Chapter 3: The Middleman

The exact date of Steel Commandment's founding can no longer be established. Its predecessor can be traced back to the holy city of Jerusalem in the early twelfth century. Founded to protect pilgrims arriving from across Europe from bandit attacks, it originally had only nine members.

By the end of the twelfth century, the organization had grown to an unprecedented size, owning more than 9,000 properties across Europe, including many famous churches and castles. Its members numbered in the tens of thousands and could levy taxes on the populace themselves or simply plunder them; even the nobles of the day knew enough to open their purses and donate gold and silver generously. They stood above royal authority and answered directly to the pope. They were the Knights Templar, the most powerful religious military force in Europe at the time.

But this excessive growth in power and wealth also became the stake that would ultimately pierce the organization's heart.

France, October 13, 1307. A Friday. Black Friday. The day the Knights Templar fell.

One shrewd king was enough to see the matter through. The reason was simple. In that age, few rulers could tolerate an organization possessing thousands of castles and vast wealth within their kingdoms while they themselves could touch none of it.

Seven years later, the remnants of the order were scattered in exile across Europe. Most of its members had died under interrogation or been burned at the stake. Its last Grand Master, Molay, pronounced a curse on the bishop and king of the time as he stood at the stake: within a year, both would die under “eternal judgment.”

Before a year had passed, the pope and king died one after the other, one of a sudden illness and the other under mysterious circumstances while hunting.

All these grudges seemed to have been laid to rest, but the flame of the Knights Templar had never truly gone out.

Rumor had it that well before Black Friday, Molay had secretly passed his office to his nephew, the young Count Bern, and made him swear before God to preserve certain treasures until “the end of the world” so that the Knights Templar might one day be saved. These treasures were hidden inside a massive pillar in the tomb of the previous Grand Master. Later, the “Pure Architects,” an organization controlled by the count, secretly removed them and took them elsewhere. Only the Templars' own system of mysterious symbols and secret religious rites could lead anyone to the treasures and allow them to be retrieved.

Even seven centuries later, no one had deciphered the secrets of those symbols, and the treasure had become a historical mystery.

In 2000, a new era began following the Empire's unification of the planet.

During those chaotic years when imperial rule had only just been established, countless resistance organizations emerged and were ruthlessly destroyed. In the end, only a few survived by hiding deep in the shadows. One of them was Steel Commandment.

They were the successors of the Knights Templar. Combining and rewriting Catholic and Eastern Orthodox doctrine, they established their own Church and laws. The Grand Master who commanded the entire order also served as pope, carrying on its faith and martial spirit.

By now, the Empire's rule had lasted a century. Steel Commandment had become the largest resistance organization on the planet, one of the very few capable of taking on imperial military forces in open battle, an entity akin to a second dynasty in Europe. Even trying to eradicate them was futile, because people could be killed, but faith could not.

This was also why Europe had more HL branches than anywhere else in the world, with an overall fighting strength second only to headquarters in Tiandu.

No superpowered criminal in the underworld dared provoke a member of Steel Commandment. Everyone knew that once you crossed them, they would hunt you to the ends of the earth in the name of judgment until they achieved their aim.

But Blood Owl gave no thought to such matters. Steel Commandment, HL—whatever side someone belonged to, once they fell into his hands, they were simply experimental material.

However much he might look like a professional enforcer or a champion swimmer, Blood Owl was a scientist through and through. In fact, he had an Ivy League qualification, though he had studied there under someone else's identity. The student he impersonated, along with the student's entire family, had become experimental subjects.

For years, Blood Owl had been searching for a way to “cure” himself. At present, there appeared to be two ways to achieve that ultimate goal. First, his research could succeed; second, all humanity could die out.

So, whichever way you looked at it, Blood Owl was making steady progress toward his ideal.

After dealing with the last senior cleric, he spent half a day searching Steel Commandment's underground mirror city. Once he had confirmed that no survivors remained, he began planning and setting things up.

The underground maze consisted of passages and rooms. Every passage looked exactly alike, enclosed on all sides by thick metal walls, with a strip of light running lengthwise along the ceiling. Walking through any stretch, it was hard to distinguish it from any other. Rooms appeared only beneath certain landmark buildings. Apart from being wider than the passages and having more strips of lighting on the ceiling, they had no distinguishing features. Every room was an identical rectangle, the same size and appearance inside, with space for roughly forty people. Each was just an empty iron box, with no tables, chairs or other objects. As with the passages, even standing inside one, you could not tell which room you were in.

This design was highly effective at thwarting intruders. Once outsiders entered the passages, they could not even establish their own position and would soon be surrounded and captured by members of Steel Commandment.

These rooms and passages allowed rapid movement beneath the city, letting members reach a designated position in very little time and disappear from the surface through secret entrances whenever necessary. This underground maze was Steel Commandment's most valuable piece of infrastructure in Venice for passing messages and evading pursuit. Now it had fallen into Blood Owl's hands. He was very pleased with it. He had always wanted a place like this, with room for all the experimental equipment he needed and no helpful neighbors to disturb him. Beneath two meters of water and nearly twenty meters of shoal sediment, he could hold a concert down here and the sound still wouldn't reach the surface.

Most exciting of all was the senior cleric's dying threat, which indicated that the organization would send more powerful members to eliminate him. Would anyone of Strong rank be among them? Blood Owl looked forward to it.

As for ability ranks, no one knew when this system of classification had first begun to circulate. It seemed to have existed since ancient times in that mysterious world unknown to ordinary people.

Back when there were many nations, their governments concealed the existence of groups such as superpowered people, cyborgs and mutants, cultivating them as weapons. In this age of unification, the Empire had likewise never disclosed such powers to the general public. It had, however, devised a fairly standardized system for classifying them more precisely.

The system was actually very simple. From Paper rank to God rank, it relied on just two figures: “time” and “number.” For example, if someone of Paper rank could kill twenty ordinary people in an hour, then someone of Normal rank might kill two hundred in an hour, or take only ten minutes to kill twenty.

These hypothetical cases all rested on the realistic premise that the victims would fight back or run. The shorter the time and the greater the number, the higher the rank. Someone who could kill a million people in one second would naturally be a god. Of course, to qualify for a rank, one had to accomplish these things through one's own power. Bomber pilots and the like obviously did not count.

In the Empire's assessment system, “time” roughly represented maximum destructive power, so ability users who performed well on that measure generally tended to have offensive abilities. “Number,” meanwhile, represented an ability user's capacity for sustained destruction and survival.

Of course, there were occasional exceptions to the ranking system, such as cyborgs. These ability users generally had no special powers of their own, fighting instead with weaponized bodies. Although they could meet the requirements for a given rank, a cyborg facing a superpowered opponent of the same rank one on one, especially one with offensive abilities, would certainly lose.

Overall, though, the system was fairly accurate and broadly applicable to all humans on the planet. To date, very few people on Earth had ever reached God rank. Even after a lifetime of effort, superpowered people often went no further than Strong rank. Anyone who reached the fourth rank, Fierce, already counted as a peerless master.

Blood Owl was just such a master, and he was only in his early thirties, with every possibility of improving further. All he needed was more prey and experimental subjects...

At noon on the day after the Copper Parrot murders, Blood Owl appeared in Venice again. He walked brazenly down the street, utterly unconcerned that his conspicuous appearance might draw the attention of passersby.

It was a curious phenomenon, really. The more afraid a criminal was of being caught, the more shifty and furtive he looked. Yet someone like Blood Owl could disappear into a crowd. Even if someone gave him a second look, it was merely because of his imposing stature.

People could not imagine that a murderer who had committed a bloody crime in public just the night before would still dare stroll around as though nothing had happened. That was how common sense led people to think.

At one in the afternoon, Blood Owl sat in a restaurant feasting on enough fresh fish, shrimp and crab for two. He had even ordered two portions of tiramisu.

Before long, an Asian man wearing small round sunglasses and sporting an extremely long ponytail entered the restaurant. Rat-faced and furtive, he hid his face behind the turned-up collar of his trench coat. As soon as he entered, he expertly identified every possible escape route, then inspected every man and woman in sight. Once he was sure there were no cops, he sat down opposite Blood Owl.

“Mr. Kirios? It's me.” Even as he spoke, his eyes kept darting about.

Blood Owl replied, “I ordered a meal for you too, but since you were late, I ate yours as well.”

“I'm only five minutes late, and you've even finished dessert. They serve the courses one at a time here...”

“Cut the crap. Did you get everything I wanted?”

“Hey... listen, pal. What you did after I left the bar last night has practically got the whole city talking. The police might already have seen us talking on the surveillance footage. Now I'm in trouble too...”

Blood Owl interrupted him. “Mr. Zuo, are you trying to raise your price?”

Zuo Dao did want to raise his price. He had wanted to right up until Blood Owl asked that question, but the instant their eyes met, he lost his nerve. “I wouldn't dare, wouldn't dare... I haven't been a middleman all these years for nothing, you know. My reputation has always spoken for itself...”

“You have quite a reputation. There's no need to explain any further. Tell me when the goods will arrive.”

Zuo Dao's eyes shifted behind his sunglasses. “I've found a buyer for your painting. A private collector, from the imperial family. With connections that strong, he'll buy anything. He'll pay within two days. Once the money reaches my account, as we agreed, I take 10% of the net profit from the sale, and the other 90% goes toward the equipment you want. I've already contacted the black-market sellers. The medical equipment will arrive the same day, and the chemicals are easy enough to get. It's the torture implements that are a bit tricky. They'll have to get some stock from adult prod... ahem... I mean suppliers in other cities. As for the computer equipment, it'll cost a little more if you want it from stock, but it's easy enough to get.”

“As for whatever money's left, you said you wanted it laundered into cash. This humble Taoist has already negotiated with a few of the local bosses on your behalf. They say you'll have to give them a 15% cut to launder it, and that's nonnegotiable. Is that all right with you? If it isn't, I'll just give you the account.”

Blood Owl gave it little thought. He polished off the last of the food on his plate, stood up and said, “Meet me here in three days. Same time.” Then he tossed two large-denomination banknotes onto the table and strode away.

Zuo Dao watched through the restaurant window until Blood Owl disappeared from view. Then he glanced around and slipped the two banknotes inside his coat with lightning speed. He cleared his throat. “Waiter, the bill!” As he spoke, he took a credit card already carrying a hefty balance from his wallet...