"Ana, are you finished yet?"I straightened up after completing my task.
"Yeah, I am. Richard…"
Anastasia trailed off when she turned around, a dazed look on her face, as well as a bead of perspiration that was borne out of exasperation. I noticed that how I tied up the poor priest was completely different from the way she tied up her ex-colleague. The a.s.sa.s.sin had something in her mouth, and both her hands and leg were bound together. As for the priest, I just bound him simply, like the usual stuff you saw in movies and cartoons.
"Um, Richard…do you know how to tie someone up?"
"Sorry…I never learned how to tie stuff." Actually, they tried to teach me that in the military but my poor sergeant failed spectacularly. Not that I was going to tell Anastasia that. She shook her head and knelt beside the poor priest.
"You didn"t even tie the proper knots."
"There are proper knots…?"
My sergeant would smack me if he had heard me say that, especially since he introduced all the weird knots to me. Bowstring knot, or whatever. I couldn"t remember. I never had to, since I was more interested in shooting than tying.
"I should teach you someday. For now, just look carefully."
Anastasia untied the knots, removed the rope, and retied the guy. I winced at having wasted my effort and both of our time, but to my amazement Ana completed the task within seconds. Before I knew what was going on, the guy"s hands and feet were bound pretty tightly. Unlike the a.s.sa.s.sin, she didn"t stuff anything into his mouth.
She probably didn"t worry about him biting off his tongue or swallowing any hidden toxic capsule.
"I"ll start searching the place," I suggested, trying to find a way to make myself useful. Anastasia nodded as she rose to her feet.
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"Good idea."
I rummaged through the place while Anastasia checked the bookshelves, presumably looking for anything hidden. Though why the masterminds would deliberately conceal anything in such a manner in their own office, I had no idea. Then again, it was entirely possible that they realized they might be defeated, and thus engaged in such subterfuge. However, common sense would dictate that you destroy your plans or any data regarding your schemes, not hide them.
But what do I know? I wasn"t a nefarious criminal mastermind who schemed and hid in the shadows. I was just some self-insert character created for wish fulfilment purposes. According to readers, I was stupid and r.e.t.a.r.ded.
Whatever. For now I should focus on the task. There was a laptop on the desk, and I booted it up while inwardly thanking my lucky stars that Leo didn"t accidentally crush and break the whole thing when he manifested behind the unfortunate priest and subdued him.
"Don"t touch that!" the priest hissed furiously, his eyes wide when he saw me switch on the laptop. The a.s.sa.s.sin, Adeline, glared at him silently but in a resigned manner, as if the guy was an idiot for blatantly giving away the fact that the laptop was a useful piece of evidence. I mean, they could be acting, but I doubted it.
The guy was too much of an amateur for that, and in any case it was more effective to maintain silence and not react at every little thing than to act dramatically to "divert attention away from the real important thing."
"Do you know what to look for?" I asked Anastasia as she approached emptyhanded. Seemed like there was nothing worth looking at in the bookshelf. She nodded and accepted the laptop that I handed to her. After clicking and opening a few folders, she finally pulled out something and projected the holographic image in front of us.
"What the h.e.l.l is that?"
I caught sight of an image that looked very familiar. A bunch of monsters, and a holographic screenshot of a very familiar-looking machine. Something that I had once seen on a mountain quite some time ago…
The dragon. Right, weren"t they using a similar machine to try and influence the brainwaves of a h.e.l.lfire Drake residing in the mountains?
"You"ve got to be kidding me," I murmured, especially when I read the lines of text next to the pictures. Dread began to fill me.
"Richard? What"s wrong?"
Anastasia was trying to piece the information together, probably reading the capabilities of the machine that was spelled out in all sort of scientific jargon. She hadn"t joined the dots yet, but to be fair she probably had never seen such a machine before.
"They plan to control monsters," I muttered. "Or at least to influence them to contribute to their goals…such as directing the monsters toward a city."
"They"re targeting Azpire City?!" Anastasia asked, horrified. "Just like what happened with Jing Tian City?"
I nodded and then glanced at the pictures of the monsters. "They"re using F-ranked Grimstone Goblins, which are an unusually aggressive species of monsters. Even though they are pretty weak, they breed rapidly…sort of like rabbits. And it says here…" I placed a finger on a line of text that caught my attention when skimming through it. "…that this machine has been designed to amplify their aggressiveness and l.u.s.t."
"Goblins are known for raping human women and ma.s.sacring human men…" Anastasia was covering her mouth in horror.
"And this amplifies that behavior into overdrive," I confirmed grimly. My eyes widened when I read the next relevant line. "They"ve got hundreds of them underground?"
f.u.c.k. That meant I had to hunt them down and root them out manually. I couldn"t just conveniently nuke them from afar before they reached the city. Worse, according to the holographic image, the goblins were already in Azpire City. Or under it, to be more accurate.
"How many mages are there in Azpire City?" I muttered, dread growing inside me. We needed every combat-capable mage we could get to protect the city. Would I be able to get all of the Goblins before they came to the surface? And when they reached the surface, they would ma.s.sacre the male civilians and **** the women. It would be a nightmare…and while the individual Goblins were pretty easy to slay and defeat, I was more worried about the chaos that would follow. Trying to evacuate and save the panicking, screaming civilians would be a lot more difficult than dealing with the Goblin threat itself.
The Dark Church had really planned everything out.
"Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"
The Dark Church priest was rolling on the floor laughing. Literally. I mean, he was tied up, so…
"Are you sure you should be dawdling in a place like this?" he sneered with a scornful smile. "If you don"t look for the Goblins immediately, this city will be in huge trouble, you know?"
I glanced at him with narrowed eyes. Even though the holographic text mentioned that the Goblins were underground, they didn"t specify the exact location. They could be in the sewers, but obviously the sewers ran throughout the city. There was also more than one underground facility. Even though we had narrowed it to underground, it would still be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
"I don"t suppose you"ll be willing to tell us where the Goblins are."
"Why do you think I"ll possess that knowledge?" the priest shrugged. "The grand plans of the higher-ups are not for one as lowly as I to know."
He had a point. The higher-ups might have withheld the knowledge from anyone they deemed as not significant enough to know, so as to minimize the chances of leaks.
"But you must have some idea," Ana said coolly. There was something in her voice that had the priest tense and sweat profusely.
"No. I swear, they never told me anything! I"m just a grunt!"
"I suppose you are…but why did they give you all this data then? What did they expect you to do with all this data? Hmm?" Anastasia knelt beside the priest, a cold smile on her face. "Isn"t it to prepare the route for the Goblins? To ensure that they get into the city"s bowels undetected? You must have been instructed to disrupt communications, divert traffic and personnel or close off certain underground sections."
The priest"s face was pale now, but he thinned his lips. Avoiding her eyes, he maintained his silence. Anastasia had evidently pushed a b.u.t.ton in him somehow and he was desperately clamping his lips shut.
He probably was wis.h.i.+ng he had learned how to terminate his own life like Adeline did.
"Do you mind starting from there?" Anastasia asked, her voice dripping with forced sweetness. The guy shut his eyes and trembled, but he looked resigned to his fate.
Even so, he was determined not to crumble.
Anastasia raised an eyebrow. "A stubborn one, aren"t you? That"s okay. You"ll eventually tell me everything I want to know."
She then took out a vial of purplish liquid. The guy blinked and stared at her incredulously. Then he smiled, almost as if in relief.
"You"re going to poison me? Then threaten me with the antidote? Just kill me already."
I recalled that Anastasia was from the Veneneum Sect, a.s.sa.s.sins who specialized in poison techniques. It made sense that she would be relying on poisons, but somehow I doubted that. Not unless those toxins caused excruciating agony that would turn a man mad and have him desperately beg for the antidote.
"Nothing so inelegant," Anastasia replied cheerfully. I c.o.c.ked my head to the side. Upon catching sight of my reaction, she snorted. "What"s the matter, Richard? Did you expect me to pull out a knife and start stabbing him? To cut off his fingers? Then grab a few healing potions to heal him before cutting him up again? That"s so inefficient and time-consuming. We don"t have enough time to break him, not if we want to find those Goblins before they hit the city. And I don"t want to accidentally kill him before he can spill what we need to know."
"Couldn"t we just find the information from reading all the data here?" I asked dryly. "Instead of wasting time with interrogation and some stupid torture scene from a badly written web novel that somehow got an anime adaptation?"
Anastasia ignored my jab. "Go ahead and read the whole thing and tell me if you find anything else. Search for any data pertaining to what I had just said about underground facilities, diversion of traffic, closing off sections, etc. That should give us a good place to start."
"I understand." I complied immediately, sifting through the multiple holographic windows and hoping to locate any sort of clues. Though wouldn"t it be faster if she searched the data with me?
Ana must have caught the look on my face, for she smiled sinisterly.
"Don"t worry, I intend to cut down the time taken to extract the relevant information. After all, it"ll be faster if he tells us everything immediately rather than us looking through every text and file for them."
"Do you think I"ll tell you anything?" the priest taunted. Some distance away, Adeline appeared as if she was sighing in resignation before she turned to look away in disgust at the priest"s bravado. She must have some idea what the liquid in Anastasia"s vials was.
"You will, after drinking this." Grabbing the guy"s chin, Ana forced his head up and his mouth open before plunging the vial into it. The guy choked and struggled, tears streaming from his eyes, but Ana forced him to swallow it. After a while, she yanked the vial out and allowed the priest to crash onto the ground, gagging and coughing uncontrollably.
"W…what did you make me drink?!" he gasped. Anastasia smiled darkly.
"A truth serum," she replied simply before patting his shoulder. The priest flinched, but she ignored his reaction. "Now, shall we begin again? You must have some idea where the goblins are right now."
"Y…y...yes…"
Despite himself, the priest spluttered an affirmative in a most unwilling manner.
"Very good." Anastasia rewarded him with another smile. "Now, can you start listing them, beginning from the most probable location?"
His eyes bulging in rage and helplessness, the priest began rambling and pouring everything out.