Chapter 159: A Public Platform

Isaac sat in the relatively bare, generic government meeting room, deep in thought. Normally, witnesses would have been placed somewhere in the courthouse, possibly even on a chair right outside the courtroom itself, with just a small amount of supervision to ensure they didn’t try to sneak a peek or talk to other witnesses that might be present.

But making sure the witness wasn’t biased by overhearing the various charges was obviously a hell of a lot harder where someone like Isaac was concerned, so he’d been banished to a random building that housed some tiny, practically insignificant part of government bureaucracy and had a room available for him.

He’d even revealed the limits of his hearing, but that was A. only his current limit and B. his new [Aura] trick meant that the limits of his hearing didn’t matter anymore.

Unfortunately, there were limits to his auric senses. Mainly, sensory overload. In exchange for using his [Aura] in such a way, he had to vastly reduce his normal senses and turn his [Aura] into a series of thin shells that surrounded him, able to tell when something passed through it and nothing else.

The only thing that made this even possible was how one’s [Aura] grew stronger with your Level, more malleable, and lost less volume when stretched beyond its normal size. Where at Level 25, extending any part of the [Aura of the Desperate Seeker] to fifty meters would reduce its overall volume by half, nowadays, he could push it to a couple of hundred meters and still have almost ninety percent of his sixty-five thousand cubic meters of [Aura] available.

But he wasn’t really listening to the trial as there wasn’t anything interesting happening. He’d known about everything she was going to be charged with ahead of time, and while the chaos in the courtroom was a little funny, it wasn’t worth devoting his time and attention to.

Instead, he was mentally running through the list that Krebs had given him. She’d been trawling through the dreams of her fellow prisoners for information ever since she’d gained the ability and it had shown.

As for the inmates themselves, they were an eclectic bunch, ranging from career criminals whose Level was too high for most prisons and had therefore been concentrated in a single facility to those who were at risk of being broken out by people who could not be kept out by regular walls.

And then you had those who were here to show them that their new superpowers meant nothing. Businessmen, mostly, who’d been involved in shady enough dealings to end up arrested and too influential to be let out on bail as they posed a serious flight risk.

These were people who’d become [Businessmen], [Day Traders] and the like and kept going as normal, all the while not realizing that blocking investigation [Skills] required [Skills] of their own on top of the methods of obfuscation that had been employed to date.

Sure, those [Skills] had been available, but they’d have required [Classes] with unsavory names, and becoming a [Corrupt Businessman] would have gone over like a house on fire if the [Class] name had become public knowledge.

The [System] had changed many things, but crime and the justice system were among those most fundamentally altered.

Casual crime would soon become almost completely non-existent as people who committed criminal acts were caught in moments without the [Skills] needed to evade detection.

In other words, if you wanted to find success as a criminal, you needed to commit to the bit. You needed the [System’s] assistance to escape [System]-empowered members of law enforcement.

This was a double-edged sword, though.

On one hand, few people would want to commit to becoming stuck on the wrong side of the law, and fewer people would become criminals by committing crimes of opportunity as getting away with them was just … not going to happen.

On the other, rehabilitation was almost impossible. [Skills] were needed to work, no matter what the job was. So if someone’s [Skills] were all geared towards committing crimes, that person was functionally unemployable, often forcing them back on the wrong side of the law to earn an income, which would then land them right back in jail.

What was really nice though was how this new reality affected corruption in law enforcement. “Getting away with crap” wasn’t a part of the standard [Skills] available to law enforcement [Classes], which meant that when someone pulled something, that would be proven so thoroughly that not even the powerful police unions would be able to get them out … unless you had a non-standard law enforcement [Class]. But how long would a [Dirty Cop] or [Crime Family’s Little Bitch] remain employed?

So those were the two hundred people who shared a prison with Arianne Krebs. And of those, seven had been contacted by the mystery organization that was driving Isaac up the wall.

Almost four percent of the population of a prison for serious prisoners were connected, and what was worse, the prisoners themselves weren’t connected in other ways.

Seven distinct people from business, the financial sector, and organized crime, as well as a couple who were just highly capable in their own right without any connections or backing.

What was worse, though, was how many of them had been dealt with rather superficially, preparations being made, and deals struck, but nothing overt was happening. No big plans were being made, and Isaac couldn’t even make out any coherent plans unless it was something along the lines of “make a mess of society”.

A threat you could see coming was one you could prepare for, but only if you knew what that threat was. But if you didn’t, well then, all you had was a timeline for when you needed to finish your bucket list.

Preparations, connections made with no clear final goal, true benefits put off into the distant future. Didn’t that sound familiar?

Isaac facepalmed with carefully measured strength, ensuring he didn’t inflict structural damage to the building.

The robbers. The bloody robbers! They’d made a basic deal with these cowardly fucks, then been more tightly tied together by the gift of fantastic tasers and other things besides, all in exchange for repayment in the future, years from now. Ten years. By then, the whole world situation could completely change. Governments and corporations needed to have plans that far ahead of time, sure. But here, it seemed like there was a concrete plan in place, and that wasn’t normal.

And sure, it was possible that there were multiple groups running around, all being at a level of integration with the [System] where they could not only hide themselves from mundane scrutiny but reliably and thoroughly defeat [Skills] meant to track them down. But Isaac doubted it. These people were ghosts, and they’d have to level up a whole hell of a lot to reach that point. For a large-scale organization, that kind of program came with accidents galore, and when it came to summoning, accidents were rarely quiet.

There’d been a lot of incidents like that in the past eight months, and several had involved organized crime. But Isaac hadn’t heard anything that would indicate an organization like the one suspected he was tracking had slipped up in that way.

Because that was the crux of the matter. It was entirely possible he was reading too much into the information a serial killer had provided, especially given that he hadn’t had a chance to verify it yet.

The people connected to the robbery at his workplace though, they had been thoroughly investigated and deemed ghosts. Therefore, he could say for certain that at least a single organization had managed to gain the degree of information security needed for the things he was seeing.

So, keeping that knowledge in mind, it stood to reason that the organization that had contacted the inmates with the same degree of inscrutability and similar requests was, in fact, the same one that had been in contact with the robbers.

He just needed to find a way to truly verify it beyond drawing superficial connections and then go after them, hard. The issue was, he couldn’t. Going up against [Skills] without [Skills] of a similar kind was hard. Crossing swords with a same Level melee fighter without useable [Skills] was always going to end with you losing, and the same went for trying to track down people hiding behind obfuscation [Skills] with zero investigative [Skills].

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Unless … Isaac focused on [Analyze Person]. It had claimed that it could bring his experience to bear when going up against hostile social [Skills], and being secretive was “social” in a way, wasn’t it?

It worked, sort of. Barely. He could see a little more than before, his knowledge of investigation piercing the shields set up, but the change was barely even noticeable. And why would it? Neither Isaac nor Hildebrand had been great investigators, and [Analyze Person] worked off of one’s knowledge. Which he didn’t have.

Isaac wished he could say that he was some kind of universal genius, good at anything he needed to do, but he wasn’t. In reality, he had a fairly limited skillset focused around fighting, [Aura] use, cooking, and a few social tricks. Everything else was either “fake it ‘till you make it” or borrowed from Hildebrand.

So this mess was something he’d have to somehow hand off to others. When it came to kicking down doors, he’d be right there in the front lines, sharing risks with everyone else.

Then again, Isaac himself was effectively a ghost to investigation [Skills] himself. [Unknown Fear] was an epicupgrade to [Privacy] and [Fleeting Presence] erased traces of his DNA as well as his fingerprints. [Psychometry] was a thing, but they were blocked by [Privacy] and that wasn’t going to be a problem for him. He could just send that list to the team himself and “heard you had some trouble with these folks”.

Someone would have to come out and ask him to his face “Dr. Thoma, did you send that list to yourself?”. And even that wouldn’t work if there was a large enough Level difference between them.

Work smarter, not harder, and all that. He’d be doing some investigation on his own, but he’d offload most of it as well.

And then, it happened. The speech. Cameras were clicking obnoxiously, people were shouting and even the [Judge] seemed utterly stunned, but the situation had played out exceedingly well.

This was a speech that would end up on the news tonight, that would become known to everyone in the country, if not the continent. And it would hopefully spur change because the powers that be had just been humiliated. Called out by a serial killer, an objectively terrible person, that had to sting.

Isaac didn’t react though, just kept dumbly scrolling on his phone until the bailiff who’d led him in here pocked his head in.

“Uh, Dr. Thoma, something happened in the trial and your testimony will not be necessary anymore. The defendant confessed to everything, The sentence is being deliberated. Would you like to watch the rest of the trial?”

Isaac nodded “Sure.”

And barely a minute later, he was stuck in front of the security checkpoint in the lobby of the courthouse, along with several other witnesses. Of course, there were very few witnesses for Krebs’ crimes, so most of them were cops from Leipzig.

“Does that happen often?” Isaac asked, “Someone just confessing in the middle of the trial with no clear reason and throwing deserved shade at the government?”

“I haven’t heard of something like that, specifically, but I’ve seen some crazy stuff. One time, there was this guy who’d damaged a couple of ‘rich guy cars’ while drunk. His lawyer then read the statement ‘I did it, I’m sorry, I’ll pay for it. I’d like to petition the court to legally ban me from entering bars’. The judge obliged, and that was that. Trial over in two hours.” A police officer whom Isaac barely recognized said.

“Nah, I can top that.” Habicht declared. He was already on the other side of the checkpoint, but the conversation had clearly sparked his interest.

“See, there was this witness who was a complete jackass. The judge had already fined him, and that helped a little, but this guy was still acting like a total bastard. So when the witness statement was over and done with, the cross-examination ended, the judge didn’t ask him if he wanted to stay behind and watch the rest of the trial.”

He paused for a moment, so Isaac obliged and asked “What does that mean?”

“You know how we were just asked if we wanted to watch the rest of the trial? Basically, that’s because trials have to be public in Germany, but witnesses aren’t allowed to watch until they’ve given their statement to avoid bias. Afterward, though, they have to be officially asked if they want to stay, permitting them to watch and therefore keeping the trial public.

“So do you know what the defense lawyer did? He asked for a recess and once it was over, asked for a mistrial as the public had been excluded.”

“Oh shit,” Isaac observed.

“Yep.” Habicht chuckled “Except there was a small wrinkle in that plan. See, the witness had come by train and the station was right outside the courthouse. So some poor bastard of a bailiff had to chase him down and apparently managed to drag the witness back out of the train car by his jacket, then bring him back to the court for the judge to ask the question, and the defense attorney looked like an idiot. But the sheer look of panic on that judge’s face … obey the rules of the court or there will be hell to pay.”

“All is well that ends well, I suppose.” Isaac shrugged “Let’s hope the same goes for this trial too.”

“Let’s.”

***

“… and Arianne Krebs is hereby sentenced to life in prison, with Sicherheitsverwahrung being strongly advised.”

And that was that. Life in prison, which tended to translate to around fifteen to twenty years of time served, as well as Sicherheitsverwahrung. This was an extension of a person’s sentence that could be added when there was a serious danger of them committing a crime once they got out. Where a normal prison sentence was meant to rehabilitate the offender, a Sicherheitsverwahrung was meant to protect everyone else.

Things had gone about as well as they could have. She was stuck in prison, but her powers weren’t going to waste and she’d already proven useful. The threat she posed was neutralized and she’d forever serve as a representation, a tangible example of what could come from careless handling of the [System].

However, should there be a problem, should she put one toe out of line, he’d always be there, ready to stop her in as final a way as was required.

Now if only his new adversary was to be as easy to deal with. If they were even real, that was.

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