Free Web NovelChapter 391: Chapter 391: Didn’t Gain an Advantage_1
Rose Iron Prison, Aiden was changing clothes in the dressing room, recalling the harrowing but successful encounter from an hour ago.
Plans truly can’t keep up with changes.
The attempt to infiltrate the middle management layer of the prison had failed, and the hired gang could not be used anymore. The royal secret police would try to contact him, with bribery as their primary method of persuasion. Due to the previous bribery incident, the prosecutor’s office began to inspect the prison’s correspondence. To show their sincerity, the secret police might even send someone to meet with him in person—up to this point, everything was still within his expectations.
When he had initially foreseen this situation, Aiden had devised a slightly risky plan.
First, he would capture the secret police who made contact with him, then control him using the "Wordless Code" to extract the necessary information, including all their bases within the city and the distribution of their personnel. Afterwards, he would temporarily imprison the operative and use the divine word "substitute" to assume their appearance and infiltrate the enemy’s base for further reconnaissance.
As long as he could uncover their highest commander in Silvertown, he could uproot the entire group.
If that highest commander were Heinz Hoffman himself, it would deal a heavy blow to the Gistas royal secret police, and their assassination plot would be hindered as a result.
Thus, he had been walking the nightroads for the past two days, giving them an opportunity to approach him. He hadn’t brought any bodyguards, lest they deter the enemy from coming near—an adventurous move, but the potential rewards were worth it. With some luck, he might be able to capture them all in one fell swoop.
Aiden had also considered that the secret police’s bribery and temptation Plan A might be closely followed by a violent Plan B that involved coercion. Apprehending one secret policeman might immediately bring a squad of reserves to rescue him. But as long as he had the power of the divine words, firearms and black magic would all be ineffective; the number of a small squad was no advantage at all—the more people he captured, the more intelligence he could glean. freёwebnoѵel.com
When he heard someone picking the lock of his house door, he didn’t shoot Roddy but pounced on him, hitting the back of his head first, then used a chokehold to silence him.
When the secret police raid team burst in, he had already switched appearances with Roddy using the divine word "substitute." As he had anticipated, the intruding secret police didn’t hesitate to beat up their own colleague, silencing and binding him before bagging him.
What Aiden didn’t expect, though, was that it would be Earl Heinz Hoffman personally executing this Plan B—upon seeing the entering group, he keenly recognized one of them as fitting Sara Rekhsia’s description. Even through the disguise and makeup, Aiden immediately identified that person as Earl Hoffman.
Of the four who charged in, only two stepped forward to help, while one stood in the back and another stood close like a bodyguard. The commanding officer in the central position was clearly a big shot.
It must be said that this head of the Gestapo really gave him a lot of face; this sudden attack slightly disrupted his stance. In the past, those he dealt with were mostly overpowered with pre-arranged situations and an advantage in intelligence.
Furthermore, they were more cautious than he had imagined; they didn’t even plan to take "Aiden Galahad" back to their base for interrogation but directly to some random spot in the wild, acting more like a gang or bandits than an official force.
With a brief assessment, Aiden realized that continuing the disguise and following them would bring risks without any advantage. To start with, the divine word "substitute," if only used to alter one’s appearance, was nearly permanent, but exchanging two targets’ existences imposed limits of range and duration on the divine word.
And once they started torturing the "Aiden Galahad" they caught, Roddy would immediately tell them the truth.
Although the "substitute" divine speech was the most perfect method of disguise, it was, after all, a "pseudo" disguise. These men were secret police, specializing in spying and infiltration. They probably had a number of methods for confirming identities using code. Playing the "True & False Monkey King" trick in front of them was simply a death wish. When the time came, being surrounded by a bunch of secret police in a place where shouting for help was useless and escape was nearly impossible.
Aiden didn’t need to do that since his main target, Heinz Hoffman, was right in front of him, which meant he could skip those preparatory steps and take direct action.
Of course, this was going to be riskier than his original plan. His divine speech could work on firearms and dark magic, but he guessed it couldn’t completely erase the power of the "Word of Punishment." The Wordless Code, indeed effective, had a major drawback—it took time to write, and once the action started, there was almost no time for such preparation.
So the first one he had to take down was Heinz, and in this regard, he did make a mistake. He should have waited for a better opportunity, but he couldn’t gauge how much chance he would have to act from the point they started torturing to the actual process. He didn’t dare take any further risks.
When Heinz ordered "Roddy" to go outside and assemble everyone else, Aiden judged that there might not be many chances left to launch an attack, so he hurriedly made his move, only to have it foiled by the bodyguard sticking close to Heinz.
He didn’t dare stick around when Heinz was preparing to use divine speech, and only had no choice but to seize the opportunity to flee. Once he was caught by the "Word of Punishment’s" binding sentence, he would have been completely cornered.
In that situation, he did have the chance to kill the bodyguard as well as the unlucky one standing outside the window, thus reducing the secret police’s numbers. But that was by no means a wise decision. Killing someone near one’s room and residence was not something the secret police would clean up after. Some espionage agents hold legal identities in infiltrated areas. If Aiden couldn’t prove the person he killed was a foreign spy attacking him, he could face a murder charge—or, if not charged, at least he would have to undergo a certain level of investigation, and he didn’t have the time to waste on such matters now.
The preparations were still not meticulous enough. If he could have anticipated earlier that Heinz would risk taking action himself, he would have written rules against the "Word of Punishment" in the Wordless Code beforehand; this whole mess should have been resolved tonight.
Aiden reflected within his heart.
This skirmish was the first direct confrontation between him and Heinz. Not only had Heinz exposed the fact that he had come to the autonomous region personally, but he would also become a target for the entire city’s police force for attacking military police personnel. Moreover, Aiden had roughly figured out one weakness of the "Word of Punishment": it had a very short effective range. As he broke through the window and jumped down, the effect of the "Word of Punishment" never manifested.
But Aiden had suffered a significant loss, revealing two of his trump cards. Heinz might not know too much about divine speech, but he could certainly deduce that Aiden had the ability to change into someone else and to make attacks like firearms and dark magic ineffective.
In conclusion, he didn’t gain any advantage. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
But from this night on, they both had jumped out from under the surface, and their confrontation was about to be laid out in the open.
Fortunately, this city was still his home ground.
