A Battle Unseen

[hyraemous]

It was October 5636.

Two students were dancing in their bedroom. It was very loud Luthorian music with a nice calm tune.

They had just finished their studies and were about to get a snack and do some stuff we're not here for. In fact, that was why the blinds were closed. Nobody could see in, but nobody could see out either. It was nighttime on a Friday. All was well.

Then everything shook. A loud boom. Windows broke, their blinds collapsed, and everything continued to shake.

And the lights went out... except for a brief orange glow.

It smelled like gasoline.

When the students managed to leave their place to investigate, a car was in the rooftop burning and upside down. A man, missing a good chunk of his body and a major chunk of his legs, had managed to crawl out and he was burning and covered in oil and blood. He would crawl to the edge before suddenly stopping and falling unconscious. He would be dead when the ambulance came. Brief screaming would also come out of the burning car, though nobody made it to the rooftop yet to try and do anything about it.

The fire, of course, started to spread throughout the building in question. At least everyone inside ran outside once they saw burning pieces of rooftop fall on their bedrooms and living rooms. The building itself was one story and it looked like one of those mass-built apartment buildings without the usual height that would come with those buildings.

And there was a small hole in the street.

But how did this happen?

Meet Rheinus Stembremmer Gutenberg. A investigator in the tainted Kundrati human rights investigation, he had just turned 78 and was going to another medical appointment. He had fallen just a couple of days back and ever since then he hadn't really felt well. In fact, he was about to go to the doctors to get the results of a scan on one of his legs.

Gutenburg lived a bit far from the doctors' office, he was living in a high end house overlooking a hill. He loved the breeze and his house and he was already retired with several children and grandchildren who lived in parts of Himmelstern and the general Triad republics. In fact, not only did he love his house but he loved his gardens. He was renowned throughout his neighborhood as a calm man who had loved his plants and who contributed to the local market every Sunday with his bell peppers and the like.

But some skeletal closets were in his mind. He did contribute to the Kundrati investigation. He was one of the main folks who contributed to the evidence swaying the decision to find no human rights violations in Legionary Kundrati... despite the fact otherwise. He was unapologetic about it, after all it had to be done, lest the investigation become another political wrangling match.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Etxea had been making a small list in secret of who to go after should things go bad. The list were people who had slighted Kundrati at-large and Etxea in general. Anyone on that list would be subject to death no matter what and no matter what the current geopolitical situation was. Gutenburg's name was on that list.

So for the last couple of weeks a few Etxeans had landed in Himmelstern. One of them got a job as a taxi driver. She would drive her rounds, figure out how the car would operate, and how the taxi rounds were planned and how people planned their routes. She would also look at how the cars would work from the inside, especially in terms of their insides and how a bomb could fit and operate. A few weeks later one of the taxis would go missing and end up in a warehouse. That was where some of the remaining Etxeans were, getting some explosive material in the meantime and working on a wiring system. They had collected enough dynamite to explode the car at least.

They set up the taxi with enough dynamite on the bottom and in various hidden areas and wired the taxi so that if a certain button was pressed, the dynamite and the taxi would explode. Now came the waiting game.

Two final Etxeans would follow Gutenberg. They would watch his house every day, taking pictures and sending them back to headquarters. The house was a fair bit quiet sometimes, after all it was just him and his wife and they would tend to their house. Sometimes their children and grandchildren visit, sometimes the duo have a nurse come out, and sometimes they would call a taxi and head to the doctors' or to somewhere nice. Every Sunday, they'd walk with a small cart with vegetables and fruits and the like to the market.

Yet one day an ambulance came. That was unusual.

Paramedics entered the house and carried out Gutenberg. 

That was the day of the fall.

Gutenberg returned home a couple of days later. But it was clear his health would need work. And so every Friday he would hail a taxi and, with his wife, head to his doctors. Headquarters had thus found their biggest opportunity to axe him.

The agent who was making her rounds had done so for a while now. Every few rounds she would be asked as to her accent, after all she was Etxean and far from home, but she was good at Luthorian. She always said she was from the diaspora, she was born in Fort William while her parents were from Kundrati itself. Of course, it was a fair background, after all many Kundratis (even the first Etxean president) started their lives in Luthori or away from home. Actually, she had begun to take classes in the local language... she had found a love match and wanted to impress him. He had been in one of her taxi rides and they couldn't understand each other much... but they had each other's number.

So when Gutenberg became one of her rounds this Friday night, she accepted. It was her job. She picked the man and the wife up and drove off.

And once they were in the street, she pressed the button.

The car briefly became a burning airplane before landing, flipped, on top of that rooftop. Gutenburg would manage to escape, though he wouldn't make it. The wife and the agent would scream, but they would succumb to the smoke and the burning.

And the news came.