Chapter 422

“What…?”

The other party narrowed her eyes as though trying to start a conversation, then attempted to get to her feet.

BANG—

I pressed down on her shoulder with mana and slowly approached.

“I suppose you were worried about getting caught by the police.”

“…….”

For a moment, her eyes changed. She was certain now, too. I was a mage working for the government. There were two choices she could make. After a brief pause, she chose the more conciliatory approach.

“…What do you mean? Is this about that soap?”

There was a deliberate hint of fear in the Old Human woman’s eyes. Rather than resist, she tried to talk to me. I nodded.

“That’s right, ma’am. You should confess while you still can.”

“It’s just soap.”

“…….”

“…Alright. In truth, there is something inside it. It’s a medicine whose distribution has recently been prohibited in Germany. I used to get it prescribed regularly in France, but I haven’t been able to obtain it since coming to Germany… so I found someone who could procure it for me. I can show you. Shall I go get it?”

“…….”

So she had even prepared a spare bar of soap. Impressive… The effort the designers put into this was something else.

I slowly raised my head and looked around. The place had been furnished like a bourgeoisie’s “second home.” There weren’t many people who would build a place like this in some ambiguous location that was neither a resort nor the city center, but they had certainly put in the effort.

When I remained silent, the Old Human continued, “I can go inside and get it right—”

“So the code required to bring it all the way here is a job interview? A tutor interview? Hmm…”

All right. There was another loophole in the loophole I had pointed out earlier. It wasn’t a major problem, but I might as well go over it briefly.

First, let’s keep in mind what I established earlier: I had to immediately find the intermediary known as <Purple Bread> and get information from them, but the problem was that I had no way to prove that I was on their side.

The loophole I pointed out earlier was this: Why hadn’t they designated someone to stop by the bakery at three? There were two possibilities.

First, they hadn’t entrusted the role of “courier” to someone within their own group. Instead, they had lured an unrelated person into transporting the item.

This created two advantages:

1. They could turn another person into a member of Pleroma.

2. If something went wrong, they could cut the courier loose and escape without being implicated.

Second, the risk involved in transporting the goods was so high that even within the remnants, they hadn’t settled on a courier until the very last moment, passing the responsibility around like a hot potato. If this were a real situation, it would be perfectly plausible. But since this was an exercise and I hadn’t been given that information beforehand, there was something slightly sloppy and unsettling about the possibility. So I kept it in mind, but fixed the first possibility as my primary hypothesis.

But if they had lured an unrelated person into transporting the goods, wouldn’t simply presenting the item have served as a kind of pass? That was the loophole within the loophole. Why had I told such suspiciously specific phrases to the baker, “I’m here to deliver some lyophilized bread to Ms. Violett Brot,” and the Old Human in her forties, “I’m here for the interview, ma’am”? If they had truly lured in someone unrelated to Pleroma, shouldn’t that person have known nothing about Violett Brot, lyophilisé, or the interview?

“…Otherwise, wouldn’t we get caught at a checkpoint? If we wanted to trade the medicine safely, we had to do it somehow…”

“How selfish of you.”

“Pardon?”

“That way, wouldn’t I be the one getting arrested? You lured me in with money and then had me say I was here for a tutor interview… And you did it to an Old Human man from the slums, at that?”

As I gave a small laugh, she stared at me with her brows furrowed. She looked as though she thought I was talking nonsense.

“With surveillance set up all over the place, you must have planned to pin the entire crime on these ‘couriers’ if anything went wrong. If the police heard that someone was on his way to a private-tutor interview, do you really think they’d just let him pass?”

Among Old Humans, it is rare for a man to work as a private tutor. It isn’t unheard of, but that isn’t the point here—Hauslehrer. Tutors of this sort were somewhat different from the Gouvernante listed in the advertisement. Lukas Everett, who had taught five-year-old Leonard Wittelsbach, was a Hauslehrer, specifically a Prinzenerzieher. Even if we assume that the courier who stopped by Violett Brot’s bakery happened to be a male and therefore changed Gouvernante to Hauslehrer on his own, Hauslehrer were generally members of the upper classes. There was no way someone would have set out from the Pankow slums in a secondhand suit to take such a position. In a situation where I absolutely could not afford to stand out, having me claim that I was there for a tutor—or Hauslehrer—interview meant that, if anything went wrong, I was the one being sent to the grave alone.

Despite that, why did I utter the phrases?

The answer lay in what I had already confirmed: Pleroma’s extreme secrecy and extreme caution in its current state.

Take this situation, for example. Say I was caught by the police earlier. Now suppose they picked up the half-eaten bar of soap in my pocket. They might suspect it, or they might not, but I’d bet on them being suspicious. If the half-eaten soap were lying against a wall or by the roadside, how would anyone know who had thrown it away or why? But if it were carefully tucked away in my pocket, they might reasonably wonder why a brand-new, unused soap was half-eaten—and why I was carrying that piece of trash around with me in the first place. Maybe they would simply let it slide. But let’s assume they didn’t.

If the impoverished young man carrying it, who had nothing to do with Pleroma and was only doing it because he had been offered money, panicked and started babbling, only saying something like, “I was told to deliver this to an eight-year-old Old Human from the GutsMuths family,” then naturally, the young man would be the only one to end up in handcuffs. The police would investigate the GutsMuths ‘family,’ who had absolutely nothing to do with the matter. Meanwhile, the Pleroma members waiting on Gutsmuthsstraße would easily be cleared of suspicion and gain more time to escape.

Now, suppose the young man kept his head even a little and decided he wasn’t going to die alone, so he used a proper mud-slinging tactic—in other words, he repeated exactly what the person who promised him money and entrusted him with the delivery had told him.

Based on everything I had figured out so far, the script would go something like this: “I was actually asked by someone to deliver this. The person was so-and-so from Pankow—let’s call him A. A told me to go into the bakery and ask for Ms. Violett Brot, then show the baker this frozen bar of soap. They said the baker would tell me the <destination>. The baker told me there was an eight-year-old Old Human boy on Gutsmuthsstraße. A had previously told me to go to the <destination>, say I was there for a tutor interview, and bring this item with me. They said I’d be paid a large sum of money once I got there. So I was on my way to Gutsmuthsstraße, just as they told me, but I honestly don’t know exactly what this thing is.”

The young man would still be punished, but compared to the previous scenario, the focus of the investigation would clearly shift toward Pleroma, making it much more likely that the police would catch them in the act.

However, even in this case, Pleroma has a way to buy themselves some time. If the young man were to come to the “nanny and child” with the police in tow, they could simply deny everything: “We only came out because the child wanted to play in the snow. We never hired a tutor, much less arranged to meet one here. We don’t know that man at all. It looks like he’s trying to frame us and cause us harm.”

It was a plausible story, at least on the surface. Even if the police became suspicious and tried to question them using divine power or conduct a more thorough investigation, there was only one adult present who could be questioned—the child’s guardian. They could arrest the nanny on the spot and take the child with them, but what if the child belonged to some influential family?—Not surprisingly, depending on the circumstances of the case, police inspections and investigations tended to be more lenient when nobles or members of the bourgeoisie were involved. So they generally wouldn’t take such drastic measures right away. That left open the possibility that the police would delay the investigation, even if only for a little while. Pleroma had deliberately placed the child there to buy themselves that small window of time.

Now, the loophole within the loophole is resolved.

These people were so excessively cautious that they had gone as far as slipping a natural-looking code into a cook exam tutoring advertisement, putting the item inside a mold, making it into a bar of soap with dark-colored wax, and even taking a bite out of it. Faced with the need to make themselves even safer, what choice would they make?

They could only hope that the young man would follow the script above.

If the young man merely said, “I was told to deliver this soap to the woman sitting over there,” the woman in her forties would have no way to buy herself even a moment of time unless she could rely on her own quick thinking and ability to improvise. She would have no choice but to be promptly taken to the police station for questioning, no matter how bourgeois her clothes looked—e.g., “We have already been told that you are connected to the substance inside this soap, so we have no choice but to investigate. If you are innocent, it would be quickest for you to come with us. I understand this may be upsetting, but all the more reason to go and prove your innocence.” Creating another problem to cover up the original one is an important element that cannot be ignored in politics or schemes. But here, there is a crucial flaw: there is no other problem to serve as a shield and obscure the truth.

But the more the young man spun an elaborate, fanciful story to “explain the crime,” the deeper his story would sink into a maze of contradictions, only making the listener more suspicious. It wasn’t simply that the police would blindly doubt everything the young man said. Rather, his story would at least leave room for the nanny’s claim to sound plausible: “I never tried to hire a tutor. I only came out because the child wanted to play in the snow, and I don’t even know what this thing is. Why would I be waiting here for an interviewee? That man must have been caught by the police and is trying to frame us.” That would make it a little less likely that the police would immediately resort to the coercive measures from the aforementioned ‘e.g.’  Unlike the previous case, there was now a story that could serve as a shield and obscure the real issue.

Of course, this wasn’t something that could be neatly divided into two absolute possibilities. There was no guarantee that the deception would work, and there was certainly still a chance they would be taken into custody immediately. But if there were a way to put up a shield that might buy them thirty minutes, an hour, half a day—or even an entire day—then what would they have to lose? In a situation where even thirty minutes of breathing room was valuable, if I were Pleroma, I would obviously choose this route. If I were to construct a game-theory payoff matrix for this situation, it would make it even more intuitive which option Pleroma should choose.

I muttered as I kept the Old Human in her forties pinned down, “Even if it really is medicine, don’t you think your efforts to cut off the tail are a little too much? And you’ve prepared quite a few other ways to slip out of this, too.”

“…I don’t know what you mean by ‘other ways,’ but I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I won’t smuggle medicine anymore, so please let this one go… If I don’t have that medicine, my hands shake so badly that I can’t work—”

“Come to think of it, there was a child. Where did he go? Are you the child’s nanny?”

“Yes, I am. He’s upstairs right now. Shall I bring him down?”

“I see… Then where are the others? There should be two more people here.”

She missed her chance to answer and tilted her head, still wearing a puzzled expression. I smiled at her and said, “Isn’t it about time you came down?”

Whoosh—BOOM!

The moment I raised my head at the sound of something tearing through the air behind me, the person who had been at my feet had already slipped away and was now aiming her wand at me from a distance. Black tendrils spun across my field of vision.

BOOM—! CRACK!

I spun around and cut through the tendrils with the sword I had transformed my staff into. Another Pleroma member had come in from behind. I couldn’t tell at a glance which of them the tendrils belonged to, but the severed vitriol repaired itself on its own, then came flying back toward the back of my head.

‘They set these guys’ skill level way too high.’

CLANG—!!

The vitriol collided with my sword, producing a bizarre metallic sound. With two vitriol attacking me at once in this cramped first floor, there simply wasn’t enough room to move. I ran my tongue along the inside of my lip and narrowed my eyes.

‘Well, since it’s come to this, should I just finish them all at once?’

No matter how high their skill levels were set, this was still a strategy game. They were nothing more than remnants who had been reduced to doing someone else’s dirty work. This was an easier game than fighting Nepomucena Wettin. Especially…

— So do not fear, for I am with you.

A red glow spread through the floor and walls. My barrier spell covered the entire building. Since no mana was rushing toward the enemy, they probably took it for a pointless attack or a miscalculation. One of their vitriol came rushing toward me, moving with the confidence of someone who had already seized the upper hand.

— You will be visited by the LORD of Hosts with thunder and earthquake and loud noise, with windstorm and tempest and consuming flame of fire.

It moved as though time itself had slowed. One meter. Fifty centimeters. And then, when it was right in front of me—

BOOOOOOM—!!

— Then the hordes of all the nations that fight against Ariel, that attack her and her fortress and besiege her, will be as it is with a dream, with a vision in the night. But Yahweh knows the way that I take.

BOOOOOOM—! FWOOM—!!

I squeezed my eyes shut as the red light erupted. I knew closing my eyes and disrupting my senses was a bad idea, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. The mana in the barrier compressed the wide-area spell, unleashing a deafening roar and blinding light as though it were about to blow the entire house apart. The ground repeatedly jolted beneath me like an earthquake. Just as I gripped my staff with both hands and spun it, transforming it into a sword, five streams of black, semi-solid liquid wrapped around my arms. Unfortunately, they were a beat too late.

BOOM—!! CRACK—

I planted a foot on one Pleroma member’s shoulder and drove my sword straight into his heart. There was a wet sound as the blade pierced something soft, followed by the sound of something breaking—and then a scream tore through the room.

“AAAAAARGH!”

— It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.

Blood and vitriol burst upward. Since the vitriol was trying to repair the wound, I had to force my mana through it with all my strength. His limbs jerked and spasmed as though electricity were coursing through them. I had to close my eyes. Even knowing this was only a Mimesis, watching someone die right in front of me made curses rise to the back of my throat. But there was no helping it. It had to be done. Here, it had to be.

When the spasms gradually weakened and finally stopped altogether, I looked around as the light slowly faded. One was missing.

I immediately aimed my wand at the stairway railing above. With a sharp crack, I pulled back the mana coiling around it and slammed it hard against the floor.

BOOM!

The moment I reached the upper floor, I heard a shrill sound and turned toward it.

“Hah… hah… huff…”

The nanny—the Old Human in her forties—was holding the remains of the bitten-off soap in one hand and a small silver revolver in the other. Her finger was already on the trigger, so I immediately thrust my wand upward.

BANG!!

The gunshot left my ears ringing. At the same time, my wand struck her arm, knocking the revolver from her hand. Smoke curled up from the floor. I strode over, seized her by the jaw, and slammed her face into the floor.

CRASH!

“…! Gah…”

“…….”

I knocked her down with mana and pinned her back against the floor. It wasn’t hard to tell that killing her companion had sent her into a panic. This one had clearly been assigned to stall for time. Vitriol bubbled beneath her knees. She must have intended to swallow the item or do something similar, destroy the evidence, and then kill herself—to avoid interrogation. I shoved my hand into her mouth and fumbled around until my fingertips caught on a tiny vial. I pulled it out.

There was about 5ml of black liquid inside. It was a very small glass bottle. I stared at it for a moment and muttered, “You should have been suspicious from the moment the last interviewee arrived.”

Why was I the last one? If I’m going to think this through, I should stop looking at the situation from the perspective of an Association mage who came here to deal with the Pleroma remnants and instead look at it from the designer’s perspective. Why did the designer put in the newspaper that there would be three interviews, and why did the baker tell us that they were expecting us at three?

(A) First, the designer wanted me to figure out the significance of the ‘three interviews’ as well.

(B) Second, we already established that the test began at noon, which means it ends at four. Even if I took a carriage from Pankow at three, I wouldn’t reach Gutsmuthsstraße until five—the usual travel time for a carriage to cover 10 kilometers is about an hour, and the distance from Pankow to Gutsmuthsstraße is more than 20 kilometers.

This training exercise was clearly designed to resemble a real situation as closely as possible, but overlooking the fact that this is still an exercise would go against the very nature of it. Even if I decided, based on common sense, that leaving for Gutsmuthsstraße at exactly three would arouse the least suspicion, the test would end at four, leaving me no choice but to depart before then. In that case, there would be little point in trying to make my movements as natural as possible.

In other words, I can conclude that the designer wanted us to head for Gutsmuthsstraße as soon as we obtained the information. And if I combine that with point (A), which I established earlier by looking at things from the designer’s perspective, then it becomes clear that I was the last one to arrive. If I take my speculation a little further…

The other two are probably already asleep somewhere in this building. How quickly we complete the exercise and get out is probably part of the evaluation, too. There are several ways I could rescue them, but…

BOOOOM—!

I brought my staff down from where I sat, knocking every wooden door on this floor off its hinges. The shockwave reached me as well, and I had to fight to keep my eyes open.

All right. The best thing to do now is call the police. Killing these Pleroma members would mean giving up the chance to interrogate them.

I lightly damaged the Pleroma members’ cores, placed them under a binding spell, and dragged them outside. The moment I reached a place where I could see the sky, I raised my wand and fired a red flare into the air.

FWOOM—

Had a minute passed? No, it probably hadn’t even been that long. Mages in Police Department uniforms warped to the front of the building in an instant and pointed their wands at me. I raised one hand to show I meant no harm, then used my other hand—the one not holding the Pleroma members’ bindings—to take out the document stained with vitriol and said, “101st Unit of the Association. I have apprehended Pleroma remnants. Take them into custody.”

BEEEEEP—

At that moment, the world turned white. The vitriol and blood covering me were gone. The Pleroma members were gone. Gutsmuthsstraße was gone. Even the secondhand suit was gone. I was back in the 101st Unit uniform I had been wearing at the start. And…

I turned my head toward the two figures standing in the training ground that should have been nothing but white. They were two aides to Adrian Askanien. One of them also held a professorship at the Imperial First Academy. As far as I knew, they were supposed to be in charge of grading the training exercise. I glanced at the elapsed time floating in the air and narrowed my eyes.

About an hour and a half had passed. Shouldn’t they be grading the results rather than standing around here? I asked the two of them, who were staring intently at me.

“Has everyone already finished the exercise?”

“No. Only Lord Narke Farnese and Lord Lukas Askanien have finished the test within an hour and a half.”

Hmm. Right. If it was Narke, he probably finished everything with his divine power. It’s a useful ability. But I still couldn’t shake my question about why they were here.

“Then why are you here?”

“You are the highest-scoring candidate in this training exercise.”

At those words, I was caught off guard and parted my lips, which had been pressed tightly shut. Before I could ask anything else, one of the aides spoke with a firm expression.

“Lord Askanien, you are to report to the Commander’s office immediately, together with Lord Narke Farnese.”