Lucius only realized he was eating countryside food for the first time in his life when the taste of the toast filled his mouth, it wasn't anything to make a fuss over, perhaps a dinner in a cheap restaurant would taste just as good, but there was something in this lunch made in a hurry that just felt... more.
Seeing the somewhat amused look on his host's face, the Watcher was sure she knew that too.
"Your reaction is just like Mischa when she ate the food here for the first time. Brings back some good memories."
"I take it that she liked the food." Lucius commented, looking at the toast he was eating. the heat had spread quite well, leaving a delectable mix of brown and golden on the bread, the cheese melted reasonably, maintaining a good consistency as he bit on it. The egg was a bit weird, it seemed to have mixed with the cheese and bread, but the taste was still quite pronounced despite not being fried.
"The General once invited the unit to have a meal at a fancy restaurant back at Omsk, it was a struggle to get her to come with us. There's this old hag here in the village, her name's Olga, she likes to make a lot of pelmeni dumplings and share them with us sometimes, Mischa goes crazy for those."
"If I ever get the chance, I should see if I can try."
"And I'll ask her to make some for you too." Dinara got up from her chair and walked back to the kitchen counter, taking a package of cream crackers from within. She opened the package and started eating them with gusto while putting everything else back in its place, though she did cut an extra slice of cheese to eat on the spot before keeping it away.
"You're not making a toast for yourself?" Lucius asked despite already knowing the answer.
"Nah," she said casually, already back to happily munching on her crackers. "Cheese is too expensive, even I have a limit to how much I would steal from Sasha. The eggs are free, though, her uncle has a coop and is always giving her some."
"I see, thanks." He said simply, earning a shrug from the woman.
"Once you're done, you can have a hot shower and rest. You can also talk with the others if you want to, they should be a bit less trigger-happy now that they've had some time to calm down."
And Lucius proceeded to do just that. The bathroom was further into the house, second door on the right inside a corridor that stood in the divide between the kitchen and the living room. Despite the apparent crisis the nation was going through, it seemed that the people from the PMC received a good amount of money judging from the number of beauty products they kept.
The Watcher didn't need anything more than soap at the moment, so decided to use just that.
Thanks to the heating system, the village had a well-developed water piping system, which allowed for a good bathing experience, though it was a pity that the water temperature could not be manipulated.
After a five-minute bath, the Warden left the bathroom - his hair still wet - in his tattered gear, the only clothing he had at the moment.
By now, he already had some time to think about his next steps. The Honkai Beasts, as Lieutenant Dinara called them, posed a serious threat to humanity, and it was an enemy with a big presence, least in this nation.
Furthermore, judging by the lack of questioning regarding his strength, plus the officer's confusion at his declaration of being unaffiliated, it was safe to assume that this world had its own force of superhumans. The possibility that they served a lone organization, much like back in his home world, was also high.
However, the fact that his coming was met with a great deal of suspicion and wariness meant that said organization did not have a good reputation with the country, or at least not with the Red Dawn.
Regardless of the reason for such, the core of the matter was that allying himself with the PMC would immediately put him at odds with such an organization in the possession of an army of superhumans, bringing unwanted attention to himself and the military group.
On the other hand, the Lieutenant had also mentioned an Eruption, which seemed to be some kind of devastating event related to the Honkai. If this kind of event could be repeated whenever and wherever, and it resulted in such chaos that could last for at least a decade, then he didn't have the time to consolidate a hidden force that couldn't be tracked.
Not only that...
Lucius looked down at the wrist of his right hand, where small, twinkling shards of dark-green crystals had taken root. They had grown after feeding on some kind of energy that attempted to corrupt him, much like the crystals' origin before it was somehow assimilated to his Source.
Currently, as a Tier 4 Watcher, the resistance to such things was enhanced enough to shrug the infection the instant it tried to enter his body, but if a normal human were to be affected by such a thing...
He thought back to the zombies, that accompanied the Honkai Beasts during the battle a short while ago. His world had its own version of them, so he knew that the danger they represented wasn't simply that of an army of fodder.
People turning into monsters in the blink of an eye, their lives gone like dust in the wind. For someone who could give their life to save another, is there greater terror than being powerless to save the innocent, and having no choice but to slay their defiled carcass instead?
An apocalypse could reach them at any given instant.
The Watchers were still needed.
Outside of Sasha's house, things didn't really change.
The soldiers were occupied closing off the places where the monsters had died in. They had gathered some of the kindling placed outdoors as crude stakes hammered into the snow, and a length of rope was tied to them to make the prohibited area.
Lucius saw a female soldier bringing a hand-drawn cart, but she left it by the prohibited area before moving to help the others hammer down the stakes.
Walking closer to a soldier who was shoveling snow out to leave a mark for where to put the stakes down, the Watcher opened his mouth to call their attention.
"Need help with moving the zombie bodies?"
Hearing his voice, the soldier raised their head, revealing a face with soft, but slightly sharp facial features, it left no doubt that the other party was a woman, but it did add a tomboyish feel to her looks.
The woman let out an awkward smile, before throwing a complicated look at the unmoving bodies further ahead. She let out a soft sigh before answering.
"You know, there was another village just some 70 kilometers Northwest of here, you can probably see it if you climb the hills on the way."
She pointed in the direction the Honkai horde came from, there was no need to elaborate further.
"The cap, you see," She continued, her voice coming with a bit of a rasp. "Likes to make friends, she has quite a few acquaintances throughout the region, as well as the PMC. Even the General took a liking to her."
Her finger then moved to point at one of the bloodied bodies on the snow.
"That's Andrei, in the rare occasions he managed to find some prey, he made some real good venison dishes. There are some others I recognize among them, the village also had the 24th unit deployed there, they have been radio silent since this morning."
With a sigh, the female soldier stabbed her shovel into the snow before stepping back. She turned to a passing soldier to pass her order.
"Mila, take my place for a while. I'm gonna give our Valk here a sales pitch."
"Got it." Was the simple answer she received.
The woman he was speaking with nodded before turning back to Lucius, moving to stay on the side of the road where they wouldn't bother anyone.
"Oh, I'm Mischa, by the way." She said offhandedly before getting back on track. "What I wanted to say before was that the cap is going to burn them herself, give them as much of a farewell they can get in this hellhole."
"The radiation emitted by the corpses prevents anyone else from coming closer..." Lucius observed, his eyes trained on the unmoving zombies.
"And because Cap is the only one who has a high level of Honkai resistance, she's the only one who can move the bodies without getting infected." Mischa explained.
The soldier suddenly let out an empty laugh as she laid her back on the walls of a random hut.
"I sometimes wonder if it's a cruel joke of whatever made these things." Her eyes turned to look down to the ground as her gloved hands sought shelter within her pockets. "The Beasts become nothing when dying, dissipating in the air as if they never existed. Heck, if you kill their boss the local radiation immediately goes down! As for the weakest of zombies... They fall, but their threat is not gone, the Honkai Radiation is still there. It seeps into the ground, perpetuating the death zone, and we have no choice but to take risks to burn the bodies."
"There should be more enemies in the destroyed village, how long until we can clean them up?" Lucius changed the topic.
"HQ is already aware of what happened, ETA for units 15, 17, and 20 is 3 days. But you wanna come with us for the sweep?"
The Watcher nodded, "If things go well, we'll be colleagues, so unless you guys decline, I see no problem in helping out."
"And I don't think we have any problem either!" Mischa smiled happily "Though that reminds me, I have yet to introduce ourselves! 37th unit of Red Dawn Military Company, first generation of local troops and made mostly out of orphans. At your service for the foreseeable future."
Lucius gave her a blank stare. "That's a rather grim introduction. And the implications don't put your employer in a good light."
"Ah, it's not that bad!" She casually waved his concern off. "No one else would help us when we were starving and freezing to death on our lonesome. Plus, despite the dubious practice, the Red Dawn is protecting a great deal of East Siberia, they also treat us soldiers - and the local civs - like humans, that's quite something in my books."
"Speaking of helping orphans," He frowned as he looked back at the village church. "If no one would help you guys when you were orphans, how did your relationship with the locals turn out so well?"
"Oh, that?" Mischa laughed awkwardly as she scratched the back of her helmet. "Not all of us are orphans, two people in our unit are born and raised in this very village, so that helped a bit, there's also the PMC enforcing fair treatment of the people under our protection."
She let out a forlorn sigh, allowing a few seconds of silence, but she eventually kept on with her explanation. "Besides, things now are different from a few years ago. Back then, even the families living in better-off cities had just a few loaves of bread to eat throughout the day, they could barely sustain themselves, much less help out strangers."
"Is it only the regions under the Red Dawn that managed to recover from the Eruption?"
"That and the places protected by the Russian Army, though those guys kept themselves to the cities and bigger towns to the West. Up North, close to the Tundra, I heard that it's still a veritable hell for the few survivors that failed to move out."
Before Lucius could continue the conversation, he saw Dinara walking towards the prohibited zone.
She had already put her coat and helmet back on. As she walked, everyone else stopped working to follow her from a distance. Not a word was spoken.
Taking the hand-drawn cart left by the rope fence, she crossed into the prohibited area and moved towards the corpses laying on the snowy ground.
Reaching the remains of the closest zombie, she carefully picked the corpse, uncaring of the mutilation it received under the firepower of their rifles, and placed it on the cart. With that done, she proceeded towards the next body.
Many of the zombies had lost limbs or even their entire heads to the bullets, picking those remains was anything but pleasant, entrains and blood splattered on her clothing, sticking stubbornly and refusing to drip down, the gore swiftly seeping into her coat and pants, her gloves were fully painted in red.
After picking up five bodies and reaching the maximum capacity of the cart, she headed outside the village.
Two hundred meters ahead, a giant pile of firewood awaited for the cremation.
