9 Chapter 9

The air was heavy and getting colder by the second.

The room was silent for one too many seconds.

Finally, Gildar was the one who broke it.

"Judging by the way you look right now, and the fact that you haven't said a word, I'm going to assume you know who I mean when I say 'he'."

Neither Curtis or Ritsuko were in the mood for his words, but out of the two, only the latter had a had a clear enough mind to speak.

"And what exactly are we supposed to do with these files?"

"I want you to get someone to approve and sanction those operations." He answered.

"HOW STUP..." Curtis wanted to blast him, but Ritsuko held her hand up to stop her.

As much as she didn't like him, doing that didn't exactly help them in any way.

"You know we can't do that, if we get someone to approve these then we'll be lightening your sentence as they wouldn't be filed under rogue missions anymore." She excused.

To which he replied, "Oh please, I already have three life time sentences, what's this going to cut mine down by? a quarter of a life time? At the end of the day it changes nothing for me."

With the increase of lifespan that was tied to the rise in a persons ability as a magus, a life sentence needed to be quantified, and the governing bodies felt that the lifespan of a normal human which was a hundred years, sufficed for those measurements.

With how many charges he has so far, the files in front of them was just a drop in the bucket. at most, he'd lose 20 years off his initial sentencing meaning that he'd still be stuck here for 280 years.

Additionally, his sentencing was up for consideration. But in no way did that mean it was going to get any lighter.

Currently, he was being investigated on so many of these that even now the charges on him were racking up. If anything, he'd be lucky if his sentencing was just doubled.

They were just waiting for all of his cases to be reviewed so they could give him one sentencing in bulk rather than call him in every other month just to tell him his sentence was increased by a few years.

After all, he wasn't going anywhere for at least another 200 years. So they had all the time in the world to decide what they wanted to do to him.

By the end of that, if they got these files sanctioned here, it would at most take out a fraction of a drop in the bucket.

"Is that what you told yourself all those time? It doesn't change anything for you so it doesn't matter!? it doesn't affect you even if you're the one doing it anyway!, right!?" Curtis snapped suddenly.

It wasn't the logic behind his argument, so much as his attitude towards everything he'd done that infuriated her.

So even if he wasn't wrong per se, she was just looking for anything she could shove his face into.

"You know what! Why don't you tell me exactly what it is I did!" This time it was Gildar's turn to snap back. "Or do you even know?"

Curtis went from speechless stare to shaking her head left and right, "...No I don't, all I heard were the killings, the hostages... I'm not completely clear on them, but at the very least I know it's what soldiers wouldn't do."

"Don't you dare throw that in my face, you got out and found some profound place for yourself in the big scheme of things, you got lucky, and that's not on me." Gildar responded, cynicism dripping from his tongue, "And since you know about soldiers so well, you know that taking orders is what soldiers do best, not giving them."

"So what you're saying is..." as usual Ritsuko caught on first.

He simply stared at her, which was more than clear enough to confirm her assumptions.

He didn't simply go rogue.

Someone somewhere needed their deeds done, but they couldn't do it through the normal military channels. So they set aside men like him to do those operations in the dark.

"The only reason I'm alive and well right now is because I have several stacks thicker than this one with their names on it and I put them in locations that even I'm not privy to." He whispered. "I let myself get put in here nice and quietly, but let's just say that a lot of powerful people would rather lose a leg than have me get a paper-cut in here."

Basically, he'd given it to a 'friend', who gave it to his/her 'friends' to give to their 'friends', and so on and so forth.

At the end of that, the poor saps at the top would have a better chance of finding it by knocking on every door in the city than trying to follow the line down.

"If that's the case why do you want to get these sanctioned and why would they allow it?" If there was a chance they might get dragged down with him, they wouldn't even allow even one of these to get out, much less a whole stack.

If what he said was true, then these were basically leverage to make sure he stayed alive. Losing a stack of these was like being one stack closer to a death ruled to be by 'accident' or 'suicide'.

"There's none of their names in there, and with how interested they are in me since I started living here, it wasn't hard to get the message to them." It was evident that these guys had a significant pull in the system if they could even get spies in the highest graded prison in the state.

Considering the type of inmates that were kept inside here, getting them to do anything for you was not cheap.

"As for why I want it sanctioned.. I want the compensation for finishing these missions.." He continued.

"What for? it's useless in here." Ritsuko asked.

He was already in jail anyway, and with how things were going, that seemed to be the rest of his life, money wasn't exactly something he needed in here.

"I want it to be given to the kid." He looked around before answering.

"Don't act like you care about him." Curtis spat.

"It's back to this eh?" He sighed as he leaned back in his chair.

"We never left it" She spoke, "don't even think for a second that because you were simply following orders that it means we're supposed to think you're innocent, you have every opportunity to turn them down, one way or another I think you at least got something out of the exchange, but regardless of all the other stuff, which I'm still not completely sure whether to believe or not, there's no reason to do this to a kid."

"What are you talking about? I didn't do anything to that kid." He replied.

"Bullsh*t you're telling me that the kid can do level 0 magic without adding some outside help into his system? What did you use? How many lives did it take to get one good one?" Curtis interrogated, snapping off the edge of her chair between her fingers, she'd smack the table again if she didn't already smash it to the floor making it much too far for her to relieve her immediate anger.

"None" He caught on to what she was digging at. She suspected the kid to be a modified human experiment or weapon, which considering the history of their world so far, wasn't as far fetched as one would assume.

Every army probably had one or two Joseph Mengele type nut jobs of their own who had no qualms with crossing the line on their experiments.

And usually the body count they racked up during those experiments was only a little less than what a small civil war would amount to.

"As much as I would enjoy playing conspiracy theorist with you, I had no need to do anything to that kid." He continued. "By the time I found him, he could do more or less what he could do now, at most I taught him the best place to aim it."

"So what, you're just going to tell us that the kid has that kind of skill and is able to do level zero magic to that level and ask us to just swallow that kind of information?" Akagi clarified, but even though she was trying her best to go through this as controlled as possible, her eyes involuntarily widened and the thoughts she was having.

"Sure, if you want to put it that way..." He shrugged.

"Why should we believe you?" Like it or not, finding out he was one of those previously aforementioned army nut jobs would probably be easier to wrap their heads around rather than what he was currently telling them.

"Because I can probably tell a much more believable lie than 'I don't know much about the kid who was found in my home'" He hit the nail right on the head. "You can check those operation files, I only know that kid from 2 years ago."

Ritsuko, immediately opened the oldest one to check. She was extremely eager to get to the bottom of this, because it seemed the more she heard, the more questions she had...

And the less answers she got.. "He's not lying, the earliest operation was 1 year and 8 months ago."

"That doesn't prove anything, he could've been attempting to make them from much earlier." Curtis tried to reason.

Honestly at this point she was just grasping at anything she could get mad at him for. So far anything she said about him was basically shot down, making it seem unreasonable for her to get mad, which in a weird way actually made her madder.

"And if I had a way to make child soldiers who could use level zero magic that way, I would decide to just stop at one after 2 years." He said sarcastically, cutting down her argument once more. "And the guys above me, they suddenly decided they don't want to stick their hands into that kind of research, just let a perfect subject like him run around?"

Once again, his argument made sense. That kind of research would no doubt require a lot of time and funds, there would be no way that they'd let the kid get around, much less end up in Curtis's hands.

"Even you have to know that it's hard to take any of this at face value, truth or not." Ritsuko reasoned again, not very well though. She was basically asking for something she can understand, which may or may not be the truth.

"What do you want me to say?" He shrugged.

"How about why you want to give the boy the compensation for these operations." She said.

"Like it or not, I am a soldier." He explained. "Regardless of how distasteful my actions have been so far, my number one interest has always been the security of this state."

"And that kid has served that interest well, whether he knows it or not, he deserves the compensation as well as merits that come with those."

"Merits for assisting in the death of innocents?" Curtis asked.

"Please, the kills were unsanctioned, but those people were far from innocent... the law just wasn't able to convict them." He answered.

"In society, that means they're innocent." Ritsuko shot him down.

Killing people who weren't convicted by law for their crimes was nothing more than vigilantism at best, which was still pretty punishable by law, and they were pretty sure that's not what Gildar had been doing.

"In reality, that means they're either rich enough or powerful enough to make things go away." He retorted sarcastically.

"You could be wrong." Curtis argued.

"I'm not" He replied.

"How can you be sure?" She asked.

"I'm a soldier not a weapon, I don't shoot a man down just because someone pulled the trigger" He iterated. "It takes months of target research before we go through with even one of these, by then I'd know better than their mothers if their kid's innocent, that's what makes me good."

"The fact that you're in here suggests otherwise." Curtis calmed down enough to simply take a jab at him.

"You mean the fact that I'm in here instead of in the bottom of some river somewhere?" He countered sarcastically.

"You shouldn't be in a position where either could be a possibility." She looked down.

"But I am, and I'm pretty sure you're smart enough that you'd never be in the same spot as me." He replied. "That's why I made sure the kid ends up with you."

"Yeah... What!?" She was in the middle of responding to him before the latter part of his answer registered in her head.

Turning her head to look at Ritsuko, she saw a thing she'd never seen the woman do in her life.

She shrugged.

"Surprise!"

avataravatar
Next chapter