Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 9.1 - Chapter 1

Early Autumn of the Seventeenth Year

Recovering from Incapacitated Status

When your health drops to zero due to a heavy wound and you are rendered unconscious, it can take some time before you are ready to enter the fray once more. Of course, your rate of recovery depends on the methods used to revive you, but it can often take a long time until you are back in fighting shape.

I realized how long it had been since I last paid a visit to someone in the hospital.

“You’re up a lot earlier than I thought,” I said.

“What’s this, a bed visit fer me?” Schnee replied. “Ya know how ta make a girl smile. But what’s with the watermelon?”

“I thought some fruit would make a nice present.”

Elisa was often sick as a child; I would sit by her side and offer her raspberries that I had picked myself, but ever since leaving Konigstuhl, I had been surrounded by folk with such tough immune systems that they barely even coughed. It had been an age since the last time I found myself in this position.

My first new connection after leaving my home had been a methuselah, who couldn’t die of natural causes in the first place. Then I had met Mika, who’d come from a place where folks made their kids skinny-dip in icy rivers to build up their tolerance practically as soon as they were old enough to walk; ignoring the minor blip that had occurred after our nightmare in the ichor maze, they were tough as hell. Cecilia was a vampire—no explanation needed there. As for Elisa, after her alfish colors had come to the surface, she had remained in good health.

“I thought docs didn’t approve of fruits ’cause they make ya chilly, no?” Schnee replied. “And don’t people usually give flowers or booze?”

The complete dearth of hospital visits in this life hadn’t given me any chance to realize that giving fruit to a sick person was a cultural holdover from my past life in Japan. Schnee’s words brought back faint memories from previous conversations where people had mentioned that in the Empire people usually gifted flowers. They were easy to order and dispose of, and above all were universally beloved for capturing the visitor’s feelings for the recipient. How could I forget that it was the safest choice in the book? As for gifts of alcohol, purportedly a stiff, hot drink helped fend off your average cold; naturally, that made that sort of thing a popular gift for folks in recovery. That said, I doubted it’d do much good for Schnee’s perforated guts.

Ugh, melons are only available in the winter in the Empire, so I had to work my ass off to get this watermelon. Who knows how far it had to travel to reach Marsheim?

“But thank ya all the same. It’d be a cryin’ shame not to enjoy an eastern delight.”

“Please do. It’s come a long way, so it should be redder and sweeter than the stuff grown here.”

“Lucky me. But I ain’t sure how long I’ve been asleep...”

“The doctor said you’re recovering incredibly quickly. It was only yesterday that your life was in danger, you know? At any rate, you’re in the clear to indulge a bit.”

Schnee’s narrowed eyes suddenly widened in surprise. Bubastisians had decidedly unmenschlike eyes and eyelids; shock showed very differently on their faces. This trait was useful in Schnee’s line of work as a master of disguise.

“Now that’s somethin’... I’d chalked myself up as a goner. Done wrote off survivin’ when I caught that shiv to the stomach, y’know? What with it being lathered up with all that lovely poison and such.”

Being an informant wasn’t simply about handing out any scrap of rumor that passed within range. Schnee had thrown herself headlong into all manner of hazards to life and limb to verify every last item of interest with her own eyes before her intel ever found its way to us. She knew best just how dreadful the wound was. And in truth it was a terrible one—the knife had struck deep and been twisted out.

Even if Schnee had survived after our battle with the assassins, she would have died moments later if there hadn’t been a healer present to take care of her. Whether from internal bleeding or infection from her own cross-contaminating humors, she would have eventually kicked the bucket in two or three days. Such was the extent of her wound.

“It looks like our trusty healer’s medicine worked,” I said. “A normal doctor would have given you up for good.”

Kaya’s medicine, created thanks to Siegfried’s battlefield trauma and her paranoia about his safety, had worked wonders on the bubastisian’s otherwise fatal injury. The slime-like algae had affixed itself to the internal wounds as it consumed any lost blood and fecal matter. It digested these into nutrients that could be reabsorbed by the body while simultaneously helping to repair the wounds. It was truly a marvel of modern medicine.

Kaya had told me that it wasn’t yet able to deal with more complicated organs like the heart or lungs, but it was undeniable that it had vastly sped up Schnee’s recovery.

“Now ain’t that somethin’. I gotta thank the lady in person.”

“Please do. She’s had a lot on her mind of late, so I’m sure your kind words would cheer her up to no end.”

Lately Kaya fell into the occasional deep pensive moment. It always started the same way; she’d be perusing the potions I’d helped her develop, and she’d get this look on her face—not quite hateful, but certainly full of distaste. I wasn’t quite sure what was the matter—I’d asked Siegfried, but he looked at me like I was the dumbest person alive—but at any rate I needed to let her know that this latest concoction was a resounding success before Schnee started moving about.

Kaya’s orders were to make sure that Schnee drank two pitchers of water over the course of the day—spread out, of course, not all at once—and to get thirty minutes of daylight each day too. On this latter point, she’d been quite firm with me that Schnee ought to especially expose the affected area.

“Huh? The ol’ sun’s gonna fix me up?” Schnee said, evidently confused.

“Simply put, yes. I suppose it would be faster for you to see for yourself.”

I turned away, as any good gentleman should, and asked her to pull up her shirt without touching the wound.

In the next moment she started making a strange, almost choking noise. I had been pretty freaked out when I saw the algae crawl into her, so her own surprise was a given, really. After all, anyone would be grossed out at seeing a green mold-like substance lining the wound, standing out horrendously against their snow-white fur.

“Mraaaagh!”

Schnee’s stifled sounds exploded into a scream. It seemed even our talented informant couldn’t bear seeing her body’s impression of a neglected swimming pool. I had placed my hands on my ears in anticipation of this, but I still considered asking Kaya for some ear drops later—a cat’s scream powered by mensch-scale lungs is a brutal thing to endure.

[Tips] Kaya’s decay-inhibiting algae concoction was created out of a fear that her friend Dirk could die from internal bleeding and decay after receiving a deadly gut wound. Kaya’s various potions have prevented deaths among the members of the Fellowship of the Blade and have allowed them to return to battle quickly, even after being gravely wounded.

“Whew... Now that made me jump outta my skin. I thought I slept so long I was startin’ to grow spots!”

Schnee took a bite of the freshly cut watermelon. It sounded like I’d gotten lucky and found a juicy one for her.

I hadn’t cut it into crescent-shaped slices, as her mouth was hugely different from a mensch’s; I’d opted instead for easy-to-bite squares of the stuff. If you’re going to bring fruit, then it’s your responsibility to make sure it can be eaten too, I thought.

“Mold doesn’t like to settle on the living,” I said. “Ah, although athlete’s foot is a type of mold...”

“Never had to deal with it. It’s fleas that get my fur a-twitchin’...”

It had taken a little while to calm Schnee down from her little mental implosion. I couldn’t blame her, really. I had faint memories of a friend in my old world who had gotten involved in a traffic accident. Apparently they’d clamped the wound shut with what was nothing more than a medical-grade stapler. I think I’d scream if I was treated like a cheaply bound notebook.

“Well, gotta be thankful I still got my life. I’ve accepted what’s goin’ on, don’t worry.”

“Great. Although Kaya said to refrain from heavy exercise, alcohol, and baths for a month.”

“Oof, half a season without movin’ is gonna be tricky. I’ll be fine on the bathin’ front, though.”

The latter part of this sentence reminded me once of again in the gulf in our day-to-day realities as different species. Unlike werewolves or gnolls, when bubastisians groomed, their saliva could mask their scent. Not only that, they hardly sweat, so they didn’t need the baths like I did. I wonder how they regulate their body temperature? I thought.

It was probably a pain for them to dry themselves once they got soaked, though. Us mensch could towel our heads dry with minimal complaint, but furred folks probably had a much harder time of it.

“Well, this will be the last bit of intel you’ll be gettin’ from me. For a while at least.”

I had bitten my tongue on bringing up the topic of intel, given that our informant was quite literally in her sickbed, but Schnee brought up the matter herself. In the next moment, she placed her hand into her mouth. With that unique sound that cats make when they’re hawking up a furball, Schnee spat something out into the bucket by her bed where they kept the water to wash her face in the mornings.

“Wh-What’s going on?!” I could only say.

“My last and most secret hiding place, Goldilocks Erich. Li’l trick of the trade, ya might say.”

After a few pained coughs, Schnee wiped her mouth and gave me a devilish smirk.

What she had produced was a wad of oiled paper. Something was wrapped inside, most likely to protect it from her stomach acid. I was hardly unfamiliar with the idea of a courier concealing a vital package in their stomach (looking back, there were much worse options I hadn’t considered at the time), and this was arguably the most natural way to retrieve it, but it was still, on its face, deeply icky to me—and it showed.

It must have taken quite some practice to swallow something quite that big. My body would probably have tapped out if I even tried to swallow something as small as a key, so this was a tactic that you couldn’t whip out on a whim.

The thing was about the size of a business card, albeit a measure thicker. I was impressed that Schnee had managed just to fit it in her throat.

“So, what is it?” I asked.

“Passes for checkpoints. Have a gander.”

The oiled paper had been wrapped almost perfectly, because the sheets of paper inside them were completely dry and legible. As she had said, these were passes issued by nobles that would allow the bearer free movement through the various checkpoints here in the west. Not only that, most didn’t have expiration dates and were inscribed with a line that forbade anyone from inspecting them on the spot. These were the highest grade of pass you could carry, and they couldn’t be issued at all without Margrave Marsheim’s ratification. They were doubly warded against forgery with magic and miracles. These were the real deal.

“Viscount Besigheim, Baron Maulbronn, Baron Wiesache...” I read aloud.

The names of the nobles who had issued these passes were all former local strongarms who had turned to the Imperial side or those who were still sitting on the fence. Baron Wiesache in particular had once had the rank of king before he had been subsumed by the Empire. He was a methuselah who had lived through the troublesome era during the Empire’s early days in Ende Erde and still maintained his own personal sphere of influence.

“Hmm, I recognize the nobles’ names, but I haven’t really heard of any of these caravans,” I went on. “I suppose they’re rather small—maybe they only serve a single family?”

My grip on the passes grew tighter as the realization hit me that these might be crucial clues in finding out how Kykeon was being smuggled into Marsheim.

My thoughts were put on pause as I felt a soft touch on my nose, as if someone were hitting the off switch on my brain. The person who had supplied this information must have read my expression.

“Cool your jets, Erich. Lettin’ your thoughts run away with ya can lead you straight into a trap.”

“R-Right...”

“Now, it was true that the merchants carryin’ these passes also had Kykeon in their stock. Some were even given daggers with the respective family crest on ’em.”

It was obvious now that Schnee had said it. The local lords had done awful things here in Marsheim, and I had let my preconceptions of them get ahead of me. I had even colored these more morally gray folk with the same brush. The fact of the matter was that the Baldur Clan’s intel on these bigwigs acting up was nothing more than hearsay. Although you could make some leaps in logic using these slips, there was no guaranteed proof that these three nobles had done anything wrong. Letting my emotions get ahead of me like this—I might as well have hitched myself up with puppet strings and handed the free ends over to the enemy.

“But the folk transportin’ this stuff have been sneaky with how they’re hidin’ the drug,” Schnee went on. “It ain’t in such easy to find places. Plus there ain’t proof that these passes have actually been used.”

“What do you mean?”

“If someone with this danglin’ off of ’em passes through a checkpoint, it’s gonna get logged, no matter what. I did a li’l bit of diggin’—y’know, checkin’ the merchants’ diaries, the logbooks of the checkpoints—and turned up nothin’. Even in Marsheim’s own entry logs. There wasn’t any proof that they were used. Whoever was carryin’ ’em paid the toll fair and square.”

Schnee reeled off all this stuff as if it were nothing; was she really unaware of how incredible she had been?

Mercantile families with wandering tradesmen often allowed their hires to live with them alongside two or three personal guards. These hired hands worked with utmost secrecy, using magic or miracles to stay on guard and make sure their employer’s secrets remained their own.

Yet Schnee had managed to infiltrate a number of these groups and get information from the checkpoints, which were all heavily guarded. How on earth had she managed it?

This was what made PCs who were information specialists terrifying. With a properly busted spread of bonuses to the usual selection of investigative skills, they could practically pluck key information out of thin air, leaving the rest of their party scratching their heads. For these superhumans, you would be more inclined to believe they’d just convinced the GM to hand off all their prep notes rather than pulling off any of the actual schemes they’d engineered.

“Not only that,” Schnee continued, “the way Kykeon and these slips were hidden was almost too obvious, y’know? Almost as if they wanted someone to sniff it out. It’s fishy.”

“But the drugs are meant to be sold. I know they would want to hide the passes extra carefully, but it seems weird to keep the drugs super hidden...”

“Agreed. If it’s hidden too well, then it’ll make business tricky. ’Specially with those slips of Kykeon. You’d expect these dealers to use more easily accessible methods.”

You could hide things in hidden pockets of your clothes, under secret compartments in your bag, or even in other products and put them in storage. However, although these would hide your product, it would be hard to get at it quickly and easily.

“Plus, this is just speakin’ on what I’ve seen, but folk who deal in shady stuff like this don’t keep it on themselves. Right?”

“Very true.”

The Baldur Clan’s mansion was a veritable den of sin—practically wall-to-wall with Nanna’s minions getting absolutely blasted on her junk, twenty-four seven—but Nanna was always changing up her stock to toe the line with the letter of the law, if not the spirit, not unlike how the synthetic cannabinoid trade worked on Earth. Even if the authorities got involved, they’d never be able to make a substantive accusation stick. I doubted that any documents or contracts pinning them to anything shady were even hidden in their hideout.

This was the reason some shady clans had their own properties in more rustic areas. No matter how many higher-ups came sniffing around—as long as an independent bureaucrat with a real passion for justice and doing things by the book didn’t show up, that was—then the clan members could slip through the net on technicality after technicality.

Taking this into account, only an idiot would put their own stock in their own home and merchants’ caravans. That, or...

“Do you think these nobles are trying to set someone up?” I said.

“I thought that was most likely, yeah.”

“You ‘thought’ it was?”

Schnee’s pink nose and white whiskers began to twitch—she was laughing.

“Who d’ya think these clothes belong to?” she said, pointing to her bloodied clothes hanging on the wall.

“It’s a maid uniform; it could be from anywhere, really.”

We had decided that it would be bad form to dispose of an informant’s clothes when her blood was splattered upon them, not to speak of the possibility of notes and such hidden in the seams, and so we had left them here after removing them from her.

The clothes in question were a long, black dress, a white sleeved apron, and white cuffs. Simply put, the sort of maid clothes you would have seen in the England of my previous world a hundred or so years back.

“The laundry maids at Baron Wiesache’s villa in Marsheim wear that uniform specifically,” Schnee said.

“You infiltrated a baron’s manor?!”

I couldn’t help but stand up in surprise. What was she doing? A laundry maid was the lowest position among a family’s servants, but there was a huge difference in working for some country lord versus a noble. Their servants were almost always hired from within their own territory! Even if he had scouted for useful workers from Marsheim, she would have needed a guarantor. This wasn’t the sort of place where you could put on a disguise and waltz in without any issue.

“Let’s call it...a woman’s secret. A gal’s gotta earn her dough.”

“That’s well and good, but you infiltrated quite the place...”

I couldn’t think up one decent strategy to sneak into a noble house without being found out. Even if the head of the household didn’t conduct a personal interview, they would get their butler or the head maid to screen anyone suspicious. Not only that, the servant world inside a household was small. Someone would notice a new face. Sure, it might have seemed fine from afar, but she would have needed to skulk around the entire manor for decent intel...

“From what I dug up, it looks like Baron Wiesache was moments from bein’ falsely accused,” Schnee said, returning to business. “Maybe it’s ’cause he’s a methuselah, but the good baron hates writin’. He didn’t have a diary. Luckily for him, his mensch butler is quite the meticulous scribe.”

“You didn’t just sneak in; you managed to have a peep at the most important servant’s diary?”

“Not just a peep. I got the copies in my sleeve up there,” Schnee said, pointing at her maid outfit.

I removed the sleeve as ordered—in this age, sleeves could be removed and discarded as needed—and poked around the seams until I found a little piece of paper hidden in between them. It was quite craftily hidden—the sort of thing you wouldn’t find unless you already knew where to look for it.

“Anyway, the butler was pretty scrupulous. He made daily records on any docs that had been stamped. And, wouldja believe it, there was nothin’ on our officially sanctioned checkpoint passes.”

“Did Baron Wiesache’s butler have the stamp of approval?”

“Yeah, he did. But it’s pretty unlikely that he pilfered it for his own ends.”

It was evident that Schnee had done some deep digging right into the baron’s office. How on earth had she managed it? The only way I could think of was more of a barbarian’s approach—silence everyone inside through brute force and simply label it as covert after the fact. More importantly, I was honestly shocked that a noble would give their household’s stamp of approval to their butler.

“I got a copy of the stamp. Have a look-see in the left sleeve.”

I checked the other sleeve to find copied notes with the baron’s seal on them. I was impressed yet again—the copies had just enough ink to bear a perfectly clear facsimile of the seal.

I held one of them up to the one on the checkpoint pass, and after a little comparison concluded that they were perfect copies of one another. Size, design, imperfections on the seal—each matched to a tee. The conclusion to be drawn was that these fake documents had been created and then writ off with the original stamp, all without the baron noticing.

“As for Viscount Besigheim, he’s pretty darn scatterbrained.”

“Yeah, I’ve not heard the best things about him,” I said.

Viscount Besigheim was still young for a mensch—was still in his thirties—and if you were feeling cruel, the familiar expression “idiot son” would fit him perfectly. The previous Viscount Besigheim died at a young age after a fatal equestrian accident, and so the younger Besigheim had taken over the family. If Besigheim senior had been alive and well, I was almost certain he never would have given up his position to his son.

According to the rumors, his two younger brothers—who had decided to become subjects of the state and were now Imperial knights—were far, far more suitable candidates to run the family.

Viscount Besigheim’s reputation had even reached adventuring circles. He had made several stupid requests, one of which was a terribly dangerous endeavor to directly procure some gin from the northern isles. Why would the man spend downright treasonous sums to round up adventurers foolish enough to play errand boy for him, you ask? Well, he had women to impress, you see.

It didn’t matter if the pay was good; the northern sea was a dangerous territory ruled by pirates. While it might have been true that adventurers didn’t have to pay as much in customs fees—if you were amber-orange or above, that was—no one wanted to waste half an entire year on a gussied-up milk run.

“Now, back to Baron Wiesache,” Schnee said. “He is, for better or worse, an honest man. Before the Empire came he was a king, y’know, despite bein’ a methuselah.”

“So basically, although the viscount might be swayed by the allure of money, that seems less likely with the baron, huh.”

“Yeah. He ain’t the kinda person to brazenly betray Margrave Marsheim, if ya ask me. If he were going to, he wouldn’t act all sneaky like this—he’d bring his men and encircle the margrave’s manor himself. If ya ask me, he’s got that barbarian spirit right down to his bones.”

The only methuselahs I knew were Lady Agrippina and Marquis Donnersmarck, which made it difficult for me to conjure a mental image of Baron Wiesache. In the days before the Empire, he had been an honest but boorish warrior-king of a lesser kingdom. I wasn’t sure what reasons he had for acquiescing to the Empire’s demands and receiving the title of baron, but it was clear to me that he wasn’t nearly enough of a sneak to engineer a plan as roundabout as the Kykeon crisis if he wanted to tear down Marsheim.

“This would suggest that we’re looking at a political attack made to look like internal trouble,” I said.

“Right. The truths I’ve gleaned would point to that.”

That would mean that the drugs brought in by the caravans and the passes required to do so were nothing more than a bluff—they weren’t the actual problem here.

Margrave Marsheim was suffering from a personnel problem so bad that he had tried to press-gang me—I had Lady Agrippina’s word on that—so the margrave’s enemies had plotted to worsen the situation by forcing the margrave to turn on one of his most powerful warriors.

Countless nations had come to ruin thanks to such methods. I would say that Baron Wiesache wasn’t quite on the same level as Yuan Chonghuan of the Ming dynasty, but he was an important playing piece and an overall boon to his region, in addition to being one of a handful of keystone players whose involvement kept Marsheim from spiraling into war. The anti-Rhinian local lords would be overjoyed if he’d been brought down by an oversight on the margrave’s part.

The plan would work even if Margrave Marsheim himself wasn’t fooled. If this false scandal came to light, then powerful nobles would come out of the woodwork demanding the former enemy of the Empire deserved nothing less than a swift death, and the external pressure would force the margrave’s hand. They would claim that it was for the greater good, but they would secretly be focusing on their own political gains.

If Baron Wiesache went down without a fight, then that would be great. If he lived up to his reputation as a powerful, easy to anger former local lord and instigated a revolt, then that would be even better. The seditionists would love to see one of the Empire’s favorite playing pieces get wiped out and stir up chaos in the region along with it.

One revolt wouldn’t be enough to topple the Empire’s hegemony, but they could chip away at the base through this internal attack. This required clever-minded scheming and patience. It was a despicable tactic, not least because it was maddening to respond to. It was difficult for us small-time adventurers to resolve a political situation that demanded more precise and civil means than a few well-placed sword strokes.

“They done found me out not too long after I put it all together,” Schnee said.

“Were you still undercover at the manor?”

“Nope. Not when I came to my theory, at least. But that’s when those five assassins came knockin’. It was like the Sun God or someone was sayin’ ta me: ‘Hey, your theory’s bang on the money!’ Problem with me is that I can’t hide what I’m thinkin’,” Schnee said with a cheeky smile. In all honesty, I couldn’t read her expression at all. She went on, “This’s only a hunch, but I bet they meant for somebody with both halves of their brain to rub together to figure out the first layer of the plot. The culprits here are layin’ bait so that the Empire can rush to conclusions and stab itself in the side.”

“Aha. But a sneaky cat stole their wurst before it could be smoked.”

It was well and good to use some shrimp to try and catch some sea bream, but you had to be aware that you could be pulled into the ocean if you weren’t careful. All the better that we’d brought along a little cat eager to play with the fishing line and unhook the bait. They had cottoned onto their missing fake evidence and had sent four—no, five, if we include the one who threw that Kykeon bomb at me—to retrieve the counterfeited material.

Our informant had found a vital piece of the puzzle, but I had no notion of where it went in the bigger picture. There was an answer to this thing, but if we had lost her, then it might have taken forever for us to reach the solution. Blessedly, we’d managed to keep a lifelong student of human skullduggery in one piece and thinking straight enough to do all the heavy thinking for us. It felt like we’d been fighting smoke before, but now I felt like we had a little bit of a handle on things.

“Kykeon wasn’t spread to lobotomize the Marsheim’s public...” I said. “It’s meant to turn the margrave against his own best assets among the gentry.”

“Yep, the difference is in the details. It wouldn’t be great to turn Ende Erde into a drugged-up, lawless land, but that ain’t enough to knock the margrave from his position.”

It was just like ehrengarde. If you wanted to take down the emperor, who was stuck in the corner but protected by guardsmen and castles, then your opener hinged on eliminating the lesser pieces. It wasn’t like shogi, where you gained enemy pieces after beating them; this was much closer to real life. You had one target, and you had to work to get to it.

That left us with a number of options.

“I doubt those three names were the only ones being targeted, were they?” I said.

“Prob’ly not, no. I didn’t have enough time to sniff about that much, but I’d bet that some other nobles are bein’ looked into as well. I bet they wanna topple as many houses as they can. Plus, y’know what they say, if ya go back six generations, the whole peerage is just one big family.”

There was no rule that said one piece of evidence had one perpetrator behind it. This was no mere streetside stabbing. This whole scheme relied on an elaborate causal chain—drug smuggling could be linked to other misdeeds, and Margrave Marsheim’s people could be removed from the board one by one.

Once you had eliminated those close to the margrave, then you were left with the fence sitters, the true bureaucrats, who would cut off their noses to spite their faces. All that you had to do was rile them up, and support for the margrave would be left in tatters.

The whole plan fit together beautifully, and that drove me up a wall. The Trialist Empire of Rhine was a great five-century-old ash tree of a nation—vast, sheltering, and deeply rooted. Yet here these people were, coaxing the roots into strangling one another.

“I’d bet that Baron Maulbronn is prob’ly in the most danger at the moment. His household ain’t much to write home about, but he’s well-liked among the pro-Imperial local lords. He’s always chattin’ away at social events—makes him a prime target for folks lookin’ to take advantage.”

After infiltrating Baron Wiesache’s manor and securing our intel, Schnee had intended to go undercover at Baron Maulbronn’s manor next, but had met with the assassins before she’d had the chance.

“Very well. Leave the rest to us.”

“Um, I’m doin’ this for myself, y’know? I don’t remember anyone taskin’ me with this.”

From between Schnee’s narrowed eyelids, I could feel her golden gaze pierce right into me. The look seemed to suggest that if she stared hard enough, she might lay bare my true intentions.

I had nothing to hide. I had decided to become an adventurer in Marsheim, so there were no lies I needed to tell.

I gave Schnee a faint smile, and she tossed her head back on her pillow.

“Jeez... This town really does got its fair share of strange folk... I keep wonderin’ when the whole thing’s gonna come down like a house of matchsticks, but then another weirdo comes along to prop it up.”

“We’re just two weirdos helping each other out, Schnee.”

Everyone preferred a clean home; you could sleep easier at night that way.

I did some mental math. Unfortunately our little adventuring unit needed funds, so I racked my brains trying to pin down who would benefit from some well-paid good deeds.

[Tips] It is said that Imperial families are all related if you go back six generations. The family tree has been made even more complex due to illegitimate children, forged family lineages, and untold secrets to smooth along inheritance.

Much like how companies in Erich’s old world would prepare accommodation for employees on business trips, the nobles of the Empire of Rhine often kept separate manors near their favorite stomping grounds. It wasn’t rare for some of the more renowned families to have upward of ten manors, when you counted the health resorts.

Just as the nobles in and around Berylin had manors in the capital, those of Ende Erde—aside from the poorest of them—had their own permanent residences in Marsheim to aid in overseeing their territory.

“What a tangle we find ourselves in yet again,” Margit said to herself. She was currently in a manor of Baron Maulbronn’s, located in a quiet bit of northern Marsheim. To be precise, she was in the manor’s attic, among the dust and cobwebs.

Schnee was still recovering from her near-fatal wound, and so Erich had taken it upon himself to continue the investigation. Margit had only agreed to go undercover like this because Erich had bowed his head and pleaded for her help.

Margit enjoyed feeling needed and didn’t particularly mind a tight, filthy squeeze. After all, she was a hunter. If the hunt called for it, part of her remit was crawling into a bear’s cave with only a few poison-tipped arrows to her name. She wouldn’t blink in the face of some dust, cobwebs, or scuttling rats and cockroaches.

The one thing that sat at the back of her mind was the context of this whole expedition. She had come to the Empire’s western reaches with the man she loved to become an adventurer, yet here she was playing burglar in a noble manor. Of course, the logic wasn’t lost on her. Margit knew that the fiends who sought to bring Marsheim to its knees with Kykeon were slowly enclosing their tentacles around Baron Maulbronn, so they needed to search his house before the false accusations against him came to light.

All the same, she wondered: Is this still adventuring?

It was obvious to all that Goldilocks’s gung-ho “whatever it takes” attitude was not normal. Any regular person who had received a formal education would label him as a patently obvious loon; he was plainly blessed and cursed with strange cares of no discernible origin. Only Erich knew of the past he held, of the years spent poring over rulebooks which had warped his very brain; of the various worlds he had enjoyed at the table which had changed his core value system.

Erich wasn’t quite foolish enough to view the world he lived in as a tabletop game, but he did fall into the trap of viewing himself as a PC. If something was interesting or would prove suitable to his purposes, then he’d gladly take on the most heterodox or roundabout path that would get him there, if it was “optimal.”

That was why normal people—sensible people—would never choose to follow, even if they were aware of their existence, the most efficient strategies he concocted. A regular person wouldn’t send their partner on a covert mission into a baron’s manor. It was true that Margit had the abilities for the job, they had worked out a way to communicate secretly, and they had secured blueprints of the manor, but all the same such decisions weren’t normal.

Rhinian law was designed to punish theft severely. Steal ten drachmae and you would find yourself without a head. There was no way that Erich, who had personally worked under a noble, didn’t know the dangers and the consequences of sneaking into such a place.

But justice was on Erich’s side; this wasn’t mere theft, it was protection. After all, the punishment for revolt was death. Not a swift death, however, but a long, drawn-out display for everyone to see. The menace known as the Infernal Knight had only recently received a similar punishment in Adrian Imperial Plaza; everyone in Marsheim knew how the law handled traitors.

In the end, this was a mission of mercy on Erich and Margit’s part. An innocent man could never deserve such a fate.

“Um... This is Kaufmann. Ubermut, do you copy?” Margit said.

“This is Ubermut. I hear you, Kaufmann. Over,” Erich replied.

The pair were talking through Voice Transmission necklaces. For the sake of anonymity, they were using code names. Erich’s own sense of aesthetics had led him to choose the German phonetic alphabet.

Goldilocks had positioned himself in the tower of a lightly guarded house located diagonally across from Baron Maulbronn’s manor. He was monitoring the corridor near the room that Margit was heading for through a spyglass.

He had come to support his partner, of course, but Erich’s magical know-how was vital here. Baron Maulbronn’s family weren’t of the highest renown, but its history stretched back to the days when the local lords still had power. The manor didn’t have advanced barriers and the like, but it had an alarm system for detecting intruders. In addition, there was a system that would detect when magic was used on the premises.

To combat this, Erich had devised a communication system with Voice Transmission that utilized Margit’s ultrafine web. By channeling their voices along it, he was able to drastically reduce the spell’s mana signature, thus keeping them undetected. The scout would work her way through the building, while Erich would warn her of any traps that she could not spot. This was vital to the plan’s success.

“The night watch are all asleep while standing up,” Margit said. “I suppose that’s to be expected of such a quiet household. There’s one wandering guard who comes once every two hours—on the dot. He just passed, so he won’t be back for a while.”

It was shortly before dawn. Margit had infiltrated the manor when the night was at its darkest...or she would have—it’d seemed wisest. Erich had instead suggested that she enter during dusk, when they would be busy with servants starting or leaving their shift. Both of these adventurers had forgone the bathroom and food for a good third of the day.

“Lucky us. Looks like Nordpol’s information was on the money,” Erich said.

These code names would only be used for this mission: Margit was Kaufmann, Erich was Ubermut, and their informant was Nordpol. The names had been chosen so that there would be no way to link them back to the real people. It made sense to Margit, but she thought that it was a bit overkill. Infiltrating the manor was never going to be the easiest task, but were all the smoke and mirrors really necessary?

“Very well, I shall invite myself down. Let me know if you see anyone.”

“Of course. I’ll be watching. Over and out.”

Margit wanted to rake Erich over the coals for a wealth of reasons, but her love for him stifled these emotions. She silently crawled through the attic space and made her way to the office, neatly picking her way around the wire and bell traps. It was as well guarded as the baron’s private chambers, but it was almost certain that the inside would be empty. Baron Maulbronn was taking part in a nighttime party exclusively for nobles in Ende Erde with jurisdictions around the Mauser River. He would be back by noon at the earliest, barring a truly masterful stroke of bad luck.

The Fellowship of the Blade was monitoring the party closely, and so a message would come immediately if the baron decided to come home early for whatever reason. Margit was capable enough to exfiltrate herself in the interim.

Margit squeezed herself into an access hole hidden behind the wallpaper. It was the sort of hidey-hole that no mensch could have exploited, but it was still a bit cramped by her standards—unlike a mensch, an arachne’s widest point was not her shoulders, but her lower body. An arachne’s spidery lower half was made up of a combination of an endoskeleton and exoskeleton containing her hydraulic muscles and digestive organs. Margit could never have managed the squeeze, if not for a little trick of her own.

“I’d rather not get in the habit of this—it’s such a cheap tactic—but it looks like I haven’t much choice...” she mumbled to herself.

An arachne’s legs were completely unlike those of mensch too. There was a slight depression at the base of each joint, with a membrane to allow for smooth movement. There were also various hinges and pivots within, allowing for a shockingly wide range of motility.

In short, she could collapse and displace certain joints to compact her profile. Some joints could be popped back in, and some could not—it was vital to know which were which. Even though arachne were tougher than mensch in ways, this was a dangerous technique. It was not to be undertaken without careful forethought. Margit bit down on a cloth and, without hesitation, popped out some of her leg joints.

She kept silent, but her straining face showed the exertion required. Now that she was a bit less horizontally challenged, she slipped through the access hole with ease.

“I wondered if it would ever be of any use, but here we are...”

This advanced technique had been passed down by Margit’s mother, Corale, who had once been an adventurer herself. Corale had explained that if you got caught and tied up, this was the easiest way of escaping if you didn’t have any tools. Corale had drilled into Margit the best way to dislocate her joints—both the human parts and the spider parts.

A young Margit had sobbed to herself on rainy days when the cold weather made her joints ache, cursing her mother for teaching her things that would never help in a hunt, so it was an odd feeling to see them finally come in handy.

“Now then, back to the hunt...”

Margit made sure her joints were all working without issue before heading to the baron’s desk. Because Baron Maulbronn chiefly resided in Marsheim, his desk was cleaned to an elegant sheen. Handwritten notes and balled pieces of paper told that he had used the desk shortly before departing.

Margit grabbed a small but eye-catching statuette—perhaps an old hero from the days before the Empire—and moved it from the left side of the desk to the right. Next she went to the three ink pots and moved the lid of the center one to the left, and then the right one to the center. Finally, she located the pen pot and pushed back the right of the two quills inside. As it slid into place, she heard a click.

It was a magical lock. Nobles used them to hide their most valuable documents; one wrong move would result in an alarm going off. Schnee had dug up the key causal sequence, but merely said it was a “gal’s secret” when questioned about how she’d figured it out. There was no riddle, no hint lying in wait somewhere in the room—it was a secret that only the baron knew. As Margit pulled out a leather case from her sleeve, she inwardly praised Schnee’s unfathomable talent.

Margit’s leather case was tightly bound with string to secure the tools inside. They were a collection of metal rods of various sizes and elaborate heads—her lockpicks, and not your everyday set either. The law forbade anyone but a licensed professional from owning anything of the kind; Margit only had a set because Corale had gifted them to her during that cold winter when she decided to leave Marsheim with Erich.

Corale’s talents as a scout went beyond just her small frame and agility. She had honed her lockpicking talents of her own accord so that her party would never suffer when they encountered doors or treasure chests in ancient ruins and the like.

“The keyhole is in the old style but...yes, the inner mechanism is cylindrical. A magical lock and then a physical one... The baron has quite the deep purse.”

Margit had taken a page from her mother’s book and honed her own lockpicking abilities—first with bought cheap training locks or disused locks scavenged from the scrap heap. She’d come a long way since.

The keyhole was old-fashioned—looking like a circle atop a trapezium—but inside was an advanced locking mechanism. It was a little bit of a pain, but she set to work quickly and placed a few of her lockpicks inside. The cylinder lock had only come into fashion a few dozen years ago. A number of pins went through a two-layered cylinder, which all had to be raised to a certain height before the inner cylinder could turn and unlock the lock. The keys such newfangled locks took were jagged, saw-toothed affairs precisely machined to lift the pins and turn the cylinder just so.

However, once you knew how it worked, all it took was a little careful trial and error to crack it open. If the lock utilized a magical randomly shape-changing alloy, or if it responded to blood or certain mana waves, Margit would have been stuck, but it was well within her skill set as a hunter to lithely uncover the lock’s sweet spots.

“That’s one down...”

In the space of twenty breaths, Margit unlocked the top drawer of the three-tier desk drawers. It might have been quick for a layperson, but a pro could have done it in a faint five eyeblinks. Disappointed with her still as of yet immature skill, Margit carefully placed her hand upon the drawer.

“No paint on the handle... No hair- or dust-activated traps...”

Some paranoid people put in extra measures on top of locks, such as old-fashioned alarm systems that would send out an alert if someone touched their belongings without permission. Fortunately Baron Maulbronn had placed his faith in the double locking system, and so hadn’t worked any childish tricks on the drawer.

“This is Kaufmann. Are you still awake, Ubermut?”

“This is Ubermut. Of course I am. In fact, I was admiring the sleeping guard’s face. It’s quite an amusing sight.”

“Good. I’ve found our first item.”

The top drawer of the desk contained Baron Maulbronn’s diary. It was a lavish thing with a sheepskin cover that suggested it was to be used for a long time. It was highly likely that the baron had taken up the diary so that he might leave it to future generations. In other words, it was a potent source of information.

Life was fragile; no one knew when death might come on swift wings for them. It was impossible to relay everything with spoken words alone, and so many nobles kept a journal of their daily activities and who they met. A diary was more than a mere memory aid—it could, in the right hands, prove a deadly arsenal of unexploded social bombs for their children and grandchildren.

“He’s meticulous, but his handwriting is...rather unique. I suppose that makes sense, considering his position.”

“How many records?”

“He’s got one book for each year. Each starts at the beginning of the year too.”

Although the baron’s handwriting was disciplined, it looked like the person who had taught him either had an utterly unique artistic sense or was straight up untalented. It was totally unlike the flowing cursive that the Imperial nobility favored. It wasn’t quite so bad that any recipient of a letter of his would think that they were being looked down upon, but they might snicker and consider him a country bumpkin.

All the same, the content covered the main details of his days efficiently enough. The diary began with Margrave Marsheim’s new year’s party.

“That’s perfect,” Erich said. “Some people can fill up one of those things in a month and so would send them back to their primary residence for storage, so it’s lucky for us that they’re all here and concise. And from the start of the year too! Could you make some copies from spring onward?”

“Of course.”

Margit drew out a few slips of paper from her knapsack, hidden under her cloak. At first glance it didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary—just simple run-of-the-mill stationery. However, Margit wasn’t going to copy out the baron’s diary by hand. It would take two whole hours to copy even a fifth of what they needed.

“Now then, I place it with the smooth side facing up...”

Margit laid the copy paper atop the first spring entry and let it rest for a few seconds. When she peeled it off, it revealed a perfect facsimile of the text underneath.

This was all Kaya’s handiwork. The talented herbalist had coated the paper in a special concoction that changed color in reaction to ink. All you had to do was place it on whatever you wanted copied, and it would be transferred over. Every quirk of the original writer—from content to penmanship—would be meticulously preserved.

After silently and carefully copying the necessary pages, Margit returned the diary to its original location and locked the drawer once more.

“Ubermut, do you copy? This is Kaufmann. I’ve finished with the diary. Is it safe to proceed to phase two?”

“This is Ubermut. It’s quiet out here. I can see some smoke from the hearth coming out the chimney, but I expect they’re preparing the servants’ meals.”

“Would you mind checking once more for me? I can sense if anyone comes down the corridor whether or not I’m occupied, but it won’t do us any harm to be sure.”

“Roger that. I’ll let you know if it’s anything concerning.”

Margit needed to check in with Erich before starting on the next part of her job. Dawn was close. Soon the servants would begin to wake and start their duties. Cleaning was done in the early morning and the afternoon, when the master of the house was absent, but it was cooking that marked the start of the day. You could work out what the day had to offer by what they cooked, with a more epicurean spread indicating the arrival of an important guest.

“This Ubermut. They have prepared wurst, black bread, and cheese for breakfast. These are all precooked. They don’t seem to have any fowl prepared for lunch either.”

“This is Kaufmann. Roger that. It seems like we should be quite all right, then. I’ll carry on.”

“Take care.”

The spread was the usual fare for servants. Unlike Imperials, the long-term residents of Ende Erde didn’t like porridge, preferring bread instead. The fact that it was only black bread today meant that the pair’s intel that the baron wouldn’t be back until later was on the money.

“I’ve opened the second drawer. It’s full of letters. Mostly from big names in Ende Erde, but some are from the south and even from abroad. Again his meticulousness is showing—he’s organized them into separate boxes.”

“Okay, we’ve got some time. Start with the ones from Marsheim nobles. If your ring starts to vibrate, that’s a sign to not open the letter.”

“Yes, I remember. Being a noble comes with its own share of problems, it seems.”

Most formulae to prevent peeping were weaved into wax seals, which would only activate once the seal was broken. There were times when people wished to hold on to letters for safekeeping and they would recast the spell to protect it once more; you had to be careful if you were rifling through someone else’s inbox. Depending on their content, letters had the power to end lives. If someone chose to keep an important letter instead of burning it, then it was likely it was sufficiently protected.

But Erich’s specially crafted magic-detecting ring didn’t react even once. Erich had worked under Agrippina and was well aware of her panoply of schemes. This had left him with a markedly more paranoid disposition than most of the peerage. Your typical rural noble wouldn’t cast a decades-long spell on a letter that would curse anyone but its intended recipient. Erich’s “better safe than sorry” attitude pushed him toward assuming that any noble could potentially be hiding vast magical talent, fit to eliminate any and all meddlers.

There was nothing wrong with being careful and prepared, but one had to be aware of the toll those meticulous standards took on those around them. Margit had an untainted worldview—she’d understood the whole time that Marsheim’s noble class wouldn’t go to such lengths.

“More than half are invitations to social events... Wow, he really is scrupulous. He’s included copies of his replies too.”

Baron Maulbronn was a social butterfly and seemed keen to keep track of his interactions. Unlike Erich’s old world where you could send an email and retain a digital copy of it, a letter, once sent, was gone for good. The baron must have wanted to keep copies so that he could assuage any anxieties if he had written something that ended up poorly received.

“Well, I am grateful; the more information for us, the better,” Margit murmured. “...Hm? Now what do we have here...”

While Margit was making copies of Baron Maulbronn’s correspondence, she noticed something out of the ordinary. Among his letters—all composed on high-quality stationery—was something written on cheaper, ruder material. It looked to be some kind of invitation from a merchant family, but the baron’s reply was openly caustic. In addition, there was a personal memo on his copy that warned his butler to never again accept a letter from the recipient.

“This warrants copying, that’s for certain.”

Margit finished working through the pile and closed the drawer.

“One more to go.”

The last phase was to check through the third drawer of the desk—almost three times the size of the two above. There were two locks; it was clear that the real mother lode lay inside.

After successfully unlocking the final drawer, Margit peered inside to find a collection of account books. They covered the baron’s receipts and expenditures in Marsheim and were carefully penned in a hand that wasn’t the baron’s own.

“This is Kaufmann; come in, Ubermut,” Margit said. “This drawer was hiding the most important thing of all. The household’s account books are inside. It isn’t for the territory, but they contain explicit records of his various expenses, in particular for entertaining guests.”

“Brilliant, Kaufmann! You’ve outdone yourself. And we can raise a glass to Baron Maulbronn later as thanks for his diligent management!”

Margit couldn’t suppress her smile as she imagined Erich beaming from the other end of the call. The baron must have been uninterested in managing his finances, and so the majordomo had been given full control over these logs. There were many nobles who, after a night of revelry, couldn’t remember how many drachmae they had spent, so this was a stroke of luck.

Margit and Erich were just happy that they had pulled together everything they’d wanted to know in one swift stroke. Margit wanted to raise a glass too—she was overjoyed that she didn’t have to spend another night up in the attic waiting for another chance to rifle through the baron’s personal belongings.

“They’re thick, so it’s clear that they’re meticulous. I doubt I have enough copy papers.”

“Copy what you can. We’re not going to go over it with a fine-tooth comb like the tax office would. If you can copy pages to give the general gist that would be perfect.”

This was to be a crucial clue in finding out whether Baron Maulbronn was involved in the trade of Kykeon or if he got swept into it without even knowing. Kykeon was too cheap to affect the household’s finances all that obviously, but any new venture was bound to show up on record.

If someone else was writing these up with official permission from the baron, then there would be hints that might lead to flushing out any other rats lurking.

“Hmm?”

As Margit was about to return one of the books, she noticed something odd. She narrowed her amber eyes and saw some dust settling at the bottom of the drawer. No, that wasn’t quite right—there was dust peeking out of a small gap in the bottom. Realizing that this was a secret compartment, Margit pushed a lockpick underneath and pried it open to find something surprising—a thick stack of Kykeon.

“Come in Ubermut... I’ve found something rather troubling.”

Judging from the size of the drawer and the way the dust was, it was likely that this secret compartment hadn’t originally been there. The color of the drawer and the panel were slightly off.

“What should I do with it? Should we remove it?”

“...No, leave it there. I think we can use it.”

The scout sighed before returning the panel to its original place. It looked like her partner had come up with yet another wicked scheme.

Margit wondered what foul woman in the capital had taught him such awful tricks and warped his very character like this. She reaffirmed her need to watch over and tend to her dearest one as she left Baron Maulbronn’s manor like a quivering shadow.

[Tips] It could be said that the Imperial capital’s fiercest battleground is one of intelligence. Thus in Berylin, many nobles have installed bleeding-edge security systems and employ a wide range of counterespionage measures.

The manors in the idyllic countryside are nothing like their urban counterparts. However, one must always be alert that there may be an exception lurking somewhere. The unluckiest folk tend to use the most protective measures.

“What the hell is this?” Siegfried said, his brow furrowed.

The hero-hopeful had just entered a private room in the Snowy Silverwolf—the settled base for the Fellowship of the Blade—and was looking at the wall with a confused expression.

The room itself was a regular room. The four founding members of the Fellowship sometimes held meetings here, and if going back to their various lodgings was too much effort, they would nap here or stay the night. For these purposes there was a small desk and two bunk beds.

Before these four had started renting it out, other adventurers had used it in the past—who knew how many dreams had flourished or died in this room?

The reason for Siegfried’s confusion was a single piece of “decoration.” Erich had somehow procured a corkboard and affixed it to the wall. Upon it he had pinned various notes and memos, as well as hand drawn pictures of various figures in Marsheim. Threads of various colors connected the pins to create a hypnotically complex pattern.

“Isn’t it so easy to visualize like this?!”

Goldilocks put on a goofy self-satisfied grin. He had spent two hours creating this evidence board in order to organize his intel on Marsheim’s Kykeon crisis. He’d committed it all to memory—he hardly needed to put it out in the world like this for his own sake. Judging from the excited look in his eyes, he found joy in the process, simply thrilled to finally have an excuse to do something like this.

“Did you forget that I can only read simple stuff?” Siegfried said. “Who’re you doin’ this for...?”

“Listen, it’s absolutely crucial that I did this. I had to. I’m a bit of a dab hand in matters like this.”

“Matters like what?”

The hero-hopeful wondered if one of Goldilocks’s screws had come loose. But from his friend’s manic mannerisms, he realized that this wasn’t something worth getting heated over. He sat down on the lower bunk of the bed—his bunk. Siegfried had once used the upper bunk, but for some reason found it difficult to sleep up there. Ever since he had rolled out of bed and tumbled to the ground, he had swapped with Erich.

“Now then, let us discuss the evil root at the heart of this Kykeon case,” Erich said. “I would propose that we give their group a name. Let’s see... Yes, let’s call them Diablo.”

“Diablo...? What language are you even speakin’?”

“It’s a language spoken in the subcontinent that faces the Aquamarine Sea in the west. It means ‘evil god’ or ‘evil spirit.’”

This name wasn’t based on any direct information; it was simply cribbed from a very similar sounding epithet of a drug lord back in Erich’s old world. However, in his current world of gods, the concept of a “devil” didn’t really exist. Fallen gods were still gods. The idea of a devil that set humans against gods just wasn’t widely understood, if it was understood at all. If a devil did exist, it would probably be viewed as a god from another pantheon, or perhaps an apostle of another religion. Even if you likened them to a hypothetical “sum of all evil,” most people would probably shrug their shoulders in confusion.

At any rate, Diablo could be found right in the middle of the corkboard—represented by a large white question mark upon a black slip of paper. From there, threads went out to link various figures—represented by their drawn likenesses.

At the top of the board were the most important people in Marsheim—the nobles, the shot-callers, and various adventurer clans—and the further you went down the board, the lower their social standing. Right at the bottom were the local lords. These ran the gamut from the big names that anyone in Ende Erde knew to houses which were only known by their own social circle. The lengths Erich had gone to dig up all this information stood out plain as day.

“You’re even weirder than usual today,” Siegfried said. “You were out all night two days ago and you were working all of last night too. Have you slept at all?”

“With what time? Look how much info there was to get through! I was having such a blast that I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, so I went over some of the new dirt with Schnee.”

“So you’re runnin’ on two days without sleep, and you got someone in their sick bed to read through that massive stack of paper?”

Goldilocks’s eyes were wide and frenzied. He was riding high on the chemicals from his brain’s own pleasure centers—no external assistance necessary. His body had reasoned that if Erich’s mood wasn’t good, then he’d shut down entirely. This ecstasy was a preventative measure.

The stack that Siegfried had mentioned was on the desk below the evidence board. Although he couldn’t read them well, he knew that they were the results of their infiltration of Baron Maulbronn’s manor the other night. He couldn’t believe that his comrade had gotten someone whose guts had only started to patch themselves together again to sift through it all.

Goldilocks defended his corner, though—he hadn’t shaken Schnee awake and forced her to read this with him. Schnee knew that she had a much better eye for this sort of work, and so she’d asked Erich herself to bring his finds from the manor to her. After all, Erich and Margit had used Schnee’s blueprints and notes in her place. In return for them, Schnee made Erich promise that he wouldn’t advance things without her. She might have been bedbound, but that didn’t stop her from using her brain.

Schnee’s assessment of her abilities had paid out. She only needed a single glance to pick out the fishy pages from the baron’s diary and letters, quickly deciding what was important and what was meaningless noise. Her gift was heaven-sent. A layperson would need twenty or thirty times more time to draw the same conclusions. It would take a small army of regular people to do what Schnee did in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost.

“You guys sure can read a lot in one night,” Siegfried went on. “But, Erich, how many drachmae did just the paper cost in this whole thing?”

“Who knows! But our home is in danger! You’d do whatever you could, wouldn’t you, Siegfried?!”

“Huh? Well, yeah. I’d do anything, sure...”

“Heh... You’d do anything.”

“Uh, you said that exact phrase before, man. Does it...mean something?”

Two sleepless nights had left Erich punch-drunk and meme-brained, but with the road before him, he paid his gaffe no heed.

“Anyway, doing ‘anything’ aside, our foe is powerful and uses underhanded methods. This isn’t the way we do things around here!”

“Even when people around here are using drugs...?”

“Siegfried, a thought experiment, if you will. If you were a local lord, what would you want from Marsheim?”

The hero-hopeful scratched his chin at this unexpected question. If he were one of the local powerhouses, then he would hate for this hilltop fortress to be weakened so much that loss was all but guaranteed. He would almost want to set it on fire to try and bring some life back to it.

But if you were considering things from the standpoint of an Imperial statesman, then things were slightly different.

“I’d want to stay unharmed, I guess,” Siegfried finally said. “Even after achieving independence or whatever, there’s no avoiding a war with the Empire.”

“Exactly. Our home is a stronghold of eight thousand that held off fifty thousand. And that was in the past. Now we’re stronger, but our defensive power’s never really been tested. If the local lords wanted to take on the largest fighting force the Empire can spare—an army of two hundred thousand soldiers—then you’d want to go into that situation from the least compromised position of strength possible.”

Marsheim was famed for the tale that the hill and castle had been erected in a single night, and this strange tactic had resulted in a powerful fortress city that had never fallen. Even after years of untamed expansion, the city walls still held a multilayered defense that resembled a terrace farm—although it seemed like it had grown without much thought, it was clear that it still maintained a strategic structure.

Towers could be quickly transformed into watchtowers; sluice gates could redirect water into the conduits and dirty streams to form defensive rivers—the city was a relic of the past margrave of Marsheim’s desire to never yield to the local lords.

Even now, although Marsheim Castle was really nothing more than a landmark of the region’s bloody past, Marsheim itself was still a powerful fortress. It was clear that the problems here, if left unchecked, wouldn’t remain isolated to the region. Even a beginner to the art of war knew that this bastion would be crucial in the event of an Imperial insurgence from the east.

“But Diablo is different,” Erich went on. “They are trying to numb Marsheim. That goes against the eventual goal of independence, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, even if the strongarms kick out Margrave Marsheim, they ain’t gonna be too thrilled to find themselves in a bunch of skirmishes after it... Hey, hold on. Who the hell is gonna win out at the end of all this?”

Siegfried groaned with the effort of wondering what the end goal could be. Erich snapped his fingers and pointed at his friend—this was the crux of the matter.

Ruining Marsheim would, at first glance, seem to benefit the local lords. However, it posed a huge disadvantage when it came to long-term strategy. Marsheim was slowly being sapped of its strategic utility. It was an appealing move in the short term, but hobbling the city’s productive capacity and fighting power was akin to shooting yourself in the foot before running a marathon.

Therefore, it was highly likely that there was someone in the background who had something to gain from allowing the local lords this tenuous lead as the Empire suffered.

“Well, to be honest, there’s a ton of people outside and inside that would be whooping and cheering if the Empire’s nose was bloodied. We don’t have enough evidence to point any fingers.”

“Huh? Why’d people on the inside want that? Imperial nobles would totally suffer if the Empire’s trade gateway suffered.”

“The Empire’s got its fair share of people who are useless unless we’re at war.”

It was as Erich said—the Trialist Empire of Rhine, unfortunately, wasn’t composed solely of people who stood to make great gains from peacetime. It was still early days—still far from the point where people would say that the war was no longer worth the cost. It wasn’t yet the state seen during the First World War on Earth, where each industrial nation’s hunger for greater productive power—for material surplus, for labor, for capital—had driven them into a frenzy.

The Empire had expended a lot of resources during the previous war of the Second Eastern Conquest, but money didn’t simply vanish. It always found its way into someone else’s pocket—sometimes with interest. It was impossible to count just how many people had made a killing from plunder or ransom just because their side was the one that came out on top. There were many people rubbing their hands in anticipation of the next war to be waged.

Although the Empire as a whole might lose out, it was important not to forget that there were foolish individuals or families who salivated over the idea of a new war—a new opportunity to line one’s purse.

“Hmm...” Erich murmured. “Come to think of it, I know someone who’d benefit from military expansion...”

“Whuzzat?”

“Nothing. Forget what I said.”

Even now, whenever Erich’s thoughts touched on plotting and scheming, the smirking face of that thing would appear in his mind. He rubbed his temples to dull the headache that began to buzz underneath. Although she wouldn’t go this far, it was a fact that the military expectations of the successful work on the aeroship meant that she was receiving quite the budget. She wasn’t a complete bystander by any means.

Goldilocks was a common civilian at heart, and so he shook with fear as he imagined what sort of gargantuan budget just one ship would need. At any rate, the plan was to confront Diablo, so he tapped the corkboard.

“It’s not all bad news though. Thanks to the intel we sourced from Baron Maulbronn and Baron Wiesache, we’ve got a grip on the shape of the plots entangling Marsheim.”

“So is the idiot Viscount Besigheim the real crook?”

“Nah, he’s just a moron, plain and simple. It’s true that he’s underhanded in his own ways, but he’s not the kind of person who would plot something like this.”

Erich still retained various fragments from his past life, and he was probably thinking of Oishi Kuranosuke or Sima Yi, who had played the fool in order to avoid being encircled by their enemies. Such great figures had lain in wait until the right time, but Viscount Besigheim was not such a savvy gentleman. He was a fool on a molecular level.

Most adventurers had seen his pointless requests on the Association bulletins, but that wasn’t the extent of his activities. He was a waster who spent over a hundred drachmae with his favorite woman in the pleasure district. His magistrates in his territory did what they liked. He was, in short, a multifaceted and inveterate crook. Schnee had followed up with the viscount’s favorite “companion” before she was injured and concluded that he was a fool, yes, but not personally implicated in this affair.

“Fortunately, working for an idiot makes you an even bigger idiot, apparently. Feast your eyes on this.”

“Like I said, you ain’t gonna get a reaction out of something I can’t read...”

Siegfried didn’t know what the letters and business accounts thrust before him said, nor would he be able to piece together their meaning even if someone read them out, but Erich’s point was thus: a number of Viscount Besigheim’s subordinates made use of the fact that their liege was an idiot to do as they pleased.

“So, these letters and money records told you that the idiot viscount is involved in the trade of Kykeon?” Siegfried said. “Like, not the stuff that goes on in Marsheim, but bringing it into Marsheim?”

“In short, yes. Wow, congrats on breaking down my whole spiel into a couple of bullet points.”

This was far more preferable to Siegfried not understanding at all, but Erich, after working so hard to explain the situation, felt the strength leave his knees. Simply put, it was as he said. Although Viscount Besigheim personally wasn’t involved with Kykeon, several of his subordinates had been bribed.

They might have intended to sell some for a little bit of extra pocket money, but they didn’t treat it as a serious venture. This relaxed attitude would eventually be their undoing. In time their misdeeds would come to light, and naturally the blame would fall to Viscount Besigheim. Erich and Schnee had come to the conclusion that false evidence had been planted on the two barons so that they could be taken down at the same time as the viscount.

“You called me out personally to chat about this stuff in detail,” Siegfried said. “That means whatever you’re plannin’, it’s not a raid like last time, right?”

“You always catch on quick, comrade.”

The young hero-hopeful’d had a knot in his stomach when he responded to Erich’s summons earlier, fearing something bad to come, but his hunch had let him steel himself. It helped him manage the inevitable headache as his friend spoke of his unhinged schemes as lightly as one’s host might propose a pleasant springtime stroll.

“Now, we need to pick which one of us will take the lead this time,” Erich said.

“It’s gotta be me. I mean, I can totally see what you’re aimin’ for. ‘Step one, pretend we got in a big ol’ fight and one of us leaves the clan. Step two, get on good terms with the dealers and find out who’s pullin’ the strings.’ The boss can’t be the one doin’ that kinda dirty work.”

Siegfried shook his head, indicating that he knew Erich’s MO by now, but when he looked at his friend, he noticed that Erich had a strange expression. It wasn’t the face of someone who had the words taken out of their mouth—no, it said, “I didn’t realize that was an option.”

Siegfried felt his blood run cold.

“Wow, Sieg, I was just going to get either you or me hired as the viscount’s bodyguard or something.”

Siegfried couldn’t see his own expression, but he knew it had regret written all over it.

“Going undercover, eh,” Erich went on. “It’s risky, but a good plan. We wouldn’t have any restrictions on our side too. Yeah, we could really make it blow up...”

“H-Hey, Erich? C-Can we forget I said anything?”

“It’ll be a good opportunity to finally bring him out into the light... Two birds with one stone, as they say...”

“S-Stop that! Y-Y’know, your plan sounded way better! C’mon, man, I just listened to too many dumb heroic tales! Stop that—stop talking! I ain’t as clever as you!”

This new plot bore all too striking a resemblance to a story from the vast library of heroic tales and legends burned into Siegfried’s brain. The second-in-command of a party had pretended to fight with the leader so that he could go undercover at a noble manor and bring all the evil noble’s shady doings to light—it was a tale of self-sacrifice and eventual glory.

But that was a story. It wasn’t the same as doing it yourself.

The Fellowship of the Blade’s second-in-command tried to stammer his way into saying he had misspoken, but the leader ignored his comments, muttering to himself as he added more paper to the corkboard all the while.

[Tips] There is no law in the Trialist Empire of Rhine invalidating evidence procured by illegal means.

“B-B-Boss, are you okay?!”

“Yeah, fine.”

It happened with no warning.

It was just as night was settling in, as the chill that signaled autumn finally arrived, that the Fellowship of the Blade’s leader and second-in-command started arguing.

No one knew the reason for their sudden altercation. The day had proceeded like any other. They had come back from a day of work and were all happily drinking. Erich and Siegfried had gone to a private room to chat, but in the space of two hours all hell had broken loose.

No one knew who had struck the first blow. The only thing that the onlookers knew was that this was serious. They had resorted to their fists, fangs bared and hungry for blood. One or both of them might indeed have received permanent damage if the owner of the Snowy Silverwolf hadn’t forced them to break it up.

Gerrit, a rookie member of the Fellowship of the Blade, had been sick to his stomach as he watched the terrible scene play out. After the fight had ended, he’d supported Erich and taken him to a private room. Now he was tending to his clan leader. He gave him a cloth to wipe away the sweat and blood. Erich spat something out into it—it was a tooth.

Margit was calming down the situation in the main room. Kaya, naturally, was tending to Siegfried. By process of elimination, Gerrit found himself looking after Erich.

“Shit, that country bum really got me,” Erich spat. “Never learned the first thing about politics—never got any real learning—but he still ran his damn mouth...”

Gerrit could sense a genuine anger in his voice. The knot in his stomach only grew tighter.

The intensity of their fight suggested that perhaps irreparable damage had been done to their bond. Both of them had shown a horrible bloodlust—something that two adventurers of their level never did anymore—and had started pummeling one another’s faces. Neither was sated with one or two blows, and the bloody fight had left Erich with the beginnings of a nasty bruise on his left cheek and a trickle of blood from his nose.

Gerrit had only gotten a glance at Siegfried, but his cheek was bleeding and he must have had a cut in his mouth, because he’d been spitting blood.

Erich was usually so calm and collected, never losing his graceful composure, so what had caused such a shift in his mood? He and Siegfried were always on such good terms, always understood each other, so what in the world could have come between them? Gerrit had been by them day in and day out, but he had no idea what it could have been.

“The bastard knocked a tooth out...” Erich muttered.

“U-Um...what happened between you?” Gerrit said.

“Beg pardon?”

Gerrit only wanted to know why it was that the Fellowship’s top two had fought, but as soon as he asked the question Erich replied with uncharacteristic venom in his voice. Erich was sitting down and leaning forward on his knees, but he raised his head slightly to glare at Gerrit. His blue eyes glittered with the residual flames of the brawl. The stare was like a knife.

“Ah...!”

Gerrit hadn’t initially joined the Fellowship of the Blade out of a love for adventure. He had his own personal mission. But as he worked alongside his Fellows, fighting to hell and back with them, he’d been forged into a proud swordsman and a full man in his own right (or so he reasoned he must have after the first Kykeon raid; he’d taken his first life that day, after all). He had been content with his lot. After all, his mission didn’t impinge on his daily life, and the Fellowship’s amiable collective temperament was, in his eyes, ideal for him.

Gerrit couldn’t lie to himself—a general ambivalence had turned into genuine attachment. Although the harmonious atmosphere made it comfortable to stay, his time here had become something more than that. He was blessed by kind companions and two irreplaceable leaders. Erich had diligently taught him how to swing his sword properly. Siegfried never failed to spot when he was in a funk and dragged him to the baths to clear his head. Life with the Fellowship was good. Its peaceful and genial image, to Gerrit at least, seemed to be lifted straight out of the Age of Gods.

“The reason me and that thing are fighting is of no concern to you. Got it?”

Trouble bubbled in Gerrit’s breast—would it be so wrong to come clean now? He knew that it wasn’t right of him to unveil the mission he had been given, but that task set to him seemed almost pointless weighed against the fate of the Fellowship. He didn’t want to see the clan fall apart. He loathed the notion that he might one day have to part from this world, where the air was thick with sweat and hot blood and yet clean and fresh as the height of spring.

If it meant saving this home he had found for himself, then it would be far, far better to toss aside his foolish pride and the weight of his secrets and finally win Erich’s trust. The young mensch steeled his resolve.

“Boss, I gotta...” Gerrit said before clearing his throat. “My apologies. It is necessary that I discuss something with you.”

“What?”

Erich’s eyes were as cold as ever. The meaning behind his stare was obvious: Pry any further or try and mediate things, and I’ll kill you on the spot. It reaffirmed Gerrit’s suspicions. There must be a reason for Erich, ever smiling and usually so kind—even at his most strict—to wear such an expression. If it meant showing Erich the depths of his resolve, he didn’t care if he had to share a secret or two.

Gerrit fixed his posture before standing upright with his heels touching—a noble show of respect.

“I am a spy.”

In order to get Erich to believe him, for them to talk heart-to-heart, he had to lay himself bare. Gerrit was an honest lad who thought in straight lines. This was the method that suited him best.

“My real name isn’t Gerrit, but Gerhard. Gerhard Silberbauer.”

And so, on a night of his fifteenth year, the illegitimate noble son shared his secret to save the two men he admired so much.

[Tips] One of the unwritten laws of the adventuring community states that bar fights should remain confined to the bar.

Today was full of unexpected events. To be honest, in the grand scheme of things it was really damn productive. I got to go over our finds with Schnee and put everything up on that corkboard. Then I had a little one-on-one meeting with Siegfried to get him up to speed.

Then there was his little suggestion. The world was full of adages about the priceless nature of time, but I didn’t think we’d end up having a fistfight immediately after our chat. And what do you think that bastard said to me when I proposed it? “Huh?! I get to say anything I want to you and hit you as much as I want?! In front of everyone?!”

Why had he seemed so excited at the prospect? After two days without sleep, my brain finally stopped working. I even started to doubt my own senses. What on earth had I done to him to garner this much anger under the surface? I mean, I admit that I pushed his buttons sometimes just so I could watch him heap his lid, but his eyes were positively sparkling at the prospect of beating me silly. And he was true to his word. He hit me with everything he had—verbally and physically.

I wasn’t going to berate the guy. The plan was to make it seem as real a fight as possible. Kaya could patch up any scratches, bruises, or lost teeth, so neither of us held anything back. It was thanks to that safety net that we could really land those hits that would leave our faces looking swollen and ugly. On top of that, we weren’t kids or complete newcomers to beatdowns. We had trained ourselves to go for our foes’ squishiest points—for the head, you’re looking at someone’s eyes and throat—and so we’d landed some calculated blows during our bloody scrap.

But he really gave it to me when it came to the insults. “You always expect way too damn much of me!” “Quit the adventurin’ business! Showy brats like you belong on a stage!” “I swear on my mother’s grave, some days it feels like I’m the harem guard for your one-man escort service!”

Harsh, my guy. And what the hell was he on about, insinuating I’m some kind of dude of the evening? It was true that I made a habit of complimenting women, but it wasn’t like I was hitting on them—I just figured most gals could use a little moral support most of the time, so long as it was appropriate to the situation. It was common knowledge that if you had a job where you worked with women, you should always err on the side of overpraising!

Stupid piece of crap Siegfried...

I wasn’t even acting right now. I was pretty bummed out, to be completely honest. My broken molar hurt, but my heart hurt more.

I actually really struggled to think about insults to throw back at the guy. I had tried to think of some during the thirty minutes I spent with a stiff drink after our meeting and before the fight, but after all my hemming and hawing the only thing I could come up with was “stupid country bumpkin.”

Ah, I would like to amend my statement earlier. I said today was full of unexpected events, but that made it seem like the surprises were all done after our slugfest.

No, the surprises kept on coming.

“My real name isn’t Gerrit, but Gerhard. Gerhard Silberbauer.”

Right now, Gerrit, one of our Fellows, was locked in a standing bow right before me, completely nonchalant in admitting that he’d been our mole the whole time.

Gerrit was two years younger than me. He’d signed up with the Fellowship shortly after we had started making our name. He painted a tough figure—more inches on him than most, broad shoulders, measured posture, square jaw. He was still young, but his face was extremely distinguished. Throw in the hazel curls on his head and the steely gaze of his gray, inset eyes, and most would assume that he was already well into his twenties.

When he first revealed his age, I thought he was trying to pull one over on me. The misunderstanding didn’t last long, though. All it took was watching how he acted. He was earnest almost to a fault—no adult was quite so green.

However, I had been suspicious that he might be a spy since early on; Schnee’s intel about his true identity had backed me up. I’d decided that this charade with Siegfried was the perfect means to give him a bit of a shake and see if he revealed his true colors.

“I know you probably think this sudden,” Gerrit went on, “but please allow me to explain myself.”

He’d told me at the beginning that he was born and raised right in the outskirts of Ende Erde. But it just didn’t track. He carried himself too well, spoke too eloquently. It didn’t make sense for someone to have all the intonations and inflections of palatial speech down pat if your father was a simple merchant. No matter how much Gerrit had tried to vulgarize his speech, he’d never managed to fully hide certain ingrained quirks of his speech.

From his lingering palatial diction, I’d been a bit worried that he was a spy for some noble or maybe one of the local lords, so I had tested him a little by treating him a little bit harsher during training and missions than I had the others. I knew it wasn’t quite as simple as this—if he were here with a mission, then he wouldn’t come clean with just a little bit of raking over the coals.

“Boss... No, Mister Erich, I infiltrated the Fellowship of the Blade under orders to see whether you were acting for Marsheim’s benefit.”

All the same, I had taught him fairly and with all the care I gave everyone else, even if my own self-interest was bubbling under the surface. There were many who had joined at the same time as Gerrit, seeking to ride on the wave that the Fellowship had created, so I made sure that none of them had too easy a time of it, even if he received the brunt of it.

I don’t know whether it was the burning desire to see his job through or if he was just a guy with a solid backbone, but Gerrit didn’t waver despite that.

Schnee had provided me with some more background on him. When I found out that he was the illegitimate son of a noble and was originally from a northern satellite state to the north of Marsheim, I understood why he was such a tough cookie. Folk from there often came to Marsheim to earn more money than they could back home, which meant that they were strict about teaching their kids Rhinian. In other words, the bruises and aching muscles that Gerrit had earned through his time here were all for the sake of his family. I could relate to the guy—I had gone to Berylin for Elisa’s sake, after all.

Part of the fight with Siegfried was to see what Gerrit’s purpose here was—what goal was worth all the suffering he had gone through. But before I could start probing him, he had fessed up all of his own accord.

Hold it Gerrit... Or, no, right, it’s Gerhard, I thought. I’ve spent a good season teaching you, so I know you’re a good kid, so where did this all come from, huh?

“I...” Gerrit went on. Sniffles and coughs began to interrupt his speech. “The Fellowship... I couldn’t...”

What was going on?! This reaction was not in any of the possible futures I had envisioned! I’d sooner have expected him to pull out a slip of Kykeon for me from his inner pocket!

“The thing is...” he went on, still sputtering, “I... I love the Fellowship! I... Please... Please patch things up with Big Bro Sieg!”

“W-Wait, hold on, Gerrit...”

“If some household complained about you...and that’s the reason you fought...then it’s all my fault! I’ve been reporting on your work ethic and who you’ve been working with this whole time!”

Gerrit’s face was covered in snot and tears by now. I was taken aback by the fact that my junior—one that was taller than me, no less—was doing his best to cheer me up. I tried to get him to calm down, but he wouldn’t stop blaming himself.

A light bulb suddenly went on in my head. This was because of that stupid insult I had spent a good half hour cooking up! I had berated Siegfried for being a country bumpkin who knew nothing of politics, and that must have set our spy’s alarm bells ringing.

And so Gerrit explained the situation. Apparently his father had asked him to infiltrate “Goldilocks’s upstart clan” and assess the risk it might pose to the pro-Margrave Marsheim faction.

Gerrit’s age and the fact that he was still a greenhorn were probably the chief reasons he had been chosen for the job. He was an illegitimate son who could not succeed the family, so they didn’t lose anything by sending him undercover into a new, poorly understood clan. His education qualified him to write, read, and follow orders well enough. He was the perfect disposable playing piece.

“During my whole time here,” Gerrit said, “I thought that you and Big Bro Sieg had an unshakable friendship, and nothing would ever come between you. I told them that! I said that you were an ideal adventurer, loyal to Marsheim in the utmost!”

W-Wow, he really laid it on thick. In the past I had heard him grumble that I treated him so harshly that he thought he saw blood in his piss, or that despite my looks I was a demon on the inside. I would have thought he had given a report that painted me in a far worse light. It had gone beyond my wildest expectations that our spy would have such a glowing opinion of our operation.

Had I finally started those first small steps to becoming a sort of paragon of virtue? For a moment I found myself up on cloud nine with his compliment, but I quickly brought myself back down to earth. It wasn’t the time for that. I grabbed young Gerrit’s shoulders.

“I’m beyond happy that you shared this with me. You don’t need to cry. You signed up with your family’s welfare in mind and you earned your place here through your own talents.”

“Mister Erich... Ohh, Mister Erich... I’m a despicable traitor.”

“Hey, now. A Fellow shouldn’t cry this much! You’re going to make your blade cry too! And more importantly, you’re hardly a traitor in my eyes.”

If Gerrit had signed up to help his household get a foot in the door with my clan or to earn some cash for his future career, then I might have shaken him a little and sent him into the yard to do five thousand swings in penance. Or, no, maybe I’d have made him melt down his blade and forge it anew. But he’d hardly had much choice in the matter with his folks bearing down on him. I couldn’t in good conscience blame him for this.

Then there came the purpose of his sleuthing. He’d had every opportunity to drag our name through the mud, and instead he’d practically sung our praises to his father—a man he couldn’t even acknowledge as such in public. I thought that these good deeds and his just heart outweighed his dishonesty.

Admittedly, behavior like this wasn’t good for any organization. It might have turned out good for us, but it wasn’t ideal to simply move on from something that could have gone either way. All the same, he was fifteen. Anyone of his age would find themselves rushing into things with much forethought. I couldn’t find the wherewithal to lecture him at this point.

It did feel a bit awkward to think that I’d come up with this whole ploy on the fly when presumably I could have pulled this off without getting beaten like a redheaded stepchild.

“You did your best and worked on our behalf because you love the Fellowship of the Blade, right, Gerrit?” I said. “And now you’re sharing everything with me. I don’t think such an honest ‘traitor’ exists anywhere else in the world!”

“Ohhh, Mister Erich...”

“Hey, Gerrit? Will you call me ‘Boss’ once more?”

“O-Of course, Boss!”

After a few moments in my tall and burly junior’s bearish, teary hug, Gerrit finally calmed down enough for me to start asking him a few questions.

I had envisioned that someone, most likely a noble, would try to dig up dirt on the Fellowship, but I hadn’t considered that they’d resort to internal methods. I had been on guard for one of our noble clients to give us a job that was more cruel than fair, and so I hadn’t foreseen them sending in someone—and someone who gelled so well with our clan—to infiltrate us.

But once I had all the details laid out in front of me, it wasn’t so hard to stomach.

“Can I just clarify why you were sent to us?” I asked. “So, you were ordered to join the Fellowship to see if we would be of benefit to Marsheim or not?”

“Yes... After all, Marsheim is hardly the best place to look if you’re in need of an abundance of reputable adventurers to employ.”

“Ahh... Yes, point made.”

Marsheim was full of untrustworthy clans. Any adventurer with the mettle to even attempt to strike out on their own would find themselves sucked into a clan before they had the time to make a name for themselves. Those who did manage to achieve some form of independence ended up making at least some kind of connection to clans or local heroes that needed some extra firepower, or they just had too strong a personality to be used by anyone.

The Heilbronn Familie’s freeloader, the zentaur Manfred the Tongue-Splitter, fell into the former category; my teacher in all things adventuring, Mister Fidelio, fell into the latter category with the rest of his party.

Back when I was a newbie, some of the clans had tried to get up in my face. Adventurers who still had no connections or loyalties were a valuable resource. Mister Fidelio was an adventurer with exceptional talents, but his loyalty was somewhat malleable. If he sensed that the person he was working for was immoral or using him for illicit purposes, he wouldn’t hesitate to turn coat and leave. He exemplified the kind of untethered lifestyle that nobles wouldn’t want to rely on.

“I sent my father a report on the Fellowship’s activities every ten days,” Gerrit said. “Updates on whether we were involving ourselves with ne’er-do-wells or not, whether we were doing our jobs properly or not, what the current size of the clan was...”

The more he told me about what he did, the more I felt that he hadn’t really posed any threat to our clan at all. The way he’d broken down and come clean bordered on an overreaction on his part, under the circumstances. It reminded me of how my own dad used to call me from time to time to see how I was doing back in my old world more than anything. This didn’t feel super spy-like to me...

“Um, is that really all, Gerrit? You weren’t asked to do anything more, were you? Like making copies of our account books? Or to take on specific jobs? Or to find out what my weaknesses were or what opportunities would be best to assassinate me should I prove to be a liability to Marsheim?”

“Of course not! Even if I were asked to do such a thing, I would never do it! More importantly, my father isn’t that kind of person!”

I could only nod back with a timid “G-Gotcha” after this impassioned rebuttal.

Despite Gerrit’s father using his son as a pawn, he didn’t seem to be an utterly heartless man. He was on the margrave’s side, and he’d even been on board with me joining the peerage.

“But,” Gerrit went on, “my father’s tired. You see, someone is keen to hear about your failures and scandals, Boss.”

Hmm, now that’s fascinating. I was an adventurer, yet I had turned down the great honor of being knighted. It was no surprise that a decision like that would turn some folks against me. It would have made more sense for one of these hypothetical enemies to have skipped past hiring spies and gone straight to assassins, if I was being honest. Did someone want to publicly settle their qualms with me? Or did they just dislike me, and that was the end of it?

Whatever the case, I could use this. I felt a bit bad for Gerrit, but this worked perfectly for my plans. Instead of using my current connections to alert the former local lords and the nobility of the dangers of Kykeon, it would be far more effective to use someone upstanding like Gerrit’s father to the same ends.

“The person I mentioned... I thought that maybe they had done something to get in between you and our big bro!”

The more Gerrit spoke the worse I felt about using him, but I needed to push those emotions down for now. I had lost a tooth in my earlier performance; it made sense to keep my audience to be as plentiful and strung along as possible.

“I see... You did great, Gerrit, honestly. But the truth is our falling out is wholly unrelated.”

“No!”

“Sorry, but I can’t work with him any longer.”

This whole little secret plan with Siegfried might have been conceived in a fit of sleepless delirium, but I needed to see it through. Still, fooling your friends to fool your enemies hurt more than I thought it would.

I had simply wanted to know what our resident spy’s motives were; how had it come to this?

I pushed down the churning ball of guilt in the pit of my stomach and handed the bloodied cloth back to Gerrit.

[Tips] When an organization gets big enough, it becomes susceptible to infiltration by observers for concerned third parties. However, they are not necessarily sent with bad intentions. 

Siegfried wished he could go back to three days ago, take his past self’s spear, and smack himself over the head a good few times.

He knew that he was at fault for being so cocksure and saying that he would do anything, but at the moment, that was only a secondary annoyance. Siegfried had finally gotten used to the home he and Kaya had spent their savings on and enjoyed the creature comforts of a decent bed. Yet now here he was, stuck in a cheap inn, slumming it once more with the fleas and the bedbugs.

“Tch... Looks like I got too used to the high life,” the hero-hopeful muttered to himself. He cursed under his breath as he coated the dirty bed with a special insect repellent that Kaya had made from white chrysanthemum for him. Once he had sanitized the bed, he finally felt calm enough to sit down.

Siegfried had spent countless nights back in his home in Illfurth in worse circumstances than these, but it seemed that your senses were warped the instant you were exposed to more humane conditions. He sighed.

Suppressing the urge to close his eyes and let sleep come, Siegfried pulled out a magic item from under his shirt. It was a necklace that looked like the choker Margit wore, but the mechanism embedded in it removed any fashion value it might have had. This was a creation worked on by both Erich and Kaya—an all-new magic item that would safely relay Voice Transfer.

“Now where is it... Aha, here we go.”

Siegfried stuck his hands out the window and felt around the frame—so warped that the window only opened halfway now—and found a little needle sticking out of the wood. A thread so fine that you could only see it from certain angles trailing off from it into the distance.

“Hellooo? Anyone there?” Siegfried said.

“I hear you loud and clear,” came the reply.

Through this communication device, which used Margit’s webbing to transmit sound without producing even the smallest mana wave, Siegfried could hear Goldilocks’s voice, along with a slight crackle in the background.

Unlike the expedition to Baron Maulbronn’s manor, they were not using signals or code names this time. Whereas Erich and Margit had used intermediary signals to relay their voices, this time their methods were completely analog—Margit complained to Erich afterward, saying that she would never weave such a long thread ever again—which meant that there was zero chance of interference.

“I got in contact with ’em,” Siegfried said. “The sight of the silver shut ’em up real quick.”

“No matter how smart the organization, they can’t weed out every fool who works at the fringes, huh?”

“I’m more amazed that they didn’t even bat an eyelid after our crappy performance, y’know.”

Siegfried had found himself in a cheap inn because he was seeing his suggestion through. He’d openly fought with Erich and walked straight out of the Fellowship of the Blade. Kaya had tried to stop him, saying that he didn’t need to go this far, but the hero-hopeful had simply said that if he was following the plan, then he wanted to do it properly. It was a decision Siegfried had come to alone, and he wanted to make sure he stuck to it.

If the hero-hopeful wanted to fool his friends, then he needed to be even more careful and thorough than if he were dealing with his enemies. If he half-assed any part of this, then who knew where his story might start to unravel? He was already paranoid that his performance in the Snowy Silverwolf wasn’t all that believable, so he had racked his brains for ways to shore up his case.

Siegfried also needed distance from his Fellows. If he stayed somewhere nearby or easy to locate, then there was no doubt that some worried clan members would come to find him and try to convince him to return. Keeping any bothersome interference from his friends to a minimum was essential.

“D’you really think they’re gonna sell this stuff to me so easily?” Siegfried said. “I’ve already screwed up their operation before. I thought they’d be extra wary of me.”

Siegfried glanced over at a small bag he had tossed onto the floor. Inside were dozens of sheets of Kykeon. Earlier, he had paid a visit to one of Viscount Besigheim’s subordinates who’d been selling Kykeon to make some small change, and they had sold it to him without even batting an eyelid.

“Hey, you need to thank your performance for that,” Erich said. “They investigated you before too, remember? I bet they think you’re craving some more Kykeon after you were doused in the stuff during the raid.”

“Hmm, yeah, well, I tried to sell the performance by goin’ to one of their watering holes and drinkin’ a ton of booze with them. I really ain’t a heavyweight, so I was worried I was gonna screw up. But man, I didn’t get drunk at all. I had to play it up! I was shittin’ myself wondering if they could tell I was fakin’ it.”

The public had no clue as to exactly why Siegfried and Erich had fallen out, but what they did know was that one of the four key members responsible for laying the Infernal Knight to waste had walked out on his party and his clan.

Siegfried had let the masses form their own theories about why he had left; he was busy making swift progress piecing together the general picture of Kykeon deals in Marsheim. In the past three days he had begun by securing the room at this inn before heading to a run-down tavern and buying drink after drink to drown his woes. To top it off, he had pretended that only a fresh hit of Kykeon could make him forget his pain.

It had been quite a shock to see just how easy it had been to buy a fat stack of Kykeon. He was a straightforward adventurer; he thought it would be quicker to deal with the seller by ratting them out to the guard. However, he knew deep down that getting one of Viscount Besigheim’s people arrested wouldn’t solve the overall problem Marsheim was facing.

“How’d you manage to fake it?” Erich said. “I can always tell when you’re sloshed—the blood rushes to your cheeks.”

“Well... I held my breath and made ’em go red that way.”

“Brute forced it, huh?”

“Shut it. Anyway, you sorted out a way for me to get rid of this crap?”

The hero-hopeful’s gambit had held out so far, but he was playing the long game. If someone came into his room and found that the stack was untouched, they would question whether he was as down on his luck as he said he was.

“Yep, we’ve got the Baldur Clan’s full support. They’ll make sure not a trace remains. Leave the Kykeon under your pillow and someone will come pick it up while you’re out. They’ll dispose of it safely.”

“Now that’s a relief. Can’t just go throwin’ it on the fire like other trash, huh?”

Erich had pulled some strings behind the scenes to get the Baldur Clan in on his scheme. One aspect that they would help with was getting rid of any Kykeon in a chemically safe manner. They couldn’t leave it just lying around for someone else to pick up and use. Setting it alight wouldn’t neutralize it; if someone breathed in the smoke, who knew what kind of disaster would await. No one knew what would occur if it was disposed of in the river either. It would have taken Kaya far too long to neutralize it personally, so Erich had no other option but to go to the professionals and ask them to devise a tool that would speed up the process.

Fortunately, not only were the Kykeon dealers infringing on Nanna’s turf, she also had her own personal reasons to see the drug expunged from Ende Erde. She had given her assent to safely dispose of the goods without a moment’s hesitation.

Nanna had told Erich that she’d picked up the knack for neutralizing drugs like these. Erich took Nanna’s word for it. Her time at the College had left her intimately familiar with how to dispose of her and her teacher’s failed creations in a way that was strictly up to code. Some no-name mages in the Mages’ Corridor would simply flush any unwanted concoctions down into the sewers—the evidence could be seen in the occasional unfortunate rat that turned up dead with technicolor foam coating their mouth—but flushing your bad first drafts on the College’s campus was akin to dealing contraband. They had to play by the book. Erich was heartened to know that he had someone experienced to help him with disposal.

“Kaya said she should be finished with that potion in a day or two, by the way,” Erich said. “She was struggling a bit. Apparently making a healthy person seem sick is far more difficult than making unhealthy skin healthy.”

“Yeah, but it’d be weird to have a druggie look completely fine,” Siegfried said. “Tell her thanks from me.”

“She got me to try one of the prototypes. Made my face turn purple! I hope she wasn’t trying to get one over on me for sending you out on this mission...”

Siegfried couldn’t hold back his laughter. The thought of Erich, always so graceful and elegant with that indelible smirk on his lips, with the complexion of an eggplant was sidesplitting. To an outsider, Kaya seemed like a demure young woman who liked following the crowd, but in truth she had a strong personality underneath. When she got mad, she got incensed. Siegfried couldn’t stop smiling at Kaya’s all too likely deliberate act of retribution.

Goldilocks must have sensed that Siegfried was bent over in laughter, his only regret that he couldn’t see it with his own two eyes. He let out a long, deep sigh. But he didn’t reprimand his comrade. After all, this schadenfreude wasn’t completely foreign to him—he would most likely react the same way if Agrippina’s cool demeanor was ruined by something similarly embarrassing.

“Anyway,” Erich said, “preparations are well underway for you to infiltrate the fringes of Diablo. The Baldur Clan will prepare some fake customers for you. Miss Laurentius is sending over some of her scariest and most tight-lipped members.”

“Thanks, that’s a big help. Bein’ alone... I dunno, I feel antsy. I know I suggested this, and I know Margit’s watchin’ from afar...but still.”

Siegfried realized, now that he was standing alone in this room, that he had never once been completely on his own since he had become an adventurer. From the moment he had kicked the sign to Illfurth on his way out of there, he’d had Kaya by his side. After his first summer in Marsheim, he had met Erich and Margit, and before long they’d started working together. In the past few months, more and more rookies had joined their clan. Siegfried had gotten used to the lively nature of the Fellowship before he had even realized it. He’d forgotten just how quiet it was to be alone in a room. The feelings of loneliness and solitude had squirmed inside his gut, keeping him awake the whole of the first night he had been here.

“You won’t be alone for long. I got Nanna to talk to the Heilbronn Familie, and they’ve managed to secure a little base nearby. I had a look and it wasn’t too shabby. Well, some of the floorboards are pretty rotten, so I had to watch my footing...”

“Gotcha. I won’t let ya down. But...Clan Laurentius is full of scary-lookin’ folk. They won’t look down on me, will they...?”

Siegfried wasn’t sure why he found himself venting these stupid, embarrassing worries to the man he still aimed to surpass.

The two of them had threaded out a rough plan before their bar fight, and Siegfried knew that it had been made to be pretty watertight. While undercover, one of Siegfried’s jobs was to try to reduce the amount of Kykeon that passed through the hands of Marsheim’s citizens by making fake sales to clients who were secretly aligned with the Baldur Clan. On top of that, a number of Laurentius’s trusted agents would also pretend to defect from their clan. These independent-minded clan members would make sure he could sleep without fear of being assaulted in the night.

And yet, he was scared of taking on such an important job on his own.

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Erich said. “They’re a tough lot, drawn to Miss Laurentius’s warrior’s spirit. Aside from the absolute newbies, they can judge a warrior’s mettle. I guarantee none of them will underestimate you.”

“I guess, but c’mon, you gotta admit they’ve got looks that’d scare kids. Won’t they get mad that they’re bein’ ordered around by a squirt like me?”

“Well... I can’t make any guarantees on that side.”

Siegfried felt the weight in his heart lessen from the simple fact that he had someone who would listen to his bellyaching.

Erich caught on to his comrade’s uncharacteristic timidity and announced that he would be sending some Fellows to help.

“Huh?” said Siegfried. “You’re sending over Gerrit and Karsten?”

“Yeah. Gerrit’s a trustworthy lad. Plus he can read, write, and do arithmetic. Like I said yesterday, he was our mole, but he’s got a decent education. Karsten thinks quickly on his feet too. They look up to you, so I’m sure they’ll be a big help.”

Siegfried didn’t want to get any of the clan involved and had resolved to go undercover alone. But Erich had realized after Siegfried had gone that it would be weird for the second-in-command, who was so widely loved, to not have anyone joining his side instead. It didn’t take a lot of digging to learn that the adventurer with the scar on his cheek was the “big bro” of all the clan’s rookies. It wouldn’t make any sense if no one had followed him, in particular no one from the early days of the clan.

“I’m happy for the help, but how’d you convince them to come while keeping the plan secret?”

“I told them where you were in a roundabout way. Basically got them to come to you of their own accord. This isn’t my first time getting people to do what I want them to.”

Erich had decided that Mathieu and Etan were too honest for their own good, and so he had decided to feed the idea of following Siegfried to Gerrit, who had experience with this sort of thing, and to Karsten, who had learned how to make his way in the world thanks to the general public attitude toward goblins. When they joined up with Siegfried, he would bring them up to speed. Erich was certain that the pair of them would be able to work effectively alongside Siegfried undercover.

“And, thinking in the long term here,” Erich said, “I thought it would be better to have a couple of people in on our plan. I mean, they’ll help smooth things over when we have to come clean about this when everything’s sorted.”

“Right. I’ll find the right time to fill them in, then.”

“Man... Etan and the others are bugging me every day about where their ‘bro’ has gone. It’s been a real headache trying to fake why we fought, you know?”

Their fight had been serious. It wouldn’t fly for Erich and Siegfried to come out, arms slung over each other’s shoulders, saying that it had been a big ol’ prank. The clan would encircle them and beat them half to death, and they would be completely justified to. Almost the entire clan were in the dark, and they genuinely believed that the home they had found for themselves was falling apart.

The strain it was imposing on the clan and everyone’s morale was already evident.

Both Erich and Siegfried knew that it was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off the moment that the Kykeon crisis was safely and sufficiently resolved. Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest choice to get someone running on two nights without sleep and someone who constantly had his head in the clouds about how he could be like the heroes he admired to come up with a sober, sensible plan...

“Take it from me,” Erich said, “get ready to receive at least one good hit from each of your Fellows.”

“Yeah... We’re gonna have some apologizin’ to do.”

The air between them had gotten a bit gloomy, and it was getting late, so Siegfried announced that he would wait until their next communication before dismantling his necklace and slipping it back under his shirt. He tossed the needle and its thread out of the window, and it faded into the darkness of the night. No one would find a single trace of their conversation.

Siegfried battled with the dodgy window for a few minutes, to no avail. He smacked the window frame with a loud tut, then headed to bed with his cloak draped over him. He made sure that he had a dagger with him and his sword at the nearest bedpost.

It hadn’t been that long since he had bought the bed for his place with Kaya, but he was already missing it. The young hero-hopeful reaffirmed his resolve to draw his mission to a neat and tidy finish before he settled down to sleep.

[Tips] It is well and good to trick your allies in order to trick your foes, but you must be aware of the damage that this will do to the allies that you duped. There are some GMs that have an “if it’s interesting, anything goes” attitude, so don’t blame them if they start trying to egg on some PvP. 

Schnee let out a big feline yawn as she stretched out from her spot on the roof of the Snowy Silverwolf.

The weather was lovely. Perhaps the Sun God was in a good mood, for the late afternoon sun warmed the earth. With His eager anticipation of His wife in the splendor of her autumnal garb, the God of Wind and Clouds had set a temperate breeze in motion—all in all, the perfect weather for a nap.

It had been ten days since Schnee had been ambushed and subsequently hospitalized by her would-be assassins. Yesterday she had become entirely sick of bed rest and had told Kaya that if she didn’t get outside soon, she was going to be more algae than person. Schnee had finally won some valuable time outside and was using it to have a sun-kissed nap.

Perhaps thanks to her tougher bubastisian muscles, she found little difficulty in hopping up onto the roof despite not having moved much for days.

“Nee hee, the gods are in Their heaven and this cat’s cozy on the roof... How perfect.”

Schnee had shed her hospital gown and was perched cross-legged up on the roof. She drew a leg up and began to scratch behind her ear with her hind paw. Obviously she could have used her hand, but the extra power from her legs just made the whole experience that much pleasant. You would be hard-pressed to find a bubastisian who didn’t prefer it this way.

“But it still feels a bit weird. Gotta be extra careful not to stretch out my tummy too much...”

A mensch who’d put in equal time in bed would probably have a thousand knots in their neck. Although Schnee wasn’t quite so stiff, it troubled her to see that her body didn’t feel quite like it usually did.

An informant made their living by chasing leads. Schnee always had to be quick on her feet, and that held just as firm now as it did in her self-described “rumor-peddling” days. Tailing someone or losing someone required quick instincts, especially when she had to work with crowds that would easily overwhelm your average mensch. Every waking hour of the day was supposed to be an opportunity to refine her craft.

Ten days in bed was more than enough to dull her edge. That went extra after Kaya was left with no option but to inject her with a sleeping draft after Schnee’s first few escape attempts. As she enjoyed the afternoon sun, an anxiety niggled in the back of her mind—usually I would’ve gotten up here fifteen seconds quicker.

“Now then... How long are ya gonna be spyin’ on a gal for? Ya mean to talk to me or am I allowed to get some shut-eye?”

Even if her physical prowess had been dimmed somewhat, her senses had not. Her mind purred on without issue—always kneading away at the intricate tapestry of theories and analysis that drove her work—and she was always aware of the affairs of the person on the far side of the wall, behind the door, or in the garden nearby.

To an onlooker, it might seem like Schnee was muttering to herself, her words lighter than the air, but the recipient knew who she was addressing.

“You spotted me, then, did you, cat?”

“Your blood reekin’ like it does, you just don’t got the savvy to slip past this li’l stray’s sniffer,” Schnee replied. “Aha... You weren’t there in the lot the other day, were ya?”

A figure melted out of the shadow of one of the roof’s small eaves. It was a tall woman bedecked in charming frills and lace.

“Pleasure to meetcha. The name’s Schnee. I’m an informant, though I’m willin’ to bet you knew that already.”

“I have no name to give, but I give my greeting. You deserve it. It is rare indeed for one of my targets to live to see another day.”

Whereas the bubastisian was still sitting casually, her tail swishing, the assassin gave a polite bow. She brought the heels of her boots together—they were awfully tall heels, and Schnee wondered how she had managed to clamber up onto the roof with them—and bowed in a manner usually reserved for men. The strange juxtaposition of this bow with her childish dress and her tall stature conveyed a strange charm.

“You’re quite the brave one, putting yourself out in the open. Surely you’d wish to stay inside, where you can lurk in more snowy climes?” the assassin said.

“Wouldja look at that, are ya scared of ol’ John? I thought assassins were pros at killin’ and sneakin’ about!”

Schnee had already built a general profile of her assailants.

It was ridiculous how little of any solidity there was to go on. Rumor abounded of a pack of fiends in Ende Erde who had miraculously avoided the weight of a bounty on their heads. Just as no one knew the names of Exilrat’s leadership, and just as no one had proof of Nanna of the Baldur Clan and Stefano of the Heilbronn Familie’s brazen misdeeds, so too had this group hidden every trace of their doings.

They were agile and covert, their honed abilities allowing them to not only get the drop on Schnee, but to chase her through Marsheim without losing her once.

This group were unlike any self-proclaimed assassins that you might rub shoulders with for the right price. These were killers so immaculate in their methods that their targets left this world with no sign of foul play whatsoever. They were the mothers of modern death.

Only two kinds of people found their way into a place of such shadowy prestige—the clandestine agents of a truly wealthy noble, and those rare individuals who simply slipped through the cracks in society and come out the other side as predators by necessity, the pressure of absolute desperation revealing their gift for the art of wrongdoing.

Schnee had deduced from what little she’d already known and what formless rumors she could gather to build a picture of the foe before her. Erich would probably have labeled this reasoning with some TRPG term like Bull’s-Eye or Information Parsing. Whereas at the table one could pry this information out of their GM with a successful dice roll, the informant had scoured her memories of all she had seen and heard, filtering out the truth from the dross, and had compiled a picture she could trust.

“Oh? I was right? Nee hee hee, every rumor’s worth lookin’ into, that’s fer sure.”

The woman in fancy garb huffed in response, as if brushing off a bad joke.

At this rate she’d be left with no reason at all to have shown her hand at this juncture. Schnee did not balk in the slightest. Clearly the informant had formed a stratagem to ensure that even with her death, the wheels would keep on turning. All putting her down would yield was another crime scene to erase.

The assassin knew—Schnee hadn’t simply exposed herself on a foolish whim. She had put herself in the open to lure in her foe and extract intel, even if it meant putting herself into danger.

“Y’know, color me surprised,” Schnee went on. “I never thought you’d show yer face. I figured I wouldn’t see ya again after you did me the favor of jumpin’ me.”

“I am...a gifted assassin, but my primary occupation lies elsewhere. If the need arises, then I may resort to intimidation.”

The assassin moved her arm as if she were swinging a bat, despite her empty hands. As if from nowhere, two wrapped packages appeared and rolled across the roof and into the gutter. From gaps in the cloth, Schnee could see two heads.

“Wowee, what a gift.”

Schnee knew the faces well—they were Viscount Besigheim’s two lackeys that Siegfried had used to begin his investigation into the Kykeon trade.

“I dunno what to say; it’s just so sudden, you droppin’ ’em in my lap,” Schnee went on.

“And here I thought I was a little late.”

The assassin would have liked to cluck her tongue in disgust, if she’d been permitted that luxury.

In order to devise an alternative plan, she had bypassed her client and gone to their mutual employer with a handful of complaints. That was all well and good, but the problem was in the delay—their method of communication simply didn’t allow for immediate turnaround, and she had to go through a bevy of long-winded and roundabout channels in order to preserve their information network’s anonymity. She knew that a single hole in their network could result in the utter demise of their organization, but it had been overburdened with schemes and intermediaries.

“So ya came here to silence me ’n’ rack up some brownie points along the way,” Schnee said. “You’re really goin’ out of yer way for yer customer, aren’tcha?”

Schnee swiftly kicked the heads out of the gutter. They traced a beautiful arc in the air before disappearing right into a trash disposal that someone had lazily left open. The unit was filled with various taverns’ food waste—mainly leftovers and inedible parts—and the heads would no doubt be lost among them as they were taken away to the compost heap. None would pray for them as they decayed back into the earth.

“My client’s pretty impatient, I’m afraid,” Schnee went on. “He’s skipped past these fools fer a target with more meat on ’em. Bet they told ya not to kill ’em yet. Am I right?”

A brief silence followed. The assassin’s face showed no trace of her emotion, but her refusal to answer spoke volumes about her disdain for the limits her organization placed on her freedom of movement.

If it weren’t for the shackles of vertical power, the assassin would have dispatched the target she should have been going after the whole time herself. But all of Ende Erde was the field of play for her patron’s greater scheme, and so certain pieces had to remain as they were. It wouldn’t do to kill any players still in center stage.

They had thought that the adventurers would do what adventurers do best: sit and wait for the optimal moment to act. It was beyond their wildest belief for the enemy group to splinter and probe at their weak spots. The assassin had long questioned what it meant to have the resolve to go out and adventure, but it seemed like she was being shown firsthand the kind of mettle that she thought only the true adventurers from an age long past had.

The contemporary sort of adventurer should have been like those who existed in the Age of Gods. They were meant to be steadfast believers in high ideals, driven to act on them even if it meant picking a fight with those in power. A proper adventurer wouldn’t hesitate to take more filthy measures if it meant that in the final reckoning, good prevailed.

They were meant to be paragons that dazzled as bright as the Sun God on this warm afternoon.

“Cat... You fed them information. I have done my own digging. The noble houses implicated aren’t just the—”

“They aren’t just the three I named, I know. Count Pforzheim and Viscount Liebentwell are marked too, right? But who could tell what a buncha adventurers would do if I told ’em that those two were evil to the core. If I sicced ’em on those too, it’d be no different from how those two were treated.”

Schnee gestured to the trash bin with her chin, indicating that this was a question that didn’t need asking. Her ears lay flat on her head—a way of indicating displeasure or wariness. This time it was the former.

An informant dealt in intel that needed to be treated with the utmost caution. Schnee’s own life had been ruined by shoddy intel; she knew firsthand just how important it was to be careful with the cards you have. A single sentence, even a word out of place could snowball. You needed to be sure that the person you gave your intel to wasn’t going to run off with it and make a mess.

That Goldilocks Erich wasn’t short-tempered per se, but he relied too much on solving problems with his blade. It was only hearsay, but apparently he had boldly taught his clan members that “at the end of the day, leave no survivors” or “through victory we earn the right to die last.”

Giving up a target to someone like that, who would cut down a villain if it would grease the wheels of the overall campaign, would ruin the tone of the adventure.

“So, what’re you gonna do?” Schnee said. “If ya want my head, I’ll give it up to ya on a plate. Though I doubt me breathin’ at this stage is gonna change much.”

“Tch... You cats are slippery creatures indeed.”

A tut finally emerged from the assassin’s lips.

Schnee hadn’t so much resolved to die. She just knew that her death would result in a net positive eventually.

Indeed, the informant had gone to some lengths to insure against her own demise. The moment of her passing would set wheels in motion to guarantee that she would be an inconvenience well beyond the grave.

There were documents that would be released unless she showed up to her monthly meeting; a safe full of evidence of corruption would be opened if her payments to the Adventurer’s Association suddenly stopped. She had formed connections with adventurers who shared secrets that would be brought to light in the event that either party should meet an untimely end. All of these measures protected her.

If Schnee had died when she had escaped from the baron’s manor, then these probably would not have made much difference. At that time she hadn’t had a veritable bomb in her possession that could set Marsheim ablaze.

Now was different. She had sent a number of these “bombs” to various locations that, in the event of her unforeseen death, would cause trouble for not only the local bigwigs but also Margrave Marsheim. Schnee held the fuse, and it was exactly that which kept her safe.

This assassin was smart enough to know she couldn’t finish the job anymore.

She had killed countless victims in the past and had never allowed her client to do all the legwork in her research. She made sure to always research her marks personally. Goldilocks’s favored ideology of “anything can be solved through violence” had a few exceptions. The assassin had therefore come to Schnee with the proclamation that she had seen through all of their plans, in the hopes she’d intimidate them into inaction. However, now a chain of mutual interests had been formed. It was too late for her to force a chain around Schnee’s throat or even a rope around her wrists.

There was nothing more terrifying than someone with nothing left to lose. This rule applied to any and all areas of life.

No, this cat was a step beyond that. She was a thorn in her side she had no choice but to endure.

“Oh? Headin’ home?”

“Indeed. I’ve given you my warning,” the assassin replied. “Plus, your attitude has revealed the general scope of your activity. I’ll do my own digging with my own two hands.”

“Ya sure? Wouldn’t hurt ta head back with an extra head in the bag.”

As Schnee gave her usual distinctly cattish laugh, the assassin turned away to leave.

It would not do to anger the owner of the Snowy Silverwolf. John was a step below Fidelio in terms of pure power, but many respected adventurers had passed under his roof and his care. His network wasn’t to be underestimated—it would take only a single howl to rally the heroes who had journeyed out of Marsheim back to protect their former home. This possibility far outweighed the value of one informant’s head.

“Tell the innkeeper I send my regards. And that I didn’t break a single roof tile this time.”

“Roger dodger,” Schnee said as she cheerfully waved the assassin off. The woman seemed to vanish into thin air, despite the gaudiness of her garb and Schnee’s perceptive acumen. For a short while, Schnee pricked her ears and listened to the faint sounds of the wind and birds, just to confirm that the assassin wasn’t coming back. She collapsed backward, the fear that she had been holding down finally welling to the surface.

“Good golly... Now that made my fur stand on end... Is that gal really a mensch?”

Bubastisians only had sweat glands on their paw pads; Schnee felt her hands grow itchy with stress sweat. Her mouth was dry from the tension. Her jaw ached.

Schnee had taken painstaking care not to invite the woman to part her head from her shoulders. Of course, she had gone in knowing precisely how vanishingly unlikely it’d been that she wouldn’t walk away in one piece, but knowing and being truly prepared were two different things, and her poor heart could tell the difference.

People like that woman—those whose faith in their abilities was truly unshakable—could easily revert into killing machines if it meant reducing the overall hassle they had to put up with. In many cases, it didn’t matter what their personal circumstances were—all it took was a single grudge to easily change their mood. They realized that if they simply threw away their morals, their past, their friends, then the murder of a single runt could secure the deaths of hundreds down the line.

“Doin’ my research is gonna be a bit trickier now... A wild dog’s scary enough, but she’s a bona fide dire wolf... Who in blazes coulda put a leash on her?”

Bluffs usually were more effective than money or daggers in drawing out information, but if you played your cards poorly you could end up shaving years off your life. Schnee cursed her foolishness. The assassin’s bloodlust had long since faded away, but Schnee’s heart was still keeping triple time.

Risk was inherent in a bluff. What you got in exchange for putting your life on the line was solid data. Schnee had held only a scrap of intel, and it might have been the thing that saved her life. She had figured that if the assassin knew John, then she wouldn’t do anything illegal while they were on his roof. Choosing to go up here had been a real risk, but it had turned up quite the useful nugget of intel.

“She got lingerin’ feelings, maybe? Didn’t think she’d still be the sorta person to want to leave a little message for John. I think it might be worth doin’ a little nighttime sleuthin’...”

That night Schnee would learn quite the harsh lesson. It was said that a bell on a cat’s collar invites danger, but Schnee had failed to notice the invisible, magic string that connected her own neck to the bell at her bedside. Kaya had set it to make sure Schnee got some decent bed rest, and so the curfew-breaking informant had to endure a painful lecture that brought tears to her eyes.

[Tips] Plots and schemes are commonplace in the Empire, and so an assassin often receives specific requests for their work—namely whether it should be carried out in secret or not. There are some cases where the murder need not be hidden. However, there are yet other cases where, for a time, no one can be allowed to know that anyone died at all. Such requests come from clients who have their eyes on an inheritance. If they can falsify the date that the person in question died, then they can secure an advantage in the inevitable discussions as to who the most deserving recipient is. In cases such as these, an inability to verify the time of a person’s death can have even greater effects than the death in and of itself.

A man entered the warehouse—an individual not even worth naming—and was shocked by what he saw. Who could have guessed that the change would be this quick?

“You’re an hour late. Ain’t ya gonna apologize?” the young man said to the Kykeon supplier.

The one who had spoken was sitting in the middle of the warehouse. The supplier shivered upon seeing his tatterdemalion appearance. His withered visage illustrated without a doubt that Kykeon was a drug for selling, not for using. His clothes were dirty and unwashed; his shoes didn’t match and fit poorly. Ink-black bags sat under his eyes above gaunt cheeks. His drooping eyelids partially covered eyes that glinted with an enervated menace. He had the pallor of a patient in their sickbed.

This was the poor state of one of Marsheim’s latest stars. The supplier felt pity and fear at the poor state that he had fallen to. The warning from the higher-ups to never dope up on your own stock had never felt more grave.

“Sorry,” the supplier said. “The patrols have gotten worse recently. Bunch of dealers have been carted off already, so I gotta be careful.”

“Are you pissin’ around? That really a good enough reason to keep me waiting?”

The deleterious effects of Kykeon didn’t stop with the body. It made people impatient, antsy. The man was clutching his knee toward his chest, his leg stick thin. His foot twitched. It was clear that the effects of the drug were wearing away at his mental state.

“Yeah, but like I could’ve done anything! There hasn’t been an official statement to round up the dealers, but more and more adventurers are roaming the streets, y’know? Just like your old pal.”

At these final words, the emaciated young man—the fallen adventurer known as Siegfried—hawked a gob of spit, his nostrils flaring. No, it wasn’t just spit—some undissolved Kykeon was mixed in with the expectoration.

“What the fuck does scum-sucking human garbage like Goldilocks have to do with our business?”

“All right, all right, I’m sorry. I’ll give you a five percent discount per sheet. We good?”

Siegfried had become one of Marsheim’s Kykeon dealers, but it was clear to this seller that he was on the stuff too. Some of the dealers on the outer edges of the network ended up like Siegfried, but it was a shock to see someone lauded as a local hero fall like this. Siegfried was only one link down the chain, but still the supplier felt smug, momentarily forgetting that he was in the same business.

The supplier hated adventurers. The public fell over one another to fellate them in song and story, all for being more uniquely unemployable than most! To the supplier, they were scarcely any different from the average peddler of their own flesh from the city’s basest brothels.

“The hell do you think I am?” Siegfried said. “Ten percent.”

“Fine, fine. Deal.”

Looking at the fallen adventurer, the seller told himself that this brat had simply run his luck dry in the span of his brief career, however exceptional that luck might have been at one time. Buoyed by this feeling of superiority, he easily accepted Siegfried’s counteroffer.

“My money. Hand it over.”

“Got it...”

A clearly disgruntled goblin wandered over to Siegfried and handed him a heavy looking bag.

“I’ll have to double check the amount,” the supplier said.

“Y’think I’d try and swindle you after this?”

The bag was filled with silver coins. They were scratched and old, meaning they were worth less than their face value, but by the supplier’s count there were enough.

“The money’s clean,” Siegfried went on. “Been through at least two pairs of hands already. You ain’t gotta worry about it being traceable through magic or miracles.”

“Understood. Here—your change from our little discount.”

The supplier gave a satisfied nod, happy that the cash had been sufficiently laundered. If it had been through two intermediary owners, then even if traces of mana or identifying magic still remained, it was impossible to pinpoint the exact purpose for which it had changed hands.

The Kykeon dealers collected far dirtier money than this, but it was better to have laundered money from both an economic and a practical standpoint.

The man didn’t bother to disguise his pleasure and clapped his hands together. His subordinate who was waiting out in front brought in some luggage from the cart. Placed before Siegfried was a wicker basket filled with clothes—naturally, the Kykeon was hidden in the sleeves and in a secret compartment.

The supplier had been so distracted by Siegfried’s poor and pathetic state that he hadn’t cottoned on to the one irregularity in the whole arrangement. This former adventurer was evidently ruined in body and mind by Kykeon, so just how had he managed to secure this much clean money? How had he secured safe dealing spots, sold well above his quota, and avoided capture when there were more searches for the stuff every day? If only he had been a bit less excited at seeing this young man’s ruin, he might have realized that a true burnout could never have made such a competent dealer.

That wasn’t all the supplier had missed. Drunk on his joy, he didn’t notice a shadow up above watching him leave with his money. It was more than likely that he wouldn’t even notice the rope around his neck until the last moment.

If you only saw what you wished to see—what others could learn and reproduce at their leisure—then the muddy current of the great game would crush you before it made you clean.

[Tips] In countries with sufficiently advanced magic, simple powders and oils are the most primitive cosmetic solutions on the market.

Siegfried was shocked to realize just how many dunces there were in the world.

The hero-hopeful always sought to better himself, transforming the rumblings of envy into the drive to improve. He was also modestly aware of his limitations, and even if he couldn’t list off every single thing that he couldn’t do, he did know two things: he wasn’t educated, and he didn’t have the mental agility to go deep undercover. The majority of the work for his performance as a drugged-out bum was thanks to Kaya’s magical makeup, which had rendered him temporarily gaunt and wasted away. His acting skills wouldn’t net him a place with even the worst acting troupe.

Siegfried remained on edge for days, wondering if someone would see through his shoddy performance and come to get him. After all, that had been what happened to Schnee. But as the days went by, no assassins came knocking on his door. Instead, he had started to deal with a seller who was even closer to the heart of Kykeon production.

This situation was nothing more than proof to Siegfried that the world was full of shortsighted fools who would ignore what was right in front of their noses if they were making a few coins’ worth of profit. As long as he mostly acted how they wanted and expected him to, then even his crappy acting would string along someone with eyes only for money. Still, the realization hardly amounted to much; one fewer idiot was a drop in the bucket.

Siegfried shook his head at yet another successful deal, but he refused to let it get to his head. Just because things were going well now that didn’t mean he was confident that he could keep up this ruse. The lad made a mental note to give Goldilocks a knuckle sandwich and make sure he was given a more heroic role to play next time something like this happened.

“Lower it in slowly, all right?” Siegfried said. “Get it wet and it won’t be good.”

Siegfried and Karsten had carefully removed one of the warehouse’s floorboards to reveal an old well. It had been built before this part of town had been integrated within the city walls. The builders of this warehouse didn’t need it but couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it, and so they’d just covered it up.

The well originally had been dug deep enough to reach the groundwater. With the development of Marsheim’s above- and belowground sewage system, the well had been connected without much thought via a small pipe.

The adventurers were carefully lowering a wooden box filled to the brim with stacks of Kykeon with a piece of rope. Down below a light could be seen faintly flickering—by the way it was moving, the team below were asking Siegfried to lower the box more slowly.

A special unit dispatched from the Baldur Clan were down below. They would handle disposing of the drug. Today Uzu had been personally selected to help and she had crawled through the sewers to secretly neutralize the stock.

Both Siegfried’s group and the adventurers down below were wearing miasma-warding bandanas over their noses and mouths in case the fragile Kykeon dissipated into the air somehow.

No one involved needed a taste of this substance to know how deadly and debilitating it was—a simple glance at the junkies around town would tell you all you needed to know. No one would slander another for being too careful with such a substance.

A flickering signal light from Uzu’s group told Siegfried that they had safely secured the load. After a few moments, another signal pierced the darkness: Pull the rope.

In return for the Kykeon that Siegfried had managed to secure came another box, nearly identical. The insides were filled with sheets of fake Kykeon—counted to match the exact amount that Siegfried had bought.

Most people wouldn’t be able to work out the difference between this and the real deal at a glance. They were cut to the exact same size—with the little perforations so that stamp-sized portions could be easily torn off—and colored with the exact same transparent sheen of the original.

Indeed, only those in the know would be able to identify these sheets as the Baldur Clan’s substitute. They were a careful combination of the ecstasy-inducing concoctions cooked up by Nanna’s despairing brain and Kaya’s own makeup potions. Smokestack Nanna’s drug didn’t provide quite the same pleasure as Kykeon, but it was designed to not be addictive in the slightest. The Baldur Clan were running at a heavy loss to produce this stuff, but that showed just how serious the College dropout’s view of the situation was. She had made exceptions to her usual profit-seeking ways if it meant destroying her competition.

The fake Kykeon provided a momentary high and made the user outwardly seem to experience the same wasting effect. No one would think to rifle through Siegfried’s stock and claim he was moving bad product.

Even though most of the clientele were plants from allied clans, they had been picked for their former addiction to Kykeon. Their own histories would make it even trickier for Diablo to pick up on their counterplot. To any onlooker, it would seem like this fallen adventurer was well and truly a part of Marsheim’s drug trade.

The Baldur Clan’s drug wasn’t illegal on paper, and it was easy to write off the addicts as folk without the fortitude or moral fiber to regulate their intake, but it would still warp your mind and loosen your grip on reality. The young adventurer applied some logic from the battlefield to stanch his guilt, reasoning that a wound from a blade was far preferable to being blown to bits by a deadly spell. All the same, dealing this drug, even if it wasn’t Kykeon, left a bitter taste in his mouth.

“Man...” the hero-hopeful muttered. “The Baldur Clan are really flush with cash... How much does it cost to make this much, huh?”

Bought direct from the clan with their crow-and-eyeball seal of authenticity, this same stuff would set you back five librae for a pack. It would bring pleasure to all physical senses for around eight to twelve hours, so it was well worth the price, but this whole operation was eating away at their funds. Siegfried was surprised they could keep up their part of the arrangement, given how costly the production process was in premium catalysts and raw mana.

“Um... Sie... Mister Siegfried?”

“Huh? What’s up, messenger girl? That’s all, isn’t it?”

Siegfried had pulled out some of the cash in the box to keep his funds stocked so that he could continue playing his role. He was sorting through it when Uzu zoomed up the well with her ornithurgy and poked her head out. Her face told of her ongoing insomnia; the bags under her eyes were almost on par with Nanna’s. She timidly lifted up an envelope for Siegfried.

The hero-hopeful took it, and immediately the ring on his finger started to shake in reaction to its mana signature. The letter was sealed with a careful formula.

“Again? Seriously?”

“Y-Yes... M-My apologies...”

Uzu gave Siegfried a sorrowful glance as the end of her apology withered to nothing.

Siegfried knew that he was being treated pretty unfairly, all things considered, but compared to him this mage girl was far worse off. As the designated go-between, she was kept on her feet at all times and nagged at every turn for news from the other end of the chain. Not only that, Nanna knew that Uzu couldn’t sleep without being doped up, and so she’d made use of her insomnia to get her to work for well over two-thirds of the day straight. It was true that the Baldur Clan were a shady lot, and Uzu was hardly exempt, but Siegfried still felt a pang of sympathy for her.

“Our connections have increased, so we’ve got way more information,” Siegfried said. “You lot can chill out a bit, y’know?”

“I-If she did, then the b-boss would be a p-professor in the capital by now...”

Siegfried noticed that Uzu’s eyes, mostly hidden by her bangs, were swimming. Uzu followed Nanna with a blind love, so this was the first time since he’d met her that he’d heard her say something about her boss that could be viewed as having a touch of sarcasm in it.

Things were getting heated, and not just Uzu’s temper.

Siegfried sighed. There wasn’t much for it—he decided to share some of the information he had been sitting on. If he let Uzu return empty-handed, then who knew what would happen to the unfortunate mage. The hero-hopeful wasn’t so heartless as to ignore this fact and go about his day without a care.

“Right, so they’ve got these parties,” he said. “Gatherings to thank their people. There’s this one suspicious person there. They’ve got quite the accent, so Margit and our informant are on the trail for more info.”

“P-Parties to thank their workers? The dealers and suppliers, y-you mean?”

“Yeah. Idiots loosen their lips when you’ve buttered them up and got a few drinks in ’em. We have similar parties with the Fellowship too, y’know?”

Erich had said once that booze was social lubricant. Give someone a big drink on the house, compliment them, and they’ll immediately start to get bigheaded. That went especially for the sort of folk who dirtied their hands in the drug trade. Some people didn’t even know what they were meant to keep secret and what they were meant to keep under wraps.

The parties at the Fellowship were also a way for Erich to allow his clan members to make this mistake in a safe environment. It was easy to say things you regretted when you were drunk, so if they made these mistakes with friends first, then they could laugh it off and learn to control their drink next time. Erich had merely been trying to train up the rookies to avoid problems in the future, but Siegfried, who had watched the more naive Fellows from the countryside getting absolutely blackout sozzled, had smartly realized that the practice could be weaponized and turned on their enemies.

Siegfried had asked Kaya to send him over some cash. And so while he drank what amounted to the thinnest possible grog—he hesitated to call it booze, as he had learned what decent stuff tasted like during his time at the Snowy Silverwolf—he plied the idiots there with drinks and soaked up their mindless boasts.

“The people in charge of the suppliers are up to something. I mean, it’s fair enough that there are more people as I’m doin’ well with payin’ ’em, but it looks like the Exilrat are workin’ in the shadows of this operation.”

“Huh? Th-Those shabby fools?”

They must have left some sort of deep emotional scar on Uzu, because she clapped a hand to her nose and mouth. Her hand had gone bone white. Back when Uzu had first crossed paths with Erich on Nanna’s behalf (thanks to Exilrat’s manipulation), he’d arranged a nasty encounter between Uzu and the ground; she could still feel the phantom trickle of blood from the wreck of her nose.

“B-But it’s normal for the Exilrat to work in the shadows...isn’t it?” Uzu said. “Even some of our s-sellers are...involved with them.”

It was something that Uzu didn’t want to say, but it was a fact that the Baldur Clan also employed its share of refugees. Many of the folk that found themselves in the tent grounds were beggars, not adventurers, and their rush mats and baskets were a clear indicator that they were involved with the Baldur Clan.

The Exilrat were known for adding those that came to the Empire in search of a better life to their fold before forcing them into smuggling and other such dirty and unsavory jobs, all for the sake of making quick money.

“They’re bein’ moved from turf to turf. These are people who can barely even say ‘good morning’ in Rhinian! If you ask me, something reeks.”

“Yes, but...if you’re worried about every little thing, then you’ll never stop worrying. They’re just as active as the Heilbronn Familie, you know?”

“But that’s why I’m suspicious of the increase in these ‘good job out there’ parties! I’ve noticed more and more people where I’m based. I remember their faces from back when we started up the Fellowship.”

Shady folk weren’t always up to no good, but Siegfried wanted to check and make sure.

Indeed, Siegfried had asked Margit to do a bit of sleuthing and found out that Erich had done them in once before—by this point Siegfried had stopped being shocked at the nonsense that turned up in Erich’s past—but she’d creased her brow and said that it was unlikely that they would bother them anymore.

All the same, the hero-hopeful named Dirk had grown up poor in the countryside and had never received the kind of education that his three friends did. He had seen a depth and breadth of ignorance in the general population that left him sickened. Naturally he counted his family among that number—his brothers who moaned that they were hungry but never offered to help in another family’s field; his idiot dad who wasted his money on drinking and ended up without enough money for decent clothes, come winter.

Siegfried knew that no amount of pain would make a true idiot learn their lesson.

“They don’t get it,” Siegfried said. “Their upbringings were too good.”

Siegfried wasn’t sure exactly why, but assumed that it was because of Erich’s and Margit’s relatively affluent upbringings that they tended to misjudge the brain of the average person. It didn’t make sense to Siegfried. Nobody would bother with war at this point if a simple punch to the face was enough to permanently adjust someone’s attitude.

Or perhaps Goldilocks had simply written off the Exilrat ever since he had crushed them in a previous campaign.

“Some fools won’t learn their lesson until they’re dead and in the ground,” Siegfried went on. “World’s a funny place, ain’t it?”

“I-I see...”

Siegfried handed over his little intel souvenir to the pitiful Uzu and saw her off before covering up the well once more with the floorboard.

Once he brushed the dust and dirt back onto the floorboard, no one would know a well lay underneath.

“Bro?”

“Yeah, Karsten?”

“How long do we have to do this?”

The goblin Karsten, one of the four original rookies of the Fellowship, looked physically pained as he asked the question. Goblins often had many siblings, and so Karsten had developed quite the resilient personality. Erich had also selected him for his aptitude with his blade. But even though he had understood the logic behind this plot, Karsten looked like he hadn’t completely accepted what they were doing.

“What other choice do we got? It’s our home and it’s in trouble.”

“I-I know that, but we’re acting like drug dealers! I... I can’t bear to see you like this, Bro...”

“’Nough of that. I told you, didn’t I? I’m the one who suggested this whole damn thing.”

Though they greatly resembled a methuselah’s ears, goblin ears were much more flexile and expressive. Karsten’s pointed ears drooped in despondency.

“A hero is someone who does the kinda dirty work that no one else wants. Tch... Ticks me off that even that li’l turn of phrase is borrowed from him...”

“Dirty work?”

“Yeah, exactly. Come on—name someone who’d happily do what I’m doin’. I can’t even go to the Association and do any jobs! At this rate he’s gonna get another rank on me.”

“That’s what you’re worried about?” Karsten mumbled.

Siegfried placed his hand on the goblin’s shoulder and put on a wicked grin. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t wipe away the boyish naivety from it.

“Listen, Karsten. If you think this is too filthy for ya, then you ain’t gonna be able to become like one of the heroes we admire, eh?”

Heroes took on what other people could not or would not do. Heroes shouldered other people’s burdens. Anyone would be frightened to stand before a dragon that was tens or hundreds of times your size. The blade in your hand and the skills you honed would feel so dreadfully unfit for the task. But a hero put on a smile and charged forth anyway.

They might not have been fighting a dragon, but their mission now followed the same logic. Their work might never be sung about in public, but they and their allies would be proud.

Siegfried knew that he would never be able to forgive himself if he ran away in Marsheim’s hour of need. The young lad’s foundations as a worthy adventurer were being hardened with every passing day. He was the sort of person who would look down at his character sheet at the end of the campaign and smile with joy at the numbers listed there. Of course, while Erich dreamed of the highest possible fixed values, Siegfried would drool at the points in his Fame column.

This was the raw and unformed steel that would one day make for the nerves of a true hero. Karsten wanted to show Siegfried—the man he admired, who he treated like a brother—to everyone back in the Fellowship and let them see how, even done up like a walking corpse, his heroic form held fast. He wanted to tell them: “Our Big Bro Sieg is someone worth putting our lives on the line for.”

“Oh yeah!” Siegfried said. “The letter.”

Completely unaware of how Karsten was looking at him, Siegfried quickly opened up the letter from Nanna. The rainbow-colored smoke that issued forth was vile, but he accepted it, knowing that it was to prevent anyone else from reading it.

He waved away the uncanny melange of primary colors and glanced over the message. The penmanship was skilled, but that made it all the more difficult for Siegfried to read. Many nobles and nobles-to-be never considered that there were those out there that couldn’t read as easily as they could. Erich was the same. Siegfried wasn’t sure if it was an unintentional habit, but the letters from his friend would often come written in a style intended for nobles that took the countryside lad five times longer than usual to parse.

“Huh? A meeting? In three days? Can’t tell if that’s soon or a while away...”

Not only that, he didn’t understand why he needed such early notice. Was it out of some kind of concern? Who needed this much warning for anything?

“Something’s probably goin’ down if they want me there so bad.”

It beat the hell out of a note that just read “Come now,” but Siegfried felt that this was a little bit too lax. A farmer liked to solve their tasks the day they cropped up. This whole waiting business didn’t feel natural to the former rural lad.

“Tch, this ain’t gonna be fun,” Siegfried said. “I hate travelin’ in the sewers. There’s a bit where you gotta crawl for a good half hour...”

“You mensch are tall after all, Bro.”

“Hey, I’m shorter than average. Heh, you know, I’m jealous of your height, Karsten.”

Siegfried was indeed shorter than the average mensch, possibly thanks to his underfed upbringing. He had tried to eat as much as he could since he’d started his new career, but it had done little to balance the scales. Goldilocks had consoled him—or maybe this was directed more to himself—by saying that people continued to grow until they were twenty, but Siegfried hadn’t grown even a single finger’s span since last year. He had given up on ever being tall.

This was the end of his period of long bone growth, and so Siegfried had swept away any false hopes. Still he couldn’t help but feel that Karsten’s compact frame was more boon than bane.

“Squattin’ and crawlin’ just ain’t good.”

“What do you mean?”

“It makes it hard to judge the distance with your sword. It puts your head farther away from where you need to pool your strength into. If you swing wrong, you could end up cuttin’ your own leg. Makes it hard to fight guys like you, Karsten.”

Siegfried merely said what popped into his head. Karsten reached about up to Siegfried’s waist, and although he was of average height for a goblin, he was still short compared to most other races.

Since Karsten had chosen to become an adventurer who threw himself into battle, he had trained with his friends in the Fellowship of the Blade. During practice, he would sometimes bend his knees, lowering his height by another fist’s width, and this made it difficult for your regular sword fighter to hit him. Indeed, there were stories that some countries’ armies fielded goblin soldiers specifically to capitalize on their short stature by crawling under the line of clashing spear walls and slashing at the legs of the enemy vanguard.

“Eh, but there ain’t no point in worryin’ about what I don’t got. I’ll man up and do the crawl.”

As Siegfried walked away to burn the letter, muttering to himself the whole while, he didn’t know that the goblin behind him was shaking with so much joy it seemed like he had received a gift from heaven itself.

[Tips] The Rhinian alphabet only has twenty-nine letters, but many nobles write in an almost illegible style to make their mail seem more grand and important.