Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 9 - Chapter 3

Summer of the Sixteenth Year

Informants

Generally, it is not in the GM’s best interest to lie: the game is predicated on their reliability as a narrator, after all. That said, an element of the untrustworthy and unpredictable is still a powerful source of tension, and as such it is also in the GM’s interest to create dangerous ambiguities that invite player speculation. Players, in turn, perpetuate this informational arms race by burning their PCs’ hard-earned resources to keep a stable of trustworthy and knowledgeable NPCs.

“You need resolve if you want to become famous.” I wasn’t sure if it was a writer or a singer who said this, and there was no way of knowing now, but I was feeling the reality of it now.

“Hmm... What to do...”

I was back in my room in the Snoozing Kitten with a whole spread of documents scattered around me. The tip of my quill rested on my curled upper lip as I pondered the situation. We’d somehow managed to pull in almost too many jobs for our current headcount.

The Fellowship of the Blade was, no joke, the new big thing at the moment.

In the months from spring to summer, we had racked up quite a few gigs together. As our initial unit of eight adventurers, we had safely protected some caravans, eliminated some bandits holed up in a local lord’s former manor, and rounded up five criminals lurking in the city.

Thanks to our efforts, our standing as a clan had risen. In turn, we’d received a flood of new requests from outside our stable of mediators and a small horde of applicants. Things weren’t all smooth sailing though—with more benefits came more headaches that I had to deal with.

I knew being meticulous about playing our cards right now would save us all a lot of trouble in the long run, but that didn’t stop the whole process from sucking out loud from start to finish. Hey, whoever designed this society? Yeah, you made a real hash of it... Mind rolling out some rebalanced material in the next errata sheet before I go insane? 

Jokes and gripes aside, this was far, far more preferable to the year I spent tidying up Lady Agrippina’s loose ends after the Empire made her Count Ubiorum. I only made it through that whole mess in the first place because I’d been pounding back medicine and spells fine-tuned to keep me functional for four consecutive all-nighters at a time on average. The events themselves are a blur, but I was fairly certain my longest streak had been a full week.

I wanted to laugh at my past college self for thinking that people who boasted about being overworked just had poor time management skills. I had been but a babe in the woods, completely naive to the horrors of a truly overloaded schedule... Anyway, one late night after all this time wouldn’t hurt.

“Right, I think we could leave this caravan guard job to Etan’s group. They’re still soot-black, but if he and Karsten join up with those two rookies who joined last week then they should be more than capable.”

My current work was to divvy up our gigs and assign them based on the skills of our growing clan’s roster. It amounted to administrative overview, but it was still a hefty job, despite using a bit of Farsight and other spells to smooth things over. I didn’t have Lady Agrippina’s completely broken perfect spatial recall, and my powers of critical thinking were strictly mortal; all I could do was painstakingly check every scrap of info that came my way, one by one.

“I can get Mathieu to show around this noble’s children on their incognito visit to Marsheim, but maybe he’ll need a little backup... Martyn’s a diligent student, and he’s gotten the hang of basic palatial speech, so I could send him in... But no, that leaves me with too few left in the roster who’ve been fully initiated...”

I scribbled drafts of different divisions of labor based on the spread of requests before me. As of this moment, the Fellowship of the Blade had eight members who could be sent on pretty much any gig without much trouble. On top of this we had gotten ten more members who I couldn’t use as freely, since I was still screening them. I couldn’t just eyeball it; there was a chance we’d picked up some grifters who were just in it for the free perks of equipment, lodging, and some food. On the other hand, I thought, we’ve dropped five members since last week, so these ones probably are a bit more trustworthy.

“Hmm... No, no, we’re still new. Maintaining a good rep is crucial. I don’t want to screw up everyone’s hard work. That means I need to assign our core members to each team or I’ll be up all night worrying about something going wrong...”

I didn’t want people to presume that the Fellowship of the Blade would just throw brute force and raw numbers at its problems like certain other clans I could name. Clients were only giving us jobs because our original party of four had built up trust in Marsheim and two of us were amber-orange—in usual situations, soot-black and ruby-red adventurers wouldn’t even be given the time of day. If I just outsourced our jobs to the newest recruits all willy-nilly, then it would bring our achievements into question.

“So, uh... Maybe I should accompany the noble’s kids? I feel a bit uneasy about sending Martyn alone. He’s a smart guy, but he could use a confidence boost. Plus, he’s a mensch—not the sort of guy who’s gonna ward off potential ne’er-do-wells on looks alone.”

I wasn’t like some hands-off recruitment agency from my old world. My job wasn’t simply to designate roles and be done with it; I had to make sure each group understood what was needed of them.

“Hold on, if I head out, then we can’t do drills while I’m away... Siegfried and Kaya are off right now too...”

Although I still wasn’t totally on board with the idea of being the leader of a clan, I’d stayed in my role as master to my disciples. I was still obliged to make sure they came out of the process fully prepared for the future in store for them, even if my measures were a bit spartan... Not that I’d left them with anything that wouldn’t heal up fine in time, of course.

“Margit could step in and do some training, I guess... Oh, no, wait, she’s on that top secret infidelity case—no one but her is cut out for that. Oh man, my brain’s gonna overheat...”

I was literally losing sleep over all this schedule juggling. I wished I could just scan all these jobs and see all the sketchy parts laid out in bright red. It really would have made all the difference for my heart if I could just have the information nicely compiled in a handout so I could avoid all of the extra digging and fact-checking. Come on, you asshole GM, think about what it’s like to be handed a secret handout in the middle of a campaign where we’re already choking on all the lore...

“Even if all these requests are legit, I still want someone to do some basic fact-checking and ease my worries. Sucks that the last informant I worked with was such a bust...”

With my racing worries swirling around my brain, I picked up the stack of requests once more and looked through them. Divvying up my people wasn’t the only problem here—even if I assigned my crew perfectly, we could still get screwed if any one of those jobs turned out to be a dud. I wasn’t being paranoid—we had one request in early summer and three already this month that had all been designed to drag our little clan’s name through the mud. Most of those we could credit to a few midsized clans with a vested interest in our collapse or a chip on their shoulder about having to actually compete a little for their gigs.

I wouldn’t stand for any attack on our clan’s rep, so I’d made sure that they knew nothing good would come of messing with us. Before taking on any request I made sure to do a bit of research, and if I found a stinker, lining up suitable payback was pretty straightforward. Even if you were called up into a basement parking lot and faced with a foe with an off-the-charts DEF score, there were always methods available to you. It would all be so simple if I could just carry over my playbook from one of my favorite video games from my old world—just overtune for Turning Ability, circle-strafe, and pour on the machine-gunfire or get good and weave in close to skewer ’em with a pile bunker.

The problem therefore lay in sussing out which ones were these “no hard feelings, but...” kind of gigs before accidentally taking the bait. Of course, some you could spot from a mile off—you just had to brace yourself for impact. The fallout was a bit of a pain too. This sort of competition was a huge drain—dealing with it ate up time and energy and paid out jack squat. All that you were left with was a sense of relief and exhaustion. You couldn’t just ignore them either—you had to do a proper job, or your rep was in jeopardy.

We’d been doing fine right at the start! We were a small clan, so we only had a few requests to manage at a time. We could spend a little time sniffing around, find the perp, then pay them a little visit. But when you had a clan of nearly twenty people, the request pile grew exponentially, and you had to waste so much more time vetting everything.

“No... I’m exhausted. I need some fresh air. Time for a little break.”

This whole process took it out of me. There just wasn’t enough time in the day to do my due diligence, unless I could start milling out clones. Wait, no, bad idea. I totally bet that clone one and clone two—who I would assign with admin and instruction of our disciples, respectively—would just band together to bury me in a shallow grave for striking off on another rollicking adventure while they sustained my grind.

I wasn’t the only one being overworked. Margit was pretty near her limit with her reconnaissance work. She was a talented scout and a top-rate spy, but she wasn’t built for information warfare. Sneaking in somewhere and pilfering the goods was a whole other ballgame from the kind of muckraking and puzzling out that the job really called for.

The natural solution to our current problem was to find an informant who could take the load off of our shoulders, but it wasn’t like folks I trusted implicitly grew on trees or anything. The one that Miss Laurentius hooked me up with seemed a bit too easily bought, so I was at a bit of a loss.

That wasn’t to say that Miss Laurentius had a bad eye for people. The problem was that we had our own individual connections columns. The informant might have been faithful to her, but their only obligation to me came from the weight of the purse that passed between us. Miss Laurentius hadn’t been trying to screw me over; she’d actually felt so bad about the situation that she apologized directly to me.

It was cathartic, but it didn’t get me anywhere. I wasn’t a single assarius richer for the effort. It’s not like she was entirely to blame in the first place. Miss Laurentius had her vicious aura and huge clan to lean on, and I’d let my guard down because of my in with her and got a fair bit too chummy with her gossipmonger.

“Who knew just how much work would come of pooling a little group together...”

As the sun began to set, I headed to the Snoozing Kitten’s yard with Schutzwolfe on my waist and began to stretch. Shymar was probably preparing dinner, Fidelio was most likely out shopping, and the old master was almost guaranteed to be on the roof having a nice nap. Merchants were busy in the summer, and so the Snoozing Kitten had few guests. The clothesline was filled with no one’s laundry but my own.

“I’m liking this other side of adventuring, but I can’t let my sword skills get rusty.”

I unsheathed my precious sword and gave it a few practice swings. I felt uneasy about the discrepancy in how light my body felt and how it wouldn’t move exactly like I wanted it to.

If you chose to be generous with the benefits for your newbies, then you would attract folks who only wanted a free lunch. If you put a high price on information, you would draw in equivalently greedy individuals looking for a big blowout. There was a Kamakura-era samurai who advised that one ought to keep their garden decorated with freshly severed heads to set the appropriate tone with one’s guests; it was probably a bad sign that I was starting to see where he was coming from. It wasn’t a bad idea to make a hard, clear statement of one’s own gravitas to ensure you went into most encounters with the upper hand.

I hadn’t foreseen headaches like these a few months ago. I was putting in the hours for the sake of our town and a great adventure, so why did I have to waste my time dealing with minor administrative issues and people who wanted my clan to eat dirt? I know I was still on my journey, but I couldn’t help but be in awe at Mister Fidelio’s ability to seemingly breeze his way to no-foolin’ heroism and stumble upon the love of his life.

I joked about my luck, but I was starting to wonder if my entire life was cursed to awful rolls...

No, keep a level head, Erich. There’s no need to rush. You’re not in a situation where you’ll be wiped out if you don’t give up every last piece of intel you have with no way of striking back. Take it slow and you’ll find your way through to the other side.

I couldn’t let my frustration trip me up. I would keep on giving it my best and not try to take any unnecessary shortcuts.

My heart started to feel lighter as I kept up my swings, a light sweat emerging in the cool summer afternoon.

Yeah, keep it easy, and don’t blow up over nothing. You can never tell what someone’s thinking when you first meet them, so stay courteous and polite while you have to. You’ll have all the time in the world to bare your fangs once you know they’re evil.

The Fellowship of the Blade had built up a reputation for being diligent and thorough. We didn’t botch our jobs because we never rushed them—this alone had set us apart from our fellow clans. If the clan’s head started acting like an impatient ass, then I’d really end up putting my foot in my mouth.

“You there,” I said, “I’m not sure what I think of someone who conceals their presence and enters the range of my sword.”

“Oho?”

I sheathed my sword out of common courtesy and placed my hand atop the pommel. This was a way of showing the person you were talking to that you meant no harm—it was harder to draw your sword quickly when your palm was right on the end.

In the next moment, it felt as if the fabric before me had transformed into a woman—such was the smoothness in the way she appeared.

“Ya saw me, huh?”

She was a bubastisian, and a smidgen taller than me—just under five foot eight, I would say. She was dressed in pretty typical women’s garb for Marsheim, and her entire body was covered in white fur. Her golden eyes were striking. The light pink of her nose and ears charmed the hell out of me, but I knew I couldn’t let my guard down. Sure, looking at her made you want to grab her cheeks and give them a squeeze and tell her how adowable she was, but she had managed to sneak into my range without me noticing her. She was a dab hand at concealing her presence.

“Hmm? But yer range, ya say? I’m still twenty whole paces from ya.”

“Still close enough to manage in one movement.”

I wasn’t feigning arrogance—my current skill set allowed me to do exactly as I had just said. Mind you, at thirty paces I’d be in trouble—I’d need to actually close the gap a bit before striking—but at this range I could cut her down in one beat.

“What’s got you so interested in me? You’ve been there for at least thirty minutes.”

“Criminy... Spotted me since I got here, huh? You’re a toughie, I’ll give ya that. I shoulda kept my distance.”

Her eyes scrunched up when she smiled. Bubastisians were cute in the eyes of mensch whether they were fresh out of their litter or on the way to the grave, but I hadn’t met someone as beautiful as her before. She had an unplaceable sense of grace—elegance, maybe.

And yet again I couldn’t let appearances deceive me. I could sense a self-assurance that lay beneath that smile.

And then there was her accent. It gave away her roots in the central Imperial cantons. I’d heard it during my time in Berylin. It scanned a bit more clearly than northern or southern Rhinian, and it had a unique sort of charisma. Even palatial speech written down verbatim in the accent came off sort of lilting and musical—a quality reflected in many of its speakers.

The central region was famous for the Rhine River, for which our Empire got its name, which was home to a massive port. The tributaries that snaked across the land meant that it was a mercantile gateway to the rest of the Empire. It was strange to see a midlander this far west.

“I can’t be gettin’ lax, y’hear. Ain’t no good t’forget there’s folk who’re sharper than me. But, y’know, coulda fooled me. I’d pegged mensch as bein’ among the duller knives in the drawer. Y’got some quality peepers.”

The white bubastisian cleared the distance between us in one quick hop. With her digitigrade legs, the movement was strangely natural.

“You’ll pardon me if I’m a little sensitive to who’s hanging around in back-stabbing distance. Particularly when I have my sword drawn.”

“Huh? Don’t go tellin’ me a sweet thing like you’s tied up in the sorta bad business that gets folks sniffin’ after your blood in the water?”

The way she had approached me had been so fluid that I felt no internal resistance to it; I could barely register the movement. This way she had of sneaking under my danger radar told me she was going to be a small ordeal to work with—just like an overly amicable cat, really.

“Well, my work involves a little roughhousing, so I suppose you could say so. Although I don’t remember cutting down anyone the rest of the world would miss too sorely.”

“Ahh, I getcha. Yeah, the mistress said you can be a li’l cold from time to time. Kinda like a noble lady. Polite to ev’rybody, but keeps her cards close to her chest.”

“You’ve done your research. I suppose I don’t need to introduce myself, then?”

Sure, she’d melted out of the shadows to drip-feed me ominous indications that she knew me better than I knew her, but her tone was just so sweet that I couldn’t help but feel at ease. I couldn’t make out a single spell anywhere on her that would’ve explained her charisma. It was something that she just naturally possessed.

There was no need to worry—I wasn’t a complete idiot. I wasn’t the sort of two-bit goon who’d fall for an obvious honey trap. I could sense myself being drawn in, but I knew better than to let her have her way. I imagined that this was a similar feeling to how it felt to be on the receiving end of Absolute Charisma—a trait I’d spent a good while banking experience for.

“Nee hee, yep, you’re Erich of Konigstuhl. Goldilocks Erich. Stonecutter Erich. And, most recently, Erich, leader of the Fellowship of the Blade. Whatcha prefer?”

Man, I thought, she’s got that feline cute factor... She seemed nothing like Shymar, who had a more plain-spoken, girl-next-door sort of charm. “Bewitching” was the word that suited this new gal best.

“Just call me Erich.”

“For sure? Woulda figured you were buttoned up a li’l too tight, if ya catch my drift.”

The way she closed the gap between us; her choice of words; her bodily movements; the distance of our faces; her twitching whiskers as she spoke; the tail that swished just out of view—I wasn’t sure how conscious any or all of these were, but they were calculated to undermine all my most cynical impulses. It was a constant attack on my psyche that sought to sway my every impression of her. I’d never met someone as openly affable as this, even in Berylin’s high-society jungle.

Maybe such smooth operators did exist in the capital, but the fact was that I’d had to hold myself in a completely different manner back then. I had to be thinner than air while treading on eggshells, terrified that any misstep could result in my head toppling onto the plush rug below. It didn’t matter what kind of person I was with. My job was to avoid being noticed by anyone important.

I took a moment to be impressed yet again at what a menagerie this world was. You didn’t meet someone like her every day.

“Very well. Shall I present myself in a manner more pleasant to your eye, young madam? Would you honor me with your name?”

“Oof, now that’s some palatial speech. I feel like I could poke ya and you’d fall over, you’re so stiff! It’s like ya built a li’l wall, right here!” The bubastisian smiled as she repositioned to face me. “They call me Schnee. Nice to meetcha, Erich. Lookin’ forward t’our blossomin’ relationship.”

“Nice to meet you too, Schnee. Although the nature of our relationship is yet to be decided.”

Schnee, huh? It was a simple name—it just meant “snow”—but it wasn’t one that people in the Empire often gave to their children. Snow meant evanescence, fleeting things, and cold, creeping death. Not the sort of name you wanted to give your newborn daughter without a lick of irony, if you’ll permit me to be a bit pithy.

Maybe it was a pseudonym. Or maybe her parents were from a place where snow was associated with beauty before its chill. Whatever the case, nothing could shake the first impression she’d given—someone who could be socially invisible for a half hour straight and then turn up her presence all the way on command.

“Heh, yeah, well, I guess ya got a point there. But, to speed things along, let me just say that I’ve got a nose for rumors... Ya feel me?”

An informant? Now this was a little too fortunate. Had she waited until I’d run my options dry? Maybe she wanted to get on the inside of our clan to gather information for someone else.

I had been working hard to make sure no one found out where I lived on a permanent basis, yet she’d found me. Not only that, she knew when to be here. She must have had a line in to my operation already. I mean, sure, maybe she’d come rocking up in my time of need for completely innocent reasons and had chosen to shoot her shot now out of pure coincidence, but knowing my luck stat, that couldn’t be right.

I had been fed on a decent diet of media where someone whose appearance screamed “I’m the female lead!” was actually the traitor. It had seeped into the cultural zeitgeist so much that I knew many a GM who’d leveraged the trope to buy even the most stoic player’s lip-trembling, tear-soaked sympathy for such future turncoats. One of the tenets that kept me safe was to always have the worst-case scenario in mind. Even if someone strolled up to you and said, “Hello, I’m your ally,” that didn’t guarantee that they would maintain that role right to the end. Everyone had their price, and you never knew when someone else might be paying it.

“Righty, well, how ’bout a li’l taster?”

Bubastisians’ thin fingers were coated with short hairs. Her fingertips (or toetips or pawtips or whatever the correct term would be), second joints, and palms had pink paw pads. Bubastisians didn’t wear shoes, so I could see that her feet were exactly the same. Clasped between those toe beans was a single sheet of paper—a cheap thing made from plant fiber instead of more expensive sheepskin. It was probably about A4-sized unfolded and didn’t seem to be imbued with anything magical.

Nothing’s more valuable than a freebie; I set aside the thought that gacha games used the very same logic (who can resist a free first ten roll?) to lure the innocent to ruin and took the paper in my own hands.

“Can I trust this?”

“Trust is decided by whoever receives the intel, Erich. My business is gatherin’ up info, sendin’ it along to an interested party, and askin’ how much they wanna part with for it. The rest is up to you.”

Schnee lithely moved into my blind spot, as if to escape from my narrowed gaze. Without a sound she moved to the kitchen door.

“If it takes your fancy, gimme a call anytime. You’re the kinda fella who only believes it when he sees it, yeah? The Empty Hive’s one of my haunts, so pop on by anytime ya like. Be seein’ ya.”

She slipped through the crack in the door and disappeared. I had to say, she’d made a hell of a hard sell. She knew what it was that was bugging me the most.

“She’s got the names of every rookie that joined after Martyn...as well as where they’re all from.”

I memorized the paper before turning it to ash. Names, races, birthplaces, their reasons for being an adventurer, their previous jobs where applicable. The evaluations of each person that followed were all correct. Not only that, she’d even included the members with bad evaluations—in other words, the ones who left after deciding that my methods just didn’t gel with them. The cold, clinical presentation was so at odds with her airy personality.

Dammit... I felt a chill run down my spine at how accurate her intel was. Even I didn’t know everything about every member in my clan; I felt a bit sick. If she’d slipped in a little lie, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to spot it.

“I...need to talk to someone about this... I feel a migraine coming on.”

When Margit was back from her gig, I’d talk to her.

But godsdamn, she’d sniffed out my base here quick. I’d always taken measures to make sure I wasn’t being followed—I had caught a few people this way—always took different routes, wore different clothes, and even got Margit to stay on lookout now and again. Had she leaked this info to other clans?

Clan Laurentius were pretty open about their hideout, and the Baldur Clan weren’t perfect in this regard either. The one thing I was grateful for was that my relationship with Siegfried and the others was strong enough to not suspect them.

At any rate, I needed to reevaluate our opsec. It would be difficult to bring the rookies up to my watertight standards, but it was better than doing nothing.

“But a spy, huh... I thought one of them was a bit suspicious, but really? Ugh, to think I’d finally understand what drives a noble to burn a fortune purging their woes...”

I dragged my heavy body back inside and left my sword in my room before heading out. Margit would be back in the evening, so I decided to spend the next while in the baths. Work could wait. If I didn’t ease this tension in me then I felt I would fail my next Sanity check.

Unable to decide whether I had stumbled upon a miracle or a nightmare, I heaved myself to the calming solace of a hot bath.

[Tips] Informants are a staple in TRPG systems as a vehicle for delivering new scenarios and warnings of incoming danger to the player characters.

However, it isn’t a job which someone needs permission to take on. A player must either trust the word of their GM or see with their own two eyes whether an informant is friend or foe.

I remember back in my old world that there was this old sitcom “married couple” trope—the lady of the house catches her husband right as he’s in from work, wanting to hash out some sticking point about how the kid’s doing at school, which the dad immediately deflects with some curt display of his exhaustion. Today, I’d become the wife in this scenario.

“Really? Now of all times?”

Margit let out a mighty sigh as she shrugged off her cloak. It was custom-tailored to help her blend in with her surroundings—a reversible model, ruddy brown on one side to match Marsheim’s brickwork and nearly black on the other for covert work in full darkness.

I knew my TV dramas well enough to hold my tongue instead of firing back that I was just as tired, slaving over a hot stove all day for the both of us. Instead, I said, “I really am sorry. Rough shift on the reconnaissance job?”

“Physically, I am fine. But one can only watch strangers canoodle for so long before it takes a toll.”

I took Margit’s cloak from her, cast a quick Clean on it, and hung it up. Then I helped her out of her sweaty clothes and into a new set.

“The good news is that we have all the evidence we need. I have the name of the object of our target’s infidelities, where they rendezvoused, a solid estimate of the value of the jewels he gave her, and a full breakdown of their daily routine. I should think that it should suffice—he won’t be worming out of this one.”

One of Marsheim’s finest undercover workers threw a stack of papers onto the table in a single swift motion. Sure, we were some generations of technological progress out from furnishing our client’s attorney with a manila folder full of twenty-seven eight-by-ten glossy color photos with circles and arrows and such or anything, but this fat pile of dirt on our man would pin him to the wall just fine. I flicked through the pages and saw that we’d even outlined each of his meals in excruciating detail. Not even the slipperiest of characters could get out of this one.

“Ugh... You even wrote down what he says in the bedroom?”

“I was lipreading, so take about a fifth of that with a grain of salt.”

Margit’s exhaustion was clearly well-earned. Arachne were far better than mensch at staying still and keeping watch, but having to wade through even a fraction of all this tiresome smut would test anyone’s will to live.

“I don’t really get why the guy would throw away his chances with a mistress after marrying into such a well-off merchant family,” I said. “When his wife and father-in-law get their hands on this, I’d bet good money his head rolls...”

This infidelity case had been brought to our attention shortly after the client had noticed an irregularity in their business’s finances. The client was the new head of a merchant family who had taken on the operation after the old master—his father—retired. At first, he thought it’d just been some amateur slipup with his calculations. At one point he’d theorized that there’d been a burglary the family had collectively failed to notice. However, as he became more vigilant, he began receiving sporadic reports from their clients, who said that their newest employee—the master’s daughter’s husband, who had recently wedded into the family—wasn’t showing up to meetings. Before long he’d become their prime suspect. The master tailed him to find out where the money was going; it was pretty obvious that it was all being funneled into his mistress’s pockets, but the master wasn’t confident in his muckraking abilities, so his mediator asked us to furnish them with some watertight evidence.

Our client was fuming. I could hardly blame the guy. He had let his daughter marry for love—a difficult prospect for anyone in this day and age—and yet he had disgraced not only her, but her father as well. The daughter was going to be heartbroken. What had convinced her husband to embroil himself in such daytime soap fodder? There was blood yet to be spilled. I was sure of it.

“Man, I’m not looking forward to briefing the mediator... It wasn’t even an arranged marriage! Why’d he just toss her to the side like that?”

“Who knows. He’s quite handsome; perhaps he tricked her.”

Margit untied her hair and let the curls fall down. I caught a glimpse of the nape of her neck in a gap in her tresses, the sight making my heart skip a beat.

Margit shot me a strange expression.

“Wh-What?” I asked.

“I saw the way you looked at me,” she said, a devilish grin playing over her lips as she sat down on the bed. I realized that she’d probably taken her hair down like that to signal to me that she was tired and in need of some TLC.

“I didn’t think I was that obvious.”

“I don’t mind—in fact, I like all the attention I get from you.”

I took a comb and sat down on the bed. Margit moved so gracefully in front of me that it seemed like she had floated there, and sat in the space between my legs. With the back of her head left vulnerable and exposed, I enjoyed the special and unique privilege of touching her hair. Did that idiot not realize how lucky this kind of relationship is? I couldn’t fathom the depths of his idiocy. Just how much untethered, virulent lust must you have to ruin your life like that?

“Ahh... That feels lovely.”

I chuckled. “I imagined you must be feeling rather exhausted, madam.”

“That I am... It’s heavenly.”

While combing Margit’s hair I took the opportunity to give her head a little massage. She melted into me as the stress of her job faded away.

“You did really great out there, honestly. You got him two days before our deadline too! You dug his grave, and he walked straight into it. My partner is truly incomparable.”

“Mmm... Your praise won’t get you anything...but it is appreciated.”

I moved my hands down to her neck, then shoulders, then back, as I undid each little knot of stress. I tied up her hair in her usual two bunches and gave the back of her head a kiss. She smelled faintly of sweat and her usual sweet musk.

“I honestly can’t believe how much the informant managed to dig up on us. It isn’t like I was gone that long. I wonder how she found out where we lived,” Margit said, kindly returning to the topic I had thrust upon her as soon as she’d come in through the door. I reaffirmed to myself yet again how lucky I was to have Margit—she kept me safe, keeping eyes where I couldn’t see, even putting aside her exhaustion to discuss the matter with me.

“We could spend hours thinking and not come up with a decent answer. I doubt we’re in danger—no one’s stupid enough to do something on the saint’s doorstep.”

“I doubt we’re going to be trailed, but let’s keep our wits about us.”

“Agreed. Erich, I appreciate how much you trust me, but please do not treat me like some kind of perfect agent. Who knows if I could even spot her. She might have allowed you to catch her in the yard, you know?” Margit said. I admired her modesty despite everything too.

But perhaps she was right—maybe Schnee was testing me. She might have made herself just shy of invisible to test whether I was sharp-eyed enough to fish her out. I much preferred it when people announced their intent to kill up front. That she’d kept her approach within the periphery in my vision the whole time made it difficult to pin down how to react. I was still in the process of setting up the groundwork; I would have preferred that she didn’t poke at our fort’s weakest point.

“Agreed... I’ll talk to Zenab when I see her next and ask if she has any antitracking charms.”

“Who knows what magical traps could be waiting for us? Who knows, maybe our enemies employ a terrifying swordsman with a secret arsenal of spells.”

Her remark was right on the money. I couldn’t simply count out the possibility that I wasn’t the only one refusing to show my true colors. It would be prudent to take care.

We decided that nothing would come of worrying or even discussing the matter with just the two of us, so we headed out to the Snowy Silverwolf for some dinner. Lately we’d headed there once a day to maintain a good rapport with the other members of the Fellowship.

“There you are,” Mister John said after we had barely taken a step in through the door, before the proverbial first round of waters had even been laid out—not that anybody here would hand out clean tap water for free in this world, of course. From his tone, he wasn’t happy with us; I made a frantic mental inventory of everything I could possibly have done to get under his skin.

“That’s him. Not the same guy, huh?”

“Huh? What’s...going on?”

Mister John’s remark was directed at an elderly mensch gentleman perched straight as a stick on a nearby stool.

“Is he here to see me?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Mister John replied. “You didn’t go to Heidewitt canton in early summer, did ya?”

“Heidewitt? I was doing some investigating down the Mauser in early summer. Client asked me to sort out some river pirates.”

I don’t know what Heidewitt had to do with anything—the canton was upriver along the Mauser from here. My little tumble with that pack of damp bandits had been the most involved undertaking in my whole spread of gigs around the start of summer. The weeks after that I’d been busy with clan stuff—there had been no time to take the four-day journey east to a canton under the jurisdiction of Altheim...

“U-Um, if I may?” the elderly man said. “Are you really...Goldilocks Erich?”

“Erich’s a common enough name; I’m sure you could find plenty of Erichs hereabouts. But in all Ende Erde, there’s only one Goldilocks, as far as I know.”

“A-And your arachne partner is...?”

“Margit of Konigstuhl. My name isn’t particularly rare either.”

The man’s expression changed. The blood began to drain from his once-livid face as he came to some sort of realization.

“If you would like, I can show you my adventurer’s tag. You can take down my number and cross-reference my identity with the Association if you like.”

The man’s gaze kept flitting from my face to elsewhere. I didn’t know what he wanted from me, but suddenly he leaned over in his chair in a deep bow. We didn’t have the kind of bowing culture that Japan did here in the Empire, but if we did, I was sure his forehead would be planted firmly in the floorboards.

“M-My deepest apologies! I b-beg your forgiveness!”

“I must apologize as well—I have no idea what this is all about. How about you take a deep breath and gather yourself. What do you know, Mister John?”

“He’s been here all afternoon screeching about wanting to see Goldilocks Erich. Apparently you treated his granddaughter horribly and he’s demanding compensation in coin at the very least.”

“You what?”

The tone I reserved only for the most horrid of crooks came out.

“Erich.”

“Ah! Sorry, Margit...”

This wasn’t good. I’d been on edge since the incident with Schnee. For all I knew, this was a respectable gentleman, not some two-bit gossip who needed my name beaten out of his lying mouth. It wouldn’t do to act like some goon shaking down an innocent yokel. The facts certainly sounded horrible, but it wouldn’t do to frighten the poor guy.

“A-Allow me to explain,” the man finally said. “A short while ago, y-your tale reached our little canton. B-Before long, a man showed up...claiming that he was Goldilocks Erich.”

The man’s quivering grew more intense; his voice shook, though whether it was out of upset or frustration, I couldn’t tell. I mentally smacked myself on the forehead for accidentally baring my fangs—he was just the messenger! I needed to keep a decent rein on my emotions if I were to treat everyone with the respect they deserved. I put on a calmer front and patiently listened to his story.

The long and short of it was that I’d picked up an impersonator.

A young man with gold hair and blue eyes—not common in the Empire—had visited this man’s canton and proclaimed himself the Goldilocks Erich as spoken of in the recent song in circulation. He’d claimed to have wrapped up a bandit hunt nearby and chosen Heidewitt as his next rest stop. The locals had extended this veritable hero a warm welcome.

The old man had given him a room, but this doppelgänger of mine had paid him back in the worst way possible. Not only did he beg for some money to “help him on his way,” he’d also bedded the man’s granddaughter—even in a world as grim and amoral as our own often was, a clear abuse of the lady’s trust and violation of her consent, given his false claims. Before he left, the doppelgänger had said he would be back before midsummer with money paid back in kind and his hand in marriage for the granddaughter. Yet the fake Goldilocks never returned, and so the irate old man came to Marsheim to find the perpetrator for himself.

“Ugh... I can’t believe it,” I muttered.

“I-I’m so terribly sorry! I said such terrible things about you! P-Please forgive me...”

“I told him,” Mister John said. “He was moaning about you all afternoon, causing a fuss in here; I made a fair account of your character against every point he raised, but he railed on still.”

Mister John seemed to have nothing against the man himself—just the severity of his behavior—but this was apparently the last straw for our poor petitioner. He slumped over in utter dejection.

“It’s not his fault, Mister John. A song’s a poor substitute for a proper description. It’s a con anyone with blue eyes and gold hair could run.”

It went without saying that there was nobody out there holding the song-cycles to rigorous journalistic standards. They weren’t biographical works of nonfiction; there was only so much you could expect from how the persons within were described. It certainly wouldn’t outfit you to pick the genuine article out of a police lineup.

Without mass-reproducible media or DNA identification, it was difficult to prove you were you beyond a shadow of a doubt (not that there weren’t also sticking points even with those methods back home). This went all the more for someone you were meeting for the first time. Trust went a long way here. I didn’t want to blame this man for assuming someone who matched up with the guiding principle of “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck” was who they said they were. He had been wronged by this fake me, so I couldn’t blame him for blowing off steam by shouting all kinds of hell in this adventurers’ tavern for most of the day either. It would be easy for me to shout hell at him in turn, seeing as he was here in front of us, but the real person in the wrong here was the bastard cheating and date-raping his way across the country using my name.

“Not only that, there are so many incidents of young men who prey upon fathers with lost sons in the same way. The only real difference is that here my name in particular has been misused.”

While forms of official photo ID were commonplace in my old world, the common person had nothing of the sort here. Of course, magic or miracles could smooth this sort of situation over quite handily, but in almost all cases you had to rely on memory, critical thinking, and the good word of others. It was no surprise that charlatans ran rampant. All it took was a little bit of digging to work out the general picture of the person you wanted to imitate and a bit of sweet-talking and, hey presto, you had your scam.

From what I could tell from this case, our suspect was a dab hand. He was a trickster with an overtuned Persuasion skill, no doubt with a long trail of broken hearts and empty wallets in his wake.

Mister John sighed. “You’re right. I shouldn’t be angry at either of you, really.” He scratched at his scruffy black hair before walking into the kitchen with the unspoken message that he’d leave us to sort out this thing. I gathered that he knew I wouldn’t rest easy until I had solved my own problems.

This had come at the wrong time, to be honest. I was already losing sleep with my current workload—now I had to waste resources on a doppelgänger? Gods help us both, if this man didn’t practically line our mutual enemy’s neck up on the chopping block for me, I could not be held accountable for what I did next.

I tamped down on my bubbling anger once more—this deflated old man was not the target of my frustration. He and I were both victims in this. Nothing would come of moaning at him; at best, I’d draw some flak for publicly harassing a poor old man.

“I, um... I, uh, am terribly sorry, how can I...”

“You really don’t need to apologize anymore, sir. What’s your name?”

“Ah! My apologies! I am Guido of Heidewitt.”

I helped Guido to his feet and guided him to a table. I refrained from taking him to our usual seat—a few of the rookies whom I had trained this morning were still there, glaring daggers at him. They must have protected my good name all through the day. Man, I never felt “devil’s proof” was a more fitting term until now. How difficult it was to prove you didn’t do something...

I sat down Guido and asked one of the barmaids to bring him a mug of water. After a few sips, his tremors finally stopped, and he seemed to reclaim some sense of composure.

Now, this is the true testing ground of my tolerance.

“Now, Guido. You mentioned that you were swindled out of one drachma. Your family must be rather well-off, no?”

“Y-Yes... We have been the canton’s landlord for the past seven generations, and we own our own modest farm. I have been retired for a while now and had set aside that money for a silk gown for my granddaughter’s eventual wedding.”

His expression, gestures, body language, words—none of these indicated that he was lying. His hands betrayed his age, but the quality of his nails revealed that he wasn’t a laborer. It looked like he was your typical landlord who organized farmers and lived off their spoils without doing the actual fieldwork.

The slight leathery cast of his face indicated that even if he didn’t till the fields himself, he oversaw their daily grind in person. It didn’t look like he had faked the remains of sun damage all to trick me. If this was all an act? Well, I’d be happy to give Guido here his Oscar. Never mind me—if he fooled Mister John, a genuine veteran in the business, he’d have earned it.

“I see... Could you describe this man once more for me?”

“He was...one finger’s width or so taller than yourself. You both have golden hair, but you don’t have his freckles.”

“You say he had golden hair, but was it the exact same shade as mine? How about the length?”

It was true that my hair was sometimes annoying to deal with because of how long it was, but between my alfar companions and my sweet sister—who would bawl if I chopped it off—I had cause to take pride in keeping it nice and shiny. Bath trips were a must. I had it brushed every day. I put hair oil in it when I could. Heck, I even micromanaged how I slept to minimize bedhead. I’d overheard a performance of my song once where the poet sang that “little girls bit their blankets in frustration as their jealousy fizzed and bubbled at the sight of his luminous mane,” so forgive me if I was a little bit touchy about people looking down on my namesake.

“Ahh, well... To be honest, it looked nothing like yours. It was...a bit darker. It was long, yes, but stopped just before his shoulders.”

This was useful information. With his dull, shoulder-length hair, freckles, and similar height, I was beginning to assemble a pretty thorough picture of the cad.

“But his sword was the real deal. Even I was impressed with it. His hands were lined with calluses, like a real watchman’s. I suppose that was what really fooled me...”

Fake Me had to be a fellow adventurer, or a mercenary, or some sort of itinerant laborer. This was more than enough to ferret him out. He must have heard the story, looked at himself in the mirror, and thought the bet was worth chancing.

Guido had been around the block a few times, so he must have known that these kinds of heroic tales tended to employ a fair bit of artistic license. That, in turn, had left him room to convince himself the discrepancy in appearance wasn’t a red flag.

“Thank you very much, Guido. This has been very useful. I respect you for coming all the way to Marsheim for your granddaughter’s sake.”

This would be enough for me to get started. Now all I had to do was show him how big my heart was.

“Hm?! N-No, I can’t! Please, take it back!”

I had just placed three gold coins into his palm and clasped his fingers over them to make sure he kept them. A few drachmae was a cheap price to pay for my good name. I wanted him to take it no matter what.

“And take this for your granddaughter.”

Guido was already flustered enough, so I felt a little bad, but I needed to give him this, at least. I had used Farsight to get a view of my head from above and had cut off a lock of my hair. I gave it to him carefully encased in a handkerchief with some embroidery that I had personally done.

“This won’t be nearly enough to assuage her soul after losing her maidenhead so cruelly, but I hope it will be proof enough that you did your best on her behalf.”

“I-I couldn’t possibly! This hair is the stuff of songs!”

“I beg of you to take it. I hope you will tell your granddaughter what happened today.” This would hopefully stand as proof enough that he had been righteously angry on his daughter’s behalf, that he had begged forgiveness for his foolishness, and that he’d received it from me. “I will make sure justice is dealt to the scoundrel.”

At that, I saw Guido off.

“Are you really sure, boss? Couldn’t he have been sent by the crook, hungry for more coin?” Etan said as I smiled at a job well done. He was the rookies’ de facto spokesman now; if he said it, they all must have been thinking it. I pulled out my pipe and took a deep drag before giving him a bold smile.

“Well, I guess our perp here wasn’t in it purely for the money, Etan. Besides, did you see that man’s face? I’ve never met someone more honorable and straitlaced than a small town’s landlord. I’m sure to have guaranteed that my name, even if it was dragged through the mud by my imitator, will be respected through Heidewitt and beyond. I’m just buying myself a little insurance against any future wannabes making a play for fame and fortune using my name.”

My actions weren’t solely out of sympathy for Guido and his granddaughter. For all intents and purposes I was marketing myself. Guido had come here fuming, ready to beat the living pulp out of the swine, but instead he found someone eager to lend a magnanimous ear. I was sure that he would answer my compassion in kind.

“And Etan, rest assured—I may not look it, but right now I’m positively incandescent with rage.”

“You are?”

Etan cocked his head in confusion—he couldn’t link my words to anything in my demeanor. Though I had raised my voice in front of the rookies before, never had I truly gotten angry at them. Even during our first meeting, when we had ended up “duking it out” in the yard, I had responded to his jibes with some grace.

But know this, Etan: I care about my rep, okay?

I was still but a fledgling adventurer, but I had friends I was proud of and family that admired me. For someone to take all that and use it to deflect blame for such heinous and base behavior—well, I could never, ever let them get away with it.

“Mocking me means slinging mud in the faces of my comrades, my family, and those I value.”

There would be no ifs or buts now—justice would be served to its absolute limit.

I had worked my ass off day after day to build up a good reputation for myself. I wouldn’t let someone misuse it for such perverse ends and leave me to deal with the fallout.

“I’m going to find him even if it means I have to fish him out of a latrine with my own bare hands.”

I was gifted this name by my beloved parents, I thought, and by hook or by crook, you will receive your due for abusing it so, you thieving scoundrel. I funneled my anger into a nice, kind smile and took another puff on my pipe.

Etan’s squeak of fear told me that perhaps I hadn’t quite erased all traces of rage from my face. He took two steps back in shock. Did I really look so terrifying right now?

“Putting aside punishment for now,” Margit said, “how do you expect to find him? Even I can’t trek around all of Ende Erde for you to find one single person.”

“Don’t worry; for Plans A through F, you shouldn’t have to lift so much as a tarsus on one of your sweet little legs. My little chance meeting earlier might have been for the best after all.”

I propped my hands up behind my head like they were cat ears. I had many ways of finding someone—many a string to pull (old and new alike), and many a spell to weave—but I thought that this was perhaps the perfect trial run for our new feline friend to prove her worth to us.

[Tips] In the Empire, people have to rely on their memories—or if they’re lucky, portraits—of people in order to keep track of their identifying features. If a child leaves a family for many years, it’s no great challenge for someone with a little improvisational skill and few scruples to usurp that child’s place. Many a swindler has made their fortune on the backs of a grieving family. Others tend to imitate famous figures in contemporary songs to steal their exploits.

In Erich’s old world, older men and women are often targeted by scam callers who claim to be in dire need of money and beg their “grandparents” to wire them large sums to bail them out.

Living in this world made me realize how difficult it must have been to commit crimes back in modern-day Japan.

“P-Please! Let me go!”

After all, there were CCTV cameras wherever you went, most cars had dash cams, and all forms of long-distance transportation had security. The police couldn’t be underestimated either, as they could use cameras on shops and homes to lock eyes on a sucker even if they didn’t have visuals on the actual scene. Anonymity kept you alive if the law had it out for you, and in my old world, that was a rapidly dwindling resource for most folks.

“I-I beg you! L-Lemme go! I’m sorry, okay?!”

“Yes, yes; stop moving or you’ll make me mess up.”

There, you had to weave past an ever-tightening web of camera sight lines and facial recognition algorithms if you wanted to get away with anything. It made things safer for those on the straight and narrow—folks didn’t go missing nearly so often, and the most egregious wrongdoers never passed without detection.

I supposed the most common way of pegging a criminal in the Empire was through sketched wanted posters. These were far from flawless. The artist’s own interpretation and the witnesses’ foggy memory made the end product always a few steps away from the real thing.

“I’m begging you! Don’t kill me!”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

You couldn’t count on human wave tactics to flush out a random stranger; unless your target had some particular identifying feature, you would be pretty hard-pressed to hunt them down once they had escaped from your local jurisdiction. There had been cases in the past where idiots had been caught because they’d run back to their hometowns out of some bout of homesickness or had come back simply because things hadn’t worked out abroad.

It was only in the previous century that countries started working together to exchange criminals on an international basis back on Earth—that should illustrate just how much distance could get you in this world.

If you wanted to really make sure your escape was flawless, you could use magic or miracles to cover your tracks, but if you were only a small-time crook, you would have to fork over a lot of cash to get a pro to do it for you. That transaction itself would hinge entirely on trust. If you didn’t know dick about magic, you had no safe way to verify if that sort of spell had actually worked. Of course, if it did, then eventually the residual mana would vanish, and the people tracking you might use their limited information to pin down the wrong person, and you would be off scot-free. All the same, any sort of escape came with its own share of issues.

Although many routes were open to you, there was no such thing as a perfect escape, and that was the sort of thing that stuck with you.

“I’d hate to pick up a reputation as the sort of guy who’d kill a fellow in a fit of pique, even if they are a low-life swindler.”

There were some real pros out there, folks who could Always Get Their Man. These were prototypes for the classical Great Detective—masters of legwork, logic, and forensics; scholars of the human soul and all its unbidden demands; true diviners, capable of finding their mark without a drop of mana. Lately I’d hired one such genius.

“The water’s nice and hot now.”

“Thank you kindly, Margit.”

“Help! Heeelp! What the hell are you gonna do to me?!”

You might have noticed a certain someone interrupting my little internal monologue. Schnee had bagged this wretched little viper in a scant five days. She had kept her methods secret—she had to protect her livelihood, after all—but she’d told me that she had spotted a certain blond-haired individual splashing out with his big blowout in a nearby town of about eight hundred residents. I took my terrified clan members with me, rounded him up, and dragged him back to Marsheim.

Schnee was the real deal. She had sketched up a likeness and had found his little hideout in record speed. I was amazed by her efficiency and grateful for how easy she was to work with.

“Come now, I said I wouldn’t kill you! We’re performing a little public display.”

We were gathered in Adrian Imperial Plaza. It was the middle of the day, and the sun was shining merrily over the nearby garden of the Adventurer’s Association. Already a crowd had begun to gather, wondering what was happening, but I was in no danger of the guards shutting this thing down. After all, I’d made sure to get explicit permission to conduct this little public punishment.

An adventurer’s name was all they had. The Association, who worked with us, would also suffer if their day laborers were unfairly slandered and had copycats dragging their names through the mud. If they didn’t take their own responsibility in matters like this, then it would be bad for business. I was given permission to clear my name and take the measures I deemed necessary, as long as I didn’t kill him—such was the agreement I had signed.

In a way, the Association liked keeping its hands out of adventurers’ affairs. The only punishment for inter-adventurer fighting was a monetary fee because they didn’t want to bother with any unnecessary paperwork. That way adventurers could duke it out, solve their argument, and pay up, and everyone could move on. This was the method with the least amount of admin.

The Empire of Rhine was a massive country, but at times it behaved like a lazy, tiny state.

At any rate, what I was performing today was not an execution, but it was a public show to humiliate this swindler and teach him to never mess with adventurers again. A slap on the wrist wouldn’t be enough—he needed to really feel sorry.

“All right, Etan, Mathieu—hold him still.”

“Stop! STOOOP!”

I wasn’t planning on brutalizing his body or anything, so I had bound him to a stretcher. All the same, man, did he like to squirm. He was like a fish gasping for the sea, but with no hope of ever returning to the water. Sorry pal, you’re being dropped right into the pot.

I sprinkled a certain special powder over the fool’s head while my two rookies kept him steady and sloshed the bucket of hot water over him. I kneaded the powder into his hair and then gave it a nice tug. It came off in a nice clean motion like a weed from the ground, leaving a shiny, bald head in its place.

“Gwaaagh!” the fool shouted.

A ripple of murmurs went across the crowd. Many of the people in attendance, subconsciously or not, grabbed at their own hair or hats.

“Ew...”

“That’s not a pretty sight.”

“H-His whole head of hair came off! Is he gonna be bald forever?”

“N-No way...”

Adventurers often worked up a sweat and found themselves wearing helmets. All the same, many people valued their hair and tried to maintain it, despite the circumstances.

“Wow! It came clean off, just like you said!” I said, with wonder.

“K-Kaya, how could you create something so cruel?” Siegfried said, his voice trembling.

“It is easier to destroy than it is to create. That’s a universal lesson you should keep in mind, Dee,” Kaya replied.

The powder I had applied was Kaya’s very own brand of depilatory cream. Of course, I hadn’t requested she make it for today specifically. Both men and women in the Empire viewed themselves as civilized, and as such worked to remove excess hair. Whereas some people used scrubs at the baths or went to specialists, Kaya had concocted her own formula. I had bought a bottle from her, and it really made hair removal such a breeze. Sprinkle it on and add hot water, and you’re silky smooth.

Kaya’s own variety was designed to not activate unless it was energized by hot water, and so even though we had been splashed by the bubbles, the fact that we were still dry meant that every hair on our own heads was nice and safe.

There weren’t any ways to speed up hair growth in this world that I knew of.

“What did you do?! Let me go! PLEEEASE!”

“Yes, yes, enough whining. This is what you deserve. I hope you’ll be learning your lesson.”

By stepping up as the first one to use my name for illicit ends, this crook had become an example for others. Punishing one person to dissuade one hundred others was a common principle. Of course, killing was off the table—it made me look bad—so this had been the best way I could devise to demonstrate what would come of crossing Goldilocks Erich.

Seeing as this man had used my hair to run his con, well, clearly he didn’t deserve it anymore. It was a little bit medieval—that attitude of chopping off a guy’s hand to make sure he couldn’t steal again—but I was being positively generous. Hair grew back. Limbs did not. Kaya’s potion was completely natural, so you could say I was as kind as a Bodhisattva.

“Enough whining. I’m not a devil! I’ve left your eyebrows intact.”

“WHAT?! You’re evil! I-I admit that I pretended to be you, but I didn’t steal your money, did I?!”

“Backchat and trying to refute the crime? Sorry, but it looks like you haven’t learned your lesson.”

“Huh?!”

Just so you get the necessary context here, people who were bald—unless it was due to natural reasons—were treated a little bit like social outcasts. Some regions even shaved people’s heads as punishment and a physical marker of what they had done.

Unfortunately being a skinhead only suited a slim subset of people. Mister Hansel’s head was carefully shaved, so it looked pretty cool in all honesty, but voluntary baldness was so rare that he had become famous for it, just like Archbishop Lempel “the Bald” had in the past.

I had prepared phase two depending on how sorry he acted; his troublesome attitude indicated that he wouldn’t just get away with a bald head today.

“Siegfried, get the rope.”

“Really? We seriously gonna do this?”

The scene’s gruesome already, I know, but you can’t be soft with someone who’s not willing to learn from their mistakes, Sieg. If I became known as the guy who let off one person who had abused my name, then I would get a flood of copycats in the near future. I was totally on the side of cruel and unusual punishment, so long as it actually functioned as a deterrent and didn’t breach into endangering someone’s life.

Not only that, I was certain he was our guy. He had tried to dash off as soon as he had seen me, and in a totally pain-free questioning he’d fessed up to everything he had done. He wasn’t making up a story to get free either—it matched up with Guido’s account. So now I needed to see this thing to the end. I needed to let all of Ende Erde know that I was one person not to mess with. Again.

“Ooh, it’s so smooth. Your head’s like a boiled egg,” I said.

“Don’t say that, man,” Siegfried said as he handed me the rope. “I won’t be able to eat eggs for days...”

“My hair! MY HAIR!”

I had used the rest of the water to wash away the remaining suds and the straggling hair. His bald head was on display to everyone. It didn’t have that bluish pallor that a buzz cut gave—after all, his hair had been removed from the root.

Kaya really did cook up something amazing. Could she rework it for plucking chickens, maybe? It could really streamline cooking, I considered talking to her later about selling on the patent... Waaait; hold on a second, I thought, catching myself. This stuff was way too powerful for everyone to get their hands on it. Someone might slather it onto the head of their enemy. For some, a social death from having their looks ruined was worse than actual death.

“All right, it’s time. Hang ’im, boys!”

“You really are a coldhearted guy...” Siegfried muttered.

Despite Siegfried’s grumblings, I was the one who had been wronged, and so I hung this baldy upside down on a magical streetlamp with a sign that said, “I am a huge bastard who impersonates others.”

“Come on, comrade. Imagine if someone used your good name to steal an old man’s money and then have his way with a poor young woman. Imagine the pointed fingers as people gradually thought worse and worse of you.”

“Ugh, yeah, I’d probably stab the guy, it’s true. I think what you’re doing is crueler than that, to be honest.”

I wasn’t an unfairly cruel man. People could only stay in this position for around two hours or so—any longer and the blood rushing to his head might injure or kill him. I would leave him up there for around ten minutes, and if he still hadn’t learned his lesson, then I would give him a nice slow rotation for a minuscule break before putting his feet up in the air again for ten more. I’d make sure to check in on him for as long as he remained unrepentant.

Ironically kindness was the one thing that could screw this whole thing over. A famous koi fish-loving swordsman emphasized the importance of the message that an act carried.

“Killing is no good, Sieg. That will make me look bad. We need to make sure the people watching can laugh at this guy’s hubris, not scowl at our cruelty. Go too far and we’ll make the Fellowship of the Blade seem cruel and unfair.”

I was a far kinder soul than the people I had taken inspiration from. He would have no long-lasting injuries, no deformities—just a bald head that would grow back. He’d just have to keep a low profile for a while. If he wanted, he could head to a territory or two over and start a new life in a town where no one knew his name. There were no social media or photographs here—it was easy to do. Even with this show, it wouldn’t earn even half the long-lasting influence that Fidelio’s night of righteous ruin had. All the same, it would stop anyone doing what this bald fool had done.

“If I was him, I’d probably slit my own throat out of shame,” Siegfried went on, looking at the strung-up man.

“People like him don’t have the guts to do that. He’s a swindler, a smooth talker—someone who avoids responsibility. But chill out. Just watch the show, okay?”

I was a bit concerned that some of the people watching were looking at him with a dash more concern than mockery—it seemed different from the veritable jeering that I heard happened at public executions—but it paled in comparison to the satisfaction I felt at a job well done.

“Good work,” I said to Schnee.

“Criminy... Spotted me again? How long this time?”

The white-furred bubastisian had come to appraise the fruits of her labor; I could see her ears flatten in despondence after I called out to her.

“I must say, I’m rather impressed by her,” Margit whispered into my ear.

A compliment from Margit meant that my beautiful scout thought that Schnee’s abilities to vanish into the air or a crowd might be better than her own. Schnee had her own racial bonuses to benefit from—bubastisians were as slinky as their cat counterparts. Many of them tended to be flighty or easily bored, so people often forgot that they were skilled hunters.

“What in the—?! When did you get here?!” Siegfried said, taking a step back. “Your fur’s so white... Man, you’ve got skills to just vanish like that when you should be the most visible one here.”

“I stand out like a sore thumb when it’s dark though! Hee hee, I’m absolutely gassed to be gettin’ to work with ya too, Mister Second-in-command.”

The bubastisian swished her tail as she took in the tonally disparate scene of Kaya kindly explaining to Sieg what “gassed” meant and an upside-down bald man shouting curses at me.

“I gotta say, Erich, you think of the funniest darn things.”

“I thought putting on a show was better than being paid back in blood. I do wonder how long he’ll keep yelling that he’ll have my guts for garters...”

“I s’pose he’ll last a good ol’ half hour? He was a small fry, almost not worth chasin’ down,” Schnee said with a sigh.

She was right, of course. He was a two-bit crook who had committed a string of small-time crimes aside from perjury. He even had a criminal brand from another region. When Schnee had brought me her notes on him, she wondered what I stood to gain from hunting down someone as small-time as him.

In my eyes, he was the perfect example for me to make. If he was a shark, not a minnow, he wouldn’t be so easy to cook up. If someone from a dangerous organization or some noble family had been the one impersonating me, then I would have had to have changed tack. This whole public rigmarole stank just a bit too much of adventurer.

He worked alone, and that meant I didn’t have to worry about him calling in the cavalry on me. All he could do was scream that he would kill me, knowing full well he’d never pull it off. I would be safe, but I did feel a bit sorry for other follicularly challenged people who looked like him who might be mistaken for a philanderer. It was a good thing there were so few bald people, I supposed.

“It was a twitchin’ in my whiskers that got me to talk to ya, but I gotta say, it looks like I should trust in our great ancestor more.”

From what I knew, bubastisians originated from a divine country in the southern continent that once possessed great power but had lost it by the current era. There was a cat god from this nation that still wielded considerable clout, and many theologians supposed that the cat lords that made their home across the Empire were related—perhaps lower-level divine beings that had broken away from that pantheon.

At any rate, bubastisians had good instincts.

“I ain’t sure which of my nine lives I’m on now, but I bet I scored some points workin’ with ya.”

Their religious beliefs and attitudes toward life and death were more complex than our own. They could communicate with intelligent cats and regarded them as their fellows. Bubastisians believed that there was a chance of being reborn as a cat lord after their reincarnation into their ninth life. This wasn’t some sort of codified belief system; it was more one of those beliefs that gets ingrained in people on a molecular level.

I wasn’t the type of person to sniff at folk beliefs. Seeing the cat lord’s acorn sprout seconds after dropping into the ground on that barren mountain in Zeufar, I made sure to keep an open mind. I wondered now if their god had a paw upon the loom of my fate.

“I know you were looking for work as much as I was looking for an informant. What do you think? Do I cut the mustard as your employer?” I asked.

“I can’t stop grinnin’ at this whole spectacle. You’re more than interestin’ enough. What I wanna hear is if yer satisfied with my work.”

“I believe I showed my satisfaction through more material means.”

As I said this, Schnee began to twitch in a particular manner. She wasn’t in pain or anything—this was a uniquely bubastisian way of laughing. Many of their race found it difficult to speak in Imperial standard, and even those who were comfortable with our language still didn’t use their vocal cords when laughing. Shymar was a native Rhinian speaker, so she laughed like we did, but Adham laughed like Schnee did.

“Ya got me there. Ain’t a cat in the world y’could pay off in shiny coins, but a gal’s gotta pay for her dinner. Thank ya kindly, Erich.”

Evidently satisfied, Schnee raised her tail as she slipped into the crowd and out of sight. It was like watching a fog dissipate into nothing.

“She’s difficult to hold on to, isn’t she? Catlike in more ways than one,” Margit said.

“Agreed. She’s nothing like Shymar.”

“I wonder if Schnee is more typically bubastisian...”

Everyone was different. It was a simple fact of the world. Not every Rhinian was an efficiency-obsessed, humorless anal-retentive. Not everyone from the isles were rowdy meat-lovers. Not everyone from Seine was obsessed with the material joys of the world.

“You absolute BASTARD! Your head is mine! I’ll decorate your grave with your guts!”

What did they say back in my old world? “The wheels of justice grind slow but exceedingly fine”? I satisfied myself with the steadily diminishing vigor of the fool’s shouts as they rang through Imperial Adrian Plaza.

From what I could tell, from this day onward, no one else dared to pretend to be Goldilocks Erich ever again. Very good. As they said, “The cat’s in her sunbeam, all’s right with the world”...

[Tips] Bubastisians have a religious belief based around nine lives—a tradition that is most likely based on broader cat folklore.

If a cat’s soul has managed to accrue enough virtuous deeds through eight lives, then it is said they will attain enlightenment upon their ninth life and be reborn as a god. Despite the size and shape difference, bubastisians regard cats as their fellows and describe death as “changing coats.” Such ideas of reincarnation are rare in the Empire.