Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 9.1 - Chapter 3

Climax

Climax

Once you’ve come this far, all that’s left is to leave the rest to the roll of the dice.

From the realm of myth to the fairground, you just couldn’t beat a good shell game if you were looking to get away with something egregious. This wasn’t limited to dodgy night stalls, where underhanded play was expected; it was also a hugely viable method in subterfuge.

I had seen many GMs play at our instincts and assumptions, leading us to chase after the obvious threat, the location that seemed fishy, the product that seemed dangerous to anyone and everyone. Hell, I had run that con plenty myself when I was the one behind the screen.

I had been the one egging players on to chase after the suspicious-looking minister in settings where players were fighting to avert a coup; I had sowed the seeds of discord among my players and convinced them to steal an all too precious artifact, mysteriously pristine amid ancient ruins.

Each and every time, my friends had told me that I was messed up, but I didn’t regret it in the least. It made for a better story.

“Man, I can’t believe we turned up at the right place just like that...” I muttered.

Still, when you were the one actually trying to find the needle in a haystack, and not merely playing someone who was, it was entirely justifiable to beg the powers that be to maybe show a little mercy. Luckily for us, things were going to plan.

Through my telescope, I caught sight of blackened wheat ears swaying in the wind. The whole field was covered in wheat blight, painting a picture that was far from the Harvest Goddess’s usual golden garb. It felt inauspicious. It must have taken a real rotten heart to force average countryfolk to tend to such a foul-looking crop.

It hadn’t yet been harvested because this area was in the north of Ende Erde, where the wind bit a little deeper, a little crueler. The colder weather meant that farmers in this region were only getting to their harvesting now, later than their southern countrymen. The forests surrounding the field functioned as a bit of a windbreak, but I imagined that also served to limit the view. This field must originally have been plowed to create a supply of wheat that could slip under the tax collectors’ radar.

Most of the fields we had passed already had been cleanly harvested, so if we had been a mere few days later we would have had to play detective, crawling on the ground to see if any fallen chaff gave the game away.

Schnee had brought in a massive win by narrowing the number of possible locations to three just looking at the raw data and documents.

If I had been running this campaign, I would have probably dedicated a good one or two episodes to the diseased wheat hunt, but this campaign was already pretty long-form, so I was glad to have skipped a few steps. We really had our allied spymaster to thank for all our smooth sailing through this adventure path.

One drawback of the table was that choosing the expedited route meant a reduced XP payout. Going straight to the boss in the shortest time possible often led you to biting the dust just as quickly, resulting in a long night drawing up a fresh character sheet.

“They’re not showing much care in the harvesting, it seems,” I said.

“I suppose that’s proof enough that they aren’t growing it to be eaten,” Margit replied. “You can tell they’re being forced into this. This is what it looks like when the peasantry labors strictly for their lord’s profits.”

The farmers were hacking away at the blackened wheat, but while you usually left the stalk up to a mench’s shin height—you needed to mulch the soil for the next year if you wanted better gains—these folk were cutting right at the base. That being said, they were growing rye, so it might not have been too huge a problem. Rye was a hardy crop which grew even on poor soil. It was worth remembering that it had only been planted for the ergot on its ears anyway. I wondered if they had done anything special before planting—whether they’d resorted to magical means, or selective breeding, or treating the soil.

“It looks like they have no plans of drying the wheat either,” Margit continued. “I think it might be fair to say that they truly are only in this for the wheat blight.”

“Yeah, makes sense. You don’t need to waste time drying the crop out in the sun if all you want is the fungus growing on it.”

Usually farmers dried their crop immediately after harvesting. Here in the Empire, they bundled up their wheat into sheaves and placed them into stooks to dry. When the moisture had been sufficiently removed and the crop was a beautiful golden color, then it would be time for threshing.

All across the cantons, you could expect to witness the beautiful sight of rows of stooks drying their golden load. Yet today there was no such scene to be found.

Without even participating in the defining image of the season, the wheat was bundled up and loaded into a carriage, which carted it all away when it could carry no more.

Depending on the region, you could even see rings of stooks decorating low-lying hills with decent wind flow. But here the hills were bare. We had done a bit of research before coming and I imagined that on the other side of that knoll lay the river that supplied their factory with water. Even if they were decent farmers, humidity was higher near rivers, so they wouldn’t be drying their wheat there anyway.

“The carriage’s set off. Let’s tail them,” I said. “To be quite honest, I didn’t think it’d only take a day to find them.”

“They probably didn’t expect us to come out this far,” Margit replied.

We had followed our leads to Rhine’s deepest backcountry, even by Ende Erde or the southern periphery’s standards. It was a truly remote place; you could see a few houses across the border in the neighboring satellite state from here. This developing canton was so out of the way that I was unsure if its name even appeared on any maps. To top it off, it was ruled by a local lord magistrate, making it the perfect place to go about your business without the Empire watching over your shoulder.

After a day and a half of rest, I boarded my beloved horse with care for my still-broken arm and set off. We didn’t have the time for the luxuries of preparation and backup, and so we’d hurried here with no regard for budget or profit and managed to pull it off in a mere five days. In a usual case, it would have taken two weeks to a month, but this was one of the most important manufacturing bases from Schnee’s research.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t managed to narrow it down to just the one.

According to our informant, Lady Maxine had given her beloved little brother a good smack—I took it figuratively then, but maybe she was being literal—and managed to rustle up tax management files and logs which detailed the comings and goings of the caravans associated with Kykeon smuggling. What she found was definite proof that Diablo hadn’t centralized their production.

It was a smart move. Even if one factory was ratted out, they could play it safe and make sure no one sniffed out the other bases of operation. This would mean that they could continue the production of Kykeon unabated, even if it limited their productive capacity. The same logic applied if a storm or some other unexpected wrinkle rendered one of them inactive.

In the case that an adventurer found one of the factories, it was highly unlikely that they could clean up all the other factories too. Even if they knew the locations of the others, the communication delay would buy time for the enemy to flee. This also held true if an army was raised to take them down. It would be no problem at all for them to pack up and leave before the army had even reached the nearest hill. These countermeasures had made Diablo that much more slippery.

Unfortunately for them, they hadn’t foreseen that the dream team of Marsheim’s top clans would come together to bring a swift end to every last point of production.

“Oh my, what a grand watermill they have,” Margit said in awe.

As the two of us sneakily followed the carriage, we were led to a river. It wasn’t too big, but it was too wide to leap over and most likely too deep to forge. Next to it was a rather fancy water wheel, spinning happily.

“The water runs below to power it,” I said. “Looks to be a stream type. Look, they haven’t added any modifications to the flow of water. I bet they chose this method because they wanted to get it up and running quickly. At any rate, it’s not Imperial standard.”

“Yes, now that you mention it, it doesn’t look much like the type from back home at all.”

We had our own waterwheel and adjoining building back in our beautiful home of Konigstuhl. However, unlike this one, ours was an overshot type; a man-made sluice built above it caused the runoff to power it. Such alterations were quite the feat to design and build, but they made rivers even with slow flows capable of producing energy. Thus, these were the most common type found in the Empire.

Powerful waterwheels like the type seen here could thresh the wheat, mill it, and could even irrigate the water. However, that depended on the energy supplied to it: if the river was calm, it wouldn’t provide sufficient power, and so these types of waterwheels had pretty much died out in the Empire.

It was looking pretty likely that whoever built this waterwheel wasn’t of Rhinian birth. Most likely a local lord had outsourced it to someone without Imperial affiliation.

“Erich, look,” Margit said. “A threshing machine.”

“Wow, looks like our folk really have deep pockets. Back in Konigstuhl the village head tried to buy one of those but gave up as it was too expensive. It’s the latest model. Look, it even has a winnowing machine.”

The adjoining building was minimally designed—just a roof over a single room. We could see inside, where the thresher churned away. Powered by the waterwheel’s kinetic energy, the thresher had several pipes for wheat intake; within the device, the wheat grain was sorted from the stems. It was a revolutionary machine that laughed in the face of the past. Only five centuries ago people had to separate the stems manually using flails.

Next to it was the winnower, an L-shaped container that was also powered by the waterwheel. Once the threshed wheat entered this, a ventilator and sieves would toss the grain to remove the husks and filter out impurities. It was an incredible invention that made what was once a lengthy manual process achievable in mere moments.

Both of these inventions had done wonders for the Empire’s agricultural output while simultaneously taking on much of the load of farm laborers. They were revolutionizing the landscape, allowing more and more Rhinians to devote their time and energies to other fields. The stories said they were originally drawn up by the Emperor of Creation, who wished to liberate his soldiers from the responsibilities of serfdom.

The fact that we were seeing the most recent results of centuries of work by the smithing union—aiming for ever more efficiency, ever smaller designs—told me that there were at least a few Imperial nobles hiding in the shadow of this whole affair.

As I mentioned before, this whole assembly used the latest technology. It was so vastly expensive that the village head back in Konigstuhl had abandoned all hope of affording one. The communal waterwheel back home had been bought over sixty years ago, and I remember the blacksmith saying that it was reaching its limits, urging the village head to buy a new one.

That was how weird it was for such an incredibly valuable piece of kit to be out here in the middle of nowhere.

In monetary terms, it would set you back thirty drachmae just to buy one of these puppies, never mind the labor costs required to get it up and running. Only magistrates or village heads that valued profit, as opposed to improving their farmers’ quality of life, would invest in one of them. This canton hadn’t even finished developing—this should have been far lower on their list of priorities.

I knew in my head that the enemy was rich, but this was a bit of a surprise. I knew that there were heaps of people who stood to make a quick profit from internal issues in the Empire, but just how big was Diablo?

“Aha... And we’ve caught them at a good time. They’re shipping off the threshed stuff. Margit, would you mind tracking them?”

“Why of course. You know how to get in touch if anything happens.”

My beautiful scout jangled one of the earrings of the pair we had split. It was equipped with an arachne thread, so fine that it was impossible to see, to allow us to communicate over long distances without so much as a drop of mana being detected.

“I’ll go report back to the others. You let me know when you find their base. I think we’ll be moving in pretty much as soon as you do. Take care out there.”

“Of course I shall. None will step in your shadow, I promise you that.”

Margit vanished as if dissipating into thin air, and soon I couldn’t even sense her presence anymore. I could practically see the manga sound effects illustrating her finely honed ability to fade from sight. She’d probably gotten so good at masking her presence thanks to all of the hard undercover work we’d gone through during this whole long slog.

I knew the workings of her seemingly instantaneous ability to vanish. She led me to focus my attention on something else, just for a moment, and used that opportunity to slip into my blind spot before hurrying away. It was an incredible technique, bordering on teleportation. I honestly couldn’t believe someone could do that purely with their own physical prowess.

It would soon be time for me to play my part. I’d put aside acquiring Absolute Charisma for just a bit longer, spending some of my experience on more martial assets instead.

Having left scouting ahead to our expert, I headed to our makeshift camp a little ways off from the road. We had set up base in an old graveyard. It was a desolate bit of land. The graves and crypt had been so worn down by the elements that it was impossible to parse their original shapes. No one had set foot here in a long time. This land probably belonged to a local lord from long ago, as opposed to anyone from the developing canton.

It was all well and good assuming that no one would cross paths with us out here, but did she really have to be puffing out smoke with all the ease in the world?

“Oh... Welcome back... And...?”

Our camp didn’t have any people-warding barriers. We’d made do with some simple camouflage. In the corner of the graveyard was a huddle of a few dozen adventurers; around half were from the Fellowship, with the rest being true-blue Baldur Clan folk.

Naturally their leader had come along. Clad in an obsidian-black cloak adorned with numerous fetishes, I could tell that she was primed for a fight. When we had found out that this was the biggest factory of the three and most likely where Kykeon’s inventor had set up shop, she had said that she would be going no matter what.

Similarly to the raid in Marsheim, Clan Laurentius, the Heilbronn Familie, the saint’s party, and some adventurers under Lady Maxine’s thumb had been organized into squads and dispatched to the other factories. If things were all going to schedule, then they would all probably have just about finished up. We had gone the farthest today, and so would be cleaning up shop a few beats behind the rest. The other factories had been a lot closer to Marsheim, but everyone else had been put on standby while we made our journey out here—it had been decided that we should all commence the attack on the same day to make sure we secured a win against Diablo.

“We found where they were growing the diseased wheat. We saw them harvesting it, but it didn’t seem like they were particularly pressed to finish the job quickly. They were threshing the wheat with a similar laxness,” I said.

“It took a day and a half to rat them out and another five to bring our forces here... I find it strange that they’ve heard nothing of the raids in Marsheim...no?”

“Agreed. However, I can say that I didn’t see them acting like they were trying to cover their tracks. Just yet, at least.”

“Are they confident, or just stupid? No matter... I don’t mind...if it means I can have a few words with the fool that churns out their dreck...”

Nanna was usually the picture of sloth, slumped on her sofa and puffing on her hookah languidly, but today her posture and her attitude seemed more put together. Today she wasn’t even sucking on her favorite water pipe. She had a rolled cigarette—widely despised in the noble community, as they were relatively convenient and devoid of any class—in a cigarette holder resting between her lips. At any rate, it had improved her mobility.

I didn’t know exactly what she was packing, but I imagined that she’d prepared one or two potent enchantments for combat and self-defense. Her water pipe had most likely been designed to project lethal force within the bounds of her manor in the event of an incursion; I was betting the cigarette holder was its equivalent for excursions into the field.

“Oy, Erich! What’s the plan for battle prep? We gonna need a day or two to scout stuff out or what?”

While I was lost in thought, Siegfried came out of one of our hidden carriages, which had been covered in a net which camouflaged it among the trees and leaves. He was wearing cloth armor—sufficient in the event of an ambush, and comfortably unthreatening to passersby on the road. It wasn’t the wisest move to be wearing your heavy armor on long excursions. With everyone’s gear packed away so that we could pretend we were just your average merchant caravan, it would take a little while for everyone to ready up.

“Thing is, I dunno if we got lucky or if our enemy have horrid luck, but we found the field already. Saw them right as they were harvesting,” I replied.

“You serious? Like just now just now? Man, they’re really draggin’ their feet, eh?”

Siegfried was a fellow former farm boy and just as surprised as I was by their harvest delays. There wasn’t much point cursing them—it was this slipup that had allowed us to spot them and turn up their base without much effort. I enjoyed putting in the hard work for decent results, but I also didn’t like dragging matters out. If fate had saved us some time, then I wasn’t going to complain.

“Do they know what it is they’re shiftin’?” he asked.

“Didn’t look like it,” I replied. “Seemed to me like they were harvesting this stuff with no idea what it was all for. They literally threshed it without treating it at all. Wheat blight’s caused by a fungus, so it’s bad to inhale the particles, but still, they didn’t do anything special.”

There were some toxins that were harmless if inhaled, but unfortunately ergot particles still took a toll along those channels. These folks were working in awful conditions. Whoever was pulling the strings evidently didn’t care if their labor force got sick further down the line.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “They had a pretty nice waterwheel. And the latest threshing and winnowing machines.”

“They did? Man, these crooks’re makin’ me jealous. We had a waterwheel and some machinery, yeah, but they barred any tenant farmers from even touchin’ them.”

“Mm-hmm, we had a winnowing machine too. It was an old thing—not really that efficient. Even with two sieves, a lot of chaff got mixed in. We had a lot of folk just ignoring it, sieving their wheat by hand to get better stuff.”

“Hm? Boss, Big Bro, you both had waterwheels in your cantons? Lucky you...”

Etan was at work fixing up the camouflage on the carriage, but as soon as he heard us talking about our old rural lives, he joined in. Most of our Fellows were ex-farmers and before long a discussion tinged with bitterness started about who was and wasn’t allowed to use the local waterwheel, if they were even lucky to have one.

In most cases, independent farmers provided the funds to build waterwheels in their cantons, and so they were blessed with the privileges of using it. Tenant farmers and serfs didn’t have such luxuries on their land. Most of our Fellows were airing their complaints.

“Those Diablo bastards... Usin’ somethin’ so precious and so useful to make drugs? Makes me sick,” Etan said.

“You said it,” Martyn added. “My family weren’t allowed to use our waterwheel. There were times I spent the whole day using a flail to thresh the grain... Makes my arm hurt just thinking about it.”

Hearing my Fellows air their complaints from yesteryear, I realized that I had been pretty fortunate. We had our own family scythe for harvesting work, and the canton had our own waterwheel, even if it was a bit worn out. Even if care was needed from start to finish, on a physical level, it required far less effort than what everyone else was describing. Not only that, an ancestor of ours had bought a millstone long ago, which was now just collecting dust in storage. We weren’t particularly wealthy, but I realized we didn’t have it all bad.

Wow, I thought, to think that a waterwheel can change one’s life this much.

“I hate to interrupt your musings on farmwork...but were they milling the wheat...?” Nanna asked.

“Huh? Oh, no, they weren’t. They didn’t have a mill.”

Now that she said it, I was surprised that they hadn’t hooked up a mill directly to the waterwheel. It too was a splendid feat of engineering. Millstones took a lot of man power to turn, so it would have made sense for them to have used the waterwheel for that too. Not only that, they didn’t even have a stamp mill—a simpler but slower piece of kit. All they could do in that building was thresh the grain.

Of course, waterwheels couldn’t power every machine you hooked up to it ad infinitum, so it wasn’t all too strange to not have every piece of necessary equipment. It made sense for the most time-consuming part, the threshing, to be done by machine, leaving sorting to be done by hand and the milling to the livestock.

A steady breeze blew in. It was possible that they ground the wheat in a windmill elsewhere. Who knew? It wouldn’t have been too odd for them to have divvied up the machinery across individual buildings and power sources to make the waterwheel perform at maximum efficiency.

“Is that right...” Nanna replied. “Then I would imagine they’re either doing that at quite the distance or extremely nearby...”

“Is milling such an important process?” I said.

“It irks me to say this...but even though I know the composite ingredients, I do not know what processes they use to make it... But if they grind it into flour, then it’ll go bad more quickly, won’t it?”

I got what she was hinting at. Grains and beans started to go off much more quickly once they’d been powdered, so it was a common practice to leave the milling until the latest possible stage in order to preserve as much of your crop as you could. This world didn’t have vacuum packaging or oxygen absorbers to keep food fresh, after all. Milling something meant it would be used imminently—otherwise the bugs or bacteria would get to it first.

Taking this into consideration, the two possible conclusions that could be drawn were that they didn’t need to mill it to make Kykeon, or if it did need to be milled, then the wheat needed to be transported quite the distance first.

This lot were producing something that wasn’t illegal quite yet, but would be labeled contraband on the horizon. It made sense for them to want to store it at a safe distance from where it was being grown.

“No amount of intel will give the answers we seek... A normal person wouldn’t usually think to be so careful...but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that they may hit upon a perfect countermeasure... In some cases at least...”

With extra emphasis on her last few words, Nanna let out a plume of smoke.

I merely hoped for our own sakes that our enemy wasn’t quite that careful.

As I was lost in thought, I heard a little tap come from my earring. We had decided on a little code to verify if it was safe to engage in communication. The person calling would tap once and the receiver would tap back twice to indicate it was safe to talk. It took a lot of tweaking to make sure the sudden sound out of the blue wouldn’t break my concentration during a battle.

“Eszett, do you copy?” came Margit’s voice.

“Loud and clear. You’re closer than I would’ve thought, Ida,” I spoke.

The Voice Transfer formula cast Margit’s voice into my ear with no trace of noise. I’d walked back here with careful steps to make sure I didn’t accidentally break our literal thread of communication, but by the quality of her voice and the requisite mana, it seemed like she wasn’t too far.

“You’re still doin’ that fake name stuff?” my comrade said.

“As long as we’re out on a job and using this tool to communicate, then yeah. You never know who might be listening in.”

Siegfried’s disgusted expression was owed entirely to his own inability to remember his codename. Margit and I had raked him over the coals enough times that it seemed the whole undercover thing brought with it some minor trauma.

I wasn’t wrong, though. Wherever you might go and whatever you might say, your name was valuable intel. Even the smallest scraps of conversation could be leveraged to derail one’s plans, and so I wanted him and everyone involved to take the proper care. I wouldn’t deny that it made me feel like a super cool tier one operator, but I had practical reasons too. You feel me?

“So try and get used to it,” I went on. “What’s your codename for today?”

“Uhh... Umm... I’m...Martha? Right?” Sieg said.

“Bingo. Right, sorry for the hold up, Ida.”

“No worries, Eszett,” Margit replied. “Could you return to our client?”

Our “client” was referring to Nanna. I didn’t want her carpooling in on our communication, so we treated her as a third party. No codename, just the “client.”

I headed over to her, and Margit asked me to open the map she had made with our camp as its central point.

“If we set your location as zero, then I’m at a point 314 degrees north, just under ten miles out. I’ve spotted a building near a riverbank that I expect is their final destination.”

“Ten miles? That’s quite the distance,” I said.

“There was decent tree cover, so I was able to head in a relatively straight line, but the carriage was going at quite the clip. I was worried I would lose sight of them.”

Margit said that, but she didn’t sound out of breath. I should never have expected any less of her. She had probably hidden her presence even as she leaped from branch to branch to stay on their trail.

“However, I cannot approach any closer,” she said.

“You can’t? Are they well guarded?”

“Not with actual guards. They’ve got a ward up. I have a bad feeling.”

Margit’s “bad feeling” wasn’t just her gut talking—her five senses were processing everything around her, and although she didn’t know what exactly was wrong, she had a visceral intuition that something was off. It was safe to assume that there was someone using nonmagical means to survey a wide area. In other words, we’d found our mark. If we were lucky, then I could initiate some payback for my left arm.

“Roger that. Don’t do anything unnecessary, got it?”

As I scribbled on the map with the aid of a compass, I worked out the general location of the building Margit had found. I compared our drawing with the map we’d been provided before the mission. The destination was roughly sixteen kilometers away, or twenty if we followed a local road not displayed on the map.

The factory must have been at a different river from the one that supplied power to the waterwheel. I surmised that it would most likely be a river that had a strong flow but variable depth, rendering it unfit for a waterwheel. Looking at the location, it seemed to fit their requirements.

“I have a question for our client,” Margit said. “The factory should have a chimney, correct?”

“That’s right...” Nanna said after I relayed the message. “There is probably some kind of gaseous waste...so a chimney would be required...”

“Right... They do have a number of short chimneys, but...none of them are emitting any smoke.”

Nanna caught herself as she prepared to take a puff of her cigarette. After gnawing on the holder in a distinctly impolite manner, she took a deep drag and held the smoke in. She remained silent for a good time. In the space of twenty of my own breaths, the cigarette smoke roiled in her lungs.

“Um... Eszett? Is something the matter?”

“She’s pondering something,” I said.

After ten more breaths, Margit was concerned and asked me to get her to hurry up, but I told her we needed to let Nanna finish whatever train of thought she was entertaining.

All the same, she had some lung capacity. Not many people could hold smoke in their lungs for this long without coughing. A pipe was one of the best ways of imbibing in a magical concoction, but your average person would probably have fainted from oxygen deprivation by now.

Just as I made a mental note to tap her on the shoulder if she didn’t move in the next ten breaths, Nanna finally let out a long, long puff of smoke.

“Is there...a foul smell?” she said.

“Um, it smells normal to me,” Margit replied. “Of trees and earth. Maybe they’re storing some manure somewhere around here—there’s a faint fecal odor. And the usual human smells on top of that.”

“Is that right?” Nanna said. “That’s good... Let’s prepare for our incursion...”

I was glad she had reached a conclusion after all that thinking, but I was a bit antsy for her to bring the rest of us up to speed.

“You see,” Nanna went on, “chimneys that don’t emit any smoke are most likely filtration devices... A plume of smoke would stand out too much, wouldn’t it...? They’ve employed a suite of formulae to break down their waste so that neither smoke nor particles are expelled from them...”

So that’s their little trick. Your average twenty-first century Earthling would probably be up in arms at how unfair it was that you could just magic up a zero-emissions factory, especially if they were from somewhere industrially productive enough to have to put up with smog.

The College’s own workshops and testing facilities were underground. The Krahenschanze was an incredibly important building, containing various office-related facilities, lecture halls—you name it—and so it was host to a whole network of top-tier purification systems. I had taken the mysterious network of testing facilities created deep underground thanks to the wonders of magic at face value, but now that I paid it a little more thought, subterranean life meant you had to budget around the valuable resource of air.

The College’s own research facilities housed a number of students who had a few screws loose, and so it was impossible to know what someone might cook up. It made perfect sense that you would need purification tools that would prevent any accidents from affecting neighboring rooms and causing excess loss of life.

Anyone would be pissed off if some idiot in a neighboring room brewed some toxic gas and caused a series of casualties to students who hadn’t learned how to apply permanent protective barriers. It wouldn’t just be an issue of responsibility and punishment; it would be a massive hole in the College’s safety protocols. Chaos would reign from roof to basement. It was a good thing they were so well prepared. If such an incident did occur, I was sure that the current emperor, a College alumnus in his own right, would give himself a rage-aneurysm.

“If they’ve got a regular number of guards and nothing appears out of the ordinary, then I imagine they’re running per their usual schedule,” Nanna said. “They’re a greedy lot, aren’t they... Trying to maximize their supply without even bothering to hide it or bail out...”

Nanna wasn’t sure whether they’d plagiarized their chimney technology or purchased it through illicit means, but no smoke was an indication that they were still working according to protocol. According to her predictions, the chimneys could be weaponized. If they wanted, they could pump aerosolized Kykeon out from those chimneys to cover the entire region in a cloud of poison and prevent anyone from approaching. Kykeon didn’t just affect humans. In gaseous form, it would affect any carbon-based life-form. It would be particularly harmful to any creature with a complex nervous system.

As long as the birds around Margit chirped and the rodents scuttled around looking for the bounty of autumn, we were still safe.

“We should surround them posthaste... Time is both an ally...and an enemy...” Nanna said.

“Understood,” I said. “You heard that right, people? I know we’ve only just settled in, but there’s ass to kick. Get your boots on.”

“Yes, Boss!” came the resounding reply.

It was really cool to hear all these voices come together in perfect harmony. My Fellows gave an impassioned howl before readying their equipment and weapons with a joyful vivacity. We were a team, and keeping everyone clad in matching uniforms looked good and did wonders for morale.

I had made use of a little reward from the manager for today’s mission and taken the plunge to invest in matching armor for everyone. Lady Maxine had paid us everything up front, amounting to around fifty drachmae for the clan, with the promise that everyone would receive an individual extra drachma as a personal reward for their hard work.

Time wasn’t on our side, so it was out of the question to commission a complete set from scratch. Instead I purchased a mass-produced set. All the same, it was leagues better than the motley assemblage of plunder that they had been using until now. I’d traded in everything we’d claimed from felled bandits for some extra wiggle room, and now all twenty Fellows here today had tempered leather armor with steel breastplates. Underneath was light but strong chain mail. Their hands and forearms were protected by high-quality gloves. They had boots and shin protectors fitted with leather straps. Their armor was a cut above your average mercenary’s.

Above all, this sense of cohesion would help not only their morale, but also their ability to work together and under me. Here was no finer example of our nature as social creatures. Upon the front of their breastplates was our clan emblem: a wolf with a sword clasped in its jaw. It alone helped toughen the bond of these comrades fighting as part of the same group. It was an age-old human trait to not only sense the strength and reliability of an army under a united cause, but also to feel a sense of pride at being part of it.

“It’s finally time to pay these crooks back a little for causing us and our city so much grief,” I said. “We’re not dealing with regular bandits today. Let’s fight the good fight and win this thing with class.”

The Baldur Clan were stationed here and a few spots elsewhere, up to their own business. They would be encircling the factory; Nanna would transmit her orders magically for this mission to keep them coordinated. While their number included some subordinate groups, the ones here with us in this camp were twenty of her best, including Uzu. However, from the looks on their faces I could tell that they were somewhat overwhelmed by the sense of cohesion we had.

As they should have. We were a band of battle-ready adventurers, bound by our desire to achieve great feats. We hadn’t come together like your regular clan in search of profit and upward mobility. At heart, we were aspirants to the way of life embodied in the heroes we admired.

“First tenet of the Fellowship of the Blade!”

“Ever enjoyable, ever heroic!” came the resounding response immediately after my own cry. The way their voices came together so clearly felt amazing.

“Second tenet!”

“Show your might through your own merit!”

Everyone in the Fellowship shared my ideals on adventuring. These Fellows had endured a brutal selection process and ruthless training, and now not a single coward stood among them. They knew what it meant to put your life on the line for the sake of battle and adventure.

I felt a rush of confidence seeing them like this. No number of disposable mooks could match up to the sense of reassurance I felt from my clan.

“Third tenet!”

“Cast no shame upon your blade!”

Morale was high, my clan was ready, and our preparations were complete. All that was left was to do our best with whatever the roll of the dice threw at us.

Everyone here today had joined with me in enduring the drudgery of this far overlong session. I was ready to reduce the cruel GM of this affair to tears. The God of Cycles and the God of Trials seemed to have Their own hands in this—or had at least found something compelling in this whole affair.

If Margit deemed it too dangerous to even get close, then I was almost certain that our assassin friends were lurking inside.

I wasn’t sure of the reasons why Beatrix and her band of assassins had tried to lay waste to Marsheim, or why they’d made two attempts on my life, but one thing I was dead certain about was that turnabout is fair play. She was in no position to complain about my commitment to retribution now. I was sure that they had some kind of tragic past pushing them to do this, but it could wait until I’d received my due. If they wanted me to listen to their backstory and explanations, then we could do that in the diner or ramen place after this was all finished. On the GM’s dime, obviously.

I had been on my horse for days with a broken arm that was slowly healing. It had hurt so much I’d vomited on the way. I’d tried to maintain my image and said I just needed a quick toilet break in the bushes, but the shame I’d felt puking my guts out from pain was impossible to put into words.

I would continue to keep an eye on the limits I’d put on myself, but this time there would be no trick I wouldn’t resort to.

“Very good!” I shouted. “To arms, my Fellows! We’ll not keep these villains waiting a moment longer for their just deserts!”

“YEAH!”

With a resounding cheer, we began our march. Our first goal was to encircle our destination and assess the situation from there. The scope of the affair had ballooned by now. There was almost no chance of us sneaking in there and bringing an end to this without a battle befitting the climax of this campaign.

I was no stranger to dirty tricks should the situation call for it, but at heart I was drawn to the orthodox solution, so long as it held up under scrutiny. I enjoyed those moments when a fellow player would say, “Hey, his stats aren’t normal,” or “Are you sure the dice values are correct?” but I never lost sight of the task at hand.

If the enemy saw we’d surrounded them and flew the white flag, then that would be great. But if they held fast, then we would take them in a fair fight and win. We would crush them before they had even a chance to dispose of any incriminating evidence.

We had the skill. We had the means. We had the will.

All right then, it’s time to see what the dice have in store for us...

[Tips] There are many clans in Marsheim that try to cultivate a sense of unity by emblazoning their emblem on their clothes or by giving their clan members matching equipment. However, the Fellowship of the Blade is the first clan in the city to have given each and every member a full set of matching gear.

“Hey! When did a lowly murderer like you get permission to—”

As the assassin strode down the corridor, each heavy-booted footfall reverberating through the room, a man tried to stop her. He was a mensch—judging by his facial features, born west of the Empire. He was clad in light armor; instead of a helmet, he wore a skull-like mask embedded with an antitoxin filter.

He had barred this woman—dressed for battle, looking off-kilter but strangely on point—for a simple reason. He had been ordered not to let anyone without permission pass him. Yet his attempt to stop Beatrix had ended in vain.

“Gwuck...?”

He had tried to bar the assassin’s way with his baton, but in the next moment found himself letting out the sort of squawk that came from a strangled chicken. Before he had even found time to blink, Beatrix had grabbed his throat and pinned him to the wall. If the wall hadn’t been behind him to receive the impact, he might have found his head dislocating from his shoulders from the hold, or if he had been unlucky, found himself with a snapped spine.

“Out of the way,” Beatrix said. “I am in a foul mood. I do not have the patience to manage my strength. Do not test me.”

A troubling sound issued from beneath the gloved hand that held the mensch aloft. In prior situations resembling this one, she would apply a bit more pressure to the carotid artery to drop her foe into unconsciousness. However, her bubbling rage right now left her unable to gauge her strength properly.

“And I’d appreciate you not calling me ‘murderer’ again, mutt,” she spat.

Beatrix almost considered ending the guard’s life then and there, but decided nothing decent would come of it. She removed her arm. He slid down to the floor, coughing and spluttering. The pressure of her hand must have injured the mensch’s throat, but she paid it no heed and walked past him.

When she reached the big door at the end, she kicked it open. Behind it were the stairs down into a basement. It was a large room with desks, chairs, and other pieces of equipment. Despite there being enough space for dozens of people, there were only a few down there. One of them was clad in esoteric priestly garments. The rest looked like your typical gaggle of mages.

Once this room housed dozens of workers, but now only this small handful of people remained. It was quite the pitiful sight.

Documents lay scattered on the desks. A pile of papers stood in front of a stove, as if someone had wanted to incinerate them but had run out of time. It was clear that the scene had been all but abandoned in a hurry. The smartest among them had removed every last trace of their presences.

The assassins had arrived here three days ago and had encouraged the ones working here to abandon their posts, claiming that it would at least buy them some time. And so they fled—those crooked devils that concocted Kykeon.

Yet for some reason or other, the least ideal situation was occurring: their client had decided to stay.

“What are you doing?” Beatrix said as she approached the mages. “Have you filled your head with so many curses that there’s no more room to take in what I’m saying? The adventurers will be here before long.”

Despite her protests, she was ignored.

Beatrix’s client had a gaunt, sallow face with a patchy beard, making his demeanor seem even shabbier than it was. The mage paid no attention to Beatrix as he rubbed the end of his quill on his forehead, muttering something incomprehensible. His dark brown hair was greasy, untouched even by a quick Clean spell. His once vibrant red cloak had been so soiled that it was now a reddish-brown. The evidence of his obsession with his research was evident in the concoctions and balled pieces of paper littering his surroundings.

“No... It’s still not enough. It would make sense for the narcotic elements to heighten the psychological effect... But an ecstatic response will interfere with proper neural transmission. If we combine these, all we’ll do is...”

“Are you listening to me, Durante?!” Beatrix shouted.

With no patience left for the mage as he scribbled away in the Orisons, Beatrix reached her hand out to grab his shoulder and draw him around. But in the instant her fingers made contact, they were repelled. This wasn’t a force field or a repellent barrier. This was the violent manifestation of his memories and emotions.

As soon as she had touched him, his psychic contamination broke through Beatrix’s own powerful mental barrier and seeped into her brain. The assassin was familiar with scenes of terror, but even she was shocked by the sights contained in the mage’s head.

The screams of a woman who had been burned alive in a fire so furious that she was consumed before the loss of breath could take her; the wailing of a young boy whose stomach had been sliced open with enough delicacy not to kill him, but exposing enough for the birds to peck at; the desperate screeching of a young girl who begged for death as a group of men closed in on her.

Beatrix had paid for her life in blood and battle; she couldn’t comprehend the contempt for life seemingly for its own sake that radiated off of him. Soon Durante’s own tragic wailing could be heard too. His desperate cries begging them to stop, to spare the girls, changed into a pleading for them to take his life instead, before finally descending into a despairing howl, cursing a world that could endure such horrific scenes.

It had only been a moment of contact, no longer than the blink of an eye, but the innumerable visions of hell itself forced the assassin to her knees in exhaustion. Still, she had achieved her aim. The mage turned his skeletal visage toward Beatrix as if she had committed blasphemy.

“You, is it, Muerte Misma...? I hope you have sufficient reason for interrupting my research,” Durante said.

“I am not fond of that name,” Beatrix replied. “I request you bequeath me another.”

Beatrix hadn’t told Durante her real name, and so this appellation was one he had decided on for her.

The assassin was a lay mage who threaded her spells based on her own personal methods that she had devised through trial and error. The peculiar magic circles all over her body played a huge part in controlling and strengthening her magic. The magic circle that acted as the center of this network wasn’t the lily of the valley upon her cheek, but a depiction of a skeletal saint upon her back that few had ever seen.

The saint had once belonged to a religious group who believed in a powerful divine being, revered as the singular god of the western reach. They broke off into their own sect, yet the intensity of their belief had led them to be branded as heretical, and soon the saint was martyred. Depicted in saintly garb and holding flowers, this skeletal figure had subsequently become an object of worship for immigrants who begged for salvation from death.

However, to Beatrix it was a depiction of a divine being that permitted retribution. The formula she had embedded within it had been crafted partially thanks to Beatrix’s own innate talents and partially through her dabbling in miracle theory. In this land, such experimentation outstripped merely old and arcane notions of faith—this was heresy.

“If that is all, then leave me be. I have much thinking to do,” Durante said, brushing her aside.

“Leave your thinking for when there’s time for it. I’ve told you three times already, have I not? A group of adventurers will be upon us soon!”

“Adventurers? Ah... Yes, I recall you making a fuss about some such nonsense.”

Beatrix’s raised voice must have caused the gaunt mage to recall her previous warnings. Durante looked about him. The only people left in the room were a few of the mage’s direct disciples and a priest of some pagan religion who had come to concur with him. It was only now that Durante realized that everyone else in the room had already run off.

However, he seemed to pay it no heed. He began playing with his quill in his hand.

“It is no great matter,” Durante said. “Even if a thousand or two thousand common people who don’t know the true meaning of suffering come here, it shall be of no concern to me.”

“That’s not the problem here...”

“In the face of my despair, all shall fall to their knees. Just like me.”

Durante had absolute confidence. No matter how large the army that came knocking, none would block his way. Indeed, Durante had no interest in the plotting and scheming that went on around him. He had simply hid away as his investor had told him to while he made his modifications to Elefsina’s Eye. In his own eyes, he had no reason to work in secret.

After all, any who would dare stand in his way would collapse under the mighty weight of his despair.

This same despair had driven Durante mad. So much so that he had forgotten the order of things in planetary reality.

If the Empire pooled their efforts together and dispatched a whole force of battle mages from the College, then it wouldn’t matter if he had spells that could cut down armies. They would still deliver him to his end.

“That reminds me... Where are the others? We’re looking rather thin on the ground,” Durante said.

“I gave them the same warning I gave you and they fled. Simple as that,” Beatrix replied.

“Spineless cowards! And you’re saying you merely watched them run for the hills, Muerte Misma?!”

Beatrix could say nothing in the face of her client’s complaints—they ran outside of her scope of work. This was a debt made out of necessity, a pact struck in exchange for the information that would let her avenge her dear Albert’s death. To achieve this, those who stood above even Durante had tasked her with his protection and other covert work.

However, their agreement never said that the assassin had to lend a hand to every stage of the mage’s own schemes. In all honesty, staying by his side for this long amounted to a betrayal of Durante’s own backers. She was only still with this man because running away now would mortally wound the pride of the One Cup Clan.

Without that pride, she would have long washed her hands of this entire farce. If she could have turned the job down, then she would never have agreed to something so unadventurous as a drug war.

Beatrix wondered if a day would come when the One Cup Clan could return to being normal adventurers once more. She clenched her teeth and pushed down the urge to strangle this deranged fool to death on the spot.

“It isn’t possible to force fools who wish to run into working,” Beatrix said. “They have no loyalty. They’re only the workforce you could scrounge together: rabble from satellite states, dogs of the local lords, fools from Seine... Keeping them all reined in is your job, Durante.”

“I am merely one man, lost in my own thoughts... It is beyond me to lead such a band of fools.”

This level of honesty was almost refreshing, but it only stoked the fire of her killing urge. However, it seemed like her words had finally gotten through to the mage. After some thought, Durante ordered the few remaining mages under him to burn all the documents.

“Are you quite sure, kindred?” one of them said. “Two years of hard work will go to waste...”

“It matters not. Everything is in here,” Durante replied, tapping his temple. “It is but a small hurdle compared to the mountain of despair I’ve had to climb.”

The flames of lunacy danced in the man’s deep-set eyes. The green blaze of his stare was no mark of blind self-assurance; no, he was telling the truth. He’d had everything written down strictly to make it easier for his fellow mages to read and share information; as Durante said, every last scrap of information was carved into his mind.

Even if he escaped with nothing but the clothes on his back, all he would have lost was a base of operation. Absolute top secret documents were stored in a vault elsewhere and could be tucked under an arm if the situation called for it. In fact, the most important thing was their harvest of wheat blight—something that would take time and effort to collect once more.

“If I have your permission, then I’ll proceed with burning what’s left,” Beatrix said. “I would prefer not to leave even the smallest scrap of evidence.”

“Do as you will,” Durante replied. “Once we’ve processed enough of the wheat, we can leave this base behind. Barely any time has passed since our distribution channels in Marsheim were laid to waste. Let us put aside this pointless wittering and focus instead on the matter of where—”

“Sisker! Krouble!”

Just as Beatrix was running mental calculations on just how long it would take to burn the documents, the door of the room burst open. The door was already wonky after Beatrix had kicked it earlier, but the kaggen with her unwieldy hands had decided to just knock it down instead of struggling with the doorknob. It came clattering to the ground, finally having reached the end of its life.

“What is it, Primanne?”

“The enemy! Coming in *tik* droves!” the kaggen shouted back.

“What?!”

Beatrix dashed out of the room, knocking the fallen door aside as she went, unable to believe what she had heard. She sped past the guards in the corridor, too fast for them to register, and hurried up the stairs. Once she reached the top, she leaped through a window out onto the roof. There she warped the air around her, creating a Farsight lens. As she scanned the surroundings, she found that Primanne’s report had been exactly right.

She saw adventurers. A formation of over thirty were marching toward the building. They were almost within beckoning distance.

“Ridiculous... How could they ferret us out so quickly?” Beatrix muttered as she looked out at the incoming force.

She realized something. She had been the one who had just called their workforce “rabble.” No matter how much of a perfectionist Beatrix or the rest of the One Cup Clan were, there was no counting out that someone else in this conspiracy would be stupid enough to make a hash of their job.

Consider, for example, the two subordinates of Viscount Besigheim. It was their own folly that had led Beatrix to eliminate them. Just as no amount of work would prevent new weeds from cropping up in between cracks in the pavement, she could shout herself hoarse and people still wouldn’t take her warnings seriously, not realizing their lives were in danger until it was too late.

Who had found the tiny leak in their operation that had led them here?

As she gnashed her teeth, the image of a snickering bubastisian appeared in her mind. It was her. Who else could it have been? Her experience and finely honed nose for intel was remarkable enough that Beatrix and her allies had tried to dispatch her once already. It must have been her.

“Blasted cat...” Beatrix said. “I should have skinned her when I had the chance!”

The assassin could no longer contain her anger as memories of her past blunder rushed back to her. She stamped her foot, a brick crumbling underneath it.

All the same, she couldn’t fault herself completely. It’d been the optimal choice not to kill Schnee at that juncture. If Beatrix had killed the informant, it would have alerted those who weren’t in the know. Schnee had been worth killing? Why? They would have gathered like flies, and her death would have set off all-out chaos.

To top it off, the roof of the Snowy Silverwolf was not an ideal place to stage a murder. Its owner had, in days past, led the patrol known as the Ardent Vigil. From their base where the arc peninsula joined with the continent, they repelled the incursion of plundering pirates without rest. Even now the Snowy Silverwolf’s owner kept an unwavering watch on what went on within his domain.

John had never told Beatrix why he’d decided to start an inn for adventurers in Marsheim despite his lauded background, but she was sure that his skills hadn’t dulled much since his time in the far north. That wasn’t to say she couldn’t kill him with her skills. The problem lay in the number of adventurers that had called his inn their home. If his former allies in the Ardent Vigil and all the adventurers that owed him heard that John had been killed, there would doubtless be a reckoning; they would turn Marsheim upside down in search of the killer. Even Beatrix couldn’t survive a mob of adventurers cut from genuinely heroic cloth.

It had been far more prudent to refrain from killing Schnee and incurring John’s wrath and all the snowballing problems that would subsequently follow, but this situation was still not ideal. It had been an impossible puzzle to solve, one crafted by the most mean-spirited of children.

“Not good... Not good at all... We should have finished packing up our things far earlier!”

As Beatrix scanned the terrain, she could sense that they were surrounded by a larger number than what she could merely see. She wagered that they numbered around two hundred. The One Cup Clan could still hold their own well enough to make an easy break through the flank of a fighting force of this size—but then there was the matter of who’d been chosen to lead the charge.

Upon their armor was the emblem of a wolf with a sword clamped in its jaws. At their fore was a young man mounted on an unbroken horse, his namesake flowing freely in the autumn wind. Goldilocks Erich.

Beatrix didn’t know what countermeasures he had taken, but for some reason Kykeon hadn’t worked on him. Back in that lot, he had been engulfed in a cloud of the stuff; he should have succumbed to its effects immediately. Yet he had stood proud and unblemished. To top it off, he had taken control of a violent gale—gods knew how!—to lay waste to his surroundings. He was a dangerous specimen, not worth fighting foolishly. Even when they cornered him in impossible circumstances, five-on-one wasn’t enough to end him. This one required absolute caution.

Of course, then there was Margit the Silent. Beatrix couldn’t see her right now, but she was certain the arachne had to be somewhere. Although the huntress wasn’t quite on the One Cup Clan’s level when it came to covert assassination, she matched them strength for strength when it came to simply remaining unseen. Beatrix’s side were in the unfortunate position of being pinned to their base. Where was Margit lurking as she watched them?

There would be no escape. If they tried to make a break for it together they would be countered; if they tried to escape individually not all of them would be guaranteed to survive. The One Cup Clan esteemed vengeance above all else, but in turn, they could never undertake a mission predicated on sacrificing even one of their number.

“Shit... What to do? Running away with our load is impossible. We have...fifty or so mercenaries in the building...”

The whole Kykeon operation only involved the absolute minimum personnel necessary. Covert operatives from a number of clients and undercover agents from the local lords had taken their share before vanishing into thin air already, but for some reason the mercenaries had chosen to remain. Odds were good that they didn’t know the depths of the scheme, merely chalking up their position here as yet another dirty job for the local lords.

The iron rule of a mercenary was to only ask what was necessary. It was what set them apart from nosier and more mercurial adventurers.

How well would they serve in battle? Most were experienced and reasonably talented soldiers, but they would fold before a single mighty warrior. Only one of the One Cup Clan would be needed to dispatch them all; it was highly likely that against Goldilocks Erich and Siegfried the Lucky and Hapless, they would crumble. They would fare fine against the pair’s lackeys, but no decent leader would turn a blind eye as their subordinates were slaughtered. Once the blade that had killed the Infernal Knight began its rampage, the mercenaries would be nothing but a minor roadblock.

“There’s not enough time to burn all the evidence. Do we knock Durante out and escape with him on our shoulders? No... If any subordinates are left, then they’ll leak information. We can’t kill them to lighten our load either, or Durante will turn on us... What to do...”

There wasn’t enough time. Even as she scraped through her thoughts, the optimal solution here wouldn’t come to her.

“Damn it all...! Albert, this is all your fault! If you were here, we could burn them all and be done with this farce!”

Albert had left the College due to intercadre political strife and begun a new life as an adventurer. Dropout though he might have been, he was a genius at extreme and potent kataskurgy. He could have blown the whole factory from its foundations with a tidy little spell and led the rest of the clan to freedom in the chaos that followed.

“Leader! Bad news!”

Main had come dashing onto the roof; Beatrix was about to tell her ally that she knew what was happening, but she couldn’t say anything before she caught the mask that had been thrown her way. It was the same leather mask worn by the mercenaries, designed to prevent poisonous gases from entering the airways.

“That madman has truly lost vah’s mind! Please, quickly! Vah says vah will round up all the adventurers in one fell swoop!”

The masks were enchanted to safeguard the wearer against magically altered or mana-bearing gases and particulates, including aerosolized Kykeon, and had been handed out to every worker and soldier in the factory. While any gas that escaped outside the factory was purified, the droplets inevitably produced during the synthesis process for Kykeon contained hazardous byproducts that the workforce had to be protected from at all costs.

“What’s got you in all of a rush, Main?” Beatrix said. “Primanne’s miracle keeps us safe from poisons...”

Seine’s Kaggen were monotheistic. There were few believers in their god in this land, and so They might as well have been absent, but their god’s miracles still worked. Beatrix’s skeletal saint and lily of the valley tattoos rendered her body too toxic in its own right for any external pathogen to pose a threat; as for the rest of the One Cup Clan, Primanne’s miracle invocation kept them safe from the dangers of Kykeon.

“Just put vah on!”

“Mmf...!”

As soon as Main forced the mask onto Beatrix, the assassin witnessed great puffs of blue smoke emanating from the chimneys. The brume was thick with mana. Durante’s mana signature was palpable.

The madman had synced up his Kykeon producing tools to the filtration system and was using them to emit a deadly cloud of a terrifying gaseous drug.

“Huh? Ah... WAAAAAGH!”

Main had been so focused on getting her leader’s mask on that she was too late to put on her own. She was engulfed by the blue smoke and began screaming, her tremendous arachne body shrinking in terror.

“Stop... Put...put that axe away! Run, Pitaji! Stop! Don’t touch Amma!”

Main’s eyes were wild and unfocused as she screamed for her parents, their names from a language that Beatrix didn’t know. Main’s mind was somewhere miles away. She cared not for her head ornaments or her mask as scratched at her face. All eight legs drew her body close to the ground. This was a far cry from her usual calm and cool demeanor.

“Main!” Beatrix shouted. “Get a hold of yourself! Turn your face to me!”

“Stop it! Don’t touch Main! Oh, Amma! AMMA!”

As the arachne flailed wildly as she called for her mother, she accidentally threw the mask she had brought for herself. For all Beatrix’s enormous strength (even without magical assistance), Main’s rampage buffeted her away.

Main had lost control of herself completely. At this rate she would end up severely wounding herself.

“That blasted madman!” Beatrix spat. “Does he not care who gets caught up in this bedlam? I knew he was a lunatic, but this is beyond the pale!”

Beatrix readied herself, took a deep breath, then leaped onto her rampaging ally’s back. She used her legs to hold Main’s arms still and forced her own mask onto the arachne, as if trying to feed a petulant baby.

“Waah... Aghhh...!”

Main spun around, not caring if she destroyed every brick beneath her, and Beatrix held on as best as she could. Beatrix didn’t want Main accidentally ripping the mask free after she had worked so hard to put it on. After a few violent rotations, Main collided with a chimney and finally came to a stop.

Beatrix anchored her right foot to the ground and looped her left around Main’s waist to lock her in place. With her arms keeping Main’s body stable, she would wait until her ally finally calmed down.

“Ngh... It appears I swallowed some smoke myself...” Beatrix muttered.

Beatrix’s attempt to restrain Main hadn’t come without cost. Due to the effort to keep Main’s mighty form still, when they’d collided with the chimney, Beatrix had accidentally taken a breath. A thick purl of smoke had found its way into her lungs, and from there, her bloodstream and her brain.

Beatrix had only avoided succumbing to the same despair-driven rage fugue thanks to the mithridatism her lily of the valley tattoo induced, the protective qualities of the skeletal saint on her back, and Primanne’s miracle. But even with all of these countermeasures, a moment’s exposure to the drug had driven a grim vision to the surface of her mind.

“Albert...”

The hallucinations that had appeared before Beatrix hadn’t been as awful as the ones that Main had seen, but they had been sufficient to paralyze her. It was as if she’d stepped unwittingly through a door onto one of the worst moments of her life: the sight of her ally’s body.

Albert’s corpse appeared now as she had found it. After losing him on that previous mission, he had been captured by the enemy. They had tortured the lad to death. Even without thaumochemical assistance, the image of what they had done to his face—stripped down to bare muscle, red and raw and wet, without even the option to shut his eyes—came to her easily.

But this was not the scene she usually remembered. This time she saw two shadowed figures. Two soon turned to three, then six, then twelve, and on and on. They were faces she knew well—other members of the One Cup Clan killed in action. Despite the passing years, she had not forgotten how they’d passed.

Albert was followed by victim after victim, a gruesome recapitulation of her greatest losses. She could never forget them—men, women, humanfolk, demihumans, demonfolk—all former comrades, all avenged.

Beatrix plunged deeper into despair as the vision drew up specters of older and older friends. Finally the faces of her dearest companions, from memories that now only surfaced in dreams, came into her mind’s eye. The first allies she had made. Her fellow adventurers that she had grown to love, before that bastard magistrate decided they were naught but disposable monster fodder. There they were, torn up by that drake, so mutilated that she couldn’t tell what parts were whose, surrounded by the other three founding members of the One Cup Clan.

They were still young. Time had stopped for them while Beatrix lived on... No, she had been left behind.

“I see... So you are all the root of my despair...”

They scowled at Beatrix, all those poor, beloved corpses. Their faces were terribly sad and full of pity for her. As she looked back at them she realized something.

Durante’s plan was to open the very gates of hell.

That madman’s dream was to share the utter abjection he had seen with each and every living person he could reach.

These visions were part of that mission. This newest concoction of his would dig up each individual’s deepest mental scar and smear salt all over the wound. That had to be it. Why else would all her fallen companions come to her like this now, when she had gone to such lengths to appease their spirits? She had never wavered; they had no cause to turn on her. All of this was only a nightmare, fed by the little doubts that plagued her before merciful sleep settled upon her. Beatrix had won vengeance for them all, just as they had wished. Everyone who’d ever harmed them was dead in the ground.

So why were their eyes full of such pity now? They looked at her as one would at someone who might no longer be a friend, as if to ask have you finished embarrassing yourself? Are you satisfied?

They were passing anxieties given false strength; nothing more. She had spent so long fulfilling her duty to her comrades. With each score settled there had been yet another to be won. It went on without end, or it seemed like it would for a time. Now she found herself here, and she could not help but feel like a stone kicked downhill, finally coming to rest. That terrible thought came again: perhaps, in each moment when her friends had passed, they had not wished for revenge at all.

No, that’s impossible. They had clashed their cups together and made their pact. Whatever happens, whoever the perpetrator, justice would be served. When it had, the avenged would wait in the afterlife with a big smile on their face. That had been their promise!

So what was this vision? A false despair conjured by her own heart’s cowardice? Cowardly flights of fancy conjured by the part of her weak enough to still doubt?

“Not enough... This isn’t enough to break me,” Beatrix murmured.

“L-Leader...” Main said. “M-Main is sorry... Tum can let go now...”

With the voice of her ally coming from below her, Beatrix realized that Main had finally regained her senses.

“Calm again, are you?”

“Yes... Main is fine now. So please, tum can let go. Even if tum won’t break...Main might...”

“Oh! Apologies...”

Beatrix noticed she had tensed her arms without realizing it. As her arms came loose around Main, she started coughing. The pressure on her lungs must have been quite intense.

“Only a moment of inhalation caused such a reaction... Quite the potent concoction...”

“Sorry, Leader. How long was Main out for?”

“Only a few moments. Time enough for an enemy to have killed you.”

It had taken less than ten seconds for Beatrix to affix the mask on Main. In other words, it had all taken place in the space of four breaths. One breath for the visions to start; two for her to go berserk. Not only that, it lingered in the body. For the average person, four breaths of the vapor could cause three minutes of hallucinations. If you kept breathing it in, you probably would never wake up from the nightmare.

“What did you see?” Beatrix asked.

“Main’s hometown was attacked...back when Main lived in the part of the arc peninsula which connects with the continent. Main was but a child, selling nets to fishermen mere kilometers from the Imperial border...”

“Ah, I remember. It was two years ago, yes? I picked you up when you were only nine...”

Main looked mature, but she had only seen eleven summers. Unlike jumping spider arachne, huntsman arachne aged quickly during their youths; most would assume from her face that she was developmentally identical to a grown mensch woman. The truth was that Main was the youngest of the group and their latest surviving newcomer.

Main had lost everything at the hands of a pirate raid. That had probably been the lowest point of her life.

The One Cup Clan just so happened to have finished a job nearby—they’d had six members at that point—and so saved Main. After a year of training and working together, she claimed her vengeance by slaughtering the foul pirates who had stolen everything from her with her own hands. It had done nothing to expunge the memory or dilute its sting.

Even if Durante hadn’t yet achieved his true ends, his creation had opened a door onto someone’s personal hell.

“To think it’s been two years since you joined us already... Time flows so quickly. No surprise that I’ve aged so much,” Beatrix said.

“Leader, now’s not the time for reminiscing! Please put on Main’s mask! Tum will inhale too much...”

“Pay me no heed. If I use my magic to slow my metabolism, then I can slow its progression. You’ll be on watch, so please use it.”

Beatrix stood at the edge of the roof, her feet shoulder width apart and arms crossed in a powerful stance. She’d been at least partly bluffing. Main’s words had brought her back out from the depths of despair, but her deceased allies still stood behind her now. She could feel their gaze upon her back.

Even with her metabolism pushed to its slowest limits and switching to long, shallow breaths to reduce her air intake, she could feel her grip on reality loosen. Beatrix steeled herself, trying to batter the hallucinations away through the force of her own convictions.

She too had been part of that pact. If the day came when she was felled in battle, then she too wanted someone to avenge her. She would never be someone else’s pawn again.

“We don’t have time to be standing around. Look, they appear unharmed.”

“H-Huh? Ve are?! Why?!”

It was as Beatrix had said. The adventurers lined up in front of the factory were standing tall. Bandanas wrapped around their faces obscured their expressions, but none of them appeared to be in the same kind of writhing pain that the two assassins had just suffered. There was no means of any kind Beatrix knew of that would offer better protection than her own three-tiered defense, and even that fell short.

“Dammit...” Beatrix said. “Too many that I should have killed off!”

It was all thanks to that woman standing at the front of their formation, incense burner in one hand and cigarette holder in the other.

Nanna Baldur Snorrison had countered the smoke with a single defensive spell.