This can’t be happening to me. This isn’t real.
I looked at Robert, who was explaining how his group had ended up in this city, but my gaze kept drifting to the small embroidered head of a Gorgon on his T-shirt.
You might not have cared about politics, the military, or listened to the news and read the newspaper summaries, but you couldn’t not know about The Gorgon.
"The Gorgon." A symbol group. A ghostly, almost mythically legendary group, whose predecessor three hundred and six years ago helped the First Three rise to power. A small, elite organization, directly subordinate to the Three and only the Commander-in-Chief. The names of the participants were always kept in the background; they didn’t exist as individuals – there was only "The Gorgon" and the Gorgons. They devoted their lives to military service, to this group, giving up their past and future. The most difficult operations, the hottest battle zones – the name "Gorgon" was always there. And no one knew whether there was more truth or rumor surrounding these fighters, whose professionalism and faith in their ideology were spoken of almost with reverence.
“…this plague started spreading rapidly in the northern part of the region a couple of weeks ago. The authorities tried to convince everyone that everything was under control. Maybe it was at first, but you can't seal off entire cities and borders, “Robert paused for a moment.” I was working with my team in the "Cold Calm" area; now fighting has flared up again there.”
“Fighting? In the southwest?” I asked, incredulous. “But they said all military operations there had ended. After all the peaceful and pacifist demonstrations?”
“People never get enough blood,” Sam scoffed suddenly, crossing his arms over his chest and looking down at the floor. I shot him a warning glance, which, of course, he didn't see. Robert, however, reacted with extreme calm to Dort's barb.
“I’m not the one who ends the fighting, and neither are my people. Just as we’re not the ones who start it.”
“How did you get here?” I asked immediately, not allowing Sam to start a debate.
“This Tuesday, we were urgently called back. We were supposed to land five hundred kilometers north of here, but the landing site was declared lost. And not just that. The red zone,” the man coughed. “In the end, we were dropped off at the central area airport and transferred into our own vehicles, with the expectation that we would leave the cordoned-off zone by land. But… The final directive from "command" brought us here. The Monarchs had to admit that attempting to reclaim lost territories was unfeasible. We were ordered to ensure that everything here remained under control; the town is small, but it’s one of the main junctions for the roads. Like every town in the Isthmus Region, really…” Robert scoffed, looking down at the floor with some disappointment. “But the Three miscalculated.