The Steel Citadel sat near Chaos Land, and everyone who mattered already knew what kind of money could be made off that road.
Over the past decade and more, every major faction, minor power, and greedy opportunist had tried to get a piece of it. Some wanted influence. Some wanted profit. Some just wanted to feed their own rotten appetites.
The result was predictable: Chaos Land became even more chaotic.
Countless ruthless organizations had been born there, and even Russia was sometimes dragged into the mess, suffering attacks that left innocent people dead and wounded in the crossfire.
For a major city on the edge of Chaos Land like the Steel Citadel, infiltration was hardly surprising.
What Drex Valen had discovered, though, was that the group hiding here was one of the most infamous splinter factions among Chaos Land's terrorist forces.
They were not just a headache for Russia. They were a constant thorn in Drex's own homeland as well.
And yet, the organization flourished in Chaos Land like a shark in bloody water, feeding off its modified brainwashing techniques to recruit new members and swell its ranks.
"Terrorists. The kind everyone wants dead."
Drex had thrown Barnes into this place for exactly that reason. He wanted him to tear through the lot of them.
An immortal Ghost Rider was more than enough to clean house here.
After days of surveillance, the authorities monitoring the terrorists realized they had likely been detected. The group was preparing to withdraw from the Steel Citadel and return to Chaos Land.
"Sir, our target has left the Steel Citadel. Intelligence says they're heading back to Chaos Land."
"Damn it! I've had them under watch for months. And now I'm supposed to let them walk away without catching the real fish?"
Inside the Steel Citadel, the security personnel stationed there let out frustrated sighs after reporting the situation.
"These bastards are rotten to the core. They use religion as an excuse for every crime under the sun. Smuggling, drugs, human trafficking, organs, slave trading, they've got their hands in all of it. I still don't understand what the higher-ups are thinking. Every time, they talk about using them to catch a bigger fish, and every time we just sit here watching them keep killing people."
One of the officers grumbled, then habitually began receiving fresh intelligence from their assets inside Chaos Land again.
If they missed this chance, it would take a long time to rebuild their network and verify everything all over again. That meant more money, more manpower, more logistics.
And somehow, the people above them always acted like they had endless resources to burn.
β¦
Chaos Land was eighty percent steep mountains, and scattered through every mountain range were local tribes whose social systems had changed little in thousands of years.
Some of them were laid-back and drifted with the current. Others were heavily armed, large enough to function like warlords, obeying orders only when they felt like it.
Into this land came countless criminal groups carrying weapons and money. They bribed tribal elites, formed alliances, and used those people's protection and support to establish themselves here without resistance.
Then they got to work in all the illegal trades they could sink their teeth into.
Tarikha was one of the biggest of those entrenched criminal organizations, and Drex had taken notice of it.
Their base was hidden in the mountains near the Russian border, and their soldiers were trained in facilities spread across the globe before being sent here.
That was why their troops were far more elite than the bandits and militia groups around them.
Even the local government would not dare provoke them. It could only barricade itself inside a few cities and pretend it still ruled the country.
If Tarikha's people showed up in person, the officials would step aside without a word, swallowing their pride and their authority at the same time.
There was nothing they could do about it.
The terrorist organization had money. It had manpower. It had long since established ties with American arms dealers and smuggled in mountains of advanced weaponry.
It was also suspected of having contacts inside the upper ranks of U.S. intelligence, giving it a terrifying information network. It could infiltrate the local government so thoroughly that any move made on one side might be answered by a strike on the other before it even had time to take shape.
There had even been multiple cases where expensive weapons bought by the local government arrived one day and were seized by Tarikha the next, as if the organization were moonlighting as a logistics department for itself.
Against that kind of power, the local government simply could not afford to fight.
In the common rumor mill of Chaos Land, people even said that if Tarikha had not made Russia and the Heavenly Kingdom its primary targets, and if it had not been unwilling to give up the weapons and business channels provided by America, it would have already overthrown the U.S.-backed puppet regime and taken control for itself.
That day, inside Tarikha's main base, a mountain fortress built from the remains of an old village, the organization's leader was speaking on a video call.
He looked refined and scholarly, with fair skin, a tall and slender build, and a gentle, bookish face. Dressed in the local traditional white robe, he conversed with ease in a fluent foreign language, completely at home in the role.
A moment later, the man on the other end of the call offered a final warning and ended the connection.
The leader gave a faint smile, stroked his goatee, and turned his sharp eyes toward the large map hanging at the front of the secret chamber.
He studied the surrounding terrain for a moment.
Then he picked up a phone and issued an order.
"Just now, the head of intelligence for the U.S. Central Asia region contacted me personally. He said our plan has been exposed."
A rough male voice answered at once from the other end.
"They're taking a cut every year, and back then they promised they'd make things easy for us when we moved against the north. So what are they planning to do now?"
The leader gave a cold laugh.
"What else? After warning us, they intend to wash their hands of it."
He tilted his head slightly, the smile never leaving his face.
"But the truth that they can't be relied on was clear the moment we first met them, wasn't it?"
"It was always a matter of each side getting what it wanted. Besides, after all these years, it's time we showed them our strength."
"Tell your people to get ready. We've spent years building this place. Let's make that old northern bear, already weak and half-dead, show us his frailty with his own eyes."
"If this works, then Tarikha's next step upward might not be impossible."
"Yes, Leader! Tarikha will stand at the top of this world!"
At that, the leader's expression warmed with visible excitement. He opened a parchment map.
On that old-fashioned, carefully designed sheet was a new country stretching across three continents.
Its territory was even larger than Russia's current landmass. If it truly came into existence, it would become the largest country in the world by area.
The leader stared at the map, his entire body trembling as though he could already see his life's goal advancing toward him one step at a time.