Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

Chapter 350 --350

He looked at her for a moment with the expression of someone processing the gap between what they had expected to say and what had actually happened. Then he said, "Yes, Your Majesty," and went to tell Dren.

Five of Tarven’s men were waiting at the treeline when she emerged from the carriage. They were not armed with anything impressive — two had tools that could serve as weapons if required, one had a proper knife, two had nothing. They were standing with the specific posture of people who had made a decision and were committed to it and were not going to discuss whether it was a good decision because the time for that discussion had passed.

She looked at them.

"You are witnesses," she said. "That is your function today and it is an important one. You stay behind my guards at all times. You speak when asked to speak. If something happens that requires you to move quickly, you move in the direction my guards indicate without stopping to evaluate the instruction." She looked at each of them. "Is that clear?"

Five nods.

"Good." She turned to Petr. "Lead."

---

The forest was difficult in the specific way that old forest is difficult — not impassable, not even particularly treacherous once you found the rhythm of it, but requiring consistent attention. The ground was uneven in unpredictable ways. The light was low and green and played tricks with depth perception. Twice she stepped on ground that felt solid and was not quite, the soft give of accumulated leaf matter over hidden depression, and both times she caught herself without incident, but the incidents reminded her to keep ninety percent of her attention on her feet.

The remaining ten percent she spent listening.

The forest was not quiet. It had its own sounds — birds, wind through the high canopy, the distant sound of water somewhere to the north, the small movements of things that lived here and were not particularly concerned with the passage of humans through their territory. Underneath all of it, once she had been walking long enough for her ears to calibrate, she could hear the garrison.

Not loudly. At this distance it was subtle — the occasional metallic sound that came from organized human activity in an enclosed space, the evidence of structure rather than specific content. But it was there, and it was getting closer, and Petr was slowing his pace.

He stopped.

He turned and looked at her, then pointed through the trees at a specific angle. She looked in that direction and saw, through the gaps in the canopy, the edge of a cleared area. The northeastern face of the garrison post — not the main gate, not the watch positions, the back of it, the side that faced a direction nobody was supposed to come from.

She studied what was visible.

The garrison was not large — a working post rather than a major installation, the size consistent with a patrol detachment of perhaps forty soldiers. The structure was functional: a main building, a smaller building that was probably equipment storage, a stable, a perimeter fence that had been maintained well enough to be effective but not well enough to suggest anyone had been expecting serious threat from outside.

The northeastern face had one guard position. One person, she could see, at a station that had the quality of an assignment given to whoever had done something worth a boring posting. The guard was present and technically attentive and clearly had not had an interesting afternoon in some time.

She looked at Arek.

He was already looking at her with the expression of a man who had read the situation and had arrived, reluctantly, at the same conclusion she had. "The shadow complement," he said quietly, "will need approximately three minutes to get into position."

She waited three minutes.

Then she walked out of the trees.

---

The northeastern guard saw her when she was approximately fifteen meters from the fence.

The sequence of events that followed happened quickly but not chaotically — she had planned this, or planned the shape of it, which was not the same as controlling every detail but was enough to establish the direction. The guard saw her, saw the guards behind her, saw the group of civilians behind the guards, and did the thing that a guard who has been given a boring assignment and suddenly finds themselves in an unprecedented situation does: he shouted.

The shout brought people.

The people who came were in various states of readiness — some in full uniform, some not, the configuration of a garrison that was functional but not on active alert status. They came through the rear gate and they stopped when they saw her, and she watched the same wave she had seen in Tarven move through this group too, but with a different emotional content. Not hope and fear. Calculation and fear.

Among the people who came through the gate was a man who walked differently from the others. Not in terms of rank insignia — though his insignia confirmed it — but in the specific way he moved, the way a man moves through a space he is accustomed to owning. He stopped when he saw her. His face did something complicated.

"Your Majesty," Harwick said. He had a deep voice and a face that had been handsome once and had settled into something harder. He was perhaps fifty, with the build of someone who had once been genuinely formidable and was still trading on the memory of it. "This is — we were not informed of an imperial visit."

"No," she said. "You weren’t."

She walked through the gate.

He stepped back to let her through, because the alternative was to physically obstruct the entrance of the empress into an imperial military installation, and whatever else Harwick was, he was not that stupid. She walked past him and into the garrison’s main yard and she turned around and looked at the assembled soldiers.

There were thirty-seven of them visible. She counted. She had learned to count quickly.

"My name is Elara," she said, loudly enough to be clear without performing volume. "I am your Empress. I am here because I have spent the last two hours speaking with the people of Tarven village, which is four miles from where you are standing and which has forty-three people in it, down from sixty-one since you arrived." She let that number sit for a moment. "I have also been informed of two additional villages in this corridor with similar situations." She looked at Harwick. "I would like Commander Harwick to explain to me, in detail and in front of his soldiers and in front of the witnesses I have brought, the nature of the arrangements he has established with the civilian population in this corridor."

Harwick’s face had gone through several changes during this speech. It had settled on something that was trying to be confident and was not quite managing it.

"Your Majesty, the arrangements you may be referring to are standard supplementary procurement practices that have been in place in this region for—"

"The name of the practice you use for it is not what I asked you," she said. "I asked you to explain it. Specifically