The Arsenal of Democracy, Part II
Even though I had fled the Soviet Union and settled in Britain, the undisputed protagonist of this era was, without a doubt, the United States. Credit where credit was due. To say nothing of their economic sheer force—commanding a quarter of the global economy on their own—their magical prowess was equally formidable. Had history not taken a bizarre turn, they would have brought the Soviet Union to its knees long ago, both in the light of day and in the shadows.
Just as they had once smuggled Nazi scientists to put a man on the moon, the United States would have excavated powerful wizards from the corpse of the Soviet Union to reign as the sole hyperpower of the new century. Although that wasn't the case in this timeline, their latent potential was still impossible to ignore. After all, they were a nation that subtly influenced my syndicate's operations, whether we liked it or not.
The reason the back alleys of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland had not yet fully fallen into our syndicate's hands was entirely due to the Yanks. Because they constantly projected their influence across the Atlantic—imperfect as it was—Rybakov's IRA was forced into an endless game of whack-a-mole with disloyal factions. Behind those factions, undoubtedly, stood the Irish-American mobs in the United States.
Those moles had once pooled their resources to attempt an assassination on Rybakov with an anti-materiel sniper rifle. If Pavel hadn't coincidentally brought the improved Rosetta Stone with him that day, there was no telling how differently things would have turned out.
Back to Pavel. I hopped down from the wooden pallet, capturing my security chief's splendid performance on my camcorder. I headed toward the area where the crates of firearms the mafia had intended to hand over to the Yakuza were stacked. Since cameras of this era were all mediocre at best, it was a bit of a shame that Pavel's heroics were captured in somewhat blurry quality.
As I moved, neither the Yakuza nor the mafia noticed my presence. It wasn't just because their attention was entirely consumed by Pavel, who was tearing through their ranks like a hurricane. It was because I had cast the perception-impeding magic I acquired back in Namyeong-dong over my entire body. Though... even without it, I doubted they would have noticed. They were far too incompetent.
In any case, the performance of the perception-impeding magic in a live-fire test was highly satisfactory. Even Pavel, who would have definitely noticed my footsteps under normal circumstances, looked utterly dumbfounded, proving it was near-perfect. The battlefield had also settled into a lull. Since I had seen Pavel take a hit earlier, perhaps it was time to pause the action here.
"That's enough, Pavel. I think we can hear them out."
"My Lady...?"
The recording was still running, but I could just edit out the part where I called him by his name. The footage up to this point would be more than enough for the Red Princess to review.
Using telekinesis, I pried open the weapon crate to inspect the contents, doing my best to mask my surprise. Frankly, the firearms themselves were nothing but standard American-made pistols you could find anywhere. They were so utterly mundane that the only odd thing about them was their presence on a Yokohama dock in Japan rather than somewhere in the United States. However, my eyes caught the far more precious value embedded within them.
...They're relics?
These weren't just shoddy handguns. They were relics, each individually enchanted. And it wasn't a simple enchantment cast on inanimate matter; these objects had actual souls properly bound to them.
No... should I classify them as golems instead?
In truth, drawing a strict distinction was meaningless. If it was an ancient object, it was a relic; if it was crafted using modern techniques, it was a golem. Some wizards even referred to high-performance modern golems as relics. In that sense, the pistols here were more than qualified to be called relics.
In my past life—and likely in this one as well—the reason the United States reigned as a superpower even in the magical world lay in one specific factor.
A fiercely patriotic wizard was working himself to the bone for the Union.
Even setting aside other factors, a high-tier wizard was a force of nature that any nation would treat as a strategic weapon. This particular wizard, who could never have ascended to the ranks of such strategic weapons through mere patriotism alone, had poured every ounce of his extraordinary talent into serving his country.
His greatest strength lay in literally "mass-producing" golems—or relics, if you will. He was an absolute master at analyzing the characteristics of mass-produced, off-the-shelf goods and figuring out exactly where and how to graft a soul to achieve the absolute peak of magical efficiency.
While I had to toil for hours over a single fragment just to process a Rosetta Stone, that man—Maverick Hunt—could churn out five hundred artificial relics a day.
One might think "only five hundred?" But repeat that for a year, and it becomes nearly two hundred thousand. Repeat it for half a century, and you have tens of millions. As far as I knew, this man, who worked exclusively for the U.S. government, had been slathering magic onto all sorts of objects since the last World War.
At first, it was highly inefficient, requiring him to graft the soul of a death row inmate on a one-to-one basis for each golem. Over time, however, his efficiency had improved exponentially. I believed the reason the United States still maintained the death penalty—though it varied by state—was precisely to secure a steady supply of souls for him.
The world wars in Europe and the Pacific, followed by the massive conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, were insatiable monsters that devoured magical weaponry. Maverick Hunt had met that skyrocketing demand with an equally staggering supply. The declining rate of actual executions in the U.S. over the years was an indirect testament to his evolving mastery.
No wonder his moniker was the "Arsenal of Democracy."
He was less an arsenal and more of a factory foreman. Because the sheer volume of his production was so immense, a significant amount of his stock inevitably leaked into the black market. I had used them a few times in my past life, and they were exquisitely balanced yet devastatingly powerful.
I recalled they were designed to use telekinesis to push the bullet forward in parallel upon firing to boost its velocity, while simultaneously compressing the surrounding air with magic to act as both a silencer and a flash hider.
Of course, if you wanted more power, you could just pick up a rifle. If you wanted stealth, you could physically attach a silencer and a flash hider. But that was like asking why someone didn't just bring a weapon rated at 200 to a place with a strict limit of 100. You couldn't tell an American spy infiltrating a sensitive area to carry an assault rifle, nor could you expect them to constantly lug around bulky attachments that made their sidearms twice as long. In that regard, Maverick Hunt's hand-crafted magical weapons were always hot commodities.
The U.S. government didn't seem to care much about the trickle of weapons leaking into the criminal underworld.
Even if a thousand slip out the back door, we still have nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand left. That was their mindset. A swagger that only the United States could afford.
It seemed the items before my eyes were part of that leaked thousand. Drawing on the experience of my past life, a brief inspection was all it took to identify them with absolute certainty.
I never expected to run into them in a place like this.
It was a rather pleasant harvest from an unexpected source. With genuine amusement, I turned to the mafia fellas still facing off against Pavel and asked,
"Yanks? So, can I assume you've decided to change your business partners from our Sumiyoshi-kai friends over there to us?"
"Of course! We never had any trust with those Yakuza bastards to begin with!"
As expected, there wasn't a shred of trust between them. Criminal syndicates were all the same. I had originally intended to let Pavel have his fun until the very end, but this changed things entirely. There was no reason to hesitate. Before we could talk business, we had to clear out the nuisances.
I honed the tip of my shadow beast, Schattenmaiden, to a razor-sharp point and drove it straight through the torsos of the remaining Yakuza. Literally shredding their lungs ensured I wouldn't have to listen to any ear-piercing screams.
Once their breath was cut short, the shadow beast opened its massive maw and swallowed the corpses whole. The shadows slithering across the floor even greedily licked up the splattered droplets of blood. While I was at it, I disposed of the remaining Yakuza and mafiosi Pavel had neutralized. Some were already dead, others were gasping their final breaths, but their ends were identical. The two surviving Americans watched in sheer, unadulterated horror.
"So, where did you get these? They seem a bit too precious for small-timers like you to get your hands on. And they certainly don't look like something you'd just casually peddle on your vacation."
"T-That's..."
Judging by their reactions, they knew these were crafted by the "Arsenal of Democracy." Leaving the wizard aside for a moment, I stepped closer to the remaining mafioso—who undoubtedly lacked any mental immunity—and locked eyes with him.
"You'd better tell the truth. Unless you want this interrogation to turn into torture."
Having just witnessed his Japanese business partners and his own comrades get sucked into the shadows, the American trembled violently, casting a desperate glance at his wizard companion. His eyes practically screamed, Is it really okay to tell her everything?
And, quite regrettably, the fellow didn't tell me everything. Given that he was completely under the influence of my Charm, it was likely because he simply didn't know, rather than a refusal to speak. But what did I care?
The uncooperative, non-magical mobster who had forced my questions to become torture was left dangling from the ceiling of the rented warehouse. It was simple enough: I detached a thread of shadow from my beast, threaded it through his flesh, and tied it to the hoist mounted on the ceiling. Detaching the shadow meant separating a fragment of my soul, but there was absolutely no way a mere mundane human could ever harm my soul.
"Ugh... uaaagh..."
Such was the sound made by a man suspended ten meters in the air as payment for keeping his mouth shut. The weather was cold, and since this was surely the most thrilling experience of his life, I imagined he found it quite refreshing.
"Hey, Yank. Your friend gave me a lousy answer, so I hung him up there. Now you're the only one left to talk... You aren't feeling overly confident just because you're a wizard, are you?"
I only managed to get a satisfactory answer after leaving one of them dangling. Why did they always have to beat around the bush? According to this wizard—who was far more pathetic than Pavel, let alone me—they had acquired these enchanted firearms after a turf war with another mafia faction in a different region.
"I-It's the truth! You have to believe me...! We were just ordered by our bosses to come here and sell them...!"
"Ordered by your bosses?"
"Yes...! If you know about the magical weapons Maverick Hunt made, then surely you know about this too, right...?! Since they can't stop everything from leaking into the black market, they at least keep tabs on the ones they've located...!"
That was certainly true. Whether the quantity was large or small, the sacred laws of market economics dictated that where there was demand, there would be supply. Magical weapons were no exception, and that crazy country, the United States, had decided that if they couldn't stop the flow, they would simply monitor it.
Why risk lives trying to track down and confiscate every single piece when you could just monitor where and how they were being used? As long as you knew their location, all was well. It was a mind-bogglingly pragmatic way of thinking. Because of this, almost all weapons produced by the "Arsenal of Democracy" circulating on the black market had tracking spells attached to them. Acquiring them wasn't purely a blessing; one had to figure out how to strip away the surveillance. I understood immediately and pressed further.
"Ah. So you passed the hot potato to the Yakuza because it wasn't something your syndicate could handle?"
"Y-Yes, exactly...! That way, our syndicate gets off the hook from their intense surveillance... and we make a tidy sum of cash on top of it...!"
The bastard looked hopeful. Did he actually expect to walk away alive just because he answered somewhat sincerely? I shattered that hope without mercy.
"And when things went south, you tried to dump those heavily monitored weapons onto me?"
I couldn't check without a mirror, but I was fairly certain my expression had soured. Well, not that a scowl would distort this face too terribly, but it was enough to show how annoyed I was.
Terrified, the American wizard began to babble excuses.
"No... that's not it...! You're a Soviet anyway, aren't you...?! No matter how much surveillance is on those weapons, once they're in your hands, there's nothing more we can do about it...!"
"In other words, you figured that even if I stole them, the surveillance would lose its track once they crossed the Iron Curtain?"
"Yes...! Exactly...!"
The mafia wizard nodded frantically. He wasn't entirely wrong. The American intelligence network, which spanned the globe, was how they tracked the weapons from the Arsenal of Democracy. Once inside the borders of the Soviet Union, the density of that network plummeted. The wizard before me clearly mistook me for a Soviet agent. Given my appearance, it was a natural assumption. However—
"Your intentions were still malicious. Even if taking this hot potato doesn't hurt me, it doesn't change the fact that you intended to dump a bomb in my lap."
I had no intention of letting them live anyway. I wrapped my shadows around the American wizard, who was still desperately babbling to prolong his wretched life. At the same time, I recalled the shadow thread holding the man on the hoist.
Pop— and then, splat!
The sound of a body bursting, followed by the sound of another body bursting. The only difference between the two deaths was whether they died from being crushed or from the fall.
After ordering my shadow beast to clean up the bloody mess in the rented warehouse, I finally turned my head to check on Pavel.
"How are you holding up? Are you alright after taking that hit earlier?"
"...Thanks to you, I was able to catch my breath. I still have much to learn."
True, if he hadn't taken that single blow mid-fight, he probably could have swept them all away in one seamless motion. Still, fighting one against ten and putting up that kind of performance was highly impressive. I offered him some reassurance.
"Well, you seem fine. Let's pack up the goods and head back."
We had acquired some high-performance magical weapons, but we also gained the intelligence that the United States was watching this transaction from afar. If my syndicate and I wanted to avoid stepping into that booby trap, I would have to run our intelligence department ragged.