REIWA JIGOKUHEN - Chaotic Disturbance of Reiwa Era

Chapter 72 - Behind-the-Scenes Struggle

Moscow: Kremlin

Now that General Secretary Stalin's visit to Philadelphia has been realized after a long struggle, Molotov, a member of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, is the man in charge of his absence. As deputy chairman of the party, he was in charge of government affairs, while his subordinates were secretly trying to make contact with Japan. Satō, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, had moved to Sweden and was struggling to extract the information while keeping an eye on the movements of his American and British counterparts.

But that Satō person really doesn't know anything, does he? Molotov thought.

He was able to decipher with a high degree of certainty the telegrams that traveled back and forth between the Swedish embassy and the Japanese mainland. The contents of these telegrams consisted only of blunt questions and insincere replies to the home country. Moreover, upon further investigation, it seemed that this trend had continued since early March, around the time the US bombers suddenly suffered heavy damage. It must have been right around that time that the Alexandrians appeared. But why the need to deceive the ambassador?

"I don't get it..." Molotov loudly sighed.

On his office desk was a report showing the plight of Siberia and the Far East region. It said that as a result of Japan's bombing that smashed the railroad bridges from one end to the other, food and other necessities of life were not circulating. If left unchecked, many people will freeze to death and starve to death in the winter.

Moreover, as if seeing through this, Satō was offering ridiculous ceasefire conditions. He was still demanding that they give his country absurd amounts of crude oil and coal, and he was also calling for the ceding of North Sakhalin and Kamchatka. He heard that they too were slurping down their own wine immediately after the diplomatic relations were terminated, but they were now getting carried away with the recent war situation.

"This is all stupid."

"Excuse me."

A knock on the door was followed by the entering secretary.

"Comrade Molotov, here it is."

"Hm...?"

He handed him something that related to radio communications from the Japanese mainland. For some reason, the countless radio transmissions and radio broadcasts that had surged since March 10 and were cut off simultaneously during the same month. Because of their plain text and incoherent content, they were initially dismissed as false telegrams. However, he had ordered them to reconsider the matter the week before last, in the hope that some connections with the Alexandrians might be found.

"There are many untranslatable passages, but... the majority of what was intercepted appears to be unapologetically capitalistic and decadent commercial radio broadcasts and private communications between individuals."

"I see."

"It is unclear why this occurred so frequently in wartime Japan, and why they occurred only in their mainland while no similar phenomena were observed in Korea or Manchuria, but at present we know that the unknown concept of time-related disaster is frequently mentioned."

"Time-related disaster... what about the Alexandrians?"

"We are still looking into it, but at this point we have not been able to identify any such words."

"Hmm... that doesn't make sense."

Receiving a new stack of papers and flipping through them, Molotov grumbled. This information is extremely important, he intuited. It could be that the Alexandrians had demonstrated some ability to manipulate time, but they may have been terribly mistaken.