OBS Chapter 4260 The Attacked Agent
Chapter 4260 The Attacked Agent
Chapter 4260 The Attacked Agent
Seeing Adelina's curiosity, Shad told her the contents of the letter, and Adelina then asked:
"So what exactly is it that Willendal has asked you to investigate? What exactly was stolen from the Royal Mint?"
Shade shook his head:
"It's not mentioned here."
"They didn't say how you were going to investigate? There should be some clues, right?"
"The first batch of agents investigating the theft know about these things. I need to complete the rendezvous before I can get specific information. Although it has nothing to do with my original purpose, well, I'm also very curious about what exactly the mint lost. I'll get in touch with that information after I complete the rendezvous."
Shad's original purpose in coming to the area was to track down the Big-Toothed Sparrow. Seeing that the investigation could finally begin again, Shad wasted no time. After confirming the location and password in the letter, he bid farewell to Adelina and set off once more.
"Let's try to find the Great-billed Finch today!"
Grey Gloves had many secret hideouts in the area, and the one Shad was told was located in the downtown area. The meeting time was 10:30 a.m. Shad arrived at the secluded alley ten minutes early. After finding the apartment according to the house number, he quickly knocked on the door four times as instructed by the contact, but there was no sound from inside.
"There's no heartbeat inside the Stone Hearts house. Ten minutes left. Does the contact person have such a good sense of time?"
He wanted to wait a little longer, but after sniffing a few times, he frowned again:
"The smell of blood. I have a bad feeling. Well, the Key to the Gate."
The door opened, and Shad entered the two-story apartment. Although the apartment had two floors, each floor was smaller than Shad's living room. It looked like it had been ransacked; all the drawers, boxes, and cabinets were open, and various odds and ends were scattered all over the floor. Shad even found several fresh bullet holes in the walls of the narrow stairwell.
"The footprints on the ground have been cleared, and although there are bullet holes, there is no echo of the bullet casings passing by."
He closed his eyes and listened to the echoes of time and space. After only three attempts, Shad heard the sounds of silenced gunfire and curses. He followed the sounds to the back door on the first floor where the gunfight had broken out. The gunfight quickly subsided, and judging from the sounds, both sides had suffered casualties. Although the Gray Gloves agents had suffered heavy losses, some survivors had managed to escape.
The attackers sent men in pursuit, while those who remained ransacked the house, cleaning up most of the evidence before leaving. There were no bodies, but after a careful examination, Shad found bloodstains on the walls.
Although Shad wasn't present at the time, he knew almost the entire sequence of events. The attackers were there to kill and steal, and the Grey Gloves suffered heavy losses.
"Although I knew it wouldn't be that easy, the fact that they attacked before I arrived—is this fate telling me that searching for the Great-Toothed Sparrow will lead me to discover an incredible secret?"
It's also possible that you were simply unlucky.
She said with a smile.
“Something went wrong at the rendezvous point. According to Grey Gloves’ internal procedures, I should go into hiding and await further orders. If I don’t receive orders within a month, I need to return to Willendale and undergo a year-long internal review before I can return to work.”
However, I don't have that kind of patience. I want to see who's really going against me—Blood Brew, Echo of Blood.
Xia De was in a bad mood. He had originally thought that once he found the agent, he could simply hypnotize him and get the results, but unexpectedly, another accident occurred. He didn't care who attacked this outpost, but if he found the person, even if it was a colleague from MI6, he would definitely make them pay.
Based on the feedback from the spell's result, the bloodstains came from a living person, but it was unclear whether it was the escaped Grey Gloves agent or an unidentified attacker. However, Shad was certain that the attack had occurred approximately an hour prior, and regardless of who the bloodstains belonged to, the perpetrator shouldn't have gone too far.
So he followed the red shadow in the air all the way to the outer city. Judging from the intermittent red afterimages, the owner of the bloodstains was clearly seriously injured in the gunfight. The person hadn't taken a carriage, but instead tried to move through secluded alleys. The owner of the bloodstains seemed to belong to the Gray Gloves' side. His severely injured body wouldn't allow him to take detours to confuse potential pursuers, so Shad found his hiding place directly in the outer city.
The hideout is located deep in a back alley between the main street of the outer city, "Church Street," and the newspaper district of the Candleburg Daily. It looks like it's close to the bustling downtown area, but it's actually quite remote.
It was a typical three-story, narrow apartment building. From the outside, the building looked dilapidated and ordinary, with no highlights. The exterior walls were made of smoked gray bricks, common in steam-powered industrial cities, darkened and uniformly stained by decades of coal smoke and fog, almost as if it had blended into the deep, dirty alley.
The bloody trail went directly into the doorway. Xia De stood at the door and listened to his heartbeat. Only after confirming that there was only one living person in the house did he use the key to open the old door that could actually be kicked open.
The interior was extremely dimly lit and had a musty smell that had accumulated over the years. The furnishings of the house were no different from those of the living spaces of ordinary poor people. As Shad walked in, the worn-out old pine floors creaked rhythmically.
He deliberately didn't muffle his voice, wanting to give the people inside the house a heads-up. He was almost certain the other person wasn't the attacker but the man in the gray gloves; if he were the attacker, he couldn't have escaped here alone without anyone looking after him.
The first floor had a simple structure: the living room connected to the kitchen and bedroom, and the kitchen connected to the bathroom—that was the entire house. As Shad passed through the living room, he glanced at the newspapers scattered on the coffee table. The front page featured Margaret, dressed in military uniform, giving a speech to soldiers' representatives at the front lines, looking even more capable than usual.
Although the place was set up like the temporary residence of a down-on-his-luck out-of-town businessman, the man sitting on the floor by the window with bandages wrapped around his body, the blood-stained cotton balls on the floor, and the medicines and medical equipment scattered around him when you pass through the living room to the bedroom, all clearly indicated that he was definitely not a businessman.
The man appeared to be in his forties, but his face was deathly pale, his lips were bluish-black, his skin was cold and clammy with sweat, and his breathing was shallow and shallow; he had fallen into a coma. His left hand, hanging limply at the ground, still held a gun. When Xia De crouched down to check on him, he noticed that the tincture of opium, hemostatic powder, and jars of dried herbs beside him all seemed to be products of Paradise Island Pharmaceuticals.
Linen bandages bound the man's gunshot wound, while bloodstained brass medical scissors and several bullet fragments nearby indicated what the man had done to him before losing consciousness. Shad even smelled brandy on the man, a combination of anesthetic and disinfectant.
"She's unconscious. She's lost too much blood, and even if we wake her up, she probably won't survive."
The fatal wound was not a gunshot wound. When Shad examined him, he found that he had suffered a severe blow to the back of his head and was currently bleeding inside his brain. It was a miracle that he was able to escape so far and get here.
But miracles cannot reverse the injuries. With brain hemorrhage, excessive use of tincture, excessive blood loss, and wound infection, this person would probably have died within ten minutes if Shad hadn't appeared.
"Sunshine therapy".
Shad clenched his right fist and raised it above his head, causing it to radiate a faint light downwards like the sun. Shad hadn't healed him; he had merely restored his ability to communicate normally. In truth, it would have been easier to kill him first and then communicate with him directly, but Shad didn't want to kill him, nor did he want to wait for him to die—that would be too much of a waste of time.
Before the man fully regained consciousness, Shad searched the house again, finding some items in hidden compartments and concealed locations, which essentially confirmed his identity as a gray-gloved agent. The pale-faced man opened his eyes and, upon seeing the stranger before him, instinctively reached for the gun in his left hand, only to find it already placed on the table by Shad.
"If I were you, I wouldn't move around right now."
Shad warned the man in a Willendale accent, standing before him and looking at him:
“Your aunt sent me to visit you and to remind you not to forget to pick up the boots from the bootmaker.”
Although the man was still dizzy from his serious injuries, he realized that this was the secret signal:
"Thanks for reminding me, Auntie. Little Michael has already gone to get it for me. What else did Auntie say?"
His voice was so hoarse that it startled even himself.
"My aunt also said that you should eat on time and remember to bring your fiancée back home for the year-end holiday, or she'll kick your butt hard."
Shad uttered the last part of the code before asking:
"What's going on now? Who attacked you?"
Even after Shad deciphered the code, the pale-faced man still refused to reveal the truth. He huddled in the damp corner of the room, retaining the caution of a secret agent even as he approached the end of his life.
"How did you find your way here? This isn't the meeting place. I can't rule out the possibility that you were also attacked by those people and forced to reveal the secret code."
Although his life force was weak, his eyes still held great strength. Shad greatly admired such loyalty; he reached into his pocket, and the man tried to stop him but was powerless to do so.
However, what Shad took out was not a weapon, but a ring with the royal crest that Margaret had given him:
“I didn’t come from Velendell. I accepted a secret mission and temporarily left my original post to impersonate someone else and come to Arcadia City. Princess Margaret will be here this week, and I need to get rid of some pests before her arrival. You understand what I mean.”
After a brief pause, Shad said softly:
"I am a grey-headed eagle."