Incorporated with DeepSeek
The rain had stopped. That was the first thing Kommissar Haas noticed, staring out the streaked plexiglass of his office window. For three weeks, a relentless, grey drizzle had fallen on the forgotten town of Niederfeld, a town dying by inches in the grip of a German economic crisis that felt more like a permanent state of being. But today, the sky was a hard, brilliant blue, the sun glaring off the puddles on the asphalt like scattered pieces of a mirror. It felt wrong. Ominous.
His commlink buzzed, a harsh, digital snarl that cut through the morning’s unnatural silence. It was the order, direct from the regional LKA headquarters in Frankfurt. A simple, insane order.
*Subject: Friedrich Vogel. Address: Am Alten Schlag 4. Apprehension for aggravated disturbance, potential paranoid schizophrenia, possession of illegal firearms. Directive: Overwhelming force authorized. Deploy full tactical complement. 20 Officers. Lethal force pre-authorized.*
Haas read it twice. Friedrich Vogel. The old man in the tumbledown house at the edge of the woods. The one who muttered about “the coming storm” and paid for his groceries with antique silver coins. They’d had calls before. Nuisance calls. Vogel shouting at kids to get off his lawn, reporting “shadowy figures” in the woods. Standard crazy old man stuff. For this, they were sending in twenty men? In Niederfeld, where the biggest crime was the meth labs cooking in the abandoned factories and his own officers skimmed a percentage off the top to look the other way? It was like using a sledgehammer to kill a gnat.
“It’s true, then?” Sergeant Becker asked, his face pale as he stood in the doorway. “We’re all going? For Vogel?”
“It seems our masters in Frankfurt think the old man is a greater threat than the *Kristallwelle* that’s turning our town into a graveyard,” Haas said, his voice tight. The Crystal Wave. A new, viciously addictive synth-coke that had flooded the streets, making his corrupt, lazy officers even richer and the town even more hollowed out.
The mobilization was a farce. His men, more accustomed to shaking down petty dealers and writing traffic tickets, fumbled with their heavy armor and assault rifles. There was a nervous energy, a mixture of bravado and fear. They were hiding something, all of them. Hiding from the real drug wars raging in the sprawls of Berlin and Ruhrpott, hiding in their quiet, rotten little fiefdom. And now they were being ordered to play soldier.
The convoy of armoured police vans tore through the quiet, sun-drenched streets, kicking up spray from the puddles. The house at Am Alten Schlag 4 was exactly as Haas remembered: a two-story Fachwerk house, timber and plaster, sagging with age, the garden an overgrown tangle. It looked peaceful. Dormant.
They surrounded it. Twenty men, taking positions behind car doors, garden walls, trees. The air was crisp, clean after the rain. Haas, from his command position behind an armored van, keyed his comm.
“Herr Vogel! This is the Polizei! You are surrounded! Come out with your hands up!”
Silence. Then, the front door opened, not with a slam, but slowly, deliberately.
Friedrich Vogel stood there. He wasn’t the stooped, frail man Haas expected. He stood straight, clad in simple, dark trousers and a worn woolen sweater. His eyes weren’t the cloudy, confused eyes of a madman. They were sharp, clear, and held a depth of cold, ancient certainty that made Haas’s stomach clench.
“You should not have come, Kommissar,” Vogel’s voice carried, calm and resonant, without him raising it. “You are interrupting my work. And you are trespassing on a quiet day.”
“Your work?” Becker muttered next to Haas. “He’s nuts.”
But Haas felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. This wasn’t dementia. This was… something else.
“Take him,” Haas ordered, his voice a dry croak.
The first two officers, clad in full body armor, moved in. Vogel didn’t flinch. As the first reached for him, Vogel’s hand moved. It was a blur. A sharp *crack* echoed, and the officer was on the ground, his helmet visor shattered, his neck bent at an impossible angle. He hadn’t even fired his weapon.
Chaos erupted.
Vogel moved like a ghost, like a predator. He wasn’t just fast; he was *efficient*. He flowed through the hail of gunfire as if he knew the path of every bullet before it was fired. A flick of his wrist, and a throwing knife buried itself in the throat of an officer behind a car door. He snatched a fallen assault rifle, fired three-round bursts with impossible precision, each one finding a gap in armor, a weak point in a visor. He wasn’t spraying bullets; he was performing surgery with lead.
Haas watched, frozen, as his world unraveled. The screaming started. It wasn’t the brave shouts of his officers; it was the raw, terrified shrieks of men being systematically butchered. Becker went down, his chest plate caved in from a kick that shouldn’t have been possible. The staccato of gunfire was punctuated by wet, final sounds. Vogel wasn’t a man. He was a machine. A force of nature.
*He’s not crazy,* the thought screamed in Haas’s mind, cutting through the paralyzing terror. *He was never crazy.*
The firefight—no, the slaughter—lasted less than two minutes. The brilliant blue sky was now a obscene canvas for the horror below. The sunny, quiet street was a charnel house. Twenty bodies lay scattered in the puddles, the clean water turning pink, then red. The silence that fell was heavier, more terrifying than the noise had been.
Vogel stood amidst the carnage, untouched. He looked at the rifle in his hand, discarded it as if it were a toy, and began walking. Not running. Walking. Towards the town center. Towards the police station.
Haas’s body moved on autopilot. He scrambled into a patrol car, tires screeching as he sped back the way they came. His heart hammered against his ribs. Over the comms, he heard the panicked calls from the station’s skeleton crew.
“He’s on Hauptstraße! He just… he just walked past Frau Henkel’s bakery!”
“He’s turning onto Marktplatz! Oh Gott, he’s looking right at the cameras!”
The shots started again. Closer now. Single, deliberate shots. Each one was followed by a cessation of a panicked voice on the comms.
Haas burst into the station, his service pistol shaking in his hand. The front desk was empty. He could hear the last of his men in the operations room, their voices high with panic. A final, booming shot from the front lobby. Then, silence.
The footsteps came next. Slow, measured. The tread of a man who had all the time in the world, walking through a building he owned.
Haas backed into his office, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The sun streamed through the window, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. It was one of the few not-rainy days. A beautiful day to die.
The door swung open.
Friedrich Vogel stood there. He wasn’t even breathing heavily. There was no anger on his face, no triumph. Only a profound, weary resolve. In his hand was a heavy, ornate pistol that looked centuries old, yet hummed with a faint, technological energy.
“You…” Haas whispered, his pistol wavering. “What are you?”
Vogel’s eyes held his. They were old eyes. Ancient. “I am a warden. A single, independent cell. My function is to watch. To wait. To cull the corruption when it threatens the structural integrity of the system. Your town, Kommissar, was a designated quarantine zone. Your officers were a symptom of the disease. A disease of the soul. The *Kristallwelle* was just the fever.”
It was all true. The muttering, the coins, the shadows. He wasn’t a madman. He was a… a Witcher Knight. A ghost from a secret war, standing in the ruins of a forgotten German town. Undefeatable. His men, his corrupt, small-time, drug-pushing officers, hiding outside the hot spots, had been nothing but kindling for this silent, cleansing fire.
Vogel raised the antique pistol. The hum intensified.
Kommissar Haas’s last thought was not of his family, or God, or regret. It was a simple, final, crushing epiphany, delivered under a hard blue sky on a day without rain.
*It was all true.*
The shot was a single, thunderous note that echoed through the silent, empty station, and then there was nothing.
