567
Wednesday, eight in the evening.
A passenger liner with flames shooting from its stern plowed into Caesar Pier at an unimaginable speed. The tremendous noise shook the buildings around the harbor until they threatened to collapse, and candles and gas lamps lit up one after another.
Caesar Pier was a medium-sized trading port, now captured by the Balam Empire and placed under official control. Naturally, the Iron and Blood Cross Order and the Aurora Order had the right to use it as allies. Expansion plans had been drawn up two years ago because of increased passenger traffic, but work had never begun due to a host of problems: cultists frequently seeking refuge, Southern Continent residents being smuggled in, bodies being dumped at sea, and government corruption.
Now it seemed the expansion could finally go ahead.
Fortunately, few people had been near the harbor, and there were no casualties beyond the damage to the harbor itself.
Before the harbor officials arrived, the flames on the smoke-shrouded pier went out on their own. Accompanied by five earth-shattering crashes, five enormous crates, each half the size of a shipping container, landed inside an empty harbor warehouse-by smashing through its roof.
A figure clapped his hands and leaped nimbly from the blazing ship onto the wharf.
Then a dozen or so figures slowly staggered onto the wharf, swaying from side to side, their faces ashen and their bodies as stiff as Zombies. Before they had even steadied themselves, they lunged for the railings and vomited toward the sea with earth-shattering force.
"Bleurgh! Bleurgh! Bleurgh!"
Tony Dawn moved a little farther away, unperturbed, and stood upwind. "Ordinary people are so fragile."
Amid the crackling flames, the sailors' retching, and the screams of the officials inspecting the harbor damage, the passenger liner that had brought