The soldiers lined them up and had them kneel. Three of the soldiers kept watch over them, one of whom spoke into a radio clipped to his chest. Two soldiers carried the bandits' bodies, lining them up neatly along the side. Another soldier went around taking photographs of the bodies with a film camera, going so far as to rip their clothes and take photos of their tattoos. The amount of gunfire earlier didn't justify there just being these six soldiers. There must have been more, hidden in the jungle around.

"Excuse me—" Jack piped. One of the soldiers glared at him. Though he didn't quite see the soldier's eyes through the mosquito net, even just the soldier's body pivoting towards him by a small inch was enough to give that impression. The fact that these soldiers closely resembled special forces from the Old World—much like the spec ops dudes that Jack saw training the militia in Parasol—and that he towered over Jack with a rifle tricked-out on so many attachments of what could be lasers, scopes, and grenade launchers, shut him up fast.

The soldier on the radio stopped speaking. "Para," he said. "Hah," the other soldiers quietly replied. Quite a while passed—it must have been a half hour—before the foliage rustled, and a soldier came out, accompanied by someone in a drab tunic and trousers, stained with thick stripes of black and green. He wore a conical hat, foliage sticking out of it wherever which way, and in his left hand, he carried a staff. His face couldn't be seen behind the curtain of brown and green-dyed fibers hanging from his hat.

The mysterious man walked in front of the three, examining them at arm's length.

"Oso," she said. All three of them were surprised that a woman's voice came out, but beyond that, her voice sounded familiar. She lifted the camouflage veil, revealing her face.

"Wh— Frill?" Jack blurted.

"Oh? Parasol?" she replied.

"My name's Jack!"

Frill said some things to the soldiers, and they went lax. The one who seemed to be the squad leader relieved some of the soldiers that were guarding them, but they weren't completely let go. Frill and the squad leader spoke to Neruz in what was most likely the Azerkal tongue. For Jack and Singer, things had looked like they'd gone really complicated really fast.

It took a while for Neruz to finish speaking with the two. Meanwhile, Jack wondered about Neruz's real identity—it wasn't as if he had been putting up a fake one, but that it just wasn't complete. Just as he was wondering that, Neruz turned towards Jack and Singer.

"My friends, I regret to inform you that— "

"We've been roped into something complicated, haven't we?"

"Tha' Paladeen fella's gon' pay me bonus aft'r this is done, goddarn…"

In the background, the Azerkal-Parasol border had become a four-way between Azerkali royalists, the opposing Azerkali federalists, Parasol's long range patrol units, and an unknown faction wearing Parasol uniform, but was witnessed to have engaged other Parasol units as well.

Originally, the royalist border guards and Parasol patrol groups simply tried to outmaneuver each other, avoiding outright confrontation. Nevertheless, someone fired the first shot. Whoever did so wasn't clear, but this was around the same time that both the federalists and the rogue Parasol forces emerged in the vicinity.

"And how do we factor into this?" Jack asked.

"As you might have conjectured, my homeland is Azerkal," Neruz explained, "For now, it will suffice you to know that I was a part of the Azerkali Guard, but personal circumstances forced me to live a roundabout life."

"Ey! So I ain't th' only wun runnin' from somethin', huh!"

"Escaping the claws of one's regrettable past cannot be compared to escaping the consequences of engaging in unlawful activities, my friend."

Just as Singer almost put up a fight, Frill came by. The mosquito net that was supposed to be draped over her face was rolled up over her hat. They looked at her, and she looked at them. It was rather sudden, so it took a while to gather a new topic of conversation.

"Ah, Ms. Frill," Neruz said after some delay, "Friends, we may consider this lady our friend in this jungle."

"Oh, so yer takin' my job, too, huh?" Singer complained, holding dearly onto his title as 'trail navigator'.

"Jack?" Frill said. He was surprised at hearing her say something other than 'Parasol'.

"Y-yes?" he replied.

"Danger. Even here," she said. This piqued Neruz's interest.

"What do you mean?" Jack asked.

Just then, Jack picked up the rustling of leaves behind him. He turned around, and saw the barrel of a rifle being lifted towards him. He blinked, and the moment his eyes were open again, Frill had already parried the gun with her staff, and a panicked spray of automatic fire swung away from them. All the while, Frill stepped in and threw the soldier off balance, finally taking him down. "Feredal!" she shouted. A swarm of soldiers responded to the sudden call, and none of them were more at a loss than the squad leader. "Pereho!" he shouted, giving the traitor a beating on the spot.

That guy on a suicide mission or something? The infiltrator was restrained. Jack made no attempt to mentally process this random attempt at his life. He chalked it up to some sort of conspiracy that centered around him. Even with such a thought, his personal mission did not change: survive.

The Azerkali commander gestured in the air, stirring up the rest of the soldiers to file up and move on. With Frill's negotiation, Jack and the others were allowed to follow them. They withheld any further talks until they arrived at the camp proper.

Even with the attempt on his life, being around a camp was better than being left out in the middle of nowhere.

They reached the outskirts of the Azerkali royalists' camp. Camo netting and well-placed vegetation obscured the approach to the camp, and commandos kept watch from unobvious foxholes. At some point, the bush by Jack's feet moved, and a sniper greeted him with what surely was a "Fuck off, don't step on me!" in their language. It spooked Singer, too, but Neruz didn't even look impressed—with ample motivation, even he could hide himself right at his enemies' feet. His expertise even extended to pretending to be bad at doing it, if only for the sake of annoying a fellow expert—like, for example, Singer—and forcing them to reveal their skill.

The closer to the camp they got, the more the sentries looked bored. Among them, the uniforms were mixed—likely Azerkali royalists and some Parasol patrolmen working together. In the camp itself, the atmosphere seemed more hassled than tense. Even the wounded being ferried to the triage tent had the strength to complain. At some point, Jack made eye contact with one of the commandos, who was sitting up from his stretcher. The man gave Jack a thumbs up, to which he squinted and realized that the commando's thumb was nowhere to be seen.

Along the way, Neruz had been explaining their to-be role in the conflict in this area.

"So we have to help negotiate with the Parasol patrols around here?" Jack asked on the way.

"It is most likely that they are not aware of the events unfolding in Samarin. It is also most likely that they would listen to a general's personal agent," Neruz replied.

"Oi, don't that mean we gon' end up crossin' the rogues 'least one time?" Singer complained. Tentatively, the Azerkali special forces were referring to the fake Parasol forces as "rogues".

"Man, the Reorganization's a hassle—what's even with the name?"

"Regardless, if this is to be a safe haven for us, the royalists and legitimate Parasol forces must first be able to identify each other before they can cooperate. Before then, we face only fatal confusion in this war."

Although Jack said "we", it was Neruz who was expected to carry the burden of messenger, Jack and Singer not being expected to do anything particularly important. The guy was perfect for the job, being able to speak both Azerkali and Inglish—maybe bilingualism was actually more common here than Jack thought, especially since Frill was also bilingual, even if she only really spoke in curt fragments.

Speaking in curt, yet understandable, fragments in two languages was still its own type of impressive, really. Such a thing really only proved that Frill more than likely perfectly understood full sentences, and might even be more learned than she let on.

Being learned, though, was something that Neruz exuded in excess. Jack's first impression of him was that he was the adventuring intellectual type—at least, that was before the neurotoxin-laced knives and grenades that he kept in some back pocket. That he even intentionally taught Jack some of the simplest yet dirtiest tricks straight from his metaphorical travel journal—the man's origins sure were mysterious. The man himself was surprisingly straightforward, in delightful contrast.

"Hey," Jack called. Neruz turned around and let Jack catch up 'til his side, and they continued walking. "Why'd you ever leave your country?"

"Friend," he replied, "I am actually a dead man. Please refer to me as Zurei in front of the officers we are about to meet. You as well, Singer. When asked, uphold—and insist if insisted—only that we are acquaintances."

"Ain' that right, though?" Singer remarked.

It was true that they had only known each other for a few weeks, regardless that those weeks had been intense enough to shake Jack's sense of normalcy. At the same time, Neruz had, once again, skillfully evaded the question by answering it with an even deeper mystery: I am actually a dead man. More than likely, he might be willing to speak openly about his background, if only his background hadn't an indefinable depth of which he was not quite sure that his acquaintances would be capable to accept—Don't ask questions if you're not prepared for the answers, so they say.

In the wider scheme of things, there were likely two different conspiracies at work in both Azerkal and Parasol, and—clear as day—the two were just as likely related. Jack was also clearly being targeted. The connection between him and these country-shaking conspiracies, however, remained vague. The optimum strategy, therefore, was just not to think about it.

They arrived at the command tent.

Inside, there were two different uniforms mixed together. Though they both looked like commandos, Parasol's special forces did not have as intricate a camouflage pattern as Azerkal's. A mix of such commandos, armed and ready to go, stood in a circle around two men representing the two sides. They looked young—lieutenants or captains, at most. They discussed strategy, hunched over a map, and there was an interpreter in the middle who hadn't a wink of sleep in the last 24 hours.

The Parasol officer looked up and eyed the new arrivals. "What're these civvies doing here?"

The commando who led them here answered with jumbled Azerkali words with a "de Samarin" somewhere in there.

"Important information… escape… refugees? From Saramin," the interpreter repeated.

The Parasol officer had a sparkle in his eyes.

***

The sparkle in his eyes dimmed. "The fuck?" was all he could muster as a reply. The Azerkali-born interpreter faced his CO and said "De puta?" in the most neutral voice he could manage.

Neruz—or as everyone else in the room knew him, "Zurei"—presented to the Parasol officer his RFID card, which proved him to be General Paladin's personal agent. The officer nodded along and went on to trust his story of Samarin being currently embroiled in urban conflict.

"Even the core units, huh?" the Parasol officer said, "I'd understand the local militia going turncoat, but I didn't think there was somethin' going on that even our own people got their dirt on."

He scratched his head.

With the fresh intel, the officers in the room agreed that the incursion by Azerkali federalists and rogue Parasol units couldn't be coincidental. As it stood, there was a good chance that the federalists and rogues aimed to take control of the border in order to reinforce the uprising in Samarin, even if it was so far away.

Risking his neck to a later court martial, the Parasol officer corrected them—Samarin wasn't actually a hundred kilometers away from the border. That was a lie intentionally spread by Parasol counter-intelligence. In actuality, Samarin was just 47km away. Animal-drawn vehicles would be forced to slow down on the dirt roads, so it may as well have actually been a hundred kilometers for a contemporary army. However, engine-driven, all-terrain vehicles could easily make the trip within a day, and Azerkal still maintained a fleet of such vehicles. The royalists possessed these vehicles at the start of the civil war.

However…

"Enemy… take base… three weeks ago," the interpreter said.

"…Okay, what about the base?" the Parasol officer asked.

"Base, many… ah, erm…"

The war room waited intently.

"…Base have 'brum brum', go fast?"

Jack couldn't believe that the others in the room could keep a straight face. On the contrary, they were horrified at the military implications of the man's belabored translation. Jack hid behind Zurei—or in his mind, "Not-Neruz"—in a bid to conceal his chuckle, while the others pondered on the possibility that the federalists might actually be able to take Samarin—but why Samarin? The officers debated to no clear conclusion. As Parasol's southernmost territory, it was isolated, leaving it practically economically independent from the rest of Parasol's allied cities. It had its own agricultural and manufacturing facilities, weapons production being part of it. If someone wanted to invade Parasol, taking the Samarin Region and its infrastructure was a must to sustain the invasion.

Still, it made no sense. The royalists succeeded in dragging on the civil war, stretching the federalists thin to the point that it could be said that they were losing. Why take a staging ground for an invasion they can't commit to? Why would they risk a counter-invasion from Parasol's dozen-member alliance just for control of one city?

Well, none of that ain't worth jack for Jack.

Peace was in short supply, and here, he was just hoping to find some. Sadly, it was quickly looking like it was going to mean shooting up the place a bit. The Parasol and Azerkali officers easily agreed to cooperate, and they placed Not-Neruz at the center of their strategy to deal with the federalists and rogues. It didn't seem like it bothered him, who had obligations towards both General Paladin and the Crown of Azerkal. Singer thought he'd get a bigger payout if he'd joined in. Frill was an enigma, and Jack had just noticed that she had disappeared somewhere between entering the camp and entering the tent.

As for himself, he begrudgingly agreed to go along. He was better off being with his trustworthy fellows in the middle of an otherwise-dangerous operation than being stuck waiting in a camp filled with potential suicide hitmen. The main goal of surviving besides, he also wanted to know why he had a target painted on his back—some reason deeper than "Pizza delivery guys from the past are a threat to the shadow state and must be eliminated!"

Given that he had not met any other pizza delivery guys from his time, perhaps there was some merit to that hypothesis.