The Steam Age: Gears and Bones

Chapter 26

The outpost was burned to the ground.

This is a true white ground—not the kind of ruins with crumbling walls, but the white ash left after everything has been burned down from top to bottom.

The wooden house structure has completely disappeared, leaving only a few charred stone pillars standing alone in the ashes.

The stone wall was scorched by the high temperature and cracked, with radial cracks all over the surface.

The ground was covered with a thick layer of grayish-white ash, which was wrinkled by the wind, like a shroud laid at the bottom of the depression.

Amidst the ashes, corpses were everywhere.

To be precise, they were charred bones.

Some had their jaws wide open, their skulls filled with ash, as if they were still screaming silently before they died.

Some were curled up in a ball, their charred ribs intertwined, and their grayish-white spines embedded between their charred shoulder blades.

Others were left with only a hand—a blackened arm bone protruding straight from the ashes, with almost all the finger bones shattered and scattered, leaving only the index finger pointing straight to the sky, as if it had been instantly burned to ashes while desperately climbing upwards.

The acrid smell in the air was so strong it was almost suffocating. Even a veteran superhuman like Captain Lianqi visibly tensed his jaw.

Perfit stood at the edge of the depression, not in a hurry to go down. Her gaze swept from one skeleton to another, examining each one carefully.

She counted in her mind—judging from the distribution of the bones, these people were not burned to death in the house, but died in an open field.

Most of the remains were concentrated in the central area of ​​the outpost, which should have been a training ground, with some piled up at the outpost's only main entrance.

They were fleeing the outpost. Then something stopped them.

Perficott raised his hand, signaling the others to stay where they were, and then led the flag captain and Cherzov down into the depression.

She crouched beside one of the skeletons and gently brushed away the ashes with the back of her dagger.

There were no teeth marks on the charred bones—they hadn't been eaten, they'd been burned to death. But what made her fingers stop beside the skeleton's neck was something else: between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae, there was a very thin, straight cut. Not from a wild animal. From a sword.

She then examined several skeletons nearby, each one identical to the last.

The body had puncture marks on its thoracic vertebrae and sternum, indicating that it had been stabbed through the chest and then its cervical vertebrae severed.

The grayish-white ground beneath them was soaked in some kind of liquid and then burned dry, revealing charred black crystalline scabs that were different from wood ash—it was blood.

Cherzov crouched down beside her, his gaze sweeping over the skeletons, and whispered a word in Romash.

Perfit turned to look at him and found the old man silently staring at one of the curled-up skeletons—a skeleton much smaller than the others, its ribs not yet fully closed.

It's a child.

He brushed away the ashes from the small skeleton with his fingers and then drew a short symbol on its chest.

"They were executed before they were infected." Perfit stood up, sheathed his dagger at his waist, his voice devoid of any emotion. "Someone killed everyone before they became infected, and then set this place on fire."

Some of the corpses came back to life, which caused this scene. This must have been done by Ross's army. We were ordered to show mercy to the infected when necessary, and to let them die as human beings as possible.

Perfit didn't respond to that sentence.

She walked around the ruins a few times, and had the flag captain organize people to move the skeletons together to identify their identities and the manner of their injuries.

The final conclusion was more disturbing than the fire itself: the entire outpost was burned down almost simultaneously with the bloodshed, leaving no trace of infection and no survivors to guide the way.

Cherzov lingered in front of the small skeleton for a few more breaths, then moved it next to the other skeletons, turned and walked out of the depression first.

He said nothing as he passed Perfitt, only shook his head slightly.

Perfit stood at the edge of the depression for a moment, taking one last look at the white, ashen ground before turning and walking toward the post road.

They did not spend the night there, but instead rushed back to the main road before it got completely dark and set up camp in an abandoned farmhouse about two miles from the Predelshinsk district.

Everyone slept lightly that night, and the number of sentry shifts was twice as many as the previous night, but no one complained.

The next morning, they finally arrived at their destination.

Perfit stood at the end of the post road, looking at the city that had been reduced to ruins, and remained silent for a long time.

The Pledelshchensk district was not what she had imagined.

In Chertzov's description, this is one of the largest urban areas in northern St. Petersburg, with dense residential buildings, a large hospital, several schools, and an industrial zone that ranks among the top in the entire Rus' Empire.

But what lay before her was only a vast expanse of ruins stretching to the horizon.

Most of the buildings had collapsed roofs, leaving only charred wooden beams stuck diagonally in the piles of bricks and stones, like the ribs of some huge creature protruding from the soil.

The walls were covered with soot marks, and some surfaces were even blackened and shiny from the high temperature—that was the glaze formed by the melting and solidification of silica in the bricks at extremely high temperatures.

The street was mostly blocked by debris from collapsed buildings, and the broken paving stones were sticking up, revealing the black soil underneath.

Several burnt trams lay overturned on both sides of the street, their iron wheels rusted and the paint on the carriages burned off, leaving only the metal sheets trembling slightly in the cold wind.

But what silenced Perfit was not the ruins themselves, but the infected.

Too much.

From where she stood, she could see at least dozens of them on the main street alone.

Some of them stood motionless in the middle of the street, like sculptures that had been misplaced; others wandered slowly among the collapsed buildings, their steps dragging, their shoulders occasionally bumping into the walls, knocking off pieces of loose brick; still others lay on the piles of rubble, digging through the broken stones with their broken fingers, seemingly searching for something.

In the shadows of buildings further away, she could vaguely see more; they were piled up in layers, slowly writhing, their human-shaped outlines blurred into a dark, undulating wave in the shadows.

Hundreds and thousands.

This number is no longer an abstract description, but a reality she has witnessed firsthand.

Perfitter lowered his binoculars, and everyone behind him saw what happened.

The flag captain's expression didn't change much, but the knuckles of his fingers gripping the sword hilt had turned white.

Ludwig stood to her right, his veteran eyes rapidly scanning every building, every street, every gap in the ruins as he calculated the assault and retreat routes. But Perfitt could tell that the more he calculated, the tighter his jaw clenched.