There's No Love In the Deathzone (BL) novel Chapter 645

Chapter 645: Side Story 2. Dance of Flame and Shadow - 4

"Haa...I feel so stupid," Agni muttered while burying his face in his hands.

He let himself drown in another self-deprecation moment for five seconds before raising his head again. In front of him, lying on his bed, was the son of his older, dead colleague. A young face, barely out of adulthood, looking even younger while sleeping calmly instead of glaring and barking like a mad dog.

Trying to face a wraith with just two beginner daggers and his wit; how foolish, an amateur mistake at its finest. And it made Agni realize something that punched him in the gut.

"Fuck, he’s just a kid."

Agni exhaled heavily. Of course, he was just a kid. The first and last time he saw the kid before was when he was just joining Nolan Hertz’s squad. The kid was...ten, probably. Hadn’t even awoken yet. He never saw the kid again because the squad kept being sent to secluded areas, and they were rarely in the main base.

Leaning back on his seat, Agni took a deep breath and slowly calculated in his head. If the kid was twenty now, he would be...fifteen when his father was sentenced to the Borderland. After five years of rarely seeing the old man, he had to face another four years of absence before the old man died.

The kid’s father died before they could see each other again. They couldn’t even meet during the unfair court-martial, so the last time the kid saw his father should be...six years ago.

"Haa...I shouldn’t swear too much," Agni sighed again, probably for the hundredth time that day alone. "But what should I do with this kid?"

He let out another sigh and got out of the room, slipping into the headquarters’ emergency stairs and lit up a cigarette. Laying his back across the staircase, Agni took a moment to close his eyes and let memory take him back to where everything went wrong. The point that brought the boy to this reckless decision.

Was it the moment when they were sent to the Borderland? No, if he had to trace it back, he might as well started the moment Nolan Hertz accepted the promotion to lead a special squad instead of staying in the main base doing desk work.

Should he choose to stay back, he wouldn’t have to be sent here and there and trapped in that damnable mission. But that wasn’t who Nolan Hertz was. He didn’t want to stay inside an office. He wanted to get out and save more people from dungeons.

And so, he chose the promotion.

Agni was twenty-five when he got recruited to the squad. Later on, he realized that the squad was a ragtag group of outcasts, and the leader was someone the Major leading their battalion disliked. Something about being a rival in the academy--Agni wouldn’t know.

He didn’t come from the academy. He was awoken when he was twenty-one, and only went through the government short course before taking the tower’s trial. He had to take a debt to afford the cost of the journey, and because his debtor was the government, he had to serve in the military to pay for it.

Perhaps that was why he was getting ostracized. Someone who came from outside of the recognized system, had nothing but debt, but also better than the others in his company. A recipe for hazing, honestly. Only if Agni wasn’t a hotblooded berserker who would bark and bite back when he was attacked. After going through many useless punishments, the higher-up gave up and threw him into this ’special’ squad.

It wasn’t bad, though. For Agni, these outcasts were better than his previous colleagues. They bonded fast through their shared ostracization under the lead of someone who was too passionate for his own good.

Nolan Hertz, knew everything about raiding but nothing about politics. Nothing about keeping himself safe even though he had a family. Agni used to think the man was foolish, and he still thought the man was foolish, although it felt kind of bad saying it after he was dead. _{freewёbnoνel.com}

"Fuck--if you know you have family, you should make a choice that prioritizes them, you dimwit!" Agni hissed along with the smoke billowing in the narrow corridor. "Even if you’d get bored to death, you should have just stayed."

If he could turn back time--no, if he could only appear in Nolan’s dream ten years before...

He should have told the man not to take the exilement-disguised ’promotion’--even though the man wouldn’t know him at that time. Or if he was too late for that, he should have told the man not to take that damn mission.

Yeah, that damn mission that plunged them into a nightmare.

"The damn border again?!" Agni had grunted when the mission slip came. The squad was in its fifth year, and two-thirds of the missions they got were always located in the farthest point, the most secluded area.

"Why are you calling it a border when it’s only at the orange-zone?" Nolan chuckled. "What are you going to call the Borderland, then?"

[That’s why I said barricade, you idiot! Who said to let them out? You need something to make those bests busy while the airstrike is on the way!]