As Allen stood outside the tent watching the quiet grief of the camp, the cloth flap of the tent behind him was pushed aside. Luna stepped out.
"Allen," she said in her usual soft tone, totally unlike how she behaved while on the battlefield. "Lishia has agreed and wants to talk to you."
Well, about this I guess, he thought to himself. In fact, with the sort of information I’m giving her it would be unnatural if she didn’t agree to this deal.
Actually, Allen more or less knew about this beforehand. While coming back to the camp, he along with Luna and Eunice had decided that sharing information would be in the best interest of each other since both of them had something which the other wanted and valued.
Hence it was only a matter of getting Lishia’s approval, which they had just gotten now.
He gave her a simple nod and followed her back into the tent without speaking much, turning away from the silent consequences of war that lay before the tent.
The air inside was rather heavy. Eunice sat in a chair to the side with multiple cloths wrapped around her arms and chest. He assumed they were something like bandages but looked very primitive.
Lishia stood near the large wooden table in the center of the room with her eyes fixed on the map spread across it.
"Please, take a seat," Luna said, gesturing to one of the empty chairs around the table.
As Allen walked closer, Lishia finally looked up. Her sharp yellow eyes were filled with a mix of suspicion and a new and grudging respect.
"Allen, was it?" she said, her tone all business. "Thank you for your help today. I’m really grateful for what you did."
"Just doing what I could," he replied with a polite nod and then took a seat across from her.
This was the perfect attitude. After all, it aligned with everything he had done on the battlefield. It wasn’t as if he had gone there to fight for himself or level up in a random system.
He just happened to be here at the camp when the battle had started and just couldn’t help but sit here while the people around him were getting killed.
Lishia didn’t waste any more time than that for the greetings.
"Let’s get straight to it," she said. "We need to know more about where you come from."
Hearing that, Allen paused for a second.
Wait, I’m going first? Shouldn’t it be the other way around since the highlander thing seems pretty small and can be told quickly and done with, rather than me telling you about an entire fucking country?
He hated giving up information first. But he looked at the three of them and realized currently they were the ones with the leverage.
He was the one sitting in their camp and he needed them more than they needed him right now.
Fine, he thought. I’ll play their game. For now.
"Well, it’s a country on the other side of the ocean," he began with his voice calm and even. "It’s very far from here. And as I’ve already told these two, we don’t have... highlanders is, I guess, what you call them. We don’t have those there."
Lishia leaned forward as she showed interest in his words. After all, this was probably the highest level of classified information she was getting.
A country without highlanders. There’s no way anyone would not be interested in it.
"It doesn’t make much sense though, if there are no highlanders then who rules and governs the country?" she asked.
"The people do," Allen said simply.
The three of them just stared at him. The idea was clearly quite alien to them.
If he had said something like a king or queen then they’d still be able to get him, but people?
"Every five years," Allen explained, "everyone in the country gets a vote. They choose who they want their leaders to be and the person with the most votes gets to be in charge. If they do a bad job then the people can choose someone else next time."
"I know it’s a little different from the system people generally follow on this side of the ocean but that’s how it’s been since before I was born. There aren’t any kings or queens or royal bloodlines. Anyone can rule the country if they get the votes of the majority."
He saw the look of pure and unadulterated awe on their faces along with the very visible confusion. To them, the idea was something they’d never even thought about.
"A country ruled by the common man..." Lishia whispered, her mind clearly racing as she was trying to understand how such a society could even function.
Allen let the idea sink in for a moment before he brought them back to reality. "It sounds perfect, I know," he said, a bitter smile on his face. "But it has its own problems."
He leaned forward, his expression now serious. "The people are split into two big groups, two parties. And they are pretty much always fighting."
"Everything is about which party is in control. They spend more time trying to make the other side look bad than actually fixing things. Progress is slow. And the fight for power... well it corrupts people."
He glanced at Luna. "I’d already told Luna a little about this. The friends I had were the ones who tried to kill me..." Follow current novels on 𝓷𝓸𝓿𝓮𝓵·𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓮·𝓷𝓮𝓽
He let out a tired sigh and did his best playing his part perfectly.
"They were good people. People I thought I could trust my life with, but they later joined one of those parties and got involved in the politics. As they started to climb the ranks their greed for more influence and control kept increasing and suddenly, my power wasn’t just my power anymore."
"It was a tool they could use to win and to get an edge over the other side. I actually had a bit of a reputation among the general people there and they wanted to exploit that."
"They wanted me to fight their political battles for them even though I didn’t want to have anything to do with politics, I just wanted to live my life peacefully."
He looked down at the table, his voice growing quiet and bitter.
"Therefore when I didn’t agree to their plans despite dozens of meetings and deals they offered, they decided to lead me into a trap. They told me we were going on a diplomatic mission to another country in order to build good relations. It was supposed to be a cultural exchange trip."
He shook his head slowly.
"But it was a lie. They were taking me somewhere remote and far from anyone who knew me. A place where they could kill me and make it look like an accident."
"If I died in a foreign land then no one would be able to disprove their story. Their image back home would be safe, and their ’problem’ would be gone. After all, they’d begun to fear what would happen if I ended up joining their opposition party after being fed up with them."
He finally looked up with his expression a mask of weary resignation.
"Thankfully I already had my suspicions a little and ended up fidning out about their plan just in time. I managed to escape and I ended up in that forest, right where I ran into Luna."