Chapter 136: Take Your Beating Standing at Attention

The transmigrators dared not let their guard down the entire journey; during the march, drones constantly escorted them overhead. Fortunately, the road conditions had greatly improved by this point: the native core area had no wetlands but plenty of everyday paths, and with the arrival of the temporary labor troops, the Temporary First Battalion soldiers could now abandon their heavy baggage and travel light.

Speak of ill and it appears — when the troops had marched more than half the distance, among the row of jumbled gadgets on Han Bo's belt, a collection no less impressive than an American cop's gear, a cell phone started beeping. Picking it up and glancing at the screen, Commander Han immediately raised his right fist and shouted: "All stop! Large enemy force approaching one kilometer out, bearing xx..."

The images transmitted by the drones to Dayuan were received by the ground station's data link almost in real time within twenty kilometers. But receiving them was useless without someone to analyze them, which caused a delay in the ground troops' response.

Fortunately, one kilometer was enough distance for even the clumsiest troops to react: the soldiers were ordered to stay in place, back-to-back, striking poses, while the dozen or so transmigrators found good positions in an acacia grove three or four hundred meters ahead and quietly waited for the Madou natives to come to them.

The gaudily clothed humans faded into the acacia thicket without a trace, while the humans baring their balls were striding swiftly closer. The Madou people were unlearned and unskilled, never having studied the adage "enter no forest when pursued," so when the warriors rounded a bend and passed along the path between the acacia grove and the thorn bushes, they sensed nothing amiss — until a row of figures flashed into view from behind the trees ten meters away.

"Damn, these Madou savages really are ferocious!" After the brief battle ended, Han Bo looked at the javelin embedded in the tree trunk beside him and said, still shaken.

"This is nothing — the Gaoshan Tribe is even more savage." Wei Yuan, standing nearby, laughed and said: "Just a lack of communication, bound to happen. Otherwise why would there be the saying 'raw and cooked savages'?"

"Ah, just thinking about those tribes up in the Central Mountains gives me a headache — they'll all be trouble in the future." While Han Bo fretted over the nation and its people, he also urged the troops to hurry their march. The main force passed the native corpses by the roadside without pausing, chasing after the routed Madou soldiers.

The Madou Society, having received vague intelligence, had organized a force to probe the situation in Xiaolong Society's territory, never expecting to be routed halfway there. Now with pursuers chasing and killing them the whole way, the men, young and old, had no time even to roll up their bedrolls and flee. The Madou people had truly torn it this time...

By evening, the last wave of reinforcements from Dayuan arrived. This wave had only a handful of people, mainly personnel from the Aftermath Working Group, with Professor Luo as the team leader.

Professor Luo had jumped ship again recently. The fellow had now wormed his way into a position as a Great Office Attaché — probably because they needed someone from the Soy Sauce Party to decorate the facade, so Professor Luo, a member of the politically apathetic "Carefree Sect," was now responsible for assisting CEO Xia with general commercial matters.

Considering a certain someone's all-rounder attributes, the leadership had directly entrusted Professor Luo with the heavy responsibility of leading the working group, with an air of "you handle things, I rest easy." Hmm, the main reason was actually that the Madou Society had too many mosquitoes, and too few ordinary transmigrators dared to go — what if one got bitten on the balls while taking a piss...

Professor Luo never declined such assignments. When he arrived at Madou and looked around, he found it no different from Xiaolong: the natives were painfully learning, at gunpoint, how to adapt to the invaders' style.

Professor Luo's team had brought nothing with them — nothing except a good number of mosquito nets. That night they lodged in the largest village of the Madou Society.

Starting the next day, the surviving headmen of the Madou and Xiaolong societies, under Professor Luo's supervision, began the surrender ceremony and signed unequal treaties. Much like in the original history: the native village chiefs presented betel nut saplings, a certain person accepted the natives' submission on behalf of the Crossing Faction, and then Professor Luo laid out the terms, which the natives complied with one by one.

Was it truly so much like history? At first glance, it seemed so.

In their mopping-up operations, through the battles with the Xiaolong and Madou societies, the transmigrators had killed a total of over three hundred native warriors — a figure higher than the Dutch numbers in history.

But the hidden attrition that accounted for the bulk of losses later on was almost nonexistent for the transmigrators.

Historically, when the Dutch launched scorched-earth raids, the Madou elderly and children they killed were never tallied. The natives who fled into the mountains and died from starvation, disease, or at the hands of hostile tribes were never counted either. When the natives surrendered and returned home, they faced a scene of three thousand houses burned to the ground — in other words, the villages and grain stores of both the Madou and Xiaolong societies had been nearly incinerated. The deaths that followed in the years after, from all this, were also never counted. Add up the numbers above, and they far exceed the death toll on the battlefield.

How did tens of millions of Native Americans perish? Bullets accounted for less than one percent: tribes forced at gunpoint to migrate, the abnormal deaths along the way, plus the screen-clearing effect of smallpox and other great killers — these were the main reasons. So, the hidden deaths that seemed unrelated to warfare but in fact had a strong causal connection were the primary reason for the global extermination of natives in the colonial era.

For the transmigrators, the people of the Xiaolong and Madou societies escaped this calamity, though they could not perceive the benefit of having their whole families trapped in their old dens... The transmigrators knew, but had no way to explain it. Fortunately, the victors now had no need to explain; they only needed to set forth the terms. After the surrender ceremony, Professor Luo immediately presented the natives with a pile of demands.

First: the Xiaolong and Madou societies shall each send one hundred twenty able-bodied young men to report to Dayuan, departing immediately. These men are classified as prisoners of war; their labor earns no work points. After three months, there will be an assessment of the two societies' overall degree of cooperation. If the score is passing, these men will then have their POW status revoked.

The moment Professor Luo arrived yesterday, he shot down the four-hundred-man resettlement plan that the office crew had dreamed up off the top of their heads — he reduced the number for the first batch of labor conscripts to two hundred forty. Forty of these were kept as a buffer: the unruly and untamable would be sent to cut timber and fill in marshes.

The remaining two hundred would be assigned at most one per ten-man dormitory room, so that the Chikan New District and the Kiln Area Base combined could just barely absorb them. A ratio of one to nine was optimal for assimilating the natives: it gave them no chance to form cliques.

Reducing the number of able-bodied young men for labor service did not mean the transmigrators were letting these natives off. The second demand Professor Luo put forward was: a north-south pincer advance.

Effective immediately, the Kiln Area Base shall send men north across Xingang Creek, while the Ma and Xiao Two Societies shall simultaneously move south. The ultimate goal is to establish communication and clear the vegetation between the two areas. In this process, the transmigrators are only responsible for providing tools; manpower and provisions shall be the natives' own responsibility.

The third demand was very simple: reparations.

Defeat naturally entails reparations — that is international custom, unless one submits directly like the Xingang Society.

The list of reparations was neither long nor short... all manner of miscellaneous fees, including rewards for the Temporary First Battalion soldiers and the follow-up temporary laborers, plus future garrison costs — basically, every sum that the Old Buddha once had to pay, the people of Ma and Xiao did not escape this time either. Of course, after the reparations were converted into deerskin and grain, the two societies together paid out two-thirds of their stored supplies. It looked like this winter the natives would have to hunt more deer to make up the shortfall.