Page 3344

What exactly that something was, the rumors had difficulty pinning down. Some said he’d captured them all and now had a dozen or more high-ranking reapers as hostages.

Others said it was far worse, that he didn’t just capture them. They said he’d turned them. Brainwashed them. Enslaved their minds and made them release all of their servants, just like that.

And still others said that no, it was something that was arguably even more terrifying. He’d simply convinced them to join him. With mere words. Didn’t even have to brainwash them.

All-in-all, it sounded rather unlikely to Loren--or at the very last, greatly exaggerated. For one thing, how in the world would anyone here in Abolish have learned about him doing something like that? If all the reapers turned traitor, and all the servants were released, then there would’ve been no one left to relay what happened.

And whenever Loren had pointed out such things to the various soldiers who were gossiping about it, they began sounding abruptly less certain and less fearful. But some also tried posing some iffy explanations. Maybe one or two reapers had escaped, they’d said. Maybe the Surgeon had let them get away precisely for this reason, because he wanted Abolish to know.

Whatever the truth actually was, all of the rumors seemed to agree that Frederick was in an almost unassailably advantageous position now.

That this war was already lost, even.

Regardless of how Frederick had managed to pull it off, if he really did have so many ex-Abolish reapers feeding him intel, then that would explain why every operation was a failure. Frederick knew what they were going to do before they did it. He knew their backup plans for their backup plans.

Needless to say, morale in this corner of the war was rather low. Over the course of Caster’s little tour around the continent, Loren didn’t think he’d ever seen it this bad.

The one saving grace, some said, was that the Surgeon Saint had a bleeding heart. A man renowned for his mercy. So if they were to lose, then at least they could be relatively certain that he would spare their lives.

That was why a lot the guardsmen and soldiers around here actually looked more bored than afraid. To many of them, the upcoming battles were already a foregone conclusion. It was just a waiting game, now.