Rowell Camp.
The heavy rain that had just ended washed the blood lingering in the mud into the puddles by the roadside, leaving the fragrance of wet earth tinged with a faint, lingering stench of blood.
However, the people here seemed long accustomed to death, to the point that the blood staining the streets red might as well have been spilled for nothing.
A dense crowd of slum dwellers had gathered before the gate that had earlier been blasted open by 100mm cannon fire, watching the spectacle.
Some lived on the nearby streets, some were slaves who had just been rescued, and others were militiamen from the First Regiment of the Avengers Alliance standing guard at the camp entrance.
At the center of the crowd stood ten militiamen.
White strips of gauze identifying them were tied around their arms, and their hands had been bound behind their backs with plastic restraints. Yet their expressions varied: some were furious, some indifferent, while others looked defiant, uneasy, or hesitant, as though they sensed disaster approaching.
Not far beside them lay the bodies of a man and a woman.
The man appeared to be in his early thirties, and the woman was around twenty-five or twenty-six. They were likely husband and wife. The former's abdomen had been cut open by a bayonet, while the latter had a bloody hole in her forehead. Both bore obvious bruises and wounds, and it seemed they had suffered greatly before dying.
Beside the two corpses, two disheveled girls sat curled up in the mud, wrapped in blankets that barely covered their bodies, trembling uncontrollably. Their expressionless faces were streaked with terrified, vacant tears and stains like muddy water.
The two of them seemed to have forgotten how to cry. They merely let out occasional sounds, like fish