Stress Relief and a Quiet Coup
"I'm sorry, what?"
"Whaat?!"
"Did you just say what I think you said?"
It was a shocking enough declaration that Susanna, Cedric, and I all reacted at once. He wanted to squeeze even more money out of our already mouse-tail-sized salaries?
According to Audrette Lavendel's memories, just last month we'd been shaken down under the pretext of the Guild Master's birthday — and now he was planning to fleece us every month?
"That is truly unjust."
Cedric said this, and for once I didn't even have the will to stop him. No, seriously — if they take more out of this paycheck, what are we supposed to live on?
"Guild Master, what exactly will this education cover?"
I asked first, forcing my temper down, and he answered in a smug, self-satisfied voice.
"Training to eliminate the stress that comes with being a member of an information guild."
"I'm sorry?"
"I've already booked someone for tomorrow."
Stress-relief training? Since when did that count as training?
The moment the Guild Master dropped his bombshell and left to go eat, we united for the first time in ages and put our heads together.
"This is genuinely immoral."
"I agree with Employee Cedric! If they take even more money from us here, what are we supposed to do?"
"It really makes no sense…."
"Assistant Manager Audrette, isn't there anything you can do? You're good at scheming, Audrette!"
"Scheming, you say?"
"Th-that is, you're just clever, that's all."
Stammering, Audrette added,
"If anyone can pull it off, it's you, Assistant Manager Audrette!"
"Don't go dumping the responsibility on me… haah."
Even I couldn't come up with a solution this time, and I let out a long sigh.
"Let's sit through whatever this 'training' is tomorrow, then decide."
The next day, just as the Guild Master had promised, a young man showed up at the guild. With a vaguely dopey face, he began speaking to us as we sat assembled before him.
"Now then, we will begin our liberation training to release the stress in your hearts."
What on earth is this supposed to be?
"Please follow along with me. Breathe in… and breathe out…"
"……."
Faced with training content that promised to be absolutely useless in life, our faces grew visibly more contorted. But the Guild Master stood behind us, watching with a pleased little smile, so we had no choice but to grudgingly follow the breathing exercises.
"Now, with this breathing, the stress in your hearts is circulating. Next, we're going to draw it out of the body. Please take one balloon each."
The man handed each of us an uninflated balloon.
"We're going to fill them to bursting and create stress balloons."
"……?"
"Pour your stress in and blow up those balloons!"
No thank you — you are the stress in our lives…
And so, once even Cedric had finished blowing up his balloon with a thoroughly chewed-out expression, the man gestured grandly and shouted,
"Now, pop the balloons! The moment they burst, your stress goes flying away! Repeat after me: stress, be gone~!"
"Aigoo, look at our nephew go! Well done!"
The Guild Master clapped and fussed like a proud parent at a recital.
And it was at that exact moment that I reached my conclusion.
My original plan had been to turn the Guild Master into a figurehead and pull the strings myself. That plan was now formally scrapped.
I couldn't take this anymore.
I would just have to become the Guild Master myself.
After the Guild Master vanished that day, gossiping away with his nephew, I went straight to researching the procedure for replacing a guild master.
In this world, a guild with fewer than five members is registered as a self-governing, for-profit association: the guild master serves as the sole operator, while the rest of us are recorded as members of the association.
Replacing the guild master requires the consent of at least three members. With me, Susanna, and Cedric on board, that part would be easy.
However, as a safeguard protecting guild masters, you cannot replace one without grounds. Usually a violation of the guild's charter does the trick — embezzlement of funds, failed missions and damage to the guild's reputation, endangering the safety of association members, and so on.
In other words, we needed to find proof that the Guild Master had committed misconduct.
And of course, we'd have to report it to the Temple afterward, too. The Temple would be furious to learn he'd casually tossed aside one of their own, so we'd need to demonstrate that his wrongdoing had caused actual harm to the Temple.
And since the Temple would need a new guild master they could actually trust… I'd also have to figure out how to raise my own reputation, which currently left something to be desired in their eyes.
"And that is why I intend to become the new Guild Master."
When I gathered Susanna and Cedric and told them this, both of their expressions shifted.
Cedric seemed to think it over for a moment before nodding — but Susanna's face drained white.
"Eeek! You found out my weakness and now you're going to make me your slave, aren't you!"
"If I become Guild Master, I can't promise much, but there is one thing I can guarantee. The work may be hard. You may not like me. But I will not touch your wages."
"……!"
"In fact, I'll raise them by seven percent."
"Wonderful! Then I, for one, support you, Assistant Manager Audrette!"
The moment money entered the conversation, Susanna transformed on the spot into a model employee.
"So what do we need to do then?"
"We dig up something the Guild Master has done wrong."
"Does spending company funds on his nephew, like he did today, count?"
"…I doubt that alone would hold up. It's far too common a trick."
Cedric said this in a calm, level voice.
"My, Employee Cedric — you seem to know a bit of the law yourself?"
"Yes, I learned a little at my previous company."
"Why on earth would you— ah."
Come to think of it, he might have picked it up in the process of reporting that company's own shady dealings. My gaze toward Cedric grew all the more pitying.
"Honestly though, if we look, I bet we'll find embezzlement for sure."
"I think so too."
"Then the account books are the natural place to start."
"Let's do it Employee Cedric's way."
And so our plot to remove the Guild Master from office quietly began.
In our guild, the account books had always been managed by Susanna — which was also why she could run the numbers in her head without ever touching a calculator.
In a normal guild, the master would keep the books locked away and hidden somewhere personally. But ours was so absurdly shorthanded that even that duty had fallen to us all along.
"Here you go! Though, um, there really doesn't seem to be anything wrong with them…."
The account books Susanna showed us were spotless — immaculate, not a flaw to pick at.
"Nothing odd in the expenses at all, and we've been paid exactly per our contracts…."
"I'm annoyed he blew twenty thousand pesos on a nameplate for himself, but that's technically not a violation."
While we pored over the books and mulled, Cedric — who had been silently holding back — finally spoke up.
"Are you certain this is really the total income?"
"Yes, I'm sure. We only had five commissions this entire month."
"Something's off…."
"What's off about it, Employee Cedric?"
"It makes no sense that a guild generating this little revenue stays afloat. He's a greedy man — he would never run a guild just to collect an ordinary salary."
"I knew the Temple was providing us a subsidy, but hearing it now… you're right, even that probably wouldn't be enough."
"So is the Guild Master secretly taking commissions behind our backs, then?"
Susanna asked, and I shook my head.
"Impossible. The Guild Master would never bother handling commissions all by himself."
"Then what is it?"
"Perhaps there's under-the-table money he's been quietly pocketing through this guild."
That was Cedric's theory, and though it still didn't quite click for any of us, we resolved to dig deeper into the account books.
"In the novels I've read, there's always two sets of books…"
Murmuring this to myself, I started rummaging through the Guild Master's seat. That was when I noticed the drawer under his desk was locked, and tilted my head.
"Huh? It's locked — so there must be something important in there."
"Can't we open it?"
"It's locked, so… no, I can't get it open."
The Crown Prince we'd worked with a while back might have managed it, but the three of us certainly didn't have lockpicking skills up our sleeves.
At that moment, Cedric stepped forward.
"I can open it."
"You can, Employee Cedric?"
With that, he took a sharp-tipped pen from Susanna and set to work vigorously jiggling it in the keyhole.
Before long, the lock really did click open.
"I learned it at my previous company."
"At your previous company?"
"They, er… they used to lock the office with a padlock to force us into overtime. So I'd pick the lock and go home."
"What the hell — that company deserves to be reported to the authorities."
If ours was pure evil, that one was more like chaotic evil, I suppose. Just as Susanna's and my eyes grew even more pitying, Cedric pulled a black notebook out of the drawer.
"Could this perhaps be… a second set of account books?"