Chapter 194. The Mastermind (4)
It was a night bright with moonlight. A full moon hanging in a cloudless sky was illuminating the earth below.
It may have had a certain charm, but for an intruder it was a brutal environment.
The pale white moonlight was like a floodlight, exposing every movement without exception.
However, for the Secret Burial Unit—specialists in covert operations and sabotage—it posed no problem whatsoever. Even if they were former members of the Secret Burial Unit, and not active ones.
In the dense private forest on the outskirts of the Rosemore territory. Karen, a middle-aged woman of generous build, glided silently along the forest path without a single sound of her presence.
Her gaze fell upon the coordinates marked on the map Clarisse had given her—an old, decrepit cabin.
"Fweet!"
Karen let out a soft whistle. A crow beat its wings and soared into the air.
One of Karen's eyes turned cloudy. The crow, sharing her vision, circled lazily above the roof before settling naturally on the windowsill.
What was reflected in the crow's eyes was the dust-laden interior of the cabin. There was nothing but a few rats scurrying about; not a trace of any human presence.
However, when dealing with the seeds of the End Order—notorious for their meticulous and thorough nature—this alone was not enough to be certain.
—Sssss.
Karen's consciousness shifted from the crow perched on the windowsill to a mouse crawling beneath the floorboards.
With her consciousness shared with the mouse, Karen swept through every corner of the interior.
The mouse's senses were sharp. The faint vibrations transmitted through the floor, and the smell that pricked its nose. With its long whiskers, it could even detect the smallest currents in the air. If there were a hidden space beneath the floor, even the faintest draft would be perceptible.
But there was nothing. A perfectly vacant space.
"Huu."
Only then did Karen open her eyes. The clouded pupil regained its vitality once more.
She lightly tapped the transmitter she had tucked inside her coat.
"Team Two. Sector A-4 clear. Simple abandoned house."
At that very moment, a logistics warehouse on the outskirts of the territory, tens of kilometres away.
"Ugh, it's cold. Hasn't a shift change come yet?"
"Bear with it a little longer. By the way, what's that?"
The guards keeping watch had spotted something.
A drunkard staggering toward them, a bottle tucked under his arm. A wobbly gait that looked like he might topple face-first at any moment.
"Hey! This is the private property of the Rosemore Count Family! Get out!"
The guard pointed his spear and shouted. But the drunkard just grinned vacantly and kept approaching.
"Heeh, any of you fellas got a light? I want to smoke but I don't have a flame."
"Why are you looking for a light here? Move aside!"
One of the guards, irritated, stepped forward and roughly shoved the drunkard by the shoulder.
"Oops!"
The drunkard staggered and crumpled helplessly backward. At the moment the guard clicked his tongue muttering 'drunks, I swear……'
Tap.
The hand of the drunkard who had fallen snatched the guard's ankle. Every trace of intoxication from just a moment ago had vanished without a trace.
"Huh?"
Crash!
The moment the guard lost his balance and fell, the drunkard's knife-hand struck the guard's nape with precision. The guard stopped moving altogether, as though a switch had been flipped.
"Wha-, what's going on? You bastard!"
The other guard, standing behind, urgently tried to blow his whistle to call for backup. But it was already too late.
Thwip thwip.
The drunkard sprang up from the ground and gave the guard a light tap to the solar plexus with the base of the bottle.
"Ugh!"
With a single strangled cry, the guard crumpled—and the drunkard caught him. A takedown that had taken fewer than three seconds.
"Sorry about that, fellas. Have a little sleep."
After dragging the collapsed guards over and laying them beside the torchlight. The drunkard immediately picked the warehouse lock and made his way inside.
"Loaded up with all sorts of things, haven't they?"
Nothing but piles of dusty timber and coal. No magic reactions, no traces of a hidden passage.
"Team Three, Sector B-7 clear. The guards have been knocked unconscious, so we're withdrawing."
Forests, abandoned mines, warehouses. Reports came in simultaneously from across the Rosemore territory.
Each time a signal came through on the transmitter, Jurgen crossed off the dozens of red dots marked on his map one by one.
Most had been dead ends, or empty shells that had already been evacuated.
But Jurgen showed no impatience. Because if you cross them off one by one, what remains in the end is only the truth.
And so at last, at the northernmost point of the Rosemore territory.
Rick, dressed as a fisherman, lay flat against the snowfield and peered down below.
Before him stretched nothing but a snowfield blanketed in perennial snow. On the map, it was marked as utterly useless rugged terrain. The kind of place where wealthy nobles might briefly set foot on as a travel destination before turning back.
But a veteran's instincts—along with a fisherman's intuition—had caught a sense of wrongness.
"Something's off about the wind……."
The wind blowing through the gorge was not flowing naturally. Like a current hitting an unseen rock and eddying, it was bending artificially, as though striking against something.
Rick drew a small telescope from inside his coat.
Through the lens, the snowfield around the entrance to the gorge came into sharp focus.
A snowfield with no one in it. Tracks of a wild mountain animal printed in the snow.
Rick carefully tracked the footprints through the telescope. The tracks continued on without pause, until—right in front of the gorge—they cut off sharply in mid-air, as though sliced by a blade.
Rick quickly moved the telescope to search for a reindeer's tracks. Those tracks too ended cleanly near the vicinity of the gorge.
"A Perception-Disrupting Barrier, that is."
Rick cleanly gave up on approaching any further.
If the End Order was coiled up in there, it was dangerous to approach alone any further. And there was absolutely no reason to do so either.
Instead, he drew out his receiver.
Tssshk.
The crackle of an old receiver signal came through.
[Your location?]
"F-9, the gorge. Confirmed a large-scale Perception-Disrupting Barrier at the entrance."
Tssshk.
The connection cut, and this time a command was transmitted to all receivers simultaneously.
[All units, converge on coordinates F-9.]
The black shadows scattered across the North all turned at once.
***
The place the End Order called their Sanctuary. Its scale was staggering beyond belief for what was supposedly an underground facility.
Not merely a bunker, but a grand structure of nearly Palace proportions, built within a subterranean space.
Yet the Sanctuary, despite its grand name and imposing scale, had a remarkably short history. A mere ten years.
The reason for it was rather absurd as well. Rupert Rosemore had said to the Order's priests who had swarmed in, declaring they would establish their Sanctuary there to enshrine him:
'I can't be bothered to travel far, so build your headquarters here.'
And with that, he had tossed them a plot of barren land at the far northern edge of Britannia's territory, owned by the Rosemore family. Land in the middle of nowhere—incomprehensibly remote from Nortaris, the North's largest city.
Any rational organisation would have pushed back.
What about supplies? Labour? The funds needed to secure both? It was the pinnacle of inefficiency, with no clear place to even begin pointing out the problems.
But what kind of organisation was the End Order?
'The Proxy commands iiit!!!'
A chain of command more rigid than the military. An organisation that submits to doctrinal distribution more strictly than any religious body.
They extracted donations by making contact with Northern nobles, conscripted brainwashed slaves and labourers to dig the earth, and ultimately raised a fortress out of it.
Meanwhile, Rupert had treated the Sanctuary as nearly abandoned, dropping in only whenever he felt like it.
Even so, the Sanctuary was the headquarters of the End Order—a notoriously secret society.
It boasted airtight security worthy of being called an otherworldly stronghold. A labyrinthine network of tunnels as complex as an ant colony, elite forces stationed throughout, and escape routes drilled everywhere throughout the facility.
Even with the Order's strength reduced to a fraction of its former self—thanks to that vile dark mage butcher—the preparations in place here were incomparable to any other diocese.
At the centre of the Ritual Chamber, which was responsible for guarding the perimeter of the Sanctuary. Cardinal Vargas, who oversaw the Northern Diocese with his hands clasped behind his back, was gazing down at a vast map.
"Any anomalies in the external perimeter?"
"No, Your Eminence."
"Inspect more thoroughly, and report immediately if even the smallest issue is discovered."
"Yes!"
At the answer from the priest in charge of the Ritual Chamber, Cardinal Vargas stroked his chin.
In truth, the fact that Y&P Trading Company was connected to every misfortune that had befallen the Order. And the fact that Penelope, the representative of that trading company, was being held captive here. When those two things became entangled, they stirred an uneasy feeling.
That was precisely why he had come here in person to assess the current situation.
He knew. It was too much of a leap. It wasn't particularly logical either.
But rising to the rank of Cardinal in the End Order was not something achievable through faith alone. One had to possess survival instincts bordering on the cunning to make it possible.
"Hmm……."
Cardinal Vargas looked down at the round table. On it sat a meticulously constructed model of the surrounding terrain and the Sanctuary's interior.
What was peculiar was that hundreds of candles were planted across that model.
Candles made from the blood and fat gathered from the sentinels guarding the interior and exterior of the Sanctuary. And so they burned in resonance with their owners' life force.
His worry had evidently been nothing but needless anxiety—every one of them was flickering its flame without a single irregularity.
It was then.
—Fwoomp.
At the edge of the round table. One candle, representing the outer ridge roughly 2km from the Sanctuary, let out a single thread of black smoke and went out.
"Hm?"
Before the priest keeping watch over the round table could blink and say a word.
—Fwoomp, fwp!
In quick succession, the candle directly beside the one that had just gone out—and then the one directly beside that—were extinguished one after another.
"Huh—wha?"
The priest's pupils shook as though an earthquake had struck.
—Fwoomp! Fwp! Fwp!
The speed at which the candles were going out accelerated. The ridgeline along the gorge, the bridge on the approach road, the ambush positions in the forest. The candles planted along the outer perimeter centred on the Sanctuary toppled out like dominoes.
"Wha-, what is—?!"
As the young priest was reeling in shock, Vargas let out a silent, contemplative murmur.
"The last reports from the outposts?"
"Th-, there were none!"
This sensation……
It was not the army of the Britannia Kingdom. Much less the Holy Knights of the Church.
Cardinal Vargas knew these dreadful people all too well.
The Secret Burial Unit. Those who crept without a sound no matter where they nested, and seized you by the throat. Hanbin's hunting hounds.
Why the Secret Burial Unit—long since disbanded—had appeared again. What connection it had with Y&P Trading Company.
All of it was nothing but pointless wordplay. The only ones capable of this were those people—and that man.
"……Is it you again."
In an instant, more than a quarter of the lights on the map had vanished.
The sectors turned black were closing inward, ever inward. Like an invisible noose, they were tightening ferociously toward the heart of the Sanctuary.
Vargas slowly straightened his attire.
"It seems I must prepare to receive these heretics."
Cardinal Vargas adjusted his grip on his staff and began walking toward the firmly sealed entrance.
"I'll go out myself."
Just as his eyes flickered with an ominous black light—
"No, no need to go to that trouble."
A low, deep voice rang out.
Thud, thud—
A man walked in, calmly pushing open the door of the Ritual Chamber—which should have been locked.
"Should an old man go out into the cold wind and catch a chill?"
Having left the diversion to the Secret Burial Unit.
It was Hanbin, who had slipped directly into the Sanctuary.