Though the Revolutionary Army's operations were still confined to remote regions, their influence had already crept deep into the heart of the Empire's capital.
Judging by the mood that had settled over the Imperial Capital of late, the place might as well have been hell itself.
...
Knock, knock.
Someone rapped at the apartment door.
This particular caller seemed to have manners, though—the knock was calm, unhurried, almost gentle.
"We've certainly had a lot of visitors lately," Noah remarked, setting down the notes in his hand and rising to his feet.
Taeko had gone out to buy ingredients, so there was no one to answer the door but him.
He pulled it open to find Bill standing on the other side.
Recognizing him at once, Noah offered a greeting. "Teacher—it's you."
Bill gave a low grunt and a nod.
The two of them went inside and settled onto the living room sofa, sitting across from each other.
Bill let his gaze drift over the room before it finally came to rest on the notes lying on the table—the work of some ancient alchemist.
'This boy is as eager to learn as ever,' he thought.
In his own youth, he too had been captivated by ancient alchemy.
Sadly, the talent for it had simply never been there; no matter how much effort he poured in, the meaning of it had always slipped through his fingers.
What he didn't realize was that Noah wasn't so different.
The difference was that the Truthseeker allowed Noah to brand all that tangled, intricate knowledge directly into his mind, strengthening both his memory and his understanding.
Alchemy was a lost art—one with no textbooks to learn it from.
Lamur's handbook had been the very first model on his path into the craft, granting him a grasp of some of the conventions and fundamentals of the old art.
But it was hardly something you could call a proper textbook.
The more he read, the more Noah came to see that alchemy varied wildly from one practitioner to the next, shaped by each alchemist's temperament and learning.
"Looks like you're still sharpening your craft," Bill said, a note of quiet satisfaction in his voice.
"There's no end to learning. The deeper I dig, the more I see how boundless knowledge really is," Noah answered earnestly.
"True enough. From the time I was young, I treated science as the truth and threw myself into studying it—and before I'd even noticed, I was already past fifty."
A mortal's life barely stretched to a hundred years.
In this world, anyone who reached seventy was reckoned to have lived a long life, and those who died peacefully of old age made up less than five percent of the population.
Were it not for the foreigners who crossed the sea to the Empire in droves, the refugees streaming in from abroad, and the slaves trafficked across its borders, the Empire wouldn't even have been able to maintain its base population.
A mere hundred years—even wrung dry of every last moment—could yield no more than a single drop in the ocean of knowledge.
And once you factored in the limits of time and space, what one could actually grasp grew poorer still.
It was precisely that frustration, that hunger, which had awakened in him the magic of Yog-Sothoth.
And perhaps, as a soul reborn into another world, he had carried that latent possibility within himself from the very start.
"Gozuki... is dead."
"So I heard."
"I read your statement. You say you had nothing to do with it, so I'll take you at your word." Bill's tone stayed even.
"The Elite Corps has lost its commander now. That makes them quite dangerous."
Every member of the Elite Corps was someone who had clawed their way to the top through brutal trials of selection.
From childhood they'd stayed at Gozuki's side, forging extraordinary strength and everything else a killer required.
And every last one of them came with their own damage—problem children, all.
With Gozuki gone, would they stay as loyal to the Empire as before?
And what if they defected, the way Akame had?
Bill freely admitted he didn't have the strength to hold these Elite Corps monsters in check.
But.
"If it were you, though—you could rein those brats in, couldn't you? Keep them in line. Get them to actually work for the Empire."
"You want me to step into Gozuki's role?"
"The title's beside the point. If those kids turn on us the way Akame did and become our enemies, that's a real headache for everyone involved."
As things stood, the Elite Corps had lost Green to death and Akame to defection, with Kurome dragged out of the Empire alongside her.
That left six: Nanashu, Guy, Cornelia, Tsukushi, Poney, and Gin.
Gin was a later addition, though he too had once been under Gozuki's command.
An Elite Corps like this was a far cry from what it had been—much diminished in strength, and the missions ahead would surely no longer be the easy work they once were.
'Hmm...'
Noah didn't answer right away.
He bowed his head and sank into thought.
The Elite Corps' strength mattered to the Empire, but it fell well short of being indispensable.
If the Empire decided that Gozuki's death made them a liability, it wouldn't hesitate for a heartbeat to dispose of all six.
By Bill's reasoning, if he took over Gozuki's post and proved he could manage those kids, he ought to be able to keep them alive.
But... how far could that really go?
Even if he kept them safe for now—what then?
The Elite Corps was the elite of the assassination unit, sent on the most lethal assignments imaginable.
And on top of that, they were certain to spend every waking hour fixated on avenging Gozuki.
Which meant they were bound to come up against the Revolutionary Army—or rather, against Night Raid first of all, since Akame belonged to that very organization.
Given the strength on both sides, the outcome was sure to be one nobody wanted to see.
And what if the Empire lost in the end?
As members of the Empire's assassination unit, they had countless lives on their hands.
They'd made no shortage of enemies, and there wasn't a chance in the world they'd be forgiven or let off.
Whether they kept serving the Empire or turned against it, both roads led to the same dead end.
As for a way to pull them free of such a trap... Noah could think of roughly two.
The first: extract them from the assassination unit and make them his own people.
The second: get them out of the Empire entirely—not to join the Revolutionary Army, but to head straight overseas.
Both plans, however, shared a single flaw. Both would require the Minister's power.
Retiring from the assassination unit was, in itself, something that was almost never allowed.
The day you joined, your fate was sealed: the only way out was death.
Either an enemy killed you, or your own side purged you.
But with an order from Minister Honest, even the Emperor's own commands could be overturned.
The trouble was that Honest... was no kindly soul.
To Noah's face he showed the utmost deference, but in private he never once stopped scheming for a way to catch him off-guard, to dig up some weakness he could exploit.
These kids weren't exactly a weakness of his, but if the Minister set his sights on them because of him, it would leave a sour taste in his mouth.
"In any case, I've gathered them up for you. Go to this address tomorrow."
"You've already decided for me—so why even ask?" Noah said, a touch helpless.
All that deliberating just now had been for nothing.
"You'll accept, so I went ahead and arranged it in advance."
'Sigh.'
'Will I accept? ...Maybe. Probably.'
Having said his piece, Bill stood and drew an envelope from the inner pocket of his coat.
"None of those six have any registered identity in the Empire. Go to the barracks today and register them with papers that let them move around the Capital. Otherwise they'll have a hard time getting anywhere in the place as it is now. Don't forget."
Security within the Capital fell, by and large, to the Capital Guard.
In extraordinary times like these especially, simply moving about required proof of identity; anyone who couldn't produce it when stopped for questioning would be hauled in as a suspect on the spot.
The letter Bill had handed over was, in all likelihood, a writ of command—one that could directly order the people at the barracks to act on his behalf.
Though even without it, Leims could have sorted the matter out for him.
Since Taeko still hadn't come back, once Bill had gone, Noah set out with the writ in hand, picking up a few things along the way.
He was, after all, stepping onto Leims's turf—it wouldn't do to arrive empty-handed.
...
The barracks was still some distance off when the long, snaking queue came into view ahead of it.
It was much like the day he'd first arrived in the Capital.
No—the line was several times longer now than it had been back then.
More people enlisting was a clear sign that the Empire's broader fortunes had soured—or rather, soured far worse than before.
When a nation prospered, its people had a wider array of ways to make a living; every trade flourished, and fewer chose the army.
After all, serving in the Empire's military meant going to war.
To the west and the north of the country lurked vast numbers of foreign tribes, eyeing the Empire hungrily at all hours, clashing with it every year in no fewer than ten battles, large and small.
Better to run a little business or scrape by on odd jobs than to enlist and court death at any moment.
Now, though, with the Empire stretched to the breaking point, the divide between the classes had grown absolute.
There were only two sides left—the oppressors and the oppressed—and no trade could stay stable for long.
Any day might bring the loss of your job, or even your life.
Even the mountain villages, which had scarcely traded with the outside world since ancient times, could no longer feed themselves under the crushing weight of taxes.
A village producing a hundred tons of grain a year not only had to surrender ninety of them—for every single ton it managed to keep, it owed double that ton's worth again in gold.
Villagers who honestly farmed and felled timber, laboring from the first day of the year to the last, still had to go into debt just to make their taxes whole.
Two or three years at the most, and a person would be driven to ruin.
Great numbers of people were reduced to slavery, stripped of any right to choose, doomed to toil for the nobles and the wealthy merchants forever—until the work finally killed them.
Those who still had a chance, of course, had no wish to walk that final road, and so they all chose to enlist instead.
Once you joined and became a soldier of the Empire, you had food, lodging, and a wage to collect every month.
The result was that every able-bodied man of fighting age came flocking to the barracks, fighting tooth and nail for the right to wear the Imperial uniform.
And even that was a privilege reserved for men alone.
For a woman to enlist was extraordinarily hard; unless she was the elite of the elite, a graduate of the Empire's officers' academy, an ordinary woman had no right to serve at all.
You wouldn't find a single woman among the ranks of the Empire's army—save for a handful of very particular exceptions.
---------
Read 40 chapters ahead and support me on patreon.
patreon (.)com/Newbietranslator