I Became the Mastermind (1)
Ding—
The bell announcing noon rang out faintly across the distance.
Derek Baldwin, captain of the Imperial Special Task Force and head of the Baldwin ducal house, found himself muttering one man’s name again and again.
The name left behind by those who had been dying one after another in recent days.
“...Luke Richter.”
At first, he had thought the man was just an ordinary civil servant.
But the report that piles of monster corpses had been stacked like a mountain in front of the man’s office gave him an overwhelming certainty: Luke Richter was hiding something.
Of course, if that had been all, he would have dismissed it.
But then—
“So the Shadow Society’s leader is dead.”
When he first heard the news, he couldn’t believe it.
He had assumed he’d misheard.
That was only natural, because the Shadow Society was no ordinary criminal organization.
It was one of the four great powers that divided the continent: the Arkan Monarch Assembly.
Six grand factions made up their balance, and each of those factions had its own subordinate organizations, built and run to expand its influence.
The most famous of them all was the Shadow Society.
It had grown around criminals who had been drawn in by the name of Kalen, the Fist King and Third Lord, and by now it ranked among the largest criminal organizations in the Empire.
The figurehead of the Shadow Society was Katran.
She had made a name for herself as the chief strategist serving under Kalen, the Fist King.
“They say she just burst and died...”
Derek lowered his head and stared at the report lying on his desk.
According to the spy planted inside the Shadow Society, Katran and several other senior officers had died as though they had burst like balloons.
What was more, before they died, they had allegedly muttered a single name like a final gasp.
That name had been none other than Luke Richter.
And it wasn’t just the Shadow Society.
The Shadow Society’s leader, along with quite a few others, had met the same end.
There was, however, one detail worth noting.
The identities of those who shared that same death were, astonishingly, all criminals with imperial warrants on their heads.
...Interesting.
Derek Baldwin slowly lifted the corners of his mouth.
The muscles at the edge of his lips trembled as he fought back a laugh.
The organization, having lost a powerful backer in an instant, was furious—and the arrow of that fury pointed not at the imperial family, but at one man.
Even the Arkan Monarch Assembly, which stood behind the Shadow Society, had begun taking an interest in him.
At that point, he had to wonder.
Had all of this been planned from the moment the man was first appointed administrator of Blackmore?
...Ha.
No matter what the result was, it wasn’t a bad thing for the Empire.
The imperial family had eliminated the rats gnawing at the Empire without lifting a finger.
He couldn’t suppress the snort of laughter that escaped him.
It was an absurdly inventive method—something no one could have predicted.
How did he do it?
The leaders of criminal organizations scattered throughout the Empire had all met the same end in a single day.
As though someone had sent them a warning.
So was all of this the work of Luke Richter alone?
Impossible.
No matter how strong he was, that was impossible.
The intelligence needed to know the secret movements of senior officers.
The overwhelming power to assassinate them in a single day.
The drive to carry out a goal without making a single unnecessary sound.
This was the work of a group.
He’s like a mastermind.
At first, it had been suspicion.
But as the pieces continued to lock into place, suspicion gradually hardened into certainty.
What exactly was he—
What kind of scheme is he drawing?
The administrator of Blackmore, the Empire’s most notorious hellscape.
The man commanding an unidentified mastermind group that had shattered the Shadow Society.
By now, high society was buzzing with Luke Richter’s name from morning till night.
And if the confusion born of that, the immense current of power it generated, came to blanket the Empire?
...
Derek Baldwin’s mind turned cold.
When he finished thinking, he rang the bell on his desk, and before long a man opened the door and stepped inside.
“You’ve heard the news, I assume?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Investigate the group that annihilated the Shadow Society.”
“Understood.”
“Don’t dig too deep. Just determine the outline. And once you uncover anything, don’t forget to connect it to Luke Richter and spread the rumor. Start with high society. Those people have loose tongues, which makes them convenient for spreading information.”
“Luke Richter, sir?”
“Yes.”
“...Understood.”
The man bowed at a sharp, knife-edged angle and left the room.
Derek Baldwin reached out and slowly opened the window.
A breeze swept in, sending his black hair drifting softly.
He brushed back his mussed bangs and murmured,
I don’t know what he’s plotting, but...
No matter what it was.
...this once, I’ll cooperate.
Derek Baldwin’s gaze turned toward the window.
“For the sun of the Empire.”
It was a stare so hot it seemed ready to sear the air itself.
Several days passed after I finished exploring the labyrinth.
I’d only been away from my desk for a few days, yet dust had piled up everywhere, which meant I had to spend a rather long time cleaning up.
Even so, the smile never left my face.
Because, well—
“Haha, freedom!”
Freedom.
Sweet, honey-like freedom—the kind only a full-time salary thief could enjoy, spending all day coasting on a paycheck without doing a lick of work.
I’d been shut away in my office for days, not moving an inch.
Whenever monsters came charging in, there was no need for me to lift a finger; I just let Rudine handle them with automatic hunting, and even meal preparation had been taken over by a picky fox beastkin who had eagerly volunteered for the job.
Every day was peaceful.
It was a honey-sweet life of doing things the easy way.
This is the life.
Yes, everything was perfect.
I was living through one dreamlike day after another—until, one day—
“...What’s this?”
A letter arrived from the imperial court.
It came with a newspaper that covered the Empire’s latest developments, and after reading it, I could only stare in shock.
“The Shadow Society’s leader was... assassinated?”
As I muttered blankly, Rudine, who had been peeking at the letter from beside me, asked,
“Isn’t the Shadow Society pretty big?”
“By sheer size alone, it ranks among the top ten in the Empire.”
“And he got assassinated? Just like that?”
“Probably?”
The Shadow Society was an assassination organization run by the chief strategist directly under Kalen, the Third Lord.
Someone assassinated the leader of a place like that? Whoever it was had to have a brain swollen so badly that it had snapped the scale clean off.
Come to think of it, was the Shadow Society’s leader even supposed to die right now?
Honestly, I couldn’t remember.
Why would I care when some random extra dies?
More than that, the Shadow Society’s leader was a vicious criminal with a massive bounty on his head from the imperial family.
Hmm. Maybe he’d actually been doing the world a favor by dying.
Just as I was offering a halfhearted prayer for the soul of the Shadow Society’s leader, who had dropped dead out of nowhere—
“It says it was probably the work of a newly formed organization!”
“A newly formed organization?”
“It says so right here. An unidentified mastermind group made up of just a few people, with nothing but rumors swirling around them.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Rudine was reading the letter aloud to herself.
“And apparently they’ve identified one person as the most likely mastermind!”
“Oh? Who?”
I asked casually, too lazy to keep reading.
The answer that came back was...
“Luke Richter!”
“Whoever that is, he sounds incredible—wait, what?!”
Hold on a second.
That was my name.
“Give it here!”
I snatched the letter from Rudine’s hands.
Then I slowly read through the contents.
The Shadow Society’s leader, Katran, had been assassinated.
But she and countless other wanted criminals had been killed the same way.
And before they died, they had left behind a name like a death mark, as if they would never forget it—
Luke... Richter...?
Huh?
All of a sudden?
But I was wronged here.
“I’ve been identified as the mastermind behind the black hand that assassinated the Shadow Society’s leader?”
“Looks that way.”
“But I didn’t kill him.”
“I know, right?”
Shit.
I was sleeping soundly with my limbs sprawled out like a man who had all the time in the world when those bastards died.
Rudine took back the letter I’d snatched and finished reading the rest of it.
“It’s not just that you’ve been singled out, either. Apparently everyone already believes it.”
“...”
“And on top of that, you’ve become infamous in high society as someone absolutely no one should ever get involved with!”
“???”
Countless question marks floated up in my head.
What the hell was going on?
This didn’t make any sense.
“The Third Lord, Kalen, has issued a statement about this incident...”
“And?”
“He said he will never let this matter slide...”
Oh.
So that meant he was openly declaring revenge.
And their target was—
“...What the hell?!”
Me.
Just as my mental state was being shredded in real time,
step, step.
Irregular, ominous footsteps drifted toward us from the distance.
They were so fast that the unsettling sound reached us in an instant.
When I turned my head, I saw a man in robes walking toward me.
“Ah.”
As soon as he saw me, he lifted the corners of his mouth.
As if he had been looking for me all along.
Then he said,
“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Azure, the direct inheritor of the Arkan Monarch Assembly.”
After he finished speaking, the man stared at me intently.
After a brief pause, as though he were deliberately drawing out the moment, he finally got to the point.
“I bring you the will of the Great Lord Arkan.”
I was dumbstruck.
And then a forgotten fact flashed through my mind.
“Luke Richter, you are—”
The Arkan Monarch Assembly.
The headquarters of that lunatic force of raw violence was none other than...
“...invited to the headquarters council.”
...Blackmore.