A Bandit's Life
How far had she gone down that underground tunnel with an armful of chests?
She tripped lightly up a brutally steep flight of stone stairs, and at last a place that actually looked like a proper house came into view. For Lupin, that was enough of a shock. Every spot the bandits had proudly introduced as their main hall had been such a wreck she doubted a human being could live in it. Set beside those, this one had the feel of the ordinary homes she had seen people living in back in Rostov. Even the timber of the outer walls felt different. Then again, looking at it that way, she began to wonder whether this was a place bandits would live in at all.
"Hey! You spacing out? This way!"
And this bastard had been talking down to her since earlier. Lupin quietly banked one stack of grudge against the little bandit, promising herself she would later reshape his skull into the character for concave.
Still, why did a bandit have eyes like blue ice? She had never seen that color among them, and it stirred an odd sense of kinship. Her own eyes, after all, were a bizarre blend of two colors, hardly what anyone would call ordinary.
...Nothing for it.
She would have to knock one stack off the tally, purely on grounds of exemplary eyes.
At any rate, she followed the tiny bandit with the piercing voice a little farther, and there it was: a vault. A monstrous thing, the sort of size a bank might commission, forged from massive iron alloy. Lupin's mind turned into a treasure chest on the spot.
"Whoa."
And inside that pitch-black interior, weren't treasure chests piled up in numbers to match everything she and the other bandits had hauled in? What was this place? Heaven? In any case, Lupin's instinct for treasure chests had never once steered her wrong. She had barely had time to feel a good hunch before a sight this outrageous was laid out in front of her.
"Hey! Put them down and get out! Quit standing there like an idiot!"
"Ah. Yes, sir! Coming out!"
The king vault? That's dinner tonight, isn't it.
Before Lupin and her Rank XI Lockpicking, complicated, sturdy locks meant nothing. As if every treasure chest in the world had been destined for her from the start, the vault was closed, and yet it was open. By her standard, a Schrödinger's lock.
She set the load down and came out, and the short bandit beckoned.
"You. Follow me."
"Yes. Yes."
After she passed her company interview, Lupin, nerves jangling, had asked her friends (the internet) a great many things. They all said the same thing: stick it out a few days, and if it felt wrong, run. Of course none of that applied to Lupin, who had botched the contract, so the advice was meaningless. There had been one person, though. Do whatever they tell you, wag your tail a little in front of the boss, get along with your superiors—it can't hurt—and when they step out for a smoke, tag along and grease the wheels. Someone had given her advice that would help for a lifetime and, at the same time, turn her into a perfect slave. Thanks to that, even now she could play the perfect youngest hire!
"This way. The stronghold chief wants a look at you. Mind your manners."
"Yes, sir!"
Would the iron tokens hanging below Lupin's chest become three? Or would she survive without becoming the first bandit to leave an iron token behind? Brimming with anticipation, she kicked open the metal-ornamented wooden door and strode in.
The door crashed open so thunderously that the stronghold chief waiting inside startled. He had been trimming the end of a cigar for a smoke; catching Lupin's eye, he quietly put a flame to it.
"You. What are you?"
The chief, it seemed, was not a man for flowery words. For Lupin, kimchi running in her blood, that was a mercifully direct opening. The scar over one eye helped, and so did the Eastern cut of his clothes, nothing like the other bandits. He called to mind a warrior out of a grand historical drama, and his favorability score climbed nicely in her head.
"Speaking for this body of mine, I am the one who will become the Bandit King."
The treasure the Bandit King had hidden. A grand adventure in search of the One Piece. Let everyone laugh and say no such thing existed; she was a storm-child of the age, pressing stubbornly toward her dream. Having finished that proud introduction, Lupin proudly said something insane.
"So kindly hand over the stronghold chief's seat."
Unexpectedly, the chief answered with calm. He had not been dazzled by Lupin's round deposits of fat. He had looked first at the two iron tokens at her waist.
Hoo.
One pull of the cigar, and he sorted his thoughts. Iron tokens were all much the same, but the bandits had nicked and altered them to look impressive, so they were not hard to recognize. They belonged to the stronghold chiefs of Mocheuksan and Momisan. Only natural, given that the Mojeonsan chief now facing Lupin was a man of considerable rank himself. Not the king of the 108 Green Forest Strongholds, but roughly a duke.
"Planning to snatch the Grand Stronghold Chief's seat while you're at it?"
"Chongbeopha... what?"
"Grand Stronghold Chief. You don't know what that is?"
Lupin instinctively smashed out the right answer to a word she did not know.
"Don't tell me. The Bandit King?"
"You looked dim, but you're quick on the uptake. Yes. The king among stronghold chiefs. The one who stands over every chief of our 108 Green Forest Strongholds."
"Chong... pyo... pa...?"
"Chong. Pyo. Pa. Ja."
Broken into pieces. A startling kindness, as if he were accommodating a foreigner who could not follow the language. The chief's favorability score rose a little in Lupin's heart. But why use a title this difficult? Couldn't he just say Bandit King? Still, if you wanted to look like somebody, a title had to be invented difficult, and cool. To borrow Lupin's words, otherwise the swagger would not survive. The Rounds and the Seven Stars were, in a way, that same kind of naming. Lupin, eternal entry-level employee, had no way of knowing that.
Even so. Grand Stronghold Chief. A name she could not memorize no matter what she did. In the end, after mumbling it under her breath about ten times, she offered an alternative. A mondegreen.
"Let's all go on strike. That's it, right?"
She suddenly felt she ought to tie a red band around her head, but say it fast and it landed, quite naturally, as Grand Stronghold Chief. The trick was mushing the middle of the phrase until slogan and title shared one breath. The chief's brow creased faintly, but he caught it well enough and nodded.
"In all my years, you're the first to knock down two stronghold chiefs and stroll in saying you'll be Grand Stronghold Chief. Not a man. A woman."
"If you'd like, I can knock you down too, mister."
"I'll decline. I might help you. I have no intention of attacking you."
"Oh. Really? A wise decision."
Praise from a girl this green was enough to make a man's blood boil, but the chief met her bluntly, with no great shift of face or feeling.
"So. Why do you want to be Grand Stronghold Chief? As you said yourself, he's nothing but a bandit king."
"To explain that, I first have to explain about treasure chests..."
"Treasure chests?"
Now what was this. The chief blew out smoke and pinched his brow hard.
"...So you were a thieving wench after the Grand Stronghold Chief's vault. Tch."
A phantom thief is still a thief, isn't she?
It was irrefutable, so Lupin nodded. At that the chief shook his head, muttering that she really was a bit lacking.
"I've lived a long time and never seen a woman smile the way you do at being called a thieving wench. So the Grand Stronghold Chief's vault really is your goal?"
Lupin grinned and rubbed her palms together.
"While I'm at it, I'd also like a little tour of the vault here. Any chance you'd open it? I'm not saying I'll haul a bunch of things off. Just looking. Oh, if I need to, I might take one or two."
A request whose purpose was impossible to grasp. But the promise that she would only lay a hand on them did not sound like a lie, and shutting her down would obviously create nothing but trouble. The chief waved her off and sighed.
"Do as you like. You'd open it even if I told you not to, wouldn't you? And I'm not sure I could stop a woman who's already beaten two stronghold chiefs."
"What. Why are you this smart? Why is someone like you doing bandit work?"
"Nothing you need to know. If it's the vault you want, look at it and get out. And take this."
No greed, for a bandit? Was he not a bandit at all? Black hair, brown eyes—he was Cheonghwa, all right.
Meanwhile the chief went to a broad wooden desk. A wooden box in one cluttered corner opened, and a single insignia sprang out. Similar in form to the iron tokens Lupin wore, but a luminous gold token. The purity looked high; the deep yellow and the sheen were anything but ordinary.
"Whoa. A gold badge, from a bandit."
The two iron tokens on the belt of her half-baked bandit outfit immediately clattered to the floor. What reason was there to keep iron hanging when a better token existed? Back home, iron was the lowest of the ranks. The bracket where only pathetic types, trolling whenever they got bored, ended up locked away.
"But why are you giving me this?"
"That thing is something like the right to speak directly with the Grand Stronghold Chief. There are only eighteen of them in all the 108 Green Forest Strongholds. It was mine, originally."
So saying, he indicated his own waist. It was empty, as if to announce that the gold token's master was the chief.
"Wear that, and my men will open the vault door for you. Don't smash it for no reason, and don't knock the boys down. Go in quietly and come back out."
A course of action far too different from any bandit Lupin knew. The suspicion from earlier swelled into a single question. Only at times like this was her intuition strangely sharp.
"You're not a bandit, are you, mister?"
A casual toss, but the chief reacted with considerable noise. The cigar dropped from his mouth, and he stamped frantically, desperate to keep the wooden mountain stronghold from catching. Certainty settled in, and Lupin asked again.
"What do you do? Infiltration? Are you an adventurer? Looking for something?"
Under the barrage he avoided her eyes and muttered.
"I'm an ordinary bandit, so finish your business and get out."
"Come on. Listen to you getting mean the second you're caught. And here I thought you were a transparent sort."
Lupin tapped the glittering gold token at her waist and grinned. The annoying chores standing between her and the treasure chests had vanished, and she felt wonderfully light.
"If we meet again, dinner's on me. At this rate I could treat you not once, but about ten times, don't you think? Anyway, I'll put it to good use!"
And off she went, brisk as anything, leaving the room in the wide-legged strut of some great man of the world. Watching her back, the chief let out a sigh he could not hold in. Where on earth had a strange woman like that rolled in from? Her strength was monstrous, and her martial power looked anything but ordinary, so why was she stealing treasure?
The door that had slammed open to see Lupin out now opened again, this time with a careful creak. The one who came in was the small bandit who had been chattering at her the whole way. He bowed until his small frame looked smaller still.
"Dharma Protector Cheong. I went through every chest we brought in, but the music box isn't there. Could it have been lost along the way?"
The stronghold chief called Dharma Protector Cheong had turned all of Cheonghwa upside down searching for the music box kept in a red case, and had only just made it as far as Mojeonsan. And it was not here? He had even heard a rumor that one of the stronghold chiefs had it. In that instant the two iron tokens rolling on the floor glinted. They belonged to the other two chiefs Lupin was presumed to have taken down.
...Could it be?
Perhaps, after cleaning out those two strongholds, she had gotten her hands on the music box. If so, only she would know where it had gone. Send her off like this, and there was no telling when their paths would cross again. The chief burst from the room at once. It was a mercy that Lupin had said she was going to see the vault. If she had left on the spot, whether he could even have followed—
CRASH!
"Ghk?!"
Out of nowhere the great front gate of the three-story mountain stronghold shattered, and several huge fragments whipped past the chief. In the shockwave, a number of the bandits guarding the entrance went tumbling across the floor or slammed into the walls. Just from the sight of people being struck and sent flying, you could roughly infer the intruder's rank. Master-class.
A moment later a woman's booming roar shook the stronghold to its beams.
"Well, well. They hid a stronghold this huge way out in a mountain valley? At this size, there ought to be about a hundred treasure chests in there, right?"
Taller than a grown man, with a short bob flicked out at the ends. A white uniform trimmed in gold, and a cape snapping behind her. The cornflower armband that belonged on an upper arm, worn instead like a headband—and ten identical copies of the very same person.
Ekaterina? What is she doing here?
The surprise appearance of the Twelfth Seat of the Rounds, the crazy bitch rumored far and wide for never doing her job and only ever sampling women.