Ilan Bird looked up at the dark building in the rain ahead and, after a careful glance, he spotted a tiny sickle emblem.
That somewhat reassured him.
He pulled down the hood to shield from the rain and walked under the eaves.
On the side, he found a small door and knocked six times, following a special rhythm.
Only then did the door open a crack, revealing orange-yellow light.
A child who looked no more than five or six years old timidly poked his head out from inside. One of his eyes was normal, but the other had had a large hole gouged in its socket and a mechanical eye inserted.
The child looked up at Bird under the hood, his unfamiliar face prompting alert; he hurriedly tried to close the door, but Bird stopped it with his hand.
How could a five or six-year-old child have the strength to compete with an adult?
With only a slight effort, Bird pushed the door open wide enough for him to slip through.
He quickly sidled inside and promptly closed the door behind him.
The child fell to the ground, looking at him with fear on his face, about to scream loudly, but Bird, who had quickly bent down, covered the boy’s mouth.
“Shh…” Silencing the child, Bird gestured for him to be quiet, but he only heard the click of a gun cocking behind him.
“Let him go!”
Bird stopped his movements.
The child wriggled free and crawled behind the newcomer, hiding there and only showing his head, looking on fearfully.
Ilan Bird raised his hands and said, “Calm down! Calm down! It’s me!”
“Bird?” The person behind seemed to recognize his voice, yet wasn’t entirely sure.
“It’s me, Tim, don’t get excited,” Ilan Bird said, turning around.
He thought he would see a handsome face.
Tim Winter was the best-looking one in their Demon Hunter Squad. When they were together, they often teased him that he was too conspicuous to be a Demon Hunter working undercover.
However, when he turned around and saw his teammate’s face, he was taken aback.
Gone was the handsome, dashing face, replaced by one full of scars. Only beneath those scars could Bird faintly make out the appearance of Tim Winter from his memory.
“What happened to you?”
Tim Winter slowly lowered his gun and sighed, “Bird, you shouldn’t have come.”
“How could I not come? Five of you entered Blackbird City, and then for more than a month, no news at all. We had an agreement to exchange information every week, but we waited a long time at the external information point and didn’t get any message from you. Instead, we almost exposed ourselves to Blackbird Heavy Industries’ security team…”
“It’s not that we didn’t want to send information…” Winter started to say but then stopped.
First, he bent down and said something to the child behind him, allowing him to leave, then turned to Bird, “Come on, let’s go to the back and rest. Have a cup of hot water, and then we can talk in detail.”
…
Ilan Bird and Tim Winter were both members of the Alliance Demon Hunter Organization, and they could both be considered among the first batch of members.
When the Demon Hunter Organization was just established, two teams were recruited; one went south to fight corruption, and the other team, which included the two of them.
They set off with a caravan, heading west, and had stayed for some time in several oasis settlements in the Western Desert, gathering some intelligence before continuing westward to the edge of the continent.
Their ultimate goal was to collect intelligence about Blackbird Heavy Industries on this western side of the continent, striving to make preparations for the Alliance to liberate this planet’s last piece of land.
Now, the only enemy left for the Alliance on Rage Owl Star was Blackbird Heavy Industries.
Those numerous desert oases in the Western Desert, those settlements built around pre-war plantation factories, hardly needed much attention. They had neither a unified organization nor sufficient military strength. After the bountiful harvest in the Green Valley Region, even the strategic resource they once held dear—food—was no longer significant to the Alliance.
The sole obstacle to reclaiming the Western Desert was the complicated and entangled relationship they had with Blackbird Heavy Industries.
But once they reached the western edge of the continent, within the areas under Blackbird Heavy Industries’ effective control, what they witnessed was starkly different from what they had imagined.
The natural environment here was still harsh, and the people’s lives were still quite difficult, not much better than those of the many settlements before liberation by the Alliance, and definitely not comparable to the living standards of an average E5 rank and above under the Alliance.
However, unlike those settlements before their liberation by the Alliance, the western edge of the continent had a complete and unified system of rule and management.
Based on what they had observed and experienced on this land for almost a year, they felt that Blackbird Heavy Industries was just a big corporation—of course, they always had been—and the fifteen million people living here were all employees of this company.
Here there were strict hierarchical relationships, performance targets assigned to each individual, organizational structures divided by department, clear managerial levels…
An order issued by Blackbird Heavy Industries’ headquarters, Blackbird City, could indeed be transmitted through the ranks to a specific individual.
Blackbird Heavy Industries would issue its own internal currency as wages, paid to every individual: there was no base salary, just commission based on workload and performance.
Similarly, they also established supply stations in various locations. Residents could use their wages to purchase their necessities for life…
This social structure caused many difficulties for Bird and his fellow Demon Hunters, who were new to the area, in their intelligence-gathering efforts.
They were new faces in this huge ‘company’, where there was little contact between departments and interactions mostly involved familiar faces.
Initially, they caused quite a few incidents, exposing their identities and being pursued as a consequence.
But gradually, they quickly found some tricks.
In the large corporation that was Blackbird Heavy Industries, there were common problems faced by many large organizations: there were too many people, making organization difficult, and it was hard for everyone to recognize each other.
They relied more on identity badges and codes to identify each other.
Ambush, capture, interrogation, torture… They obtained a lot of intelligence and gradually learned how to disguise themselves, starting to fit in like a fish takes to water.
And soon, they were no longer satisfied with merely gathering intelligence on the periphery. They set their sights on the headquarters of Blackbird Heavy Industries — Blackbird City.
However, that place was a different world.
Mysterious and closed off, they couldn’t even find a way in, as if that entire massive city, estimated to house seven million people, didn’t need to interact with the outside world at all.
