“Erfin Klanert, the blond St. Katraz exchange student suspected of murder. The day after the incident, you disappeared.” The monocled man’s tone was casual, almost singsong. “Looks like you were a Galgad spy after all. Couldn’t bear to see one of your countrymen suffer, could you?”
Seeing him had been what inspired the youths’ flight, and the Galgad man Erna had just saved screamed upon noticing who was there.
“I’m with Genesis Army counterintelligence, captain of Nilfa division two. They call me Momus.”
The Genesis Army had been right on their heels. Erna couldn’t help but be impressed at how sharp their noses were.
The man flipped his pistols to their sides and laid his fingers on their triggers.
“Don’t bother trying to learn my name. Soon, you’ll wish you could forget it.”
A point-blank shot rang out from each side.
Erna hurriedly leaped to the right to dodge, but the bullets had never been intended to hit her. He was bluffing. Counterintelligence agents didn’t just kill spies. Their job was to capture them for interrogation.
Erna should have known that, yet she sacrificed her balance all the same.
Momus immediately closed the gap and pistol-whipped her.
Erna’s vision went so white, it was like an explosion had gone off right in front of her. His attack had landed, and hard. She was afraid she might pass out, but she quickly righted her stance and pulled a knife out from under her skirt.
“That’s a hit. H-I-T. Ah, and what a satisfying hit it was.”
Momus patted his pistols, once again having lapsed into song.
Erna wiped the blood off her cheek. Annette stood beside her, stony-faced, and shot a glare at the four white-coated agents surrounding them.
“……………”
Annette said nothing.
Was she still mad at Erna? Or was she simply annoyed that her warning had gone unheeded?
Either way, their first order of business was dealing with the situation in front of them. These were trained Genesis Army operatives they were dealing with, and the smart thing to do would be to flee rather than to fight them head-on. If nothing else, the way Momus moved made it clear that he was a fearsome combatant.
“If you try to run—”
It was like Momus had read Erna’s mind. The moment she wondered what he was going to say, he kicked the cowering Galgad man.
“Gahhh!”
“—I’ll cut this filthy Imperial’s ear off.”
The smile playing on Momus’s face made it clear he was reveling in the pain he was causing.
He seemed to be under the false impression that Erna and Annette were spying for the Galgad Empire. Even though they weren’t, though, Erna still wasn’t about to abandon an innocent bystander.
“…………………”
Seeing Momus’s shady smirk made the pieces fall into place.
Indignation burned through her body. “Is this always how you people operate?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m talking about fishing—the way you tormented that Galgad man who’d done nothing wrong, just to root out a few spies.”
Given what he said, and given the timing with which he’d appeared, this had to have been a setup. He was using the very technique Jean had mentioned.
The Genesis Army had been all too happy to lure those youths into attacking the man.
“You’re only just realizing that?” Momus said with a mocking laugh. “We do it all the time. Secret societies are a cancer on our nation, and it works just as well on them as it does on spies. Those bastards give us a real hard time when they go and get in bed with spies.”
Erna squeezed her fists tight; the Genesis Army’s methods were despicable.
Momus went on, not sounding ashamed in the least. “If you want to complain about atrocities, the Galgad Empire was the one that started all this.” There were notes of ridicule in his voice. “They were the first to use the abominable weapon that is poison gas, were they not? Theirs were the submarines that attacked anything that moved. We gave women jobs in our arms factories, and they were the ones who used that as an excuse to massacre civilians, men and women alike, by shelling our capital to the ground.”
Now he was going on about the Great War that had ended twelve years prior.
After invading the Din Republic, the Galgad Empire had used it as a stepping stone to surge into the Lylat Kingdom, bombarding its capital city Pilca and very nearly capturing it. Resentment for that still ran deep in Lylat.
“It’s all the vile Empire’s fault!”
Momus’s voice gradually grew in intensity.
“The opium flooding our streets, the repugnant state of our public health, our faltering economy, the way we’re falling behind the United States—those devils from the Empire are to blame for all of it!”
Erna took another look around the dank alleyway.
Despite the gunshots that had just rung out, nobody was so much as stirring. To the contrary, several of the dope addicts were quietly laughing at her. The rest were averting their eyes, determined not to get involved. This had become a regular occurrence for them.
It was a sight Erna had seen a lot over the past year. The wealth-obsessed aristocrats and capitalists composed the upper class, and the peasants were left to starve at their feet with no hope to cling to. It was hard to say in good conscience that the throngs of poor even had rights there.
“Did you ever think that your antiquated class structure might be the cause of your country’s problems?”
“That’s not even worth considering,” Momus snapped dismissively.
The Nilfa members she’d fought last week had been the same way. They’d spewed off hate-filled epithets about the Galgad Empire, praised the aristocracy, and held the peasantry in contempt. No matter how many hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of times Erna saw it, it never failed to fill her with rage.