Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum (1)
“Oh…”
The thoughts that drifted back through the years had always ended in conclusions that could never be called happy, and Elze Constanze was suddenly yanked back into reality.
The witch lightly brushed her fingertips along her eye corners. The tips of her index fingers were slightly damp—that was the only thing that had made it seem as though she had accidentally grown sentimental.
One shouldn’t say something so unkind as “she’s just getting old.” After all, her body was still flowing with the blessings of fire, so in appearance she remained fixed at the most beautiful time of her life.
Tsk, well, she had promised herself she wouldn’t let emotions sway her again, yet the flashes of regret and loss that had brushed through her mind couldn’t be forgotten no matter how many eighty years had passed.
Well, now… what had I been doing when the old days suddenly came to mind?
Elze wiped the liquid from her eyes with a quick swipe and turned her gaze back to the monitor. Her narrowed, crimson eyes soon fixed on a specific line.
Yes… the knight clad in scarlet armor.
The Soviet communists had designed their full-plate armor knights, but there was nothing in common with the episode from the Battle of Verdun.
If there had been, it would have meant Elze had dredged up the past from a void with nothing in it.
Elze Constanze had recalled the soul she had devoured in Verdun upon seeing the full-plate armor of the Soviet knight.
In fact, it was the armor designed to guard against the shrapnel that exploded outward when a mortar shell first struck the ground and then bounced.
It was not meant to block the mortar shells themselves flying from far away, but to protect against the fragments that shot out afterward.
One also had to think of cavalry in the way people thought of tanks today. That was armored vehicles; what Elze was talking about was literal horse-mounted cavalry.
Among the souls she had devoured in Verdun, there had been isolated groups of cavalry as well.
They had not been of much help in trench breakthroughs, but they had been so mobile that, at the time, they had been deployed as special units of some kind.
Of course, in the hellish battlefield pitted with trenches everywhere, what could cavalry possibly do?
When Elze had found them, most of the horsemen were already wounded or dead.
If the horses were injured, the cavalrymen’s mobility dropped sharply.
That was why the cavalry she had faced had become isolated and left behind, and it was also why she had been able to hunt them down so easily and claim their souls.
The thoughts naturally drifted toward the direction she had tried to forget.
What if she had somehow taken those fragment-protection armors from the corner where they were stored and given them to the boy before the final clash of the day?
Or better yet, what if she had cast a defensive spell that drew on every ounce of strength the boy could muster, rather than one that simply provided basic protection?
Or, what if she had simply finished her work a little sooner and rushed to the boy’s side?
…Enough of that.
Elze shook her head. She knew intellectually that such rumination was entirely unproductive.
The past was already over and could not be changed, and the future had not yet arrived and could not be changed. The only thing one could do was to give the present one’s very best.
And because the witch possessed the wisdom that came with a lifespan proportional to her age, she understood perfectly what one had to do when thoughts veered into unproductive, sentimental territory.
It was simply to throw oneself into one’s duties. When a person was busy, one could not think of anything else.
These thoughts were entirely the result of Elze Constanze’s own habit of having far too much idle time.
Elze Constanze reached for the telephone installed in her residence.
The title “co-leader of the Northern Covenant Syndicate” was one she had no particular wish to use, but it was simply a call connecting directly to her adorable niece.
The ringing did not last long.
“Hello, Rin?”
---
Elze Constanze, with the permission of the leader of the allied organization, had headed toward the southeast of London in the county of Essex—Southend-on-Sea.
She had visited the place once before. It had been transported straight from Hamburg to London by air, and she had been served fresh mountain-sourced salmon.
The name had been… Norton Harris, perhaps. A second-rank mage of the British Magic Bureau who had fled and ended up caught in the Syndicate’s surveillance net.
Well, thanks to him she had been able to find her niece, so it could not be called completely useless.
If it had not been for that man, Elze would still be living the same tedious life in the suburbs of Hamburg, alone and without end.
There was one more thing that had sparked Elze’s interest in Southend-on-Sea.
The Northern Covenant Syndicate member who had accompanied her as an observer and guide had told her that the old monastery in this city was the very place where her niece had first “disposed” of the organization’s enemies.
That being said, she had felt a flicker of interest. Indeed, in what manner had Yerina Bronska carried out such a thing?
Of course she had seen it once when dealing with that Norton Harris of the British Magic Bureau.
Yet it was only natural that she would want to know what kind of magic an Elze-influenced, unaffected Yerina had used—whether as a mage or as her only remaining blood relative.
Elze followed the guide organization member toward the entrance of the underground monastery.
The underground of the monastery that had continued unbroken from the Middle Ages, even before the witch had been born, held a distinctly somber atmosphere at first.
There were no old oil-soaked torches like in a coal lamp mounted on the walls, but the bare incandescent bulbs placed at regular intervals made one wonder whether they had been given even the minimum of care.
Of course, once one reached the end of the stairs that wound down into the underground, such doubts vanished.
Tap—the guide organization member pressed the switch disguised as a brick wall, and a palm-sized lock mechanism popped out from the opposite side.
Keypad for entering passwords, fingerprint-recognition electronic device, and beyond that a lock that recognized the unique pattern of each person’s iris.
As mentioned earlier, Elze had also caught a glimpse of this scene from behind once. At that time, her niece had been standing in front of her.
Triple… no, more accurately quadruple-layered security had been released one after another.
There was one more because a hidden CCTV in the basement stairwell constantly checked who the visitor was.
What followed was a whooshing sound of air. The wall that had seemed merely a dead end had opened entirely, revealing the interior.
From the outside it would have looked like a spider web had been freshly strung and covered in dust, but the true inside of the underground monastery was cleaner than expected.
Elze Constanze had been guided to a place the opposite of the one she had gone for the dual curses of reality and dream world—the place where the original monastery form had been deliberately maintained so that those being tortured could not guess where they were.
Therefore, the difference she felt now was all the greater.
“Hmm… so even here in the underground space, you’ve hidden places like this.”
Elze began to look around the “factory” her niece had poured her heart into erecting near London.
The word factory was accurate. A number of large CNC machine lathes and automated production lines had been turning away.
“Is that the factory that produces those synthetic artifacts?”
“Yes. Originally it was the line for processing the most important artifact, the Rosetta Stone, but since the original has already been smashed into thousands of pieces…”
“Ah, I see. I have one of those too.”
“Yes, it is currently repurposed for making other synthetic artifacts or golems. Unlike the national artifacts that are strategic weapons, isn’t it more important for ordinary artifacts to minimize processing errors?”
Elze Constanze fiddled with the stone fragment she had kept in her pocket.
The artifact she had been given by Rin on the day they had arrived in London from Hamburg, made from the British mages’ pride—the Rosetta Stone.
Only then had Elze realized who lay behind the theft that had shocked most countries of the world, not just Britain.
To have conceived such a plan and moved her own people at such a young age. Elze had not shown it on her face, but inwardly she had been surprised by the realization.
It was not simply the plan itself, but the fact that she had been running a vast organization for the purpose of constantly projecting power outward.
The British, who boasted that their artifacts were still the world’s finest thanks to plundering magical relics from every colony, had surely tasted the feeling of being plundered themselves for the first time.
Thinking that way, Elze could not help but smile faintly.
Yet the reason she had come to the underground of the Southend-on-Sea monastery today was not to hear some trivial tale about the improved Rosetta Stone.
Elze casually raised the topic with the guide organization member. She had not activated Charm, so she had not coerced a positive answer.
“Well, that’s true. It is important, isn’t it? But isn’t the more important facility even further in?”
“…Yes. Correct. I will show you.”
Following the nodding organization member, Elze had arrived at a deeper point. It was clearly thirty meters or more from the base.
That would be… roughly the average depth of the London Underground?
Having made such an idle guess, another set of triple-layered security opened a massive door.
The scene beyond it was so like the interior of a research lab accredited with a high biosafety level (BSL) that one might think as much.
What had caught Elze Constanze’s gaze above all else was, of course, the transparent glass container sunk deep into the center.
A large test tube four meters in diameter and eight meters high. Inside it swirled a faintly green, semi-transparent culture medium.
Of course, what mattered most of all was the content within.
A person once called Benjamin Ashford, an Englishman who had been eyed as the successor to inherit the British Magic Bureau.
That person was now swollen all over, in the form of a lump of living slime, trapped inside a glass container full of culture medium.
One could no longer even call it human in shape.
Electrodes were attached to the surface of the lump, collecting the vital signs of the living slime that still breathed, and through tubes connected to the test tube a flowing liquid dripped.
Elze felt a instinctive revulsion. The appearance was not human, yet the soul was so twisted that it was still human’s.
Yet at the same time she felt relief. That a magical biological weapon of sufficient power slept here, under the management of the organization led by the niece she trusted.