Kaguya spent two more days observing the outer sectors surrounding Basa before finally making her decision.
The surveillance had given her what she needed. Patrol schedules, convoy routes, average response times, checkpoint procedures, drone coverage patterns, and guard rotations had slowly assembled themselves into a complete picture of the city's outer defenses.
Useful information.
Necessary information.
But intelligence alone had never been enough to understand people.
Akira understood armies because he had destroyed them.
He understood governments because he had watched them collapse.
Civilizations, however, were different.
To understand a civilization, you had to live among it.
Fortunately, human beings had always been willing to open their gates for the right reasons.
And in a dying world, desperation remained one of the most convincing reasons of all.
The old woman died sometime during the night.
