April 11, 870 AD

"Shadow" Sven was completely annoyed as he looked out the window.

In this miserable city of Paris, it was snowing without end. It was entirely gray and depressing. Even though thick clouds covered the sun, Sven did not need to see the sky to know the exact time.

He used the Frankish palace guards to judge the hour.

Every single morning, regardless of the freezing weather, the palace guards would march around the stone courtyard outside his window at exactly 7:00 AM.

There were exactly fifty guards. They marched in a square formation for exactly thirty minutes. Sven thought this group of armored idiots was completely ridiculous.

If they simply stayed inside their barracks and rested, they would conserve their body heat and save the empire’s grain supply. Instead, they stomped around in the wet mud for no tactical reason at all.

However, thanks to this bunch of idiots, Sven could now determine the perfect time to leave.

That was right, Sven wanted to flee this backward, freezing city. He was an elite spy for the Iron Kingdom. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

His personal goal was to earn exactly two thousand silver coins so he could buy a massive farm in Wessex, raise fifty fat pigs, and never have to work in the freezing cold ever again.

He was tired of sleeping on a hard wooden bed under a thin wool blanket. He had reached a point where he simply did not want to stay in Francia for one more minute.

Since arriving in Paris exactly thirty days ago, Sven has noticed how ignorant the local population is.

As long as they had a loaf of hard bread and a cup of cheap wine, they did not care about the world changing around them.

Sven was the best infiltrator in the entire Northern military. Because his skills in stealing information and spying on news were flawless, Queen Gyda herself trained him.

Gyda had sent him to Paris with one mission.

Two nights ago, Sven had climbed over a twelve-foot stone wall. He opened a wooden window and entered the Emperor’s private study. Inside the room, he found a piece of animal parchment resting on a wooden desk. Sven read the parchment, and his heart skipped a beat.

Emperor Louis the German was secretly trying to steal King Ragnar’s private inventions!

The parchment explicitly stated that the Emperor’s men had found a broken iron musket left behind on the battlefield at Calais.

The Emperor had transported this broken weapon to Paris. He was currently employing exactly one hundred of his best blacksmiths in a hidden forge.

They were actively dismantling the iron firing mechanism to reverse-engineer the flint lever.

Furthermore, the Frankish alchemists had scraped the unburned black powder residue from the metal. They were currently testing different ratios of sulfur and charcoal to replicate the explosive chemical reaction.

If the Frankish Empire learned how to manufacture muskets and black powder, the war would drag on for years, costing the Iron Kingdom thousands of lives and millions of silver coins.

Sven knew that escaping via dirt roads was a completely useless. The Frankish patrols would easily catch him.

His only way out was by booking passage on a merchant boat traveling down the River Seine to the coast.

According to Sven’s exact observations over the last thirty days, a grain transport boat left the city docks at exactly 8:00 AM every single morning.

The boat delivered wheat to the coastal forts. It took exactly forty-five minutes for the workers to load the heavy sacks of grain onto the boat.

Sven only had this small time frame to get on board. Otherwise, he would have to wait an entire twenty-four hours for the next boat.

Today was the day he was leaving.

"Left, right, left, right!"

Sven heard the annoying slogan again. He looked out the window and saw the group of guards in steel chainmail finishing their marching routine and turning a corner around a stone building.

’Finally, it is time to leave,’ he thought.

Sven put on his wool coat and fastened a leather belt around his waist. Inside his right pocket, he had exactly three gold coins and fifteen silver coins.

He opened the door and walked down the stairs of the inn. An innkeeper was wiping a wooden table with a dirty cloth.

"Good morning~" the innkeeper said. "Where are you walking to so early in the snow?"

Sven had told all the local residents that he was a salt merchant from Burgundy named Pierre. He even carried a small leather bag filled with ten pounds of cheap salt.

However, Sven did not respond to the innkeeper’s question. He simply ignored the man and walked out the front door into the freezing air.

Sven walked down the dirt street toward the river. By the time the Frankish guards realized he was missing from his inn room.

As he approached the wooden marina, Sven saw the long-awaited merchant boat bobbing in the freezing water.

Under the watchful eyes of the local guards, heavy canvas bags of wheat were being carried down the docks and thrown into the storage room of the boat.

Sven counted the security forces. There were six guards standing on the dock.

Sven planned to wait until the stack of unloaded goods provided him with a clear visual blind spot.

Then, he would walk towards the porter. He would show the man one gold coin and ask him whether he wanted to have a rich life or if he wanted to get his neck snapped.

As long as he could get on board and hide under the grain sacks, Sven believed the temptation of the gold would be enough to keep the porter quiet until the boat set sail.

At the exact moment Sven tightened his grip on his leather bag and prepared to take action, he heard a loud shout from behind him.

"Do not let him move!"

Sven’s heart dropped. He turned around quickly.

A large group of Frankish soldiers were rushing towards him.

They came sprinting out from three different dirt alleys, forming a half-circle that blocked his escape route back into the city. The freezing river blocked his path forward.

Sven dropped his leather bag on the snowy ground. He threw his hands high in the air and fell to his knees on the dock.

One of his core rules of espionage was to never show pointless resistance. As long as he survived today, he could adapt. He could negotiate. He could spit out fake intelligence about City Titan, or he could even offer his services to Emperor Louis for a higher price as a double agent.

As long as he got paid silver coins, he would do anything to survive; this was the fundamental principle of "Shadow" Sven.

But as the Frankish soldiers pointed their spears directly at his chest.

He had used a flawless disguise. He followed Gyda’s infiltration instructions precisely. How were they able to find him?