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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: Simzy
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– Caesar! How are you? Those wicked women aren’t treating you too badly, are they?
Letitia still knew me as Caesar, and believed I was being held captive by wicked women.
In our calls so far, I had made up a story that ‘those women have a fatal weakness of mine, and if I act out, many people will get hurt. So for the time being, I have to cooperate with them.’
A position like, ‘it’s not my intention, but I got caught up in an evil affair and became an accomplice to a villain.’
“Still, it’s a bit better than before. They even give me free time to make calls like this. But I didn’t call when you were busy, did I?”
– Caesar’s calls are always the top priority, so don’t worry about things like that. And who is worrying about whom right now, really.
She wasn’t wrong.
This was what I liked about talking with Letitia. Perhaps because we both had a lot to hide, she only said things that were pleasant to hear.
I continued the call while taking out blankets from my backpack and laying them around. I put the phone on speakerphone to let the sound spread out more.
“How’s the clothing store business?”
Strangely, Letitia never said that she was a soldier.
When I looked at the internet news, I would often see pictures and articles of ‘Letitia, the right arm of the Iron Empress Virginia,’ and I had even once asked, ‘Isn’t that you?’, but she insisted to the end that she worked at a clothing store.
And then she would send pictures of her own clothes, saying, ‘This is a new arrival, what do you think? Do you think it will sell well?’
It was a good excuse, and a convenient lie. Of course, everyone has circumstances they can’t talk about. Perhaps Letitia was also letting it slide, even though she noticed that I was just making things up.
Since we were in the same boat, it was a relationship of, what’s good is good, and letting it go.
– I don’t know. I think I need to seriously look for another job. It seems more promising to just wash and repair contaminated clothes and sell them than to get and sell new clothes.
“Is the situation that bad?”
– The zombie animals have gotten cunning. On top of that, the zombies that were in the unprotected zones before are gradually pouring into the cities and roads.
Letitia said that more and more zombies were gathering in the city. Zombies are predators. Predators move their territory when the food in their hunting grounds runs out.
On top of that, the city was a place full of alien sounds and smells. The problem was that the zombies sometimes blocked the roads.
If someone dies on the road, the zombies swarm around them. If you shoot them to subdue them, this time they swarm in after hearing the sound.
The roads all over the country are being paralyzed like this. The highways with wide lanes are a bit better, but the smaller roads are gradually being cut off.
What would happen next was obvious. If the roads were cut off, supplies would also quickly run out. At first, one or two things would disappear, and then they would be completely empty.
But in the city, there were not only the gendarmerie but also armed vigilante groups. Humans who had weapons to kill others even if they had no food to eat for themselves lived together in the narrow, narrow city.
It was obvious what would happen.
“Then what about you? Are you okay?”
Letitia was silent for a moment. When her voice was transmitted over the phone again, it was a little choked.
– …Thank you for asking. Yes. I’m okay. The gendarmerie is doing a pretty good job. They periodically go out to clear the roads, and the vigilante group is also working with enthusiasm. Most of all, the commander.
“Commander Virginia Helford? I saw her on the news.”
Virginia’s popularity was rising day by day. She kept proposing new reform and improvement plans, and they were all measures that the military could take in an emergency situation.
Distributing water purification tablets that had been stockpiled for military emergencies to the citizens, mobilizing the medical corps to expand hygiene and public health, or establishing a communal meal system by collaborating with military cooks and restaurant owners.
Overall, it was not a good sign. It meant they had started to control supplies on a group scale.
The reason for organizing the vigilante group was probably for that reason. If you told ordinary citizens to cooperate, they wouldn’t listen, but if it was the ‘vigilante group,’ a subordinate organization of the military that needed to receive cooperation, the story would be different.
The militarization of civilians. The militarization of the city. No matter how I looked at it, it seemed like Virginia was raising an army.
– Still, thanks to that, I was able to safely get the reagents Caesar had asked for. I have a lot of acquaintances in the military. You can probably come to Hampton in two to three weeks.
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Hampton City Hall, conference room.
A container was placed inside the conference room. It was for the reason that it was cheaper to just put a soundproofed container than to soundproof the entire conference room.
Thanks to that, Letitia and her subordinates could shout at each other, curse at each other, and cause a ruckus without any sound leaking out, before finally coming up with a plausible solution.
But now, Letitia was alone in the conference room. She had slipped out of the office with the excuse of ‘I need to look at some documents in a quiet place,’ and was on a call with Caesar.
‘I can’t stop.’
She herself knew that it was a deviation. But she was already addicted.
Not as a lackey of Romer, but as a righteous tights-wearing outlaw. Not as the head of the special public security team, but as a woman of salvation who wanted to somehow rescue an unfortunate man from the clutches of evil.
Letitia could be a better person than she herself had thought. With Caesar, it seemed she could continue to be so.
Then her eyes fell on the documents.
The number of skintight impersonators was not decreasing. Even men were doing such hideous things.
That much could be thought of as a pleasant event, but breaking into a house with a gun and threatening was a different story. In some cities, there were even reports of skintight-wearing gang robbers appearing.
And somewhere else, a skintight-wearing robber had been bitten by a zombie, and a full-body-tight zombie had appeared, becoming a topic of gossip.
Should she strengthen the punishment? Or, since it seemed the government and the military were making the situation worse by constantly responding, should she lower the intensity of the punishment and ignore it?
The document was asking for Letitia’s opinion on that.
– Thanks. Leti. Then next time…
“Hey, Caesar?”
Letitia urgently caught him.
– Yes, go ahead.
She had caught him, but Letitia was in a dilemma.
One side of her heart whispered, ‘Just say it. If you’re really going to marry him, you have to check if he can be a support in this aspect too.’
But the other side dissuaded her, saying, ‘Isn’t this story too heavy right now? It’s more important to give the impression of a fun and cheerful person. Don’t be mistaken. You haven’t even met in person that much.’
But to Letitia, it was truly a soul-shaking story. Virginia had inflicted a ‘harsh’ punishment on the skintight-suit-wearer.
She hadn’t cut off his limbs and thrown them to the zombies, but she had inflicted a more severe public punishment. To the extent that it could socially bury a person even in these chaotic times.
But what if Letitia, whom Virginia trusted more than anyone, was the ‘real’ skintight-suit-wearer. And what if she could never be caught…
Letitia didn’t want to disappoint Virginia. But, she also couldn’t easily let go of her liberated self.
The life of wearing a tight leather suit and running through the night streets of Hampton, protecting the house of a nouveau riche during the day and robbing it at night, and then revisiting the next morning to investigate the method of how it was robbed…
It was thrilling and fun. And gradually, she was becoming desensitized. Letitia was an investigator, so she also knew how a careless criminal gets caught.
She knew. She knew, but. She couldn’t stop. If this continued, it would only lead to ruin. She would be tied up and repeatedly excited by an electric needle that gave pleasure, before finally being electrocuted to death.
– Leti? Are you there?
Ah. He was asking. Since he was asking, she had to answer. ‘I was planning on saying it from the beginning. If not, there would have been no reason to even have this dilemma.’
In the end, Letitia asked the question.
“This is a bit out of the blue, but when someone has high expectations of me, but I know that I can’t actually meet those expectations. What should I do?”
Both sides of her heart were in an uproar. ‘Hey! That’s too abstract! You know, there’s A and B and C, but actually C is… even a middle school girl wouldn’t talk like that!’
It was as she had expected. Caesar didn’t answer for a long time. He only let out ragged breaths.
“S-sorry. I was too absurd…”
– You mean, what should you do when you feel like you’re deceiving someone?
It felt like her heart had stopped for a moment. Letitia felt like she was going to cry. As expected, her judgment was right. Caesar was a person she could trust for the rest of her life.
“Yes. I feel guilty. Like I’m deceiving them.”
– You must like that person a lot. Seeing as you don’t want to hurt them.
That was right. It was. Letitia liked Virginia. She was a superior who had recognized and acknowledged her hardship and had properly recognized her value. But now she was deceiving the person who had recognized her.
“Yes. That’s right.”
– Well. Hmm… everyone has circumstances they can’t talk about. If it were me, unless I could offer a really proper alternative, I’d rather not say anything.
“…May I ask why?”
– Sometimes, people are more important than the truth, right? And sometimes, there are things you don’t want to let go of, even while enduring some contradictions. That’s how the heart is.
‘Just like our relationship, Caesar.’ Letitia smiled.
“But shouldn’t relationships be honest?”
– They should be honest, but shouldn’t there be consideration before that? The kind of consideration of whether the other person can hear this, whether they can handle it.
Consideration. That was a part Letitia had not thought of.
– Leti. Try to put yourself in their shoes. If someone were to tell you a bunch of things you don’t want to hear, saying, ‘I’m telling you this because I’m a real friend…’ what would you think?
“I’d tell them to mind their own business and not be so full of themselves.”
– Couldn’t the person who is precious to Leti think the same way?
“…Then, for the time being, there’s nothing I can do other than complain to you like this.”
It was said seriously, but laughter was heard from over the phone.
“Did you just laugh?”
– No. I’ve been having similar worries lately. We really seem to connect well. What an amazing synchronicity.
Letitia didn’t know what synchronicity meant, but for some reason, she felt better. And then she became curious about who could hold such a person hostage?
“Thank you. Caesar. I feel a little better. That’s right. I shouldn’t rush to judgment without even knowing if the other person is ready to hear it.”
– Thank you too. Leti. Thanks to you, I’ve solved some of my worries.
Letitia tilted her head. What on earth was this man caught up in. This wouldn’t do. Letitia, while shuffling through the documents, drew her signature on a certain proposal.
“Caesar. When you come to Hampton this time, you have to be prepared to spend the night. It can’t be helped.”
– Pardon? Why?
“Because the disinfection procedures have been increased. It will take a huge amount of time to get in and out, so it’s almost impossible to come and go on the same day.”
It hadn’t been like that until now, but it would be. Because Letitia herself had signed the proposal to strengthen the disinfection procedures. In fact, this was something that would cause a lot of inconvenience to many people.
The strengthening of the disinfection procedures meant nothing else. It only meant that they would abandon the cars on the road and watch for a longer time to see if a transformation occurred or not.
But, to make Caesar spend the night at Leti’s house, this was the only method that came to mind right now.
“So…”
She was about to say something more, but a strange sound was mixed in from over the phone.
The sound of a zombie’s howl.
– Leti. Sorry. I have to go. I’ll call you when I’m done.
Click.
“…He hung up.”
She thought about calling back, but Letitia decided not to. Because she didn’t know what Caesar’s situation was. Maybe if she sent a text but he could be in danger.
“This won’t do. I have to hold on to him somehow.”
Letitia stood up from her seat. 20 minutes had already passed.
As she entered the office, the personnel who had been dispatched from each department stood up from their seats as if to ask Letitia where on earth she had been.
“Everyone will go out for an emergency safety check of Hampton, so be ready in 10 minutes.”
Letitia commanded imperiously.
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