Steel, Explosives, and Spellcasters

After returning from Qianmin Street, Lieutenant Colonel Field held the first full officers' meeting of the Army Headquarters Military Police at Moritz's apartment.

Number of attendees: three;

Chairman: Lieutenant Colonel Field;

Secretary: Warrant Officer Montaigne.

[Because Major Moritz's hearing has not yet recovered, the conversations with Major Moritz in the previous chapter and this chapter were all transcribed by Winters and then shown to Major Moritz, and will not be reiterated.]

"Senior, there are only three of us, and the Major can't hear anything. Do we need to be so serious?" Winters said with a mix of laughter and helplessness as he buried his head in writing the meeting minutes, having already started addressing the others as 'senior'. A trip to Qianmin Street had brought him a bit closer to the two official officers of the military police.

"This is the first full officers' meeting of the Military Police, of course, we need to be formal," Field said with a beaming smile. "To hold a full officers' meeting, we need at least three officers. Before, there were only Moritz and me in the Military Police, so we couldn't hold this meeting. Now with you, we have exactly three... Hey, don't put this in the minutes."

Winters quickly began to scratch out the text he had just recorded: "Does a warrant officer count too? I'm not a formal officer yet."

"The 'Regulations' do not specify that warrant officers do not count, don't be so rigid. As a trainee, you're just going through the process."

"If I may ask, before me, hadn't there been any trainee officers here?"

"Haha, no."

Huddled under a thin blanket on the lounge chair, Moritz snored inopportunely. Although the Major had temporarily lost his hearing and could only sense vague sounds through bone conduction, it actually improved the quality of his sleep.

Field discontentedly tossed his cap at Moritz's face.

The Major woke up startled, wiped the drool from his mouth, and sat up, asking in confusion, "Is the meeting over?"

"[The kind of curse that would make the saints in the paintings cover their ears]... Don't put the curse in the minutes either!"

"Alright." Winters quickly scratched out the text he had just written down.

After some sorting, the first full officers' meeting of the Army Headquarters Military Police finally began in an atmosphere of unity, tension, seriousness, and liveliness.

Beyond giving the Lieutenant Colonel a chance to indulge, there was one serious matter for the meeting: to save the careers of the two field-grade officers. To prevent them from being kicked from their current cold bench to an even colder one someday in the future—like to the War History Division.

In the Senas Alliance, the military made it almost impossible to discharge an officer outright. Therefore, officers who made mistakes were usually demoted a few ranks and then kicked to a 'cold bench'. This indirectly led to the histories of the wars of various Republics military being quite sour to read.

Winters didn't need to worry; he was just a trainee officer, and even if things were reversed in the future, it wouldn't involve him. But Field and Moritz had treated him well, so he also wanted to do his part for the careers of his two seniors.

The Lieutenant Colonel ordered Moritz and Winters not to form any more cliques and to report everything they saw and heard at the dock that day fully and without any omissions.

The whole mix-up was really Moritz's fault. The Major told Winters he wanted to discuss something secretly, so Winters kept his mouth shut and waited for the Major to approach him. But after leaving the customs prison, two bottles of strong liquor made Moritz forget about the matter entirely.

So it was only now that Field was hearing the specifics of what happened at the docks from the two key eyewitnesses.

"You mean one of the dead might have been a spellcaster?"

"I can't be certain, but I think that person may have used a Deflection Spell."

"If one of the dead is a spellcaster, then things get interesting," Lieutenant Colonel Field's expression grew serious. "There are only about a hundred or so spellcasters in the Sea Blue Army, and if one goes missing, it would be easy to find out. I'll look into this... There were assassins mixed in among the dockworkers?"

"Yes."

"Without masks?"

"None."

"Do you remember what they looked like?"

The faces of those assassins disguised as dockworkers were just too ordinary, so nondescript that they lacked any distinguishing features. Winters tried to describe them for quite a while but couldn't make it clear, ending up helplessly saying, "If those assassins were standing in front of me, I could recognize them, but I really can't make it clear just through words." Stay connected with empire

"The dockworkers are all familiar faces; they should remember something. Humph, that place on the docks is controlled by a few groups of people, and you need more than just brute strength to become a dockworker. We'll find out who introduced them, who vouched for them with a little investigation."

Winters suddenly remembered the Swift Sword he had snatched: "I took a sword from one of the assassins. It ended up in the water when the assassin blew up the dock. Should we have someone dive for it?"

"You go hire a few sailors who are good swimmers tomorrow to dive for it," Field suggested as his right hand fingers subconsciously tapped on his glass. After thinking for a while with furrowed brows, he said, "We can try, but I think it was probably carried away by the tide."

"And a gun, I kicked one of the assassins' guns into the water too. Their gun was strange, it could fire without a match cord. It was also short, usable with just one hand."

"Didn't the cripple tell you? Someone paid a high price for several spring-loaded guns," Field said as if it were obvious.

Winters was surprised: "What's a spring-loaded gun? This is the first time I've heard of it."