The work did not cease until the last bloody rag had been wrung out, the last makeshift bandage secured, and the weak, rasping breath of the final patient faded into the deep, exhausted silence of full night. Dusk had long since surrendered to a velvet blackness pierced by a scattering of hard, cold stars. The great hall of the tavern, still reeking of iodine, blood, and the sour tang of fear-sweat, was now a chamber of quiet suffering and fragile hope. Necessity, that cruel and ingenious tutor, had forced Michael to become a battlefield alchemist. With the proper medicines exhausted, he had resorted to desperate, kitchen-sink chemistry.
When the disinfectant alcohol ran dry, he turned to salt. Great clouds of precious, imported iodized salt were dissolved in buckets of well-water, creating a stinging, saline solution that burned corruption from wounds with a brutal, cleansing agony. It was a poor substitute, but it was something. The coarse, grey, locally-traded salt from Hock's caravans he wouldn't touch; he suspected it was boiled from irradiated tidal flats, a slow poison. Using it on wounds would be an act of malice, not medicine.
For bandages, he had sent the women scavenging. Every scrap of relatively clean fabric in Cinder Town was hunted down—spare shirts, moth-eaten blankets, sacks. They were boiled in great kettles over open fires, then laid out on the still-warm rooftops to bake under the Wasteland's unforgiving stars. The sterilized rags, still smelling of lye and sun, became the town's new lifelines.
The final, surreal act of this macabre production was the swaddling of Zach the Ogre. His immense, fur-covered body was a roadmap of deep gashes and spectacular bruises, a testament to his battle with the Fourth-Rank monster, Blackhand. The only material left of sufficient size and (relative) cleanliness was a set of the replica JK uniforms. With a sigh that was part resignation, part absurdist humor, Michael himself helped tear the black-and-white pleated skirts and white blouses into long, frilled strips. They wrapped the mountainous Ogre from chest to thigh, the lace trim and sailor collars creating a bizarre, punk-rock mummy. Zach breathed, a low, steady rumble like a dormant engine. For a creature of his obscene vitality, unconsciousness was not a death sentence, but a recharge. Feed him enough, and he would rise again.
One figure, however, weighed heavily on Michael's mind. Old Gimpy lay on a pallet in the corner, his head wrapped in bloody cloth. The ancient shotgun's catastrophic failure had not killed him. It had, however, sheared off most of his left ear and peppered the side of his head with metal fragments. Whether he would wake, and what kind of sharp, cantankerous ghost would inhabit a 'One-Ear' Gimpy, was a question for another day.
Making a final round of the wounded, Michael stopped beside Lynda. The wolf-girl moved with a tired grace, her tall frame bowed with fatigue, the magnificent purple goose egg on her forehead a badge of her tank-driving heroics. "Lynda," he said, his voice soft in the quiet hall. "You and the others… you must watch them. All night. If a fever takes hold, use cold well-water on cloths. Cool their brows. It's all we can do now." The admission tasted bitter. He was out of pills, out of powders. The magic of his world was spent. The only thing he had in abundance was a small mountain of hemorrhoid ointment, a cruelly ironic surplus.
"Yes, Master," Lynda murmured, but her voice was thick with a misery that had nothing to do with the wounded.
Michael reached up—she was still half a head taller, even slouched—and gently touched the swollen bruise. "Don't worry about this," he said, adopting what he hoped was a suavely commanding tone. "It will fade. No scar. You'll be as… formidable as ever."
Lynda's amber eyes, usually so sharp, welled with tears. She didn't care about the bruise. With a sob that seemed to come from her boots, she buried her face in his shoulder. "The uniform," she choked out, her voice muffled by his shirt. "The black and white one with the little anchor… it was my favorite. My only new dress. And we tore it to wrap the Ogre."
Michael stood very still, the romantic speech dying in his throat. The chasm between his cultural programming and the priorities of a Wasteland woman yawned before him, vast and unbridgeable. After a moment, he patted her back awkwardly. "There, there," he mumbled. "Next time. I'll bring more. A whole suitcase of them. Different colors. Ruffles. Whatever you like." The promise of future frivolity finally calmed her, and he extracted himself, feeling like he'd navigated a social interaction far more complex than the battle itself.
Stepping out into the cool night air was a relief. The sky was clear, the stars indifferent. And then he saw it, a sight that brought a grim, satisfied smile to his lips. Rolling through the shattered main gate in the pallid moonlight was a convoy. The battered Wuling van led the way, followed by a procession of figures—a long, snaking line of captives, perhaps two hundred strong, their hands bound with wire or rough cord. Bringing up the rear, grumbling and majestic, was the Isuzu truck. The hunting party had returned.
Among the trudging prisoners, Michael spotted familiar, hateful faces—the Aura-wielders who had led the assault on the walls. The backbone of the badlands gangs, broken and paraded through the dust of their intended conquest. The scourge of the region had been captured, neutered in a single, brutal evening. You have no idea,Michael thought, the cold calculus of a lord settling over him. No idea what's in store. Your debt isn't paid in blood; it's paid in labor. In sweat. In the rebuilding of everything you tried to burn.
By the time the ninth hour chimed on a salvaged, half-working clock, the delayed and subdued victory supper began. In Michael's third-floor office, now lit by the gentle glow of a single, good oil lamp, he faced his guests. The dozen men of Chinese descent sat around the scarred table, their postures stiff with a formality that felt ancient.
"My apologies," Michael began, the words in Mandarin feeling both right and strangely intimate. "The day… got away from me. This is a poor welcome for brothers who fought at our side. Please, do not think it reflects our gratitude." He gestured at the meager feast: a sizzling plate of spicy strips fried with minced rad-lizard eggs, a platter of tea-stained eggs and boiled mole-rat feet, a large bowl of cold, dressed instant noodles. It was peasant food from his world, a hasty collage of cheap calories. Only the rice, steamed to perfection, and the seemingly endless supply of cheap, cactus-based beer, hinted at abundance.
He needn't have worried. As the men beheld the bowls of white rice, the pale, slender noodles—staples of a homeland known only through stories and dreams—their stern composure shattered. Tough, weathered faces, etched by a lifetime of survival, crumpled. Grizzled men wept openly, silent tears cutting tracks through the battle grime. Their hands, clumsy with unfamiliar tools, fumbled with the chopsticks Michael provided. They ate with a reverent, desperate haste, shoveling the fragrant rice into their mouths, mixing it with their tears, consuming not just a meal, but a sacrament of memory.
Later, over cups of bitter beer, they spoke. Of their lives. Their knowledge of the Great War was second-hand, fragmented lore passed down: the human nuclear retaliation, the invaders' desperate, catastrophic plague-magic that consumed friend and foe alike in a final, mutual gasp of bioweaponry.
But their recent history was vivid and bleak. The survivors of the Expeditionary Force, a hundred or so souls, had found an old pre-Collapse military waystation dozens of kilometers to the east. They fortified it, named it nothing, for names were for places that had a future. They found a few dozen women of the diaspora. They tried to build. But the Wasteland gnawed at them. Sickness, raids, barren soil, and failing equipment whittled them down, generation by generation. Now, they numbered barely fifty, the youngest a babe in arms, the oldest a grandfather who remembered his grandfather's stories. The final blow had been the failure, months ago, of the settlement's last water purifier. The men had done the only thing left: they had gone to work for the raiders, selling their skills and their honor for a trickle of clean water for their families. It was how they had come to be standing on Audra's wall.
The leader, a man named Zhang Tiezhu—Iron Pillar Zhang—finally set down his empty bowl. The question he asked was the one that had hung in the air all evening. "Lord Harry Potter. What is your will for us?"
Michael met his gaze. "Bring your families," he said simply. "Bring them all. Tomorrow. This is your home now. Here, we stand together. We build together." He paused, a sudden, impulsive thought striking him. "No," he said, the word sharp. The men flinched, tension returning. Michael held up a hand. "Not 'Cinder Town'. That name… it's ash. It's what's left after the fire."
He stood, a new energy animating him. "We start anew. From this day, this place is the Territory of Meili." He used the pinyinpronunciation, letting the meaning hang. Beautiful, thriving."The bitterness is over. With our own hands, we will make our lives sweet again."
He began to pace, the vision spilling out, painted in words for men starved of hope. "We will clear fields. We will plant crops that don't wither. We will raise pigs that grow fat, chickens that lay eggs. We will build a school, and the children will learn not just to fight, but to read, to write, to understand the world that was and the one we will make. We will have workshops! Forges! We will make things again, useful things, beautiful things." He turned to them, his eyes alight. "The life before the war… we may not see it in our time. But our children might. Or their children. We plant the seed today."
In the dim lamplight, Michael saw it happen. In the eyes of Zhang Tiezhu and his men, the hard, flinty spark of survivalist endurance began to shift, to soften, and then to catch a new fire. It was a fragile, wondrous thing, kindled not by a full belly alone, but by a promise of a future. It was the first, true light of hope in the Territory of Meili.