Chapter 2: Public Security Police
"Roman, you're awake? How did this happen... How's your body recovering?"
At the sound of the voice, Jörg turned his head.
Shiloh Ens, dressed in a neatly pressed plaid shirt, was already striding into the ward with an expression of open surprise. There was concern on his face, almost warmth. To anyone seeing him for the first time, it would have been hard to imagine that this short-haired young man, only a few years older than Jörg, was a grasping opportunist who measured friendship in profit.
Only the old Jörg would have mistaken such a smiling tiger for a friend.
"What is it?" Jörg asked, his tone calm but heavy. "Are you surprised I didn't die?"
The words struck harder than they appeared to.
Shiloh stopped for the briefest instant. A flicker of something cold passed through his eyes before he smoothed it away and laughed, as though brushing aside a harmless joke.
"Come now, don't say that. You're the famous Baron Roman. How could a lucky commoner like me dare entertain improper thoughts about you?"
He spoke lightly, but the speed of his answer only made the performance more obvious.
"If it hadn't been for your recommendation after the Kapp Putsch a year ago, crediting me for that affair, I would never have risen from an ordinary policeman to head of the Public Security Police Branch."
Jörg gave a faint smile.
Had this been the man who had lain here two days ago, half-dead and still clinging to old illusions, that flattery might have worked. But the fool who had once confused dependence for loyalty was gone.
"Is that so?" Jörg asked softly. "Then if I asked you to return it, Mr. Shiloh, would you agree?"
For a moment, Shiloh nearly laughed again.
In his heart, he had always despised this ruined Junker. Why should a wastrel like Jörg von Roman hold rank simply because he had been born with a noble particle in his name? What had he ever done to deserve authority? He drank, gambled, wasted family property, and still expected the world to bend around him. If not for the title, if not for those remaining deeds and contracts, he would have been worth less than the mud on a laborer's boots.
Shiloh had once assumed the man would drink himself into the grave soon enough. Once the land deeds and stock contracts were in hand, he had fully intended to ensure the rest disappeared with him.
Junker? Baron?
A fool in a fine coat was still a fool.
He should have mixed even more into the wine.
Still thinking Jörg was merely testing him, or perhaps making some drunken jest in a sober room, Shiloh answered without hesitation.
"Of course," he said with practiced sincerity. "If you gave the word, I would submit my resignation to the government at once. I would gladly return to patrolling behind you as before."
Then, as though remembering something casually, he lowered his voice and leaned in a little.
"Ah, yes, Mr. Roman. I've recently come across a very promising venture, but it happens to be lacking a bit of start-up capital. I was wondering whether you might be willing to lend your support."
There it was.
Not concern. Not friendship. Business.
Jörg stepped closer and placed his left hand on Shiloh's right shoulder, as if confiding in a trusted companion. He even lowered his voice, deliberately letting a note of difficulty enter it.
"Shiloh, I truly would like to help you. Unfortunately, all my remaining assets have been mortgaged to a gang in the Southern District. They have evidence of my gambling debts, enough to cause trouble for me if they choose."
He paused, studying Shiloh's eyes.
"You are the famous head of the Public Security Police Branch. Surely a small matter like this..."
Before Jörg even finished the sentence, Shiloh had already taken the bait.
"Leave it to me, Baron Roman," he said at once, almost eager. "Such a trifling issue is hardly worth troubling you over."
That answer came too quickly.
He really was a good actor. No wonder the old Jörg had taken such satisfaction in calling him a friend.
"Then I'll leave it in your hands, Shiloh," Jörg said, patting him once on the shoulder. "You truly are my best friend."
Shiloh smiled, exchanged a few more polite words, and soon took his leave.
Only after the door closed behind him did the expression on Jörg's face gradually stiffen.
The warmth vanished first. Then the faint amusement. What remained was something colder, quieter, and far more dangerous.
Cardolan, who had been standing nearby the entire time, stepped forward at once. His brows were tightly drawn, and it was obvious he wanted to speak. Yet for several moments he said nothing, as though unsure whether he was even allowed to give voice to what he was thinking.
Jörg glanced at him through the mirror.
"Don't stand there making faces. What, were you planning to tell me to cut ties with him?"
Cardolan hesitated, then lowered his head.
Jörg let out a quiet breath and turned from the sink.
"How could that be?" he continued evenly. "That man has taken far too much from me already. It's time he started spitting some of it back out."
He crooked a finger.
"Come here, Cardolan."
Cardolan walked over reluctantly, his expression still uneasy. Looking at Jörg now, he felt something had changed in a way he could not explain. The face was the same. The voice was the same. Even the habits were mostly the same. Yet the presence behind them felt different, as if something inside his master had suddenly hardened.
"Master..." Cardolan asked in a low voice. "Are you truly all right?"
Jörg snorted.
"What nonsense. Don't I look perfectly fine?"
He dipped a cloth in cold water and wiped the last traces of fatigue from his face. When he spoke again, his tone was calm, but each word carried an edge Cardolan had never heard before.
"I've simply come to understand something. A good man is meat for wolves. The kinder he is, the cleaner they gnaw him to the bone. In this world, pity and friendship are worthless once profit enters the room."
Cardolan's throat moved, but he said nothing.
Jörg continued, now in the clipped cadence of an order.
"I need you to do something. For the next few days, stay close to the Night Salon in the Southern District. Do not leave it unwatched. The moment you see policemen, or any unfamiliar faces approaching the place, you call me immediately."
The command was so precise that Cardolan's posture straightened on instinct.
"Yes, master!"
Though he was still confused, there was one truth he had never doubted. However Jörg changed, however strange his words became, he was still Jörg von Roman. And Cardolan's place was still at his side.
Jörg said nothing more. He merely adjusted his police uniform in front of the mirror.
The dark blue-green fabric had been brushed clean. The buttons gleamed. The collar sat neatly at his throat. With a few splashes of cold water and the return of strength from whatever strange force had coursed through his body, the lingering weakness of the hospital had all but disappeared.
He raised his head and studied the face reflected before him.
It was a face both familiar and unfamiliar now. Sharp lines. Blond hair. Clear blue eyes. Handsome in the severe, unmistakably Germanic way that made uniforms seem born for the body wearing them. Yet behind that face stood two lifetimes, layered uneasily atop one another.
And in that overlap, a ruthless plan was already taking shape.
Since Shiloh wanted to swallow him whole, then Jörg would let the man choke on a bullet.
The door creaked open behind him.
Cardolan gave one last look, then quietly withdrew from the ward, leaving Jörg alone.
Silence settled over the room.
For a while, he simply stood there.
Whether because he had inherited fragments of the original owner's temperament, or because the collision of two lives had dredged up traits long hidden in both, Jörg felt faintly estranged from himself. The clarity in his mind had sharpened, but so had something darker. The old Raymond would never have so quickly accepted murder as a reasonable answer.
Yet the thought did not revolt him.
That, more than anything, was unsettling.
"System," he called inwardly. "System?"
No answer came.
His mind remained still.
If not for the extraordinary lightness in his body, the sense that every muscle and bone had been reforged, he might have convinced himself that the earlier mechanical voice had been nothing more than a hallucination from waking out of a coma.
At first, he had half expected the sort of absurd good fortune that belonged in cheap fiction. Sign in once, receive an army. Sign in twice, summon cannons. Sign in three times, march into history with banners flying and everyone kneeling on schedule.
Reality, as usual, was less accommodating.
Even if he truly had been granted an army, what then?
He could not have fed it. The Weimar government itself was staggering under debt, instability, and foreign pressure, while the Treaty of Versailles had already reduced Germany's military capacity to a shadow. An army that could not be legally maintained, properly supplied, or politically concealed would be less a trump card than a death sentence. Its weapons would be confiscated, dismantled, and sold as scrap long before it changed the country's fate. Its soldiers would become statistics, labor, or corpses.
One army alone could not prop up a collapsing order.
No, whether the System existed or not was secondary.
His true advantage did not lie in miracles. It lay in memory.
He knew what was coming, or enough of it. He knew the fractures within Germany. He knew the disasters waiting just ahead. He knew where the nation would bleed, where it would panic, where it would hand itself over to men who promised salvation and delivered catastrophe.
That foresight was worth more than any fantasy reward.
It was the one leverage he possessed to keep Germany from plunging into the abyss a second time.
After a few moments, he exhaled slowly and walked to the window.
Outside, Berlin sprawled beneath a grey autumn sky.
...
By the time Jörg stepped out through the hospital gates, the cold had sharpened.
He paused on the pavement and looked around.
Military trucks growled through the streets, carrying French soldiers who had long since settled into the role of occupiers. Their laughter drifted behind them from open truck beds, casual and cutting, the laughter of victors who no longer needed to conceal their contempt.
Not far away, the shattered remains of a statue lay scattered across the ground.
It had once been Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Now it was rubble.
The head had been broken off and defaced, and someone had scrawled a French insult across it, the word loser pressed like a stamp of triumph onto imperial stone. A few royalists still lingered nearby, staring at the fragments with hollow expressions, as though mourning not only a monarch but their entire understanding of Germany.
They had once spoken of fighting to the last moment.
So why had surrender come before the French ever reached the capital in force?
To men like these, defeat was not merely military. It was betrayal. They refused to recognize it fully, and they refused even more to recognize the Weimar Republic that had followed. In their eyes, parliamentary democracy, financiers, party men, and urban interests had all combined to poison the Reich from within. It was they, not the exhausted army or the broken treasury, who had stabbed Germany in the back.
But the ordinary people passing by spared the ruins only a glance.
Politics was too large, too distant, too abstract.
Hunger was not.
The war had ended more than a year earlier, yet Berlin was still full of the displaced and the desperate. Men in threadbare coats huddled against walls. Women carried children with hollow eyes. Veterans missing limbs sold matches or simply sat in silence, as if the city had already stepped over them and moved on.
The Great Berlin expansion had transformed the capital almost overnight. The city's territory had swollen many times over, and millions more people now fell within its boundaries. With that growth had come everything else as well: slums, overcrowding, unemployment, shortages, and the steady multiplication of those with nowhere to go.
Homelessness spread with the city itself.
And where misery expanded, crime followed.
Smuggling. Street violence. gang rule. Political agitation. Sudden riots. Harsh suppression.
All of it had become part of the daily rhythm of Berlin.
Strictly speaking, such matters fell within the reach of the Public Security Police, which made that institution one of the most contested levers in the capital. Every faction wanted influence over the force that stood between order and the mob.
And yet Shiloh still found his power insufficient.
Jörg understood why.
The man might have enjoyed the authority of office, but he lacked its foundation. He was still a commoner in a world where pedigree and property remained currencies no less real than marks. His rank could be challenged. His legitimacy could be whispered against. Even the policemen under his command likely muttered in private that he was nothing more than a puppet lifted up by the Junker he now sought to rob.
For a man like Shiloh, there was only one answer.
Climb higher.
If he could become Chief of Police in Berlin, the muttering would stop. Men who now sneered behind his back would salute without hesitation. And to rise that far, he needed more than merit. He needed the visible symbols of weight and permanence.
Land.
Factories.
Assets of his own.
And soon, he believed, they would be his.
"Have you searched Roman's house?"
The voice came from not far down the street.
In the shadow of a waiting car, Shiloh stood with two tall, narrow-faced policemen. One of them had just opened the rear door for him.
"Yes, sir," one of the men replied respectfully. "Unless he hid them in a bank, there's no way we should have found nothing."
Shiloh's face no longer carried even a trace of the humility he had displayed inside the hospital room. The smile was gone. The ingratiating warmth was gone.
What remained was naked greed.
"That idiot doesn't have the brains for that," he said coldly. "Take me back first. Once we get the documents, you two will replace Roman as squad leader and deputy squad leader."