9th Grade Civil Servant In Another World Chapter 53 - The Stench of Blood (7)

Lüdelheim’s District 1 is vast.

Even excluding the Supreme Leader’s floating residence.

The District 1 contains over a dozen neighborhoods, some densely packed with people and buildings, others not so much.

The most desolate area is the industrial complex on the outskirts of the District 1.

That place where blacksmiths and textile workers once gathered had seen hundreds of factories built over hundreds of years, but now they were moving one by one to other districts with cheaper land, leaving it empty.

Though it was precious land worth its weight in gold, it had been left abandoned due to accumulated pollutants over the years and complicated ownership issues.

It was a problem the government should have stepped in to resolve, but they seemed to have given up on it for some reason, leading to all sorts of rumors circulating among the people.

The Ossel headquarters was hidden among the countless buildings of that factory complex. Right in the center of the site, where neither sound nor secrets could ever escape.

Hannah Art stood under the neat roadside trees lining the main street, unfolding a map.

Dressed casually with sunglasses, looking around, she appeared to be nothing more than a tourist visiting Lüdelheim for vacation season.

“About a 20-minute carriage ride from the police station entrance to the headquarters? There might be some variance depending on daily traffic conditions.”

She couldn’t actually race a carriage to measure it. Just approaching the abandoned factory area would arouse suspicion.

In the end, Lucas and Fael had to mathematically derive the result by measuring distances on a map. The White Raven Order’s intelligence network had been a great help.

“Twenty minutes…”

Definitely ambiguous.

As Lucas had said, once the operation began, there was no telling what might happen. They had to minimize external interference as much as possible.

That’s why Hannah had volunteered to divert the police station’s attention.

Hannah looked up at the grand and solemn police station building, then picked up her small, ordinary travel bag and walked forward with determination.

“What business do you have here?”

A patrol officer standing guard at the police station entrance stopped Hannah. She flicked her unremarkable brown-dyed hair and snapped in rapid speech.

“Suis cal tuer la shion!”

“Excuse me? What did you say?”

She gestured wildly with excited movements.

“Le voleur vilain!”

A colleague approached the frowning officer.

“Seems like a Rubellia woman.”

Rubellia was a neighboring powerhouse that bordered Schufaben but had a completely different atmosphere and national character.

Today her assigned role was ‘a Rubellia tourist extremely angry about having her bag stolen.’

She alternated between anger and pleading, squawking like a proper Rubellia person.

“A thief at the carriage station stole my bag! Someone switched it without me knowing! They just left this note stuck on, that’s all!”

She rattled off in rapid Rubellia speech while thrusting a piece of paper with a brief message at the officer.

「A gift from the White Raven Order」

The officers who had been laughing while watching the pretty foreign woman throw a fit suddenly went rigid.

“Hand it over!”

One officer roughly snatched her bag, while his colleague twisted Hannah’s arm to subdue her.

“Kyaaaah!”

She was dragged into the police station screaming that it hurt.

“Inspector! Take a look at this!”

“What? White Raven Order? This woman?”

“No, the woman seems to have been used—”

The police station instantly became chaotic. Hannah understood every word while maintaining a confused and foolish expression, repeatedly protesting about what they were doing.

After she had been making noise for quite a while, an interpreter was assigned to her.

“What’s your name?”

“Emma, Emma Durand.”

“Miss Durand, do you have a passport?”

The interpreter’s attitude was very rigid and intimidating. She obediently pulled out her forged passport.

“Where and from whom did you receive this bag?”

“I told you! Some bastard switched it while I wasn’t looking for a moment in the station waiting room!”

“What was originally in your bag?”

“My dress.”

“And in the switched bag?”

“Nothing at all. Really nothing! Hurry up and catch the bag thief! It was an incredibly expensive dress!”

While she threw her tantrum, the bag was moved to the examination room.

An analyst wearing gloves carefully examined the bag from all angles and brought over a magic detection device to test it.

“Really nothing inside. But the magic is considerable. The bag itself seems to have magic cast on it.”

“It’s not an expansion spell or weight reduction spell at least. Should we try a few more runes?”

“Then what could it be, surely not?!”

Hannah, who had been continuing her annoyed tourist act, glanced at the clock on the wall.

‘Five minutes left.’

If there were no major incidents, it would be more than enough time for Fa-Elhar and the team members to infiltrate the headquarters.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

She stood up abruptly and asked the interpreter, who gave a perfunctory response. She slowly rounded the corner.

BOOM!

As soon as she closed the bathroom door, an ear-splitting explosion shook the building.

“Kyaaaah!”

“Aaaaah!”

Screams erupted everywhere.

Hannah took off her shoes and held them. She escaped through the window and ran through the streets where onlookers were gathering.

The police station was already engulfed in flames, with escaping officers pouring out. Hannah casually mixed in among them and left the scene.

***

As the door closed, the 1st Conference Room was once again filled with deathly silence.

Salute to the architects who filled the iron door with sand and covered it with elegant wood.

The people in the room briefly fell into the illusion that this place was safe, but soon awoke and entered a state of frenzy.

“Lieutenant General, we must fight too!”

“We can’t let those reactionaries get the better of us!”

“No, let’s escape even now! The brave Ossels are buying time, but it won’t last long!”

Noisy voices squawked throughout the room.

“Quiet.”

But as soon as Lieutenant General Kaiser spoke, the voices died down and silence returned.

The lieutenant general showed a satisfied expression and pulled out a bundle of keys from his inner pocket. Beautiful brass keys with intricate patterns carved on them.

When he extended his hand, his aide, who had been standing like a statue, handed him a coffee cup and took the key bundle instead.

The aide approached a marble sculpture decorating one corner of the spacious room.

A sculpture shaped like an angel blowing a trumpet. The aide inserted a key into the trumpet’s lead pipe hole and turned it.

Grind grind grind!

Clank!

Soon the entire room vibrated, and iron shutters descended from the ceiling. All doors and windows were covered, and the room was completely sealed.

The Ossels breathed sighs of relief while feeling puzzled.

“Lieutenant General, if we can’t assess the outside situation like this—”

Someone cautiously began to speak, but Lieutenant General Kaiser wasn’t listening to him.

“Strange, very strange.”

He merely muttered while leaning back comfortably in his chair.

The attack happening precisely when the Supreme Leader had left for his villa, and the fact that they knew the headquarters’ location and structure.

“Who could it be.”

The one who leaked internal secrets.

The general’s eyes swept over the Ossels pacing around the round table.

There was no law saying it had to be one of them.

Perhaps they were mixed in among the personnel drafted for the Supreme Leader’s security detail. Nearly half of all Lüdelheim Ossels had gone with him.

However, Lieutenant General Kaiser thought,

‘It doesn’t matter who it is.’

Only 8 people were permitted entry to the 1st Conference Room.

Excluding Kaiser and his aide, all were of major rank, playing roles in managing all Lüdelheim Ossels without separate jurisdictions.

In other words, they could be called Lieutenant General Kaiser’s assistants, but were in fact the Supreme Leader’s eyes watching him—

‘Parasites.’

Always opposing for the sake of opposition, reporting his every move to the Supreme Leader, and doing a terrible job of the tasks entrusted to them.

So it didn’t matter who the informant was. This situation wasn’t a crisis but an opportunity.

Lieutenant General Kaiser, having finished organizing his thoughts, savored the coffee remaining in his cup.

Before long, the elegant melody of a violin was filling the space. A minuet he was fond of.

The sound of a flute layered softly over the violin. Added to that, thump, thump, drum beats began to resound.

Lieutenant General Kaiser rose to his feet.

Bang!

A gunshot tore through the air.

Thump!

With each drumbeat,

Bang!

A gunshot each time.

Amid the struggling sacrificial lambs, Kaiser’s movements sliced through the air with cheerful precision.

***

Bang!

Rata-tat-tat-bang!

Loud noise hammered at my ears.

Sitting on a chunk of broken concrete and firing at the wall, I lowered my aching arm.

“This should be enough. Let’s stop, we have other things to do.”

“Shall we.”

Johann, who had likewise been casually shooting, also stopped pulling the trigger. Near him lay the lower-ranking Ossels who had been standing guard.

“Then now for the final step.”

Fael, Assad, and the other elves were carrying Ossel corpses. They would strip the corpses’ clothes and dress them in the same outfits as us.

‘Reactionaries killed in Johann’s valiant struggle’ were needed.

Since we’d burn down the entire building, it would be hard to tell who was who.

This world had no technology for identifying corpses. No procedures for comparing dental records, no spells to magically restore their appearance in life.

I was aiming for a triple kill.

Release the prisoners to enhance the White Raven Order’s image.

Wipe out the Ossels while gaining real combat experience.

Finally, preserve the Ossel leadership to make Johann a hero.

Johann would heroically inform the leadership about the invasion after breaking through an enormous assault, then fight valiantly against the reactionaries.

Thanks to this, the Ossel leadership would save their lives.

As much as I hate to admit it, countless Ossels had been swept away. Personnel were precious, and to bury this massive incident, they’d have no choice but to appease him.

It was simple logic, but after studying the Ossel organization’s nature, I thought it had a good chance of working.

Of course, the colonel might kill Johann, but well, what could happen. Essentially this was a gamble.

This was also a minor copy of the process by which I—that is, Lucas Redan—became a hero.

‘His heroic act is fake too, just like mine.’

I grinned while looking at Johann.

“How about it, think it’ll work?”

But he maintained his usual cold expression.

“I can’t tell. Everything depends on Lieutenant General Kaiser.”

“Lieutenant General Kaiser? The number one person in Ossel you mentioned?”

“That’s right. He’ll be waiting inside for the situation to end.”

Johann pointed at the 1st Conference Room door with his gun barrel.

“Why doesn’t he come out and fight himself?”

“He’s a sinister spider of a man.”

“That’s rich coming from you… Cough cough!”

The smell of smoke rushed into my nostrils. Daniel had successfully started the fire.

“We should go. Well then, lastly.”

When I aimed my gun at Johann, he obediently took position.

Bang!

The bullet barely grazed Johann’s shoulder, and he collapsed behind the barricade into a pool of blood, motionless.

Fael flicked his hand. A small spark began burning the wall.

***

The minuet was still playing inside the 1st Conference Room.

The metallic stench of blood floating in the air stuck to his tongue.

Lieutenant General Kaiser, who had been wiping his face with a handkerchief, suddenly felt the air growing hot.

This was different from the heat of physical exertion. The metal was heating up.

There was definitely a fire outside. The reactionaries had decided to roast this room whole.

He silently gestured to his aide.

While Lieutenant General Kaiser had been killing the six majors, his aide, who had been quietly waiting in the corner, inserted the key into the sculpture again and turned it.

As the shutters disappeared, the two men opened the door and stepped into the corridor.

A corridor engulfed in flames.

Seeing thick smoke billowing up through the windows, the entire building seemed to be on fire.

Lieutenant General Kaiser discovered two bodies collapsed behind barricades beyond the corpse-filled corridor.

An unconscious middle-aged Ossel and a young Ossel clutching his blood-soaked shoulder, trembling.

When Lieutenant General Kaiser made eye contact, his aide shook him awake. Tears of pain flowed from the young Ossel’s eyes.

The general met his gaze.

“Did you single-handedly eliminate the reactionaries?”

He nodded.

“All of them?”

This time he shook his head.

“Did you call them here?”

He shook his head again.

Lieutenant General Kaiser helped him up.

“What’s your name?”

“Major, Johann Werner… sir.”

He managed to say with difficulty.

“Major Werner, what happened today must never be known by anyone.”

“I will guard the secret… with my life…”

“Congratulations on your promotion.”

He took Johann with him. His aide carried the unconscious colonel.

After escaping the headquarters while avoiding the flames, they heard the loud sound of galloping hooves. Men in police uniforms were riding toward them on horseback.

“We received a report of a fire here! Hey, you’re under arrest as suspects—”

Bang! Bang bang!

Two bodies slumped down.

Johann’s trembling arm still held the pistol.

“Heh, heh hahaha!”

Lieutenant General Kaiser laughed.

Against the backdrop of flying sparks and the collapsing factory, his laughter continued for a long time.