The Cake Is Not a Lie (5)
There was one question about spatial substitution through shadows.
What happened when, after the substitution was complete and the state was restored to its original condition, the relative positions of the substituted part and the original part ended up different?
If it was an inanimate object, the worst that could happen was that the object would be damaged by the misalignment. But if it was a person…
It wouldn't end nicely, I think.
Judging by the double electric barbed wire I'd just tested, it seemed that Shattenmädchen itself compensated for slight misalignments. After all, the relative positions could never be perfectly identical every time.
If this magic were sensitive to even the slightest distortion, using it in actual combat would be impossible. So I had to assume that a certain degree of error correction was a preloaded feature.
Just how much error could it compensate for on its own… well, of course, I couldn't test that here.
I summoned a separate Shattenmädchen right next to me. In its mouth, which I opened wide, lay the subspace connected to the shadows.
"Ah."
My eyes met the head of the Brigadier General, which was inside the shadow. Stuck in complete darkness, he had been squinting from the glare when the mouth of the Shattenmädchen opened and light poured in along with the outside view.
The Brigadier General was naturally thrown into a panic. That was obvious from the way he frantically clawed at the spot where his head should have been attached, even as he lay sprawled on the floor.
Hmm, seems like quite a shock. I think it would be better to put in extra effort and erase his memories for this one.
I shoved my head into the mouth of the shadow hand, locked eyes with the Brigadier General fixed in the subspace, and whispered slowly.
"Forget."
Specifically, to the state where he first met me. He still had a role to play.
As soon as Charm activated, the Brigadier General immediately lost consciousness.
I was currently sealing part of the power of Charm in the usual way, based on the method I'd derived from Elze's unique magic, Nibelung. Thanks to that, even though I used magic to the level of twisting a person's memory, the headache was far less severe than before.
After all, handling a non-mage human with Charm didn't require much effort. There was no reason to use a nuclear bomb to kill an ant, so I buried part of the innate magic embedded in my eyes and knocked the Brigadier General unconscious.
And then, shortly after.
"Where is it? The plutonium."
"I… I don't know…!"
The question was the same as before, but the answer was different. The reason his answer had changed was that, even though I had erased part of his memory with Charm, a certain fear of me remained in his subconscious.
There was no need to take more risks, so I thought it would be better to feed him a Cultured Slime before I left.
First, the plutonium. I forced the answer out of him with the formless energy granted only to witches, and asked again.
"You'd better answer truthfully. What do you mean by 'I don't know'?"
"It's… it's true…! Even the person in charge of a nuclear facility doesn't know which storage bunker… or which silo actually has a live warhead…!"
"Hmm, it doesn't seem like a lie…."
It seemed to be the truth. For security reasons or something, even the facility manager apparently didn't know exactly which warhead contained the plutonium.
Perhaps the system was designed so that only when the launch code or a release order came down from higher-ups in an emergency would they find out.
I thought for a moment. This would screw up my original plan to use the Brigadier General to easily siphon out the nuclear material. But an alternative came to mind quickly.
Even if he doesn't know which warhead has the plutonium, at least the fact that plutonium exists here is certain, isn't it?
It was like a kind of random box. You didn't know which box was the winning one, but among the boxes here, at least one or more were guaranteed to be winners.
If that was the case, you just had to open all the boxes.
I wrapped the Brigadier General's body with Shattenmädchen and dragged him along like a dog on a leash toward where the warheads were stored.
"Ha! Do you think our country's nuclear security is that shoddy? Even though I don't know which warhead has the plutonium, a signal will be sent immediately if an anomaly is detected!"
The Brigadier General's shout carried a certain confidence. And for good reason—the security of a nuclear facility had to prepare for even the most improbable scenarios.
If they could imagine it, so could the nation's enemies. So preparation was inevitable.
As someone who had free access to British nuclear facilities, I'd had the opportunity to ask the nuclear physicists and security personnel there what kind of countermeasures were in place. One of them was physically blocking access to the warheads.
The moment unauthorized access was detected, the warhead containing the nuclear material would be tightly sealed, and a signal would be sent to the office of the commander-in-chief or an equivalent facility.
So the Brigadier General's shout was essentially the truth.
I let out a snicker and replied.
"Oh, really? Then shall we check if the signal goes through or not?"
"…?"
Of course, I knew this, so I had no intention of approaching the nuclear warheads through normal channels. Why would I do them a favor?
"Anyway, just follow me."
The Shattenmädchen wrapped around the Brigadier General's body and neck urged him forward. Given that he was tied up like a dog leash, it was more like crawling than walking.
I arrived at the deepest part of the nuclear facility, a cavern filled with random boxes. It was an underground space as wide as several football fields put together. It was clearly carved out of the granitic rock mass that was practically a specialty of the Korean Peninsula.
This must have been an incredibly difficult construction project, incomparable to simple tunnel boring. I suppose it reflected the national obsession with nuclear weapons.
But now, it was simply the stage for realizing my plan. Every time my heels clicked on the metal-plated floor, the sound echoed clearly through the underground space.
The radioactive cakes inside the random boxes were mostly stored in the form of missiles and aerial bombs.
I reconfigured Shattenmädchen and cast a thick shadow over the warheads of the missiles and bombs. Every time the shadow penetrated into the warheads where the plutonium was presumed to be, it was followed by spatial substitution through the shadow.
I had already placed a Geiger counter inside the Shattenmädchen's mouth, so if the plutonium was substituted into my 'inventory,' the beeping machine sound would be heard immediately.
Most of them were duds.
The fact that the proportion of nuclear weapons actually carrying live warheads was far smaller than I had thought meant that South Korea's nuclear capabilities were pathetic compared to the fuss made in the reports.
There might be more in other places, not just Pyeongsan.
That was probably the more reasonable inference. As I'd thought before, the saying 'don't put all your eggs in one basket' applied just as well to radioactive eggs.
After scanning four or five warheads, a signal came from within the shadow.
— Beep, beep-beep, beep.
A monotonous machine sound. It had a tone that could trigger PTSD in some people.
I smiled brightly and asked the Brigadier General, who was still tied up in the shadow.
"How about that? The signal you were so confident about doesn't seem to be going through. Instead, my machine is beeping."
"…."
The expression on a non-mage's face when they encountered magic was a sight I'd grown quite used to by now. But it never got old, because every time, I got to realize my own superiority.
I spoke into the radio to Pavel.
"Izamer of the Dangso. Got one. I'll take it as it comes for now."
"Confirmed. No issues outside either."
Right after the substitution, I stored the first plutonium chunk I'd secured in a corner of the subspace inside Shattenmädchen. Of course, I put it in a concrete box I'd prepared in advance to prevent a nuclear fission chain reaction.
After about 30 minutes of moving around the underground space, I managed to load roughly 100 kilograms of plutonium into Shattenmädchen.
That was enough mass to make about twenty 1-kiloton nuclear warheads with neutron reflectors. Of course, I couldn't expect that much power in actual combat, but that didn't matter to me. I needed tactical nukes for actual use, not strategic ones.
After retrieving 100 kilograms, I had already made a full circuit of the underground space. It wasn't objectively a small amount, but I still felt a bit of regret. Well, it wasn't like there was that much plutonium here anyway. Maybe it was fortunate that I could steal even this much.
No… it's not exactly stealing, is it?
This was just temporarily moving the nuclear material to me and the organization. There was no reason to ask South Korea's politicians for permission to transfer ownership of the plutonium. If they had any complaints, they could come to London and voice their objections in person.
Now I'd seen everything I needed to.
All that was left was to cleanly erase the memories of the Brigadier General and other facility managers, feed them Cultured Slime, and quietly leave the way I came.
"Now, shall we head back?"
I said it with a rising intonation, but the listener's opinion wasn't really important. I urged the Brigadier General, still tied to the shadow leash, to return.
Just as I was about to go back to where I'd come from—
——!
A sense of being targeted from a distance suddenly rang the alarm bell of my soul. The modified Rosetta Stone I always carried on me suggested an evasion path through a sensation synchronized with my soul.
Fwoosh— I leaped for a moment and dodged the attack that had been aimed at me from afar. The object that passed through empty air harmlessly held a trace of magic.
I used Shattenmädchen to pick up the object embedded in the floor and examined it. It seemed to be a rifle bullet with some magical modifications.
Right, I'd forgotten that not everyone here was a non-mage.
I'd been wondering where he'd run off to since he wasn't visible, but now he'd finally shown up.
Weren't you late by a long shot? What kind of thorough preparations were you making that you'd strike such a belated blow?