WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ The Reluctant Imperialist

Chapter 107

──────

How to Reach a Dream (2)

The space reeked of blood, mana-laced chemicals, and horse dung.

I looked at Ashton, tied to a chair. Outside, the clash of blades was frantic, but my own time felt frozen.

"......Is that you?"

He asked me.

The Izenheim named Ashton called his comrade's name through ragged breaths.

"Yulian."

"Yulian......"

But he could not open his eyes.

Because he had none.

Dark red blood flowed from his empty sockets, down his cheeks, and to his chin.

──Thump.

My heart still beat.

Izenheim.

They had been hiding among us for quite a long time. There was surely one among the knights, no, maybe more than one.

"Yulian......"

A knight named Ashton, calling for Yulian.

Should I kill him.

Or let him live.

Thoughts spread through my head.

Ways to keep him alive, interrogate him, and use him. Chances to extract what he knew and track other Izenheim.

But Izenheim only served their own kind. They wanted only the grand cause of destruction.

They were otherworldly species with no will to live, no, species whose entire lives were focused only on that one end.

Could I really use beings like that?

I still did not even know exactly what I was fighting.

Even now, Izenheim's true form remained hidden behind a veil. I was certain they existed, but only as an opaque silhouette. Their full shape was still unknown to me.

Worrying over questions with no answers was useless.

The enemy of humanity could not be left alive.

Methods could differ, but that duty could never change.

To stop my thoughts, I set a standard.

It became my reference point, my axiom, and then my conviction.

"......"

On the ground were strange drugs the cartel bastards had used for torture. I picked up a reagent vial and a discarded syringe. With the virus's intuition, I understood the mana formula inside the drug.

The virus accepted mana as mana.

Maybe it even interpreted things that were not mana as mana, then absorbed them.

──Brrrrr.

The liquid in the vial boiled.

A variable released by the virus seeped into it and twisted the mana formula that made up the drug.

It was my first time using this method. It was another new kind of realization, yet a question rose.

Why was I trying to kill Ashton in such a complicated way?

Just because I did not want Yulian to suspect me?

Thunk.

I drove the needle into the back of Ashton's neck.

"......!"

A short groan escaped him. His body convulsed.

The moment the syringe emptied, Ashton's head slumped weakly.

His breathing stopped.

"......"

I crushed the empty syringe into powder in my hand. I hoisted Ashton's corpse over my shoulder. Then I left the stable and ran. I sprinted through the jungle.

Yulian, who had finished dealing with his opponents, followed behind me a moment later. Shouts and footsteps of cartel men echoed at our backs, but it did not matter.

On this harsh mountain path, we were faster than any vehicle.

Knights were human tactical weapons cultivated by the Empire's extreme Iron Men ideology.

Time had dulled that meaning a little, but at least the two of us were not fakes.

* * *

An unnamed forest in the borderlands.

I lowered Ashton from my shoulder. Yulian lit a small mana spark and illuminated the body.

"He's dead."

Under the bluish light, Ashton's condition looked horrific. Flesh torn away, bone exposed, countless marks of torture.

Yet Yulian showed no emotion.

Not even a flicker moved in his clouded eyes.

I found that strange and asked him,

"Was he your comrade?"

Yulian nodded.

"He was."

I looked at Ashton.

This man would never return to the Empire. Just like before regression, even his body would never be found.

Because he had the heart of a subspecies.

"What are you going to do with this corpse now?"

Yulian asked.

"I......"

My mouth stopped.

Just now, Yulian's voice echoed in my ears.

'What are you going to do with this corpse now.'

It sounded like he was asking about the corpse's use.

As if there were something in that line I did not know, something he did.

Suddenly.

A spark lit in my head.

Strange suspicions began to rise.

Looking back, this was odd.

What exactly had Yulian done before I got here?

Yulian was an outstanding knight. In Sentinel, few matched him in both pen and sword.

Even so, he was too calm. His comrade had been kidnapped, yet he did not move first and only moved as I led.

As if he had been waiting for me to find something. Guiding me there.

"......"

That was too much to dismiss as just his dry personality.

The Yulian I knew was never incompetent.

"......Yulian."

I turned toward him. The suspicion that had grown like a branch reached one single possibility.

Why had Ashton suddenly been detected by the cartel, and how had I ended up here?

A knight Izenheim was rare. Even from Izenheim's side, someone that valuable had to be kept alive. How could he have been captured by trash like a cartel?

"It was you."

No matter how I thought about it, only this man made sense.

"......"

Yulian looked at me in silence. In his deep eyes, an unreadable light flickered.

"You."

I asked him.

"Did you kill Ashton?"

Yulian's expression was always the same. His face gave nothing away. I had mistaken it for composure, calm, and poise. I had been very wrong.

I had never once looked inside him.

There was too much I did not know about him.

"......Yeah."

Yulian nodded with a low cough.

"I leaked information to the cartel."

My face hardened.

He lowered his gaze to Ashton's corpse. A faint breath slipped through his teeth.

"Ashton. This man was not a pure Imperial. He borrowed the identity of a commoner named Ashton...... he was a man with dreams that were too big."

Yulian spoke quietly, as if recalling a not-so-distant past.

"I was the first one to learn that fact. I was also the one who removed him from Sentinel."

If you entered Empire Point while impersonating an Aran, the minimum sentence was death.

Anyone who knew and ignored it could also receive an extreme sentence close to death, depending on status.

"I let Ashton go. I let him keep the title of knight."

Yulian confessed both his own crime and Ashton's.

"He thanked me. Said he would repay me somehow."

A glass-shard sharpness entered his dry voice.

"But at some point, Ashton's greed seems to have grown again. He broke his promise and showed signs of trying to return to the center."

"......You were watching him?"

"Someone who deceived the Empire could deceive me too."

A man whose inside could not be read showed no openings.

Yulian continued calmly.

"Max. I do not know what is right. I do not know what is wrong either. But I can clearly see what is rotten."

Yulian's gaze flashed slowly.

"Do you know how much cash the cartel pays up to the palace and the Imperial Guard?"

The Imperial Guard scooped money from everywhere.

Soaked in drugs, soaked in shit, soaked in blood, it made no difference. They could wash it clean anyway.

"Even so, the upper ranks tolerate the cartel. Some even see it as war-preparation funds."

Yulian went on in a subdued tone.

"But that money comes back into the Empire through the border. It destroys subjects and crushes the poor. They are breaking human souls for scraps of profit."

I sat on a rock in the forest as if it were a chair.

"Max. Do you know the crimes nobles commit using narcotics? Do you know the crimes addicts commit to get narcotics?"

Upper-class nobles forcing commoners into addiction and turning them into horrific slaves, even children among the victims. A father high on drugs slaughtering his own family, and people selling their family to get more drugs......

"Before this harm spreads further, before it becomes irreversible, someone has to cut it off."

While I stayed in the center, Yulian had watched all of that, watched it, and watched it again.

"Maximilian."

He called my name.

"To bring down the cartel, normal methods are impossible. We need far more money, and people."

I understood his point quickly.

"......You need a stronger cartel?"

Yulian nodded.

"Destruction and replacement."

Then he pointed at Ashton's corpse.

"Use this as a pretext to destroy the current cartel, and replace the empty space with one that can at least be controlled."

Yulian's plan, and the reason he asked me to cooperate, had been this from the start.

"You were testing me."

"I will not deny it."

For a moment, I did not know what to say to him.

After regression, maybe for the first time, I had no words.

The miracle of regression had shown me a new side of Yulian.

"If we start a war without fixing the cartel, it will badly harm the Empire too."

He tried to persuade me.

"Also, narcotic raw materials are no different from stimulants. In wartime, they become critical supplies."

Raw materials grown on cartel farms, including black poppy, were used as battlefield stimulants.

Stim packs were a core war resource.

"For someone as purely imperialist as you, there is no mission more fitting than this."

I looked at Yulian.

His offer was right for me. For the Empire's interests, and for my own cause.

But was it right for Yulian himself? For a man worn down and worn out, with both feet buried too deep in the world's darkness......

"Yulian."

Suddenly, the words spilled from me.

"What are you searching for?"

Swaaaaaa.

Wind blew through and shook the branches. Shadows rippled like a dance.

Yulian lifted his head and looked at the night sky. Soft moonlight pooled in his eyes.

"......Who knows."

From him, I saw it.

"Maybe I am searching for a way to reach a dream."

I saw a fragment of Baltaras.

* * *

The finest villa in downtown Berkina.

I opened Ashton's rib cage on a steel plate. I examined the heart first in detail. The other organs were not needed.

"......Subspecies."

"You learned autopsy?"

"Yes. The heart shape is different. The more mana-trained the person is, the clearer it gets."

Atria, ventricles, muscle, all of it was different. Unlike humans, a subspecies heart was altered by mana. Depending on individual talent, more efficient paths were carved.

"I'll keep the heart."

I removed the heart and put the corpse in a freezer.

Thanks to Yulian, I learned something new.

A living Izenheim was hard to use, but a dead Izenheim had plenty of uses.

"Then I will explain now."

"Yes."

Yulian pointed to the chalkboard on the wall. Dozens of photos were connected like a spiderweb.

"Costa, Pellier, and Kunta. These three are the most influential cartel heads, the ones they call capos. They fight each other and dump drugs competitively and recklessly. No order, no control."

I scanned the capos and their men. In their world, they had many nicknames: Viper, Boss of Bosses, Iron Boar.

Their world was small.

"We can kill them easily. We'll handle the cartel's 'destruction' with this corpse."

Ashton. This man would become a hero. Not an Izenheim spy with a forged identity, but an ill-fated knight brutally murdered while trying to protect Imperial civilians.

If we enraged Sentinel and the knight forces, then hurled that power at the cartel, the destruction operation would solve itself.

Yulian pointed out that exact part.

"Even if we cut the head, new heads will rise."

Before regression, the Empire had cut cartel heads too. But their subordinates had splintered and run wild, making the situation even more chaotic. Even after the Empire fell, their tyranny continued.

"If that is how it ends, better to create one controllable organization that covers the whole cartel."

In other words, raise the strongest cartel.

"Do we have candidates?"

"I have one I have been raising for quite a long time. He has skill and purpose. But...... cough."

Yulian gave a dry cough. Cough, cough. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and gave a bitter smile.

"My own funds had limits. To raise him, we need even more enormous money than this."

"Funding is not a problem."

"I know. But honestly, cartels consume money far beyond what you think. No matter how much you pour in, it disappears."

Yulian seemed worried about me. Maybe even that was an act, but one thing was certain.

Just as I could not read Yulian, he could not read me either.

"You saw my money and still worry? You don't need to."

I spoke calmly.

"I'll tell only you, Sir Knight. My net assets are at least ten billion dollars."

"Ten billion?"

Yulian blinked.

"Yes. That is the minimum. Truthfully, even I don't know exactly how much I have. It increases every day."

Kanillan short-position profits, commodity surges, mana stone mine revenue, and the absorption of multiple Imperial companies. The structure where money produced money was already complete.

"......I see. I did not expect ten billion."

At least for me, anything solvable with money was the easiest thing of all.

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried