On the carriage to the town of Cambay, Baron Rudolph put down the file in his hand, threw a piece of wood into the brazier next to him, and stirred up the firewood piled up in the basin to make the fire burn more vigorously.

"Do you need some?" asked the attendant on the side, taking out a bottle of gin that had been soaked in hot water for a long time.

Baron Rudolph wanted to refuse, but in the end he could not hold back the greed in his heart, and said, "Just a cup!" followed by another emphasis, "A small glass will do." ”

"Is the Baroness still urging you to relieve your hangover?" the chamberlain has been with Baron Rudolph for many years, and the relationship between the two is not so much a superior as a friend, so he is also very familiar with Baron Rudolph's affairs, and he talks a lot more casually.

"Less nonsense!" Baron Rudolph glared at his attendant with some displeasure, and then took the large wine glass full of wine from the other party's hand, although the wine glass was not a small glass he emphasized, but he didn't mind, after taking a sip carefully, he reluctantly put the glass on the table, wiped the wine stains on his beard, and then picked up the file next to him and flipped through it.

"What's wrong? Does this give you a headache too?" Seeing Baron Rudolph frowning while looking at the file, the attendant asked curiously, "Is the person you want to arrest troublesome for?"

"It's a little bit of a problem. Baron Rudolph nodded and said, "This matter is a matter of the Special Operations Division. ”

"Oh. The attendant immediately showed a look of understanding, and did not ask any more.

Baron Rudolph set aside the file he had read three times, rubbed his eyes, took another sip of wine, and then leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes and recuperating as his mind quickly thought about the case he was about to deal with.

On the surface, this case was a mistake made by the head of a local secret department, and he needed to be brought back to the internal affairs headquarters of the various secret departments in Winter Rin City for re-examination and loyalty testing, and he had handled more than thirty cases like this in the past few years, which was the simplest of all his tasks.

But this mission was different, because according to common sense, this mission should not fall on him, the first-level examiner of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Imperial Security Service, and the head of the department who committed the crime was not from the Imperial Security Service at all, but another officer of the Special Operations Division with more power, and giving him this task was as absurd as letting a Caprador hunting beast pull a carriage.

At that time, after he received this task from above, his first feeling was that someone was joking with him again, and when he confirmed that there was no mistake in this task, he immediately thought that he might have become a pawn in the power struggle above.

The secret services of the empire have many intricate relationships and different powers, and the Imperial Security Service has always been the most powerful of all secret departments, and its power network covers almost all departments of the empire.

Although the powers of the Imperial Security Service have decreased over the years and restrictions have become more and more numerous over the years, no matter how they are reduced and restricted, it is still the largest secret department of the Empire.

However, the emergence of the Special Operations Service directly cut half of the power cake of the Imperial Security Service, and the Imperial Ministry of the Interior also gave the Special Operations Department many powers that even the Imperial Security Service did not have back then, such as the power to mobilize a part of the local army, military police and police, etc.

Therefore, in the Imperial Security Service, it is customary to face the Special Operations Division in many things, but because of the level of executive power, even if the Imperial Security Service will have some small actions, it will still cooperate with the Special Operations Division in some tasks.

Although legally speaking, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Imperial Security Service can govern the Ministry of Internal Affairs of various departments of the entire Imperial Political and Military Department, but the legal principle does not represent everything, the internal affairs department of the Special Operations Department has always existed independently, and this time suddenly a special operations department's internal affairs task fell into the hands of the Imperial Security Service, and those who got this task will naturally think about it.

Baron Rudolph, who didn't want to be a pawn, found all his connections in the Imperial Security Service on the day he received the mission, and inquired about the content related to this mission, and finally he found out that this mission was actually related to the glorious noble Pipero family, and it was also involved in the disappearance of the contemporary Count Pipero.

The aristocratic circle of the French Empire is also divided into levels, there are hereditary nobles, and there are also military nobles, but no matter what nobles, they still have great respect for those old nobles who have inherited from ancient times, and the glorious noble Pipero family, which has appeared since the First Dynasty, is such a highly respected aristocratic family.

Because of its ancient inheritance and the history of marriage covering the entire period of the three major dynasties, the nobles of the Francois Empire now have more or less some blood of the Pipero family, which also makes this generation of the Pipero family even if it has declined, it can still be regarded as the most respected ancient nobles by the Francois aristocratic circle.

It is precisely because of the status of the Pipero family in the aristocratic circle that the various behaviors of the Emperor of France against the Pipero family were opposed by the nobles of the French Empire, and after the establishment of the United Kingdom of France, there will be a large number of old nobles who will not hesitate to give up all their properties in the empire to switch to the United Kingdom, and there are many reasons, and what happened to the Pipero family should also be one of the reasons.

After all, in anyone's opinion, the royal family can even fight side by side with the knight king and inherit the three major dynasties, so the other noble families may be just a piece of fat ready to eat at any time in the eyes of the French royal family.

Although after Louis X succeeded to the throne, in order to eliminate the distrust of the aristocratic circle towards the royal family, he made some compromises to those old nobles, and even let those nobles enter the real power department, but at the same time, he also promoted many military nobles, and then divided the aristocratic circle, so that the aristocratic circle was full of contradictions, and temporarily diverted the attention of those old nobles from the royal family.

However, with the sudden disappearance of the puppet head of the Pipero family, whether it is an old nobleman or a military nobleman, their eyes have returned to the royal family.

At that time, news came out that the puppet family master had turned into a man-eating monster in that sudden outbreak of world changes, killed several guards guarding the manor and escaped.

In the eyes of ordinary people, this matter is nothing, after all, there have been cases of ordinary people suddenly mutating into monsters in various towns, and ordinary democracy may have panicked about it at first, but now it is accustomed to it, and even after hearing the news, they will feel schadenfreude, thinking that there are finally nobles who have mutated into monsters.

But for the aristocratic circle of the French Empire, this news is obviously not accepted by them, because until today, there has not been a single case of mutation into a man-eating monster among the nobles in the French Empire, although some people have some inhuman mutations in their bodies, but this mutation is controllable, and the mutants can still maintain their sanity, unlike those mutant monsters that appear everywhere, all of them are irrational and feed on people.

Therefore, it is difficult to believe that the current patriarch of the Pipero family has mutated into a man-eating monster, plus the Pipero family is completely controlled by the royal family, and the soldiers guarding Pipero Manor are all elite soldiers, even if they can't deal with mutant monsters, it shouldn't be difficult to hurt mutant monsters and drag other support people to arrive.

However, through some secret sources, it was learned that the soldiers guarding the Pipero family at that time were not injured at all, and the rumored so-called injuries were actually disguised.

These rumors instantly made all the nobles think of some secret experiments done by the royal family and some scholars, and thought that the current patriarch of the Pipero family was probably the royal family as an experiment, and for a while, an inexplicable panic quickly spread in the aristocratic circle of the empire.

In the eyes of the nobles of the empire, it is not unacceptable for the royal family to experiment on ordinary people, because it does not touch their interests, but now it seems that the royal family may experiment with the nobles, which makes the nobles of the empire feel that their lives are threatened, and the reaction is naturally strong.

It's just that in the face of the reaction of the nobles, Louis X behaved very strongly, temporarily suppressed the dissatisfaction of the nobles, and secretly sent people to step up the search for the missing Pipero patriarch, no matter what, he must be caught or killed before other forces catch the Pipero patriarch, otherwise once the Pipero patriarch falls into the hands of the nobles, then the final direction of the rumor is not something he can control.

The head of the Cambay branch of the Special Operations Division, which Baron Rudolph was going to deal with this time, involved a task related to the capture of Patriarch Pipero.

As mentioned in the dossier, the sub-head sent all the members of his team to capture a man-eating mutant who tried to escape to the Northlands, but accidentally encountered a large avalanche that has not been encountered in a thousand years on the Rum Peak, and all the members, including the man-eating mutants, disappeared in the avalanche, and after the sub-chief sent a distress letter to the nearby Special Operations Department, he went to the mountains and forests to find the whereabouts of the missing members.

This is just a very ordinary accident of responsibility for causing huge casualties due to wrong orders, according to the procedure, the head of the sub-department will be brought back to the headquarters of the Special Operations Division for review to see if he is deliberately causing casualties and whether he is still loyal to the empire, but the problem now is that after investigation, it is found that the cannibal mutant who those members went to hunt down is very likely to be the missing Pipero patriarch, so this ordinary responsible internal affairs incident has become a major event that the nobles and the royal family are staring at.

After discovering the complexity of the matter, the Special Operations Division immediately referred the matter to the Imperial Security Service, on the simple grounds that the matter involved national security issues, and the members were people within the Special Operations Service, and the Special Operations Service was not suitable to deal with the matter.

The Imperial Security Service was tempted to get the matter back, as they also knew it was troublesome, but they didn't have any more appropriate reason to do so, and in the end it was Baron Rudolph, the censor with the appropriate authority in the Internal Affairs Department of the Security Service.

After figuring out the reason for the incident, according to Baron Rudolph's own thoughts, he also wanted to dump this task to others, but unfortunately although he had many connections in the Security Bureau, he was not as good as that person to voluntarily take over this problem for him, and he offended many people within the Security Bureau, and these people prevented him from voluntarily giving up the mission, and in the end he could only be put on a carriage and driven to Cambay Town.

Although Baron Rudolph did not encounter any troubles and dangers on the road, his keen instincts developed over the years on the battlefield were able to detect that there were many eyes around him staring at him.

Among these people, some of them are familiar to Baron Rudolph, who are the sights of the hunting beasts of the Security Bureau, and a large number of people are of unknown origin, but they must be from both the royal family and the nobility.

Baron Rudolph didn't know what the royal family and nobles were planning to do, and he had no interest in knowing, he only hoped that he could safely take the head of the branch from Cambay Town, bring it back to Daodong Rin City, hand it over to the relevant departments, and end the mission.

"How far is it from Cambey?" Baron Rudolph suddenly glanced at the woods outside the car window, then at the cavalry of the Ministry of Internal Affairs who had followed him out, and asked his attendant.

"This is the third time you've asked today, and it's like your urinating every night. The chamberlain teased very casually, and then, before Baron Rudolph became angry, replied, "There is still half a day's journey, and it should be possible to reach it in the evening." ”

As he spoke, a strange cry suddenly came from outside the carriage, and a strange bird with a long beak and black feathers flew to the carriage and landed steadily on a specially installed shelf next to the door.

Seeing this strange bird appear, Baron Rudolph and the attendant officer were stunned, and the attendant officer quickly returned to normal, hurriedly came to the window, took out a meatball from a pocket, put it in front of the strange bird, and let the strange bird devour it, and then took a special small clip from the strange bird's claw and neck, and handed it to Baron Rupert.

Baron Rupert unwrapped the clip, took out a copy of the text message he had stored inside, and looked at the dim light in the carriage repeatedly, with a look of surprise on his face.

"What's going on?" Seeing that Baron Rudolph's expression was a little wrong, the attendant officer hurriedly asked.

Baron Rudolph handed the note to the chamberlain and said, "Those who are chasing Pipero ...... No, two members of the Special Operations Division who hunted down the cannibal mutants survived, and snatched a very magical artifact from the monster, and asked them to return to Winter Rin City immediately with the three men and the strange object, without any stops in between. ”

The attendant only briefly looked at the note, and then said, "It seems that that strange thing is very important. ”

Baron Rudolph nodded, and then without further ado, ordered the carriage and the cavalry behind to speed up and reach the town of Cambay as soon as possible.