The Unsafe Safehouse
"Um... excuse me."
Bang-bang, grrr, du-du, bang-bang. Strip the gun—blink, click-clack. Lupin's shoulders bounced to the beat. She hummed some bizarre little lyric and showed no sign of stopping.
Third class, on a train they'd barely managed to catch. The seats were so cramped that Vatslava's shoulder rose and fell right along with hers.
"Going after a treasure chest is all well and good. But why are you taking me with you..."
"How many vacation days you got left?"
Vacation days? Vatslava tilted her head.
The manager and the owner of Bar Antique were vicious squeezers of labor, and in this world, worker-protection laws simply did not exist. Where slavery ran rampant, something like paid leave was never going to.
"What... is a vacation day?"
"You don't get any?"
"I've never even heard of such a thing..."
Good grief. What a pack of barbarians. Even Lupin's old company—where overtime and holiday shifts came as regularly as meals—had at least paid out her leave in full.
"Black company. Just quit. You're gonna be stuck running around with me for a while anyway."
"No. I mean. I didn't exactly show up for work because I wanted to...... Pardon?"
What was she talking about?
Vatslava's eyes went round. As if congratulating her on the firing, Lupin was smiling, bright and clear.
"For a while?"
"The treasure chest you told me about. You've gotta stick with me until I find it. Find it fast, and it might wrap up early."
"S-stick with you?"
If they never found the chest, did that mean together until she died?
"I... I already told you where it is..."
"I'm terrible with directions."
She was smiling sweetly, but it was a lie. You could tell from the smile alone. Definitely a lie. She meant to use her and throw her away. One hundred percent—the hound gets cooked once the hunt is done. She'd be silenced.
Remembering the impossible feats she'd watched Lupin pull off yesterday, Vatslava squeezed her eyes shut.
"A g-guide. I could introduce you to someone else. I really could......"
"I don't want that."
"I-I'll set you up with someone truly good! They know the area better than I do!"
"I'm a little shy with new faces. Strangers make me uncomfortable."
I'm a stranger too, though?
...But turning it over, the one who had spent a whole week listening to Lupin's whining and soothing her through it was Vatslava herself. If even the con she'd run trying to sell the woman into slavery counted as "getting acquainted," then she had nothing left to say.
"Hhhk..."
There was no way out. Once the treasure chest was hers, she'd kill her cruelly. How would it happen? Strung upside down from the ceiling with a hole in her throat, every drop of blood drained, a pale corpse? Or chopped into neat slices of meat? She might simply beat her to death. Lupin was more than capable of it.
As if turning worry into certainty, Lupin chattered on like it was nothing.
"Don't look so sad. If you're useful, I might let you live. Bring me word of another treasure chest, and hey—your life might get an extension. That's the idea."
Was this woman actually a monster wearing a human face? Was she this obsessed with treasure chests just so she wouldn't starve? No wonder she'd been far too fast, and far too strong, for any human!
Only then did Vatslava ask the question that actually mattered.
"W-why are you so obsessed with treasure chests?"
She had listened to the complaining all week and written it off as meaningless nonsense from a thoughtless customer. Now she needed to understand this love of treasure chests.
"Because it's fun."
So thoroughly insincere an answer that the questioner's will simply folded. At the sight of Vatslava wilting, Lupin raised her voice as if genuinely flustered.
"No, it really is fun. You're hurting my feelings, you know?"
"I'm sorry.... I just don't understand..."
"It's fine. I've seen plenty of people like that."
Trying to understand looked likely to send her to the afterlife first. Better to give up on understanding and look for a way to live.
For now... I'll think once we're in front of the boss......
A cantankerous woman with a face as flat and wide as a loaf of bread, caked in makeup of a shade that didn't suit her, trying desperately to dress it up. A woman who, if Vatslava so much as hesitated over the drink she was offered, narrowed her already thin eyes to needles and stabbed her with a look. Not a relationship she had chosen. A bad bond she couldn't cut even if she wanted to. She had hated her with a passion—and yet right now, that woman almost seemed preferable.
The pink-haired woman in the next seat terrified Vatslava. Utterly. Far more than the boss, who had beaten her whenever the mood struck under the name of education.
Will the boss... win this time, too?
They had clashed with the authorities more than once, and still the trafficking ring had stood for over ten years. Inside the safehouse, officers and rank-and-file together, nearly a hundred people lived on site. You needed numbers like that to beat back the bounty hunters and sheriffs who came crashing in whenever they grew bored. By common sense, then, Lupin's odds weren't high. However exceptional her body, she couldn't be free of the tyranny of headcount.
But if. If Lupin was so strong she dealt the ring catastrophic damage, Vatslava could watch for her moment, grab only what mattered, and run. True freedom. And so the fervent prayer of a villain went on—a trafficker who had personally sold off more than a few people.
I want to live......
Watching Vatslava drop off mid-prayer, Lupin let out a dry little laugh. With that big frame and that bushy hair, she'd taken her for some kind of lion. Asleep, she was a herbivore through and through.
She glanced down. Empty bottles already stood in a row on the floor—five of them. The treasure-chest withdrawal was getting worse by the day. She was on her sixth straight bottle of liquor past forty percent, and only now was drowsiness starting to creep in. Still, it beat a week of whining at the bar. At least now she was following solid information toward a treasure chest that actually existed. A hundred would have been better than one, and ten thousand better than a hundred. But finding even a single one was something.
A hot-goods safe, too.... Well, it still counts as a treasure chest.
Abandoned Chests had been more than enough, so she'd never bothered coveting the other kind. But a treasure chest had always been a plunder-safe to begin with. Pirates looted riches from all over, hid them somewhere only they knew along with a map, and that became a treasure chest. They had only grown famous as a collectible once they started turning up in games like a cliché. Trace them to the root, and treasure chests always led back to bad people.
Just as Lupin had told Vatslava: if traps and the like kept it protected in some secret place, and opening the lid turned up nothing but precious things, then that was a treasure chest. Which meant a bank vault, broadly speaking, belonged to the category too. The only reason she hadn't robbed one was that Lupin—once a modern person—had neither a reason nor the desire to crack a bank vault.
But if. Really, if.
Abandoned Chest:32,768 / 32,768 (100%)
If bank vaults were added to this collectible list, then she'd be willing to crack one. The more she turned it over, the more the present situation rankled. Secret Chest or bank vault, she wished they'd just add one already. A vault job the status window itself had signed off on—how was anyone supposed to resist?
And come on. Other people got status windows barking do this, do that, whipping them this way and that until they were mentally cornered. Lupin's was pure laissez-faire. It had last checked in three years ago, then gone completely silent. Waaah. You can't just neglect a baby. No chests to eat, and she'll starve to death!
"......Not even this gets a reaction?"
Cold. Absolutely cold. Most open-world games lived by being unfriendly, sure, but the fashion these days was kindness and convenience. Trying to talk to a status window this utterly oblivious felt like holding a conversation with a wall.
...I'm tired. Might as well sleep.
Even so, Lupin hadn't given up hope. Events had a way of appearing out of nowhere, and a way of firing off a specific trigger.
The moment I pop that safe open, what if I get something like a Secret Chest detection ability.... Hehehe.
She could put up with all the annoying combat in the world, if it was for a treasure chest...........
The far edge of the eastern continent. Sirabov City, in the Rostov Republic.
The trafficking ring's safehouse, disguised as a derelict ruin somewhere along the outer coast. Deepest inside it, the boss's private room was unusually busy today. Heave. Two bald hulks set a great chest down beside the one already there, and the officers spoke.
"So the treasure chests have ended up at two."
"I jump every time I walk into this room. A treasure chest just sitting there like it owns the place."
Sunglasses that couldn't cover even half her flat, wide face shifted as the boss cackled like a witch.
"Aigoo. Kids these days don't know the charm of an antique. A safe isn't just a safe. Why can't they see that? Right, my boys?"
"Treasure!"
"Chest!"
In truth, with the money the boss moved, she could have commissioned a sturdier, stronger vault—one that wouldn't break even under aura. But she was a woman who had clawed her way through a harsh world. In an underworld full of people who greeted you by putting a round in your face, she had lived by thinking about how to look stronger in other people's eyes. An unbreakable vault was safe, she had decided, but it looked weak. Like a coward already assuming someone would one day take what was inside.
So she chose a treasure chest instead of a vault. A proud declaration to the world: kill me and take it, if you can. Right after that declaration the authorities came crashing in, and the organization nearly came apart—but once she survived, it only grew more solid. Small outfits, smitten with that provocative stance, gathered beneath the boss just to stay alive. That was how the trafficking ring had become the giant it was.
The organization's promising sprouts looked at Milwi's treasure chest and nursed dreams of becoming just like Milwi. The fearless ones tried to rob it and died at the hands of her two sons, the Vladimir brothers. That everyday scene had been repeating for years.
"Boss. There's a request for an audience."
Milwi, smiling as she stroked the newly placed chest, rose.
"Who? I didn't have anything scheduled today."
"A scout from the Ryazan side."
"Vatslava? What's happened all of a sudden?"
The subordinate who had come with the news repeated exactly what he had seen and heard.
"She's found a decent junior. Seems she wants to introduce them to you, Boss. If you don't have the time, I'll send them back."
Vatslava. A pretty little thing, obedient—the cute youngest of the scout line. Milwi liked pretty people, and so she had been giving her rather special treatment. But because Milwi had used somewhat violent methods when she brought Vatslava into the ring, the two of them were close and not close at once. A complicated relationship that did not explain itself easily.
"Hm. If Vatslava brought them, they must be all right."
Milwi trusted Vatslava. Still, if you meant to work as a scout for the trafficking ring, looks and a silver tongue were mandatory. You had to meet the conditions before anyone put a collar on you and worked you.
"Pretty?"
The subordinate answered with confidence.
"About Vatslava's level, or better. Good enough to sell as merchandise, if you ask me."
Milwi liked pretty people. She liked it when pretty people couldn't defy her orders, and submitted.
"Bring them before me at once!"
