Chapter 49 The Anonymous Police Personnel Still Working Overtime
The United States.
As a country with legal firearm ownership, shootings are quite common. However, this "commonality" refers to the frequency of their occurrence. For this nation, post-incident processing is still indispensable. If no one reports it, private incidents can remain beyond official intervention, but once a report is filed, the authorities must launch an investigation.
In a certain alleyway, a flurry of gunfire occurred with a density that could only be described as eerie. The residents of the United States, practicing self-preservation, hid in their homes. Amidst a profound sense of insecurity, the residents collectively chose to report the matter to the police station.
As for who would be made aware of this by reporting it to the police, that goes without saying.
Wrapped in a heavy coat, the highest-ranking official of the police station—whose diligent workday had yet to end—finally arrived late to the crime scene. In truth, the Chief had already been leading a team to search for someone not far from here; he had only rushed over to investigate after noticing the intelligence coming from within the police department. A shooting in an alleyway area was clearly not a normal situation to be handled by general officers. When the phrase "abnormally frequent gunfire" was mentioned, the Chief already had a general mental idea of who was responsible.
The Chief going to the front lines personally was a normal occurrence, though it did make his stomach ache a bit—a detail that could be ignored. Furthermore, while technically past closing time, the Chief habitually worked voluntary overtime.
"Acting without notifying me, that guy..."
Standing with a stiff posture, the Chief's expression was somewhat grim. All around him were honeycomb-like bullet holes covering the ground, the walls, and even extending to the higher sections of the houses behind the alley walls. Glass shards littered the ground.
The sheer quantity could only be described in the thousands; the Chief couldn't help but mentally reconstruct a vision of a torrential rain of bullets. Based on the distribution, there were no blind spots where one could evade. The depth of the bullet holes indicated they were all from sniper rifle rounds. If the Chief and his men had to face this kind of pre-arranged kill zone... it would be quite troublesome.
The hardest part wasn't the subsequent counterattack, but surviving the very first bullet of the ambush. Second was finding a way to break through this sniper fire coming from all directions without being pinned down and waiting for death. With the strength of the twenty-eight men under the Chief, surviving this setup wouldn't be a problem, but doing so without a single casualty would be "Hard Mode."
The twenty-eight men each wore different expressions—anger or confusion—while the Chief was the only one who realized whose handiwork this was. The only person capable of mobilizing such a unit was Faldeus.
At least, Faldeus was the only one the Chief was familiar with.
—You've shown contempt for the law and order, Faldeus.
Theoretically, the Chief also had his name listed among the masterminds, but he had never truly stood on the same battle line. The Chief and Faldeus did not sit at the same table. Before summoning a Servant, the Chief simply couldn't defeat the three main masterminds. Thus, his plan at the time was to stall until after summoning a Servant and then act according to the situation.
But even after summoning a Servant, he hadn't been able to cut ties with Faldeus and the others as he wished, because everyone had summoned Servants. The opposition had three Servants, while his side had one; the police station still lacked the capital to contend with them.
Even so, the Chief felt a momentary impulse to break with Faldeus.
Claw marks extending continuously along the walls forced the Chief to explore further inside. Taking a deep breath, the Chief led his team into a space where even the air seemed tainted, walking toward the end of the bullet trails. A strange smell still lingered in the air, so oppressive it made it hard for an ordinary person to breathe. With every step, the crisp sound of shards crunching underfoot rang out, sounding exceptionally piercing in the deathly silent alley.
The Chief advanced roughly a hundred meters through the countless bullet marks, yet the passage marked by gunfire had not yet ended. At this point, the Chief felt it wouldn't be strange if the target of the shooting were already dead. A guy like Faldeus possessed no morality whatsoever when it came to his goals, making him very difficult to deal with.
Something flashed in his peripheral vision. The Chief stopped and noticed an unnatural object on the ground—a doll that seemed slightly damaged from an impact but was still barely usable. Finding an unnatural prop in such an abnormal place, and considering it might play a key role, the Chief picked it up and carefully handed it to a nearby officer.
"Take this as evidence and keep it at the station for now."
'Why would a doll appear in a place where hundreds or thousands of ricochets were bouncing around?' The Chief couldn't understand it at all. So, he stopped thinking about it.
The Holy Grail War had only lasted one day, yet the Chief had already encountered enough irrational things. The matters regarding the blood-sucking species and the Saber went without saying. Then there was the man who debated martial arts with a Heroic Spirit, the massive hole punched out of the Kuruoka residence from thin air, and this eerie alleyway shooting.
"These guys, stop causing trouble for people."
Rubbing his temples, the Chief chanted:
"Sherlock Holmes is questing, manifest the bloodshed."
A two-verse spell, built upon a somewhat unstable foundation, was activated. This investigative magecraft was a minor spell developed by the station to save effort; essentially, it used magecraft to replace the process of bloodstain detection via scientific means. Its advantage was a very wide detection range; its flaw was that it couldn't show the specific distance to the bloodstains, only the general direction.
The formula generated a circular radar area in the user's mind. Aside from a small range of a few meters represented by the center of the circle, all other bloodstains would be perceived by the Chief as red light points on the edge of the circle.
Very quickly, a light point representing blood appeared ahead.
'The guy who was sniped probably didn't escape after all' the Chief speculated.
But when a red dot appeared to the left as well, the Chief slightly adjusted his view.
'Perhaps a firefight occurred and they took each other down.'
Immediately after, red dots to the right and rear lit up. At this stage, the Chief gradually realized something was wrong. It was as if... the one being hunted wasn't the target of the snipers, but the snipers themselves.
The red dots that lit up next could no longer be described by "front, back, left, or right." If the disk was viewed as 360 degrees, light points at various degrees responded almost simultaneously, causing the red arcs to gradually form a complete circle...
The Chief began to intuitively feel the pressure brought by the enemy's numbers. But the problem was, if the red dots represented being hit, the situation was likely the reverse!
Red dots continued to light up, to the point where he even hallucinated the sound of a warning siren. The edge of the circle was gradually plated in red, the color spreading along the arc of the disk. The Chief was surrounded in a tiny circle by the constantly emerging red, unable to move, about to be swallowed up...
Acting decisively, the Chief cut his connection to the magecraft to catch his breath. If one were to use an analogy, it was as if everyone had been struck by an attack that shifted from points to a whole plane before they could even run.
'Again?'
Announcement
Hello everyone!
As always Thank you for your support!
I'm happy to announce a new Fanfiction! There are already 40 chapters!
You can find it in my secondary account: VarieTL02
COTE: I've become a substitute
Mikage Touji transmigrated in the world of Classroom of the Elite with no explanation and entered the class 1-A, well at least he as a cool power even if a bit weak for now.
Until Ayanokouji Atsuomi asked him: "Is this you?" referring to a photo of Kyotaka.
"How could I possibly be that gloomy guy in there?!"
"Drop these useless excuses, Kiyotaka. Did you think that by changing your name and getting plastic surgery, you could escape my control?
Your enrollment materials are completely fabricated; not a single person can prove you ever existed. Furthermore, the timing of your appearance completely coincides with the time and place of Ayanokouji Kiyotaka's disappearance. And you're still saying you aren't Ayanokouji Kiyotaka?"
"Pfft..." It turns out that when people are truly speechless, they really do laugh.
"If you're looking to cause trouble, take a left out the door and find a police station. And another thing..." Mikage Toji helplessly spread his hands. "The one you are looking for is Ayanokouji Kiyotaka. What does that have to do with me, Mikage Toji?"
[Harem - No Ayanokouji - Sakayanagi Arisu in class D.
I really recommend it even if it doesn't have Hikigaya XD it's very funny and the first girls are not the usual ones (Spoiler: Morishita Ai, Yamamura Miki and Shiraishi Asuka)
Read ahead (60 chapters) by supporting me on buymeacoffee com/varietl or ko-fi edwriting