"Understood, Instructor."
Seeing the old woman so angry, Chelsea quickly backed down.
She did not want to be punished.
Despite how the old woman looked as if a strong breeze could knock her over, in reality, she was a dangerous person whose strength was practically monstrous.
Chelsea had lost count of how many times she had felt grateful that they were allies rather than enemies.
The white-haired old woman who called herself Barbara reacted fiercely whenever the girl called her an old hag, her eyes widening round.
She put on a terrifying expression, clearly intending to frighten this brat who did not understand respect.
"Chelsea, if you dare call me an old hag again, I'll give you a memory you'll never want to look back on for the rest of your life!" Barbara threatened viciously.
As the instructor of the two girls, she understood both of their personalities and weaknesses perfectly.
Looking at Chelsea, who had temporarily submitted on the surface, Barbara could not help thinking, 'Why can't this annoying little brat be obedient like Taeko?'
"Hurry up. But be careful. If you sense danger, run immediately."
"Yes, yes."
Chelsea took out a makeup case.
This was her Teigu—Transform: Gaea Foundation.
That's right, she was a Teigu user.
Because of this Teigu, although she was not the type suited for direct combat, as an assassin, she possessed an incomparably terrifying ability.
Gaea Foundation allowed its user to transform into anything they wished.
Whether human or animal, as long as she wanted to, she could transform.
The giant owl from earlier had been Chelsea in disguise, monitoring the movements of the Empire's assassination unit.
To ordinary people, the ability to transform was simply unimaginable.
After all, how could a human possibly turn into something else? Even though Gozuki had noticed the giant owl's surveillance, he had only assumed that it was a trained bird.
He would never have imagined that it was actually a human who had transformed.
Chelsea used her Teigu to transform into a bird.
Because the battlefield was too scattered, compared to turning into a land animal and running back and forth, becoming a bird with the ability to fly made it much easier to oversee the entire situation.
Flying into the sky, Chelsea looked down at the disastrous scene below. Even in the form of a bird, she still revealed a shocked expression.
Destruction.
Every battlefield had suffered a certain degree of damage.
Several of the more serious locations had even seen multiple buildings collapse.
These buildings occupied fairly large areas and had multiple floors.
With Chelsea's imagination, she truly could not understand what kind of method could cause such large-scale destruction.
Bombs or cannons might have been able to do it, but she had not heard any thunderous explosions just now, nor had she seen firelight or gun smoke.
That meant this destruction had not been caused by bombs or cannons.
'Wait, that's…?'
Chelsea discovered many horribly dead figures among the ruins.
She was frightened.
Because those who had died were the mercenaries hired by the Revolutionary Army.
Their status was the same as hers—they had all been hired to come here.
For the moment, they could be considered companions.
They belonged to a large mercenary group known as the Tengu Party, which had over a hundred members, every one of them a skilled fighter.
This mission had sent out several dozen of them.
And now, all of them had become cold corpses.
'No way. All of them were killed?'
The other side clearly only had seven people, while their side had several times that number.
Could it be that every one of them was a monster like Barbara?
'Eek!'
In midair, Chelsea suddenly felt an extremely sharp gaze shoot up from the ground, making her feel as if her life was under an immense threat.
Using her bird's-eye view, she discovered that on top of the ruins of a building, a blond, cold-faced boy was staring at her with a gloomy expression.
The killing intent carried in that gaze was astonishing.
'D-Did he discover me?'
If Chelsea had transformed into a cat, all her fur would have stood on end.
Her heart tightened, and she quickly turned around and fled from the sky.
...
After seeing the bird leave, Nahashu withdrew his gaze as well.
He began moving toward the rendezvous point, preparing to meet up with Gozuki and the others.
At the same time, he worried inwardly over whether everyone had survived this ordeal.
The air blade was one of their trump cards, but it was not their only one.
If they used all their hidden cards, Nahashu believed their survival rate should still be extremely high.
Being able to do this was all thanks to that genius from the Science Division!
...
In a hidden alley somewhere in the town, Barbara and Taeko raised their heads at the same time and saw a small bird descend.
"You're back?"
Chelsea landed on the ground and returned to her original form.
She was panting heavily, her forehead covered in sweat.
Gaea Foundation was an extremely powerful Teigu, but the stronger the power, the more restrictions naturally came with using it.
Transforming consumed the user's stamina, and transforming into different things consumed different amounts.
A bird was one of the forms that consumed a great deal of stamina.
And Chelsea's greatest weakness was her basic stamina.
More importantly, her still-shaken expression made Barbara's heart grow much heavier the moment she saw it.
"How was it?"
"Hah… It's really, really bad."
Seeing that she was unwell, Taeko thoughtfully stepped forward to support her, helping her stand steady.
She and Chelsea had both undergone Barbara's training together.
Whether or not they could be called friends was unclear, because neither of them had ever discussed that subject.
But their relationship was probably fairly "good."
Chelsea caught her breath and began reporting.
"The Tengu Party's people were all wiped out. There were probably around forty of them. On top of that, the places where fighting broke out were severely damaged. It was most likely caused by the secret weapon the Empire's assassination unit is rumored to possess."
"And the enemy personnel were almost completely unharmed. Right now, they should be moving toward their rendezvous point. I originally wanted to follow them and find out where they were meeting, but I was discovered."
"That killing intent was too strong. I may already have been exposed, so I didn't dare continue investigating."
What?
The Tengu Party was an organization with quite a reputation.
Their members should have been fairly strong, yet a force of nearly forty people had been wiped out almost without injuring the enemy?
That was far too exaggerated.
Even Barbara herself could not win against forty experts from the Tengu Party.
In fact, she was not even sure whether she could retreat unscathed.
If the intelligence was accurate—no, since Chelsea had brought it back, there was definitely no problem with it—then the enemy's actual combat strength was not something they could face head-on.
Seeing how the situation had changed, Taeko asked, "What should we do now? Do we give up?"
"No."
Barbara smiled eerily.
"They are in the open, while we are in the dark. That is our advantage. Next, all we need to do is wait for the right opportunity. Don't forget, we are assassins. Assassination is our true skill."
She knew that the other side would not give up easily either.
They would definitely remain here.
Because their objective had yet to be achieved.
The connection between the Revolutionary Army and the foreign tribes had not been cut.
"Hehe. They still don't know that the intelligence was bait we deliberately leaked to lure them in."
The Revolutionary Army truly did have contact with the foreign tribes, but that batch of goods was not traveling by water along the White Wolf River.
They had deliberately mixed truth and falsehood and passed the information to internal personnel.
Even the people who received this false intelligence did not know whether it was true or false.
Those people were cannon fodder.
From the beginning, it had already been decided that they would be sacrificed.
Oarburgh temporarily withdrew.
...
Meanwhile, Gozuki looked at everyone who had arrived at the rendezvous point without a single person missing, and he secretly let out a sigh of relief.
He smiled and said, "Well done. No one fell behind. It seems all of you really have grown stronger over this period."
In truth, he had originally thought one or two of them would be missing.
After all, they had completely lost the intelligence war.
The enemy had set such an exaggerated trap for them, and this incident was truly embarrassing.
Nahashu said calmly, "Father, I noticed a bird different from the giant owl appear. Could that be…"
Gozuki analyzed, "Without a doubt, it was the enemy's eyes. And there is another strange point. Birds can at most deliver messages, yet judging by the enemy's reaction, it was almost as if those birds could speak. Otherwise, there would be no way to explain their efficiency being so high."
Birds were just animals.
Even if someone could train birds and make them obey orders, a bird was still a bird. It could not open its mouth and tell its trainer their information.
Therefore, even if one could control birds, what meaning would there be in using them to monitor an enemy?
Birds could not speak or write. Even if they saw something, they would have no way to express it.
If it were for tracking, that would still be understandable.
But this was clearly not tracking. It was more like… surveillance.
Otherwise, there was no way to explain why the enemy had been able to prepare such a trap.
"It may be some kind of secret art," Gozuki murmured.
"Secret art?"
The term was unfamiliar to all seven members of the elite unit.
They had never studied that.
Gozuki explained, "So-called secret arts usually come from ancient times. They possess powers that surpass human understanding and can create many unbelievable phenomena. Even I have only heard of them. People who master secret arts are mysterious and rare, and most of them belong to foreign tribes. But if someone among the enemy can use a secret art to understand what animals mean, then today's events make sense."
Or perhaps…
The secret art user themselves could transform into a bird?
Thinking of that, Gozuki decisively shook his head.
No matter how one looked at it, that was too unlikely.
The purpose of Koken Temple's martial arts was to improve one's ability to control the body. Body control was an absolute field.
At Gozuki's level, he could freely control even his hair.
He could fire his fingernails out with power greater than bullets, and even his tongue could become a weapon stronger than a sword.
That was why he understood that the fundamental mass of bones and muscles could not be changed.
A bird's size was hundreds of times smaller than that of a human.
How could a person shrink down to that extent?
And even if they could, would they be able to return afterward?
If there was anything in the world that could accomplish something so miraculous, then it would not be a secret art.
'Uh.'
Suddenly, a thought flashed through Gozuki's mind.
'Could it be… a Teigu?'
'Did the enemy have a Teigu user among them?'
He was shocked by the conclusion he had reached.
Because Teigu possessed that much deterrent power.
A single Teigu user could influence far too many things. No Teigu user could ever be judged by common sense.
"Damn it. There's too little intelligence. At the very least—wait, right. Isn't there someone who specializes in researching Teigu?"
In the current situation, if they wanted to reverse the tide, they first had to figure out the enemy's ability.
Otherwise, there would be no way to recover from their disadvantage, because they would not even know where to begin.
Avoiding the children, Gozuki found an empty place and took out a black crystal from his chest.
"Let me think. How was this thing used again?"
'First like this, then like this, and then…'
Right. Finally, he only needed to do this.
Beep—!
The black crystal suddenly lit up and turned into an object emitting white light.
Strangely enough, although it was clearly so bright, the light remained completely restrained and did not scatter outward.
Then, the light changed again, and a vivid image appeared.
Noah looked at Gozuki in the image while sitting in his chair and asked, "What is it? Why are you contacting me?"
Gozuki stared at the scene before him in astonishment.
"It can really communicate over long distances?"
One had to understand that Noah was in the Imperial Capital, while Gozuki was on the Empire's northeastern border.
The two of them were separated by an extremely vast distance, yet now they could speak face-to-face.
It was nothing short of a miracle.
"Didn't I already tell you that when I gave it to you? Don't tell me you never believed me at all." Noah sounded thoroughly speechless.
"To be honest, even now, I can hardly believe my own eyes."
Gozuki watched Noah pick up a steaming cup of coffee. Even the rising steam above it was clearly visible.
This was practically a strategic-level invention.
"Right, let's get to business. I want to ask you something about Teigu…"
Gozuki explained his theory.
After Noah finished listening, his eyes immediately lit up.
"No, Gozuki, your guess is correct. Those birds monitoring you are probably people who transformed."
Among the information he had gathered on Teigu, there was indeed one miraculous Teigu like that.
Transform: Gaea Foundation
It could allow the user to transform into anything according to their will.
The ability was simple, yet utterly great.
Noah was extremely interested on it.