Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 9.1 - Chapter 2.4

She didn’t hesitate to unleash a flurry of full-power blows, mixing in spear-hand finger jabs and punches seemingly at random, most likely to shut down any opportunity on my part to react at all.

The dagger I kept at my waist was just something I’d lifted off an old foe not worth thinking about. It was a mass-crafted piece, but it had served me well. Still, I could hear it groaning as it took each of her heavy blows. The blade was starting to warp, throwing off its center of balance.

Dammit! I had piled on a bunch of add-ons for my One-Handed Swordsmanship, but the truth was that it wasn’t one of my strongest skills. I was starting to lose control of the situation under this hail of blows. Her assault was so persistent and focused that I wanted to scream and ask who had told her my weaknesses.

“Haaaah...”

“Crap!”

A half second of wondering what abilities would be safe to reveal here had allowed the mensch to make a big move. All of her hand strikes had led me to assume that she was strictly a fistfighter, but she was readying an almighty kick! One could kick with three times the power of a punch. I’d barely been able to block all of her blows so far; it would be disastrous to take on this kick head-on.

Moreover, with her focusing cry, her muscles suddenly bulged, her leather straps straining with the change. A buffing formula flowed through her body, causing her already mighty leg to swell to almost log-like proportions.

“YAAAAH!”

With a shout that would frighten off even birds of prey, she leaped into a full-body spinning kick. With her arms giving her extra momentum, her heel spun so quickly that even my Lightning Reflexes could only barely keep up.

The next thing I noticed was all the wind being forced out of my lungs.

She’d traced the circular arc of her kick at a speed that surpassed human cognition. I think she had been aiming for the left side of my stomach. I couldn’t be sure, though, because the kick was so damn fast that I didn’t actually register the hit—that, or because it had been so brutal that I had blacked out for the moment that it made contact.

It was nothing short of a miracle that my left arm had moved into position in time to soak the impact.

It was pure instinct that had caused me to drop my dagger, bring my hand in front of the intended point of contact, and to create a protective wall just in time. This instinctual guesswork was the only thing that had saved me from watching my legs grow ever farther away as the top of my body was blasted off.

I ignored the pain as I did a tailspin in midair. The intensity of our battle had left my ears useless, so I used Farsight to get a scope of my situation. If I kept sailing along this trajectory, I would receive a nice follow-up attack courtesy of the wall.

There was no way I could stick the landing unscathed. I might as well have been hit by a freight truck.

It pained me, but I needed to crack open my arsenal and bring out some help. I opened my lips ready to call out—those same lips that had received an alfish blessing.

“Lottie!”

“Okaaay!”

The moon was in the right phase; the wind wasn’t stagnant; optimal conditions to call on a certain sylphid.

Lottie’s wind allowed me to regain some control of my flight, and a gentle pocket of air brought my mad spinning to a graceful stop. I altered my course and propelled myself toward a ventilation window and freedom.

“Hmph! They’re so cruel to our Beloved One! How dare they!” Lottie said as she fluttered around me. I was carried down the street about a block away. At this distance, I could safely call myself extricated. This was far enough to be a completely different scene.

“Thank you, Lottie,” I said.

“It was easy-peasy! And I hate, hate them! They hurt you and they make the air all stinky gross!”

Lottie was cute as ever as she huffed and puffed, but the incredible work she’d done just now drove home that she was a powerful being. Alfar were nearer to gods than any base meat-thing, and today Lottie had arguably done more for me than any deity.

Even if I had survived the hit thanks to my Insulating Barrier, I couldn’t have done anything about the blowback. It had been a really hairy situation.

“How long has it been since my last brush with death?” I said to myself.

It had been a while since I had truly felt that my life was in danger. The last time had been when we had run out of tea in the cursed cedar’s ichor maze.

I let Lottie’s wind gracefully set me down and breathed a sigh of relief as I confirmed all my limbs were still attached. I was in one piece, but my left arm was looking pretty gnarly. I had tried to meet her kick with my elbow, as it was the least squishy part, and I’d also used my dagger as spaced armor, but the immense power of her kick had crushed the joint.

The impact had rippled through me. My shoulder was dislocated, and I was pretty sure every bone in my arm was broken. The wet sensation coursing over my fingers told me that it was most likely an open fracture.

I wasn’t surprised, considering the might of that kick. I was thankful that I had limited the damage to one nonessential limb, to be honest. If she had hit my chest, the impact would have obliterated my heart and my lungs.

“Ugh... When the adrenaline wears off, this is going to hurt like a bitch...”

Our trusted healer had furnished each of our crew with a bottle, to be used in the event any of us found ourselves in over our heads with a particularly tenacious enemy.

I yanked off the stopper with my teeth and scraped the exposed end upon a nearby wall. It sparked, then caught alight, releasing a plume of colored smoke. Kaya had worked some pigments together to dye the plume a dazzling red. We had decided as a clan that if any of us saw the signal, whoever had lit it either needed immediate support or had failed in their mission.

This had been passed along to our fellow adventurers; the others, who would be finishing up with their jobs soon enough, would most likely come to my aid.

Now then, how to use the time between now and then? I’d rigged up Schutzwolfe with a locator enchantment well ahead of time, and so I retrieved her from beneath the rubble and broken boxes back at the warehouse with a little space-time magic mischief. The area was thick with Lottie’s mana, so no one would notice my business here.

“How disappointing! Do you realize how cruel it is to turn down a woman’s invitation?”

Of course she hasn’t given up!

It sounded like she was behind me...but I twigged in a matter of moments to the trick—a simple Voice Transfer spell. She emerged from the shadows of a building in front of me.

I hadn’t written off this possibility, but what tenacity! And how could she teleport into such a tiny shadow?! Come on gods, nerf this woman, I beg You!

“Whose man do you think you’re looking at?”

Right when I had her at a more manageable midrange and was wondering how far I could get with one arm out of commission, I sensed two, no, three things hurtling overhead.

Margit had caught up with me, to my surprise. She threw herself from a nearby roof as she loosed a bolt from each of her eastern-style crossbows. Hoping to get the kill in, Margit had launched herself right at my assailant’s head.

“To think that someone could hide their presence from me!” the woman said.

“As if I would let anyone trying to poach from me see me coming!” Margit replied.

Three simultaneous deadly projectiles had evidently been a little too much for the mensch woman. She managed to twist her body to avoid the bolts, but she was forced to take on Margit’s daggered lunge with her hand.

The pair of them froze. Although her light weight took some of the oomph out of plunging attacks like this, her dagger—forged and maintained such that it could slit the throat of a full-grown wild boar—pierced the assassin’s hand. Her movements were limited, and she had no shadows to flee into now. Just as I was about to dash in and make use of this opening, a voice that only I could hear tickled my earlobe and made me stop.

“Thanks, Lottie,” I said.

“Here it comes!” she replied.

As the two women grappled, I stepped back and swung Schutzwolfe overhead. An ear-piercing sound shook the air.

She was more than a block away and fully indoors, but the vierman had gotten a lucky fix on me through the warehouse’s window. The distance worked to their advantage—it had been nigh impossible to sense them readying their bow. But no matter how skilled the archer, no one could hope to keep a sylphid from noticing an aberration in the currents of the air. As long as I was aware of when the arrow had been loosed, it would be trivial to knock it out of the air, no matter its speed. Any less would bring shame to the Skill IX name.

The arrow had broken the sound barrier, but I heard it clatter to the ground behind me as I cut it down. I could almost hear the wasted energy dispersing from its cooling frame.

Oof, but my hand is stinging... That arrow had some kick behind it. Get hit at the wrong angle and not even mystarille could stop that.

“What a pain...” Margit said. “What is your body even made of?”

With a shrill metallic rasping sound that a dagger should not have made against human flesh, Margit leaped away from the assassin and did a half rotation around my neck. As she settled into her usual spot with a lot more intensity than usual, she clucked her tongue in displeasure. Not only was she disappointed in her sneak attack, her beloved dagger from Konigstuhl had suffered quite the wear and tear. A pro sharpener’s TLC would be needed to bring it back to life.

I immediately hoofed it to avoid any more deadly arrow fire or unwanted company. This time, the night assassin in the evening gown didn’t pursue. However, I did hear her shouting.

“Tch! Lost your nerve, Goldilocks?! Your father would weep at your cowardice!”

“I survived your five-on-one! Come back when you can actually finish the job!”

Ignore her shouting, Erich! Such taunts weren’t genuine—it was a bid to slow the quarry’s pace. Even if she mocked all of my late ancestors, I needed to plug up my ears and keep moving my feet! Revenge would be mine, but if I let her control the situation now I would only be playing into her hand. I wouldn’t fight to a satisfactory level.

It would be Margit, me, and as much as I didn’t like it, probably a few Fellows, versus the rest of them. I was worn out, whereas all five of them were still kicking. If I responded to her heckling, we would be at a severe disadvantage. It irked me, but I needed to live to see another day!

“You saved me, Margit,” I said.

“I apologize for taking so long to find you,” she said. “Every opening had a trap waiting for me.”

“And our Fellows?”

“I ordered them to retreat to the rendezvous point. They understood after I told them that if the enemy made you order them to not get involved, then they wouldn’t even be able to buy time.”

It must have been hard for them to swallow, but it was the most expedient option. Putting aside that I was severely outnumbered, I hadn’t managed to take a single one of them down. They were deadly foes, pure and simple. I was really thankful for my partner’s cool head under pressure.

However, I wondered if our fight had gotten a little out of hand. I noticed that the ruckus had awoken some of the locals, and now adventurers were convening on my smoke signal. I prayed that our enemies would take this as their sign to retreat. Time was now on our side, and they had wanted to eliminate me alone—I doubted they would want to act with so many sets of eyes around.

Ugh, they really did a number on me... When Lady Maxine explicitly told me not to die, I’d thought it seemed like a flag, but to be attacked immediately upon walking through the door was way too quick a turnaround for my tastes. Dammit, Gray Head! You’ve got a gaping hole somewhere that almost made me buy the farm!

I didn’t want to hear anyone even try to say that it was dreadful luck that had so thoroughly ruined my day. Sure, I knew how foul a hand fate liked to deal me, loath as I was to admit it, but getting thrown into that pit of murderous vipers went beyond luck. I’d been set up.

“Are you okay, Erich?” Margit said. “Your left arm is in quite the state.”

“If I’m being honest, I’ve been trying to not look at it,” I replied. “Is it bad?”

“Oh... Well... Keeping things figurative, I would say it looks like a thoroughly abused toothpick.”

Thank you for the lovely mental image.

I’d screwed the pooch. Hiding your hand and knowing when to drip feed the right amount were different things. I could see Lady Agrippina laughing at me now. All the same, it wouldn’t have been good for me to pull out all the stops just because I was on the back foot. Looking at things in the long term, the enemy would have loved to see me show my whole hand. I couldn’t justify going in wands blazing.

Even if I eliminated one of them, as soon as I revealed my arsenal, I could tell that they would have come with me with all they had too. As soon as I had gotten serious, I bet they would have sent one out as a sacrificial pawn to set me up for the perfect counterattack from the rest of them. I wanted to avoid that if at all possible.

During my fight with that woman, I had the voice of a certain mystic blade in my ear screaming at me, wondering why I hadn’t drawn it and turned it upon such a worthy opponent.

The Craving Blade was a weapon that I only wanted to use when I knew I could kill every last witness. I had a wider circle of connections now. I had more than just Siegfried’s fragile mind to protect; the whole Fellowship was better off not freaking out over the black blade I kept at my side. I didn’t want it stirring up rumors.

Who knew what would happen? I felt that I would literally implode if someone labeled me as a fake swordsman because of my mystic blade. It wouldn’t be fun if I got a bunch of sword-hungry bandits coming to steal it either. Not to speak of the collectors of curios and intrigued magia who would beg me to sell it off to them. The most avid among them would most likely be the best equipped to part my head from my shoulders if I wouldn’t give the nod and take their money.

My safest option to maintain a healthy adventuring life was to only bust it out in the most desperate of situations.

And so, after this base-raiding mission, only I—the one who had helped steer the whole thing—had failed. But a surprise was waiting for us. When we returned to the warehouse, we found that our original targets had already been dispatched—most likely to prevent them from spilling their guts to us. I’d come face-to-face with some of Diablo’s deadliest assassins, but it’d take some powerful mind management to get me to say I’d come away from the experience with great results.

What a morning... I would have been sick in the head to even imagine that a goth-loli ninja would bust out of the blue baying for blood.

[Tips] The quickest method to draw on the boons or power of another force is to integrate it within yourself. Mages of the distant past would accessorize with the sources of their puissance, or experiment with altering their very bodies.

Magia of the Imperial College say that such methods are incomplete due to the extreme measures required and the difficulty in teaching such things. However heterodox it becomes, magical augmentation of the self is hardly an inferior method.

At around the same time as Erich’s deadly onslaught, Siegfried and his team were putting a neat bow on a job well done, completely unaware of their clan leader’s troubles.

“I guess that just about wraps things up,” Siegfried said.

In preparation for the conditions of the day’s job, the Fellows had all donned miasma-warding face coverings. Siegfried scanned the room, confirming that despite their suspicious appearances the only people still standing were allies, before cleaning his blade.

“Gerrit, how’s things over there?”

“All cleaned up!” came the reply. “It was an easy job, Big Bro Dee!”

“Gah, call me Siegfried!”

The teasing that had begun last night still hadn’t run its course. Siegfried shook his fist at Gerrit—who also went by a different name, but this detail was apparently lost on everyone—but the former spy ducked back out of the door and out of sight.

This banter was typical of boys their age, but the scene was anything but. Blood spattered every available surface, and all around lay heads, heads, heads—all parted from the shoulders of Diablo’s minions, each face frozen in an expression of shock, agony, and confusion.

The operation had been swift. Potions designed to suppress their foes had been pitched through every window within range. The crooks had still been fast asleep, snoring through their last breaths. It had been a breeze for the Fellowship to mop up.

If Erich had been here, he would probably have thought that the GM had decided it was too much effort to bother rolling for initiative.

“But man,” Siegfried went on, “who’da thought they’d even look the part. Did Diablo’s recruiters just turn you away if your mug didn’t meet some kind of baseline level of gnarliness?”

Even when the fallen were scoundrels to the last, it was a Fellowship policy to treat their heads with care. The tear gas potions had left them in quite the pathetic state, but some still had enough guts to grab the daggers at their pillows and attempt a counterattack. Siegfried picked up one such head and carefully wrapped it up.

“Hey, Big Bro Dee? Basement was empty,” Etan said. “I think we got them all.”

“You too, Etan?! Call me Siegfried, or so help me gods, I’ll...”

The hero-hopeful had personally taken five heads. The building had three floors—technically two, as the first floor’s ceiling had been removed to open up more storage space. Whether the owner had signed off on such alterations was an open question. Siegfried had dispatched the three sleeping up on the top floor and two idiots that had fallen asleep by the door instead of keeping watch. Etan, Gerrit, and the other Fellows had all taken one kill each. Counting up the heads, the number had matched their intel.

It was a peaceful end to the mission. No ugly surprises in the form of unaccounted-for heads had turned up, and with no one they were obliged to capture alive, there was little left to do at this juncture.

“Curse the lot of them... Don’t they know how important the name is to me? Whatever, I’ll give ’em a good lecture later,” Siegfried muttered. He raised his voice: “Hey, you lot, open those windows! We gotta get some fresh air in here. Keep your face masks on, got it?”

The base had been successfully won, but they still had some investigating to do. Boots tracking through the blood, Siegfried picked through the battle-ravaged building.

On the first floor—on second glance, Siegfried thought that the renovations had most definitely taken place without permission—were boxes of Kykeon, as well as an assembled aerosolizer. In other words, nothing out of the ordinary. However, he was aware how close they had been to imminent crisis. The magic tool looked ready to fire anytime; he imagined that Diablo had intended to use it in a matter of days.

“Hm? This their breakfast or something?” Siegfried said. Lit by the morning glow through the open window, he was checking a desk to see if anyone had mistakenly left important documents or notes when he saw something odd. “Well, they ain’t being fed very well. Not much of their blood money’s going into decent grub, it seems.”

It wasn’t clear if it was their breakfast or leftovers from last night, but pieces of cheap-looking black bread were lined up on the desk. It was of appalling quality. The sad-looking lumps were more rye than decent wheat and tough enough to break your teeth. The person who’d baked them must have thrown them all into a communal oven without much thought. They should have just given their flour to an actual baker; they might have ended up with something edible. Unfortunately poverty didn’t afford them such luxuries. Most who merely scraped by used the communal oven every few days to cook something to eat.

“Hold on... This ain’t merely badly baked, it looks like diseased wheat...”

With the dawn sun illuminating the bread, Siegfried furrowed his brow at what he noticed.

“Um, Bro? What’s ‘diseased wheat’?”

“Huh? Never heard of it, Gerrit?”

“Sorry, I grew up in a town, not the countryside... Well, it was pretty rural compared to Marsheim, to be honest.”

Gerrit awkwardly scratched his head as he replied.

“Diseased wheat is pretty much exactly that,” Siegfried said as he pointed at the dry bread. “The ears of wheat turn black and decay. Every farmer knows you shouldn’t eat wheat like that.”

“Wait... Plants get sick too?” Gerrit said.

“Well, yeah? Everythin’ livin’ can get sick. Whenever we got some diseased wheat, the whole canton would get into a fuss wonderin’ who the Harvest Goddess was punishing.”

Bread made with diseased wheat would end up looking more black than usual, and this effect was compounded when rye was mixed in. In the case of the pieces on the table, the flour must have been poorly milled because it looked visibly lumpy. The farmer-turned-rookie-instructor ripped off a chunk of bread to reveal, as expected, black bits of chaff.

“Oh! We had ’em once too, Bro,” Etan chipped in. “Family who caused it was forced to the other side of the moat. Wasn’t pretty.”

“The other side of the moat...? Oh, you mean they were kicked out of town?”

“Well, not permanently. They weren’t allowed to come to the village assembly and stuff.”

Another former farm lad, Etan clearly had experience with what Siegfried dubbed “diseased wheat,” even if the nomenclature differed from region to region. They lived in an age where information didn’t spread so quickly, and this went double for inauspicious concepts. Fortunately, the description had been enough to put Etan on the same page.

It was believed that a family produced diseased wheat because their faith in the Harvest Goddess was lacking. In most cantons, the punishment for this was social ostracism.

This wasn’t done completely without reason. The blight could easily spread to wheat crops planted elsewhere. As soon as it was spotted, a whole canton would get up in arms at having spotted a veritable hornets’ nest in their midst. The local priest of the Harvest Goddess would be enraged, as would the rest of the community—any diseased wheat could not be used as part of the annual land tax.

Negative effects weren’t all directly felt either. Rumors would spread in nearby cantons that diseased wheat was rife in that canton. Merchants wouldn’t want to take on poor stock, so they would start to avoid cantons that came up too often in the rumor mill.

“But man, eatin’ this stuff because there’s nothing else to chow on?” Siegfried said. “They must’ve been damn desperate.”

Bread made with diseased wheat wouldn’t kill you after a few mouthfuls, so it was no surprise for people with no other option to resort to it. Unfortunately, even the high heats from cooking weren’t enough to purge the bread of toxins; the more you put away, the more you risked your limbs wasting to sticks and your brain rotting down to curds. Still, hunger and common sense rarely got on long. Some pregnant women, given desperate enough conditions, would keep eating the stuff knowing full well it would make them miscarry.

“Were they really that desperate? Really?” Etan said.

The audhumbla had taken a step back from the desk, evidently paranoid that the bread was ill-omened. It was no surprise, really. This stuff wouldn’t stop at ruining a single plot of land—in the worst-case scenario, the church would be called in to set a whole field ablaze to rid the land of it.

The farmers-turned-adventurers realized that although it wouldn’t be much of a surprise for a poor city dweller to buy tainted bread without knowing, it was a bit odd for members of a growing drug empire to willingly consume it.

“They’re not just fringe dealers either,” Etan said. “They’re close to the center of the organization, so I doubt they would be hurtin’ for money.”

“They save money by only givin’ the fringe dealers the bare minimum white bread they need,” replied Siegfried.

Knowledge had spread about the dangers of diseased wheat, and now the outbreaks only really occurred in the most rural of farming villages, or where the local gods and the Rhinian pantheon engaged in a divine tug of war that the regular person couldn’t see. Most of these communities were run by bullheaded leaders whose talents weren’t all that respected by their constituencies.

Siegfried’s and Etan’s hometowns were cut from savvier cloth. The farmers understood that diseased wheat was to be burned immediately and the gap in the crop was to be filled by mixing together various grains. Even if winter was going to be tough, they would under no circumstances dare to eat it. It went without saying that Marsheim had at least as little interest in seeing blighted goods brought within its walls.

“Hey, Bro? I found some bags of wheat in the basement along with the boxes of Kykeon!”

While Siegfried and Etan were pondering the lumpy pieces of bread, Gerrit had investigated the basement and had just returned to report his findings. After his second-in-command had mentioned the communal oven, he thought that perhaps some flour was still remaining unused. After a quick search, he had found bags stuffed with blackened wheat.

“No way... It’s all diseased wheat,” Siegfried muttered, a frown visible.

“Seriously?! Gross!” Etan said. He joined the middle finger and thumb of his right hand to form a circle before rotating it in the air before him—a cleansing act practiced by the cult of the Harvest Goddess.

“There’s so much of it,” Gerrit said. “Were they making it here...?”

“Nah, I don’t think so,” Siegfried said as Gerrit trailed off. “No pestles. You wouldn’t be able to cook up a single potion here, let alone something like Kykeon.”

Siegfried had helped maintain and organize Kaya’s workshop countless times by now. He had a general idea of what it took to concoct potions. Kaya kept her workshop spotless; this room was positively filthy. Kaya had told Siegfried that her cleanliness didn’t just come from a desire to have a tidy place to work with. On a practical level, if any stray dust contaminated the reagents, the quality of her concoctions would suffer.

Along with the dirt and grime, these thugs had no ventilation worth mentioning, nor a single cauldron to their name. All that they had were empty bottles of booze littering the floor. It was almost certain that nothing was actually synthesized here.

“Hey... Hold on,” Siegfried said as he picked up one of the stray bottles at his feet. “This liquor’s fancy stuff.”

He pondered for a moment: What would idiots who had spent all their money on expensive alcohol—and possibly some late-night company—do to make sure they had something to eat?

As the image of Siegfried’s deadbeat dad flittered in his mind’s eye, he came up with a theory.

They must have stolen this wheat from somewhere—most likely from their own allies in Diablo in order to fill the holes in their bellies. And why would their allies have so much of this diseased wheat? Siegfried wondered if he had, perhaps, got hold of a loose thread that could be followed all the way back to the origin of Kykeon...

“Hey, someone fetch Kaya,” he said. “Right now.”

“Got it.”

Good and bad news wound themselves together in the hero-hopeful’s mind while he waited for his Fellows to fetch their herbalist. Now that the base had been subdued, they didn’t need to worry about Kaya getting caught in the cross fire.

Siegfried was sure that this horrid discovery would help them finally draw the Kykeon affair to a close.

[Tips] Despite the narrow implications of the name, wheat blight threatens many of the Empire’s staple cereal crops. It is detested as a stain upon the Harvest Goddess’s golden garb.

It won’t kill you if you eat it, but consuming it will cause intense pain. It is feared by farmers all across the land. However, the threat of famine can push anyone to far worse depths. Those in the know recognize they are only deferring their agony by surrendering to their stomachs, while those who don’t end up feasting upon the stuff in moments of unwitting desperation.

The female assassin visualized the day’s events as a series of maneuvers on an ehrengarde board, trying to unravel precisely where everything had come so entirely off the rails.

She had made the right choice at each stage. She was sure of that. She and all her compatriots had all lived to see another day.

The assassin hadn’t had any other choice in the Kykeon affair but to lend her aid, and everything she had done had been in consideration of its success. She and her team had done everything in their power.

This much was no different from how they had conducted business for the past twenty years.

And yet, despite their track record, it felt as if the situation just would not improve. Their present situation was a perfect microcosm of the larger issue.

Troublesome little pieces remained in annoying locations; worrying larger pieces came to strike at their heart again and again. Her opponent’s upper hand was still far from certain; their prince still sat unpromoted to an emperor, but the state of the board spoke volumes: things were awfully out of their favor.

Yet she had to acknowledge that she was only a piece on the board, not a player.

Even if the assassin had been told that it was her own bad move that had created this situation, she wasn’t the one at the top making the decisions. She didn’t even know who to air out her complaints to. If she grumbled to the God of Cycles, arbiter of fate, He would probably ignore her, most likely because such matters were beneath Him.

The gods weren’t cruel, but They weren’t necessarily kind either. They merely passed judgment on your fate after death based upon Their own personal calculations in line with Their teachings. No mere mortal trapped in linear time could reckon with the cosmic truth in earnest.

“Bea... A’e you o’ay?” the hlessi asked her leader.

“I’m quite fine, Lepsia. I’m made of sterner stuff.”

Back in the warehouse, after the assassins’ leader had decided to fall back, Lepsia expressed her concern despite her own wounds. Lepsia was the only one left that called her “Bea.” Maybe it was this amity that still let her put on a confident face and laugh at adversity.

The leader of the elite assassins took off her glove and examined the wound on her hand. Poison from Margit’s attack had seeped inside, yes, but this was easily metabolized. She poured some more mana into the permanent formula that buffed her physical prowess. As she flexed her muscles to allow the mana to flow through her, the bleeding eventually stopped.

This woman usually kept her hands hidden, but the removal of her glove revealed a trailing, complex magic circle in the pattern of a lily of the valley—a plant as deadly as it was medically valuable. These properties helped stimulate her own body’s healing factor. Although Margit’s blade had cut through her hand up to the middle joint of her ring finger, it wouldn’t take more than half a day for the bone to mend. It had helped that it had been a clean cut.

“See that?” she said to Lepsia.

“P’ease don’ push you’se’f,” the hlessi responded in a quiet voice.

The leader flashed another grin at Lepsia and said that she should worry about her own injuries. After all, hlessi weren’t exactly sturdy.

She was their leader, and her confidence flowed out from that fact. She was their rock; the only support these four vagabonds had. She couldn’t ever dare to voice any meaningful worry or concern.

“But this wasn’t the most ideal of outcomes. We should have finished him off,” the group’s leader said. She took off her other glove and touched her cheek before muttering an incantation.

“Little Hans did go, to a world he did not know... He walked for seven years, and slept for seven too... Even passing seven people, he was ignored as he passed through...”

The words were lifted from a pastoral nursery rhyme, but this aided in its power. The more people knew the words from the incantation, the easier it would be for the world to accept the changes in reality. If a magus were here, they would shake their head at such an utterly vulgar method.

After she finished reciting the words, the tattoos snaking across her body disappeared; the attention-grabbing makeup fell from her face. Her skin was transformed, perfectly concealing her arcane tattoos. It was as if a different woman stood in the same clothes. Although the bags under her eyes had always been visible, the lack of any adornments upon her face made them stand out, giving her a fleeting kind of beauty. Whereas before she looked as if she were ready to kill, now it looked like she might pass away at any moment.

“But this isn’t good,” she muttered. “If we don’t kill Goldilocks Erich, this mud boat will sink ahead of schedule...”

She flicked the straps off her boots and slipped out of them. The whole outfit was so complicated that it almost required outside help to put on, but she undid it all without complaint as she walked. With each step, each piece landed on the floor behind her. Eventually, her slender body was only covered by a black leotard spun from the whiskers of a stamping drake.

“What do, Sheikh?” said the vierman, Shahrnaz. “I not know much, but...it best to kill him, no?”

“You’re quite right, Shahrnaz,” the leader replied. “Our client failed to restrain those fools. Then they had to get picky about which piece to infect with their poison. That was why we needed to settle the score today, but...”

Shahrnaz picked up the trailing clothes and pushed them into a knapsack. In return, she handed her leader an old, simple flax cloak. It was decorated with a yellow sash—only worn by those who sold personal services. In less euphemistic terms, it was the uniform of a sex worker. With this, the disguise was complete. With the hood up, not even those who knew her would recognize her now. Many women would refuse to wear such a thing, even if it meant fleeing for their lives, but it was the perfect way for an adventurer to lose herself in the crowd.

“I expected so much from those local lords,” she went on, “but I didn’t think that those cloaked fools would run about so wildly as this...”

“But Sheikh, they born here, no? This state...unexpected,” the vierman said.

“Yes, it’s as you say. But you all are blessed with logic. Whereas these people have an obsession with place. Their reasoning runs at strange angles to our own. Some folk would light a furnace to burn a hair.”

“Main is quite surprised too,” the huntsman arachne added. “Leader, surely vah was only meant to be the opening gambit of ve’s negotiations?”

Main was making her own preparations to depart from the warehouse. To this question, the leader could only pull a wry grin that said, Yes, that was how it should have gone.

In truth, the whole Kykeon production and distribution engine was the business of a separate partner to their client. Originally, they had only intended to produce Elefsina’s Eye; Kykeon wasn’t even a glimmer of an idea at that point. The plan had been to use this new drug to rein in the Baldur Clan—who leaned in Margrave Marsheim’s favor—and to make money by selling it to various satellite states. That had been their whole opening gambit.

However, the plan had gotten out of hand. The bigger it grew, the more people voiced their own ideas, and with the addition of an excessively talented individual, the strings that held the plot together stretched so wide and thin that the one who had incited the whole affair couldn’t see the entire picture anymore.

They had created a drug that brought an immediate, inescapable ecstasy, and it had been spread around Ende Erde with no inhibition. A sane person would never concoct something like this, nor share the methods of its dissemination. And even if they had managed to, only those with the basest of villainous hearts would dare to put it into action.

“They should never have resorted to pushing Kykeon so early on,” the leader said. “No, it should never have been made at all. All they have done is set in motion a wheel of revenge that will spin on into eternity.”

By merely bringing it into existence, it had caused those who opposed it to decide that a swift death was the only solution—the only option was to kill or be killed. If you looked upon this affair with a wider lens, it seemed almost farcical. It was like watching a foolish dog or cat snapping at their own tail at the corner of their vision. Yet a human could only reckon with so much at once. The more they tried to expand their reach, the more people got involved, and the more complicated the affair became.

There would always be those who rallied under the same leader or stood on the same side—with the local lords, for example—but had different destinations in mind. Even if they dreamed of the same victory, some could never keep their intentions even for the next few years to come from running at cross-purposes. Some dreamed of a victory that would come slower, in a century or so.

“What led us here, I wonder...” the leader murmured to herself.

“Huh?” Primanne said. “Didn’k we wank *tik* ko gek revenge *tik* for Alberk?”

The leader nodded. “Indeed... Albert... Yes, this debt traces back to him in the end, doesn’t it?”

Albert had been the group’s youngest and most recent recruit. He’d been killed in action the year before. With him gone, Main was once more the sole newcomer to the group. The One Cup Clan had lost much with his death. His absence still felt like an open wound. They would get their revenge. That was how it had always been—there would be no clan without solidarity in retribution.

“If we go back far enough, it was my own survival that put us here...” the leader muttered.

If a follower lost an arm, she would make the enemy atone by taking four. If one of her allies were killed, then slaughter was the only reasonable response. She’d sworn as much long ago, when there was still more than one person left in the world to call her “Bea.” She’d made that oath to a band that no one but her remembered now.

She had once been of a renowned household, but all throughout her childhood, she had never once been praised for her talents—or at least, so it seemed through her own lens toward the world. Driven by a need to live strictly on her terms, she ran away from home, taught herself magic, then made steps toward becoming an adventurer of renown. She was hardly the first to do it.

“Albert, Gaetan, Chantal,” she went on. “All of them lost, all on the same job—that never happened before. One year, and three of us dead... Something is slipping.”

“Y-Yeah... We paid ’em back for *tik* Gaekan and Chankal, but *tik* we never gok Alberk back...”

She’d fled her home for simple enough reasons. She wanted better for herself than the entrapped life she had known was commonplace for women of her status all over. She would sooner die than marry a man two summers her senior and have the meaning of their life end there. She wanted to become an adventurer and prove her worth to the world itself.

The dream didn’t last; it was brought crashing down by the most minuscule of complications. With it came the end of everything she had created: budding camaraderie, strengthening trust, and a love that had disguised itself as a growing sense of self.

She’d lost everything to a simple reconnaissance mission.

“Looking back on it, we lost Patrice to that job too, in the long run. You remember him, don’t you, Lepsia? You were rather fond of him.”

“I re’em’er,” the hlessi replied. “He was a ’ood ’erson.”

The trauma of each and every job she had taken on with the One Cup Clan had been burned into her memory, but it was this first job, the one that had ended and begun everything, that outclassed them all.

It had been a simple monster hunt. Young adventurers as they were, they had laughed it up at the time; how foolish the magistrate was to hire four parties to chase down a few violent animals!

But the job had turned out nothing like they had been told to expect. They had reached the cave expecting a family of bears, but instead they found a pregnant lesser drake. The magistrate had been no paranoid fool anxious over a few hungry beasts; he had sent out these adventurers as a litmus test with no expectation that they would return alive.

Adventurers were cheap and disposable pawns. There was no shortage of replacements waiting to leap into action. Not only that, they didn’t even need to report back. No news merely told the magistrate that they had perished, and this was all he really wanted to know. The whole point of the expedition was to furnish him with convincing evidence that the issue was serious enough to warrant aid from higher-class adventurers or knights. The magistrate had probably decided that their deaths were the clearest means to prove the drake’s imminent threat and would lead to the smoothest negotiations with the nobles in charge.

In short, he’d wanted all twenty of these rookies to perish, all to make his report that more convincing. If he’d managed that, it would have put him in a better position to get his way, furnishing him with all the evidence he needed to make the nobles further up the chain of command look like indolent fools.

“Then two years ago, we lost Carole and Cecile in Szczecin,” the leader continued, reflecting on the past years of the group.

“I not yet joined then,” Shahrnaz said. “Heard they strong.”

“That they were. They were two floresiensis sisters. They moved so in time with one another—truly singular talents. People couldn’t tell them apart when they fell into their rhythm.”

They hadn’t all died in that lesser drake’s den, of course. Of the twenty adventurers, a mere four survived. They had lost their allies and their armor, and barely crawled their way from out of the cave. They were certain that even if they limped back home, the magistrate would have taken measures to ensure that no one knew the truth behind the tragedy that had befallen them.

As the survivors shared one measly cup of gruel, they made a promise. Revenge would be theirs. Those who had thrown them to the wolves would suffer, all to be certain that they would join their fellows in the next world.

“Patrick, Eckart, Josette, Charles...”

As she named their fallen and counted them with her fingers, all that remained of them was a stinging loneliness and the memories of the moment she had avenged each of them. The One Cup Clan had far outgrown the original twenty unfortunate adventurers. At their peak, they had numbered sixty. And yet, only the five here remained.

Had they chosen the wrong path in life?

The clan was a home for these pitiful souls that had been abandoned by everyone they had known, who had been deemed useless and cast aside to the crevasse overlooking death. The One Cup Clan only asked one thing of its members in return.

It was only natural to want to shed blood for fallen comrades. It was easy to tell someone to forget the past, but how could anyone when it still so clearly defined their present? Was it truly human to sit in silence as you lost those precious to you?

They could not, would not endure the mockery of the more-content-than-thou. Vengeance was something that only those who had lost, who had been stolen from, could understand. Digging two graves on a mission of vengeance was amateur hour.

Even though only one member from the original twenty was still alive to remember the oath they’d shared, she would not allow anyone to deny their truth.

How could these poor adventurers sit in silence after their fellows had been killed, treated as nothing more than a disposable rag or toothpick, heartlessly tallied up as collateral damage?

She had decided that those who’d wronged her own would be brought to a just end, but here she found herself wondering if such a path should have led her here.

She was certain that they hadn’t made a mistake. Every one of the clan had hoped as much. They had laughed—If I die, then at least kill the one who killed me.

Even if this path they walked down led to more of their number being lost in the future, they would continue as they always had. No matter what sort of terrible job they had to undertake to achieve their goals, they would make sure that in the end the scales were balanced.

“A question, Main,” the leader said. “Was there any fault in my leadership?”

“Tum did all that was possible, leader,” Main replied. “Tum were the first to catch on that the plan was in shambles. Tum warned ve of the dangers abound. Main also believes that although vah was quite the independent move, choosing to eliminate Goldilocks Erich was the most appropriate decision. ’Vwas the optimal choice, leader.”

The decision had been made as a group after pooling all their intel. If Main said so, then their leader had nothing more to add.

They had all entered into this willingly. None of them believed that they would receive a positive judgment from the gods at the ends of their tales, but they did believe that the gods viewed the whole scope of their lives. They merely wished to bring about their own justice, so that they could settle their own scores in the world of the living.

That was why they couldn’t tell themselves that they weren’t wrong this time, why they hadn’t failed. She tried to tell herself this, but doubt still bubbled underneath.

“You’re quite right,” the leader said. “This was the best option for us. It was preferable to sitting around and doing nothing.”

The names of the lost kept coming to her. As they did, terrible theories surfaced and clouded her mind: Was it a mistake to seek revenge for Albert? Was it a mistake to take responsibility for the fates of these four who stand with me now? Was it a mistake to have hunted down the magistrate for my fallen fellows back then? If death had come for me instead...would so much tragedy have been avoided?

She didn’t want to entertain the possibility that any of these could be true. If her entire life since that fateful day had been a mistake, then by the gods, was there anyone out there who could give her a decent answer as to what she should have done with all that anger and despair?

“B-Bea... Ca’m dow’... You’re ’lee’ing...”

“Hm? Oh, right... Sorry, Lepsia. I must have tensed up without noticing.”

She smiled at Lepsia, nonchalantly adding that it wouldn’t be good to dirty her disguise. She cast a quick Clean spell so that the room no longer bore any traces of their presence. One more useful bit of tradecraft, learned purely out of necessity.

As the assassin stepped out of the disposable hideout—one of many—she realized something.

“That’s right... I told myself that I would ask Goldilocks a question if he managed to survive my first attack...”

Goldilocks had gotten involved in this crisis more by chance than anything else. She wanted to ask him how it felt becoming so entangled in this grand web of killing.

As he had fled, she had wanted to tease him more—to say that choosing to stand your ground was more effort than it looked like—but she had gotten a bit carried away, it seemed.

The assassin smiled, thinking that she would get her answer the next time they met before disappearing into the shadows of a nearby alleyway.

[Tips] Humans are creatures driven more by sentiment than reason. At the same time, they are pitiful creatures that cannot live without their capacity for thought without passion.

It was an odd feeling to have secured such a splendid overall result but not have actually changed the situation for the better.

I wasn’t being cynical or anything. Our operation involved a huge roster of adventurers, and yet of all the people assembled in this one room today, I was the only one who had sustained a major injury, and we hadn’t even managed to raid our base. I wanted to reiterate—this wasn’t coming out of my bitterness that our victory on paper didn’t feel as good as it should!

“Is that everything in your reports?” said Lady Maxine.

On the evening of our citywide raid, the heads of the participating clans gathered in the reception room of the Adventurer’s Association. We were here instead of that plush room in the Golden Mane because the details of our meeting no longer required conditions of absolute secrecy. In fact, Lady Maxine wanted to make something of an open conspiracy about the matter now that we’d made our move. Although she wasn’t trying to rake the nobles of Ende Erde over the coals, she wouldn’t mind if a few rumors reached designated ears, that perhaps the nobles should pull up their bootstraps a bit or perhaps they should feel a little bit embarrassed for letting some lowly adventurers decide the future of the city.

It bore repeating that Marsheim was chock-full of cliques and factions. From info leakers to sleeper agents, the Association had all manner of holes. Even if we said not a single word about our operation outside of these walls, inevitably the details would find their way to relevant ears. This would be further expedited by the innate human urge for gossip. Sooner or later, the news would reach everyone it needed to.

Our manager was particularly talented in this area. Timings were calculated to a tee, pressure was applied, complaints weren’t permitted; the message was always delivered loud and clear.

“Well, not a bad result,” she went on after everyone nodded their assent. “Consider your alcohol expenses for tonight paid by the Association. You did a good job. I might even consider gifting honorary promotions to those adventurers who perished in action.”

Our report for Lady Maxine had skewed generally positive. Several clans had lost a few members in battle—mostly subcontractors in the Heilbronn Familie or the Baldur Clan—but we’d just about met our goals.

Each and every base had been crushed; important pieces had been killed or captured. The ones left alive were probably in very good care right now, having a nice little conversation about their career choices. This little job was being dealt with directly by Lady Maxine—no outsourcing to the Baldur Clan this time—and I expected that her hired mages had given our crooks a really warm welcome.

“While it is well within your remit as adventurers to make merry with a well-earned drink or twelve after a successful job, I fear we can’t unstopper the kegs and raise our glasses quite yet. Goldilocks?” Lady Maxine looked over at me.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

I stood up, but with my left arm in a sling, I probably painted a pathetic picture as I struggled to my feet. Kaya had done a bit of emergency work on it, but she was no surgeon. She’d apologized in the moment that she wasn’t the best at setting bones. Not only that, she had said that the force of the blow might have resulted in some nerve damage. For the sake of not causing any further harm, she’d refused to employ any anesthetics while my arm was still on the mend. In short: even now, it hurt like a motherfucker.

“Hmm... Would you prefer to smoke?” Lady Maxine inquired, looking at my arm. “I can make an exception for today.”

“I appreciate the kind offer, Madam Manager,” I said, “but not while I’m convalescing. Doctor’s orders.”

“Right. You may remain seated, if that is preferable.”

Lady Maxine had evidently seen the pain creasing my forehead and had made this kind exception on my behalf. As much work as it had taken to put me in a state that required no further fussing over, I still wished that some benevolent force would drop by and leave me with some anachronistically strong painkillers.

I hadn’t drawn Kaya’s righteous ire this time—she was a professional, never bringing personal feelings into the matter when it came to healing work—but she told me that apparently if you dulled the pain when you were speeding up a fractured bone’s recovery, it would worsen the prognosis. Pain was your body’s way of putting up a red flag. When people willingly ignored these pain signals, they often ended up overextending themselves. This went double for constant, aching, unsuppressable pain. I doubt even the most twisted of masochists could have put up with the lingering agonies of having the snot beaten out of you in a five-on-one matchup.

My situation had been so bad that it would’ve been pointless to even ask Kaya how many places my arm was broken in—I had a nice cocktail of open and comminuted fractures—and she had managed to get my mess of an arm ready to be fixed up in a matter of days. I was well aware that I was in no position to complain.

“One shouldn’t ignore the requests of their doctor,” Lady Maxine went on. “I ignore my father and that brother of mine if the situation calls for it, but never my physician. You won’t understand until you’re older, I imagine.”

“A doctor, huh,” chimed Miss Laurentius. “Can’t say I’ve had the misfortune of knowing one!”

She was plainly in good spirits. Apparently she’d found her first worthy opponent in a bit on the day of the raid; her battle-junkie blood was still up from the fray.

Despite their skills, the crook that she had bested hadn’t been on Lady Maxine’s hit list, and so there had been no extra payment in it for her. It hadn’t dulled her mood in the slightest—she had simply said she was happy to enjoy a good drink with the head later. I was happy for her, but sharing a drink with one’s grisly battle trophy was way out of the question for my mensch tastes.

“I ain’t so much as caught a cold,” Stefano said with a nod.

“Indeed... I hadn’t paid it much thought before, but I haven’t had any dealings with healers in that capacity either,” Mister Fidelio added.

I didn’t want to come off as rude, but I wasn’t surprised by Stefano’s comment at all. He was already a real brick wall of a dude, but here he was, his face looking freshly stitched up all over. At a glance, I figured his grim new mug had raised his gangster cred by a good fifty percent. I figured a guy like that didn’t need to worry so much about his health; your average pathogen would take one look at the guy and flee the premises before risking a tussle with his immune system.

Then there was Mister Fidelio, who had returned without so much as a single stain on his shirt, let alone a physical injury. He didn’t need to resort to Stefano’s methods of immunity through deterrence; I think he could literally punch the malady out of himself if he wanted. If he ever died in battle, then that would be a veritable sign of the end times.

The two of them were textbook heavies. In the raid, Stefano’s larger operation had meant that a few of his people had suffered injuries, but Mister Fidelio’s party had such an easy job of it that he almost felt bad for being paid for his work. Apparently when they had heard the saint coming, the crooks had practically flung their bodies to the ground as they prostrated themselves in surrender.

They were right to, in my humble opinion. Only the greenest newcomers to Marsheim wouldn’t know about Fidelio’s legendary night of righteous justice. The deeper you waded into the city’s underbelly the more intense your fear for the man. Fighting with him would burn you down to your component atoms; choosing surrender and begging for mercy left you a better chance at survival than any pathetic counteroffensive you could muster.

The problem for our poor villains was that once they were targeted, fighting Fidelio’s party was inevitable. The other three members of Mister Fidelio’s party had most likely caused similar scenes. It really reaffirmed to me what a deadly weapon fame could be.

“If one started talking nonsense to me...about an apple or day or some such...I would shut them up with a little cloud of pipe smoke...” Nanna added.

The Baldur Clan and their leader had completed their jobs with little issue as well. The irony of the situation was that she was manufacturing potential patients with all the suspicious concoctions she was cooking up. In all honesty, if she dared proclaim that she was a doctor, I’d be the first to shout out my objection.

“I see that although many of you have little need of a doctor, in the Empire we say that you should always have two doctors at hand,” Lady Maxine. “There’s an old expression: Just because the swallows have arrived doesn’t mean that summer has come with them.”

“A proverb, is it?” Nanna said. “Well, if you wish to hear some...interesting anecdotes...then I have plenty...”

Nanna’s interjection lay on the far side of rude, but Lady Maxine was a dab hand at dealing with rootless rogues and ignored the comment. I sensed a similar sense of control that I felt from those GMs who, while they enjoyed adding depth to a story, would never let pointless chatter derail it.

“Nobles and other Associations are rigid things that will not budge with limited evidence,” Lady Maxine said, returning the conversation to the matter at hand. “However, they will be more willing to talk with more evidence to the cause.”

In our manager’s words, the raid had brought a temporary halt to the dissemination of Kykeon, but it would also lay key groundwork in the information war behind the scenes that was to follow.

Generally speaking, no matter where in the Trialist Empire of Rhine you found yourself, you would see that it was well-managed with civilized folk. Unfortunately this love for law and order left it lacking in flexibility.

For those who found themselves on the lower end of the pecking order, there was nothing so detestable as paperwork. As infuriating as it might have been, it served to protect you. You wouldn’t find yourself with your head flying from your shoulders thanks to shoddy evidence or hearsay—well, apart from when you became the object of an abuse of power, where someone important chose to prioritize their own convenience.

On the flip side, this meant that if you didn’t have watertight proof or multiple pieces of evidence that didn’t contradict one another, it was difficult to bring your claim to those in power. Not only that, no matter how much you could plead, the Adventurer’s Association refused to show its register to any of the adventurers in its employ.

“Well, enough of that,” said Lady Maxine. “I fear that you all almost did too well.”

In a twist of fate, the raid had simply been too smooth and successful. As the one who brought everyone together, I felt responsibility before any pride.

“Oh? You’re dissatisfied with our great efforts?” Miss Laurentius said with a huff. Lady Maxine waved at her to calm down.

There wasn’t any issue with the raid itself. It was what came after.

Unlike a literal fight to the death, in the battles waged between organizations, it was sometimes a problem if you were winning too much. Lady Maxine would have preferred having the jigsaw pieces laid before her over a slightly longer timeline than this. It was a little bit of a problem to have them all dumped into her lap at once.

There were three pieces of information that she wanted. First: where Kykeon was being made. Second: an estimation of Diablo’s military might. Third: any intel on the mastermind behind all this.

This was the general order of preference too. Intel on the one pulling the strings was lowest in priority because it was probably some local lord somewhere whose name would come to light after they were dispatched. For anyone related to the margrave, the only good local lord was one who had swapped sides or died.

However, with so much intel in her hands, the situation did a one-eighty a bit too quickly. Even a lowly farmer’s son like me understood that.

Imagine you’re playing a boardgame. What would you do if you were losing horrendously compared to your opponent? If it were me, as soon as I realized that no amount of strategizing would lead me to victory, I would change my game plan to annoy the shit out of whoever was in the lead. And who knew—if I managed to make them screw up enough, it could even land me a miraculous turnaround. The other option would be to be an endless thorn in their side and sap every drop of satisfaction from their victory.

This was an illogical, human way of dealing with the pain of loss.

“Although we have stopped the spread of Kykeon, albeit temporarily, we were too extreme in our might,” said Lady Maxine. “Our enemy may resort to desperate measures.”

All of this theorizing applied particularly to the mastermind. During the raids, we had secured information, but it had been so sloppily hidden that name after name after name of involved parties popped up. Not only had we succeeded in securing information, but the more intel-focused folk among us—Mister Rotaru the Windreader and informant Schnee chiefly among them—had turned up a trove of data.

The GM had organized an easily winnable battle, but had accidentally left out way too much plunderable information, it seemed. If they were here right now, I’d shake them and tell them to stop deciding how much info to drip feed us based on dice rolls...

Jokes aside, even a single hint would allow our skilled informant to secure a ton of data. A single foothold was the first step on the road to the right answer.

Among the intel, it was unclear if there were innocent nobles drawn into the scheme in order to stir up discord, and so we needed to take it all with a grain of salt, but it was more than enough for us to get a picture of the shape of the enemy plot.

The enemy organization was made up of a wide variety of peoples—from extremists, even among the local lords, who thought poorly of the Empire, to immigrants from the Exilrat who remained ostracized by the Empire, to nobles who stood to gain from unrest in their own nation. Diablo was a multiheaded hydra, and that made them more of a pain to deal with.

It could be said that one of their flaws was that the more bloated an organization gets, the more any sense of unified order gets muddied.

Even in society, which functioned almost purely on personal interest, there were fools who forgot the fundamental need to make money. There were cases where even while a business was toppling, on the verge of bankruptcy, workers would quibble about pointless things, all the while ever delaying the decision of which buyer or supporter would save their business. I’d read so many such cases where the arguments dragged on for so long that the potential buyers all pulled out and the business fell into bankruptcy purely due to its own idiocy. It was enough to make you laugh.

Although Diablo had rallied together under the aim of toppling Margrave Marsheim’s power, any sense of cohesion was impossible to maintain with such a tenuous and fractious coalition. They all had their own personal motives, and the only singular thought they shared was “Yeah, let’s fight with the Empire!”

“At this point, the identity of those in Diablo is not important,” said Lady Maxine. “We can expect that they are most likely hard-liners of the local lords of Ende Erde. The only thing that matters right now is that they are an enemy to the Empire.”

What made the local lords difficult to deal with was that they were plentiful across Ende Erde and belonged to a vast number of different factions. There were the hard-liners that Lady Maxine mentioned, who wanted nothing but to stir up war with the Empire. Then there were the soft-liners who did nothing, simply waiting in the shadows for the right time to strike, until the day that the Empire finally withered away. The majority of the local lords found themselves in one of these two groups, but there were also a wide variety of smaller cadres; those who didn’t care about whatever happened when their ancestors and the Empire first clashed in the first days of the Rhinian incursion westward, or those who leaned toward peace, merely trying to live as best they could under the Empire’s rule. There were also the moderates who, while they didn’t outwardly cause antagonism, kept a keen eye on any concessions the margrave made or tried to engineer situations that would cause him to lose power, with the eventual aim of toppling him.

Finally, there were the extremists—the ones who wanted to win with brute force. It was highly likely that these extremists were the ones who had pulled the trigger on the whole Kykeon plot.

“The hard-liners are a relic from an age where the local lords dreamed of smashing the Empire with a quick war,” Lady Maxine went on. “It is almost certain that they wanted to keep Marsheim in the most pristine condition possible so that it could act as a base from which they could launch an attack on the Empire. However, imagine children who are told they can draw anything they like on a wall. There will be those who merely copy whatever it was the first child drew out of a desire to conform.”

Among those who wanted a revolt in Marsheim, it was easy to understand what the hard-liners wanted. This made them less dangerous to deal with. These members of Diablo were far more reasonable in their thinking in wanting a winnable war.

But such were the times. Even though most troops would be conscripted, this still was not an age where conflict could be solved in a more offhand, strategic manner like firing missiles at the capital of the enemy nation or by directly targeting factories and the like. A war that would bring a conclusion to a quick and definitive end to the enemy’s control made far more sense.

Although a war would bring ruin to the cantons and noble territories of the pro-Marsheim faction, the same would be said about the local lords’ land. This self-preservation helped keep them in check.

The problem we had dug up was with the Exilrat.

“It appears that the Exilrat’s aim is not to replace the locus of control of Marsheim,” Lady Maxine said.

In the raid, we had encountered two people who were thought to be key members of the Exilrat. However, it hadn’t been possible to bring them in alive. One of them had been a terrifying menace who had slaughtered seven of the Heilbronn Familie’s people on their own before finally perishing in a one-on-one battle with Manfred. The other had used some kind of magic tool to self-detonate.

This was only hearsay, so I won’t go into detail, but it was Mister Hansel who had dealt with this suicide bomber. Even with the Exilrat member grabbing his shirt and blowing up right in his face, all he had to say was, “My eyebrows are singed... Guess I gotta shave ’em,” worrying that it would only make him look scarier than he already was. What a guy—proper frontliners truly were tough as nails. Compared to him, I was far closer to your average person. I would’ve probably been nothing but ash on the floor after an encounter like that.

“In a number of bases, the aerosolizer tool was assembled and ready for use,” said Lady Maxine. “None had been fitted with a mana crystal, but otherwise they were fit to use at a moment’s notice, or so the report states. Stefano? The details, if you please.”

“We turned up a buncha barrels filled with this bluish water,” said Stefano. “There were pipes leadin’ ’em straight to those magic tools. Oh, and they weren’t normal barrels either. They were huge, the kind filled with beer that you see in the Wine God’s temples.”

Despite losing the two potential members of the Exilrat who were near the heart of Diablo’s operation, we hadn’t come away with nothing—we had learned that the Exilrat’s aim was simply the destruction of Marsheim.

In addition to the two bases that Stefano and Mister Hansel had dealt with, there had been aerosolizers prepped at seven other locations. It had been Siegfried’s luck (for better or worse) that had led him to one of these—I was glad that it hadn’t accidentally gone off while he was there—and there had been sufficient proof that they had been ready to use them.

Naturally, we only had guesswork to go on, but it seemed that the Exilrat had hopped on board with the local lords’ evil schemes so that they could incite some large-scale terrorism.

Of course, it was impossible to know if this was something that the entire clan had decided on, but it was an irrefutable fact that at least the extremists of the clan wished to see Marsheim burn.

“Question for ya, Smokestack,” said Stefano. “You had a look, right? With what they had, Marsheim’d be cloaked in a haze for months, huh?”

“Indeed...” Nanna replied. “It was not...ideal... Looking at the size of the mana crystals...hmm...I suppose the smoke would still be cloaking the outer walls of Marsheim...even after half a year...”

Simply put, it was insane what they were planning. This would scare the pants off even the local lords and the nobles—both those who wanted to see chaos reign in Marsheim and those who had their own political schemes to fulfill—who were in on Diablo’s plot.

If the region surrounding Marsheim was rendered torpid for that long, the only thing that awaited anyone and everyone was a nightmare that served no one. Local order would come to pieces; the city streets would be lined with overdose victims. Those left over would be plunged into a Hobbesian frenzy. It would be hell on earth—the end of the city—pure and simple.

“If you will permit some brutal honesty, I think it would be worth forgetting Diablo for the moment. We ought to set fire to the tent grounds and burn every last member of the Exilrat to cinders.”

We could only give noncommittal groans to the manager’s heavy statement.

“But madam,” said Miss Laurentius, “that wouldn’t go well. We would only drive them deeper into their hidey-holes. Never mind that they have agents with full residency status within Marsheim, we’d have no hope of ferreting them out from the rest of the public. Wouldn’t such methods only create more chaos than we began with?”

“Laurentius, I appreciate the concern, and it is well-founded. I believe that at this stage it is absolutely paramount that we bring a close to this issue without alerting the citizenry. It would be all well and good for my own head to line the city walls due to my own shortcomings, but failure here would damage the reputation of every adventurer across the entire western reach.”

“If you truly don’t care what happens to you, why not use your connections to call in the army and crush them?”

“Because I do not wish to create any unrest in Marsheim. Imagine what would happen if even a peep of this reaches the ears of the common folk. The gates would be rammed in mere moments with citizens attempting to escape.”

Ahh, that’s right. Chaos among the citizens would play perfectly to the enemy’s favor. Even if we had cut them off from their superweapon, if we didn’t stop the fools who’d taken it up in the first place, then countless innocents would fall into despair.

To add insult to injury, the local lords would be overjoyed at seeing the pandemonium unfurl without them having to raise a finger and take the opportunity to make their move. If we didn’t stop this soon, all of our hard work would be for naught.

“Therefore, I wish to prioritize expunging the Exilrat,” said Lady Maxine. “Unfortunately, another issue had to crop up...”

“We have found that...diseased wheat is a key component...in the production of Kykeon,” chimed in Nanna. “That needs to be dealt with too...”

Nanna’s eyes were even more unfocused than usual. After she spoke, she let out a deep sigh, and along with it a billow of smoke from her pipe. It was as she said—this extra cog in the works meant that the Kykeon issue would not simply be solved by bringing the hammer down on the Exilrat.

The evidence at hand suggested that however much they’d done to execute the plan to fog out the city, they had no hand in producing Kykeon. Even if every last member of the Exilrat were ratted out and crushed, whoever it was that knew how to concoct Kykeon might dash off into the shadows, ready to brew up some more revenge.

After however long, they would come back to Marsheim, and we would have no notion of when to expect the next Kykeon crisis to rear its ugly head. If Marsheim was engulfed in a debilitating drug cloud when we had all but forgotten about it, then everyone committing seppuku a hundred times over still wouldn’t atone for our error.

“I wish to be perfectly certain about this,” Lady Maxine said. “Diseased wheat is the key ingredient, yes?”

“It is...” Nanna said. “It has been an age since my studies on public sanitation...but I remember that one of the side effects of ergot poisoning...is similar to Kykeon’s psychotropic effect...”

If the situation wasn’t already enough of a headache as it was, Siegfried had found bags of diseased wheat—which some dealers had stolen to bake bread with—and had twigged to its real purpose. Kaya had held her head in her hands, berating herself for not realizing sooner. When Nanna had been informed, she had recalled what she had learned in her core classes at the College—again I was reminded of how magia truly were technocrats—and although she didn’t grasp the exact processes that transmuted wheat blight into Kykeon, she had found that they were incredibly similar in makeup.

“The harvest has already begun,” Lady Maxine said. “Even if we send out teams now to raze what we can, a lot has already most likely been taken away into storage. Blast... I feel the bile rising in my throat already...”

“U-Uh, I’m really sorry...” Siegfried murmured, evidently concerned for Lady Maxine’s health due to the discovery he had personally made.

“Pay it no heed, Siegfried,” she replied, waving her hand to dismiss his concerns. “It was a small blessing that you informed us early enough to move into action.”

It was likely that what he’d found had spared her long-suffering stomach lining more than it had jeopardized it, purely thanks to the timing.

Hubertus, her bodyguard, had placed an infusion on the table. Lady Maxine gulped it down before setting it back down with a bang.

“In all honesty, this is a top priority too,” she said in a resounding voice. “Tomorrow I intend to meet with the margrave and get his permission to review all of Marsheim’s import logs. In recent years, a number of regions have yielded an inadequate land tax, supposedly due to bad harvest. With the situation as it is, they now seem suspicious to me.”

“They were providing a smaller land tax? Strange... The Harvest Goddess and the God of Wind and Clouds have been on good terms this year...” Mister Fidelio murmured with a frown creasing his brow. This in turn prompted a difficult expression of Lady Maxine’s own. I wondered if she simply just didn’t want to break it to such a moral man as him that the Empire would resort to less-than-honest measures to secure the public’s trust.

“For decades now, we have cited inclement weather, droughts, and water supply faults to overlook the local lords’ tax inconsistencies when we have needed to cement their backing. You understand, don’t you? It’s like giving pocket money to an unruly child.”

“Yes, but if they do untoward things with that money, then there was no point in giving it to them in the first place...”

This was one of many political measures that Margrave Marsheim had been implementing to ameliorate Ende Erde’s sticky political situation. It was a small carrot instead of the stick, but one that could prove poisonous in the wrong hands. I nodded along, hearing it laid out. If leeway was given on levies for certain cantons, they could discreetly harvest their diseased wheat unmolested, even if a magistrate from the Empire came to investigate their crop. Tax collectors were busy all year and wouldn’t pay it much heed either.

Wheat blight caused ears of wheat to blacken and decay, and was caused by a fungus called ergot. If the ergot spread to barley or rye it would be easy to notice. You could easily see what had been infected and work to either spread or halt the infection.

Ergot didn’t emerge with the budding of wheat. Instead it spread on already grown wheat, and that meant you didn’t need a lot of it to get started. It wouldn’t take too much work to contaminate a whole field. In those cantons untouched by the blight, the magistrate or village chief could just pay it no heed—writing it off as a fact of life that people elsewhere had to deal with—and instead focus on the busy task of tending the fields.

Back when the cause of this disease wasn’t known, they simply left the land alone and focused on working areas that hadn’t been infected yet, with the long aim of letting the disease run its course. I expected that folk who had moved to developing cantons had never heard the words “diseased wheat” in their lives.

“We should be able to produce a list of likely colluders based on their tax irregularities,” continued Lady Maxine. “It will be another night of staring at logbooks... I can feel the migraine coming on already, but it must be done.”

If Diablo slipped through our fingers, that would be the end of it. A wide-scale unmasking wouldn’t go unnoticed. Any survivors or delivery agents who were on their way to sell their wicked stock would turn back around if they noticed that their buyer had been killed, and so information would eventually make its way back to the manufacturers. If they had two brain cells to rub together, then they would pack up their production line and run for the hills before they were found out.

We were running too short on time.

“Luckily for us, it should be fairly trivial to narrow down the list of viable venues for mass production. I’m right, aren’t I, Kaya?”

“Ah! Yes, it is incredibly likely that they need a vast amount of firewood and water. It isn’t something that any old person can make using their stove. There’s only so many places where you could hope to consolidate that much of both resources.”

With all eyes on her, Kaya counted on her fingers as she listed possible candidates, taking absolute care not to misspeak.

First, a river needed to be nearby. Production of Kykeon would require a ridiculous daily input of water, so this was pretty essential. It would have to take a considerable amount of land just to store all the blighted wheat. Given the sheer volume of Kykeon on the market in Ende Erde, odds were good that the supply originated from a huge centralized chain of production.

Simultaneously, such a site couldn’t be built on too flat land—it would stand out and draw unwanted attention—and so it needed to be far away from most population centers, but not so far as to make delivery prohibitively costly. Anywhere too near vital roads or large Harvest Goddess churches would be bad, but somewhere totally unconnected with no roads to bring in resources would be too inconvenient.

Somewhere too arid would also be bad. Fungus like ergot was quite tough, but it grew weak without sufficient moisture in the air, and so areas where humidity would drop and dry winds would blow in the winter would severely reduce the quality of their product. We couldn’t forget that Kykeon was being sold at a price that was far lower than the requisite materials, so it would be pretty likely that they wouldn’t waste more money maintaining ideal conditions through magic. To cap it off, a widespread barrier would result in conspicuous mana reactions. They wanted to remain unnoticed, and so it was highly doubtful they would resort to magical means to protect their stock.

“We won’t have to search through Ende Erde with a fine-toothed comb, from the sound of it,” said Lady Maxine after Kaya’s explanation. “I feared that we would be searching for a needle in a mountain of haystacks, but this will make our mission significantly easier,” Lady Maxine said.

“All the same, it still isn’t an insignificant number,” Mister Fidelio added. “Preparations will need to be made for a longer excursion.”

Although we had these wonderful factors helping to pin down our target, it wasn’t so easy as getting a map of Ende Erde and putting a literal pin in it. They were a careful bunch—neither would they choose somewhere that would be easily sniffed out, nor would they risk losing everything in an accidental fire; it was highly likely they were operating out of multiple factories.

Even if Lady Maxine put her eye health, stomach health, and sleep on the table to narrow down possible candidates, if we sent people out, most would be sent on a fool’s errand.

This wasn’t ideal. Forgetting Mister Fidelio’s easy comments on bringing justice to them, it would be an issue to have to commit to so many long journeys.

“Hey y’all, jus’ leave it ta li’l ol’ me,” came a familiar voice.

As I was lost in thought, a white-furred bubastisian came and stood before me. She had been so silent that I thought she hadn’t come today. Where on earth had she been hiding? I glanced at Margit for an answer, but my partner merely shrugged her shoulders, just as confused as I was.

“I’ll do my own bit of diggin’ and get that number down even further, manager. Though even I won’t be able ta do it all by my lonesome, if ya catch my drift.”

“Very well. Tell me what you require later and it shall be done, informant.”

“You betcha. A simple thank you will do nicely as payment this time around,” Schnee said before snickering.

As ever, I found her narrowed eyes impossible to read, but I was amazed by her ability to head back into her life’s passion despite almost dying not so long ago. The healing algae inside her still hadn’t fully broken down yet.

“Finding the factory is top priority,” said Lady Maxine. “However, we have another equally important issue.”

“Seriously? Two ‘top priority’ missions? Give me a break...”

The audhumbla’s muttering went unanswered by everyone, but everyone knew what he meant.

This was all too common. You were going about your day, and then two or three urgent tasks were put onto your plate that needed to be finished today. When they held people’s lives in the balance, it made perfect sense for multiple “top priority” tasks to exist at the same time.

As we worried if we would be able to cover all of it at once, the manager brought out a likeness portrait.

...Whew, that was close. It had taken all the power I had to spare to stop myself from crying out, Why the hell do you have a picture of that goth-loli?! in a frankly inhuman tone.

“It took a bit of work, but I managed to convince another Association manager elsewhere to share this with me,” said Lady Maxine. “Goldilocks, this was the person who attacked you, am I right?”

“Y-Yes, it was,” I squeaked.

What was with my voice?! My brain must have been overheating at the sight of her...

But I was certain. This was the same woman who had smashed my arm to bits earlier today and had left me to weather this miserable convalescence.

I had given my own personal rundown of her details in my report and had even attached my own attempt at a likeness, but the one before me wasn’t a copy of that. Judging by the penmanship, it had been drawn by someone with training in drawing bounty posters or likenesses for work. This world didn’t have photographs yet, and your only way of getting a person’s identifying features was a drawing like this or a list of descriptive bullet points.

This drawing allowed me to get a better look at the woman who attacked me today, but as I looked closer something was off. This wasn’t an attempted copy of what I had drawn, nor was it a bounty poster that had been created recently. She looked younger—perhaps in her late teens.

Her eye-catching makeup had changed her impression somewhat, but I had been close enough to feel her breath on my skin in a fight to the death, so I knew. Her gaudy appearance had drawn my attention away from her features, but I knew that it was her. If I mentally added in thick makeup and a decade-plus of hellish battle, it’d be dead-on.

“I want all of you to remember this face. If you see her, do not let her escape.”

“Nee hee, it was quite a task gettin’ intel on her,” Schnee added. “Her name is Beatrix Eugenia Friederike Brecht. As you might’ve guessed from all the surnames, she used to be a li’l ‘princess’ of a well-off house.”

I was puzzled by the timeline. This was way too fast. I’d given my report this afternoon after receiving my emergency medical care. Even if the Association had a thaumogram, it just wasn’t possible to source this information in a matter of hours. It had taken the immensity of the raid today for Lady Maxine to share with us the details of the adventurers’ register, so it was highly unlikely that another manager elsewhere would be so willing to hand over classified information.

Judging by her age in this drawing, it must have been created just after she became an adventurer. If it had been stored for all this time, then surely someone she worked with—the manager or one of the receptionists—would have stood up for her.

What I was trying to say was that it would have taken ample time and evidence to convince whoever had held this information to part with it. Schnee’s feline senses weren’t so finely honed that she could read the future, were they?

“Her adventurin’ history is as squeaky-clean as they come,” Schnee said. “She was registered with the Adventurer’s Association in Luneburg and reached copper-green rank. She was a real trusted adventurer with a ninety-plus percent job completion rate. But, well, that explains why she’s such a tough cookie.”

“Yes,” said Miss Laurentius, “she must be, to have done such a number on Goldilocks. She takes lives for a living, I presume?”

Schnee glanced over at me as answer enough to Miss Laurentius’s question.

Deep breath, Erich. This is good! This is all the proof you needed that you weren’t almost killed by a complete nobody who popped out of nowhere. It’s something to be happy about!

By the way Schnee wagged her tail as she walked, I imagined that Beatrix was already a known quantity to her. She had most likely been working undercover in order to dredge up any information that she could and only thought it fitting to lay bare before others once she had made sure it was properly vetted.

Schnee truly valued the accuracy of her intel. Even when it came to an assassin that had almost ended her life, she refused to raise the alarm based on her gut or guesswork.

Indeed, we were able to head to the raid without any unnecessary presumptions or misplaced eagerness because we had only been told what we needed to know—we never had the leeway to make any unnecessary predictions, only given the appropriate amount of preparation.

All the same, I really wished that she had told us what she’d nearly turned up dead in that lot for in time for us to pass the excuse along to our prospective employers.

“The best assassins go unnamed,” Schnee went on. “Second-rate assassins lose themselves ta temper. Well, I don’t need to tell everyone here that, now, do I?”

Siegfried and Kaya looked like they did need an explanation, but I made a mental note to bring them up to speed later.

The thing was that people didn’t know that the truly talented assassins were, in fact, assassins. Truly gifted murderers could skillfully erase the fact that a murder had even taken place at all, only raising questions when the erased party ceased showing up where they were expected, leaving their estimated time of death deeply ambiguous.

In the heroic stories, there were often passages that helped add awe to a villain’s wicked deeds explaining how they were feared for killing so-and-so, but in reality the fact that people knew the name of the assassin was already a big red mark on their reputation. After all, knowing someone’s face and background made it a lot easier to devise your response to them. As you pieced together relevant bits of intel, you could draw up an even better strategy to pin them to the wall.

“Well, should she come strollin’ into Marsheim, everyone’ll be on high alert,” said Stefano. “I don’t need to remember her face—I’ll strike her down before anyone can get in edgewise.”

Typical local gangster that he was, Stefano propped his jaw on his palm in a relaxed posture, speaking as if he were reflecting on some fun anecdote from his past.

If you were plotting some kind of scheme, then the most important part was that no one found out about the plan in the first place. With this very obvious first rule, it made sense that a big noble who had hired a group of assassins or intelligence agents wouldn’t know their names in almost all cases.

Consider, for example, my series of bouts with Miss Nakeisha during the last stretch of my tenure under Lady Agrippina. Marquis Donnersmarck, who had her entire clan in his pocket, was known as a philanthropist and a charitable man. No one was aware of the wide purview of his subordinates, or the depth and breadth of the intelligence network they managed.

A secret blade is most powerful because it is secret. If it hadn’t been for that tortoiseshell cat, then Schnee would never have been saved, and it would have been a long time until I ever reached the core of this whole plot.

“But copper-green, eh... That explains why she can move between cities without being stopped,” said Miss Laurentius.

“Quite... At that rank...you become a registered citizen...after all,” said Nanna.

“Not only that, she did a real number on Erich,” Mister Fidelio added. “I wonder if she turned down promotions. Ever since I reached sapphire-blue, I’ve stood out more than I wished to, with celebrities and whatnot knocking on my door. This far up the chain, you can really feel the way rank weighs you down and lifts you up in equal measure.”

Adventurers were looked down upon, but once you were in the upper echelons it wasn’t rare to receive requests that would span multiple cities or even nations. A high rank brought with it ease of movement through checkpoints. Adventurers’ tags also were magically altered to act as a form of identification, and so were a valid item to use as a pass.

At the third rank of amber-orange, my clearance only covered Ende Erde, but when you reached copper-green—which was third from the top—you could pass through almost everywhere in the Empire unimpeded.

In other words, if you pretended that you were acting on behalf of a job, then you could go about your business unnoticed—unless someone caught you in the act of trying to enter somewhere you were forbidden. All you needed to do was pretend that you were in good with some big-shot noble and you could do whatever you wanted without even the fear of having your name recorded in the entry log.

“Apparently she even worked in Marsheim when she was younger,” Schnee said. “She was here for two years, give or take, but then up and left, moving her base of operations a number of times afterward.”

Judging by the time frame, this had been back before anyone in this room was anyone important. Stefano had still been vigilantly waiting for the opportunity to usurp his uncle; Lady Maxine had still been assistant manager.

Hold on, had I even been born yet? No, she didn’t seem that old...

“If the records are correct, then she was only amber-orange while she was in Marsheim,” Lady Maxine said. “We had a mixed bag of adventurers at the time, and she stood out, but not all that much, so there isn’t too much on her. Usually records are disposed of if there hasn’t been anything of note within five years.”

Adventurers could change their registered Association, but it was simple for them to put in a request to do a little bit of extra work at another Association. Amber-orange was ample rank to bring a letter of recommendation from your registered Association to your target destination, but it seemed for some reason or other that Beatrix refused to request one.

“Gotta say, this task really took it outta me,” Schnee said. “Turns out she and you in the Fellowship of the Blade got a mutual connection.”

“Huh? We do?”

“Yessiree. She was a resident at the Snowy Silverwolf herself, once upon a time. John’s an honorable sort and not much of a chatterbox to start with, so it took some real doin’ to get him to talk.”

I was surprised—I hadn’t even considered the possibility that my assailant had eaten at the same table and slept under the same roof that I had. As I thought about it, adventuring made for a fitting cover for a career killer. Carrying a weapon on you was part of the job; any suspicious-looking potions or magical tools could be chalked up as part of your kit. Nobody so much as quirked an eyebrow if you and your coworkers read as strange or foreign—that was par for the course. As long as you weren’t a fugitive, it made for a logical cover.

Now then, she was from an old family that had noble connections—I seemed to recall that her name was the same as a huge riverboat freight service turned retailer that had an outlet in Berylin—but for some reason or other had found herself an adventurer moonlighting as an assassin. Life sure was unpredictable.

No... Maybe I was overthinking it. Maybe it wasn’t about going undercover—maybe she had ended up this way because her plans hadn’t panned out.

In my own life, there had been a number of moments where I was aware that I needed to steel my resolve and follow through with my decision. When I had gotten too involved with the College while in Berylin; when I had almost died in the battle against that masked man—my dream of becoming an adventurer had nearly been snuffed out more times than I could count.

Even after becoming an adventurer, I had met with a similar sort of danger once...no, three times now, I would wager? There was that time in the summer after I had become an adventurer, where if I had continued to school annoying folk who had come to pick on me, my character sheet would’ve been carried off in a different direction. Then there was that time after Elefsina’s Eye had just started circulating, where I had been thinking that all this narco business really wasn’t my idea of adventuring, but if I had run away I would’ve had to deal with the lifelong hurt of my cowardice. Finally, there was the much more recent cusp of the Kykeon crisis. If I hadn’t decided to make use of my connections—as much as it embarrassed me to—I would have ended up on a boring job dispatching suspicious character after suspicious character leading to quite the depressing end.

Making preparations to run away; resorting to senseless violence because thinking through the problem at hand was too much for me... If I’d surrendered myself to these urges, I was sure I would have eventually found myself entangled by fate’s refusal to let me go.

I wondered if Beatrix had suffered much the same fate.

“Whatever the case,” said Schnee, “the state of ol’ Goldilocks Erich here should be enough ta illustrate her talents.”

“Would it be uncool to try and blame the fact that I was outnumbered five to one...?” I said, but naturally her portrait gave no reply. All I could do was shrug at Schnee’s pointed finger.

I was sure that Beatrix had been holding some of her own cards close to her chest, but I had still been pushed to the brink of death. It was looking like I would need to bring out a few more of my trump cards if I didn’t want my story to be brought to a close the next time we met.

“She ain’t just a skilled fighter, she’s also careful,” Schnee went on. “In this case, the only evidence left of her presence was Erich’s own wounds. She won’t want to leave her business unfinished...”

“I see... They want to destabilize our command structure by taking heads, do they? We’ve done our share of similar work in the past,” Miss Laurentius said as she leaned back on her three-seater, causing it to creak under her weight. “It’s pretty effective,” she went on. “There have been ogres in the past who, surrounded by enemies on all sides with a strong sense of cohesion, had thrown down their helmets with a smile, happy that they had finally found a place to die. The way I hear it, usually they went out satisfied.”

With few worthy individuals to challenge, ogres were powerhouses in their own right. There were stories of many battles where a single ogre warrior had completely turned the tides of a struggle.

When ogres got serious and charged straight into the enemy flank, with a full readiness to face death head-on, their fervor for bloodshed would shatter their opponents’ strategy. Of course, this ridiculous approach cost ogrish lives aplenty, but weighted against the glory to be won, cowardice rarely if ever won out.

Man, they really are like a bunch of coked-up Shimazu clan types... Talk about scary...

Miss Laurentius chuckled, but it was exactly as she had said. It was highly likely that Diablo would start picking away our most prestigious and significant players in the hopes it would loosen our grip on the situation.

“Basically, just watch out to not get offed, got it?” Miss Laurentius said.

“Gotta say, it makes it easier fer me if people get the picture quicker,” Schnee said. “As she said, sleep with one eye open, folks.”

The warning was apt. The worst thing right now would be for our coalition heads to be assassinated in their sleep. It would spell disaster for our alliance, and we had worked too hard to cobble it together in the first place.

It would also leave us with fewer pieces to work with. We would have to either A) go crying to Margrave Marsheim at this late stage in the game, or B) fight on knowing full well that our foe could do something terrifyingly unexpected at any time. That was a future that we definitely wanted to avoid.

Clans were cults of personality, from a certain point of view—they hinged on a relationship between one leader and many subordinates. That leader’s charisma, power, and resources held the clan together. What would happen if that head was killed? Without a leader you didn’t have an army; you had irregulars—directionless rabble. They would disintegrate in a matter of days.

We were dealing with opponents who had almost killed me the day after Lady Maxine had praised me for being the glue of this alliance and told me not to die. Considering my survival, it wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine that they would target another clan head next. Stefano or Nanna were likely targets, as the Heilbronn Familie didn’t have a proper internal political structure of their own and the Baldur Clan existed purely due to Nanna’s presence. Man, I would worry less if either of them were as strong as Mister Fidelio, or at least as tough as Miss Laurentius.

“That is the situation with which we are faced,” said Lady Maxine. “Our plan is to expunge the Exilrat while simultaneously isolating the enemy’s production base. I will play my part to make sure the enemy never has the opportunity to remove any of us from play. I ask you all, the clan leaders here today, to take sufficient precautions.”

Lady Maxine announced the end of the meeting—having decided that she had brought us sufficiently up to speed on how up to our ears we all were—and was wrapping things up, when suddenly there was a quiet knock on the door to the reception room.

Hubertus, who was standing guard next to it, noticed a letter pushed under the door. This was your typical communication method if you wanted your message to be delivered without actually making yourself known.

Hubertus checked the letter then handed it to Lady Maxine. As she read it, a wrinkle creased her forehead.

“An emissary from the Exilrat...wishing to explain their situation? What is this?” she muttered.

I had reached for my red tea—long since gone cold—now that the meeting had reached a breaking point, but I almost dropped the cup out of shock.

Internally I begged for at least one person to praise me for holding my tongue and not spilling a drop...

[Tips] There are many positions that allow you to cross administrative borders without drawing suspicion. These include but are not limited to caravan owners, bards, scholars, and of course, adventurers.

The vampire had pondered long and hard about what he needed to do. It was hardly an uncommon thing to feel ashamed of your family; the Rhinians had a whole complicated compound word for it. Still, this was far more grave than anything the idiom was fit to describe.

He wasn’t born in the Empire. To reach the land of his birth, you would have to travel far, far south, and upon reaching the Verdant Inner Sea, you would have to keep heading east until you arrived at the shores of the Black Inner Sea. It was a distant land, one any Rhinian would struggle to name.

And in this land, vampires were subaltern—less than human.

While the prevailing attitude there and in Rhine was rooted in the same contempt for vampires’ mythological ex-mortal origins—recounted in the Empire in the infamous fable “The Man Who Swindled the Sun”—the actual reasoning differed in execution. In his homeland, vampirism was seen as a corruptive influence, an impurity begetting an impure race. Many credited their conditional immortality to dark and heinous rites.

The old tales were plentiful—new vampires were born from mortals who had partaken in the blood of plague victims; they were created after seven days and seven nights spent on the rope after hanging themselves; they were illegitimate children, born from the womb of a corpse. Each story was meant to put the fear of all the gods in one’s heart.

Believed to be accursed creatures given unnatural luster on a diet of impure blood, they were debased as “strigoi.” And so, this man, like many others before him, left the place of his birth and found himself in the Empire—a land where he would finally be treated as a person. Many an immigrant could tell the same story.

In his homeland, every day had been a new hardship, but here at the Empire’s western edge, people merely saw him as a sickly-looking soul who could not function under the light of day. In comparison to what he had once known, it was paradise. He sullied his hands with dirty and disreputable work to stay there, yes, but in his own way he fought to stay as much out of affection as desperation.

However, his life had taught him something. He had learned firsthand of the agony of being abandoned by everything familiar. He knew few hardships greater than to be driven from your home, and the ceaseless slog toward somewhere, anywhere livable.

But this? It wasn’t right.

The vampire would be among the first to admit that Marsheim wasn’t kind to its immigrants. All the same, it never veered into active cruelty.

It wasn’t as if he was barred from the city behind the walls. If he went through the proper channels and managed to scrounge together some money and a proper guarantor, then even his immigrant status wouldn’t prevent him from registering as a citizen.

The city was inconsistent, for better or worse, but as long as you conformed to the local rules, you could reasonably expect to be treated fairly. You just needed to know when to swallow your complaints with the Marsheim way of doing things.

And so this vampire—the man known as Zwei to the Exilrat—decided that it didn’t matter if his decision caused internal friction. He would take the matter to the Association and save his second shot at home.

It took the death of one of his fellow councillors and the replacement of another with a political decoy after their injury for Zwei to finally realize something: a contingent within his own, no longer able to bear their mistreatment, had resolved to bring Marsheim to a swift end.

It had been a complete shock to him. Even the stupidest among them knew that they needed Marsheim more than Marsheim needed them. The Empire was a big place, but he doubted there was anywhere else that would tolerate the size and scope of the tent grounds.

All the same, he understood their pain—the depths of their anger at being maligned and discriminated against; the difficulties and worries of a life with no one to depend on.

Even Zwei, born with a vampire’s resilience, still bore deep mental scars from the agonies he’d endured in his homeland. Those scars had scabbed over, almost forgotten, but if he scratched at them, the bitter urge to see everything around him burn welled and wept. Yet anger turned to shame as he realized the futility of so cruelly destroying the land which had given him another chance at life.

These thoughts had propelled him to the Association, that he might lend a helping hand—no, that he might seek penance for what he had done. Zwei was ready to bare his body to the glow of morning and be reduced to naught but ashes if it meant bringing this foul Kykeon business to a close.

He had another mission: to pass on to the Association’s leadership that Exilrat had no united front behind the plot. The clan was founded on mutual aid. Any money they earned was spent on clothes and food for elderly folk unfit to care for themselves. Savings were sent to former compatriots and family from their motherlands. The largest portion was spent in teaching Rhinian to their children, so that they would be able to integrate with Marsheim more easily than their ancestors.

It was a ridiculous proposition to state that everyone in the Exilrat wished for Marsheim’s annihilation.

Zwei didn’t know the exact numbers of the collaborators within his clan, but even if it were more than half, the majority of them had merely been seduced by the prospect of earning a trifle more coin toward their ever-gnawing expenses—what was one more dirty job, if it kept you fed another day? By his figuring, he assumed there could be no more than ten percent among the Exilrat who knew entirely what evil they were complicit in. They were the only truly despicable and cruel folk to be found among his kin.

There was Funf, once a local lord of Ende Erde. He had been full of hatred for the Empire, constantly bemoaning the fact that he had once been a king. Zwei had received news that Funf had died today.

Then there was Sieben, whose long journey to Marsheim had cost him his twin brother. Rumors abounded that Sieben had been made a plaything by Imperial nobles in the past, but in Zwei’s eyes that could hardly excuse him for avenging himself upon the whole city.

Even Drei was on board with sinking Marsheim. He told anyone who would listen that before long, all the Exilrat would be marked for death and hunted like animals by the state. But Zwei couldn’t square such claims with his own lived experience.

Now, Zwei wasn’t a complete dreamer. He knew that Marsheim wasn’t a heaven on earth—merely a corner of the Empire where its bureaucratic power was still light on the ground. But it was better than that.

The taverns often served vinegary booze, the women in the pleasure quarters weren’t easy on the eye, the merchants dealt in dirty money and skimped on change. All the same, none of them called Zwei vermin at the first flash of fang.

Zwei ran the calculations over in his head but still couldn’t reason his way into being on board with gassing Marsheim. He would repent for the shame his “family” had brought upon them all and save this city. Zwei forged ahead, certain that if he explained the situation to the Association manager, she would show some sympathy.

“What reason do I have to believe you?” she said after he had finished explaining himself. “You do realize the situation, don’t you? I wouldn’t put it past you to waste our time when that is our most valuable asset right now.”

A sense of ephemerality trumped beauty for this woman whose hair was populated with ever more grays and whose cheeks were hollower than they were before. Zwei could sense the quiet rage underneath the surface as she spoke.

When he had arrived at the Association building, Maxine had been engaged in a meeting with adventurers from various clans of Marsheim. The very same adventurers who had killed his fellows just this morning. Even as his hands trembled with the letter in them, the vampire knew that he couldn’t back down. If he did, the tent grounds would be engulfed in fire. It had never been the warmest of welcomes, but all the same Marsheim had granted them a place to live.

Zwei’s pride and very life were worthy sacrifices if it meant stopping the wheels that were currently in motion.

“Allow me to demonstrate my resolve,” Zwei said.

His cloak cast a shadow on the inside, blocking any light from reaching his face, but here before Maxine and the adventurers, Zwei revealed his true face. The councillors of the Exilrat valued anonymity above all—to them this was akin to death. Zwei continued unperturbed and reached into his mouth.

And then, he pulled.

Into his hand he placed four canines—the symbol of his race and the very crystallization of his pride.

Pulling one’s teeth with one’s hands was excruciating, but the pain alone was hardly the point; by removing or damaging their canines, a vampire sacrificed much of their heightened vitality and resilience. Such methods were common in the lands to the far east of the Empire—a show of surrender and vulnerability in the hopes that it might deter further violence. The practice was not unknown in the Empire. The celebrated Lampel the Bald had removed his own fangs and offered them to the Night Goddess as the first part of his penance—but it had long since died out.

In this moment, it didn’t matter what logic ran behind it. All that mattered was whether Maxine understood the depth of his desire to tell the truth.

“E-Eins and Vier agree with me,” Zwei said, with some difficulty. He cupped his hands under his chin to avoid dirtying the carpet with his blood. Zwei literally forced the words out as he made his request. “If I have your aid...then I can prevent the others from acting foolishly. So please...please protect the tent grounds. Even if you must...scatter my ashes under the morning sun...I beg you not to harm or drive out the immigrants of Marsheim...”

“I shall consider it,” Maxine replied. “Before that I will need information on this affair’s instigators.”

Through his brutal honesty, Zwei had received Maxine’s pardon.

The code of law would find Zwei guilty, but Maxine refused to stick so closely to the book. There were three reasons why she didn’t pass judgment on him now.

The first was the extenuating circumstances leading one of the Exilrat’s councillors to present himself today. Further, if she killed Zwei now, the survivors would most definitely grow desperate and realize their end was nigh. Lastly, someone would have to pacify the people of the tent grounds. In the long run it would be better to keep the one person who would be grateful for the task alive to do it.

Imperial morals and the spirit of political compromise spared the Exilrat from utter destruction, but there would be few who would ever bring up the events of this evening.

[Tips] A bountiful nation with permeable borders will always attract immigrants. The Empire maintains an effective relationship with immigrants through a stance that remains unchanging whether these immigrants are present or not.

Nothing made me more uncomfortable than watching people work overtime while I was the only one sitting back relaxing. Of all the fighters in the Association reception room, I was the only one with nothing to do. With my left arm out of commission I would be of no use, so my seniors in the business kindly told me to stay put and get better.

It pained me to stay here doing nothing, but in all honesty it only barely edged out the actual physical agony of my wound. Kaya told me that taking painkillers or interfering with my fever would slow the healing process, so I sat there without even a cooling salve on my forehead.

The fuzzy feeling in my head told me that the beginnings of my fever would probably come into full force in about thirty minutes or so. I might have been somewhat confident that I could swing my sword with my one good arm, but I would be nothing more than dead weight if I was out there on the front lines.

Lady Maxine had also kindly allowed me to stay the night, claiming that there was no better place to hunker down with a price on your head. I swallowed my pride and focused on letting my body mend.

“Feelin’ fidgety?” came a voice from below the sofa I was using as a bed.

Something white flitted across my vision. It was Schnee’s tail, swishing before me as she sat on the floor, flicking through the documents she was reading.

“Well, yeah...” I replied.

It was the most natural choice for our informant to be staying here too. She herself had announced that she was more brains than brawn; it would be madness to send our ally best qualified to unveil our enemy’s secrets into the field of battle—doubly so when dealing with assassins. They might have made the call to retreat this morning, but it was highly likely that they were waiting for the perfect moment to strike and bring our whole organization tumbling down.

They had sussed out that I was the newest and weakest link among this distinguished group of adventurers and had come for my head first. Schnee had to be nearly as high up on their hit list. It’s how I would have done it in their position. They still had the upper hand while their headquarters were still unknown to us, and so killing the informant would buy them the most time. I would’ve tried a second or third time to get the job done, if I were in their position. That said, it had been a while since the first attempt. Had they given up? Or was Schnee avoiding attacks without realizing it? Or, most likely, had she taken measures to avoid being targeted? I had no idea—this informant truly was unfathomable.

“I get how you’re feelin’, but you gotta put up with it,” Schnee said. “You’re the boss, after all.”

“I understand in theory,” I replied. “But I can’t logic my way out of these feelings.”

Schnee had evidently sensed my unrest. She started batting at my nose with her tail. What makes the swishing tail of a happy cat so irresistible to grab?

“It’s a soldier’s job ta march, and a leader’s job ta wait.”

“Don’t worry, I am well and truly aware of a soldier’s desire to bust down the castle gate themselves and lay waste to everything in sight thanks to a bubbling impatience.”

From now to my very first days as an adventurer, I’d taken up a position on the front lines out of admiration for those who led from the front. This was the first time that I had been the only one left behind. I couldn’t hope to quell my restless heart.

The habits of my younger heart had seeped into my soul. I knew on paper that only a piss-poor leader forced themselves into the fray with anyone, especially their subordinates, when they could barely stand. All the same, my instincts shrieked at me for lying around doing nothing. No matter how many times I told myself that I should rest like a good patient while Siegfried filled in for me, I just couldn’t get to sleep. It wasn’t just the thrumming pain in my arm. I simply couldn’t switch off my brain.

I wondered how long it would take for me to accept my role as the leader and zonk out while my allies did their jobs in my absence. Back in my previous life, I had moaned about my overly paranoid boss who stuck his nose into our affairs, wondering why he wouldn’t just be a good manager and wait until we were done. My past self would laugh at me if he could see me now.

“Don’tcha worry ’bout a thing, ’kay?” Schnee said. “Saint Fidelio’s leadin’ the march! Not even those assassins could scratch him.”

I felt something soft and warm on my shin. From her position on the floor, Schnee had leaned her head back onto my leg.

“Plots and schemes are fragile when it comes to actually tradin’ blows,” she went on. “Them choosin’ to start an all-out battle would mean givin’ up any advantage our intel gave ’em. This whole thing would have to be decided by a li’l brawl.”

“And in Marsheim, anyone who could beat the saint’s party in a fight...”

“...There is no such animal.”

It was an exceedingly pat way to put it, but I was in total agreement. At sapphire-blue, Mister Fidelio was the highest-ranked adventurer in Marsheim. Nobody in the whole city matched his pure power.

Of course, it would be foolish to say that the noble and single-minded saint was the best adventurer in all of Ende Erde.

Mister Fidelio only really got involved with the final stages of large-scale plots like these—I expected that many evildoers thought long and hard about how not to get him involved—and he couldn’t be everywhere at once or cover a lot of ground on short notice. On top of that, he had his inn to run; he needed time to get ready and couldn’t sustain a long, drawn-out war.

Still, he was undeniably the heaviest hitter in the whole game in these parts. Despite his lack of noble status and the absence of hundreds of troops, the master of the Snoozing Kitten was a well-trained and powerful adventurer, not to be angered under any circumstances. I had only faintly sensed the depths of his strength through our sparring sessions, and even in practice matches he had me easily beat.

There were three people I could compare him to: the ogre Lauren, who taught me the meaning of fear; Lady Agrippina, whose presence in this world felt like a fundamental error in its source code; and Lady Leizniz, who, under her skin, was nothing more than a massive ball of mana.

Mister Fidelio existed close to their realm.

That didn’t make him any less terrifying. He was a monster; the kind of threat that, if he willed it, could introduce his foes to conditions resembling the surface of the sun. This power put him up on the shelf with the other Great Terrors of the world, yes, but what made him scary was that he was a hero-level adventurer who could just turn up like a stray cat wherever it pleased him.

There were a number of similar characters back at the TRPG table—wandering adventurers who had pretty much maxed out their strength, but didn’t wish for much and instead went about untethered with their adventurers’ tags hanging from them. It was way too easy to fall for such seemingly harmless monsters.

“It’s all turned into a pretty dull affair all at once, eh?” Schnee said. “They’re gonna fess up an’ apologize or settle on a more ‘fitting’ end for their li’l dream.”

“A desperate last-ditch attempt, I’d wager.”

“Yep. With him there, they won’t wanna dash off somewhere to plot another round.”

I cast my mind back to Zwei—a man with a frustratingly rugged sort of handsomeness. I’d had to deal with him after his subordinates had decided to make a project of harassing me through the summer of last year. Despite having tasted defeat at my hands once already, he was still one of their highest-ranking members. I doubted that he would be so irrational just because I had kicked him about a little back then.

The Exilrat had drawn the displeasure of the entire Adventurer’s Association, and so it was clear to everyone that the saint had rocked up to their door due to an inability to stay quiet any longer. Now, the question was, if they had someone with a stat spread as busted as Mister Fidelio’s, would the whole plot surrounding Kykeon have evolved as it had?

The answer was no. If the crazed fool who wanted to bring destruction to Marsheim had the personal power to put it into action, then it made zero sense for them not to do so by their own hands. They at least would have found such a powerful ally before proceeding to the foolish plan of dispersing Kykeon.

The fact that I could lay back and relax here at the Association was proof enough. If a beast on the same level as Mister Fidelio’s party was clashing with him right now, you would be able to hear the echoes of their battle from leagues away.

“But...were we not good enough?” I said.

“Hm? Whatcha tryin’ ta say?” Schnee replied. She twisted her head to look at me—in such a manner that no mensch could twist their spine—while her body still faced forward. Her narrow eyes met with mine.

“I was wondering whether you felt uneasy involving only the Fellowship with drawing this whole thing to a close.”

“Ah, I getcha now.”

Schnee flittered her ears, as if to brush off my silly question. She crossed her legs and in the next moment began scratching her ear with her leg.

“This whole thing ain’t over yet. I got him involved ’cause at this stage it was easiest. But when yer truly in a pinch, one little piece ain’t gonna cut it. Especially in this whole shebang.”

“A pinch?”

“Even with Fidelio on our side, he can only take down one base at a time. You get it, don’t ya, Erich? If we take our sweet time, then the enemy’s gonna pack their bags and scamper off. You’d hate for Diablo to keep on changin’ their tack, changin’ their drug, pokin’ at us again and again.”

Schnee was positively certain that one swift battle would never be enough to bring an end to this whole plot. We couldn’t just “cut the Gordian knot” and be done with the whole thing. There were too many antagonists in play, their schemes interleaving and compounding beyond any one person’s ability to navigate them, let alone conquer them. Kykeon, Diablo—these were only sides to the tangled mess that we were dealing with. Even if we cut a string or two, threads from elsewhere in the plot would come to patch up the holes.

Just like how the mold on bread ran deeper than what you could see, merely scooping out the visibly affected part would leave the invisible mycelium that remained. At least with bad bread you could burn it or compost it; we had no such option with Marsheim.

“That’s why I stayed patient ’til I found a tough group of fellas who could fight more than just one battle, journey as far as they need to, and take their licks and pop right back up.”

Schnee needed time enough to gauge exactly how deep the contamination ran before lopping off the infected part. She loved this city. She would accept no substitutes. So she’d kept her attention on the bigger picture. While we were focused on discussing the fruiting bodies, she was looking down on both the bread and the tray in which it was sitting.

Cutting off the infected part swiftly was best for the rest of the batch, after all. I gathered that it was her own personal feelings for Marsheim that had led her to try and deal with this situation as surreptitiously as she had. I hadn’t yet developed the same level of attachment for this place, but I could easily tell that her level of dedication and devotion was something else.

“You chose to stay once already, so sit tight for just a bit longer, Erich,” Schnee said.

“You really see everything, don’t you?” I replied after a pause.

“Nee hee, what can I say? Cats know a thing or two.”

I couldn’t believe that she knew that I had once truly considered leaving Marsheim. It wasn’t as if she overheard me—I hadn’t even told Margit. She’d just worked it out by watching my disposition and choice of words.

It was a great relief having her on our side, but man, she terrified me just as much.

“This whole affair’s made up of bits and bobs, and each run super deep. I know that even if li’l ol’ me was to work myself to the bone, then I’d never get to the end of the lies and the schemes.”

As she leafed through the documents the manager had given her—all stamped with “Reproduction Prohibited”—Schnee’s profile looked terribly sad.

“But y’know, I’m doin’ this is for a specific kind o’ revenge and reconciliation. It might kill me, and there ain’t no goin’ back, but I figure if that’s the price I pay, it’s worth payin’.”

Schnee’s words hinted at a past that she wasn’t yet ready to reveal to me. Perhaps it was more accurate to say that her instincts as a professional had told her that merely teasing at it would lodge the question in my brain, lingering at the edge of my peripheral vision. Even as she lost herself in her own memories, she still managed to probe at my own sentimentality too.

At any rate, I was a fan of this city in my own way too. I would see this whole scheme to the end.

“By the way,” she said, “how’s your arm doin’?”

“Kaya said I’ll be back in one piece in three days. In the meantime, it hurts like nothing else.”

Thanks to all the germs for nasty little potion ideas I’d sown in her mind, Kaya had cottoned onto the fact that my own mana pool wasn’t insignificant, and so she’d cooked up a special potion that would essentially force my body to heal itself. However, it was a risky brew—one she wouldn’t trust most folk to handle. If your average Joe were to use it, they could die from mana depletion. Therefore, out of the whole Fellowship, it was reserved for Kaya and I. We kept a tight lid on it, as we knew that if word got out about this “miraculous three-day cure-all,” no one in the Fellowship would have another moment’s peace from the crowds of prospective buyers. We didn’t need that kind of heat on us.

And so thanks to her, despite the gruesome appearance of my injury, I was due back in battle before all too long.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to smoke?”

“It’s okay, I’ve not actually put any leaves inside. Just keeping my mouth occupied, really.”

I had been holding my pipe in my mouth in the hopes it would occupy my attention and placebo effect my way to feeling better, but it didn’t work without any smoke. I wished I could at least light up some calming herbs, if I couldn’t resort to painkillers...

“Won’t do no good if you don’t relax and get better.”

“I know. My arm is my livelihood. I’ll stay put for three days to keep it.”

“We’re gonna need your help, so ya better steel yer nerves while ya can.”

I myself had laid similar harsh realities on my own injured Fellows. I didn’t mind taking what I dished out. After all the beatings I gave the rookies on top of sending them out into battle, it wouldn’t be cool if their leader started bawling due to a silly broken bone.

“At this rate I think I can narrow our targets down to five locations,” she said. “If things all go to plan, then I can get that to three—and I’ve got two just about locked in.”

“That would be amazing. An adventurer needs a destination, after all.”

As a renowned strategist whose name and circumstances escaped me at the moment once put it, an ordinary person at hand was a thousand times more useful than an absent hero. I couldn’t even recall if they were from this world or my last, but the fact of the matter was that their words dripped with truth.

It didn’t matter how strong you were; if you had nowhere to direct your skills, then you were naught better than a scarecrow. No end of adventures could end up falling into your lap. You needed the discernment to tell the ones that’d leave you tilting at windmills apart from the real deal.

I was well and truly grateful for the ample wisdom of so many past leaderly types available to fall back on.

“That manager’s really somethin’, huh?” Schnee went on. “She had way more dirt to dish than I woulda guessed.”

To be honest, this time around I did feel like I’d become a cheap adventure hook dangled by the GM in front of Mister Fidelio to spur him into moving things forward, but it beat not having an adventure at all. There were tons of GMs who resorted to painstaking prep just to flesh out NPCs who were only tasked with giving the real hero a little push, like me.

“Anyhoo, if I get some juicy tax records, then I oughta save a good half day.”

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Now, now, Erich... You can’t ride a horse one-handed, can ya?”

While I was idling in my thoughts, she said something that made my ears prick up. A good half day? Save? From what?

“And if all goes swimmingly, then I’ll be able to get this wrapped up in a good day and a half! If I’m bein’ honest, I’d go myself and have a look-see, but I’m just about tied down. But if we get the list down to less than five candidates, then that’ll make moppin’ up go real quick.”

“W-Wait, a day and a half to narrow the list down? Hold on... You’re saying this other work needs to be finished in that time?”

“Exactamundo, Erich! If they get the slip and hide away, that won’t be swell, now will it? While I’m doin’ my readin’, y’all will get your preparations done and get ready to leave within the day. Otherwise it’ll be too late.”

Yes, it was true that we had quashed a whole swathe of bases in a day, but the enemy’s scope was huge. There were bound to be runaways and they must have had their own way of passing word along when they were in a tight spot. There must have been those who had jumped ship, having realized that the hammer was coming down in Marsheim. We had attempted to limit this chance as much as possible with our quick and focused raid, but even a perfect plan is only perfect in theory.

Was Schnee really insinuating that we had to go out and start running around again to snag people involved with Kykeon production? Seriously? I had envisaged today being a long-distance race, sure, but was Schnee really saying that this was a marathon for everyone involved?

“We could probably get one squad to crush two or three spots if they’re nearby... It might be hard if you’re only movin’ as a group of five, but you can take turns fightin’, no?”

“H-Hold on, Schnee...”

“We gotta ask the manager to prepare some horses and a carriage... This is gonna be a big little trip!”

I tried to stop her monologuing, but suddenly that fatigue I had been so craving earlier washed over me, and I couldn’t even reach out my hand. My fever must have finally hit—flipping the off switch on my body to prevent me from doing anything too unruly.

“Hmm... I reckon odds are good Diablo’s runners are gonna be workin’ on zero sleep, movin’ their evidence all day, but does that really change my figurin’? Aha, but they’re a big org. They’ll be in trouble if they use their thaumograms now. So, yup, guess we gotta get boots on the ground ASAP.”

Nooo... A terrifying strategy with a punishing itinerary was coming together before my very eyes! I knew that we didn’t have a choice and letting people slip through the cracks would cause headaches down the line, but I could already tell that the Fellowship was going to kvetch up a storm when I broke the news to them!

I wanted to ask Schnee to afford me a moment’s consideration as she assembled her plan, but I felt my eyelids closing. Her voice transformed into distant alarm bells.

I couldn’t head out as I was, so I would have to rely on my clan. Our little celebration tonight would be their last break for a while. I expected that we’d be pulling one or two all-nighters to boot. I decided that it would be better for my health to give the orders (as much as it pained me to do) from the safety of my bed.

I had no choice but to consider the delicate balance that was required of my position. I couldn’t be too hasty and I couldn’t be too caught up in wanting to be there all the time, or things from here on out wouldn’t be any fun. I needed to curb my impatience and grit through this brutal collective deadline.

But all the same, our clan was full of good kids. If it was for justice—and if Lady Maxine footed the majority of the bills—they wouldn’t say no.

They would probably moan about me behind my back, but as long as they got the job done, I could deal...

[Tips] Hit points simply illustrate your proximity to being rendered out of action. Zero HP doesn’t necessarily equal death. Should an emergency call for it, it’s possible to suppress one’s usual instincts and force yourself to push on.

“Now that’s not good...”

The assassin was high up in the air, one of her legs hooked onto a spire and the other resting lower down, as she stared out at the tent grounds. The problem? They weren’t burning, there wasn’t all-out chaos—the view seemed positively peaceful.

Thanks to Zwei’s heartfelt pleading, the adventurers had decided to throw out their plan to storm the community. At this moment, the Exilrat were presenting the evil handiwork of Drei and Sieben for the adventurers to deal with.

A number of agents had been dispatched in the case of an emergency, but at this stage in the game it was highly doubtful that these Exilrat adventurers would even want to lay down their lives all for the sake of stirring up chaos. Those fools who had been caught up in the assassins’ client’s plot would never see their dreams of revenge upon the world fulfilled. All they would receive for their efforts was being put to justice by those they’d once called their fellows.

“Tch... This is exactly why I told them not to bother using these outlanders...”

With the situation as it was now, there was no hope of a sudden spark to ignite the flames of war. It was too far gone. Not even their undercover agents—workers and intel, rendered useless—could make a meaningful move now. The tent grounds were a settling ground for those who had fled from their homes. Those people that put their lives on the line should have known that engineering long-term gain at potentially tremendous short-term cost would be beyond the pale to most among their number.

“This puts using our thaumograms out of the question too... Now that they’ve got the slimes moving in the sewers, we have to assume they have contingencies in place against our magical assets...”

All the same, they would have made good cinders to set Marsheim alight. As Beatrix released her grip, she thought it was a shame that these pieces hadn’t been put to better use.

Gravity took hold. The distance between this steeple atop the city’s outer wall and the hard ground was about one block—easily enough to reduce any mensch into a smear on the pavement.

But Beatrix had the gift of magic. The sun was slowly setting, and as she fell into the steeple’s shadow, her body vanished, like a diver swallowed up by the water. In the next instant, she reappeared in the shadow of a tree outside the walls.

Beatrix didn’t know the exact workings of this particular formula. After all, she was a mage, not a magus. A good half of her spells she knew by feeling alone, a remarkable talent that she was unable to put into words. Her magic caused the shadows of this world to behave like water, defying all laws of physics to lend them depth and permeability. Having safely emerged from her shadowy portal, Beatrix checked to make sure nothing had been lost in transit before heading to the rendezvous point.

The problem with this unique method was that if she dropped anything while in the shadow realm, it would be gone for good. For some reason, anything that she had affixed to her person would travel safely through, yet everything else—including other passengers—could not be taken with her. This was something she had proved through practice. She had once attempted to enter the shadows with a rat that she had scrounged up, but her instincts told her: Enter with this rat and it will die. She never attempted to directly weaponize her shadows.

All the same, it was an incredible boon to be able to transport just herself to any shadow within her vision. Various checks still made it hard to sneak in and out of towns without being noticed—Beatrix made a habit of wearing the clothes of a noble on vacation to ward off unwanted attention—but it proved astoundingly useful in infiltrating enemy bases.

“B-Bea... Wel’ome ’ack. ’Ow was it?”

“No good. Spineless fools... They retreated to their tents without even crossing a single blade. Well...I suppose that is no surprise when Saint Fidelio is leading the charge. Unfortunately for us, the thaumogram is off-limits.”

The rendezvous point was a short distance away from Marsheim. There, Lepsia was tending to two horses they had stolen from the guard after their retreat from the city. Her injuries from this morning hadn’t had time to heal, so she had been stationed here to look after them.

“Can we re’rieve it?”

“No. The self-deconstruct mechanism should be sufficient. Dammit... This is exactly why I prefer not to resort to such flashy gadgets...”

A number of thaumograms had been installed in other locations aside from the tent grounds, but there was only one mana crystal bearing the coordinates for communication. Even if a professional were to disassemble it, it was designed to constantly wipe its mana traces, barring anyone from tracking them. Yet Beatrix’s discontent came from the fact that it wasn’t absolute—it couldn’t completely erase its signature.

Beatrix’s modus operandi was to never use anything she couldn’t perfectly dispose of, even if she were ordered to. She had once been a perfectionist who didn’t even allow so much as a single hair to remain at the crime scene. Now she was expected to just leave behind huge magic tools? The fact that it took multiple people just to carry them meant they were already a huge liability. Beatrix found it difficult to trust a self-destruct mechanism made to anyone else’s specifications.

“Wh-Wha’ ’o we ’o?” Lepsia said. “We ’an’t co’unica’e with ’em...”

“Yes, and the messengers in the city will be useless before long,” Beatrix replied. “We’ll have to go with our own two feet. However...”

If she weren’t before one of her subordinates, Beatrix would be gnawing at her nails in anxiety right now.

Her client was sloppy, slow to act, and wouldn’t listen to any admonishment, but one thing that they could do was disappear quickly if the alert was sounded. She had already told them that their bases in Marsheim would be in danger unless they took Goldilock Erich’s head, and so it was doubtful that they’d retreated to any bolthole of theirs nearby.

As for her client’s client, they were too far to be moved into action. They worked behind the shield of the depth and breadth of their network—the more impenetrable, the better protected they were—but this meant with commands coming from a satellite state, it would take at least a week for information to pass in or out of their system. Worse still, essentially random factors of pure luck and their precise physical position could alter the speed at which the necessary information found its way to them, for better or for worse—if they were absent on other business, Beatrix and company were on their own.

“What would be our optimal next move?” Beatrix said to herself. “Do we focus on bringing the whole organization up to speed, and send people to each location, or should we focus on protecting our most vital assets? Or...”

Beatrix started pacing as she muttered, attempting to organize her thoughts, when she stepped on something unexpected. It was a pair of six-sided dice. There was a leather bag that had fallen near the horses. It must have fallen out during packing.

“Primanne... Your stress is making you sloppy,” Beatrix muttered, despite the kaggen’s absence. “I may be in charge of cleaning up after the rest of us, but she should really keep an eye on her little trinkets.”

Carved from buffalo bone, the dice had a unique sheen and texture—a personal treasure of Primanne’s. It was said that a miracle imbued in them guaranteed freedom from the strings of fate themselves. No matter what tricks were played, what underhanded measures were put into action, even if the person was protected by an uncanny level of luck, the dice would ignore everything and function fairly. The number they showed was guaranteed to be accurate in this plane of reality.

“I tell her to keep the gambling to a minimum, but to be honest for a moment, I feel like the one making wagers now...”

It went without saying that Primanne owned the set out of a fondness for games of chance. Kaggen held their arms up close to their chests when relaxing. It was a posture that looked like prayer, and in truth they were a race that held fast to their superstitions. Primanne often rolled dice to divine portents of weal or woe with each new job—if the roll was bad, more careful preparations were needed. Beatrix looked at her ally’s fond possession and smiled.

“Odds, and I’ll raise the alarm... Evens...yes, I’ll buy time by heading to the biggest warehouse.”

Beatrix shook the dice in her hand. The quiet clack and rattle soothed her inflamed mind.

Her train of thought touched on the possibility of simply abandoning this accursed job. It was a viable option. Perhaps three options was better anyway. Letting the dice choose between two options felt like a waste of the full range of results; three felt a bit more well-rounded.

This job was as good as over anyway. She had made the optimal choice at each juncture, but in the end the board was still full of hostile pieces closing in, barely winnowed down at all. A coolheaded player would concede here and now before resting while they considered the next game.

But Beatrix’s vengeance was not yet complete. If she chose to abandon this job without even achieving the One Cup Clan’s goal, then how could she dare face her deceased allies?

Perishing in battle would be far preferable to running away and being pursued. Even if her client was a poor leader, their client was particularly crafty. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to eliminate five adventurers-turned-assassins who had outlived their purpose. Those who bore inconvenient knowledge were not permitted the luxury of peace or rest. Such were the rules of this world.

“What’s wro’g, Bea?”

“It’s nothing. Let us hurry on; time is short.”

Beatrix readied her left hand to catch the dice as she loosed them from her right. She chuckled quietly. It seemed that her fate wasn’t to force a checkmate nor to run away, but to attempt the most optimal plan once again.

[Tips] There are spells and enchantments that allow people to sever themselves from fate in one way or another, whether they permit the user to escape the reach of divine meddlers like the God of Cycles or slip past the bounds of the flow of a place’s mana. Yet the world is an ironic place; these methods are handed down by the very divine arbiters of fate Themselves.