The Easiest Way Not to Become a Bastard
Lupin came back in a single day—not with Maze Rat's head, but with the Jade of Spontaneous Life in her hand. The news alone had the Association branch in an uproar, and the jade turned the uproar into a full-blown riot.
"Well? The effect's killer, right?"
"Whoa. This isn't a nap. I feel like I slept the whole night through."
"Hey, me too—me too, let me try it!"
Everyone wanted just one turn. They were howling for a taste of that paradise of a sleep when Tasili, in early for the morning shift, fixed Lupin with a look of pure disbelief.
"Lupin? How are you back already?"
The adventurers scattered like cockroaches caught in the light, and the bustle around Lupin's table died in an instant. It was proof enough of how formidable the man who held the branch's authority could be—though in truth, most of them fled for fear his spirit-draining lecture was about to begin.
Left on her own, Lupin turned her hands the wrong way around and pressed her palms together.
"I obey!!!"
The subjugation had only started yesterday, and for a moment he wondered if something had gone wrong. Then the orb Lupin had brought back settled the question beyond all doubt. It was the Jade of Spontaneous Life—the very relic Maze Rat had seized while taking revenge on a noble he held a grudge against. Even Tasili had no choice but to conclude the hunt had ended well.
"No trouble with your companions?"
The question reminded Lupin of a promise. She still owed Yegor those gold bars.
"Nope. We got along just fine."
Half true, half not. Still, she'd come back close enough with one of them to carry a dying wish. That was the friendship of men for you. It had been a short time, but they'd understood each other well enough that there was no need to complicate things.
"Truly?"
"C'mon. Have a little faith in your disciple."
"Ho ho. Very well. You're applying yourself more every day, so I suppose I ought to trust you."
"Hehe."
"So. How did you decide to divide the bounty?"
Lupin had no idea there was a bounty. She had brought down a powerhouse ranked twenty-fifth on the individual list—worth ninety-two thousand gold—and she was grinning over nothing but the appraisal of the relic in her hand.
"Eh. The three of them can sort that out, right? You know I don't really care about money."
"You've decided to be satisfied with the Jade of Spontaneous Life, in place of the bounty?"
"Whoa. You know the Jade of Spontaneous Life? You are, and I mean this, the absolute best."
Set it by your pillow while you slept, and half your usual rest left you refreshed, your mind clear as glass. A miraculous thing. You could thrash yourself to the brink of death with violent work all day long, and a few hours of sleep beside the jade was all it took—your body came out clean as new. Lupin had already sampled that divine effect three hours ago, in a catnap.
If only I'd had this back when I was gaming! I could've cleaned out so many more treasure chests, in so many more worlds. What a waste.
Reading the grin spreading across her face, Tasili asked,
"The reason you want it... is so you can hunt treasure chests even harder?"
"Gasp. As expected of Master. Insight, level two hundred."
"Return it to its owner, and you'd receive a considerable sum in exchange. But from the look of you, you have no particular wish to give it back."
"Nope. I'm just gonna keep it. You said so yourself, Master. By Association rules, treasure taken off a wanted criminal belongs to the adventurer."
When something favored her, Lupin remembered it with uncanny precision. But she'd already been running her mouth all over the place, so the rumor was bound to reach the original owner's ears. Leave things as they were, and it was plain as day that some nobody of a woman coveting another family's heirloom would spark a quarrel.
Age had done nothing for Tasili but sharpen a useless foresight. He set the two outcomes on either pan of a scale and weighed them. Getting the original owner to relinquish the Jade of Spontaneous Life would be exceedingly tricky. Wasn't the man one of the highest nobles in the Rostov Republic, a member state of the Imperial Alliance? The Adventurer Association preferred the middle path, and it naturally wanted no part of a shouting match with a house that grand.
And making Lupin give the jade up...? That wasn't merely difficult. That way lay total chaos. He couldn't begin to predict what argument she would make, and if the other side tried to take it by force, he had the ominous feeling a physical clash would follow.
"Master, your face looks bad. This isn't gonna start a war or something just 'cause I didn't give it back, right?"
At that, Tasili changed his thinking. Better to make House Ryurikovich give up the Jade of Spontaneous Life. Difficult was not the same as impossible. And snatching away something Lupin had taken a liking to, only to warp her over it, would be its own kind of trouble—now, of all times, when she was only just beginning to socialize.
"By any chance, have you thought about what sort of request you'd like to take next?"
"Anything you look into for me is fine, Master. Hehe."
As it happened, Lupin's trust in Tasili was rock-solid. Anyone who handed her a treasure chest was, by her personal metric, the GOAT.
Nobles of a distinguished house would never treat a benefactor shabbily...
A simple, clear plan took shape in his head. A house with that much history was sure to have its grudges, and among them were those who watched hungrily for the family's fall. Clear out a good number of them, and the other side's thinking would change. And Lupin, as it happened, had exactly the power to do it.
"Understood. I'll look into it right away."
"That's my Master. You're the only one I trust!"
After that, Lupin spent a while hawking her miracle cure to the other adventurers, then set out late in the afternoon for the address Yegor had given her. Cute kids would be waiting, she figured, so she'd bought a few gifts along the way. She'd grown up in an orphanage and spent plenty of time with the little ones there; even if it was only in dead Yegor's place, someone ought to drop by now and then. If they wanted to play, she was confident she could play. These days she was strong enough that giving two of them airplane rides at once, for a full hour, would be nothing.
"This the place...?"
35 Yegor Street, Western District, Ryabolsk City. The address had a feel oddly like Korea's new street system, and following it brought her, before she quite noticed, to the western outskirts of the city. Right beneath the walls, a commoners' quarter came into view—the kind of place where long shadows fell once the sun began to set. Most of the houses ran two or three stories, framed in brick or logs, walled mostly in wood, and roofed with thin Western tiles. In Korean terms, they had the feel of old villas: tired walk-ups, households packed in together, plenty of them multi-family.
And in the farthest corner of the neighborhood, down a dim stretch where few people came and went, stood the house Yegor had told her about. Lupin opened the sack slung over her shoulder and counted the gold bars. Ten. She'd brought them properly.
All right. With this money, you little darlings are moving into a big, comfortable house.
Knock, knock. Lupin rapped on the door.
CRASH!
The door tilted, toppled flat to the floor, and shattered to pieces.
"Huh?"
She hadn't meant to break it. Glancing around to see if anyone had noticed, Lupin poked her head inside. The dark interior held not a stick of furniture—only dust. It didn't feel like a place where anyone lived at all.
This bastard. Don't tell me he lied about the address just because he didn't want the gold? The guy is seriously insane. A man who'll go this far just to refuse gold bars... now that is dedication.
She was still muttering her highest praise when a voice came from behind her.
"So this is where you were."
"You scared me!"
She spun, and there stood Yegor.
"What. You were alive?"
"Don't say it like you were hoping I was dead."
"I mean, come on. People who get swept up in something like that usually do die."
Soaked to the skin, Yegor pressed a hand to his forehead. He'd spent hours searching in the water and out of it, and the whole effort had been a complete waste; no wonder his feelings were a mess. Worried Lupin might be waiting outside the labyrinth and fretting, he'd combed the area like he was hunting lice—and she'd run off. The sense of betrayal was enormous.
Meanwhile, Lupin was annoyed about something else entirely.
"Never mind that. Was the whole 'I have siblings' thing just you selling me a sob story?"
"The only thing I lied about was the address. My siblings are alive and well."
"Then where are they?"
"They're living in Avignon."
Lupin's memory was limited to treasure chests. Unless you told her the place that looked like this, where I found such-and-such a chest, she absolutely could not remember a city name or a person's name. It was in that same vein, coincidentally, that she remembered Tasili and Vatslava at all. She stood there with a blank look, ignorance dripping off her, and the sight left Yegor briefly at a loss for words.
"I come here to talk and end up teaching geography. My youngest, who's still in primary school, would be smarter than you."
"Could be. Kids these days are crazy smart."
Lupin had, after all, lost a puzzle showdown to a sibling eight years younger.
"Tsk. And I bought them a cake. Anyway, it's really far, right?"
"Even by train, it's three weeks at minimum. Give it up."
Lupin opened the cake box she'd bought for the children. It was a large fresh-cream cake topped with fruit, and because she hadn't known their ages, the candles she'd grabbed at random numbered a hundred and fifty.
"Be a waste otherwise. Guess I'll eat it."
She plopped down on the ground and started wolfing the cream cake with her bare hands. A cake the size of a large pizza vanished in minutes. She wiped the cream from around her mouth and sucked it off her fingers, one after another, and Yegor, watching, muttered under his breath.
"I knew it from the moment she tore into that wild boar. She really can eat."
She was shoveling cake like someone who had starved for three days. That was all he meant. Female knights and adventurers might eat plenty, but none of them ate like Lupin.
"Right? I do have quite the appetite."
It had absolutely not been a compliment. A gentleman, however, could hardly tell a girl you eat like a damn dog, so he left it there. The sugar, meanwhile, had put Lupin in a good mood again. The reason was thoroughly biological, but she simply figured she felt good because she was full. She capped the meal with a neat little burp—impeccable table manners—and asked,
"So. You going back to that Avi-bastard place? Avignon? Whatever it's called?"
"Not yet. I'm not thinking about it."
"Then do a job with me. Pay's this. Ten big gold bars."
Lupin had been through hard times as a child, and she couldn't stand the sight of kids living hard—not even if it killed her. But Yegor was a brick wall. Slipping the money quietly into his sleeve would never work, and she knew it; that was why she'd come all the way to the house in the first place. Better to hire him cleanly, adventurer to adventurer. And a good method had just occurred to her.
"It's a very important job. Bodyguard work."
"Highly sought after, I'll give you that... You actually had someone who needed protecting?"
Strictly speaking, it wasn't a person. It was Lupin's honor that needed protecting. Save one life, and she could keep herself from becoming a complete bastard. Now that was a wise use of gold bars. At the brilliance of her own little scheme, Lupin smacked herself on the forehead.
