Those old bureaucrats, local tyrants, and evil gentry whose sources of wealth Count Boles had cut off with his iron-fisted purge in Herwenham—some even left with their families ruined and dead—also turned their eyes in secret, amid fear and resentment, toward this band of "lawless" "mobs."
Openly or covertly, they provided intelligence, provisions, even weapons, hoping to borrow these "blades" and hack at the Old Marshal they hated to the bone.
Gustav was no fool. He was happy to accept this "aid," and he knew full well what abacuses those lords were clacking in their heads, but he did not care.
What he wanted was to survive, to let the people who followed him survive, to demand blood debt from this unjust world!
What king's law, what nobles, what lords—in his eyes, they were all bullshit! All maggots sprawled on the bodies of poor folk like them, sucking blood!
Boles? That old fellow from the Royal Capital, the one who was supposedly going to "rectify the administration of officials" and "return the fields to the people"?
Hmph, his words sounded sweeter than song! Who knew if he was just another one come to scrape the earth bare? Even if he really was an "incorrupt official," could the local tyrants he killed and the fields he seized fill the tens of thousands of starving mouths under Gustav's command?
They could not! This world had rotted through long ago! Rather than count on others, better to count on the blade in your own hand!
And so his force grew larger and larger like a rolling snowball, from dozens to hundreds, to thousands, and then to the present, with tens of thousands gathered under him, howling over an entire region.
He was no longer satisfied with petty raiding and looting. He began deliberately