Chapter 274: Chapter 274 Pirate Princess_1
After completing their inspection of the entire core area’s cells, Aiden and Flandre returned once again to the vicinity of the ward’s main gate.
As they passed by cell number three, Aiden paused briefly.
Inside the cell, the incarcerated "Mad Halo", her hair disheveled, sat on her bed staring vacantly at the wall opposite, with an expression that was both smile and not.
Most of the time, Halo was actually quite quiet, just sitting there with an obviously abnormal expression, seemingly lost in thought.
However, when she had an episode, it was extremely serious. She would cry and laugh, waving her arms and kicking her legs, and occasionally self-harm. If there were anyone near her at that time, she wouldn’t hesitate to attack them, trying to remove a part of their body to offer as a sacrifice to the Evil God.
Aiden wasn’t sure whether she truly didn’t remember that the dominator she served had vanished and was desperately trying to reestablish contact, or if she knew but was attempting to resurrect that ruler through these actions.
After learning about "Mad Halo" from Melifilia, Aiden had tried several times to communicate with her, but to no avail. Forget getting any specific intelligence about "Mr. Blood Coat" or the Right of Hatred from her mouth, it was difficult even to have a normal conversation.
In her calm moments, she was almost completely detached from the world around her. Only when given instructions related to daily life such as eating, changing clothes, or bathing did she show any reaction—other than that, anything said to her would only be met with a vacant stare, and occasionally she would flash an abnormal smile.
In her agitated state, sitting in an interview room even if chained by mercury alloy golems so that she couldn’t move, Halo would still continually try to stand up and lunge forward to attack, all the while babbling nonsense.
At that moment, Halo noticed Aiden’s gaze and slowly turned her face towards him. Then, like the female ghosts often seen in ghost stories, she tilted her head to the side at a ninety-degree angle, her face twisting into a distorted smile.
"No matter how many years pass, seeing her always feels extremely unsettling," Flandre commented, unaware of Aiden’s thoughts, simply expressing her sentiment. "It’s good that as long as she’s locked up, there won’t be any trouble."
Other than going out to bathe, Halo was almost never allowed out of this cell. Although she was mad, she was still capable of taking care of herself. The door of the cell had a delivery slot to provide her with food and clean clothes. The purpose of Rose Iron Prison detaining her wasn’t for her rehabilitation but purely to contain such a dangerous individual, preventing her from causing harm to ordinary people on the outside.
Aiden stepped forward, leaving the core area together with Flandre.
As the ward’s main gate closed again, Aiden heard a strange and unpleasant song coming from cell number three: "Who are you, oh who are you? Neither killed nor broken, truly pitiful, oh truly pitiful, ah hahaha!!"
They had just left the ward when a prison guard approached quickly, saluting the two supervisors and then handing over a document: "Warden, this is an urgent official document that just arrived."
Upon seeing the document envelope, Aiden frowned—it bore the imperial crest, but the seal was stamped by both the Autonomous State’s judicial department and the prison administration bureau.
This meant that the document had been sent from the Empire to the Autonomous State’s judiciary, gone through multiple levels of review, and then made its way here through the supervising department of Rose Iron Prison.
The Empire’s extradition request was Aiden’s first thought, but after thinking it over, he couldn’t recall any criminals recently captured in the Autonomous State that required the Empire to send documents for extradition.
He immediately tore open the document to skim through it, then his eyes widened in surprise.
Flandre glimpsed from the side and was also stunned, "Huh, not an extradition request? Instead, they want to transfer the prisoner... to us? From the Empire? That can’t be right, can it?"
Similar documents weren’t all that uncommon for Aiden and Flandre to see, but one coming from the Empire... was indeed a rare sight.
Because of the special circumstances under which The Covenant was signed, the Autonomous State had provisions to accept other countries’ requests to transfer convicts who had been judged in those countries for violating The Covenant, to "extradite" them back to the Autonomous State, which would then take over and exercise punishment on behalf of those countries.
Simply put, not all prisons on this continent could offer containment conditions like the Thorn and Rose prisons in Silvertown, which were built through funding from The Covenant nations. Some small nations would struggle to find any prisons capable of perfectly containing Class S wanted criminals, and in those cases, they would send the criminals to serve their sentence in the Autonomous State.
The reason Aiden and Flandre were surprised was that the Dragon Spine Empire typically didn’t send such requests.
As a major power that spanned the northern part of the Southern Continent, the Dragon Spine Empire had fairly comprehensive judicial facilities. Its domestic prisons, although not necessarily on par with the two large-scale prisons built by The Covenant nations in the Autonomous State, weren’t far off in standards either. The Empire had the capabilities to detain most of those who violated The Covenant, so there was no need to transfer them to the Autonomous State.
"It’s a pirate, named..." Aiden flipped to the criminal’s record, "Annie Drake?"
Drake...
Aiden paused, recognizing the surname.
Wasn’t this the same surname mentioned in the letter from the vampiric progenitor, the pirate who possessed the Wordless Code?
He quickly read through the attached record in the document and soon understood the reason.
This Annie Drake seemed to be the famous pirate of Red Shark Island, Navi Drake’s daughter, known as the "Pirate Princess".
Aside from her title as the "Pirate Princess", Annie Drake appeared to have nothing special about her. The record showed that she knew some basic dark magic, was proficient with firearms, and led a group of forty-five pirates, committing twenty-six robberies with a small warship called the Gryphon Vessel near the Coral Sea Domain—most of which were "peacefully" carried out.
Overall, she was a run-of-the-mill pirate, perhaps only notable for her knowledge of dark magic, but whether judged by her personal strength or her crimes, she wouldn’t even reach the average level within the core area.
However, at the very end, a detail was recorded that made one doubt their eyes.
Actually, four years ago, Annie Drake had once been apprehended in the Empire and was incarcerated in the Empire’s most secure capital prison.
Then, this seemingly unremarkable "Pirate Princess", with the help of the Red Shark pirates led by her father, successfully broke out of prison, taking with her twenty-nine other prisoners and some of the prison’s supplies in the process.
During this entire event, they didn’t cause any casualties.
