The Steam Age: Gears and Bones

Chapter 68

Perfit pushed open the wooden door at the top of the spire.

A cold wind swept in, carrying fine snowflakes that stung my face like tiny needles.

She pulled her coat tighter around herself, walked to the top of the tower, and leaned her cane against her side.

From here, you can overlook the entire Wild Boar Ridge Fortress and the starkly different worlds to the north and south of the fortress.

North of the defensive line was a hellish place.

A black horde of corpses surged from the edge of the wilderness, covering every inch of foothold on the outskirts of the fortress.

They piled up, climbed, were pierced by spears, and shattered by volleys of gunfire, with those behind stepping on the corpses in front to continue surging forward, like a never-ending black tide, tireless and fearless.

The trenches and fences she had built with her own hands were like a flimsy dam in the face of this black tide. With each impact, the fences creaked under the strain, and with each impact, a piece of frozen soil at the edge of the trench peeled off.

The soldiers ran, loaded, fired, and thrust their spears down the city walls. Their movements had become mechanical and stiff from continuous combat, but they were still fighting.

The artillery crew loaded iron shot into the muzzle of the infantry gun, pointed it downwards, and aimed it at the densest horde of corpses at the foot of the city wall. After a muffled roar, black flesh and blood exploded in a fan shape at the base of the city wall.

But that fan-shaped area was quickly filled with new infected people, like a stone thrown into the sea, which was swallowed up again after one wave.

The defenses were still holding, but Perfit knew better than anyone how long they could hold out—she had personally calculated the ammunition reserves and marked the line graph of the zombie horde's attack frequency.

If this repeated assault continues, one night, the fence will collapse first, then the trenches will be filled in, then the infected will climb the walls over mountains of corpses, and then the defense line will be shattered like a sandcastle by a wave.

South of the defensive line lies a precarious peace.

She could see the scattered villages at the foot of the mountain—farmhouses with gray tiles and stone walls, the slender spires of churches, and the ruts left by oxcarts on the winding country roads.

It was evening, and wisps of smoke rose from the village chimneys, scattered by the wind against the gray sky, as thin as a veil.

People in those villages were cooking over fires. Mothers were stirring oatmeal porridge in front of the stove, children were chasing the last rays of sunlight in the yard, and old people were sitting on the doorsteps smoking pipes, looking at the gray fortress to the north. Perhaps they felt a vague unease, but they always felt that the war was still far away.

The faint sound of church bells drifted in; it was the sound of evening prayers, the most ordinary sound Perfitt had ever heard in this world, yet now it trembled in her chest like a taut string.

She could clearly deduce the path the zombie horde would take after breaking through the defenses.

She had simulated the speed of movement, the direction of impact, and the size of the clusters of those infected individuals.

She didn't need an all-seeing eye; she could see it with her eyes closed—south of Wild Boar Ridge, the first to fall were the villages at the foot of the mountain, the second were the towns further away, and the third were the towns even further away.

The infected will not tire, they will not stop, they will advance southward, turning cooking smoke into black smoke, evening prayer bells into screams, and every stone-walled farmhouse into a graveyard piled with corpses.

The church spire, gleaming warmly in the setting sun, will become, like the bell tower in the Pridelshinsk district, the last isolated island where survivors frantically pull on the bell ropes, desperately pleading for help from the long-gone reinforcements.

The mother stirring oatmeal at the stove will become a frozen, pale corpse, just like the young soldier she saw kneeling at the bottom of the trench in the ruins of St. Petersburg harbor, his hands still gripping his rifle in the posture he had before he died.

Those children who chased and played in the yard would be burned to nothing but charred ribs and their skulls filled with ashes, just like the tiny, curled-up skeleton she saw in the ashes of the old town outpost.

As long as she nods, or even without her nodding, just with her tacit approval, the defense line will quietly crack open at a pre-arranged moment, letting some of the infected people through and pouring into that land where smoke rises from chimneys along the predetermined route.

Then the plague will spread, the emperor and parliament in the rear will be awakened by fear, the wartime regime will transform from a political farce into a national consensus within weeks, and Romulus will begin full mobilization...

This was precisely the goal she had strived to achieve by risking her life to cross the horde of zombies, exhausting her mental strength in the face of the divine abominations, and enduring so many days in a coma.

This goal is correct.

But the path to that goal required her to personally pave the doorways of the villages south of the defensive line with corpses.

Perfitt's fingers tightened, his knuckles digging painfully into the stone wall.

Every aspect of this plan is controllable—casualties can be predicted, the spread can be limited, and evacuation routes can be planned in advance.

None of this would exceed her deductive abilities, nor would it exceed the joint command and control of Chertzov and Ludwig.

It is controllable, efficient, and almost guaranteed to work.

But what if? What if she fails to control the situation? What if some infected people are missed?

Those civilians who were evacuated and retreated were caught up, tackled, and torn apart.

Even if every soldier on the defensive line does their best to cover their retreat, and even if the pre-set ambush and containment zones are set up very tightly, the movement path of the infected cannot be predicted with 100% accuracy.

Someone is bound to die.

They weren't soldiers, not those who were prepared to die in battle, but civilians.

It is those who could have been protected by this line of defense.

She recalled the words Corporal Krasov had asked her as he boarded the cruiser beneath the clock tower in St. Petersburg: "Miss, do you think there's any hope for Ross?"

Her reply to him was, "We came here to find a way to save it."

In the abandoned farm in the Ross Swamp, when she used alchemy to conjure the first pile of black bread, not a single one of the long-starved soldiers reached out to grab it. Instead, they formed a crooked line and repeatedly rubbed their hands on their uniforms.

On the night of the breakout, she told everyone on the front lines, "It's not time to despair yet," and they believed her, so they followed her out.

They followed her through the pass, through the horde of corpses, through the battlefield littered with the bodies of their comrades, until they reached the fortress.

They believed her.

Because she was Perfit Brandlis, she was the one who told them "it's not time to despair yet," she was the one who pulled a barrier from the frozen ground to hold back the horde of zombies, and she was the one who transformed firewood into black bread when they ran out of supplies. He

They placed their hopes for survival on her, believing that she could end the disaster and save their country.

If she makes that choice, she will betray that trust with her own hands.