Belated Judgment (V): The Only Craft He Excelled At

The Mountains's machine spirit was keening—but merely describing it that way was not quite accurate.

Strictly speaking, its cries did not enter Karyl's ears directly. The darkness helped it. The machine spirit's voice rumbled through the darkness, recounting all that had come before.

Rusting metal, erased Aquilas, filthy evil spread across the hull—the Mountains's machine spirit was terribly weak, on the verge of dispersing, yet it still existed. Like a dying soldier lying in a trench, stubbornly feeling through a heap of corpses for his gun.

He needed the gun to complete his mission, but he had gone blind. Unable to distinguish what he needed amid blood and bodies, he could only reach out with his fingers, little by little, and howl.

Karyl truly heard that cry.

He stopped and surveyed the vast sand pit.

The traditions inherited by the War Hounds had long since diverged greatly from the cruel displays once held on Nuceria, yet what he saw now was enough to make him feel as though an age had passed—the corpses buried beneath the sand had returned.

Some had rotted away, while others still retained flesh. Fresh, steaming blood stained them dark red, so vivid that the sand could no longer simply be called "yellow sand."

A slave master's masterpiece. A bloody grindstone. A shortcut to utter inhumanity.

Karyl slowly raised his head.

He saw a banner hanging from the top of the pit, tattered, bloodstained, and torn in many places along its edges.

What color and design it had originally possessed could no longer be determined with the naked eye alone, for a massive eight-pointed star of Chaos had befouled everything upon it. Skinned faces taken from loyalists had long since replaced the banner's original fabric.

Expressionless, Karyl raised his right hand, pressed his fingers together, held