Chapter 18: The Inspector's Decision

“How are your injuries?” Tian Yi asked without much feeling as Gu Wen and the other three entered the bookshop.

Gu Wen gave a cold laugh. “I'm never doing fieldwork again.”

“Once our ranks grow a little more, the work you and Accountant have to handle will be far more complicated and demanding than fieldwork,” Tian Yi said.

Gu Wen found a place to sit. “Do I need to introduce him?”

Tian Yi addressed Spayton, who stood behind Gu Wen. “The Night Knight, Mark Spayton. I've long admired you. A pleasure to meet you.” So he said, but his listless expression and the way he remained slumped in his seat without moving a muscle made it clear these were mere pleasantries.

If someone couldn't even be bothered to stand up and shake your hand, what was all this about long-standing admiration? Where was the pleasure?

“So you're Tian Yi,” Spayton said. “My price is very high. I don't know whether Gu Wen mentioned that.”

“For money matters, just speak to Accountant,” Gu Wen cut in. “Don't bring up such boring subjects in front of the boss.”

Tian Yi took a sip of coffee. Very pleased with Gu Wen's remark, he seized the opening to move away from this “boring” subject. “Now that everyone's here, get ready to teleport. Once we're in Beijing, we can have Dr. Stranger look at Gu Wen's injuries while we're there.”

Before he had finished speaking, Gambling Snake had already walked silently over to a bookshelf and begun activating the relocation device.

“What do you mean, teleport?” Spayton asked in confusion. “Wait... did you just say Stranger, the Demon Doctor?”

Beside him, Accountant put in, “Close the door first. You'll have plenty of time for questions from now on.”

Gu Wen then asked Tian Yi, “Everything arranged with Li Wei?”

“Yes. With Demon Doctor and Toy Marshal on the job, dealing with a rich young dandy is hardly a problem. Especially since you captured the woman he's in love with and took her hostage,” Tian Yi replied.

“I did capture her,” Gu Wen said. “But you're the one who turned her into a ‘hostage.’”

“Fine, let's say I captured her,” Tian Yi said. “By the way, how did your operation go? All taken care of?”

“All done, though there were some unexpected complications. Otherwise I wouldn't have been injured,” Gu Wen replied. “When I broke into their system, an expert happened to be at Apostle's Western European mainframe. She immediately mounted an extremely effective response. Fortunately, Destiny had an overwhelming performance advantage. She couldn't stop or detect my intrusion at all, just make me work a little harder and cost me some time.”

“Really... So Steel Commandment does have top computer talent after all. How good do you think she is?” Tian Yi asked.

Gu Wen looked up at the ceiling and thought for two seconds. “Better than me.”

“Oh?” Tian Yi set down his coffee, apparently interested now. “That narrows it down considerably.”

“That's hardly surprising. If you were looking for the thirty best hackers in the world, I'd be one of them. If you only wanted twenty, I might still make it. But if you picked just ten, I wouldn't necessarily be on the list,” Gu Wen said. “Sorcerer is unquestionably the best hacker on this planet. Everyone knows he's number one. Gates might be second. He's far behind Sorcerer, but his abilities are strong across the board. Of course, it would be hard to establish a clear ranking between him and the rest of the top ten.

“The woman I ran into today definitely belongs in the top ten. She looked very young. Given her ability, in a few years Apostle could very well surpass Gates's Matrix in her hands and become the better system.”

“Then in your judgment, will she affect our upcoming plans? Cause any complications?” Tian Yi asked.

Gu Wen laughed. “Ha... How could she? Do you have any idea who Sorcerer is? He's practically a turd the god of the binary world shat onto this earth. Pick out a few programs he wrote before he was fifteen and you'll scare his peers pissless. Challenging a system he created is a pipe dream.”

“Good. Then we can ignore her,” Tian Yi replied. “Tomorrow, we start the game according to the original plan.”

…………

Three hours later, Steel Commandment headquarters, Rome, Crown Commandery.

Holy Land inspector Agostino Lodovico sat behind his desk listening to his secretary's report. He wore a clergyman's uniform and had curly brown hair, a full beard, kindly features, cheeks that stayed rosy all year round, and an impressively ample belly. People in Steel Commandment often joked that if he dyed his hair white and stuck on a false beard, he would be all but guaranteed a top-three finish in a Santa Claus lookalike contest in Finland.

His secretary was called Dasher, a South American with a large, curled beard and a great love of Mexican chili sauce. There was so much about this man to make fun of that you could never get through it all. First, his name: Dasher, one of Santa's reindeer. Second, he had been born in Northern Europe and had never spent a single day in South America. Apart from his skin color, he was Northern European through and through. He spoke English and German, yet knew absolutely no Spanish, and still he was always imitating Mexicans according to some peculiarly European stereotype...

“Street surveillance cameras recorded the four intruders' entire escape from the local police, though obtaining the police footage will take a little longer. Every member of the Kaifeng branch successfully withdrew through the secret passages. There were no major problems with the data purge at the base either. Nothing useful should have been left for HL.” Dasher scrolled on his tablet, and a photograph of Bimawen appeared among the supplementary information on the screen. “Provincial internal affairs chief Feng Bu'er is currently under investigation. According to his statement, he encountered the intruders while using the toilet... and was then held captive for a time. Also... Feng Bu'er says one of the intruders can control invisible threads, though his strength should only be Paper rank. They also possess a computer called ‘Destiny,’ which is claimed to be superior to our Apostle system.”

Lodovico's expression changed slightly. “Oh? Is that information reliable? Has the Apostle system been damaged?”

“Lady Vanessa in the Red Lion Commandery submitted a detailed assessment half an hour ago,” Dasher replied. “The intruder did successfully breach the Apostle node in Kaifeng, but she detected it immediately and took countermeasures, isolating and locking down the compromised Apostle unit. After the intrusion ended, she conducted a comprehensive inspection of Apostle worldwide and found nothing suspicious, so we can essentially rule out damage to the system. Information leakage, however, was presumably unavoidable.

“In addition, Lady Vanessa's report describes the intruder's machine as resembling a ‘block of black metal.’ Its processing power is beyond estimation and very likely superior to our system's.”

Lodovico considered this. If Destiny really was that astonishing, there were only a handful of people in the world who could have built it.

After thinking for a while, he asked, “Can we confirm the identities of the four intruders?”

“By collating the information supplied by the Kaifeng branch's knight captains He Yi and Meng Qi and several other knights, and combining it with surveillance footage Lady Vanessa obtained through various channels, we can identify two of the four. One is the deserter we are pursuing, the Night Knight, Mark Spayton, a Strong-rank ability user. This was his first public appearance since leaving the organization. The other is called ‘Accountant,’ a Paper-rank ability user who specializes in financial fraud, as well as forging bonds, works of art, rare currency, and so on. He's meticulous and keeps a low profile. There is no official record of his crimes, and we cannot trace his real name, but plenty of people in the underworld know him.”

Dasher paused, continued working on his tablet, and said, “As for the other two, we have no leads at all on the young man who controls threads. None of the databases we can access contain the slightest clue to his identity. According to Lady Vanessa's description, he's an Asian man in his early twenties. Um... quite handsome.”

“What did you say?” Lodovico looked at Dasher in puzzlement.

“That wasn't me,” Dasher said. “She added that to her report...”

Lodovico rolled his eyes helplessly. That slacker who always had candy in her mouth hardly ever wrote a proper report anyway.

Dasher continued, “As for the man who ran over the rooftops and up the walls, his facial features match those of an ordinary office worker named Tom Stall in Maple Leaf Commandery. According to local police records, however, he seems to have become embroiled in a dispute involving a noble and then vanished off the face of the earth. The relevant records consequently became a heap of vaguely worded garbage that leaves us none the wiser. He Yi's report states that this man's movements were extremely professional, his strength impossible to gauge, and that he could not possibly be an ordinary office worker. The name Tom Stall is merely a meaningless cover identity, so we still know nothing of this man's background.”

Lodovico stroked his beard in thought, as was his habit, then said, “A deserter, a financial fraudster, and two formidable men of unknown origin... If they worked for the Empire, they could simply have identified themselves to the police. Or they could have let themselves be arrested and waited for their superiors to intervene, then walked out of prison.

“If they don't work for the Empire, they belong to some other organization... But why come into direct conflict with us? The world is still a long way from the stage where rival powers carve it up among themselves...”

“Could they belong to some intelligence agency the Empire refuses to acknowledge publicly?” Dasher suggested.

“You young people watch too many films. There's only one government in this world. What would it need an agency like that for? Investigating aliens? After its agents get arrested, is the Empire supposed to announce that those particular earthlings have absolutely nothing to do with our government of Earth?”

Dasher shrugged. “Then what do you think, sir?”

Lodovico let out a long breath. “The Dragon Commandery is divided into thirty-four districts. Steel Commandment has branches throughout, but only fourteen have Apostle, and of those, the Kaifeng base currently has the weakest fighting force. This incident was certainly no coincidence. They knew precisely where our branch was, and they came with a clear objective, straight for Apostle. That suggests their intelligence-gathering capabilities may be greater than the Empire's. Newly formed resistance organizations simply aren't capable of that.

“So, in my view, it's time to have a word with Xingtian. Whether they had anything to do with this or not, there's no harm in firing a warning shot. The outcome of the fighting here is still uncertain, and our meager strength in Asia can't weather any major upheaval...”