The central square had been prepared for the occasion with the protocol official occasions received—a raised platform before which the population gathered in numbers the Imperial Guard considered comfortable for crowd management, Mahallem banners on the sides, and the kind of organization that communicated this was a state event and not a street conversation.
Liou stood on the platform.
Formal vestments—not the beach vestments, not the full-audience version, but something intermediate communicating seriousness without ostentation.
His hair in its small bun.
His usual expression.
The crowd waited.
“Citizens of Mahallem,” Liou began, with a voice projecting effortlessly, with an aura that reached even the farthest edges of the square without ever becoming oppressive, “today I come to speak of a matter that directly affects the lives of every one of you.”
A calculated pause.
“The law of bank robbery.”
A murmur ran through the crowd—not surprise at the topic’s existence, but the specific anticipation populations develop when they know their Emperor is about to announce something that will be, at minimum, interesting.
“For too long,” Liou continued, “bank robbery in Mahallem has operated in a chaotic legal vacuum.
People robbed without a license.
Without regulation.
Without adequate fiscal responsibility to the Empire.”
The crowd listened with the specific attention of people who knew, from accumulated years of listening to Liou speak, that what came next deserved full attention.
“As of today,” said Liou, raising a scroll an assistant had handed him with the appropriate ceremony, “I hereby establish the Non-Consensual Banking Activity Licensing System.”
Silence in the crowd.
The kind of silence preceding questions no one yet knew how to formulate.
“Any citizen wishing to rob a bank,” Liou continued, with the voice of someone explaining a perfectly reasonable fiscal policy, “must first obtain the Criminal Permission Certificate, issued by the Ministry of Regulated Activities.
The certificate is valid for one year and carries a symbolic administrative fee.”
“Upon obtaining the certificate,” he continued, turning the scroll’s page, “the licensed citizen may proceed to rob the bank of their choice, respecting established business hours and avoiding injuries to employees, which remains prohibited regardless of license.”
In the crowd, an older man raised his hand with the genuine confusion of someone who genuinely needed clarification.
“Your Majesty,” he said, when Liou signaled for him to speak, “what about the stolen money?”
“Excellent question,” said Liou, with the approval of a teacher satisfied with the class.
“The licensed citizen keeps the proceeds of the robbery.
However”—he raised a finger, with the precision of someone arriving at the important part—”they must pay the Empire a Non-Consensual Banking Activity Fee, equivalent to double the stolen amount.”
The crowd processed this.
“Double,” said someone from the crowd, with the voice of someone doing the math in real time and not liking the result.
“Double,” Liou confirmed.
“If you steal a thousand coins, you pay two thousand to the Imperial Treasury.
The difference is absorbed as an extraordinary contribution to the maintenance of Sherpia’s roads.”
“That’s not…” someone began, further forward, before stopping, clearly trying to rephrase the objection in a way that did not appear to question the Emperor’s fiscal logic directly in public square.
“And,” Liou continued, not letting the objection grow, “even with a valid certificate, the citizen can still be arrested for the robbery.
The license does not grant immunity.
It only ensures that, if arrested, the judicial process proceeds with proper administrative basis rather than informal chaos.”
Complete silence in the crowd.
The kind of silence that exists when an entire population is simultaneously trying to process a policy that seemed designed precisely to have no practical benefit whatsoever, and deciding whether it was worth pointing that out to the Emperor of Mahallem out loud. This chapter is updated first at novelping dot com.
“So,” said the older man finally, with the courage of someone who had already gone too far to stop now, “the certificate doesn’t prevent arrest.
And I still have to pay double.”
“Exactly,” Liou confirmed, with the satisfaction of someone who felt the policy had been well explained.
“Then what is the benefit of the certificate?”
Liou was momentarily quiet, with the expression of someone genuinely considering the question with the seriousness it deserved.
“Bureaucratic,” he said, finally.
“It’s more organized.”
The crowd was left with that answer in the way crowds are left with answers that do not fully address the question but come from someone with enough power that insisting does not seem like a good idea.
Liou was about to continue—there was more scroll, more clauses about what constituted “business hours” for licensed robbery purposes, presumably a section on what would happen if two licensed citizens attempted to rob the same bank simultaneously—when something in the crowd changed.
The Bomb Man
Liou felt it first.
He did not see it—the crowd was too dense, the platform’s angle did not cover all points with direct visual clarity.
He felt it, in the same way he had felt Alígargar’s presence at the fair weeks earlier, but different—this presence did not have the density of something ancient and powerful.
It had another quality.
The specific quality of something built for a single purpose, compressed, unstable, about to release everything it contained all at once.
The man was in the middle of the crowd.
Early twenties, loose robes barely concealing the volume beneath them—cylinders, wires, the visible architecture of amateur explosives built with determination compensating for competence.
His eyes had that specific quality of someone who had arrived at a decision through a path most people present in the square could not reconstruct even if they had all the time in the world.
His hand was on what appeared to be the activation mechanism.
No one in the crowd had noticed yet—they were too focused on Liou, on the speech, on the collective confusion about the fiscal logic of licensed bank robbery.
The man had chosen the moment and place carefully, positioned centrally enough that the explosion radius would cover the maximum number of people possible.
Liou stopped speaking mid-sentence about the precise definition of “business hours.”
The crowd, sensing the change in the Emperor’s posture before understanding the reason, began to turn, to search for what had made Liou stop.
The man raised his hand with the mechanism.
And Liou was no longer on the platform.
Liou’s movement did not have the quality of dramatic urgency the situation technically justified.
It had the quality everything Liou did had when the situation truly mattered—absolute economy, absence of waste, the calm certainty of someone who had already calculated the trajectory before the body even began to move.
He crossed the distance between the platform and the crowd’s center in a time no spectator present could describe accurately afterward, because human memory was not equipped to process movement at that speed in a way that produced coherent narrative.
He reached the man before the thumb completed the press on the mechanism.
Liou’s hand closed around the man’s wrist with enough force to prevent any further movement, but calibrated—not crushing the bone, only immobilizing completely, with the precision of someone who knew exactly how much force that specific immobilization required and applied not a gram more than that.
The man looked at Liou with eyes that had, until that moment, been fixed on what he was about to do and that were now fixed, with pure shock, on the fact that the Emperor of Mahallem was standing directly before him, in the middle of the crowd, holding his wrist with a firmness that made any attempt to complete the action physically impossible.
“No,” said Liou.
One word.
Without unnecessary volume.
But with the absolute weight of something that did not admit a second attempt.
The surrounding crowd, which had begun to realize what was happening, began to retreat with the contained panic of people who realized they were near something that could still explode even with the Emperor intervening. You are reading on NovelPing, the official source.
Liou, with his other hand, reached for the mechanism in the man’s garment.
With movements that had the technical precision of someone who knew exactly how that specific type of device worked—where the important wires were, what the deactivation sequence was that would not trigger anything by mistake—he disassembled the mechanism with the same economy of effort he had used to cross the crowd.
The device lay inert in Liou’s hand.
The man, still with his wrist immobilized, looked at what had been his weapon and was now merely a collection of non-functional components, with the expression of someone whose entire plan had collapsed in a timespan too short for the brain to fully process the transition.
“Who are you,” said Liou.
Not with fury.
With the calm he had when genuinely interested in the answer, which was, for those who knew him, more unsettling than fury would have been.
The man did not respond immediately.
“Garmanist,” said someone from the crowd, closer now that the immediate danger had passed, pointing to a symbol discreetly sewn onto the man’s sleeve, a symbol João would have recognized instantly from his battles against Spreichem.
Liou looked at the symbol.
Then at the man.
“Drugged bread,” said Liou, with the calm recognition of someone fitting pieces they already knew.
“How long.”
The man, his wrist still held in Liou’s hand, any resistance having completely evaporated before the reality of the situation, lowered his eyes.
“Three months,” he said, with the voice of someone who had just been torn from a mental state in which they had lived for that time and was now, abruptly, confronted with the clarity of what they had been about to do.
The surrounding crowd processed the scene with the mixture of relief and retrospective horror of people who had been, unknowingly, seconds away from disaster.
Liou held the man by the wrist while the Imperial Guard, finally reacting to what had happened, made their way through the crowd to reach them.
“Take him,” said Liou, when the guards arrived.
“Medical treatment before interrogation.” A pause, with his voice gaining something approaching genuine fatigue.
“And find out where Spreichem is selling this time.”
The guards took the man.
Liou stood in the middle of the crowd, the disassembled device still in his hand, looking at the empty space the man had occupied.
The crowd, slowly, began to applaud.
Not the organized applause of an official event—the spontaneous, growing applause of people who had just watched, live, their Emperor save hundreds of lives with the same casual ease with which minutes earlier he had explained a completely nonsensical fiscal policy about bank robbery.
Liou looked at the crowd.
Then at the platform, where the scroll with the rest of the Non-Consensual Banking Activity Licensing Law still awaited reading.
He walked back to the platform, his aura settling again to its quiet resting quality, the applause continuing behind him.
He climbed onto the platform.
“Where was I,” he said, picking up the scroll, with the voice of someone resuming a conversation interrupted by something minor.
The crowd, still recovering from what they had just witnessed, fell into expectant silence.
“Ah,” said Liou, finding his place.
“Business hours.
Defined as the period between sunrise and sunset, except on national holidays, during which licensed robbery incurs an additional twenty percent surcharge as it is considered activity on a special day.”
The crowd, with the specific resilience of a people living in Mahallem who had learned to accept that normal days included both assassination attempts and absurd fiscal policies about organized crime, listened to the continuation of the speech with the attention they could muster.
Somewhere in the crowd, someone murmured to their neighbor:
“Do you think he’s even going to mention what happened?”
“It’s Liou,” the other replied, with the simplicity of someone who had lived long enough in that city for the answer to be self-explanatory.