From Skaven to God of War

Chapter 410, Prisoner

The sandstorm finally stopped.

Fortunately, they survived.

At this time, the wilderness was in a mess, with many huge potholes on the ground, and one-third of the transport vehicles in the convoy disappeared.

At the same time, some of them were twisted and deformed as if they were hit by a sledgehammer. Some guys who were not completely dead were wailing in the twisted and deformed steel, and those who survived looked dazed.

Not long after, when the communicator on his waist made a sound again, the cowardly young mercenary finally came to his senses, and a burnt smell appeared in his nose.

Realizing something, he pulled up his leg suddenly, and a piece of flesh stuck to the steam boiler was torn off.

This is where the fragrance comes from.

It’s not that painful, but it’s precisely the lack of pain that represents a big problem.

He hurriedly turned off the steam boiler and bandaged the wound on his calf with the yellowed linen.

This is the best way he can deal with the situation at the moment.

This kind of burn was not unfamiliar to him, and he also knew what this would bring. The best way to deal with it now was to turn around and find those profiteers to buy a bag of expensive spore powder, but he could not afford the price of breach of contract, so he had to send these guys to their destination even if he had to bite the bullet.

Now all I can do is pray, pray that I can get through it, pray that I can survive.

The rats soon started moving again.

Those guys who were not dead and were still wailing were ignored for the time being.

The rest of the journey was extremely difficult for the young rat mercenary. During the previous random shooting, he broke one side of the glass on the grille observation port of the tracked transport vehicle he was driving.

Every time we moved forward, the black sand in the wilderness would be blown up by the strong wind and flow in through the broken grille observation port.

Such wind could not damage the structure of the tracked transporter, but it could fill the hair all over its body with black sand.

His condition was getting worse and worse. Even through the bandage, one could smell a nauseating stench from the wound on his calf.

There was no pain, but he felt himself getting weaker and weaker.

The worst case scenario has occurred, and he is afraid that he really needs to buy some spore powder from those unscrupulous merchants.

Fortunately, not all news is bad.

They arrived at their destination.

Gradually, a rising mountain, a pitch-black mountain appeared in the sight of all the ratmen. This was the destination of their trip and also the third super iron mine discovered by the ratmen on the Black Iron Star.

A new ratman city is about to fall in this dark mountain.

The first two super iron mines have entered the full-speed development stage. They support the starports of the two planets, the Second Fleet of the Ratmen and the Divine Fortress.

This dark mountain is the third super iron mine discovered by the Rat People on the Black Iron Star. It will support the construction of the Rat People’s Third Fleet and the unfinished starport on the Black Iron Star.

It’s just not easy to get to this point and it will take some time.

First, you need a camp that can roughly smelt steel, and then gradually expand this camp into a majestic steel city, a super city that integrates mining, smelting, and production capabilities.

This is not a project that can be completed in a short time. It may take twenty years, or even a hundred years, or even a century. This is already an incomparably long period of time for the rat people.

After going up to the starry sky, the lifespan of the rat people increased slightly, but only slightly.

Before leaving the Shenqi Star, the average rat man might only live eight to twelve years in his lifetime, but now, this number has increased to twenty. Of course, this is an average value.

The difference in lifespan between ratmen is outrageous.

It depends on the specific environment and whether one is qualified to enjoy those truly precious things, but these are the privileges of the respectable ratmen, rat bigwigs, big businessmen, and bureaucrats. For the ordinary rat free people, these are the privileges of the respectable ratmen, rat bigwigs, big businessmen, and bureaucrats.

Their lives are not long, and it is not easy to live to the age of twenty.

It would take at least a generation of ratmen to destroy this city, and this number might even continue to increase.

This is a scale that is almost unimaginable for ordinary rat people.

At this moment, these ratmen who were sent to this wasteland were the starting point of everything and also the trapped prisoners.

They are unable to leave this wasteland all their lives. They work, give birth, work, and realize the grand vision step by step, although they cannot intuitively know what they are doing until they die.

For them, the meaning of life is to earn those shiny pieces of iron, to live, and to try hard to prove that they live better than other guys.

So they are prisoners, prisoners of this city that has already begun to be built.

A huge steel city, a steel city no longer buried deep underground, a steel city that was built bit by bit, with countless ratmen surging in it. Their entire lives, or several lives, several generations, everything, survival and death, will be trapped in these steel giants.

All it takes is a bit of shiny metal.

Endless steel formed the bones and flesh of the ratman fleet, and also the bones and flesh of the ratman empire.

After successfully unloading the goods, the young rat mercenary obtained a certificate engraved with steel.

This is what he needs to exchange for his reward.

This time, after one rotation, he was able to get a fairly good reward, one hundred blood gold coins.

Of course, if he didn't have the voucher when he turned back, the situation would be different for him.

Those ratmen bureaucrats are not good guys at all. They are incredibly greedy guys. They will not hesitate to take advantage of every opportunity to squeeze the blood out of you.

His condition was getting worse and worse, and some turbid pus was already flowing out of the wound on his calf.

All we can do is pray.

Pray that I can return safely and alive.

Before setting out, he had never thought that this mission would be so dangerous.

These rat mercenaries, although called mercenaries, actually do not have much combat capability. They are more of a group of unlucky people who are forced to wander in the wilderness.

Just like him.

He was born in a settlement called Iron Bush. Just because he was not as tall as his brother, he was driven out of the family by his parents on the day his brother came of age.

A man was hanging out in that small settlement.

Even the hideous scar on his face was just a scar left from a fight with his brother.

He wandered around the crowded Ratman Tavern every day, stealing the steam trains that traveled to and from the settlement every day with a few young Ratman boys who were also driven out.

Their small settlement didn't have many special products. It was built only because two tracks intersected next to their settlement. Almost all the decent jobs in the settlement revolved around the intersection and the steam trains that traveled to and from this node. They maintained the tracks, cleaned the trains, provided spare parts, and replenished food and some turbid water.

His father is a track maintenance worker, and his brother will inherit his father's job and his father's name, the new hammer rat in the steel bush, and become a decent track maintenance worker.

And he was the pickpocket who hung out in the tavern.

He took advantage of the stop where the steam train stopped, climbed onto the carriages carrying various ores, tried hard to fill his dirty leather bags with the ores, and finally fled in a hurry before the guards on the train noticed him.

This is what he does day by day.

It's not a decent or safe thing to do.

From time to time, young guys would be caught by the guards and beaten to death on the spot.

Looking at the bodies of his companions hanging high on the station gate, he was terrified for a moment, but in this small town, there was nothing else a guy like him could do except doing this.

If you don't steal from the train, you will have to endure hunger.

Compared to hunger, death seems to be nothing.

In fact, this kind of life is not boring.

After all, each arriving train brings different things. Most of them are dark iron ore. Even if you fill a bag with them, you can only get one or two white mushroom blocks in exchange.

And if he was lucky enough to come across trains loaded with black gold, trains loaded with good copper ore, or even trains loaded with blood gold, then he only needed to fill half a pocket to allow him to stay comfortably in the tavern for several days.

The best thing he got during his time stealing on trains was a shiny piece of blood-gold with beautiful patterns engraved on it. He pierced a hole in it and hung it around his neck.

Originally, his life should have continued like this.

Until one day, a train guarded by many rat warriors stopped in their small town. The train was carrying only one piece of cargo.

A huge golden bell.

That night, the rat man in the small bar, who was also the owner of the Rat Man Bar and a big shot in this rat man gathering place, was in a very low mood.

He poured cup after cup of mushroom wine into his mouth and told them some stories about his youth.

He said that when he was young, he left this small rat-man gathering place and came to a place called a city, where he worked as a rat-man mercenary.

When talking about the place called city, the rat man's face was particularly excited.

That day, he asked the rat man a question.

"You are so amazing, you must be in that city. You must be living very comfortably in that city!"

But what he got was the rat man's laughter.

The next day, he again skillfully climbed onto the carriage of a steam train, but this time he did not come down.

Burying himself in the dark iron ore, he followed the steam train and left the small settlement.

In this way, he arrived in the city with curiosity and expectation, and after some setbacks, he became a rat mercenary.

He was lucky. Thanks to the hideous scar on his face, his journey as a ratman mercenary was not bumpy. In the huge ratman city called Blast Furnace, he helped the ratman gang collect debts, groped in the sewers for special mushrooms, and broke into the wilderness to hunt ferocious beasts.

In just the second year after arriving at the blast furnace, he received praise from a rat gang leader, and thus, he got this assignment.

Spore powder is sold in this camp.

But he didn't have that much blood money.

In order to join the Rat Gang, he donated all the blood money he had saved in the past two years to the leader of the Rat Gang.

The convoy was about to set off, and he could only grit his teeth and follow.

When he was in the iron thorns, he had always been very curious about the ratman engineer who was the greatest in the settlement, the ratman engineer who made his father, a railway track worker, terrified at the mere mention of him, and who even he was polite to. But why did he have no name?

He just always wanted a name.

Those respectable guys all had names, but this rat man had no name.

Until he came to the blast furnace.

See all sorts of things.

In the past, he often felt bad because he lost to his brother and failed to inherit his father's name, Iron Hammer Rat.
But after arriving at the blast furnace, such thoughts did not arise in my mind again for a long time.

Compared to the blast furnace, the steel thorns are too small.

The railway maintenance worker is also nothing.

He longed to make his own name in the blast furnace and pass his name down from generation to generation in the blast furnace.

It's just not easy.

This is just a goal for now.

But it is good to have such an idea. After all, only something you desire can give you the motivation to climb up.

It's just not easy.

The stench was so strong that it was almost impossible to suppress the sandstorm in the wilderness.

Everything in my sight gradually became blurred.

Before he knew it, the young rat mercenary had fallen to the end of the convoy.

It was time to stop, so he pulled the handle of the tracked vehicle hard to stop it.

This old tracked transport vehicle slowly stopped in the wilderness.

All this went unnoticed, and no one in the departing rat-man convoy noticed that a tracked transporter had become dislocated. They roared away, as if they did not want to stay in the wilderness any longer.

The young Skaven mercenary was left behind.

There was silence all around. Apart from the whistling black sand, there was no other sound.

Curled up on the cold metal seat, listening to the rustling sound of the wind.

Whispering in a low voice.

"It's so cold, so cold!"

(End of this chapter)