Sorry for the late chapter, I thought I had already scheduled today's chapter.
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Planet Dal, Southern Hemisphere, Temporary Resettlement Camp, Sector Seven.
Chris stood at the entrance of a massive medical tent, watching the humans who had just been dropped off.
Three hundred and twenty-seven people. The youngest looked no older than five or six, while the oldest had heads full of gray hair.
Dressed in rough canvas clothing temporarily issued by the Dawn Defense Force, they huddled into the corners of their medical cots. They looked at everything around them with a gaze Chris couldn't even begin to describe.
It wasn't fear.
It wasn't gratitude.
It wasn't anger.
It was just... empty.
Like they were nothing more than slabs of breathing, blinking... meat.
"Chris?" A medic called out from behind him. "Give me a hand here, this one refuses to lie down."
Chris turned around to see a fourteen or fifteen-year-old boy gripping the frame of a cot for dear life. He absolutely refused to lie down on the clean white sheets.
"No, no, no... I can't lie down..." the boy wheezed, his voice violently hoarse as if he was forcing the words through vocal cords that hadn't been used in years. "If I lie down... tomorrow... they'll slice me tomorrow..."
The medic froze. Chris walked over and crouched down in front of the boy.
"Nobody is going to slice you," he said, trying his best to make his voice sound gentle. "You aren't in that place anymore. The people there have all been... handled by us. You don't ever have to be sliced again."
The boy looked at him, a faint ripple finally breaking through the emptiness in his eyes. But it wasn't hope. It was pure confusion.
"Not sliced?" he repeated, like he was trying to comprehend a word in a language he'd never learned. "Then... then what am I supposed to eat?"
A heavy lump formed in Chris's throat.
He wanted to tell him, we'll give you food.
He wanted to tell him, you never have to trade your own flesh for anything ever again.
He wanted to tell him, you're a human being, not livestock.
But looking into those eyes, he suddenly realized... this kid had probably been raised in the pens since the day he was born.
He literally didn't know what it felt like to not be carved up. He had no concept that it was possible to eat a meal without bartering pieces of his own body to get it.
The absolute only rule of survival he knew was this: if you want to live, you have to offer up a piece of yourself.
And here Chris was, telling him that this fundamental law of the universe no longer existed. The boy didn't know how to process that. And neither did Chris.
"Take it slow," another voice drifted over from behind him.
Chris looked back and saw a middle-aged woman walking over in a medical officer's uniform. The name tag on her chest read: Adela Knox, Captain, Dawn Defense Force First Corps Medical Battalion.
Adela sat down on the edge of the cot and gently placed a hand on the boy's trembling shoulder.
"No slicing." Her voice was even calmer than Chris's, carrying an indescribable, soothing warmth. "No more slicing, ever again. Every single piece of flesh on your body belongs to you. We are going to give you food, and you don't have to trade anything at all to get it."
The boy stared at her. A thick mist began to well up in his hollow eyes. It was tears. He probably hadn't cried in years.
"Then... then I..." his voice started to violently shake. "Every day... every single day I have to think about... which piece they're going to cut off tomorrow... I... I really don't have to think about that anymore?"
"You don't have to think about it anymore." Adela gently pulled him into a hug.
The boy started shivering in her arms. And then, he broke down. It was the kind of agonizing, primal wailing that had been suppressed for years—a grief so deep he didn't know how else to express it except through raw, guttural sobs.
Standing on the sidelines watching this unfold, Chris suddenly remembered Corporal Jeremy's dying words.
"You guys have to keep fighting for the dawn of humanity."
He was starting to actually understand what that meant. The dawn of humanity wasn't just about butchering the man-eating xenos. It was about helping the people who had been eaten... learn how to be human again.
--
Late that night, Captain Adela wrote in her journal:
"Today, I gave a thirteen-year-old boy a physical checkup. He asked me: Which piece of meat do I have to cut off to trade for my next meal? It reminded me of when my brother Luca and I were kids, living every single day in absolute terror, just waiting to die. That was until Archmagos Paul stood in front of me, cured my sick brother, and gave us real food to eat. He truly brought the dawn to us and the people of Aurelian. And now, we are going to bring that same dawn to other suffering souls."
"It took me an hour to convince that boy that he didn't need to carve off his own flesh for a meal. After he finally understood, he cried for another hour. Then he asked me: So what am I supposed to do every day now? I couldn't give him an answer.
It's true—they've been locked in cages for three hundred years. Every day, they only had to do two things: wait to be sliced, and wait to heal. Now, we tell them they're free. But they have absolutely no idea what to do with that freedom. They don't even know how to use a spoon.
At dinner tonight, out of the three hundred and twenty-seven people in this camp, two hundred and nine of them ate directly with their mouths.
An old man asked me: Is this the rule in the new cage? He told me that in his old cage, eating with your hands wasn't allowed, and you'd get beaten for it.
I didn't know how to answer him. I could only tell him: This isn't a cage. This is home. He just smiled when he heard that and said, You're a good person, but there is no such thing as a home in this world. I didn't know how to argue with him. Because he was right... for them, the concept of a 'home' has literally never existed.
We liberated them. But can they ever truly come back to life? I don't know. All I know is that tomorrow, another three thousand seven hundred people are arriving. Every single one of them is going to ask the exact same questions. And I... have to learn how to answer them."
--
Planet Dal, Southern Hemisphere. The city of Bankal.
This metropolis, second in size only to the Royal Court itself, was currently blanketed in an incredibly eerie silence.
Bankal Darwin stood at the very top of the command spire in the city center, staring down at the densely packed encampments sprawling outside the city walls.
As the very first Dal xenos shaped after Charles's rise to power, he had been alive for three hundred and ten years. He had watched with his own eyes as Charles evolved into the tyrant who ruled this entire planet. As the single most rational entity in the Dal domain, he had never once worshipped the so-called Blood God, but he had never questioned Charles's absolute rule, either.
Because under Charles, the Dal race truly became the undisputed masters of this world. Humans were penned up in cages, harvested like livestock. The very humans who had created them, despised them, kept them as novelty pets, and ultimately tried to exterminate them—they had all ended up as food on Dal dining tables.
It was a glorious golden age for the Dal race.
Right up until a few days ago.
Those humans in gray uniforms came from the sky. King Charles had his skull stomped into paste by a golden human in the middle of the Royal Court Plaza. Three Greater Daemons, summoned directly from the Blood God, were hacked into literal ash by that exact same man.
Bankal hadn't seen it happen with his own eyes. But he had heard the frantic reports brought back by the routed survivors fleeing the Royal Court. Those shattered soldiers claimed the golden human wasn't a man at all. They called him a demon wearing human skin. They said his axe could cleave through anything, and his wings of light could blot out the sky.
Bankal had no idea how heavily exaggerated those claims were. But he knew one immutable fact: if Charles and three Greater Daemons couldn't beat that human, then the Dal race was truly, undeniably finished.
"My Lord," the voice of a personal guard echoed behind him. "The city walls have been fully reinforced. The trench lines have been dug down to the third layer. We've constructed two thousand four hundred bunkers. Every adult male capable of holding a weapon has been drafted into the garrison."
"Total troop count?" Bankal asked.
"If we include all the elderly, the women, and the children... one billion, five hundred and thirty-seven million."
Bankal fell silent for a few seconds.
One and a half billion. These were the final seeds of Planet Dal. Every single survivor who managed to flee the Royal Court, the eastern continent, the western continent, and every other city the humans had crushed—they had all eventually converged right here.
The city of Bankal was now the absolute last bastion of the Dal race.
"What about the humans?"
"Their orbital fleet is still holding position. All seventeen airships we sent up were shot down."
"So we can't get out?"
"We can't get out."
Bankal turned around. The three-hundred-and-ten-year-old xenos had absolutely zero expression on his face.
"Then we fight," his raspy voice ground out. "One and a half billion against five hundred thousand. The numbers are on our side. We rose up from being humanity's pets, and even if we fall back down at their feet, we will fight to the absolute bitter end. We will at least prove that we resisted, and we will die without regrets. Charles may have been a brutal tyrant, and countless Dal died by his hand, but he was still the king of our race. He was the one who led us out of the mud and gave us true dignity. I have no desire to debate right and wrong anymore. Even if we are facing humans with the power of gods, I am willing to march into the abyss with all of you. For the Dal race... let our blood burn to the very last drop."
Bankal roared at the sky!
Along the city walls, countless pairs of crimson eyes flared to life in the darkness.
In the trenches, dense swarms of Dal soldiers scrambled to reinforce their fortifications.
Inside the bunkers, the whine of energy weapons charging up blended into one continuous, deafening hum.
One and a half billion xenos waited in every corner of this city for a final, desperate battle with absolutely zero way out.
But what they didn't know...
Was that Helovia had already mobilized an endless fleet of transport shuttles, massing them together and heading straight for Bankal.
Four hundred and fifty thousand troops from the First, Third, and Fifth Corps, backed by over two thousand Astartes, Grey Knights, Brothers of Silence, Tech-Priests, and a hundred freshly repaired Dreadnoughts.
The final battle for Planet Dal was about to begin.