The Imperial Palace (1)
Valkan Kast, chief executor of the Arkan Monarch Assembly, had only been following the mysterious man because his Great Lord had ordered him to do so. He had never, not once, truly served the man out of loyalty. When he was suddenly summoned and told to look after some unheard-of stranger, how could he not find it absurd?
Still, arguing with the Great Lord's orders would only make life harder for him, so he had decided to treat the whole thing like a business arrangement and serve the man cleanly and efficiently.
“See you later, 6th Lord.”
Kalen, the 3rd Lord and one of the old pillars of the Monarch Assembly, had called Luke 6th Lord with his own mouth.
The position of the sixth lord had been left vacant for centuries, because the existing lords guarded their turf jealously. They had demanded absurd qualifications from every new candidate, and one by one even the most promising contenders had been rejected.
And yet they had actually acknowledged a human being. Worse, they had done it after being crushed beneath his overwhelming power.
Not only that, but the Great Lord had even gone to the imperial palace to meet the emperor in person. In hindsight, Valkan had probably ridden the right line so well that it was almost embarrassing.
But there was no time for that now.
The lordship was practically settled already, and once it was, who knew how long he would be stuck at Luke's side? He needed to leave a good impression, and leave it early. For all he knew, the next chief strategist might end up being him….
...is what you’re thinking, isn’t it?
I let out a snort. His thoughts were written all over his face.
I knew Valkan well enough from the original novel; he wasn't a minor character by any means. He had earned that post not only through skill, but through an almost supernatural ability to read the room.
Sure enough, Valkan swallowed a sigh and said, “6th Lord.”
“Yes?”
“If, as the 3rd Lord said, the other lords are all going to visit here one by one, then shouldn't we prepare countermeasures in advance?”
“Why bother?”
“May I ask how much you actually know about the other lords?”
“Hmm. I know their food preferences and everything else.”
“...Pardon?”
Not a chance. I shut that line of approach down immediately.
I had the original story's information, so there was no way I could possibly not know the other lords. Each of them was a titan at the very top of the continent, and that level of influence inevitably fed back into the branches of the story that grew from the roots.
I held up five fingers and said, “There were five in total, if I remember right.”
“Yes, that's correct.”
“The First Lord, Ekhion the Magician. He’s probably off at some academic conference for the moment.”
“He left a week ago, as far as I know.”
“The Second Lord, Myeonggak the Black Hand. That skeleton is probably roaming the country looking for a useful corpse.”
“......He departed for Alderender, in the northern territory.”
“We just saw the Third Lord, so that's enough. And isn't Arhen, the Ice Emperor, climbing mountains in search of a beast-class familiar?”
“......Yes.”
“Then there's only one person left to worry about.”
The remaining one was Etina, the Fifth Lord and King of Shamanism.
She could be called the strongest shaman alive on the continent.
Shamanic power itself was rare and unusual, but once a shaman reached a certain level, their combat ability skyrocketed—then skyrocketed again.
Etina was no exception.
She wasn't the strongest of the lords, but she was one of the most troublesome.
“No, seriously, why would I prepare at all? I never said I'd become a lord.”
“Pardon? Why wouldn't you become one?”
“Then, by the same logic, why should I?”
“Because you'd be holding the greatest power on the continent. Isn't it obvious you should?”
The greatest power, my foot.
What kind of power was there in governing a lord's territory the size of a proper noble domain? It was just a burden.
Of course, it wasn't all bad.
The moment I became a lord, I would be completely free from the shackles of money.
Just like at the academy, I would be able to do whatever I wanted with an overflowing budget.
...Actually, that might not be so bad?
If I was going to beat down the Outer Gods that appeared near the end of the original story, it probably was better to prepare in advance.
Honestly, if the budget was sufficient, I didn't think there was much that would be impossible.
Just as I was mulling it over in that halfhearted way—
—the rumble of carriage wheels reached us.
I stopped speaking and looked out the window.
A gaudy, pure-white carriage had come to a stop in front of the office building.
The crest attached to the carriage wheel was the imperial seal.
“……”
Had they already come to clean up the nonsense Arkan had spouted at the emperor?
Judging by the fact that they had arrived in such a flashy imperial carriage, they couldn't have been ordinary functionaries. If they weren't from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, then they'd probably picked someone reasonably high-ranking who at least knew my face.
Of course, in my desert-dry social life, there weren't exactly many people who fit that condition.
I fixed my gaze on the carriage.
The driver in the front seat climbed down, opened the rear door, and held out a hand.
The woman who took it and stepped down was none other than—
“Selena?”
Selena Lugrite.
The principal of the academy.
“....”
Selena stood there and glared at me for a long while.
She looked as though she had plenty to complain about, but she just stared without saying a word.
It wasn't especially surprising.
At the academy, Selena had always looked at me that way whenever our paths crossed.
“It's been a while, Luke Richter.”
“It has.”
“......Everything about you really is unbelievable, isn't it?”
Selena muttered while looking somewhere past me.
Where her eyes had landed, twenty people sent by the Monarch Assembly were gathered together.
Among them, her gaze was especially fixed on Valkan, and Valkan, in turn, seemed perfectly happy to meet her stare head-on. So they clearly knew each other.
“You know him?”
“Valkan Kast. Chief executor of Arcana. Arkan's pet dog who barks 'woof' whenever she tells him to, right?”
At Selena's blatant sneer, Valkan gave a faint smile.
Then he hit the mark dead on.
“Better than a self-proclaimed deputy tower master whose published papers are mostly nonsense, I would think.”
“......”
Well, to be fair, Selena's papers were nonsense across the board.
Thanks to that, though, there was plenty to refute, which made collecting grades wonderfully easy.
Still, that wasn't the important part.
Without wasting time, I asked her, “You've come to take me to the imperial palace?”
“That's right. I don't know the details, but just remember that it's an imperial command.”
“Then let's go.”
“Okay, hop right in. No, eek! Not next to me! A different carriage! There are plenty of nicer ones over there!”
...She was treating me like some kind of monster.
She had done the same thing for all five years at the academy, but no matter how often it happened, it still left a strangely unpleasant taste in my mouth.
I swallowed a sigh and boarded the carriage she pointed to instead.
Valkan followed behind me, intending to board as well, but Selena frowned.
“What do you think you're doing?”
“What does it look like? I am boarding the carriage.”
“Then why are you boarding? The summons was for Luke Richter alone.”
“What an incomprehensible thing to say. Is it not only natural for a guard to accompany the lord he serves?”
“???”
She tilted her head.
“Lord? Guard? Whose?”
At Selena's question, Valkan pointed at me.
“I will be entering the palace as 6th Lord's guard.”
“...What? Sixth Lord? Who?”
“Can't you tell? I mean Luke.”
Selena stared at me, sitting there in silence, and her jaw dropped.
“A lord? The lord I know? The sixth lord that had been vacant for centuries?”
“Exactly.”
“......Ha, hahahaha.”
What was wrong with her?
I cut the conversation off. “Are we leaving or not?”
Still reeling from the shock, she blinked at me for a long time.
Then, as she stood there muttering things like, “Has Arkan lost her mind?” and “How are they planning to handle that freak?”, she climbed into the carriage.
And then she added one last line.
“...The Monarch Assembly is screwed.”
Clatter, clatter!
“......”
It was the finest carriage the imperial family had prepared in person, and yet it still rattled all the same.
This world had, surprisingly enough, only developed magic. Metallurgy, on the other hand, lagged even farther behind than medieval Earth.
There wasn't even a concept like springs or suspension, so every time we crossed an uneven road it felt as if my backside was being beaten to a pulp.
For a moment, I considered drawing up a blueprint and selling it to the imperial family.
Then I remembered the trouble that would come afterward and lost interest.
That was when it happened.
SKREEEECH!
The carriage slammed to a sudden stop, and my body lurched forward so sharply I nearly went straight into the seat ahead of me.
About to complain about the driver's violent braking, I looked out the window and asked, “What is it?”
“Monsters.”
I looked where the driver was pointing.
Black smoke was rising in a foul plume from a village not far away.
Unluckily, it sat right in the middle of our route.
Kwaaaah—!
From the distance, dozens of black silhouettes were charging toward us, and every last one of them was a beast-class or higher magic beast.
If we simply passed them by, that might have been the easiest option, but that village was on the only road leading to the imperial palace anyway.
So I was about to move out personally when Selena stepped in front of me to stop me.
“Hold on. You may be smart, but magic is a different field entirely.”
She drew on her mana.
Merely gathering that mana was enough to press the air down with force and make the ground tremble.
“...”
Normally, I would have stood back and watched her work.
But this time, I couldn't.
Because—
those are all money.
Civil servants are promoted strictly on performance.
And the fastest way to rack up performance is, quite simply, to produce results.
What do you do with a slain beast? Hand the corpse over to the imperial family, and it all counts as achievements and money.
And by rights, the corpse-processing rights go entirely to the person who handled the monster.
Acceleration
The bluish haze, made even clearer after absorbing the shards in Kalmash, streaked through the air at supersonic speed.
Revolve
As though it had a will of its own, the haze became lines and planes, spreading out to cover the sky.
The burst shards of light closed around the dozens of charging monsters like a cage of thunder.
They could not move, as if space itself had stuck them in place.
Time
The prison of light that held them began to compress, as though it were contracting.
At that moment, when the flow of time itself was roiling violently—
End
SKREEEECH!
The enormous prison compressed into a single point.
The pressure tore space apart, and cold winds howled out from the rent wound in the world.
“!!!”
The dozens of monsters that had charged in, trapped within the prison of time, had their bodies wither and shrivel like mummies.
And Selena, who had been gathering mana to unfold a large-scale ritual—
“Y-you crazy….”
—made a gurgling sound and tipped over again.