The Last to Take Their Seats Before Doomsday

The Black Calamity had been underway for nearly a month, but Krim Fortress, on the southern frontier of Transia, remained quiet.

Not far from there, Transians were building defenses at a frantic pace around the entrance to the Filthy Swamp. Rumor had it that criminals were being worked to death every day, but the cruel barbarians wouldn't let them stop.

They even had kobolds supervise the work, subjecting the prisoners to both physical and psychological torment.

Rebellions broke out one after another, but the People's Army reservists stationed on the Maginot Line always managed to put them down quickly. Lord Kudell even treated them as a kind of "quasi-military operation," using them to improve the young men's discipline and organizational skills.

It sounded inhumane.

The problem was that these criminals weren't locals.

With Transia in such a dire state, Mirian, the governor, wished she could split every person in half to get twice the work out of them. Transia didn't even have a prison system, so everyone convicted of a crime was sent straight to the Maginot Line to do forced labor.

Half the criminals on that line came from the Kingdom of Nordtov. The Wolf Queen continued her crafty "aid strategy," organizing the criminals into an army and sending them to Transia as Nordtov's contribution to the war against the Black Calamity.

It was obviously a case of pulling a fast one.

But Transia was short on workers, so the governor gritted her teeth and accepted it.

When the Carnations across the border saw that this could be done, they followed suit. Apart from the first fifty thousand border guards they'd sent as reinforcements, Marshal Loren also rounded up every criminal in East Prussia and Saxony with more than six months left on their sentence and sent them to