“Man, what a great kiln. With both gas and electric power, it heats up in an instant... It even has temperature control, so I don’t need to worry about the strength of the fire...”

  Lud voiced his admiration as he examined the bread kiln, far more convenient than the conventional log-fed kiln he had back at Tockerbrot.

  “No, no, this proofing cabinet is even better.”

  But, as he stood in front of the machine next to the kiln, his opinion quickly changed.

  A proofing cabinet matured the bread dough at high temperatures. By setting it to a temperature that was best suited for the yeast to grow, it greatly shortened the maturation time of the bread.

  “If I had this, I could cut down the production time, and really increase our output.”

  For a long time it has been said that, “the baker is the first in town to wake.” There are stories about the croissant, which was said to have been created in celebration of a baker from a certain country. One morning, before dawn, the baker discovered a pagan militia preparing a surprise attack on the town, and then warned the villagers and allowed everyone to escape.

  The dough had to ferment early in the morning in order to make bread that day, but with a proofing cabinet, the amount of time needed decreased drastically.

  “If only we had one... But... It’s probably expensive isn’t it? I can’t imagine how expensive it must be.”

  It was so expensive that there were probably only ten of them in all of Wiltia.

  The war was governed by absurdity. During the war, there were investments in new technology, because there was the money, time and personnel that would be unheard of during times of peace. The proofing cabinet might not have been invented without the war.

  Nothing is born from battle—but that’s not true of war. This was an unfortunate fact for all the pacifists in the world, but it was the truth. The technologies were later sold to civilian interests, further refined and made available to the public, and eventually became an indispensable part of everyday life.

  But, Lud wondered how many decades it would take for this progress to reach Tockerbrot...

  “I’m back, Master!”

  At that moment, Sven returned, carrying a large bag on her shoulders. She had found flour, butter, salt and other ingredients necessary to make the bread, and she then went back to look for anything else they might need.

  “Oh Sven, welcome back. That’s quite the bag you’ve got there.”

  “Yes...”

  Putting the large bag down, she rustled through the contents and lined up the spoils.

  “Well, first we have this Dom Perignon champagne and Hennessy cognac.”

  They were very expensive brands of alcohol, the pride of Filbarneu, a country rich in fertile soil.

  “Then we have dry-cured ham and canned caviar...”

  She took out a chunk of high quality Sparia dry-cured ham, said to be a delicacy without parallel, and then she produced cans of rare, salted fish eggs that could only be gathered from the eastern inland sea.

  “This whole bag is nothing but super luxury foods. We can have our own party right here.”

  Looking at all the gourmet food, the likes of which he had never seen before, Lud couldn’t help feeling excited.

  “There’s just one more thing.”

  “Wait, there’s more?”

  Sven pulled a final object from the bag.

  “A time bomb.”

  “Wow, so they even had a time bomb............... Wait, what?!”

  Sven’s tone was so indifferent, it took Lud a few seconds to realize what this was, and he shouted the second he recognized what was in front of him.

  “This has already been deactivated, right, Sven?”

  His military training immediately took over. Having spent years sleeping on a blanket-covered bomb case instead of a bed, Lud now examined the bomb with an extremely cool head.

  “Yes, its mechanism was quite simple, so I easily disarmed it.”

  A number of cords extending from the bomb had been detached, and the timer’s clock display had stopped.

  “So terrorists are targeting this ship, is that it?”

  “That seems to be the case.”

  Despite the danger, both Sven and Lud were extremely calm.

  Soldiers are constantly required to make difficult decisions under pressure, and this taught many of them to be thorough realists. They could change nothing by talking in circles about the lunacy soldiers were presented with. Instead, they waste no time before devising plans and countermeasures to deal with the situation.

  The former soldier and his former weapon acted as they had been trained.

  “It’s because Wiltia’s pissing everyone off.”

  “With so many potential reasons, it’s almost impossible to identify anything specific.”

  It could be the result of political or cultural conflicts, it might be religiously motivated, or it might even have been sparked by a personal grudge. Narrowing it down would be difficult, but Lud could speculate, based on the terrorists’ approach.

  “This bomb was placed in the food storeroom?”

  “Yes, it was placed to be difficult to discover, but it was not hidden in a particularly clever way.”

  There were various ways to cause destruction, depending on the bomb.

  If many small, high-powered explosives are camouflaged to look like something else, there is a risk that the planted bombs will be exposed. So, one bomb that is capable of delivering a fatal explosion is hidden very carefully.

  In contrast, this bomb was hidden so sloppily that Sven discovered it by chance while prowling around for food. Most likely, a number of cheaply made bombs had been planted in different places.

  “There’s only one thing we can do. We have to let the Commander know about this bomb, and force the Defairedead to make an emergency landing. I’m sure the guests will object... Wait!”

  He had been thinking like a soldier, but then Lud remembered something.

  “Dammit! Now the party will be canceled! Even if we bake bread, no one will have time to eat it! What are we going to do?!”

  “P-P-P-Please calm down, Master!”

  The two of them were used to scenes of chaos during wartime, but the conversation now turned to their bakery. The pair both held their heads in their hands.

  “It’s unfortunate but human life can’t be replaced...”

  “What’s going to happen to the challenge...”

  Sven spoke with a worried look on her face as Lud’s shoulders drooped in disappointment.

  The Sophia that Lud knew was a violent and unforgiving superior officer. She wouldn’t accept any excuses for the failure to complete the mission, even if there was a good reason behind that failure. She imposed the same strict regulations on herself.

  “It’s over...”

  His military training couldn’t come up with a way of dealing with the problem this time.

  “Hm...”

  As he sat feeling gloomy and downtrodden, he heard a noise. He realized that someone was inside the air vent in front of him.

  “Sven... Get behind me...”

  Lud was careful as he removed the grate fitted over the air vent.

  “... A child?!”

  In the air vent was a young girl. Her dress was in a terrible state, torn and covered in dust.

  “... Milly?! What the heck are you doing here?!”

  Expecting the young girl to be back in Organbaelz, Lud was shocked to see Milly crawl out of the vent, dressed completely differently from usual.

  “H-Help... quick... it’s terrible...”

  Lud didn’t know what had happened to Milly, but after finding the bomb planted in the storeroom, there was clearly something dangerous going on inside the ship.

  Milly was kidnapped by terrorists once before, and it had been a deeply frightening experience for her. With those psychological scars not yet healed, she was panicked facing a similar situation.

  “Calm down, breathe in, breathe out...”

  Lud didn’t rush her, and tried to calm her down and make her breathe slowly and deeply.

  “What happened? Tell me calmly.”

  “Haa... Haa... T-They had weapons... a lot of them... the person... talked about a ‘special forces soldier’...”

  “Special forces?”

  Special forces were soldiers assigned to specific missions, which were different from regular military operations.

  So this time... it’s their handiwork... If that’s the case, this is pretty serious.

  This was going to be much more difficult than the previous incident, when most of the terrorists had been amateurs. Only someone with experience in such matters would be able to quickly distinguish between professionals and amateurs.

  “You gotta help, quick... she’s going to die... Sophia’s going to die!”

  “The commander?!”

  Lud understood that somehow Milly and Sophia had met and come across the special forces soldiers, who had planted bombs on the Defairedead. Then, Milly had escaped to look for someone to save the ship.

  “I can’t believe it... The commander’s...”

  “Haa... Haa... Haa... ungh.........”

  After having told them all she could, Milly fainted.

  The upper level of the Defairedead was in chaos. The armed insurgents moved quickly, even faster than the Wiltian military’s praised blitz tactics.

  All hell broke loose on the stage when the children’s choir began their performance with the band. The guests at the party watched the performers as though they were looking at odd, if amusing, animals. The Pelfish entertainers on stage were supposed to sing songs praising Wiltia, referring to them as masters, to stoke the audience’s sense of superiority. But the band dashed those expectations as soon as the curtain rose.

  Instead of instruments, the band held firearms. There was no warning before the gunshots rang out. It was so sudden that many in the audience didn’t understand the reality of the situation, and were shot straight through the head as they wondered if it was part of the entertainment.

  The armed attackers had disguised themselves as the band. The large instruments such as harps, basses and tubas had large cases to hold them, and the armed group had hidden the firearms in the instrument cases. As guests were killed mercilessly and their blood-soaked bodies were strewn on the floor, the rest of the guests finally understood what was happening.

  A terrible panic broke out. Some fainted from the shock, others scrambled over one another to escape, while a few tried to save themselves by hiding behind others. They all lost their heads, and ran around in chaos like a herd of small, spooked animals.

  The armed group wasn’t large. There were only ten of them, at most. In comparison, there were over one hundred guests in the party hall. Even though they were defenseless, if all the guests jumped at the attackers at once, while there would have been some causalities, they could have dealt with the attackers and brought things under control. To prevent this, the armed group purposely created a situation where the guests would be unable to make such calm, coolheaded decisions.

  From the beginning, they didn’t plan to restrain the guests in the hall. They were thousands of meters in the air. There was nowhere for the guests to run. From the moment they picked up their guns, and made their revolt—No, from the instant they boarded the ship, the guests were already abducted and imprisoned.

  The panic they stirred up laid the ground-work for their next move.

  The Defairedead’s control room, unlike the two-seated cockpit of an airplane, sometimes derided as nothing more than a chicken coop, was a sizeable room suited for steering an immense ship like the Defairedead, and was filled with operations staff, comparable to the size of the bridge on a large battleship.

  “Hello gentlemen. I am very sorry for interrupting while you are busy working, but we will be taking command from here on out.”

  A giant man, Commander Dreadnought, the leader of the Special Forces, suddenly appeared in the control room, clad in the armor of a long-forgotten era.

  The security force stationed on the ship was preoccupied with the disturbance in the party hall, seeing to the safety and protection of the confused guests, so the control room was utterly defenseless.

  “W-What the hell... Who are you!?”

  Although it was now used as a commercial vessel, the control room staff on the Defairedead was mostly made up of soldiers, transferees from the Wiltian military.

  “Under your command... you said?! What do you plan to do with this ship?!”

  The captain fearlessly replied to the strangely-outfitted man who appeared in front of him.

  “Do not worry, we have no plans to plunder the ship, or to change its destination. Please keep to your present course to the former Pelfish capital of Ponapalas. There—”

  With his helmet visor lowered, neither the captain nor the other staff could discern Dreadnought’s expression, but his voice was surprisingly mild and gentlemanly.

  “—I’ll have you sink this craft. I’d like it to be as horrible a catastrophe as possible, one that will become the stuff of legends, and make people curse the existence of such an airship.”

  There wasn’t a shred of compassion in the words he spoke.

  “Nonsense!”

  The captain swiftly pulled out his gun.

  There were very strict regulations against bringing a firearm into the cockpit of a ship, with the lives of so many people on board at stake. However, because the captain was responsible for everyone’s safety, as a precaution, he was allowed to carry a gun in order to prevent any catastrophic injury or damage to the ship.

  But—

  “Eh?”

  In the next instant, without warning, the captain fell over dead.

  “How unfortunate.”

  Dreadnought had closed in on the captain quickly and before he could pull the gun from his holster and take aim, Dreadnought struck the captain with his powerful, metal arm. With that, the captain’s head was gone.

  “It’s a crude expression, but... cease all resistance. It’s futile and disgraceful.”

  Dreadnought wiped the blood dripping from his fist with a handkerchief as he spoke, his tone still mild and polite.

  Thus, the Defairedead—called the supreme ruler of the Principality of Wiltia’s skies—was now under the control of Dreadnought’s special forces team.

  “What the hell?!”

  Now aware of the commotion above him, Lud left the unconscious Milly with Sven, and headed to the upper level. He set off toward the top level at once, but on his way, he found the guests on the second level in an uproar.

  “What’s going on, what happened?!”

  “Help! The upper floor is a mountain of bodies!”

  “What’s going to happen? I paid a high price for these tickets, you know!”

  In the confusion, the distraught guests who had escaped the hell in the party hall were spreading word about the disaster on the upper level, generating further panic, with everyone on the verge of rioting in the corridor.

  It would be impossible for fifty crew members to get this situation under control. To make matters worse, although Lud wasn’t aware yet of the captain’s murder, the crewmembers could no longer contact the bridge.

  “So that’s how it is... They’re clever.”

  Looking at the scene before him, Lud understood the motives of the people who had taken over the ship. Normally, in order to occupy a facility, personnel would act as guards to prevent an uprising by the hostages. However, it was impossible to bring in the number of troops necessary to cover a ship this immense.

  So they’ve only secured the important locations... The control room has probably already been taken over.

  The soldiers had attacked out in the open, panicking the guests and leaving them to struggle chaotically. This was more like the storming of a castle than the hijacking of an airplane.

  So the enemy is aiming for the control room... and they’ve dealt with the security personnel, taking a minimum number of hostages. They focused on occupying only the top floor to do so... so that’s it, then?

  Even if Lud pushed through the crowd, the stairs had been blocked, and he worried that the elevator had been destroyed as well.

  “If that’s the case then... Right!”

  Coming up with an ingenious plan, Lud stormed through the crowd and headed toward the area near the bow of the ship on the second level—the galley from where he had been ejected just a few hours earlier.

  “What in all of heaven and earth is going on!?”

  “I don’t know!”

  In the galley dining room, the host was having an argument with Olfen, who had recovered from Sven’s punch. They were aware of the uproar on the upper floor, but had no idea what to do. They yelled at each other to disguise their own panic.

  “W-What do you want, agghhh!”

  Lud entered, pushing his way past the cook’s apprentice guarding the door.

  “Y-You’re that baker from before... W-What are you doing?!”

  Lud stood before Olfen, carrying a hatchet used in case of emergency.

  “It can’t be... Revenge for before? Wait, we can talk about this!”

  Olfen’s face grew pale as he begged for his life, fully aware that Lud had good reason to take revenge. The large, muscular man with the scar on his cheek was coming toward him with an ax in his hand. Panicking, Olfen was on the verge of wetting himself from sheer terror. But, that was not Lud’s objective, of course.

  “So there is one after all!”

  In the back of the galley was a tiny elevator used for carrying dishes to the upper level. It was too small to hold a person, but the shaft itself had enough space that even someone Lud’s size could squeeze in and climb to the top.

  “Heeeere we go!”

  Raising the axe high, he smashed the door to the elevator with all his might, and crushed the clasp on the food carriage inside. It was a violent way to do it, but since this was an emergency, Lud hoped Olfen would ignore it.

  I really don’t want them to ask for damage compensation after all this...

  In a few minutes, Lud had made an opening.

 

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