How Rude — I Only Borrowed It
Yegor was beginning to feel that he finally understood, if only a little, what the treasure chests Lupin never stopped talking about actually were.
"Don't tell me you... cracked the National Assembly's safe?"
Lupin drew her brows in and snapped.
She meant it. She hadn't particularly set out to steal anything. And even if she had, the stuff belonged to criminals, so what was there to fuss about?
That was simply how Lupin had always treated whatever turned up inside a treasure chest, a tradition running all the way back to the Abandoned Chests. Take it or leave it. If she helped herself to what she needed from a box nobody else was touching, it had never been a problem to begin with.
As for Secret Chests, the Association had even put its official stamp on the practice. An adventurer was free to keep the belongings of a wanted criminal they had brought down. (No one had yet established that the owner of a Secret Chest was necessarily a wanted criminal.)
"Anyway, I was going to ask you and then put it back. I only took it because I was genuinely curious."
On any ordinary day, Yegor's reaction would have gone like this. Laying hands on someone else's property? Put it back where it belongs, right now. And she would have said it herself: the Republic was in chaos, so he ought to stay out of whatever he could.
But this was the National Assembly. If everyone recorded in those bribery ledgers was a sitting member, that was an entirely different story.
Documents that could finish the country off completely... Why was something like this under the National Assembly?
Rostov's civic movement had reached a point where the same unrest could break out in any other empire and no one would blink. The people handing out work up top preferred the clever these days, and with technology advancing, you could no longer survive by burying yourself blindly in your own job the way you used to. The citizens' education, their independence, and their political awareness were rising to match.
Inevitably, free will, the will to self-rule, and the will to independence swelled right along with them, clashing with the old aristocratic order until the country split into nobles and anti-nobles and locked horns. That, in short, was the Rostov Republic.
And there was no way the cult would let a situation like this slip past. Weren't they the sort who turned up anywhere on the continent and stirred the pot? If they could snap one arm of the Imperial Alliance — if all they had to do was hide behind the citizens and give them the slightest shove — they would wedge themselves in without fail and turn the whole place upside down.
To Yegor's eyes, the papers Lupin had brought were decisive evidence, gathered for the express purpose of reducing the country to a shambles.
"These documents. Can you bring all of them?"
"First it's 'you stole them,' and now this. Listen to yourself."
"Anyway — can you get them? This is important."
"Hey. Don't cut me off! I'm not some dog named Poppy who fetches when you say fetch and sits when you say don't."
"Lupin. This is serious."
Lupin tilted her head. Why's this guy being so dead serious? Are these documents actually that important? Ordinarily she would have been ready to hang conditions on him — you make lunch, you call me boss, whatever came to mind. Even so, something about it nagged at her.
"Judging by the mood alone, is the cult about to pop out of nowhere?"
"I'm not certain, but there are circumstances that make me suspect it."
"What?!"
"Shh. Lower your voice."
The work of those vicious cult bastards! Put it like that, and even someone as cold-blooded as Lupin couldn't keep from lending a hand. Why? Because the cult tangled with bad people, and wherever there were bad people, a treasure chest was bound to turn up.
"So if I bring all of it, we'll know exactly what this is?"
"Yes."
Still, before she granted Yegor's request, she couldn't forget the objective that came first. To get the wing-cloak, a cape had to be made. That was why they had come to the tailor's, and even now the door stood wide open, all but waving them inside.
"Then I'll just leave the cape order with the tailor and head straight back."
"Leave that to us as well. We'll prepare a design you'll be satisfied with."
Today Yegor was shooting past Woongi and making a naked play for Siri and GPT's job. Lupin, though, was tempted by the offer all the same. If she tried to design it herself, what would come out was a flat wing-cloak with not a scrap of artistry and two hundred percent practicality. Better to let someone with an actual opinion about clothes dig through the details.
More than anything, Yegor was a knowledgeable bastard, so Lupin jumped to the conclusion that he'd have a fair eye for fashion too. He might not fuss over it, but the shirt and trousers he wore weren't the kind of shabby look a face alone could carry. And then there was the beautiful system of cracking the Secret Chest and dumping every annoying chore on the people around her. That suited Lupin just fine.
Come to think of it, had Secret Chest hunting always been meant for a team, unlike opening Abandoned Chests on her own?
"Hold on. Let me think."
But the moment she pictured a team, the inevitable friction rose up, and her heart — which had been rolling along nicely — caught and stopped dead. Memories of seniors and juniors who got in the way no matter what she did.
Still, these guys are competent on a level those people can't even compare to.
After fretting, Lupin made up her mind. Fine. Hand things off one by one. If she liked how it went, keep handing them off. Like it or not, they were stuck traveling together for two years anyway. If she forcibly shut down people who were offering to help, all she'd do was dig an emotional ditch for no reason, and then the train trip would turn into a total snooze again. Ugh. Enough of the vow of silence.
"All right. I'll give you a few keywords, so pull about five candidates. I'll pick the one I like."
Five years and several months since she had started living in Elysium, and only now was Lupin beginning to consider the concept of human relationships. If Tasili had known, she might have wept tears of pure emotion.
The cult was standing behind the citizens. The cult was putting weapons to a protest that ought to have stayed peaceful. At this rate, the entire country would fall into the cult's hands. Talk like that was the topic of the day inside Rostov, and the citizens had split cleanly into two camps.
The anti-noble faction cried that this was just an argument for keeping faith with the nobles who had been sucking their marrow dry, and shouted that they ought to build a country of the citizens, by the citizens, for the citizens — freely lifting a speech left behind by a great president of some nation beyond the dimensions. The pro-noble faction appealed for restraint: better that than handing the country to the cult and watching it fall apart, and fanning the flames like this made them no different from the cult itself.
In any case, the anti-noble faction was firm, and its creed was to stop at nothing, force included. They were extremely radical. Most of them believed the world could not change without radicalism. There may have been no one fully sworn to the cult, but among the agitators there were certainly those in collusion with it. Right here — the action captain of the civic group leading the protests was one such man.
"Breaching the Assembly is no longer far off. As I told you, they're watching the citizens' mood, so they absolutely won't fire or attack. You saw it today, didn't you? In the end, one person broke the cordon and got inside."
"A truly remarkable result. Before long we'll see the nobles and the imperial family on their knees before us. So. What comes next?"
"Within the next two attempts, we'll go for a complete seizure of the Assembly. Once we have it, we take out the trump card we've hidden inside."
"With the cult and the Shrine Maidens backing us, I couldn't feel more secure."
The nobles couldn't attack the citizens lightly, not if they wanted the pro-noble camp to hold together. From the shadows they could try to assassinate the opposition, but if it wasn't done cleanly in a single stroke, the backlash would be worse. That was why Assembly Speaker Dmitri couldn't simply call in force and scatter the opposition. Thanks to that, the opposition had only grown bolder. At first they had meant to push the nobles toward change through hard-line protest. Now they were drawing up plans to overturn the board entirely.
They weren't demanding every guarantee under the sun for no reason. It was a ploy to make the other side lose its temper and slip. Whether you were waging a keyboard war online or arguing face to face, the one who went ebe-bebe like a brat was always the one who got under people's skin the most.
The current action captain of the civic group — the same man who had stacked an enormous sum of backroom money from the cult in a safe beneath his house — spoke.
"That one forged bribery ledger will set the whole country ablaze. Even the people who still back the noble assembly because they don't know any better will turn their backs completely."
"Yes. We're ready to seize each institution whenever we please. All that's left is to send up the signal flare cleanly."
"Just leave it to me. It won't be long now. Today I'll make one last check on the Assembly side, and then we enter the final phase."
Back again in the basement of the National Assembly. Lupin, fussing with the safe, seized one of the people who had come down to the document archive.
This one is the owner of the Secret Chest.
"Mmph. Mmmph! Mmph — mmph!"
Trying to stop the pigeon's spoilers was pointless. Tell it to shut up all you like — the thing was still whirling around over the chest owner's head. How was she supposed to stop that? So Lupin decided to take it in good spirits. She already knew the ending, but climbing back up through the process and digging out the truth could be its own kind of fun. She had never cared about the story anyway. If this was how she filled her curiosity, that was enough.
"Excuse me. This safe. Is it yours?"
Lupin eased her grip a little, and the woman clerk she had been holding tried to scream.
"Ah-ah."
Smack.
She had done her best to hold back, but one palm to the back of the head and the woman was out cold. Waking her would only get the same result, wouldn't it? Then she would just have to find out for herself. Lupin started rummaging through the clerk's pockets. The skirt pocket was empty. The breast pocket was empty too. Her hand moved on to the jacket.
"Found it."
A letter, folded in two. She opened it to find the page crammed with angular script she couldn't read. Lupin wondered whether she ought to train a foreign-language Growth Value — though first she would have to do something about falling asleep the moment she opened a book.
"...Guess I'll just ask Goraemon."
He always looked appalled and told her to stop advertising how ignorant she was, but even while he scolded her, he explained everything. Grumble all he liked, that kind heart of his wasn't going anywhere. More than that, this particular job had turned out to be genuinely fun to do with Yegor. Every time she brought him something, his face moved about five times more than usual — how could that not be entertaining? Nothing delighted a spectator quite like a usually expressionless bastard getting knocked flat by surprise.
Just as Lupin had hoped, Yegor took the documents and the letter, clutched at the spot between his brows, and groaned.
"...Haa. How do you end up in something like this every single time?"
"So. Is it the cult? Or is somebody rolling in the 2nd Airborne to hit the capital?"
"What are you even — anyway, yes. The situation is serious."
Lupin wasn't entirely wrong. Yegor relayed the contents of the deciphered letter.
All forces dispatched by the cult have finished deploying to a location within Novi Rostov. Awaiting commencement of the operation. The start is set for immediately after the National Assembly's confidential documents are made public...
But to Lupin, that too was still as good as a cipher. She only blinked, wearing a vacant look, until Yegor spoke.
"The documents you brought are the confidential papers this letter is talking about. They were forged by the cult. To overthrow the Rostov Republic."
Lupin jolted and shouted.
"Those rebel sons of bitches!"
