At the Construction Site, a tower crane rose high into the sky. Poet sat at the very tip of its jib, rain soaking him through, yet all he felt was exhilaration.
Beneath the crane came a cacophony of clamor and shouts.
There were more and more Infected. At first, there had only been a few hundred, but now, at a glance, their numbers had exceeded three thousand.
And the number was still growing. Infected continuously streamed in from the refugee encampments, joining this riot driven by emotion. Poet estimated that its final scale might reach ten thousand.
He watched the frenzied crowd below with great interest, thinking that only a scene like this was worth watching. Back in Grulu's mining district, he had spent considerable time conditioning the local survivors, but the place had been too desolate, with hardly anyone passing through.
Poet shook the rainwater from his body and rose to his feet in high spirits.
The horizontal steel beam was slick with rain, but Poet displayed an uncanny sense of balance. Swaying slightly, he raised both arms and assumed the pose of a symphony conductor—
He waved his nonexistent baton to the right and said, "This side, be enraged."
Then he flicked his fingers to the left. "This side, despair."
Both hands thrust forward. "And over here, you must hate!"
The Infected below let out roars and charged recklessly at the approaching convoy!
They had all gone mad. Even when run over by vehicles, they refused to retreat. They used bricks, shovels, and other tools from the Construction Site to smash the vehicles, even clawing at them with their nails and ramming them with their heads, their behavior almost utterly stripped of humanity!
The team members inside the vehicles were somewhat stunned. Seeing the refugees, usually listless and