Chapter 149: Discontent.
Elias, on the other hand, was clearly about to lose his mind.
"Am I the only sane person here?"
Ryan found Elias’ question weird. Sure, Vincent was a piece of work, but the rest of them were more or less normal, at least by the standards of people who had been thrust into a magical world and forced to conquer the city of a fallen civilization, which happened to be crawling with vile creatures that feed on flesh.
He looked around the group before clicking his tongue.
"Except for Vincent, I think the rest of us should be more or less mentally stable."
Elias stared blankly at him for several seconds.
"Andrea just won an impossible war and is now planning the early demise of a corrupted deity, Damien is a walking dead man that is obsessed with power, and you think they are both good people..."
He didn’t say a word out loud. At this point, there was no point doing so. Trying to convince these people that something was wrong with them would probably only make him look like the crazy one.
Ryan, meanwhile, seemed perfectly content with his own assessment. Compared to everything they had already experienced, their current situation didn’t seem particularly strange to him.
Elias could only sigh internally.
"I’m definitely the only sane person left in the Round Table."
Andrea was getting tired of listening to all of them. The conversation had already drifted far enough from anything useful, and they still had hundreds of exhausted survivors depending on them.
She looked towards the others and spoke coldly.
"Organise the survivors and let’s move on. There’s no saying what we will find or what will find us if we stay here for too long."
Her words immediately brought the conversation back to reality.
Vincent wasn’t the type to care about the condition of ordinary people, but for some reason, he suddenly asked a question that everyone else had probably been considering.
"Are we going back to the surface? The Eidolon army has completely been terminated and the Chief has died by your hands. We have nothing to fear. We are the dominant race of the ruins of humanity."
Andrea didn’t need to think it through.
She shook her head.
"The camp is gone now. The freezing cold and unpredictable blizzards can still take the lives of what’s left of us. People like us might be able to survive up there for a while, but consider that most of us are now low-level Awakened, with the majority being no different from ordinary humans."
She glanced towards the exhausted survivors gathered nearby.
"They’ve already survived one war. Sending them back into that frozen wasteland without shelter would only put them in another one."
Andrea’s expression remained calm as she continued.
"There’s a passage that will lead us close to the ruins. We will protect everyone from monster attacks till we reach the city."
The decision was simple.
They couldn’t stay here, and they couldn’t risk sending the survivors back through the frozen wasteland. Whatever awaited them underground was still unknown, but at least they had a destination.
... ...
Seris prepped up a little wooden crate and jumped onto it, Damien was right beside her, but he wasn’t inclined to take center stage, he’s learnt that allowing your lesser to grow by experiencing what you do not wish to experience yourself is the best way to help them grow, or so he heard Vincent mention once.
"Everyone." Seris called out loudly, until most survivors stopped what they were doing and started to pay attention.
Seris continued. "The round table has come to a decision, everyone is to start packing their belongings immediately, the supplies that need to be moved will be distributed among different groups so the work will be efficient and fair, we are to start moving deeper into the frozen caves before more monsters track us."
By the time she finished speaking, there were more than two dozen people around, they were exhausted and barely had anything to eat for the last two days of fighting, many of them had lost friends and even loved ones.
"Is that all?"
A woman wearing a bloodied long skirt said silently, when Seris and everyone else turned their attention towards her, she suddenly screamed madly.
"Is that all they have for us, haven’t we been through enough, they are strong, they can fight against monsters we can only run from. But my brother is dead out there, his corpse is rotting in the cold... he’s all alone, and now you’re saying that I can’t even go back for him."
Seris quickly shook her head. "No, that’s not it... the camp has been destroyed, and there’s simply no way for us to survive out there..."
"We can’t, but they can." The woman suddenly interrupted. "They are powerful, they have abilities that make them look like God’s, and they would rather use those abilities to keep us silent, underneath their heels, they would sooner see us waste away than help us."
The gathering crowd nodded and reaffirmed the woman’s declaration.
Seris waved her hand frantically as the situation gradually became more and more unstable. Several survivors began murmuring among themselves, their tired faces showing the same frustration as the woman who had spoken. They had spent the last two days fighting for their lives, and now they were being told to abandon what little remained of the lives they had before the battle.
"That’s not true, the high level awakened are doing everything they can for us, they even fought the Eidolons for us."
"They did that for themselves, it’s not like we were the only ones dying." A man said condescendingly.
More voices immediately joined him, making it harder for Seris to speak over the gathering. Some were angry, others simply looked exhausted, but the longer the argument continued, the more difficult it became to convince them.
"The high level awakened have been harassing my sister and many more innocent people, the round table knew and did nothing, and now you want to convince me they have my best interest at heart, what a load of bulshit". A young man yelled in Seris’s direction before picking up a piece of broken ice and preparing to throw it.
But the moment his hand began the motion, a massive black fist covered in miasma suddenly held it in place.