Chapter 32
Chapter 32
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Translator: uly
Chapter: 32
Chapter Title: The Incompetent Minister Wants to Retire
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Within the walls of a noisy, bustling cafe in the heart of the capital, the air was filled with the vibrant hum of lively chatter.
Lisana Simon sat in a tense silence, positioned face-to-face with the woman she believed to be her sister.
"I am truly sorry for dragging you all the way out here when your schedule is so demanding, Lisana."
Lisana shook her head slowly to demonstrate that she harbored no ill will.
"No, it is perfectly okay. I found myself quite bummed out as well after you abruptly up and left yesterday without a proper goodbye."
"Hearing you utter those words makes me genuinely happy. Honestly, my little sister has always been far too sweet for her own good."
Her sister flashed a gentle, practiced smile and rhythmically tapped her teacup with a silver teaspoon. Lisana suddenly remembered her mission and began to rummage through the bag she had brought along.
"Oh, that's right. I managed to bring exactly what you requested of me. Here it is—this contains every scrap of information the Minister has painstakingly gathered on Oracle so far."
A thick, heavy stack of classified documents landed on the table between them with a dull thud. Lisana pushed the pile forward, but for some inexplicable reason, her sister didn't even make a move to touch it.
"Sis?"
"Yeah?"
"Do you not need to take this?"
Lisana looked visibly puzzled as she posed the question, but her sister merely replied with a chillingly clear and sharp smile.
"You pathetic little bitch. The mental suggestion has already worn off, hasn't it?"
In that singular, terrifying instant, all the ambient noise of the cafe vanished into a vacuum of silence.
At the exact same time, a cold blade burst violently through her sister's chest, erupting from behind her back.
Dark blood began to trickle from her mouth as she slowly turned her head to look back at her assailant.
A man wearing a menacing owl mask stood there, his eyes cold and unyielding.
"Piercing a delicate lady's heart in one single strike? That is a bit much, even for you, don't you think?"
"I wouldn't dignify something that remains alive and talking after getting its heart pierced with the title of 'lady.'"
"Heh, you make a fair point there."
John pulled his sword from her torso with a wet squelch and swung it again with blinding speed, completely severing her neck.
The head of the woman who had been cunningly impersonating Lisana's nonexistent sister rolled across the wooden floor like a discarded toy.
And that horrific display was merely the beginning of the chaos.
"Guh!? Everyone, fall back immediately!"
At John's urgent shout—as he was the first to sense the mounting magical danger—the Intelligence Department agents disguised as ordinary cafe patrons scattered in perfect unison.
The lifeless body of the woman who should have died instantly erupted into a column of violet flames and exploded, swallowing the entire cafe in an instant.
The Owls and the hidden agents leaped out of the shattered cafe windows, barely escaping the lethal blast radius.
Christina, who had physically carried out the slow-moving and shocked Lisana, set her down and issued a stern warning.
"Maintain your distance so you don't get caught in the impending fight, but do not leave our sight for a second. Have I made myself clear?"
At the grim warning that she could still be targeted for assassination, Lisana nodded her head frantically and backed away toward safety.
In the meantime, the charred body that had just exploded rose from its spot and calmly picked up its own severed head, reattaching it to the stump of its neck.
"Wow, you guys are significantly more ruthless than I had originally thought. Was a punctured heart not enough—did you truly feel the need to decapitate me too? Isn't that a bit of an overkill?"
As she casually adjusted her reattached head, she began to scan her immediate surroundings with a predatory gaze.
There were no signs of civilians left. They had likely all been efficiently evacuated to avoid getting caught in the crossfire or being taken as hostages.
'Let's see the board. All the owls are gathered here, gunning for my life. And the agents—judging by their sheer numbers, it appears most of the Department's elite forces are present.'
It was the best possible tactical outcome she could have hoped for. She bared her teeth in a dark, triumphant grin.
'Just a bit more effort. I need them to focus their attention even more intensely on me. So they don't have the room to consider any other dangerous possibilities.'
With an elegant and dramatic flick of her fingers in the air, her mundane clothes were transformed into a vibrant red dress.
Having changed her appearance via high-level magic, she bowed gracefully to the group with the fluid, exaggerated poise of a seasoned theater actress.
"It is a pleasure to meet you all. Just as you had correctly suspected, I am indeed an Oracle executive. My name is Alina Ripenschtal. I do hope we can get along."
"...The <Magic Drama Composer>? Are you truly the mastermind behind the infamous Ripenschtal Massacre?"
"Oh my, you actually know of me? I find myself quite flattered by the recognition."
The incident she referred to involved a nine-year-old prodigy, blessed with genius talent, who used a magic experiment as a cruel excuse to turn her entire family into mutilated test subjects.
That horrific event was known to history as the Ripenschtal Massacre.
"The word on the street was that you were dead."
"Life has so many unexpected twists and turns. Would you like to hear the full story?"
"I'll pass. The mere sound of it seems like it would ruin my appetite."
Without another word, the five members of Owl charged at Alina in a synchronized assault.
She harbored the thought that handling all of them at once would be a tedious pain and moved to retaliate—
—only to belatedly and to her shock notice that her feet were already frozen solid to the ground.
"What is this..."
"I usually prefer the elegance of one-on-one combat, but given these dire circumstances, you'll just have to bear with me."
A woman stepped forward confidently from among the ranks of the agents.
She had an unfamiliar face, but there were only a handful of people in the empire who could pull off a magical feat of this magnitude. Alina recognized her identity immediately.
"Angela Barrmut...!"
In that moment of distraction, the owls' lethal weapons and iron fists tore into Alina's form.
Alina summoned intense flames to melt the ice binding her feet and shake them off, but it came at the heavy cost of her body being reduced to a battered, broken wreck.
'They truly went all out, even calling in the <Devil of Ice> to join the fray. It will shorten my window of time a bit, but actually, this chaos works in my favor.'
The Minister had probably planned to use Lisana as simple bait to lure out and capture or eliminate an executive like herself.
But the Oracle organization had been using her as a bait of their own.
From the very start, Oracle had been certain the Minister would notice the anomaly in Lisana Simon's behavior and break the suggestion.
It wasn't a weak mental suggestion by any means.
But the human mind was infinitely delicate and impossibly complex. Even a mage of Alina's high caliber couldn't make a suggestion perfectly airtight, no matter how much she tried.
So Oracle had placed a bet on his legendary perception.
They bet that the Minister would spot Lisana Simon's oddity and dispel the suggestion herself.
And everything was proceeding just as they had hoped.
'Now the Minister's flank is wide open and unprotected. This is my perfect chance to grab that <Iron Blood> and take him away!'
Oracle's true goal was nothing more than a grand diversion.
Erich Yon's deliberate appearance earlier had been exposed anyway, but it also served to firmly plant the idea in the Department's mind that 'Oracle executives are incredibly strong.'
To successfully catch or kill such an executive, the Department would feel forced to commit its maximum military force.
Leaving the Minister essentially alone and vulnerable in the meantime.
'Alright, it is time for me to buy as much time as I possibly can.'
With Angela Barrmut joining the battle, she wasn't sure how far she would get in this state, but as she raised both hands to unfold complex magic circles—
—Alina suddenly sensed something profoundly off about the numbers.
"...Hey, tell me, weren't there originally only five owls?"
There was now an extra, sixth owl-masked figure standing among them.
That fact alone she might have brushed off as some newbie operative that Oracle hadn't scouted yet.
But this particular owl wasn't joining the fight—instead, it hung back at a significant distance, carefully protected by the regular agents.
'...There is no way.'
The absolute worst tactical possibility flashed through Alina's mind like a bolt of lightning.
Sensing immediate danger, she ignored everything else and unleashed a torrent of flames and lightning from both hands at the owl in the rear.
As she had feared, all the owls and Angela rushed in front of her to block the lethal attacks with their own bodies.
No more proof was needed to confirm her suspicions.
Unable to hide the sudden despair in her voice, Alina spoke up.
"Why... why are you actually here...? What the hell is going on?"
The man slowly and deliberately removed his mask in response to her question.
Seeing his cold face, Alina swallowed hard, then shouted in a fit of rage.
"Answer me! Why on earth are you here at the front, Minister?!"
"............"
The Minister said absolutely nothing.
Erich felt an overwhelming sense of incredulity as he dodged a massive, glowing sword beam hurtling toward him, leaping desperately sideways.
"No way, isn't this person far too strong?"
Francesca snorted with contempt at Erich's blatant and visible bafflement.
"That realization probably just means that you are exceptionally weak."
Erich felt genuinely wronged and insulted by her sharp words.
His actual combat experience was clearly superior to hers, no matter how you chose to slice it.
Yet he was being steadily pushed back by her relentless assault.
It was purely due to an insurmountable and innate skill gap.
'This is insane. The Minister not being at his residence contrary to our plan is bad enough, but getting stalled like this by a knight?'
The various subordinates he had brought from the Department had all been finished off by the 3rd Knight Order knights waiting in ambush.
Only Erich was left standing now.
Any way you looked at the situation, it was time to run, but Francesca had no intention of letting him go easily.
"You shall regret targeting the people you did as you meet your end."
"I have no desire to die just yet?!"
Regretting that he had come alone for the sake of stealth and mobility, Erich flailed desperately with his weapon to survive.
Judging the situation to be safe enough now, I turned my gaze back toward the chaotic fight unfolding before me.
Not that I could really make out much of the actual technique, though.
I was just internally marveling, 'Whoa, my subordinates and my little sister are seriously kicking ass today.'
They all moved with such blinding speed that I couldn't track a single one of their movements.
It makes me wonder: are they even the same species as I am?
It truly makes me wonder if they belong to some other powerful race entirely.
"Kyaa?!"
As I pondered the possibility of new human subspecies in all seriousness, the battle finally seemed to be wrapping up.
The one who had impersonated Lisana's sister... what was her name again? Oh, that's right—Alina.
Her upper body, which had been severed from her frozen lower half by Angela's ice magic, was currently being hacked apart by the owls.
The sight was so gruesome it actually made my stomach churn. It's a good thing I had already finished my meal.
"Haa... haa... haa..."
"Is she still not dead after all that?"
"Is this even a living creature at this point in the fight?"
Angela approached from behind the panting and broken Alina, while the owls muttered in exasperation at her resilience. She gripped ice-forged swords tightly in both of her hands.
"That thing is probably just a decoy."
"A decoy? Do you mean she is a fake?"
"Something along those lines. It is a high-fidelity construct made with a homunculus clone of herself, though."
The two ice swords pierced directly into Alina's chest center and through her head.
"I had some working hypotheses when it didn't die at first, but surviving this confirms it is definitely a decoy."
"So what exactly do we do now? We certainly cannot just leave it like this."
Angela shrugged her shoulders at the owls' logical question.
"What else is there to do? We cut its link to the original."
Angela clasped her hands together and began a low chant. The ice swords embedded in Alina's body began to glow with an eerie light.
I had absolutely no clue what was happening, but as the light intensified, Alina began to writhed in visible agony.
"Gaaaaaaaah!"
"Did you truly think you could cause all this chaos and just get off with a severed link? I cannot kill you through this, but it is going to hurt like hell for a while—so brace yourself."
With a sudden flash, the light burst outward. Alina's upper body on the ice sword and her frozen lower half crumbled to ash and vanished into the wind.
Was it finally all over?
"Phew. All done, big bro! Angela did great today, right? You should praise me!"
I suppose that's true.
I hadn't actually done a single thing myself, so it felt a bit weird to say, but good job to everyone involved. Let's all go grab some shawarma after this.
"Uh, Minister. Look at that..."
As I was pondering which shawarma shop was currently the best, Christina pointed a finger toward the sky.
A single bluebird was flying straight toward me.