Godfather's System - 220. Exaltation - 12

After having stayed with Dahmut for a day, putting together a plan for him, and even helping him to take down one of the Somaton handlers, I left the capital with the satisfaction of a job well done. Of course, Dahmut was capable enough to kill him, but disguising his death as an accident had been a tricky issue.

People with the System didn’t die by slipping in showers or in convenient car accidents. Leading the two nobles near before inciting them to fight hadn’t been easy, but it was worth it. After dealing with him, cracking the dead drop of the handler had been easy, and so was adding an alternate identity for Dahmut as a mid-ranking spy as a local recruit with several local spies under him.

They had some measures to prevent our strategy, but nowhere near enough for me to mark them as truly professional. As usual, relying on their Stats and magic too much to perfect the organizational details.

Too bad I couldn’t sweep through them. They were careless, but not idiots. The accidental death of a handler was acceptable, but multiple deaths in a short sequence would raise too many red flags. Ideal for creating chaos, but not so much for establishing a spy ring.

I hoped that Dahmut would establish it successfully. I needed to find the identity of that mysterious organization sooner rather than later. Otherwise, I didn’t have high expectations from the spy ring. Even being updated about the gossip of the capital would be enough.

Of course, I hoped that Dahmut would prove himself capable and give me much more, but there was a distinction between hopes and mission requirements. Hoping my employees would pull miracles was alright, making those miracles a necessity for survival was not.

That was a sign of poor leadership.

With that thought, I turned to my next task even as I moved toward the Somaton-Ralum border.

It was time to have a talk with my uninformed recruit, who was still operating, still moving rapidly between different directions.

With Speed, traveling to the border took about a day, and I found the place locked in a tense cold war. On both sides, there were three flying fortresses and about twenty flying castles for each side, representing a significant investment of their military forces.

However, both sides stayed behind their land-based fortifications, showing their reluctance to start an all-out war.

That was not a surprise. The only reason I had dared to poke around even if it risked starting a war was because I was confident they wouldn’t start one Not when the Calamity was already looming over them.

I could feel the location of my unwilling recruit, but going directly to his location would not be a good idea. Instead, I passed through the border, my Stats making it a trivial achievement. The security measures kept me away from the palace and the royal library, but it was hard to apply the same security measures for the whole stretch.

Once I passed the border, I visited one of the hunting towns near one of his hiding spots — real-time information about his location making it easy to discover him — once again dressed as an old hunter, a bow on my back and a sword on my waist. My appearance didn’t earn a second look as I approached. The crisis at the border made a lot of people leave the immediate region.

That was evident in the rows of tents that spread around the walls. However, professional hunters were pretty much nomadic people, so the place was far better organized than the messy camps I had dealt with when I first arrived in this world.

“Hey, young man. Do you mind pointing me to an inn?” I asked.

“Try the north side, Grandpa, but only if you have the silver,” he said. “Prices are through the roof.”

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“Those crazy nobles,” I muttered crankily. A few people looked at me. Not for no reason, as bad-mouthing nobles was never a good idea. One could never know if there was one that decided to walk around undercover and decided to take offense.

“Hey old man, keep your mouth shut,” the young man I had been talking to said. Then, he continued with a whisper. “Not all of us have one foot in the grave and have nothing to lose. And, with everything going on, who knows who’s around.”

“Sure, kiddo. Thanks for the directions,” I said before I turned and walked away, with rows of tents around me. It was the idle walk of an old man with nothing to do, but like many things that I had done, it was far from harmless.

With my Perception, I was able to capture everyone around the outer camps without a ward blocking my senses, and even then, I had the ability to penetrate them stealthily. Since my accidental recruit was able to avoid the detection of the Somaton forces for such a long time, he had to have some informers around his hiding spots to keep ahead of his enemies.

The reaction of the young man had shown that there were Somaton forces in the town, keeping an eye on things. I searched for them. The wards of the town prevented me from casually catching anything from outside. They were far from breakable, but I didn’t bother tangling with them. Even if I bypassed them, I would be trying to listen to hundreds of discussions from a distance while trying to make sense.

It would have been like trying to complete a puzzle in the dark. Technically possible, but not worth the effort. Especially when I could simply walk into the town by paying a modest entry fee. It was not out of place for an old hunter with even a modest ability to have some money for luxuries.

However, before going in, I wanted to finish observing the tents. While I expected to find the majority of Somaton agents in the town, occasionally patrolling the tents, the same was not true for the spy I expected to be there.

I walked around for almost two hours, but I failed to find anyone suspicious. Well, I found many suspicious characters including a dozen smugglers, some spies working for bandits, and other garden-variety criminals, but none of them felt particularly interested in the movements of the Somaton forces.

Unfortunately, that didn’t mean that they certainly weren’t. Even with my absurd stats and my lifetime of practical knowledge, identifying the spies wasn’t almost as easy. I had great success at the Capital, because the spies in the outer rings had been particularly active. With my perception, it didn’t take long for me to catch one of the lower-ranking spies.

From there, discovering the rest was trivial. Ultimately, the spies acted as interconnected webs, and following their connections to discover others needed only a few blasts of Charisma to carefully foster the paranoia of the first target, driving him to a safe house as a precaution.

A few deciphered documents, several subtle interrogations, and a couple of faked orders later, I was able to get my hands on their internal reports, making my life easier, as spies always watched other spies, giving me a wealth of information. That allowed me to find several spy rings in less than a day.

It was somewhat ironic that discovering a lone operator was far more challenging than discovering a complete professional spy ring, but unfortunately, it was the truth. Hunting for spies was like spear fishing in muddy waters. The speed, alacrity, and evasion of the fish didn’t help it, if it didn’t move.

Similarly, the sole operator was difficult to discover.

I paid special attention to the patrolling soldiers. Or, more accurately, I paid attention to the people who had been paying great attention to their movements, trying to see who welcomed their presence, who was merely disgruntled, and who treated them as genuine threats.

It was a slow stakeout operation, one I had learned how to do thanks to the many undercover officers who tried to target my territory back in the day when I still had a territory that spanned several states. Before I started winding down my reach to prepare for retirement.

I chuckled. I was amused by, not only the spectacular way my retirement plan had ended, but also imagining what those undercover officers would have said if I called my unique brand of stakeout slow.

For the police, any stakeout operation that lasted a week was extremely short, and that was when they checked a couple of streets.

My own brand of stakeout allowed me to check the whole tent town in less than half a day, and gave me a list of eight suspects that I could explore further. An unmatched efficiency. From there, I just needed to interrogate them or engineer some situations to see how they reacted.

The truth from their subordinates would be best.

However, now that I had identified the potential informers, I needed to gather some less reliable forms of information. While idle gossip wouldn’t be accurate, and would be more lies than truth, there were times when lies from enemies told a more accurate picture. It might tell me why Somaton was so afraid of him.

And, having dinner while not on the run would be nice as well.