Chapter 529

“‘The astral plane,’ huh.”

Leonard nodded without much reaction and took a deep breath. He merely let out a long breath and asked no further questions.

A peaceful festive atmosphere continued throughout the city for Easter. Children ran into the tunnel beneath the city hall and emerged on the other side. Beneath the bridge, people on ferries laughed and chatted among themselves. As I caught the mana confetti prepared by Bamberg City Hall and made it disappear in my hand, I wondered if this scene resembled one I had seen before.

That day and today were different.

We had the information and allies we needed to carry out this operation smoothly. And thanks to having prepared the Kingdom of Bavaria well in advance, we had turned Bavaria, already a military and economic powerhouse, into a state equipped with systems and resources no other state possessed.

We had only about twelve hours to prepare and formulate the operation, and only a couple of hours remained. But our usual attitude and preparations had never been lacking, so there was no difficulty in seizing an opportunity when it presented itself.

I stepped aside for the children running wildly around us, took out the cigarette I was going to smoke, and lit it. At the same time, I unlocked the door with the city hall key we had made with the Royal Family’s help.

I kept breathing until the effects of the drug had seeped deep into my body, then asked Leonard, who was already smoking it properly without needing any instruction.

“Do you know how to smoke?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

He drew deeply on the cigarette while looking at me. Instead of answering, he picked up the large document box he had set on the floor and entered the building first.

It was an era when walking into city hall while smoking wasn’t particularly strange, so no one stopped us. The building was empty for the Easter festivities.

Naturally, we hadn’t come dressed in ceremonial robes or military uniforms. Instead, we wore clothes that looked like something civil servants might wear, with my cognitive distortion magic layered over us as well. I had to conserve my divine power for our safety, so I didn’t make the spell particularly strong.

“Why aren’t you even asking what kind of cigarette this is?”

“I don’t smoke anywhere else.”

Leonard answered after skipping an entire exchange. I often did the same myself, and it was difficult to find someone who would converse that way with me, so I liked it.

Once again, Leonard said something completely out of nowhere.

“Not bad.”

I knew he was talking about the cigarette. Unlike ordinary cigarettes made from tobacco leaves, this one had been made for astral projection, so the taste was surely different. But Leonard didn’t bring up the taste.

“It makes your senses much sharper. You go through a brief period where they become duller… and then they become much sharper again.”

Leonard spoke with a cool, analytical gaze, as though he were examining the individual elements of his field of vision.

“Interesting. I think it could be useful in combat as well. Would it be all right if I incorporated this into my regular training?”

“I brought it for the sake of Your Highness’s victory, so of course.”

At those words, a subtle, unexpected light appeared in Leonard’s eyes.

He knew what lay behind victory—all that would follow in its wake. Though he wished for victory and hoped that he would prevail, he did not take those words as praise directed at himself. He was someone who understood that human life and dignity accompanied the victory that so many people employed by Bavaria, myself included, and his own subjects wished for him.

It would have been nice if he had simply laughed playfully and been pleased. But he already knew that he could not remain at that point. He had been taught from the beginning to live this way, and now he no longer felt the need to show us the side of himself that he had once revealed only as an exception.

Leonard smiled faintly.

“Thank you.”

I quietly looked at his face before turning away.

“I’ll explain what kind of cigarette this is. You can see the astral plane now. You’ll probably feel a little dizzy. When that happens, don’t try to push through it. Stop for a moment. If you need divine power, just signal me.”

“I will.”

As I climbed the stairs, I said, “Now, as for why the entrance to Bamberg Cathedral is located in Bamberg City Hall… I trust you’ve already figured out everything we can learn from that. Naturally, it means there are Pleroma here in City Hall. They could even be low-ranking civil servants who we never checked with divine power before.”

“Of course.”

“Good. Then let’s keep trusting each other and move quickly.”

It was easy to assume that the Pleroma in City Hall had kept watch over the place, since they had gone to the trouble of creating an entrance for themselves. But today was Easter, so there was no one working at City Hall. The Pleroma had attended the daytime Mass and would have to take part in the major announcement afterward, so they would not bother coming here to keep watch during this brief interval.

There was no need to waste time being overly cautious inside City Hall, then. I had even prepared luggage specifically to make us look like civil servants. I walked down the corridor I had passed through with Emanuel not long ago. When I reached the room where I had been told there was a lever, I checked that there was no mana on the doorknob and turned it both ways. As expected, it would not budge.

I pushed mana into the hole in the immovable doorknob and solidified it, then quickly turned it. By the time the mana began to disperse, the door was already opening a crack.

Leonard set the document box down at the end of the corridor and put on the monocle he had prepared in advance. He took a bundle of papers from the box and handed them to me. The documents at the bottom were merely props, but the ones on top were our insurance.

I put on my own monocle as well, then closed my eyes and took another drag from my cigarette to prepare myself. After that, I took a deep breath and entered the room.

“Ah.”

My vision began to ripple violently. I could immediately tell which object was the lever. A book tucked into one side of the bookcase was giving off a pale yellow mist. Leonard, realizing that the world looked different through the monocle, looked at me with slight bewilderment. The mana around the rim of his monocle was writhing wildly, almost as if it were alive. Mine was probably doing the same.

Overall, the artifacts we had equipped on our bodies were showing much stronger colors and flows than the lever in that bookcase. Clearly, the spatial magic artifacts did not have much mana invested in them.

It worked. It had worked here, too.

At the time, Grand Duke Maria had directly seen Sarah Hohenfels’s spatial transfer artifact—the lever—and returned to Emanuel’s estate, where he made something similar. He then put the finishing touches on the ambient mana detector he had been developing as a temporary measure.

The problem, as I had thought before, was that Grand Duke Maria was hardly a conventional mage—strictly speaking, graduating from a Department of Magic didn’t make someone a mage in the first place. He did everything in ways that looked like hackwork to anyone else, and he frequently used blood in his creations. That meant that even if I knew how he made them, reproducing his methods was difficult.

That was why I had already concluded that simply knowing Grand Duke Maria’s techniques would be of little use to me. As Emanuel had discovered in the Labyrinth, even if he learned Grand Duke Maria’s techniques, anything he made using his own blood would fail to function properly.

However… at Stadelheim, I discovered that using my own blood could produce results similar to Grand Duke Maria’s, or even better.

The monocle made with my blood was performing quite well, not all that different from the one I had seen in the Extra Chapter.

Leonard asked, “Is this what the astral plane looks like?”

“Only part of it. More precisely, it lets you see the effects of mana that interfere with the maintenance of the natural world’s equilibrium.”

I took off the monocle again, slipped it into the breast pocket of my clothes, and answered.

Then again, what would happen if I went back and pulled this lever?

We had already established that there was Pleroma presence in the city hall, but there was still one problem.

What about security?

There hadn’t been any particular security magic on the way here. There wasn’t even any security magic on the doorknob to this room. What were they relying on to be this bold?

A strategist should be able to think of that question. More importantly, they should have to. Otherwise, there would be no way to even begin gauging what those bastards had planned and carried out, let alone test whether our assumptions were correct.

According to the answer I had obtained from Alexander Kluger, a Federal Council member from Pleroma, Pleroma had now set the security of their spatial magic quite strictly. To prevent just anyone from entering and moving freely through Pleroma’s world, only those who had received baptism could move around there without trouble. If someone who had not been baptized entered, an alarm would be sent to the corresponding diocese.

Back when Pleroma was not under much pressure from outside attacks, they had allowed anyone to enter their dioceses. That had continued for a long time, entirely to facilitate their missionary work.

They would lure non-Pleroma people into their world and build relationships with them.

How did I know this?

Gerda Assmann had done exactly that to me.

To lower the guard of the non-Pleroma people they were trying to convert and win them over, Pleroma would bring them to parties or solemn Masses. They sometimes forcibly turned people into Pleroma, but the best outcome was always to make the person’s own heart move without any coercion.

A loyal collaborator who supported Pleroma with all their heart, without needing any special device to make them do so, might not be particularly useful right now, but in situations requiring the utmost caution, such a person could become a more powerful asset than anyone else.

However, after the situation outside began to look increasingly serious and the Command’s operation caused heavy losses, they seemed to have finally decided that it was time to strengthen their security.

We were wearing more than a dozen artifacts on our bodies right now. Of all the artifacts concealed beneath our clothes, the most important one worked like this:

We would be recognized as though we had received Pleroma’s baptism.

By people? Well, who knows.

By the system? Yes.

We had analyzed the mana of mages who had been freed from Pleroma, both before and after their baptism, and collected the subtle changes in their mana wavelengths. After gathering twenty samples that way, we naturally discovered that the ranges overlapped in roughly the same areas.

So we wore artifacts capable of reproducing those wavelengths.

What if we were stopped right here?

Then I would have to use one of the two checkpoints.

We had prepared for every possibility to prevent that from happening. All we could do now was hope it would be enough.

I threw off the drab jacket that made me look like a civil servant and changed into a cassock. Then I raised my left hand and counted down, watching Leonard. My right hand remained resting on the leather book spine. When I finished counting—

We were somewhere else.

I looked up at the high, arched ceiling. We were in Bamberg Cathedral, used by the Archdiocese of Bamberg and the Diocese of Eichstätt. A few people were sitting in the pews, but they hadn’t noticed us appearing in the back. Mass was over, and no one was wearing clerical vestments. They couldn’t have gone far, so we had to be careful.

Fortunately, I was wearing a cassock with an ornament around my neck bearing Pleroma’s distinctive cross, the same one I had seen in the Catacombs before. No one here paid us any attention.

I put on the monocle again and looked at the world through it. Leonard, who had kept his monocle on the entire time, started moving first.

As expected, there were levers near the altar. Several of them, in fact. Each one probably led to a different place.

When I turned around, I noticed a stone carving shaped like an animal on the statue holding the holy water basin. Its color was different from that of the statue beneath it, too.

For now, I followed Leonard and made my way through the aisles between the pews. Everyone sitting there merely glanced at us without reacting. They simply continued praying, running their fingers over the Bibles and rosaries spread across their laps.

Smiling, I spoke to Leonard through the soundproofing spell.

“Enhanced security is bound to become a liability.”

“Hahaha.”

Leonard laughed, having understood what I meant.

Why was it dangerous?

Because if the rule was, ‘From now on, anyone who hasn’t been baptized cannot be brought into our world,’ then they would naturally assume that an alarm would go off on its own whenever a non-Pleroma infiltrated their world.

That meant it didn’t matter if our clothes happened to be inappropriate for wherever we ended up. For example, if we went to a layperson’s residence, a cassock wouldn’t exactly be appropriate attire, but it wouldn’t be suspicious enough to cause a major problem, either. Even if we were already safe enough, this made us safer still.

It was 2:20 PM.

I looked over the various locations of the levers and spoke to Leonard beneath the soundproofing spell.

“I’ll go check one first.”

“Alone?”

“What if I end up walking into a bishop’s office? It’ll be easier to come up with an excuse if I’m alone. Your Highness, please look into something else.”

“All right. Let’s meet again in an hour.”

Leonard said that as he tapped the communication artifact by his ear. He moved one of the candlesticks on the altar and disappeared.

— [Ah, it’s Würzburg Cathedral.]

I soon heard him mutter to himself.

Below my field of vision, I looked at the one object whose color was different from the rest. It was a key set into a drawer beneath the altar. I hesitated over whether I should turn it or pull it out, then turned it.

What appeared before my eyes was, indeed, a bishop’s office. Fortunately, there was no one there. But how did I know this was a bishop’s residence? Because the building itself looked unmistakably like one. Bishop’s residences often had the appearance of royal buildings. Bishops of old had held positions prestigious enough to have such buildings constructed large and lavishly.

If this was the bishop’s residence in Bamberg, then it had to be the ‘new palace with the rose garden’ Ralph Huber had mentioned.

I quickly turned around to retrace my path, looking for anything that gave off a murky light. Three pendulum-like objects hung from the door at the back. To the naked eye, they looked like simple decorations attached to the door. Through the monocle, however, they were surrounded by a faint blue mist.

There was no guarantee that a lever for returning would have been placed near the point I had moved to. But with a structure like this, where one entered from the outside, guests visiting the bishop’s residence would need a way to return to where they had come from. So I could make a near-certain guess that this object was the one that would take us back to Bamberg Cathedral.

Before returning, I approached the bishop’s desk and checked the objects that were glowing.

Strangely enough, there were a lot of pens. A holder containing ten quill pens, a decorative fountain pen, and a drawer with another key inserted into it. I opened the other drawers. Every one of them opened easily except for one. I strongly suspected the drawer that wouldn’t open contained documents.

That decorative fountain pen showed almost no signs of use. In other words, there were hardly any traces of it ever being handled.

The quill pens were probably levers for traveling to other dioceses. As for the decorative fountain pen, I would have to think about it more, but I suspected it was a lever leading to the gathering place of Pleroma’s entire leadership.

There was another glowing object in the wide drawer directly beneath the table, where stationery, spare ink, and pens were usually kept.

To my naked left eye, the lever looked like a porcelain ring box. Judging by the ridiculous amount of decoration, with even the flowers and ribbons made out of porcelain, my twenty-three years of experience as an Old Human told me that touching it would probably take me to the residence shared with Ralph Huber.

And since that was almost certainly the case, I decided not to touch it. Not now, at least.

The drawer with the key in it seemed to have been opened more often than I expected. I gripped the document tightly and turned the key.

An archive unfolded before my eyes.

It was 2:30 PM. Still plenty of time. After checking the time, I drew my wand, transformed it into a staff, and struck the floor twice. I heard no signs of anyone nearby. Whistling softly, I prepared my divine power.

― Seek, and you shall find.

“Six o’clock.”

Far too many documents lit up. I changed the search to ‘throughout Germany.’ The result was the same.

“Major announcement.”

The number dropped considerably, but when I actually pulled them out, either they had nothing to do with today’s 6 PM, Easter announcement, or they merely mentioned the announcement without revealing what it was about. If it was that highly classified, it would be in the bishop’s desk drawer.

I immediately turned back and moved the fog-shrouded door ornament. I crossed back into the bishop’s office and pulled out one of the quills. The space changed as though nothing had happened.

Just as I thought. I’d already noticed when there were so many of them. The room looked exactly like an office, but a nameplate on the desk identified its occupant as the bishop of the Diocese of Speyer. I pulled on the iron flower ornament attached to the door to return the way I had come.

Back in the bishop’s office in Bamberg, I took advantage of how smoothly things had gone and picked up another quill. I put it down.

It was another office, empty of people. This one belonged to the bishop of the Diocese of Würzburg.

Judging by the fact that there was no one in the bishop’s residence, they must have gone off to some sort of meeting. But if they were planning to announce such an extraordinary discovery at 6 PM, one grand enough to shake the world, I’d already expected them to be busy by 2:50.

Which was why I was here at this hour.

“Your Highness, if you don’t think you can quickly find a lever to return, don’t go in. It’s fine to run into trouble on-site.”

— [Understood.]

Leonard answered in an easygoing tone. I thought that would be the end of our communication, but after a brief sound like wind and something being moved, his calm voice came through again.

— [This is rather enjoyable.]

I laughed. He seemed to be getting around just fine so far. It made sense that he would. Wasn’t this the perfect time for us to be active?

The perfect time for us to make our move.

The next thing I wanted to find above all else was the location of the control room. Where would we have to go to control the spatial magic of this diocese? The best course was to meet up with Leonard and search for it together.

As I had learned from my observations so far, the dioceses—or at least the levers in the Bavarian dioceses—were patterned according to their respective functions. For example, the lever leading to the main cathedral was built into a door, while the levers leading to the offices of other diocesan bishops were spread across various objects. The quill levers made it easy enough to move to a diocesan bishop’s office, but there were eight dioceses in Bavaria, six if Eichstätt, Munich-Freising, and Bamberg were excluded, and there were ten quills. So I needed to take my time and match each diocese to its corresponding quill. I’d simply gotten lucky twice so far. I did have a safety net, but there was no reason to use it carelessly.

First, I decided to return to the archives and look for any other levers connected to it.

About thirty minutes later, we happened to run into each other in a residential area.

“What is this?”

At my instinctive question, Leo shrugged. He had the same look on his face, as if he didn’t know either. That expression told me plenty. I gathered myself and cast a soundproofing spell before speaking. By now, casting soundproofing whenever there were two or more of us had practically become a habit, and we had to do it as a matter of course.

“…I didn’t expect to meet you here.”

“Neither did I. It seems the passages are connected.”

Even as he said that, Leonard stroked his chin with an impassive expression. I knew that the look on his face was a different kind of impassiveness from his usual composure, so I asked, “Is something wrong?”

“I came to a residential area earlier as well. A residential area for the faithful. There were naturally a lot of people there.”

“That would make sense. It’s Easter, after all.”

“But there’s no one here…”

I nodded and asked, “What did you touch to get here?”

“I first moved to the Archdiocese of Köln.”

Leonard paused as he retraced his memory.

“Then I moved back to the Diocese of Speyer.”

“Yes. And then?”

“I touched a decoration on the door leading to the basement of the residence there.”

“Haha… The basement, huh. Looks like we think alike.”

That was exactly what I had done. I had deliberately avoided touching the fountain pen on the desk because I was worried there might be no way back, or that I might end up having to use one of my checkpoints in haste, so how the hell did touching a decoration on the door to the basement of the bishop’s residence bring me here? Honestly, this was just ridiculous. I grumbled inwardly with a hollow laugh. Still, I couldn’t really complain, since I had done it because I’d noticed something strange—the door decoration that should have been on the inside was attached to the outside.

Leonard burst out laughing when he realized that I had tried to reach the basement of the bishop’s residence for exactly the same reason he had. I looked out at the vast residential area and the natural surroundings beyond it and said, “Then the purpose of this place is obvious. It’s a joint training ground. The problem is, we don’t know exactly how to get out.”

The spatial magic covered an enormous area. I had taken off the monocle I’d been using to check both the locations of the levers and what the levers actually looked like, and put on my pince-nez instead, but I couldn’t see any object containing that strange mist. I didn’t even know if we had to go farther in before we would find one.

“If there’s one thing we can be glad about, it’s that there’s a high chance they’ve prepared a lever for leaving the training ground.”

Leo had said he’d been in the Archdiocese of Köln. The Archdiocese of Köln was outside Bavaria. Since the levers we had touched were in bishops’ residences, the bishops must have used them to come and go, and they still had to get home somehow. They couldn’t simply warp back according to their own coordinate systems. This was a place where not only the Pleroma bishops from the Bavarian dioceses, which belonged to the same ecclesiastical province, but also bishops from other ecclesiastical provinces would gather, so there was a good chance their coordinate systems weren’t unified. Unless this spatial magic extended outward like the arms of a radial network, there absolutely had to be a lever that led back.

But if they had actually implemented some kind of technology that allowed this spatial magic to connect to every ecclesiastical province despite their different coordinate systems, then we were out of options.

“At least we have these glasses.”

Leonard said that and began speaking more casually.

“We should stay together here. Don’t fall behind.”

“Exactly. Let’s run and look.”

We ran straight ahead from the square. The square was circular, with eight roads branching off from it in total, and we also had to search the alleys between them, so we needed to find a way out quickly. We numbered the roads clockwise, starting from the front of the square, and ran through them at full speed. By the time we had passed the first road, the clock read 3:30. We passed the second road, then the third. And when we reached the end of the fourth road, what I saw was something strange.

It was an enormous… plain. And it was covered in ruins. It almost looked like Pompeii. I wondered if this was what it would look like if someone dropped a bomb on ancient Rome. We turned back toward the square, and as we were passing the fifth road, Leo said something strange.

“We’ve been here before.”

“We haven’t.”

I frowned at him as though I were looking at a madman. Leo shook his head.

“We need to go back. I know where to go. The way out of the residential area was by the fountain in the square.”

“Really? I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it earlier…”

I had thought there was no way out no matter how carefully I looked. Thinking I should calm the madman down a little, I muttered as I continued, “But we definitely can get out of here. You said you came from Köln, didn’t you? Don’t panic. Let’s just go for now.”

Leonard shook his head at my words.

“Köln? I didn’t go there. I was in the Diocese of Speyer.”

Has he gotten heatstroke or something? How did he even manage to get around in this state? Were we going to make it back in time? Still somewhat shaken, I checked the time.

“Why is it 3:50 now?”

It had just been 2:30. No, wait. That’s right. It was 3:50. Had I finally gone mad too…? I laughed and rubbed my forehead. Leo’s expression was strange. No, his whole appearance was strange. I pointed at his eyes and asked, “Why are you wearing those monocles?”

Leo frowned at me, then opened his mouth.