Talula, who had been so aggressive just moments ago, plopped down in her chair and sprawled across the wooden table as if she had deflated.
"I can't keep this act up anymore..."
A weak complaint squeezed out of Talula's mouth.
"Isn't it pretty convincing? A clueless nouveau riche heiress with a powerful desire to dominate—Aaaahhh!!"
Before Orson could finish teasing her, Talula roasted him to medium-well.
"Is this really the only way...?"
Talula grumbled helplessly while Alina smiled and kneaded her shoulders.
"You've worked hard, Talula. Haven't we already tested it? This is the most effective method. Only by exchanging benefits from a position of superiority can we quickly gain their acceptance. It also lets us promote the idea that the infected are harmless without seeming abrupt, and we can also—"
"Use the trade network as cover to connect the villages' intelligence network."
After acting spoiled for a while, Talula sat back up and returned to her usual self.
"Thanks to Orson, we can actually build an intelligence network."
Alina looked at Orson with admiration.
"Yeah. I never expected the communication problem that had been holding back the Guerrilla Force all this time would finally be solved by Orson's Originium Arts. I really did pick up an incredible humanoid signal tower back then."
Talula joked with Orson.
"And there are no phone charges, either. Pretty conscientious of me, right?"
Orson joked back, then noticed that Talula was missing "that thing."
"Big Sis Talula, you forgot your emblem."
"Hm? Oh, I'm still not used to having an official name."
Realizing she had forgotten to wear her armband, Talula took one out and put it on her left shoulder. It was red, bearing a pattern resembling a DNA helix.
Its name was—
The Reunion Movement.
The Stalled Reunion Movement
A full year and two months had passed since Alina woke up.
A lot had happened during that time. Not too much, but certainly not too little.
First, the organization that had gathered around Talula finally settled on a name that would accompany everyone for the rest of their lives: the Reunion Movement.
Orson had suggested the name, and everyone—including Talula, the Abyssal Hunters, the Shield Guards, the Guerrilla Force, and the infected fighters—had chosen it immediately. Perhaps this, too, was the choice of the worldline.
Because of that, all the other names Orson proposed, such as "Chaldea," "Griffin," "Heavy Sakura," "Anti-Entropy," and "Tekkadan," were rejected.
With the change of name and Alina's return, the policies the Reunion Movement had always followed also began to change.
Talula realized the limitations of their old approach. She had personally gone out to invite and take in infected people. Although that could gather plenty of sparks in the early stages, they could not spread into a wildfire because they were too concentrated.
The turning point that completely changed the Reunion Movement's methods came from a development in the Originium Arts of "Orson the Tuner."
The people had always struggled to get their hands on Ursus's official communication devices. Then one day, they discovered that Orson's tuning of an object could make it maintain a special frequency. As long as they made another object with exactly the same frequency, they could send and receive signals. With a little DIY work on an electrically powered signal amplifier, a communicator could be made.
And it operated on an independent frequency with absolute encryption.
"What's truly terrifying is my own talent...!"
Orson, who had crowned himself Terra's Edison, not only failed to understand the difference between Bell and Edison, but was later dragged off by Talula to make a huge batch of communicators in one go, burning himself down into pure white ash.
Thus, the Reunion Movement gained a force capable of bringing about qualitative change—the power of communication, or rather, the power of connection.
Some infected people and impoverished villagers had long since tied their lives to the land beneath their feet. Forcing them to leave and instilling in them the will to seek freedom and warmth was, in a sense, another form of arrogant plunder.
In that case, they would let them remain in their own villages while still giving them a way to access information from the towns outside.
The final result was a trade network in name, linking village nodes together to exchange supplies. On one hand, it improved the living conditions of the northern residents. On the other, it let them more directly perceive the gap between their lives and those in the towns.
After all, once people saw such a disparity, they would more or less unconsciously develop certain emotions.
The noble education Talula had received from Koschei was indeed effective. More than seventy percent of the villages were directly intimidated by Talula's bearing, words, and manners, and readily signed contracts with them.
For the small number of villages clearly under a lord's jurisdiction, Talula would first try to sign an agreement, then use Koschei's identity to probe them.
The greatest advantage of the "Immortal Black Snake" was that no one dared say for certain whether he was truly dead. No one could be sure that the silver-haired Sankta before them was merely talking big.
After slightly changing its operational model, the Reunion Movement no longer focused on "testing the infected and mobilizing them to join us" in every village. Instead, it divided its work into the following elements.
1. Build a trade network and ensure that the existence of the "Reunion Movement" could genuinely improve a village's living environment, increasing its influence and credibility.
2. Deliver luxury goods from outside, provide the villages with information about the outside world and neighboring villages, and make them clearly feel the difference between social classes.
3. Use trade and other means to openly or secretly place several Reunion Movement members in the villages as operators of intelligence nodes. At the same time, gently promote the idea that infected people "are usable labor and need not be feared," allowing people to gradually adapt to and grow accustomed to the presence of the infected through profit.
4. Build an intelligence network capable of monitoring the movements of over eighty percent of the northern Enforcement Teams while allowing villages to exchange information with one another.
Eight months after the Reunion Movement adopted this operating model, more than three-quarters of the villages across the northern tundra had established intelligence and trade networks.
Although they had not deepened their connections further out of concern for "spies" and "moles," the situation had changed enormously compared to the early Reunion Movement, which could only survive around its own strongholds.
Though these villages had not completely accepted the infected as their own people, they would protect infected people out of consideration for profit and had gradually become accustomed to living alongside them.
Some villages even took the initiative to report the infected people they were sheltering to the Reunion Movement, which became one of the main ways the organization recruited fresh blood.
Back at the village, the village chief had accepted the trade Talula proposed earlier, and the group was preparing to leave at the village entrance.
"Thank you so much for your help... My lady, I will take in those infected people. As for the coal our village needs to get through the winter, including those... ahem, cigarettes, I'll leave them in your care."
"And thank you for being content with your current way of life. Otherwise, these city goods wouldn't be worth much profit."
Talula replied with a smile. Her words struck right at the people around them, who had never considered moving closer to the south.
"I'm joking. I know that merely surviving on this tundra is already unimaginably difficult. But even so, I still hope you can come to yearn for the southern towns. After all, yearning is the first step toward action."
"...Yes, my lady. Perhaps you're right."
"Then we should be going. Make good use of those infected people. Their value is more than just a few packs of cigarettes. Of course, there's no harm in getting along well and building a good relationship with them."
Talula nodded to the infected people assigned here, then left the village with Orson and Alina in the off-road vehicle.
"Haaah~~~~"
Once she climbed into the back seat, Talula revealed her true colors again and leaned directly against Alina's shoulder.
"Leader, Lord Orson is still driving. Is this really all right?"
Alina asked with a smile as Talula leaned on her shoulder.
"Orson will be fine. At worst, we can just quietly get rid of him."
"Can I pull over and cry for a while!?"
Orson loudly complained, while Talula and Alina both smiled.
"Now then..."
After the joking ended, Talula took out a map, marked the location of the village they had just visited, and wrote down its needs and the supplies it could provide.
"Mm... The villages in the north have basically all been 'seeded.' Aside from food, which no one has much of, the trade network can already provide mutual supplies for everything else. So the next step, naturally, is to..."
"We're going south, Talula. The goal you told me about back then."
Alina gently stroked Talula's hair beside her, her tone soft and calm.
Though everyone had held this belief, actually uniting the north still left them feeling dazed and unable to quite believe it.
"Yes. Everything before this was merely accumulation. From here on, every step we take will become more difficult."
Talula put away the map just as Orson suddenly slammed on the brakes.
"Stop! Where are you people from? Forget it, I don't care where you came from. Hand over everything valuable you have!"
Several people dressed like drifters gripped battered weapons. Perhaps because an off-road vehicle was such a rare means of transport in the north, they immediately saw Orson's group as fat sheep with plenty to rob.
"Sigh... Alina, Big Sis Talula, wait here for me."
Orson sighed, opened the car door, and walked into the middle of the thugs.
"All right, I'm going to ask three questions. First, have you ever killed anyone?"
Orson held up three fingers, showing no fear toward them at all.
"What? Damn it, who are you looking down on? Of course we've krrr... killed people!"
"The stomach growling completely covered the important part... Fine, second question: have you heard of the Reunion Movement?"
"Huh? What the hell is that? Hurry up and hand over your money and food!"
It seemed this group of bandits knew nothing about the newly formed Reunion Movement.
"Then the final question—Rest Note."
Orson snapped his fingers, and a massive pitch-black shadow of an intangible entity, two people tall, appeared behind him.
"Have you heard of The Silence of the North?"
Before they could answer, Rest Note pounced on the weak and helpless bandits like a grizzly bear.
Sparks Scattered Everywhere
The off-road vehicle chugged back into the settlement. Orson skillfully parked beside a tent, got out, and tossed all kinds of goods from the trunk, including several unlucky fellows who had been knocked unconscious and tied up.
Trying to rob the "leader of the Reunion Movement," the "living manifesto of the Reunion Movement," and "The Silence of the North"—one could only say that this tiny band of refugee thieves had somehow gathered quite a collection of sleeping dragons and fledgling phoenixes.
"Teacher Orson!"
According to the "First Law of Ino," whenever Orson went out on a mission, within three minutes of his return to the village, he would definitely attract the white-haired Liberi boy.
"Good afternoon, Ino. Have you been studying diligently today—Pff!"
Before Orson could finish speaking, Ino's enthusiastic hug nearly knocked the air out of his lungs.
Though the boy still looked slender and frail, the Reunion Movement's increasingly abundant resources had improved his physical condition far beyond what it had been at first.
"Hmph..."
While Ino and Orson were intensely cuddling over here, Sasha on the other side shot Orson a look as though he were garbage.
Orson could understand it. After all, when Alina had stolen away his student, he had looked at Alina the same way.
"Teacher Orson, I learned another new song! Dame da ne, dame yo~"
Ino softly hummed a strange song he had learned from who knew where, and Orson immediately recognized the tune.
"Sounds good. You just need to make your facial expression more like a pinecone candy bean to really capture the feeling."
"0v0?"
Orson rubbed Ino's hair. This boy had originally loved singing more than anyone, but because someone had forcibly inserted an Originium shard into his throat, he had completely lost his voice. Now that Ino could sing again, Orson felt the weathered satisfaction of watching a child he had raised grow up.
"Oh, right. These are this time's gifts."
Remembering something, Orson ran back to the off-road vehicle and brought out several paper boxes.
"This one is for you, Ino. There's a harmonica inside. It's a very interesting little instrument. And Sasha, this switchblade is for you. Young people like this kind of thing, right?"
"A harmonica...? Anyway, thank you, Teacher Orson!" "...Thank you."
"Hahaha, you're welcome—though it would be even better if you didn't try to secretly poke me with some weird mind-control feather while hugging me!"
Ino was acting strange again. To protect his soul, Orson immediately made a break for it.
Not long after greeting the twins, Orson ran into FrostNova, who had also just finished a mission.
"Good afternoon, Snow Rabbit."
Orson waved at FrostNova. When she saw him, she first looked happy, but after noticing Talula and Alina behind him, her expression became somewhat awkward again.
"How did your mission go? Big Sis Talula and I brought you your favorite carrots. Big Sis Talula is so considerate toward her comrades—Pff!"
Orson cheerfully brought a carrot over, only to be sent flying by a snowball FrostNova threw at him.
"Idiot signal man...!"
FrostNova angrily stormed toward the other side of the settlement, but after only a few steps, she turned back, snatched the carrot from Orson's hand, then ran off in a huff while gnawing on it.
"...What was that about? Did her mission run into trouble?"
Before you continue