Little People and Great Figures

"How come you're looking at me like that, Hans?"

After hanging up the "phone," Lothar looked at Hans in confusion.

The mood he had been building would have seemed overly sentimental if he brought it up now. Hans composed himself, flashed a mouthful of white teeth, and beamed. "It's nothing, my lord. I just feel like I'm a big figure now too."

Lothar found that rather baffling.

If anyone counted as a big figure, Hans, as one of his Left and Right Arms, had long been one in the eyes of the Crusader nobles. Why was he suddenly getting sentimental about it now?

"Of course you are, Big Figure Hans. Let's go. The ceremony is about to begin."

The ceremony he referred to was a large-scale execution.

Besides the public coronation, city procession, and banquet on the first day, Kools had led a force to purge the resistance within the city, including many diehards.

These people were far more devout than the Saracens who had fled by ship. They were true hardliners with no value in being reformed, so they became an example to cow the rest.

According to the interrogations, most of them were actually pilgrims from elsewhere, with very few locals among them.

After all, Alexandria had a strong commercial atmosphere. Latin merchants, Greek merchants, and Persians came here in an endless stream every year to trade. It was the largest port in the entire Mediterranean Sea apart from Constantinople.

Compared to it, Port Ayla was merely an up-and-coming junior, its population only just having surpassed fifty thousand.

For a fanatical Zoroastrian to live in a city filled with Greeks, Jews, and Copt heretics was hardly easy.

Apart from those diehards, there were also gang members who had taken advantage of Alexandria's chaos to commit crimes and robbery,