing we can do.”
“Securing supplies was a huge success, so we should get a bonus. This is our share too. You should’ve done better yourselves.”
“Our squad members each do what they’re best at and receive distributions according to their work. That’s fair, right?”
It wasn’t fair.
Seven people—plus the newly joined Rita, Gid, and Ollie—made a total of ten Pascals, and they were given dangerous and demanding missions: monster subjugation, reconnaissance of new areas, securing travel routes, searching ruins, mandatory participation in defensive battles, tracking wanted criminals, and so on.
The other squad members’ missions were comparatively safe and simple: selling loot and purchasing supplies in the “city” inside the final defensive line, maintaining the camp, repairing equipment, socializing with other autonomous squads, preparing meals, cleaning, and the like.
The missions assigned to the Pascals were generally excessive, making it difficult to meet the targets. In contrast, the other squad members easily exceeded their goals.
As a result, Pascal’s children were always short on distributed supplies, while the others had plenty.
“You’re injured and short on medicine? Can’t be helped—we’ll share our portion. But we’ll put it down as a debt, okay?”
They were assigned missions where they wouldn’t get hurt, then lent their surplus medicine to the Pascals, who were injured every time. In return, they took even more supplies.
“You need to take down at least one named monster this month. An autonomous squad needs that level of results for headquarters to provide support. You don’t want to go crawling around the ruins starving again because you ran out of supplies, do you? Try harder.”
“You can do it, right? You’re Pascals.”
All the results reported to headquarters as an autonomous squad were produced by Pascal’s children. But the ones who enjoyed the rewards were the other squad members.
“Try harder. Then you’ll get more.”
“You didn’t meet the target. We did. So this is only natural.”
Two months after joining, Gid said,
“This isn’t natural. Right, Rita?”
Rita nodded.
“These people won’t do anything difficult or dangerous at all. Because we’re strong, they dump everything on us and take more supplies for themselves. They’re polite on the surface, but in reality… they’re worse than our previous squad.”
They decided to leave this autonomous squad—together with the other Pascal’s children who were effectively being used like slaves here.
“But… if we leave here, where are we supposed to go?”
“Other squads are worse. Some places don’t even treat Pascals like people. At least here they give out supplies according to work done. They even pay wages.”
“At least we can refuse missions, even if it means going a bit hungry. I almost died in my previous squad.”
“There are Pascals over eighteen here. They say Pascal’s children usually die young and have trouble making it past eighteen. Compared to that, this place is livable.”
“If you don’t belong anywhere, you have to wander those contaminated ruins to survive. You’ve done it too, so you know—that’s… too hard.”
“It’s not like we can live inside the final defensive line anyway. For us, this is the best option.”
The oldest among them, Sera Pascal, was only nineteen.
An average age of fifteen. Weapons who knew nothing but fighting monsters. Pascal’s children with such high mortality rates that surviving past eighteen was difficult.
Orphans without the right to live inside the final defensive line. Children so easy for adults to cajole and tame.
Having spent years in this squad and grown accustomed to being exploited, most of the Pascal’s children were passive about escaping. Only Sera and Is responded positively to the suggestion to leave.
“It pisses me off that we can’t get treated because we don’t have supplies to borrow, even when there’s medicine! Little fox and one-eyed eagle, if I follow you, at least you won’t stop me from using the medicine we have, right? Right? Huh?”
“I finally managed to get water and fertilizer for my flowerpot, but they took it away, saying it had to be shared. The flowers I’d just sprouted dried up and died. They say flowerpots are a luxury. Yeah, I know, but still… I want to grow flowers. If I go with you, can I do that?”
As Rita was discussing where they would go with them, she suddenly said,
“If it’s just us, anything’s possible. As long as what we earn doesn’t get taken away, we’ll have enough supplies.”
“So instead of looking for a place to go, we make our own place.”
Gid picked up on her idea.
“Yeah, that’s it, Rita. We can just live on our own.”
“Let’s make a new autonomous squad. A squad made up only of us—only Pascal’s children.”
At that dreamlike goal, Ollie pointed out a problem.
“Making an autonomous squad is free, but getting officially recognized by headquarters is going to be a pain in the ass. Especially for Pascals like us—all minors, no birth records. Damn it, they’ll definitely demand an adult with citizenship as a guarantor.”
“And we’ve got a record of shooting the squad leader and deserting! An unrecognized autonomous squad is no different from a band of raiders! There’s a reason no one can escape this shitty flea-infested den for no reason!”
Despite the realistic objections, Gid didn’t panic.
“There’s something I gained while staying here.”
He pulled out a small notebook.
“Contact information for city businesses that trade with autonomous squads. Some of them are illegal black-market dealers.”
“A client list? The squad leader must’ve hidden that with his life on the line—how did you get this? Black-market dealers too? Don’t tell me you—”
“A guarantor who’s an adult with citizenship? We can buy one. The money to buy that? We earn it by selling monster byproducts. A record of desertion? You already know—headquarters doesn’t care who belongs to an autonomous squad. They only care about the squad’s results.”
As his plan rapidly took shape, the children stared in amazement. Gid narrowed his one remaining eye and proposed,
“Alright, then think about it. What kind of place do you want the autonomous squad we’ll make to be?”
Among the children who could barely keep up with his ideas, only Rita—who had been imagining the future since the moment she first brought it up—answered immediately.
“I want it to be a place that serves as a guidepost for Pascal’s children like us, wandering the ruins or lost with nowhere to go. Like a lighthouse in the fog.”
And so the blueprint for the autonomous squad called Beacon was drawn.
The process of leaving the autonomous squad “Pair” was not smooth.
There was no way the squad members would welcome the escape of the slaves they had been exploiting so well. The tamed Pascal’s children were passive toward change.
After conflict and persuasion, an escape plan was barely put together.
However, just before the plan was carried out, one of the Pascal’s children who had agreed to go with them betrayed them and reported them to the squad leader.
“Our squad rewards devoted members, and likewise hands down harsh punishment to traitors. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
While Rita and Gid were out on a subjugation mission, the children who remained behind were tortured. Ollie, Sera, and Is didn’t say a single word to the end, but another child spilled the entire plan.
All of them were taken hostage.
“Renew your oath. Swear that you’ll devote yourselves fully to the autonomous squad Pair. Then I’ll forgive you.”
Re-swearing was something rarely done because of the many side effects and dangers. If done wrong, you might not become a sworn member again—instead, you could be broken during the process of dissolving the old oath and end up ruined.
The leader of Pair, gripping Ollie’s throat as he lay battered and broken, demanded that Rita and Gid re-swear.
Gid clenched his teeth. Rita saw Sera, who was tied beside Ollie, signal with her eyes. She whispered to Gid,
“I’ll pretend to dissolve my oath and detonate my od, so you save them.”
“What? Detonate what?”
