Tyre! (13)

"So you failed to see what the Shadow Prince was thinking?"

An ordinary question challenged every member of the Blades of Delirium squad. After a moment of silence, Karel, the squad's last member, answered it.

"It wasn't that he didn't want to evacuate those refugees. He simply couldn't."

His low voice echoed through the dark chamber shrouded by the Holy Bone Stele.

Delion, Val, Brest, and Dari turned their helmeted heads toward their captain. Ever since Lord Commander Silas had disappeared, the remaining Blades of Delirium had fought separately, until the Shadow Prince used special means to gather them once more.

But after regrouping, only fifty-five Blades of Delirium remained. Diego organized those fifty-five men into eleven squads, temporarily placing them under Nutans's command.

Now, those eleven squads were making Tyre's final stand.

Only when the enemy had reached the city gates did the Imperium government finally begin an organized evacuation of the civilians stranded in Tyre.

First came the workers, then the various technical personnel, and finally the soldiers.

Farmers and proletarians were placed at the very end of the evacuation plan. They could only wait anxiously at the docks or city stations, but Guk's sudden crossing of the Witlier Grand Canyon had made the western land routes impassable. Any spontaneous civilian evacuation had become even more impossible.

"Once Gramatia falls, the Imperium will be like a farm whose granary has burned down. It was easy enough to feed twenty people before, but now... it can't even feed ten. These millions of refugees, these millions of mouths—the Imperium has no way left to resettle them."

"The Imperium only has twenty-five million people now. Losing one twenty-fifth of them at once... isn't that too great a price?"

Dari could not help questioning it.

"Do you know how much food the