How to Catch a Big Fish
Assuming the beautiful masked girl was the hero, I deduced the reason she had suddenly shown up at my house last night.
Normally, most of my money was kept at the governor's office or the bank, so the cash I kept at home was only for the occasional night out drinking.
Even that had piled up into a decent sum lately because work had kept me too busy to go out, but it still wasn't enough to tempt the infamous beautiful masked girl.
That meant she was after something else. Among the items I'd recently acquired, the only thing with real cash value was the orichalcon ingot.
But if a sudden flood of orichalcon ingots hit the market, it would be too easy to trace, so that was out. Which left only one possibility.
"The roster."
I pulled the roster—half its cipher already decoded—from the desk drawer and felt certain of it. Someone on this list had to be directly or indirectly connected to the hero.
Otherwise, she wouldn't have come in person to retrieve it.
Thanks to her surprise attack last night, I'd stopped midway through the decryption and still hadn't properly identified everyone on the list.
Given how serious the situation was, I needed to finish decoding the cipher today.
I was staring at the roster when a voice called out.
"Chief Financial Officer, your coffee."
"Ah. Thanks."
After receiving the lifeblood of any working adult, I glanced around the empty finance office. It was the second day of the special audit period.
Yesterday alone we'd recovered three hundred million gold in taxes. The governor's office finances were back in the black, yet we were still hungry for more.
Whether it was because we were finally cracking down on the tax-dodging freeloaders we'd let slide until now, everyone was working with more enthusiasm than ever.
I made a rubbing of the roster and hid it in the secret compartment of the second drawer—just in case. If this list ever went public, blood would flow through Oz. Even without the beautiful masked girl, plenty of royalist nobles would be desperate to find it.
All I had to do was exploit that situation to the fullest.
"Agnes, I'm not going out on any inspections today. I've got something I need to finish."
"Ah, understood."
"Dorothea should be in the staff lounge. Take her with you when you leave, and buy her whatever she wants. I'll cover the expenses later."
After I waved her off, Agnes bowed and left the office. Now completely alone, I rolled my stiff shoulders and went back to deciphering the roster, picking up where I'd left off yesterday.
My goal was to finish before the end of the workday.
"It's… done!"
I finally cracked the cipher eight hours later. As expected, it was a substitution cipher that reversed the sacred script into hieroglyphs, but the lack of spaces and the omission of initial sound rules had eaten up an enormous amount of time.
After replenishing my exhausted brain with honey water, I copied every noble's name from the decoded roster onto a fresh sheet.
The list contained far more names than I'd anticipated. As expected of Marquess Quillen—the most powerful figure among the current royalists, he had plenty of people lining up to support him.
Thanks to that, I could round them all up at once like a string of sausages.
After memorizing the names of the forty tax thieves on the list, I waved at Agnes, who had just returned from her inspection.
She took off her coat and tilted her head.
"Is something the matter?"
"Not really. I figured this might help the team, so I dug it up."
I showed her the list in my hand.
"…This is?"
"A roster of royalists supporting the Oz Independence Association."
With this, at least half the imprisoned royalist leaders were finished. Supporting the Independence Association in present-day Oz was tantamount to high treason—completely separate from the harder-to-prove crime of insulting the governor.
Interrogating them would also let us sweep up the entire resistance network hiding in the shadows.
Two birds with one stone.
Agnes accepted the document with a dazed expression, then nodded.
"I'll handle it by tomorrow."
"Good. Thanks for your hard work."
I picked up my bag and stood. My head was tired from all the thinking, so I planned to leave on time for once.
The next day, all of Oz was in an uproar.
Evidence that royalist nobles had been secretly supporting the Independence Association kept surfacing, and a veritable bloodbath followed. Those who resisted were dragged away by force. Ancient noble houses were torn apart on charges of treason. Most of Marquess Quillen's faction, already imprisoned for insulting the governor, now faced additional treason charges and were sent straight to trial.
Some newspapers criticized the governor's office for what they called "Bloody Wednesday," but police raids soon uncovered records of bribes paid to the nobles, sparking yet another scandal.
While ordinary citizens kept their mouths shut amid the tense atmosphere, they condemned the nobles for plotting rebellion to seize the throne. Even though the country's prestige had hit rock bottom, the prevailing opinion was that these nobles had brought disaster upon themselves by trying to divide power among themselves while the legitimate heir, Prince Tippetarius, was still alive.
Of course, most of the intellectuals offering such commentary were pro-Magic faction figures friendly to Ozma's governor's office, but perhaps it was best to leave that inconvenient truth alone.
In any case, once Marquess Quillen—one of the royalist heavyweights—and his followers were swept away, word arrived that Duke München, who now held the largest remaining faction, had begun moving in earnest.
Duke München was Prince Tippetarius's cousin. With the prince having renounced his claim, he was the man closest to becoming king in this country.
Naturally, he was next on the governor's office's target list.
Of course, we still had to catch the beautiful masked girl suspected of being the newly awakened hero first.
I asked the question while we were playing chess.
"Dorothea, do you know how to hunt foxes?"
Tap!
"What? Where did that come from all of a sudden?"
"Foxes are timid but clever. The moment they hear human footsteps, they bolt straight into their burrows. Once they're inside, there's no way to catch them—fox holes are just the right size for foxes and nothing else."
I captured her bishop with my knight as I spoke.
"So hunters use a different method."
"You're just saying random stuff because you think you're going to lose, aren't you?"
This time her queen took my protruding knight.
I advanced my rook.
"When foxes dig their burrows, they usually make two entrances. That way, if one collapses, they can escape through the other."
Check.
"So what?"
Dorothea blocked my rook with her knight.
"That's why, when hunters go after a fox, they light a fire at one entrance to fill the burrow with smoke, and set a net at the other."
I moved my bishop into the space her knight had just vacated.
"The fox, startled by the smoke, bolts out in a panic and gets caught in the trap the moment it leaves the burrow."
"……"
Dorothea reached for her queen to take the bishop, then froze with a look of realization. She had just noticed that no matter which piece she moved, her king would be taken in six moves.
"Let's play again."
Looking thoroughly annoyed at her loss, Dorothea glared at me with a pout. At first she'd beaten me one-sidedly, but now our win rates were nearly even. After all, parallel thinking training wasn't something only she could do.
"Sorry, but I've got work to do starting now."
I shrugged and began clearing the chessboard. It wasn't that I was running away after finally winning a game—I actually had things to take care of today.
Dorothea must have known that too, because after trembling with frustration for a moment she declared, "I'll definitely beat you tomorrow!" and fled to the lounge with the chessboard in hand.
No matter how old she got, that girl still had a childish side.
Well, that was part of her charm.