Free Web NovelChapter 376: Chapter 376 Aiden Galahad_1
Same name, same surname?
This was Heinz’s first thought when he had heard of this name before, a heretic inquisitor with a bit of fame in the autonomous regions, young and promising, who hadn’t reached the age of twenty before rising to the role of a senior judge in the Heretic Inquisitor’s Headquarters in Silvertown and had once captured an S-class wanted criminal by himself. freeωebnovēl.c૦m
But the information revealed that this "Aiden Galahad" was the warden who had taken office in Rose Iron Prison five years ago.
Heinz glanced at the photo attached to the information and immediately confirmed it—as the same person.
The information included two photos, one was cut out from an old newspaper report, showing a commendation ceremony where the senior heretic inquisitor Aiden Galahad was receiving a medal in his uniform.
The other was a photo of Aiden Galahad snapped through the windows of a high-rise building, which was very blurry due to the distance and angle. The spy who had captured this photo clearly realized that getting too close for tailing and photographing might be noticed by a former heretic inquisitor. Nonetheless, the photo was still barely recognizable—barely identifying the features of the target and confirming it was the same person in the clipped newspaper photo above.
An ace judge who had rapidly approached the peak of his career within less than three years on the job, suddenly transferred to work as a prison guard?
This made Heinz feel that something was amiss.
He continued reading; his subordinates had obviously had the same initial thoughts, so in the time after Sera was imprisoned, they had tried to gather and organize information about this former heretic inquisitor as thoroughly as possible.
The former heretic inquisitor’s career of nearly three years at the inquisition bureau was basically as Heinz had heard; he had started to show his talents not long after joining, rose to senior judge after just over a year, captured an S-class wanted criminal single-handedly while in service, captured five A-class wanted criminals, participated in teams that captured two S-class and nine A-class wanted criminals, and had also commanded a crackdown on a cult group on the purge list.
There was nothing particularly surprising about this; among the combatants in organized groups, whether soldiers, mercenaries, or other armed personnel, there are always some individuals who naturally stand out from the rest. With the same level of training, some quickly become sharpshooters, while others just become live targets on the battlefield.
Heinz had seen this caliber of talent both in the military and police of Gistas and the Empire; relative to this, Aiden Galahad didn’t seem too out of the ordinary.
After entering Rose Iron Prison, Aiden Galahad proposed many constructive initiatives that greatly improved the prison management level, and his position also rose quickly, promptly filling the vacant role of warden. Once in office, he undertook even more drastic reforms and achieved quite remarkable results, transforming the once annually troubled Rose Iron Prison into a model unit within the system.
In the three years since taking office, he resolved numerous incidents within the prison each year, and this year, his activity reached a peak, with the issues he resolved increasingly involving matters outside the prison and even cooperating with the Heretic Inquisitor’s Headquarters several times, vaguely showing a tendency to return to his old profession.
His subordinates unearthed four major incidents that occurred this year; the first two primarily concerned the interior of the prison, with the first being a miscarriage of justice and the second a swiftly suppressed riot. The remaining two involved capturing two wanted criminals respectively.
The first one was a vampire cultist, who had been sentenced to death and was still awaiting execution; the second, the notorious pirate king of the Empire’s Coral Sea Domain, Navi Drake, caught during an attempt to break into Rose Iron Prison and escape with prisoners.
Aside from these four incidents, there was another event marked as doubtful—several months ago, a suspected Harvest Mother Cult group was eradicated by the inquisition bureau in Silvertown.
The notation "under suspicion" meant that secret agents suspected Aiden Galahad’s involvement in the incident, but they had not found concrete evidence.
However, it was this very event, whose relevance to Aiden Galahad was uncertain, that completely captured Heinz’s attention, and his subordinates had specifically highlighted the related documents.
The Royal Secret Police had extensive intelligence networks abroad, but not all intelligence was actively pursued.
Abroad, they mainly focused on powers that might threaten the Kingdom.
Therefore, they were not so familiar with the Blood Moon Cult, which involved a great number of vampires, or the intelligence on imperial pirates, but the Harvest Mother Cult, nicknamed "Black Goat," was their "old friend."
The Harvest Mother Cult originated from the royal family of the Old Lese Kingdom, which once perished. After the fall of the Old Lese Kingdom, it was divided by the Dragon Spine Empire and the Kingdom of Gistas. For the Harvest Mother Cult, set on restoration, the Kingdom of Gistas represented the second largest obstacle on their path to reclaim the country.
From the perspective of Gistas, the Harvest Mother Cult was a significant hidden threat to their national territorial integrity. For a long time, the Harvest Mother Cult had been on the hit list of Gistas’ Heretic Inquisitorial Office. Meanwhile, the Kingdom’s Gendarmerie, to which the Royal Secret Police belonged, along with its precursor, the King’s Royal Guards, had also never shifted their watchful eyes off the cult in the past hundred years or so.
Put simply, in Gistas, the heretic procedural authorities had always borne the responsibility of exterminating this cult, while the Royal Secret Police also continuously sought information about the cult, ready at all times to contribute their strength to the elimination of the Kingdom’s enemies.
The actions of the Banquet Forest Heretic Inquisitorial Office in Northwind Town were not public, but the Royal Secret Police managed to find out that the cult eradicated there was very likely the Harvest Mother Cult.
The Royal Secret Police also knew that the Harvest Mother Cult, like the royal family of the Old Lese Kingdom, possessed a secret technique able to transform people into synthetic beasts and mass-produce alchemical artificial humans.
But only Heinz knew that the secret technique held by the Harvest Mother Cult might be the same as the one possessed by the Hofmann Family, described in ancient texts as "a great power that mortals not favored by the gods cannot inherit."
Heinz did not believe that the Heretic Inquisitorial Office of Silvertown had the capability to eliminate the Harvest Mother Cult, a cult that neither the Empire nor the Kingdom of Gistas could uproot entirely, but indeed, after the incident, the Harvest Mother Cult ceased its activities. freewёbnoνel.com
And a few days earlier, the Royal Secret Police had discovered that the forces of the Harvest Mother Cult inside Gistas had been taken down one by one. Both the Heretic Inquisitorial Office and the Royal Secret Police had conducted thorough investigations into the matter and determined that the deed was not the handiwork of any country’s official institution, but most likely that of a master of black magic working alone, with the prime suspect being the S-class fugitive, the Great Witch Habanis.
Even earlier, the Harvest Mother Cult had attacked the base of the witch assembly, Banquet Forest.
If both assumptions held true, it meant that the Banquet Forest Heretic Inquisitorial Office and the witch assembly, two organizations that were almost impossible to collaborate, had both purged the Harvest Mother Cult concurrently.
Merely because the Harvest Mother Cult had provoked both parties at the same time?
Or was there someone... orchestrating it all from behind the scenes?
