We left before sunrise.
The elders did not know.
The children did not complain.
Baba did not hesitate.
We traveled south along ridge-lines instead of old stone paths — stone paths belonged to Payan now. Ridge-lines belonged to hunters.
By midday, we smelled smoke again.
Not thick like the sect's ritual smoke.
Thinner. Controlled. Tactical.
A different kind of fire.
The Battlefield Without Battle
We crawled the last ridge on our bellies.
Below, in a clearing blackened by ritual burning, Payan soldiers formed three lines.
Front: shield-men, blind, ears tilted, spear butts grounded.
Middle: sighted spearmen with iron points.
Rear: crossbowmen —
Crossbowmen.
The sight of them tightened my breath. I had expected swords and spears. I had not expected mechanical lethality.
The System chimed quietly:
Weapon Identified: Crossbow (Early State)
Range: Medium
Penetration: High
Training Requirement: Low
Strategic Value: High
Kingdoms loved weapons that equalized weak men with strong men.
It made armies bigger.
Enter the Sect
They came from the tree line opposite the Payan formation.
Not silently.
Not stealthily.
With ritual.
Ash-faced, wool-robed, staffs in hand, chanting low, stomping earth in patterns.
Their leader — the same tall man we'd seen at the first ritual — raised his staff and shouted:
"YOU WHO BRING CHAINS TO THE VALLEY — TURN BACK!"
His voice cracked through the clearing like snapped wood.
The crossbowmen did not react.
The shield-men did not flinch.
The spearmen did not move.
Only the Payan captain broke the stillness.
He rode forward on a stocky horse and produced a wax slate.
Not a weapon.
A warrant.
He held it up and shouted — voice clipped, official, trained:
"BY DECREE OF THE PROVINCIAL TEMPLE AND COUNCIL — CEASE ILLEGAL FIRES AND UNAUTHORIZED RITUALS!"
His tone wasn't angry or fearful.
It was administrative.
The sect laughed — the sound half-mad, half-holy.
Fire crackled at their backs.
Their leader slammed his staff into soil.
"THE FIRE OF THE EARTH NEEDS NO PERMISSION!"
The sect echoed:
"NO PERMISSION! NO PERMISSION!"
Haniwa whispered beside me, "They argue like elders."
"Yes," I murmured. "Except elders do not die for arguments."
Three Models of Power
In that clearing stood three philosophies:
Payan: Law makes obedience.
Sect: Belief makes loyalty.
*Tribe (us): Survival makes truth.
The children were seeing what the System already knew.
Civilization was not one thing.
It was war between forms of legitimacy.
The captain raised his slate again.
"You have been warned."
The sect leader spread his arms wide.
"LET THEM COME!"
Then the sect charged.
Not in lines.
Not in formations.
Not in discipline.
Like wildfire.
Order Answers
The Payan did not chant.
They did not pray.
They did not invoke gods.
They moved.
Shield-men shifted forward as one body, spears snapping up behind them, crossbows lifting in arc.
The captain shouted a single word:
"LOOSE!"
Crossbows snapped.
Short bolts cut through ash and wool and skin. The sound was not thunderous. It was a series of brief, sharp cracks — wood, string, iron, flesh.
Three zealots dropped instantly. Two more stumbled but kept charging. The rest shrieked madness into the clearing.
"BURN THEM! BURN THE FALSE!"
Spear-men stepped forward.
Not to meet the charge — to finish it.
Their iron points punched into bodies that did not dodge, did not block, did not even slow.
Fanaticism met iron.
Fanaticism lost.
Within seconds, the sect collapsed into a heap of sobbing, bleeding bodies, some twitching, some crawling, some still chanting.
The leader — tall, ash-faced, fire-eyed — crawled toward his staff, fingertips brushing wood.
The Payan captain dismounted, walked to him, and spoke evenly:
"Your fire does not frighten the state."
Then he drove his spear downward.
The leader went still.
The Clearing Falls Silent
No cheers.
No celebrations.
No glory.
Just execution.
Then logistics.
Crossbowmen began reloading bolts calmly. Blind shield-men tapped for bodies, locating the dead. Spear-men dragged corpses into a pile.
One soldier pulled a wax slate and took note of:
• bodies
• locations
• wounds
• surviving equipment
Record-keeping.
History was being written even here.
The System chimed:
Administrative Function Observed: Battlefield Accounting
Purpose: Reports, doctrine, resource management, punishment
Haniwa watched, horrified and fascinated.
"They kill fast."
"They kill clean," I said.
Talli whispered, "Why burn them?"
"They won't," I said. "Not yet."
Payan didn't burn bodies for religion.
They burned for sanitation.
And for messaging.
The Message
The captain gave his final order:
"Signal the council."
A soldier lit a resin torch and held it high.
Thick smoke poured upward — not black like the sect's ritual smoke.
White.
Clear.
Controlled.
The System identified it:
Signal Code: "Rebellion contained. Territory secured."
Payan did not shout victory.
They signaled it.
Then they turned north — not toward us, but toward the hills beyond.
Their job was not to hunt children hiding in brush.
Their job was to report.
The Cohort Reacts
As the Payan left the clearing, the children exhaled as if they had been underwater.
Tullen: "Fire-tongues die fast."
Haniwa: "Fire-tongues do not care if they die."
Talli: "Payan care if they live."
I nodded. "And that is why Payan wins."
Baba did not correct me.
Because he agreed.
Sovereign Realization
As we left the ridge, the System spoke for the first time in a new tone:
Geopolitical Lesson Logged:
Chaos cannot defeat Order without Force.
Order cannot defeat Chaos without Legitimacy.
Tribes cannot defeat either without Strategy.
Then a quieter prompt:
Strategic Option Unlocked: Diplomacy (Passive)
Diplomacy meant talking.
Talking meant bargaining.
Bargaining meant risking that the state would measure us — and decide our worth.
But I was three.
So I smiled.
Because I knew something power forgot:
Sometimes states underestimated children.