Chapter 353: Beneficiaries

Catherine's pen kept moving.

She filled a page, tore it out, and handed it to Richard.

Richard took it and glanced at the page.

There was no long-winded explanation on the paper, only a few brief lines of text and numbers.

The first line:

“Row B: 10. Row C: 47. Row D: 74. Row E: 29. Row F: 58. Row A: 43. Total: 261.”

The second line:

“Practitioner casualties: Fischer (mild contusion). The rest: 0.”

The third line:

“All 261 dead were refugees. 0 dead were Senior Practitioners or students.”

For the fourth line, she drew a horizontal stroke, and beneath it she wrote: “What are the odds?”

A massive spiritual attack where hundreds of the drowned surged out at once, erupting across all six tent rows simultaneously.

Practitioners were shoved to the ground and suffered a few bumps, while prep students drained their ether and collapsed in exhaustion for a few days.

Montagu maintained a light curtain for ten minutes, nearly face-planting in the mud when his ether bottomed out.

None of these injuries were fatal.

Even the only one to sustain an actual injury, Fischer, had merely been knocked into a bolt by a panicked, burly man—an incident entirely unrelated to the evil creatures.

Two hundred and sixty-one ordinary refugees died, yet not a single Practitioner or student perished.

The Empire's most elite Minor Adept hidden ones appeared precisely in the nick of time.

Equipped with pre-packaged sets of standardized gear, they accurately sealed off every passageway.

For the hour and a half prior, the young Practitioners had been thrust into an environment intense enough to make them break out in a cold sweat and force them to go all out, yet carefully calibrated so they wouldn't actually die.

A chill ran down Richard's spine as he handed the paper back to Catherine.

When Catherine took the paper, her fingers brushed against his. Her fingertips were ice-cold.

She tore the paper to shreds and stuffed the pieces into her pocket.

Then she wrote another line and flipped the notebook over.

“Harding once said something.”

“‘The group in Row B didn't do much, but everything they did was right.’”

Catherine's pen hovered over the notebook for a moment before she scribbled another line.

“His tone was pretty much identical to Croft grading us.”

The train rolled to a stop at an unnamed little station.

The platform was entirely deserted, with only the lights flickering in the wind.

After waiting for about three minutes, the carriage lurched violently and began to move again.

That sudden jolt woke Fischer in the back row.

Sporting a bandage with one corner sticking up, he groggily cast a glance in their direction.

Then he rolled over and fell right back asleep.

Montagu walked over from the row behind them.

He was holding a military enamel cup, having scavenged hot water from who knows where.

The blond young man sat down in the empty seat across from Richard.

He didn't say anything at first. He just rested the enamel cup on his knee and took a sip.

Then, his gaze swept across the small notebook resting on Catherine's lap.

She snapped the notebook shut, preventing him from seeing anything.

Montagu looked away.

“You two are tallying the accounts,” he said.

Richard didn't deny it, and Catherine remained still.

Montagu placed his cup on the iron rack just beneath the train window.

“I'd advise against digging any deeper into that math.”

Catherine flipped her notebook to a fresh, blank page.

“Digging deeper into what?” Richard played dumb.

“Into who authorized it,” Montagu said, looking right at him.

“Who approved building the refugee camp in that specific location. Why they only dispatched Practitioners and prep students to run patrols. And the exact timing of the reinforcements.”

Richard remained silent.

“The answers to those questions.” Montagu kept his voice low, ensuring only the three of them could hear.

“Even if you find them, you won't be able to change a single thing.”

“Two hundred and sixty-one people,” Catherine wrote on her pad and showed it to them.

Montagu spared the line a glance.

“Yes. Two hundred and sixty-one people.”

There was no coldness in his tone, only the quiet resignation of someone who had seen too much.

Montagu picked his cup back up.

“Those two hundred and sixty-one were part of the calculation.”

“The calculation?”

“The total number of registered refugees in the camp was four thousand, seven hundred and twelve.”

Montagu's voice was incredibly soft.

“The actual death toll is two hundred and sixty-one. That's roughly five percent.”

Richard pushed aside any thoughts of some twisted sacrifice, opting to view it purely as the standard attrition rate one might expect at a weak point like the Unresponsive Pit.

The annual budget allocated by the Imperial Capital General Administration to each location came with figures that implicitly included anticipated personnel losses.

But these refugees weren't Practitioners, meaning they didn't count toward the regular casualty quota.

The Ancient Gaulish Inscription System was a known quantity. It was officially registered on the books.

The refugees had been situated directly over it because someone specifically needed those four-thousand-odd people right there.

Their mere existence and breathing—even their terror and the despair that festered inside those tents day and night.

The raw emotions of those living humans served as the finest testing reagents.

They had positioned over four thousand living people above a two-thousand-year-old reception system just to see if it would overload under the relentless, round-the-clock influx of new tributes from the Flanders Frontline.

To see how severe the overload would be, and what level of horrors would spew out when it finally gave way.

To test whether Practitioners could hold the line, and if they couldn't, exactly how long it would take before Minor Adept-level reinforcements became necessary.

All of this data was vital for wartime.

Military supplies departed from these ports to cross the channel toward the front lines. Troopships set sail from here carrying fresh reinforcements.

They couldn't afford for anything to go wrong at the port, so they needed a practical field test.

The reagents were the refugees. The testers were this batch of young Practitioners.

The fail-safes were those hidden ones and the full sets of standardized sealing arrays they carried, present on-site from the very beginning.

They waited until the situation escalated just enough to make the youngsters break a sweat, generating sufficient data while filtering out who was useful and who was dead weight.

As for the wretched wails regurgitated on top of all that, fattening the land beneath them—that was beyond what he should be considering at his current level.

Montagu finished his hot water.

“You're both smart. You couldn't pretend to be blind to this even if you tried.”

“But you have to understand one thing.”

“We're sitting on this train, pocketing field pay, with an official field record stamped in our files. We are the beneficiaries.”

“You, me, Catherine, Fischer... Everyone who participated in this mission has already had their names written into that report.”

His voice was a mere whisper.

“That report will be sent to the Imperial Capital General Administration, left on a desk for the big shots who decide our futures to flip through.”

He looked back and forth between Richard and Catherine.

“The line reading, ‘Row B Tent Area Patrol Group, Best in District,’ will take you two very far in life.”

Montagu stood up.

“As for those two hundred and sixty-one people... keep it to yourselves.”

Richard leaned against the window, watching the blond youth's back disappear into the shadows of the rear seats.

Montagu had maintained that light curtain for so long his ether bottomed out, nearly leaving him face-down in the mud.

Yet, not a single one of the items stashed in his pockets had been touched.

The reason was likely the exact same one that kept Richard from calling out his own shadow.

Richard pulled his gaze away from the window and stared down at his own hands.

Everything he had done had been perfectly calibrated to remain within the reasonable limits of a standard Practitioner.

His shadow had stayed crouched beneath the veil the entire time, and he hadn't put on the Mask of Hermes, either.

Sitting next to him, the red-haired girl had her scarf wrapped tightly around her neck.

Richard didn't know all the details of what Professor McPhee had given her after Debate Week.

But he had witnessed Catherine's performance in the Row C tent area with his own eyes.

She executed her tasks beautifully, but that was all—just beautifully.

She was methodical, clean, and utterly flawless.

She was hiding something, too.

As for what she was hiding, Richard didn't ask, nor should he.

Catherine, meanwhile, found her thoughts drifting to an old woman.

The elderly woman had been clinging to a tent rope with both hands, only to have a drowned corpse crawl out from behind and seize her ankle, dragging her downward.

The old woman had cast a single glance in Catherine's direction.

She hadn't said a word; she merely looked at her.

In that split second, the toll of the Nemesis Mask had nearly slipped out of control.

She had been a hair's breadth away from unleashing the mask's true power of judgment.

But she had forcibly suppressed the urge.

The sealing deflection Spell Formula Professor McPhee had helped her construct did its job.

She would rather be dragged off to collate rubbings than expose the mask's judgment in front of four thousand refugees and a crowd of Practitioners.

She chose silence, and in that fleeting moment of silence, some people simply ceased to exist.

A long silence settled over the carriage.

The train rolled to a halt at another platform.

This stop lasted quite a while, seemingly to wait for a troop train approaching from the opposite direction to pass.

The platform remained completely empty. A gust of wind sent an old newspaper tumbling along the tracks.

Amidst the quiet, a voice drifted over from the back row.

“Mmph... Mmm...”

Fischer was sleep-talking.

His voice wasn't loud, but in the hushed train car, it rang out with striking clarity.

“Mmm... wasn't my fault... mmm... he pushed me... mmm...”

Richard and Catherine simultaneously turned their heads to look.

Fischer was curled into a ball on the hard wooden bench.

The back of his head rested against the carriage wall, and the sticking-up corner of his bandage rose and fell in time with his breathing.

His lips twitched, and he mumbled another sentence.

“It was a fisherman... mmm... fisherman built like an ox... shoved me...”

He rolled over, turning his face toward the window.

“...don't touch the bandage... hurts... mmm...”

Catherine quickly jotted down a line in her notebook and held it up.

“Is he awake or asleep?”

Richard swept his Inspiration over him.

“Asleep.”

Catherine snapped the notebook shut, the corners of her lips curling upward.

The train began to move again.

The wheels rolled over the track seams, producing a steady, rhythmic clack-clack sound.

As the train entered a tunnel, the light inside the carriage dimmed.

Fischer let out an incredibly loud snore from the back row.

Embracing the darkness, Richard closed his eyes and began to feign sleep.