14
The day after the incident, Ricardo and Anastasia visited the chairman’s office at the Chuden Company. Ricardo sat on a sofa, sipping his green tea as he finished delivering his report. Taking a deep breath, he added, “Anyway, we pulled that scum out by the root. We rescued Ana, too, and our losses were…well, they ain’t so bad.”
“Appears so,” his boss replied. “Though it seems you did commit a string of illegal acts…”
Chuden, seated across from Ricardo, nodded deeply after hearing the story from start to finish. Ricardo, dissatisfied with the vague response, wrinkled his nose. “Hey, that’s a pretty murky way to put it, eh? You got a complaint for me?”
“Of course we do! Do you have any idea how scared I was because of you, old man? You’re getting a pay cut—a pay cut, you hear?! Mister Chuden, tell him!”
Ricardo grunted awkwardly. “B-but I said I was sorry, Ana…”
As Anastasia wailed and yipped beside him, Ricardo’s expression darkened slightly. Chuden merely shrugged in exasperation. This was one of those times Ricardo had to own up to his mistakes.
Thanks to Anastasia’s cunning, the criminal operation had been spectacularly dismantled. But the only reason they got that chance was because she had been captured by slave traders—a grim reality that left Ricardo apologizing profusely once he learned the details.
He had never imagined his kindness could backfire so horribly. Every danger Anastasia faced was his fault.
“Still, because of that, we got to crush Razcrew’s company—”
“Apologize!”
“Yip—I’m sorry! I’ll work hard to make sure this never happens ever again…”
As Anastasia hopped in anger, Ricardo’s ears flopped in guilty apology. Chuden, watching the exchange, couldn’t hold back his laughter anymore.
“You guys are really somethin’… Okay, okay, I get it. Anastasia, you were the hero of this story. And Ricardo…well, I guess heroics and failure cancel each other out.”
“You’re way too soft, Mister Chuden. This old man is gonna let it go to his head.”
“Then you’ll just have to knock him down a peg, Anastasia.”
“Ahhh—all right, understood. I’ll knock him down a whole bunch!”
With Chuden’s permission in hand, Anastasia shot Ricardo a side-eyed smirk. It was a look that made Ricardo uneasy about what she had in store for him. At the same time, this was the look of “The Girl Who Opened the Gates.” And he was proud that she was. He had been right about her all along.
“But Anastasia, my lady, I’m mighty impressed you linked the slave traders with the bandits. How’d you even figure that out? Did you get one of the goons to spill the beans?”
“Uhh, well… It wasn’t anything so grand, really. It’s just, they had a leader, right? And that guy had this jingly-jangly shiny thingy that looked real familiar to me.”
“You recognized an accessory of his?”
“Yeah, I thought I’d seen it while doing caddy work. Anyway, the guy sellin’ ’em mentioned bein’ attacked by the bandits you two were talking about. So I just thought…maybe that’s why the old man and his mercenaries couldn’t find the bandits. Just seemed to me like all the stuff the merchants were selling would be tough for bandits to get fenced.”
“……”
As Anastasia brushed it off like it was just a lucky guess, Chuden drew in a sharp breath. Beside her, Ricardo was speechless. The way she’d connected the dots seemed outlandish, yet somehow, it had led her to the right answer.
And she had managed to communicate that information to Ricardo right when he needed it.
“When Hetaro and Mimi—oh, those were the catmen kids captured with me—anyway, when Mimi got hit, I thought, huh, why did her brother’s cheek turn red, too? Just seemed like maybe they were connected by a blessing. Then I heard them talkin’ about a third sibling on the outside.”
“So you…cut wounds into the other siblings so they’d appear on the third sibling as a map?”
“Yeah, sure was lucky I happened to catch a glimpse of the map in here. That helped us draw a pretty good one.”
Committing a complicated map to memory and replicating it after seeing it once was no big deal for Anastasia. Neither was calculating their exact travel distance and triangulating their position simply by watching the sky through the small window in the wagon, noting the sun’s position, and counting the wheel revolutions.
By pinpointing the exact location of the enemy camp for the mercenary night raid, she had essentially cleared the way to victory—excluding the wild, unpredictable variable known as Didorii. From start to finish, Anastasia was a key player.
“But how did you do all of this from inside a wagon…?”
“Even the walls of loading platforms get hot when the sun hits ’em. Also, I counted out the time ever since I heard the midday bell. I dunno, with all that information, it was easy to figure out where we were on the map.”
“Y-yeah…guess so…” Ricardo nodded tentatively. She kind of had a point—each individual action wasn’t groundbreaking on its own.
But to count time by the second, calculate her position based on the sun’s angle, formulate an escape plan, and perfectly carve a map onto a child’s stomach from memory—most people could never do all those things.
And Anastasia did it all by herself.
He had no idea what to make of it.
“Holy… You really are more than I imagined.”
“Hmm?”
As Anastasia tilted her head innocently, Chuden looked thoroughly pleased. He was the one who had seen potential in her, pulling her from a bar where she ran errands and turning her into an apprentice merchant.
Her work had already started giving him a return on his investment, and now he had solid proof that his judgment was right. Who could blame him for grinning like an idiot?
But Ricardo remained wary. Chuden’s high hopes for Anastasia’s future were dangerous in their own way.
So, with a particularly rough hand, he tousled Anastasia’s hair and muttered, “Well, can’t argue with that. She’s more than anyone could imagine. Never dreamed that before I got the chance to rescue her, Ana’d wipe out the boss. I’d be terrified to be that slave trader!”
“W-well, I did what I had to! It was dangerous outside, so I figured we should at least make sure we were safe inside…and slave traders deserve every bad thing they get— Hey! You’re tangling my hair!”
By the time Ricardo had arrived, Anastasia had already collared the head slaver and forced him to suffer the same punishments he had inflicted on them.
He couldn’t think of a more poetic revenge.
“I know I promised I’d let you hold my collar…but maybe I said that too soon.”
“Hey, don’t be stupid. A promise is a promise, come hell or high water. Seriously, what stupid stuff are you spouting now?!”
As Anastasia blushed and yelled, Ricardo bared his fangs in a wide grin. He had left this part out of the report, but when he’d shown up to rescue her, Anastasia had flung herself into his arms and sobbed. He figured it was best to keep that a secret.
Chuden watched the pair, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of his sails. Still, Anastasia’s merits aside, it was time to wrap up the conversation.
“By the way, about those catfolk kids who got captured with you and helped out…where’d they go?”
He inquired about the other heroes of the story, who were mysteriously absent. Ricardo and Anastasia exchanged identical puzzled expressions.
“Well, we don’t know,” Anastasia admitted. “The oldest sister could use healin’ magic—I know she healed the other two boys, so they should be okay…”
“She said somethin’ like, ‘Champions of justice neeeever ask for payment!’ and then ran off somewhere.”
“…How could she possibly say that?”
Chuden’s question hung in the air, because it was the same question tormenting Ricardo and Anastasia.
Those three siblings had suffered great harm helping to take down the criminal outfit, yet they hadn’t asked for a single coin in compensation. The girl had just grabbed her brothers and disappeared into the rising sun—well, not exactly. They had gone through the city gates, so they were probably still in Banan somewhere.
“Callin’ themselves champions of justice…do those little runts even understand what they’re talkin’ about?”
“Oh, they understand, I’m sure of it,” Anastasia replied confidently. “I can’t deny that their justice and courage saved my hide… And one other thing I’m sure of is we’ll meet again someday.”
As loud as those siblings were, tracking them down wouldn’t be difficult. But that wasn’t what Anastasia meant.
Ricardo crossed his arms. Anastasia smiled beautifully, and he gave a simple nod in return.
“You’re probably right.”
With that, Anastasia straightened up and announced, “Okay! I got an extra day off, so back to work.”
“Whoa, hold up! But for the past two days, you were—how can you be so—?”
“All I did was lie there. C’mon, old man, you’re on guard duty for the company! And no blunders like last time, you hear?”
The tiny girl tugged on his arm fur and then started pushing Ricardo toward the door. He had hoped to spend the day drinking himself into oblivion after filing the report, but it seemed even that humble request wasn’t going to happen.
“Your price dropped because of your last blunder, right, old man? Now it won’t be long until I can afford to buy you!”
A smile burst onto her face as she boldly dreamed of trafficking people herself.
And when Ricardo saw that smile, he sighed pathetically, feeling utterly defeated.
But…it wasn’t a bad feeling.
It would be natural for people to call him a fence-sitter. Scratching his head at that thought, Ricardo turned and followed after Anastasia.
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