Six days later,
On a rough road near the No-Man's Zone.
Little White Tiger and Old Ninth huddled in the cab with narrowed eyes. The bumpy trail nearly jolted the bile out of them.
Chun Prefecture was drawing closer, but the two of them were in increasingly bad shape.
"Hang in there a little longer. We're almost at the Settlement Town where I usually stop. We can get something hot to eat there."
The driver felt in his pocket, found he had run out of cigarettes, and could only press harder on the accelerator.
Screeech-
The truck, running at full throttle, suddenly braked hard.
Little White Tiger nearly flew out of the cab.
"What happened?"
"Fuck, just our luck. Highway robbers."
The driver was clearly an old hand and showed little panic at running into robbers.
He took a stack of cash out of a drawer and called to the people outside the window, "Brothers, thanks for your hard work. Mind moving aside? Here's a little money for you boys to buy some smokes."
"They're not robbers."
Old Ninth had sharp eyes and immediately saw that they weren't bandits.
The Overlord Stronghold had the most ruthless highway robbers, but Old Ninth had seen its people, and their bearing was completely different from that of the group before him.
Seven men stood spread out on either side of the road.
Both Old Ninth and Little White Tiger could sense something deliberate about their positioning, though they couldn't say exactly what.
These seven clearly weren't people from outside the city, either. The armed thugs and bandits out here had skin rough enough to use as gauze. These young men all carried camouflage packs, and their skin had more of a sheen than that of people outside the city.
"We don't want money,"