Chapter 613: Thoughts?
After reading through all the papers which had been stuffed into the secret drop-off point, Mr. Blank shook his head wryly.
Just to be on the safe side, he had waited over 2 months after the Rockwell Kingdom had launched its counter-attack on the organization before attempting to retrieve these documents from Misty City.
He had thought that this would be long enough for the Balfour Family’s vigilance to begin to wane, but he had been wrong.
Although it wasn’t obvious on the surface, Mr. Blank could tell that there were significantly more patrols keeping an eye on the city and the general region than the last time he was in the South East Province.
Still, as a veteran of this tradecraft, he had made sure to never act suspiciously or out of character, so slipping in, grabbing what his fallen subordinates and cooperators had left for him, and slipping out had been relatively easy.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that all the documents he retrieved were written in some kind of code that he had no idea how to break.
There was no way to tell from these papers just how far the Rockwell Kingdom had managed to investigate him or the organization, or how many of its members had been compromised.
Mulling over the issue for a while, Mr. Blank eventually just sighed, "Oh well, it’s not that big a setback. It was mostly just our low-level cooperators that they managed to root out. The real core of our plan hasn’t suffered much damage."
What’s more, as far as he could tell, none of the really important members of the organization had been captured or identified, nor had any of their long-term plans been exposed.
It was, in all honesty, a lucky break for them.
That said, thanks to his profession, Mr. Blank was more than a bit paranoid, so he still decided to send out orders for the rest of the main cells to lay low for a while.
This might delay their plans, but that wasn’t too much of a problem. They had been at this for over a decade now, and they likely wouldn’t really start taking action for another 5 years, so waiting a few months to ensure their security wasn’t further compromised wasn’t going to make much of a difference.
.....
"So, that’s the situation," Celestina laid out the full content of the message she had just received from Minister of War Marianne Campbell to those assembled in her office, "Thoughts?"
Naturally, the room fell silent.
It was a small crowd, just Allina Crest, Samuel Balfour, Elliot Balfour, Elizabeth Carlson, Frey, Lucas, and Louise Rockwell, but each of them was either a leader or strategist with in-depth knowledge of the current situation, so the fact that none of them had any answers at all really said something.
However, what were they supposed to say?
Using the records the First Queen had risked her life to retrieve, the kingdom’s spy network had managed to uncover nearly 800 new targets related to their mysterious foe for them to hit.
It was an achievement that was equal parts impressive and distressing.
Impressive that in just 2 months, under the direct guidance of the king and queens, the Rockwell Kingdom’s spymasters had managed to dig so deep into the enemy’s organization, but distressing that the enemy had actually penetrated the kingdom so deeply in the first place.
After the large-scale raids back in June, the plan had been to sniff-out the remnants of the enemy’s influence then use small groups of elite troops to conduct a coordinated stealth attack.
The thinking was that by using another round of lightning-fast raids, they would be able to quietly seize more records with information that would reveal their enemy’s identity and allow them to eliminate whatever influence they had left in the kingdom once-and-for-all.
Unfortunately, it seemed they had greatly underestimated how deep the rot went, making a precision strike no longer a feasible plan.
Simply put, there were too many targets across too wide an area, with too little information about which ones were critical and which ones were not.
Elite strike teams led by the available Spirit Initiates might be able to hit a quarter of the primary targets all at once, but after that, word would surely spread and the enemy would just go deeper into hiding.
If they got unlucky and none of the targets from the first wave of attacks contained the information they needed, there was a very real possibility that acting now would just make things worse.
Understanding all this, the small group in Celestina’s office felt incredibly frustrated.
They really could have used some more heads to brainstorm with, but that was impossible.
Of the other senior leaders in Misty City, none of them had been 100% cleared of the suspicion of treason yet, which was in-and-of-itself quite disturbing.
There were, of course, others in the city who had been cleared of that suspicion, but they didn’t have the necessary status to participate in a meeting like this.
And so, all the brains they could throw at this problem were already present.
Eventually, it was Frey, the Snow Spirit Fox, who broke the silence, asking the most obvious question of all, "Is it really not possible to just launch another massive attack like we did last time?"
Frey was actually supposed to be relaxing atop one of the cold mountains of the South East Province, but after ’failing’ at her duties on the day of the mass-terrorism incident, she had volunteered to remain in Misty City in order to restore her honour.
"It’s possible," Lucas replied on behalf of the others in the room, "but the chances of that achieving our end goal are even lower than randomly picking from among the targets and sending in our elite forces."
"Why so?" Frey continued to ask. She was highly intelligent, as most Spirit Beasts were, but the land she came from was primarily dominated by beasts, which led to her considering most problems from a simpler, more straightforward perspective, unlike with humans who tended to scheme and plot in order to get what they wanted.
"Because mobilizing that many troops takes too long and raises too much fuss," Allina sighed, "No matter how quickly and quietly we try to move, we’ll still need many days to get everyone in place, and by that time, with the enemy already on high alert, they’ll likely have fled and taken or destroyed any useful information we might be seeking."
"Which is precisely why we wanted to only use elite forces this time," Celestina followed up before rubbing her temples.
Samuel nodded, while Elliot just groaned.
"What we need is some excuse to deploy our forces beforehand, one that won’t arouse suspicions," Elizabeth mused.