The Men of the Kingdom Part I

by Kugane Maruyama

  He started feeling flustered under Tina’s unreserved gaze. He thought he would just endure it, but then he wondered if she had noticed something he’d carelessly missed, so he made up his mind to ask. “What is it?”

  “You’ve gotten too big.”

  “…Huh?” That made no sense. Climb had several question marks over his head when Lakyus interrupted to apologize.

  “Never mind, it’s just her thing. Don’t worry about it, Climb. Really, don’t worry about it. Really.”

  “I see—”

  “What are you talking about, Lakyus?” Climb had forced himself to accept the explanation, but unable to do so herself, Renner interrupted.

  Lakyus made a whiny face at her. “Ugh, whenever it comes to Climb…”

  “Oh, I just—”

  “Shut up. The reason I didn’t bring Tia is because she’s always trying to put weird ideas into Renner’s head. So can you just understand that and be quiet?”

  “Aye-aye, demon boss.”

  “But… Lakyus. What is it?”

  At Renner’s follow-up, Lakyus’s face twitched violently with an expression of agony.

  Right when Climb thought he should maybe chime in, she suddenly turned to him. “Uh…Climb, looks like you love wearing that armor.”

  “Yes, it’s fantastic armor. Thank you.”

  The word forced was far from enough to describe the change of topic, but hoping to prevent the princess’s guest from losing face, he replied and ran his hand over the white armor he’d received from Renner. It had been constructed from quite a bit of mythril and a little orichalcum; was enchanted with various spells; and was surprisingly light, sturdy, and mobile.

  The Blue Roses were the ones who had offered to supply the mythril for his equipment, free of charge. No amount of bowing could possibly be enough to express his gratitude.

  He was about to lower his head when Lakyus stopped him. “No worries. We just gave Renner the leftovers from when we made our own mythril armor.”

  Even mere scraps of mythril could fetch an extremely high price. An orichalcum-ranked adventurer might have had the means to forge a full set of mythril plates, and a mythril rank could have possibly owned a mythril weapon. But the only ones who could hand over the material like it was nothing were probably powerful adamantite-ranked adventurers.

  “Besides, it was Renner who asked. We couldn’t say no.”

  “You wouldn’t take my money. I even saved up my allowance for it…”

  “…Isn’t it weird for a princess to have an allowance?”

  “The money from my estate is separate. I wanted to make Climb’s armor with my allowance…”

  “Yeah. You wanted to give him armor you made with your own money.”

  “If you knew, then why did you give the metal to me for free? You jerk.”

  “Do I really deserve to be called a jerk for that…?”

  Pouting Renner and smirking Lakyus started quarreling without really fighting.

  Watching the two, Climb’s stoic expression nearly broke, but he held it together.

  The fact that he was able to see this—this peaceful, warm scene—was thanks to his master, who had taken him in. But he couldn’t ever open up and reveal his feelings. Showing his gratitude was proper, but he had stronger feelings deep inside, those he couldn’t show.

  They were…love.

  Climb shoved them down and suppressed them. Instead, he said the words he’d repeated many times. “Thank you, Princess Renner.”

  The way he held his body clearly demarcated a line between their respective positions—clarifying their relationship as master and servant. Renner reacted to this with a smile that contained the faintest hint of sadness, which Climb only noticed precisely because he watched her more than anyone every single day.

  “You’re welcome. Now, we seem to have gotten a bit off track. Let’s return to our earlier discussion.”

  “About the Eight Fingers, right? You got that we snuck into three villages growing the drugs and burned the fields, right?”

  At that name, Climb mentally frowned behind his blank visage.

  The Eight Fingers was a criminal organization operating in the kingdom’s underworld. His beloved and respected master was figuring out what to do about them.

  If they torched the drugs supplying the livelihoods of those villagers, the question of what would become of them didn’t have any good answers, but they were necessary sacrifices in eradicating the narcotics eating away at the kingdom.

  Someone with absolute power would have had a number of ways to solve the problem, but despite being the princess, Renner had virtually no support. Consequently, she had to make realistic choices as to who she could save and who she needed to ignore.

  If she petitioned her father, the king, she might have been able to attack with military and authoritative might wherever she wished. But since the Eight Fingers had clear ties to various nobles, intelligence would most certainly leak, allowing the criminals to anticipate her moves and destroy all the evidence of their crimes.

  That’s why Renner had chosen to rely on her friend Lakyus and her team directly.

  Climb knew that such a request was a risky move. Normally, adventurers fielded jobs via the guild; accepting jobs directly was not permitted. What they were doing was against the rules.

  Granted, the guild couldn’t very well penalize or banish a team at the highest rank. Still, breaking the rules could hurt their reputation internally and put them at a disadvantage in the future. The reason they undertook the mission regardless must have been because the Blue Roses loved their country and saw Renner as a friend.

  She was putting herself and her team on the line, making Climb even more grateful to her.

  Lakyus felt it was about time to bring up a certain topic, so she opened the bag Tina had brought and withdrew a piece of parchment.

  It was something the Blue Roses hadn’t been able to decipher. Lakyus thought Renner, who had the best brains of anyone she knew, might be able to figure it out.

  “We found these when we were lighting the narcotic fields. They seem like some kind of instructions, so we brought them back with us, but…can you make anything of them?”

  On the unfurled parchment were symbols from no writing system for any country they had ever seen. Renner answered nonchalantly after just a glance, “It’s a substitution cipher.”

  A substitution cipher was a type of code where symbols or other characters were substituted for single or multiple character units of normal writing. If A is ∆ and B is , then ∆∆∆ is AABBA.

  “That’s what I thought, too. So I looked everywhere for the key, but unfortunately I couldn’t find it. It’s possible they have it memorized, so it made sense to charm the man we captured into being our ally and get it out of him that way. He seemed like someone in charge. But as you know, charm magic is less effective when the same person casts it on the same target multiple times. I wanted to make sure the first round was a good one, so I thought we should check with you first.”

  “I see… Why was this at the scene anyway? Is it a trap…? Or was there some other reason? Then they wouldn’t use something very hard to crack. Right. I think this is pretty easy to decipher.”

  Lakyus’s eyes widened. She exchanged a glance with Tina beside her in spite of herself.

  She couldn’t believe it. On the other hand, well, it was Renner.

  “Uh, so, in the language of the kingdom, the first letters will represent either the masculine article, the feminine article, or the neuter article, so… One second…” As the princess mumbled, she got up, still holding the parchment, and grabbed a pen and paper.

  Then the letters started to flow onto the paper.

  “This is a pretty simple cipher, since each symbol stands for a single character. And we’re lucky they were using the language of the kingdom. If the key were a book from the empire or something, it’d be pretty much impossible. With this…well, if you can figure out one letter, it’s j
ust about filling in the rest from there. Anyone can decipher this with a little effort.”

  “Noooo, it’s easy to say that, but it’s impossible unless you know tens of thousands of words, right?” said Lakyus.

  “These are instructions written in code! You wouldn’t expect any overly complex phrasing, and the possibility of there being difficult vocabulary is extremely slim. It should be written in plain language even a child could understand, so that narrows it down quite a bit.”

  A figurative sweat drop dangled in Lakyus’s mind.

  Her friend talked like it was simple, but it wasn’t such an easy thing.

  She can do it, but…she really is incredibly smart.

  Every time they met and talked, she was surprised anew. Lakyus didn’t know anyone who fit the word genius as well as Renner.

  Lakyus secretly had the creeps, but Renner was relatively nonchalant when she said, “I got it! It wasn’t instructions, though,” and handed over the paper. It was a list of various places in the kingdom. There were seven in all.

  “I wonder if it means there are drugs stored here or that they’re important strategic locations,” Lakyus suggested.

  “I doubt they would write down such important information and leave it lying around a mere production facility… They must be decoys.”

  “Decoys? You mean it’s a trap?”

  “Hrm, I don’t think so. Uh, the Eight Fingers is one organization, but people say it’s split into eight organizations that kind of work together, right?”

  Lakyus nodded.

  “So they’re intentionally giving away information about the other seven organizations, er, divisions, I guess, to divert attention from themselves.”

  “They prepared intelligence on the other seven divisions…? I expected the organization was far from a monolith, but I didn’t expect them to be this…” To adventurers, betraying one’s comrades was disgusting. “I knew we’d have to move fast, but yeah, I guess if we don’t, we’ll have issues.”

  Renner nodded and Lakyus asked another question.

  “So then, what about that brothel? Apparently, it’s a pretty nasty one where you can do anything.” Just saying that made her insides boil with rage. Those filthy pieces of trash! Garbage who can’t think of anything except their own desires should drop dead! She snarled in her mind, recalling the information she had on the brothel, not as a noble’s daughter but as an experienced woman adventurer. She didn’t even need to guess what “anything” meant. She knew that multiple people, men and women, had been killed for pleasure.

  Back in the days when there was slave trafficking, a few of those types of brothels existed in the underworld. But right before her eyes, by the work of her friend, slavery became illegal, and those facilities began disappearing. This place could very well be the last brothel in the royal capital or even the kingdom.

  That was precisely why it couldn’t be expunged so easily. They would surely meet strong opposition. It was the last filthy paradise for people with unspeakably sleazy tastes.

  “Hey, Renner. Since there’s no way to use your authority to carry out a search, why not have us force our way in and blow the lid off the place? There won’t be any trouble as long as we find evidence, right? If the slave-trafficking division is really running the brothel, it’ll be a huge blow to the Eight Fingers if we take it down, and depending on what evidence we find, it could also be a heavy strike against the nobles who do business with them.”

  “Maybe, Lakyus. But won’t that cause troubles for your family, the house of Alvein? So it’s tricky. It’s tricky if we mobilize the Blue Roses…but it’d be impossible for Climb to go in and take them out on his own…”

  “I’m sorry I’m not strong enough.”

  When Climb bowed his head, Renner cupped his hand in hers and smiled kindly. “Sorry, Climb. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s the only underworld brothel in the capital. No one could take it out alone… I trust you the most, Climb. I know how hard you work for me. But don’t do anything reckless, okay? And I’m not asking as a favor—that’s an order! If anything ever happened to you…”

  Even Lakyus, watching from beside Renner, felt the peerless beauty’s teary eyes pierce her heart. How was Climb’s heart doing?

  He frantically tried to keep a straight face but couldn’t quite manage it. On the contrary, his blushing cheeks said it all.

  If a bard were to title this scene, it would be The Princess and the Knight—it was moving, but a touch of fear unsettled Lakyus. She didn’t think it was possible, but if Renner was doing all this on purpose, then she knew every trick in the book—it was unbelievable.

  What am I thinking? That’s not the kind of thing you should think about a close friend. Everything she’s done speaks to the fact that she’s not a bad person like that. If I can’t believe in the Golden Princess who’s done so much to help people, then who can I believe in?

  Lakyus shook her head and spoke, in part to clear away those horrible thoughts. “By the way, Tina and Tia’s research turned up the names of a few nobles with connections to the slave-trafficking division chief, Coccodor. The only thing is…it’s too soon to move on the info, since we haven’t confirmed whether it’s true or not yet.”

  When she listed the names of several nobles, there was one that prompted a simultaneous reaction from both Renner and Climb.

  “His daughter is one of my maids.”

  “I can’t imagine he had her placed here to spy on you…but there’s no guarantee she’s only here to cultivate prestige.”

  “Yes. I should be careful how I’m handling information. You remember that, too, Climb.”

  “Okay, let’s decide what to do about those places we learned from the coded message. And Renner. Can I borrow Climb? I want him to go tell Gagaran and the others it seems like we’ll be making a move really soon.”

  2

  3 Late Fire Moon (September) 9:49 AM

  Climb walked down one of the capital’s broad streets. There was nothing about his appearance that made him stand out, so he melted completely into the crowd.

  His white full plate armor certainly would have attracted attention, so he’d taken it off. If he used a special alchemical item, he could change its color, but he didn’t feel like going to that much trouble just to wear it. There was no need to equip full armor just for a walk around the city anyway.

  So he was dressed lightly, with mail hidden under his shirt. The only thing that set him apart from an ordinary civilian was the longsword at his hip. That was about the same level of gear as the patrolling soldiers—guards—mercenaries, and other people on the street wore. Even if some people gave him a relatively wide berth, he wasn’t armored heavily enough that the crowd parted or anything.

  Any ponderously outfitted people were adventurers. This style was less for necessity and more to stand out.

  For an adventurer, dressing to attract attention was not strange. It was advertising. Some even dressed in a particularly eccentric way to create a strong impression, spread rumors, and make a name for themselves. In other words, style was like an adventurer’s trademark.

  But for adventurers at the level of the Blue Roses, whom Climb was currently going to meet, there was no need for fashion statements. At their rank, a stroll down the street was enough to get people talking.

  Eventually, on one side of the street, an adventurer inn came into view. On its grounds were the inn proper, a stable, and a yard large enough to practice with a sword. The fantastic exterior made it easy to imagine the beautiful interior, and the windows of the guest rooms were fitted with clear glass.

  That top-class hotel was a gathering spot for adventurers confident in their skills and able to pay the fairly high rate.

  Ignoring the guards on either side, Climb opened the door.

  For how large it was, there were few adventurers in the spacious bar and dining hall that took up the entire first floor. There just weren’t very many elite adventurers to begin with.

 
After a slight murmur traveled through the group, their curious eyes gathered on Climb. He paid no mind and scanned the room.

  The occupants were all extremely powerful. Any one of them could have easily defeated him. Every time he came to a place like this, he was reminded how insignificant he was.

  Climb endured the depressing thought and held his gaze on one particular point in the bar.

  He was focused on two people sitting at a round table all the way in the back.

  One was small and cloaked in a black robe.

  The figure’s face was hidden. It wasn’t because of the quality of the light but because the person was wearing a strange mask, with a crimson jewel set in the forehead, that covered their entire face. There were eye slits, but even the color of the irises behind them was out of sight.

  Then there was the other person.

  The one in robes was small, but this character was overwhelmingly large—to the point it brought to mind the word megalith. The entire body was thick in a way. But it was not wrapped in body fat.

  The figure’s arms had the girth of logs. The neck supporting a square head seemed about the size of a woman’s thighs put together. A broad jaw clenched with effort, and eyes resembling those of a predatory beast kept tabs on the area. The short blond hair prioritized only function. The chest conspicuously bulging under the clothing brought to mind the image of pectoral muscles trained to extremes—frankly, it was no longer the chest of a woman.

  The adamantite adventurer team comprised entirely of women—the Blue Roses.

  This curious pair contained two of its members—the arcane caster Evileye and the warrior Gagaran.

  Climb continued his approach, and the one he had been aiming for called out in a husky voice, “Hey, virgin!”

  The gazes that had left Climb gathered on him once again, but no one jeered. On the contrary, the adventurers lost interest immediately and averted their eyes with something resembling pity.

  The reason for this detached treatment was that everyone knew getting involved with a guest of Gagaran’s was not brave but reckless, even for an orichalcum- or mythril-ranked adventurer.