by Hiro Ainana
He probably didn’t have a whole lot of friends. Most of the city hall officials nearby were staring at him with confusion or annoyance.
Just as I figured, he wasn’t very popular.
“Well, it seems that you have nothing to discuss with us. We have some business with the viceroy’s aide now, so if you’ll excuse us.”
With Arisa and Ine in tow, I navigated around the crook as he howled with laughter.
Ine’s living armors couldn’t enter the city hall, so they waited on standby in the parking area with the carriage.
“Hey, wait just a minute! What’s your so-called business with the viceroy’s aide?”
The crook jumped back in front of us like a cartoon villain, face twisted with impatience and spit spraying from his lips.
The officials he’d shoved out of the way frowned and cleared their throats pointedly as they left the room.
“I’m afraid it has nothing to do with you, so you’ll have to excuse me.”
“Wh-what was that?!”
I was under no obligation to answer this guy, and I dismissed him with a thin veil of politeness and headed toward the counter. My business was with the aide only.
I told the receptionist that I had a delivery for the aide and asked him to relay the message.
Placing the sack on the table, I took out one of the bottles and handed it over.
“But how?! We destroyed the kiln and everything…!”
The crook was shouting about something, but I had no reason to answer. I just smiled and ignored him.
“Humph! I’m sure they just bought some low-quality potions in town anyway! Well, we aren’t gonna accept some shoddy diluted medicine!”
Fed up with the silent treatment from me, the scoundrel turned his wrath on the receptionist and the staff member who’d taken the potion.
He moved in closer to the staff taking shelter behind the counter. They looked annoyed, but they probably couldn’t ignore a friend of the aide’s, so they dealt with him as best they could.
“Actually, these are even higher quality than the one hundred and twenty potions they delivered earlier.”
“Y-yeah right…”
Encouraged by the shock on the crook’s face, the staff member continued. “The manufacturer name is the same, too.”
“N-no way… My perfect plan… ruined by a commoner…?”
Honestly, I’m more surprised he expected such a half-baked plot to work in the first place.
“Our path to greatness, gone…”
The crook muttered to himself madly as he backed away, crashing right into the counter.
Our eyes met over the sack of potions.
“Th-that’s right. Without these… W-without these, they’re through! We can still win!”
The man kept murmuring as if he’d lost his mind. Then, suddenly, he snatched the sack off the counter and roared as he threw it violently to the floor.
“My hand slipped!”
All the staff members froze at his loud, bald-faced lie.
The potion began seeping out of the bag.
“Nooo! Mr. Satou, the vials broke! The potions are leakiiiing!”
Ine shrieked and tried to rush over in a panic, but I stopped her.
“Oh, woe is me! My foot slipped this time!”
The man jumped on top of the bag, smashing the few remaining intact vials.
“What kind of idiot pulls a stunt like that in front of all these witnesses?” Arisa muttered next to me with a dry smile.
I felt exactly the same way.
“What’s all this noise?! You’re in the viceroy’s service, you know!”
The viceroy’s aide emerged from his office in the back.
“… What’s this?”
The aide gestured toward the sack and the puddle at the small-time crook’s feet.
“Those are the magic potions that the witch’s messenger delivered. Although this gentleman has smashed them…”
“Was this after accepting the delivery?” the aide asked the staff member icily.
“N-no. We were still in the middle of assessing the quality.”
“Then I see no problem here. There is still half a chime until sunset. Bring another set.”
The aide’s cold-blooded reply shocked the staff more than us. A few of them tried to intervene on our behalf, but they quickly withdrew under the aide’s deathly cold stare.
“Wait just a moment.”
“What now? This man is the one who broke them, right? The county government takes no responsibility.”
Well, I didn’t expect them to.
“No, but I would like to be compensated for the damage to my property from this man. Those were worth ninety gold coins in all.”
“Fair enough. You are free to bill this fellow, then.”
“Wh-what?!”
The aide silenced the small-time crook’s protest with another icy glare.
Once the aide had returned to his office, one of the staff members whispered to me in private that I could enlist the aid of the government in collecting the debt, as well. If he couldn’t pay, the man would be sentenced to slavery.
Nobody likes this guy, huh?
“Ah! He’s running away!”
The culprit tried to sneak away, but Arisa spotted him and shouted.
The man bolted like a rabbit, and Ine’s puffbird took off after him.
As the man screeched to a halt with a shriek, trying to fend off the bird, Nana and the beastfolk girls captured him.
Once I’d praised the girls and the puffbird for their good work, I went to the counter to fill out the paperwork to request help in receiving my reimbursement. As thanks to the staff member who’d whispered to me earlier, I slipped him a few silver coins.
After watching the guards take away the criminal, we moved on to our next course of action.
Only half a chime left until the deadline—forty-five minutes.
“Come in… Ah, it’s you. What do you want? If you’ve given up, I advise you to leave this city.”
After a staff member guided us to the office, the aide met us with a frigid response.
Ignoring his question, I handed some papers to the staff member.
“Aide. I would appreciate your signature and seal on this.”
Scanning the documents he had received from the staff, the aide narrowed his eyes.
“… A delivery completion certificate?”
“Y-yes. They delivered the remaining one hundred and eighty potions. We also checked over your memorandum, which they submitted along with the delivery to ensure that there were no problems.”
The aide placed the documents on his office desk with a trembling hand, then glared up at me.
“What manner of trickery is this?”
“There were no tricks involved. We simply used wisdom, hard work, and friendship.”
“Utter nonsense…”
In reality, I never would have been able to carry out this mission alone.
I had dodged the aide’s question, but the real trick behind the delivery was this:
I’d noticed on my radar the small-time crook’s marker lying in wait for us, so I’d devised a new plan.
As I’d made a grand entrance in the front with a delivery of sixty dummy potions, Liza and the others brought in the real delivery through the back door. To make it look like all 180 were present, I’d included about a hundred unfired vials, and the crook was easily fooled.
The fake potions were the same quality as the real ones, too.
Basically, between the 198 vials I’d made myself, the thirty-seven that Nana had gathered, and the five that I already had on hand, about sixty spare vials remained.
Ine had pulled off forty rounds of transmutation for a total of two hundred potions, and I had recovered forty bottles’ worth from the original batch after the crash, so we had a total of 240 potions.
In other words, I had sixty extras prepared from the very beginning.
And since the cu
rrent market rate for potions was almost three times the usual amount, he had probably misunderstood my named price as covering all 180 potions, not just the sixty he’d broken.
I hadn’t honestly expected the small-time crook to take such an idiotic course of action, but…
I wasn’t planning to explain all that to the aide. Time is money, after all.
“Is something wrong? All that’s left is for you to sign and seal it.”
“Urrrgh…”
I pressed him politely, but the aide only groaned as if on the verge of death.
“Excuse me, Mr. Aide?”
Concerned about his strange behavior, the staff member attempted to speak to him, but the aide simply stood with his mouth set in a thin line and his eyes closed.
Apparently, he was just going to refuse to sign.
Oh dear.
I hadn’t expected the seemingly prideful aide to resort to such a shamelessly childish plan.
Time slowly ticked by as a heavy silence dominated the room.
…Nearly thirty minutes passed with the aide’s mouth clamped shut. He was probably planning to keep this up until time ran out.
Maybe I should try the laughing gas to make him laugh?
I comforted myself with this ridiculous idea as I continued to put silent pressure on the aide.
Moment by moment, time slipped away. I checked the map and the clock on my menu. There wasn’t much left until the deadline.
The door to the office opened quietly, without so much as a knock.
Since this was as good a time as any, I tried speaking to the aide.
“Mr. Aide, couldn’t you please sign the certificate of delivery completion?”
Just as I expected, there was no response from the aide.
“I suppose I shall have to sign it, then.”
At this unexpected voice, the aide opened his eyes.
The man who had spoken smoothly signed the delivery note on the office desk, then stamped it crisply with the seal on his ring.
“C-Count Kuhanou!”
The aide’s startled cry echoed in the office.
I gave a nod to the person behind Count Kuhanou.
“M-Mistress!”
“It seems you’ve had quite a difficult time of things, Inenimaana.”
Following my gaze, Ine yelped in surprise as well.
Yes, the old witch had ridden on the elder sparrow to pick up Count Kuhanou from Kuhanou City.
I’d worried it would be a close call when I checked their position on the map earlier in the abandoned village.
This had been a worst-case scenario backup plan, but I was glad they’d made it in time.
The old witch patted Ine’s head gently, then bowed in gratitude toward me.
“Mr. Satou, I cannot thank you enough for your help in this matter.”
Nestled in Ine’s hair, the puffbird gave a little “pou-kwee,” as if to say that it deserved some thanks, too.
Now, this peaceful atmosphere applied only to my party. The aide, on the other hand, was in serious distress.
“Wh-why are you already…?”
“Can you not tell? Mistress Witch here has informed me of your evil deeds.”
The aide sank deeper into his chair, and Count Kuhanou stepped closer.
A few knights, clearly the count’s guards, had slipped into the room unnoticed, and they pulled the aide up out of the chair.
“Your father was a vassal of Marquis Muno and a friend of mine at the royal academy. Thus, I thought I would help his family, who had left their territory to depend on ours… But it seems I was blind.”
“Please, wait. This is a conspiracy between the witch and this man here—!”
“Hmph, a conspiracy, indeed! Do you take me for a fool?”
The aide tried to pin things on us, but Count Kuhanou cut him off in a booming voice.
“Have you forgotten the debt of gratitude my county owes to Mistress Witch? Why, your own younger siblings were among the beneficiaries of her medicine in the plague of five years ago, were they not? And in this current conflict with the kobolds, how many knights and soldiers do you think have lived thanks to her potions?!”
The aide withered under the count’s powerful rage.
“A man who does not help the viceroy is not fit for the title of his aide. And you shall no longer have the privilege of perpetual aristocracy in my territory. I shall leave you only with the title of hereditary knight, that you, your elderly mother, and your younger siblings shall live as commoners with only the smallest of pensions,” Count Kuhanou spat at the aide.
At this, the aide gazed up at him in a silent plea, but the count refused to change his decision.
The aide muttered with his hand to his chest, and something like static electricity forced the knights to let go of him.
“As the acting servant of the viceroy, I invoke thee—”
The aide mustered his strength for a desperate cry.
It was clear that he was trying something, but Count Kuhanou stopped the knights from grabbing him with a wave of his hand.
The count clearly knew what he was doing, so I refrained from interfering, too.
“…How foolish,” Count Kuhanou murmured pityingly, standing defenseless in front of the aide.
“Spirit of Sedum City, attack the enemy of our home! Punish Chuubatsu!”
When the aide recited the final command word, lightning flew from the amulet in his hand toward Count Kuhanou.
I jumped in front of him immediately, but the lightning dispersed before it even reached me.
“How truly foolish. As the count of Kuhanou, I could never be harmed by such a spell in my own territory. Or have you forgotten who lent you your borrowed power in the first place?”
I see… That must have been an attempt to use magic from the City Core, then. So a count can grant a viceroy the right to use the City Core, and the aide is serving as a stand-in for the viceroy, but of course it can’t be used to harm someone higher-ranking than himself. Got it.
“I shall have mercy out of respect for your deceased friend. Instead of charging you with treason, I shall reduce your sentence to a simple capital—”
Wait a second.
Trusting my intuition, I jumped over the aide’s desk and in one smooth motion delivered a kick that broke his jaw and knocked him unconscious.
I hadn’t made an error in holding back my strength.
I had needed to very noticeably injure him.
“…And why did you feel the need to make such a show of interrupting?”
Count Kuhanou turned a cold stare on me as if I were an insect.
…So he really was planning to execute the man right here and now.
“Because there are children present. Forgive my insolence, but if you’re going to put the man to death, surely the execution grounds would be a better place for it. This is hardly something that a little child should have to see.”
To be honest, I didn’t want to see it, either.
If they’re going to throw him in jail or whip him, I could accept it, since it’s his own fault, but I seriously don’t want to watch an execution happen right in front of me.
I met the count’s gaze for a moment and smiled, which seemed to drain some of the fury from his countenance. After glancing toward Ine, he finally calmed down completely.
“It seems you have made yourself a most worthy acquaintance, Mistress Witch.”
With that short comment to the old witch, Count Kuhanou collected the amulet from the aide, and on his order, the knights carried the man away to jail.
The Mystery of the Bundle of Papers
Satou here. Encryption technology is sometimes necessary in game production. It’s useful for preventing tools that hack save data or duplicate the product itself. But I’ve never been any good at decryption.
After the aide was taken to jail, the old witch and I went to meet with Count Kuhanou in the drawing room.
First, the count gave the old witch a s
omewhat roundabout apology for allowing the viceroy’s aide’s conspiratorial actions to go so far. After that, talk turned to the subject of a reward for me.
I’d honestly been expecting a punishment for interfering in the execution, but that wasn’t the case.
“So your name is Satou? It seems you’ve been through quite some trouble. What would you like for a reward? Goods? Money? If you should wish to be employed by the government, that is within my power as well.”
I wasn’t sure how to answer the graying count.
I didn’t have much use for more money or goods, and I wasn’t really in the market for a job, either.
“This may be forward of me, but if I could receive permission to purchase Magic Scrolls and spell books within your territory, I would be most humbly delighted.”
“I suppose as an acquaintance of Mistress Witch, it’s no surprise that you should have such a thirst for knowledge. Very well, then, I shall issue you a permit.”
I hadn’t been expecting much, but the count generously agreed.
That seemed to be the end of his business with me, but since I hadn’t been given permission to leave, I stayed to listen to his discussion with the witch.
They talked about the hydra in the mountains along the southwest border and how he wanted her to make an antidote for its poison to help the soldiers who would be searching for it.
He avoided specifically using the word hydra, but since he mentioned a report from the constable of Noukee, there was no doubt in my mind what he meant.
Apparently, a hydra had attacked about three years ago, damaging both Sedum City and the surrounding villages, meaning it must have destroyed the abandoned village after all. The count darkly explained that it was one of the monsters that had crossed the border from the Muno Marquisate some twenty years before.
When his discussion with the old witch was finished, Count Kuhanou informed us that he had a meeting to discuss countermeasures against the hydra, so we took our leave.
The count offered to treat us to a lavish dinner at the viceroy’s castle, but since the beastfolk girls wouldn’t be able to join us, I politely declined.
Once I’d received my permit from a staff member, we left the government office behind us.
