187 Chapter 187: Extracting Information (1/2)
”Ana, are you finished yet?”
I straightened up after completing my task.
”Yeah, I am. Richard…”
Anastasia trailed off when she turned around, a dazed look on her face, as well as a bead of perspiration that was borne out of exasperation. I noticed that how I tied up the poor priest was completely different from the way she tied up her ex-colleague. The Assassin had something in her mouth, and both her hands and leg were bound together. As for the priest, I just bound him simply, like the usual stuff you saw in movies and cartoons.
”Um, Richard…do you know how to tie someone up?”
”Sorry…I never learned how to tie stuff.” Actually, they tried to teach me that in the military but my poor sergeant failed spectacularly. Not that I was going to tell Anastasia that. She shook her head and knelt beside the poor priest.
”You didn't even tie the proper knots.”
”There are proper knots…?”
My sergeant would smack me if he had heard me say that, especially since he introduced all the weird knots to me. Bowstring knot, or whatever. I couldn't remember. I never had to, since I was more interested in shooting than tying.
”I should teach you someday. For now, just look carefully.”
Anastasia untied the knots, removed the rope, and retied the guy. I winced at having wasted my effort and both of our time, but to my amazement Ana completed the task within seconds. Before I knew what was going on, the guy's hands and feet were bound pretty tightly. Unlike the Assassin, she didn't stuff anything into his mouth.
She probably didn't worry about him biting off his tongue or swallowing any hidden toxic capsule.
”I'll start searching the place,” I suggested, trying to find a way to make myself useful. Anastasia nodded as she rose to her feet.
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”Good idea.”
I rummaged through the place while Anastasia checked the bookshelves, presumably looking for anything hidden. Though why the masterminds would deliberately conceal anything in such a manner in their own office, I had no idea. Then again, it was entirely possible that they realized they might be defeated, and thus engaged in such subterfuge. However, common sense would dictate that you destroy your plans or any data regarding your schemes, not hide them.
But what do I know? I wasn't a nefarious criminal mastermind who schemed and hid in the shadows. I was just some self-insert character created for wish fulfilment purposes. According to readers, I was stupid and retarded.
Whatever. For now I should focus on the task. There was a laptop on the desk, and I booted it up while inwardly thanking my lucky stars that Leo didn't accidentally crush and break the whole thing when he manifested behind the unfortunate priest and subdued him.
”Don't touch that!” the priest hissed furiously, his eyes wide when he saw me switch on the laptop. The Assassin, Adeline, glared at him silently but in a resigned manner, as if the guy was an idiot for blatantly giving away the fact that the laptop was a useful piece of evidence. I mean, they could be acting, but I doubted it.
The guy was too much of an amateur for that, and in any case it was more effective to maintain silence and not react at every little thing than to act dramatically to ”divert attention away from the real important thing.”
”Do you know what to look for?” I asked Anastasia as she approached emptyhanded. Seemed like there was nothing worth looking at in the bookshelf. She nodded and accepted the laptop that I handed to her. After clicking and opening a few folders, she finally pulled out something and projected the holographic image in front of us.
”What the hell is that?”
I caught sight of an image that looked very familiar. A bunch of monsters, and a holographic screenshot of a very familiar-looking machine. Something that I had once seen on a mountain quite some time ago…
The dragon. Right, weren't they using a similar machine to try and influence the brainwaves of a Hellfire Drake residing in the mountains?
”You've got to be kidding me,” I murmured, especially when I read the lines of text next to the pictures. Dread began to fill me.
”Richard? What's wrong?”
Anastasia was trying to piece the information together, probably reading the capabilities of the machine that was spelled out in all sort of scientific jargon. She hadn't joined the dots yet, but to be fair she probably had never seen such a machine before.
”They plan to control monsters,” I muttered. ”Or at least to influence them to contribute to their goals…such as directing the monsters toward a city.”
”They're targeting Azpire City?!” Anastasia asked, horrified. ”Just like what happened with Jing Tian City?”
I nodded and then glanced at the pictures of the monsters. ”They're using F-ranked Grimstone Goblins, which are an unusually aggressive species of monsters. Even though they are pretty weak, they breed rapidly…sort of like rabbits. And it says here…” I placed a finger on a line of text that caught my attention when skimming through it. ”…that this machine has been designed to amplify their aggressiveness and lust.”
”Goblins are known for raping human women and massacring human men…” Anastasia was covering her mouth in horror.
”And this amplifies that behavior into overdrive,” I confirmed grimly. My eyes widened when I read the next relevant line. ”They've got hundreds of them underground?”
Fuck. That meant I had to hunt them down and root them out manually. I couldn't just conveniently nuke them from afar before they reached the city. Worse, according to the holographic image, the goblins were already in Azpire City. Or under it, to be more accurate.
”How many mages are there in Azpire City?” I muttered, dread growing inside me. We needed every combat-capable mage we could get to protect the city. Would I be able to get all of the Goblins before they came to the surface? And when they reached the surface, they would massacre the male civilians and **** the women. It would be a nightmare…and while the individual Goblins were pretty easy to slay and defeat, I was more worried about the chaos that would follow. Trying to evacuate and save the panicking, screaming civilians would be a lot more difficult than dealing with the Goblin threat itself.