The Eye (2)
Truly, every time I saw her, she brought information that defied imagination. Staffing reinforcements for the Southern Border, of all things.
The next morning, Melanie's expression when she heard what I had decided was quite the sight to behold.
"Good thinking. I was wondering when you'd finally bend that stubborn streak of yours, but at least you did it before the Minister retires."
"...Thank you."
Beyond the crystal orb, she stared at me with a face that was half admiration, half disbelief.
"You did get Hailin's permission, I trust?"
"Of course."
I answered with a faint smile.
The image of the Acting Director raising both hands in welcome a mere five minutes ago was still vivid in my eyes.
"So then — there must be a reason you're telling the Director of Intelligence about Immigration Bureau business, hmm?"
She swayed her tail in a manner that suggested she found this amusing.
She had a point. This had nothing to do with the Intelligence Department. So why had I brought the matter to her?
"I thought I might... ask for your help in finding some talent."
The simple truth was that our office alone was strained just trying to recruit people suited to become officers.
There were two paths to becoming an Immigration Officer. The first was direct scouting; the other was sitting an open interview.
The former was how I myself had been recruited. The latter was the route every other officer had taken.
But scouting is far too difficult right now.
Finding talent was no easy feat. It wasn't as if rumors were circulating about someone, somewhere, possessing extraordinary administrative skill.
And besides, anyone truly exceptional had far more suitors than just the Immigration Bureau.
So the first option was out — especially now, with people flooding in like madmen, there wasn't even time to spare for it.
Which left the second. The open interview.
Melanie's eyes narrowed into slits as she caught my meaning.
"Ahh. You need intelligence. Who the promising ones might be — and you want me to coax them into sitting an interview, at the very least."
"Precisely."
"Then I'll have to consider how many might be worth the trouble. Since you've gone to the effort — how many are you planning to take on?"
I had already thought this through. I answered at once.
"Twenty."
...
Silence. The tail that had been swaying gently just moments before stopped dead.
"T-twenty!?"
A shrill shriek.
"Honey, did you eat something bad?"
"I fasted for a day."
"What happened? A royal order, perhaps?"
"No. Nothing like that."
"Not five, not ten — twenty. What on earth possessed you to come up with such an uncharacteristically wise idea?"
Under that lingering, hard-to-shake suspicion, I simply shrugged.
"It's just... I thought perhaps the time for change had finally come."
Expanding the staff.
When I had first made that decision, I'd intended only to replace the Vision Officer. But on reflection, one person to fill that seat would not be enough.
It has to be far more than that.
Look at the Northern Border alone — weren't they understaffed by more than thirty?
If we were going to grow, growing decisively was the only right answer.
And now that Erzena was gone, we truly had to shore up our manpower before the Five Senses Officers collapsed one by one.
It's necessary not just for me, but for the officers themselves.
The time to break my stubbornness had come.
"Well thought out. Truly well thought out!"
Melanie, having read my expression, spoke with visible relief.
"You really have changed, honey. I thought you'd only fill the Vision Officer's seat and stop there."
"...To be honest, I did consider it. But I figured if I did, the Five Senses Officers would beat me to death."
"Quite right. Loyalty, in the end, only flourishes where there's breathing room."
And with that, she cast me a pitying look.
"Honey, you are overworked and married to your job. That's why you've believed, all this time, that this was normal. The officers beneath you were practically brainwashed into the same delusion!"
"Th... that seems a bit harsh."
Still, the anxiety remained.
Could I really place that much trust in a large-scale batch of recruits outside the Five Senses Officers?
It was bound to be a considerable gamble. Though, of course... a gamble I would have to see through regardless.
Melanie, thrilled by a proposal that far exceeded her expectations, pressed on without hesitation.
"Have you drawn up any hiring criteria?"
"They must be trustworthy."
"Too abstract. More specific. I mean beyond the baseline Immigration Officer qualifications — what do you want to add?"
I sank into thought for a moment.
The baseline qualifications were simple. Fluency in at least three to five languages, a thorough understanding of procedure and regulation, and training in emergency response.
And what would I add on top of that? If someone is to be trustworthy in my eyes — what must they be?
The answer came quickly.
"They must be native-born citizens of this kingdom, without a single mark on their criminal record, strict in their observance of the rules, and capable of processing at least one immigrant every five minutes."
I wanted experienced newcomers. People who would never rot with corruption and who worked with utter thoroughness.
Finished products, in other words.
...
The silence returned.
This time, a different flavor of stillness settled between us — along with a tail that had begun to rattle and shiver like a viper's.
A very Lamia way of saying: extremely displeased.
"Honestly, it'd be faster to reprogram the entire border garrison and make them officers."
"Is that not feasible?"
"Judging by that list, you'll never find them. And you want twenty of these people?"
For the first time, Melanie fixed me with something close to contempt.
"Try molding the Taste Officer into that standard first, then come back to me with your criteria."
"What's wrong with our Taste Officer!"
I said it, but honestly, even I knew it was a stretch.
Still — the Taste Officer was an exceptional case. She was a minor, to begin with; there had been no other choice.
Feeling a stab of guilt, I stuck out my lips and muttered.
"...That's exactly why I'm asking for the Intelligence Department's cooperation."
"Some things change, and some things stay incorrigibly stupid. Call it a small mercy, I suppose."
But in the end, Melanie conceded.
"Ahh, why do I love such an idiot of all people... Good grief."
I elected to ignore the short sigh.
"I'll send someone over. I simply couldn't rest easy sending you nothing but a dossier, apparently."
Just then, something I'd temporarily forgotten surfaced in my mind.
"Ah... Director. Has there been any, er... movement from His Majesty's side, by any chance?"
"Hm? What's the King to do with this all of a sudden?"
"I heard he would be issuing a summons in light of recent events, but I haven't received anything yet."
"Ahh. You mean regarding the saintess."
Her voice turned slightly cold. But it soon softened back into its usual honeyed register.
"It'll probably take a while. The timing, of all things, couldn't be worse. The Finance Ministry under the Home Office has just launched an audit of all government agencies. Every administrative procedure has been provisionally suspended because of it."
"An... audit, you say?"
I hurriedly checked my calendar.
And there, on tomorrow's date, something was written in glaring red letters.
FINANCE MINISTRY GOVERNMENT AGENCY AUDIT — D-2
I stared at it blankly.
"Oh. Oh no."
It was real.
And two seconds later—
"AAAAAAHHH!?!"
My scream echoed through the meeting room.
Oh, for heaven's sake. How could I not have known about this?
Had the last month been so hectic that I'd forgotten it completely?
But Melanie merely waved a dismissive hand and burst out laughing.
"Don't fret over it. They're out to fleece the Home Office far more than the Foreign Office. They'll only touch the border as a formality."
"F-formality, you say?"
No, I'm sorry — an audit, no matter how formal, is still an audit.
There would absolutely be that horrifying process of ransacking our records to the bone.
And I hadn't prepared a single page of documentation.
Yet Melanie's voice drifted lazily through the crystal orb.
"Forget that — for the love of everything, start thinking about relaxing your standards first."
"I'll postpone the interviews and prepare for the audit."
"I'm telling you it's fine. If you're that nervous, just ask the person I'm sending for a hand."
And with those words, our transmission ended.
The next day, someone knocked on the door of our Immigration Bureau.
And it was—
"Hello, honey."
"...Huh?"
Melanie Lacroix, Director of the Intelligence Department. She had come in person.
"...Why are you here?"
Meanwhile, at around the same time, a woman was stepping down from a carriage.
"Thank you, driver. Here is your fare."
She was a woman of quite otherworldly presence, her eyes entirely hidden beneath purple hair that cascaded down like a waterfall. Add to that an immaculately pressed uniform bearing a badge shaped like a gold coin, and she announced to anyone with eyes that she was a person of a government agency.
"Th-thank you. Um... that is to say."
But the driver couldn't tear his gaze from what lay beneath all that attire and poise.
Reading his stare as nothing new, the woman extended her hand further, pressed the fare into his grip whether he liked it or not, and spoke.
"Call me the Auditor."
"Y-yes, thank you! I'll, uh, I'll be off now, then!"
The driver, barely comprehending a word he was saying, answered in a panicked rush, then whipped his carriage away from her at full gallop.
What she felt in his receding gaze was fear. And a faint undercurrent of disgust.
"...Ha."
As if well accustomed to it, she let out a hollow laugh and lowered her eyes, just as the driver had.
Where a human's legs should have been, there was something else entirely.
Eight of them — and the massive lower body of a spider.
Rike Nirweber. Half human, half spider — a member of the Arachne race, and the chief auditor of the Finance Ministry.
By rights, she should have been auditing not the Southern Immigration Bureau, but the Ministry of Roads and Transport under the Home Office. And not alone, either — with two colleagues from her department.
Instead, she now stood alone at the Southern Border, the most notorious posting in the entire Home Office of late.
An audit was grueling labor: every scrap of a full year's records had to be examined top to bottom. And to guard against the slightest error or misreading, cross-verification had to be carried out two and three times over, by many hands.
Yet flouting every convention, the Minister of Finance had thrown her into this place alone.
At the memory, eight eyes narrowed furiously behind that curtain of deep purple hair.
"That damned bunch of..."
V Someone's voice began to echo through her mind.
"Minister! Minister! Sending Rike to Roads and Transport would be a waste of talent, don't you think?"
It was the voice of her own colleagues — the other auditors.
"Why not send her off alone to the Southern Border instead? Clever, capable Rike could do two people's work by herself — no, four. That's what eight limbs and eight eyes are for."
Competence and diligence, it turned out, had a way of drawing envy. Stand out anywhere, and eyes turn to you — and with admiration comes the pricking of someone else's insecurity.
Insecurity gathers others who share it, and curdles into quiet contempt, into exclusion. Layered on top was the natural unpopularity that came with being Arachne — a race inheriting the visceral revulsion people feel toward spiders.
The result: Rike was being frozen out of the Finance Ministry, plain as day.
"How can you bear to walk around looking like that? Why don't you at least buy yourself some transformation elixir and turn human?"
That was the remark she heard whenever they remembered she had ears.
She had protested to the Finance Minister time and again, but the spineless man, unwilling to stir up discord within his department, had done nothing at all.
No. Enough of that. Stop thinking about it.
Clutching the document case that had fallen to the ground, she lifted her head.
Now was no time to be chewing on old wounds. There was exactly one reason Rike had come here.
To work. So that was where her focus belonged.
She cast a sardonic glance at the castle walls towering in the distance.
"The Southern Border..."
If the rumors were true, this place was a gathering ground for the strangest people imaginable.
For all that she had lived her life buried in charts and tables, a few stories had reached even her through the chatter her colleagues traded back and forth.
That the head of the Southern Border had denied entry to a Holy Church pilgrimage. That terrorist attempts came roughly once every two weeks, and that the Immigration Officers — eyes rolling back in their heads — caught every single one. That among the officers there was a werewolf who could level a house with his bare hands, and a creature from the deep sea whose true form was said to drive anyone mad who laid eyes on it.
Nothing but grim, unsettling tales, one after another.
...And the Dragonewts flocking here — supposedly because a dragon might actually be in this place.
A faint thread of unease crept up on her.
Was this place really not a demon realm? And what fate awaited her, one who had set foot in it?
But she soon shook her head and shook off the scattered thoughts.
"Whew..."
With that sigh, she made for an inn near the border. The audit began tomorrow, after all.
I just have to do the work I've been given. That's all.
Better to work alone in a rough, hostile place than to labor alongside useless fools who did nothing but cluster and cluck. All the job required was cross-referencing ledgers against documents. She would have no need whatsoever to socialize with anyone.
Come to think of it, that would suit her just fine. Comforting, even.
With that thought, she began to walk down the middle of the street.
Click-clack. Click-clack.
With every step she took, no leather heel met the cobblestones — instead, an eerie sound rose from legs wrapped in chitin and bristling hair.
At that alien insectile rhythm, so unlike the footsteps of the street, gazes swung toward her all at once. And in the same breath, the smiling, laughing faces changed.
"Oh dear."
"Gross."
"Eek — what is that thing? It's a spider!"
Familiar words, familiar jabs, flung at Rike.
She ground them beneath her heels and pressed on.
"...Hmph."
As if she could not possibly hear any of it. She raised her chin instead, back straight, proud.
But the faint tremble in her shoulders — that much, she could not suppress.