The Fallen War Zone

After flying forty or fifty li southeast, they saw a cluster of campfires laid bare by the lakeside.

Wild horses neighed, men traded lewd banter, and women wept.

Gondola concealed itself amid the dark clouds. Duru looked down at the crowd below, confusion flickering in his eyes.

"My lord, it seems that pregnant woman used us as a gun," Duru muttered as he looked at the men drinking and eating meat, as well as the men, women, old, and young locked in cages nearby.

Like the pregnant woman from before, the people in those cages wore only animal hides. Some were even naked, huddled and trembling in the biting spring chill.

Angel said blandly, "You only realized that now?"

"That pregnant woman deliberately pointed us in this direction so that we would run into these people." Duru spat. "Those people look like nothing good. If we were ordinary people, what she did would have been throwing us straight into a pit of fire. I never thought that woman's heart could be so black! What a waste of the fur coat you gave her, my lord!"

"Do you think that, after seeing us fly brazenly up to her in Gondola, she would have taken us for ordinary people?" Angel did not seem particularly bothered. "And judging from the way she answered your questions, she was not wrong. She did not want to answer us, and we were looking for signs of human habitation. The place she pointed out was correct, and these people could also count as signs of habitation."

"It was just that she harbored ill intentions and wanted to use our hands to deal with them."

Duru grunted. "Lord Pat, aren't you angry?"

"Do you want to fly back and teach her a lesson?" Rather than answer whether he