Normally, the room didn’t have so many people in it, but today it was unusually crowded. There was Jircniv himself, along with four guards; Fluder Paradyne, the empire’s most powerful wizard; ten of Jircniv’s most trusted retainers, who were sharp enough to supplement even the emperor’s unparalleled intelligence; as well as one of the Four, said to be the strongest knights in the empire, Lightning Baswood Peshmel.
They all sat where they pleased and had been debating imperial policy. The papers scattered everywhere spoke to how heated the meeting had become. Some of the participants were even starting to lose their voices.
The young emperor, known also as the Fresh Blood Emperor, said something to Fluder that he never said to anyone: “Don’t worry about it. I cause a lot of trouble for you. I’d like to hold back a bit, since you’re getting older, but I can’t seem to help but rely on you. Forgive me.”
“I’m grateful for your kind consideration, Your Imperial Majesty, but I am your faithful servant. Please order me without compunction.” Fluder accepted the emperor’s sentiments and bowed slightly.
He’s grown into a fine young man, thought Fluder, looking at the handsome youth.
Fluder had begun serving the empire about six generations previous.
He hadn’t gotten along with the emperor at the time, six emperors ago. Still, his elite magic ability found him in one of the highest positions at court almost immediately after he was invited.
Consequently, he was a little closer with the following emperor, and at the same time he was granted the position of principal court wizard, he was engaged in the magic education of the emperor’s heir.
Three emperors ago, he began passing on all sorts of wisdom as a more general teacher and became deeply involved in policy.
Then came the current emperor, so precious to him.
Fluder had witnessed generations of emperors, and there was not a single incompetent one among them. Each of them seemed chosen by the gods in their excellence; they were all children blessed with aptitude (although the first one he served was in the prime of his life). Even in that splendid company, the current emperor was exceedingly bright. Although it had been in the works for two generations, the reason they were able to declare the country an absolute monarchy was his ability.
Fluder loved Jircniv Rune Farlord El Nix.
He’d poured himself into his education as if he were his own son. He was sure the emperor thought of him as a second father, too.
Still…
Even if he loved him like his own son, he would cut him off.
I want to peer into the abyss of magic, Jir. To do that, there is nothing I wouldn’t abandon, even a charming boy like you.
“So, Your Imperial Majesty, are you all right with completely canceling this season’s invasion of the kingdom?”
“Yeah. Looking into that demon Jaldabaoth is more important. Gramps, did you come up with anything?”
“I’m afraid not, Your Imperial Majesty. We’re looking, but we haven’t found any documentation.”
Yes. That was his story.
“Sir Paradyne, can you not investigate using magic?”
Fluder put on a prudent expression and half closed his eyes. “Certainly magic possesses omnipotent potential, but…”
“Sorry, Gramps. You tend to ramble about that stuff. Better skip ahead.”
“Understood, Your Imperial Majesty.” Fluder looked disappointed and continued in the tone of a teacher instructing a dull-witted child. “There are ways to counter magical searches. For instance, do you know the walls of this room have a barrier to keep sound from escaping? There are other examples. Detection magic obstruction is one.”
“Aha… So there are all sorts of methods for countering, and that makes it difficult…”
“Yes. And we would have to consider ourselves lucky if our spell getting negated were the end of it. Casters in higher realms sometimes prepare counterattacks against detection magic—spells that could even kill someone if they weren’t careful.”
What use could my level of magic be to the Supreme One? …There is truly no one more worthy of the words Supreme One than him… I must show him I can be useful as soon as possible…
Several people made sour faces when he mentioned that one could be instantly killed in a counterattack, but Fluder wasn’t interested in their opinions.
“In that case”—one of the retainers picked up a sheet of paper—“does the fact that you managed to locate what appears to be the base of the caster Ainz Ooal Gown mean that you’re superior to him?”
“Don’t be naive!” He suppressed a bitter grin and spoke forcefully so they would sense his irritation. “You’re being too optimistic. When we noticed that he had saved the village of Carne—no, that he had saved only the village of Carne—we were monitoring the entire vicinity when we discovered the ruins. Since we had never heard of them before, we continued monitoring and just happened to see the caster Ainz Ooal Gown enter them. You’ll land yourself in trouble if you forget that it was nothing more than serendipity!”
He meant it in part. Only a fool would take the Supreme One lightly. Well, he’d done it, too, but how pitiful it was to be ignorant.
Fluder inwardly sneered at his previous, foolish self. What a truly dark time that was.
“I beg your pardon.”
Fluder accepted the apology with a raised hand.
“Oh, speaking of which, Gramps, what happened with the workers we sent in?”
“I received the first report via Message from a spy I had tail them, and it appears they’ve been wiped out.”
Jircniv counted the days on his fingers, and his eyes widened just a little. He had heard they sent multiple rather outstanding teams. If they were really all annihilated in a day, or maybe even only half a day, that would be surprising.
Of course, Fluder wasn’t surprised. He thought it was an utterly natural outcome. But the expression he put on his face was one of disbelief.
“…Really? Still, we can’t rely only on magic intelligence. When will the adventurers be back?”
“When no one returned, they decided to withdraw immediately, but it will take about four more days.”
“So to get information from the returned adventurers, it will take…at least five days? I guess we can’t make any moves during that time, then?”
Message was not a very reliable source of intelligence. The farther away someone was, the harder it was to hear them. But there were other reasons that many nations didn’t trust the spell enough to use it for important matters.
The most famous incident was probably the tragedy of the country called Gattenburg.
Gattenburg was a human nation of mainly casters that three hundred years ago made it possible to rapidly share information by connecting its cities with Message. They trusted Message too much, and just three pieces of false intelligence plunged the country into civil war. The cities fought one another, and when monsters and subhumans attacked on top of that, the country fell to ruin.
The bards sang many other tragic tales, such as the one about the man who killed his wife after hearing she was unfaithful, but it turned out to be a lie.
For all those reasons, there were few people who trusted Message. Rather, people who trusted it too much were liable to be called fools. Jircniv was one of the people who didn’t put much faith in the spell. He did use it, but he made it a rule to have an additional source for his information. He never relied solely on magic.
“But what an idiot. If he had hired a worker team out of E-Rantel, things would have gone more our way. His incompetence is why we can have him dance in the palm of our hand, but at the same time, it’s a problem if he’s too incompetent. We need him to be a better decoy.”
“It’s just as you say, Your Imperial Majesty.”
Jircniv furrowed his brow at Fluder’s agreement.
The plan they had created upon accepting Fluder’s proposal at a meeting several days ago had two objectives.
On
e was to grasp Ainz Ooal Gown’s personality.
Fluder had noticed that Ainz Ooal Gown’s presence hadn’t moved from the ruins for a few days. This led them to conclude the ruins were the caster’s base, so they sent the worker teams in to gauge Ainz’s reaction.
How would he react to someone intruding into his home—moderately or severely?
From the fact that the workers had been wiped out, they had grasped one facet of his personality.
The other object was to sour the relationship between Ainz Ooal Gown and the kingdom. The best would have been to hire workers from E-Rantel, but unfortunately that’s not how it happened.
He wasn’t that stupid…
The only information that had gone to the count was that there were some unexplored ruins. It would have taken guts to hire kingdom workers for the shady purpose of ransacking ruins in kingdom territory on behalf of a noble from the empire. Hiring workers from the empire was the best they could have expected him to do.
But that wouldn’t sour the relationship between Ainz Ooal Gown and E-Rantel, much less the relationship between him and Re-Estize as a whole. So to accomplish the second goal, they had to make sure word of the ruins got to the Adventurers Guild in the kingdom as well.
“Momon’s visit to the empire worked in our favor.”
“It sure did. He’ll probably be the one to tell the guild over there that the workers were all killed in those unexplored ruins. Once they know the empire is targeting the ruins, they’ll get serious and mount their own expedition.”
They had shoehorned adventurers into this plan expressly for that purpose. Of course, they hadn’t exercised the emperor’s authority at all. They had used spies to spread intelligence.
They had to make sure the story of this incident ended simply as one lone noble acting recklessly. That way, even if the empire’s involvement came out, Ainz Ooal Gown’s anger would be directed at the count they had manipulated, and Jircniv would be able to work things to his favor.
“So then we’ll have kingdom adventurers invading the residence of Ainz Ooal Gown, who is known to react severely. How will this immensely powerful caster respond to the kingdom? And what will the guild do after he inflicts his revenge on them?”
Looking forward to it. Jircniv smiled and then confirmed just to be sure, “So we understand the power of Ainz Ooal Gown. He’s strong enough to obliterate worker teams with no trouble. And we can pin all this neatly on one stupid noble, right?”
“Of course. We were very discreet, so only the people in this room know what really happened.”
“Okay, that’s fine, then. I just wanted to— Huh?!”
A vibration like the rumbling of the earth interrupted him. The furniture shook and the windows rattled, but it didn’t feel like an earthquake. It was more like something huge had crashed into the ground, with one big jolt.
“What was that?! Find ou— What a racket. What’s going on?!”
Jircniv could hear screams coming from not only inside the room but outside as well. The room had thick, sturdy walls, so the voice had to be incredibly loud. Or was it more than one? What could have caused something so out of place as a shriek in this place?
A guard who had peeked through a gap in the curtains into the courtyard, where the screams seemed to be coming from, answered with a pale face. “Your Imperial Majesty! It’s a dragon! A dragon has landed in the courtyard!”
For a moment, everyone was dazed. The couldn’t understand what had just been said. Well, how could they have? Though they knew he wouldn’t lie, they all rushed to the window to confirm with their own eyes.
They practically ripped the curtains off the window, they yanked them so hard. When they looked through the semitransparent glass and saw the dragon sitting imposingly in the middle of the courtyard, all their jaws dropped.
“Wh-why is there a dragon here? Where did it come from?”
“Foreign affairs minister! Was anyone outrageous enough to ride a dragon into our courtyard supposed to visit today?!”
“No, I’ve heard nothing of the sort.”
“Have you ever met the dragons from the Council State? Is it one of those?”
“…It doesn’t look anything like descriptions I’ve heard, and I heard them from a diplomat, so they should be reliable.”
“Still, the biggest problem is how it was allowed to penetrate this far! The emperor is here! What is the Imperial Air Guard doing?!”
With their tough bodies wrapped in hard scales, life spans far longer than humans’, and magical ability on top of various skills, dragons were the most powerful beings in the world. Of course, their strength ran the gamut; there was no lack of dragons who had been slain by adventurers, but looking back through history, neither was it rare for cities or even whole countries to be destroyed by angry dragons. The destruction of a city in a country to the south twenty-odd years ago was still fresh in everyone’s memory.
One of those fearsome beings landing in the courtyard of the imperial palace was an unthinkable emergency.
Even Jircniv himself was swallowing hard and waiting to see what would happen when he saw two small figures get off the dragon.
If he squinted, he could make out two children with brown skin like they had suntans.
“They must be dark elves.” Fluder calmly stated the pair’s race.
“Sir Paradyne! What is that dragon?! Who are those elves?!”
“Well, I don’t know this dragon, either…”
Knights surrounded the children who had dismounted, as well as the dragon itself, as a matter of protocol. The knights were the empire’s pride, but they looked awfully unreliable opposite a dragon. It truly was the strongest creature in existence.
From the knights’ ranks, one man with a shield in either hand stepped forward.
“Whoa, whoa. He’s going? Well, he’s the only one who really could…but wouldn’t it be a shame to lose him?”
The one who approached the dragon was Unshakable Nazami Eneck.
He was one of the empire’s top fighters, said to be the strongest of the Four in a defensive battle. He was resistant to many different types of energies but looked utterly flimsy compared to the dragon. Everyone had to nod in response to the comment that seemed to imply it was Lightning Baswood Peshmel’s comrade’s final hour.
“Your Imperial Majesty, please evacuate!”
“Where would I go? Where’s even safe?”
The retainer regained composure at Jircniv’s scoffing reply.
“But!”
“I get it. I get what you’re trying to say. But I’d be a laughingstock if I fled the imperial palace, even if were up against a dragon. It doesn’t seem like a Council State dragon, but if it did this knowing I wouldn’t be able to run away… I’ve heard dragons are clever, but this one appears informed of our political situation as well.”
He was purging the nobles, but that was on the military strength of the knights. If word got out that he abandoned the castle when a dragon appeared, there was a good chance the nobles would think, So that’s the extent of his power? and rebel all at once.
He wasn’t about to let a mob defeat him, but the empire would still lose a chunk of its might.
Whether I fight or run, it’ll end in a loss. What a nasty move to make. Who is that dragon?
More people had gathered in the courtyard. There were the forty men from the emperor’s guard and sixty knights, plus arcane and faith casters.
“I’m not sure a hundred and twenty people is enough. I think I should go, too, Your Imperial Majesty.”
Jircniv furrowed his brow slightly. Fluder was the empire’s greatest trump card. He wasn’t sure if it would be profitable to play him against a dragon. The thing that finally ended his hesitation was his belief that Fluder would surely be able to escape in a worst-case scenario.
But Jircniv didn’t know that Fluder volunteered to go to avoid having to teleport the emperor to safety.
“Thanks, Gramps. If possible, can you ge
t Unshakable to fall back?”
“Understood. However, our opponents are unfathomable. They may be astonishingly powerful, so you should prepare to run.”
With that, Fluder flung open the window. Then he threw himself into the air and flew up into the sky with a flying spell.
“Uh, can everyone hear me all right? I am Aura Bella Fiora, servant of Ainz Ooal Gown.”
Just then an incredibly loud voice echoed out.
“The emperor of this place sent some rude guys to Lord Ainz’s home, the Great Tomb of Nazarick! Lord Ainz is not amused. So if the emperor doesn’t come to apologize, we’ll destroy the country!”
Jircniv grimaced. Who reached that conclusion and how? How had they followed such a fine trail of evidence?
Looking around the room, he was met with shocked faces. Realizing what he had in mind, they all shook their heads.
“For starters, we’ll kill all the humans here! Mare!”
The dark elf standing next to him thrust a staff into the ground. That instant, it seemed like a huge, localized earthquake occurred in the courtyard—the only reason there was any doubt was because Jircniv didn’t feel a thing. Still, with the dragon and the dark elves as the epicenter, the ground shrieked, ripping open a pattern of gaping fissures more intricate than a spider’s web.
Knights, guards, casters—everyone except Fluder in the sky was swallowed up by the earth.
The dark elf, casually standing there, must have skillfully kept her allies out of the area of effect. When she pulled the staff out of the ground, the fissures sealed up just as suddenly as they had opened. In fact, they closed up so quickly that the spiderweb shape appeared again as ridges of dirt.
None of the knights who had been gathered in the courtyard were anywhere to be found. Everything was over all too quickly.
“Okay, then! We killed them all. Next, we’ll kill everyone in the castle… Er, wait, we don’t know which one is the emperor, so I guess we won’t do that! But if he doesn’t come out soon, we’ll destroy the city! Emperor, please hurry up and get out here!”
“Y-your Imperial Majesty,” a retainer asked, pale faced and shuddering. “…Do you think by coming on a dragon they mean to say we ‘stepped on the dragon’s tail’?”
The Invaders of the Great Tomb Page 26
