MTL - Astartes of the Bear School

Chapter 868 850. Death

 They are quite polite.

 This made Lan En feel relieved.

 Perhaps this group of people before was really just dull.

The witcher thought optimistically.

These people are thin and tall, looking like malnourished skinny men.

But in terms of height alone, they can indeed keep eye level with Lan En.

There were about ten lumberjacks in this group. The person who took off his hat in response to Lan En's greeting was probably the foreman. After he stood up, many lumberjacks focused their attention on him.

 After taking off the straw hat, the image of the little foreman was very different from Lan En's expectation.

 The hair is frizzy and messy, with the damp heat from working on it.

 The cheeks are thin and even sunken.

"Can you help me? This person is unfamiliar with the place, but he is very sad."

 This is an ancient saying, in vernacular it is - piercing punishment.

 But as he spoke, he seemed to have no sense of time, and hesitation was now added to his stiff and dry voice.

Like his fellow men, the leading woodcutter sat on the ground with the bread Lan En gave them, and the wood they chopped was placed at their feet.

This made Lan En's eyes narrow slightly.

 Finally he took out the towel tied around his neck, wiped his dark hands, and took the bread.

The foreman looked at the large loaf of bread in Lan En's hand, and then looked up at Lan En himself.

“I am a lost traveler. After a good sleep, I can’t even tell whether it is morning or afternoon.”

 But Lan En did not express his real doubts openly. Instead, he asked about the name of the place first.

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 Stiff and dry, not only the voice and vocal cords. Lan En even felt that the thinking in their heads was very difficult.

He turned around and greeted: "Du, take a rest and have something to eat."

Lan En said naturally, while taking out a loaf of bread from the alchemy leather bag on his waist and passing it over.

"This is the forest. And now it's morning. No. Afternoon."

 A punishment with a wide gap between the upper and lower limits. The lower limit is to be stabbed to death with a single shot, which is a clean and tidy punishment. And the upper limit.

 Some people like Jesus’ crucifixion, where his limbs were nailed first and then stabbed to death. There are also cases where, like in the heavy flavor legend, the spear head is inserted through the victim's lower body, and then he stands up, using gravity to slowly penetrate the whole body and protrude from the mouth.

What's happening here?

 “Zeng punish the forest?”

The foreman waved his stiff arms and first asked his group to sit down and rest, and then introduced Lan En.

 “You don’t know? Oh. By the way, you are a traveler.”

This is the first time that this group of people has spoken after Lan En arrived.

 Judging from the way the foreman greeted his companions for food just now, he should at least be a normal person with emotional intelligence and experience in leading a team.

 But so far, even people with Down syndrome are better than him in terms of movement and speech performance.

The bread given by Lan En was very big. Even if it was divided among nearly ten people, each person still had a piece as big as half a palm.

Thick, strong, and very filling.

They, a group of lumberjacks, had been working very hard, and the hair on their heads was lying on their foreheads due to sweat.

 But I don’t know why, each of these people dressed themselves up carefully.

Even if she is naked, only her wrists and ankles are exposed.

Lan En saw that they had been wiping sweat, but no one was willing to take off their collars and go shirtless.

 “Aren’t you here to pay homage to the fire-passing ceremony? Underneath the Zengpu Forest is the ruins of the famous French Fortress where the famous Salary King [Farlan Undead Team] stayed.”

“This forest and the undead settlement on the hill behind it are the fiefdom of the Duke of Ulster.”

 Lan En pretended to be suddenly enlightened and spoke perfunctorily.

The other person said a lot of information at once, and Mentos was working with Lan En to sort it out. The ‘Fire Passing Ceremony’ sounds like a very famous and large-scale ceremony, so much so that it attracts many people to travel long distances to watch the ceremony.

 ‘King of Salary’ seems to refer to some kind of title, connected with the previous ‘Fire Passing Ceremony’, ‘Fire and Salary’. Lan En guessed that he might be the host of this ceremony?

‘The French Undead’ and ‘The Duke of Ulster’. These things lacked predescriptive descriptions in the lumberjack leader’s words. Lan En didn’t understand what they meant for a moment.

 I only know that this world is still dominated by the possessing class, and that the place I am in is a duke's fiefdom.

It seems that even though, as the lady in the lake said, this is a place where even the basis of existence is very different from other worlds, some things can still make people feel familiar.

Lan En didn’t expect to know much from the lumberjacks’ mouths, so after finding out how the undead settlement came to be, he didn’t ask any more questions.

Although the name Immortal Settlement is strange, a place that pursues and features "longevity" should also have such a nickname.

 It is a settlement after all. There must be more people than in the forest, and there should be more information available.

 Lan En was planning his future actions in his mind.

At the same time, it seems that these loggers haven't had enough to eat for a long time.

Lan En saw them holding the black bread he gave them and stuffing it into their mouths hungrily.

I really don’t know how the Duke of Ulster managed to make a group of woodcutters who didn’t even have food focus so much on their work.

 But soon, Lan En had no time to think about it.

 “Uh-huh-huh!”

A woodcutter holding the black bread in his hand and chewing it fiercely seemed to have choked in his throat because he ate too quickly and the black bread was too dry and too solid.

The eyeballs on his already thin face suddenly protruded like a frog. At the same time, his face turned red, and his long and thin palms were waving helplessly in the air.

The woodcutter around him quickly put the bread in his mouth and tried to help him with his free hands.

Lan En also noticed something was wrong, and quickly stepped over the legs of the leader of the lumberjacks, wanting to go over and help.

 But within these four or five steps, the man stopped moving.

 Lan Endu was in a daze.

After all, if food chokes the trachea and throat, according to his common sense, it will take more than ten minutes before it becomes life-threatening.

 So he didn't walk in a hurry just now. He walked four or five steps for three seconds.

 It’s just three seconds of suffocation. Then the person dies? !

Although the dead man's body was so thin that it felt like a mummy that should have been buried long ago, but it was too soon.

What made the witcher feel even more abnormal was that everyone, including the lumberjack leader, was stunned for a moment when faced with the sudden death of their companions.

Then it seemed like he was no longer surprised and didn’t take it to heart anymore.

The woodcutter who had come over to help with black bread in his mouth just now sat down next to the corpse and started eating again.

The demon hunter frowned slightly, and at the same time, his left hand was placed on the handle of the knife at his waist without any trace, and he slowly retreated.

 “Man, one of your men is dead.”

Lan En, who retreated slowly, walked to the leader of the lumberjacks who had just passed by. He looked down at the leader who was sitting on the ground and said something inexplicable.

"Isn't this a big deal? Why do I think you don't care?"

 “It’s a big deal to die.”

 The team leader seemed to have difficulty understanding what Lan En said.

 He repeated Lan En's words with difficulty.

"It seems like it's a big deal. Yes, someone died, it's a big deal."

 “But why don’t I care?”

　　What he said was incomprehensible, and the leader of the lumberjack team looked as if he was confused about what he said.

 The next moment, "Pfft!"

 A sharp wooden point was suddenly lifted up from behind the leader and thrust into the skinny body!

 (End of this chapter)