YMMV / Hungers as Old as This Land

• Complete Monster: Compared to the creatures of the Hungers, who are vicious but have a warped morality and even a sense of honor, this duo proves that Humans Are the Real Monsters:
  • Cyril Redstone is the sociopathic leader of the Blackhawks, a mercenary band willing to do any dirty job for the right price. Telling a group of unionizing quarrymen that he's come to negotiate, Cyril kills them all to scare their fellow workers into submission. Agreeing to murder every single man, woman, and child in the settlement of Grey's Bluffs so his employer, Gerard Bancroft, can seize the land, when Cyril learns the leader of the settlement is Abraham Foxman, an old war buddy who saved his life, Cyril just uses it as an excuse to charge Bancroft double. Planning on stealing all the gold he can before handing the land over, Cyril slaughters most of the settlement, personally tortures Abraham to death for not telling him the gold's location, and later threatens to torture Siobhan O'Clery, the lover of Abraham's daughter Esther, right in front of her if she doesn't tell him either. Lying that he'll let the survivors live if he's taken to the gold, Cyril plans on murdering his guides and then the rest of the survivors once he gets what he wants.
  • Gerard Bancroft is the cold-blooded co-owner of the Bancroft & Hughes Mining and Railroad Conglomerate and the unofficial head of Independence. Employing Cyril Redstone and his Blackhawks to carry out dirty deeds to keep his business running smoothly, Bancroft is introduced paying Cyril for murdering the unionizing workers at Bancroft's quarry. Despite having made an arrangement with Grey's Bluffs, Bancroft covets the valuable land the settlement's on, and hires Cyril and his Blackhawks to murder everyone in the settlement so Bancroft can seize the property. His actions resulting in the destruction of Grey's Bluffs, the deaths of the majority of its people, and the scattering of its few survivors, Bancroft views his absolute control over the region as the "natural order" and thinks human lives are worthless when compared to the expansion of his business.
• Love to Hate: Cyril Redstone is a cold-blooded mercenary willing to wipe out an entire town and murder the man who saved his life just to enrich himself. However, his superficial charm, dry sense of humor, raw pragmatism and amusing POV sections which emphasize how much of an utter sociopath he is all serve to make Cyril as entertaining as he is loathsome.

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