Ghost Ship (1)
A full year had already passed since the Warlord's death.
It has been 16 years since you began playing this game. Excessive gaming may interfere with a healthy daily life.
"…"
The moment I hit the sixteenth anniversary of my transmigration into this world, I snatched the bouncy ball off my desk and hurled it across the room.
"Son of a bitch!"
"Whoa, what's got into you this time, yeah?"
"Haa… No. It's nothing."
Riel, deep in her work, jumped at the outburst. I forced my expression under control and tried to smother the irritation, but of course she couldn't leave it alone.
"What is it? Did someone send you another blood-written letter going, 'O Prophet, lead us!' or something?"
"…"
She just had to drag up the one thing I'd finally managed to forget. I extended the new etiquette-injection baton I'd made, telescoped it out, and cracked it down on her head.
"Kyaah!"
"Volume. Keep your voice down."
Watching her clutch her head with a pained look filled me with a strange, quiet satisfaction. I sat back down.
"Stop faking it and get back to work."
"It really hurts, yeah… damn it."
She even managed to work up a few tears while she kept rubbing the spot, but this was a disaster of her own making. Not a single shred of guilt stirred in me. Feeling considerably lighter, I turned my attention back to the mountain of paperwork.
Unfortunately, it didn't take long before the sighs started again.
"Huuuuuu…"
"What now?"
"…It's been a whole year since the Warlord's forces collapsed, and nothing's really changed."
Riel tilted her head, looking puzzled.
"If nothing's changed in a year, doesn't that just mean things have stabilized, yeah?"
"Can you really call a state of unbroken chaos 'stabilized'?"
"Okay, when you put it like that…"
She realized her mistake and offered a sheepish apology. I let the past year roll through my mind as I spoke.
"I really did try everything I could to lock in the Empire's hegemony over the last year."
"In practice, if you leave out the Nurbal Republic, well… yeah."
For twelve months we'd been running an operation that used the eastern chaos to our advantage—slipping Imperial control into the cracks while every other nation's grip was shaky, expanding our territory. The problem was that the actual gains amounted to only a tiny fraction of the east. The disappointment still sat heavy in my chest.
Riel, however, looked at me like I was missing the obvious.
"Still, from your perspective, Minister, isn't that kind of a blessing?"
"Hm?"
"Think about it. If it hadn't been just Nurbal—if the Loyrakan or the Mek… no, the Fuchsviets or whatever had gotten dragged in too—do you honestly think you could have held it together?"
A rare dose of pure fact-violence. I nodded, conceding the point.
"You're right. I hadn't considered that."
Wider borders would be nice, sure—but whether we could actually digest them was a completely different question. I decided to stop chewing on the problem there. With a silent prayer that the remaining work would stay free of sudden disasters, I started clearing the queue one item at a time.
Eventually the last file on the terminal blinked closed.
"Nothing special today either, yeah!"
"Mm."
Aside from the lingering eastern mess left by the Warlord, the day really had been quiet. I stood up, ready to escape into the break room I'd built just beyond the office—
—Beep!
—Beep-beep-beep-beep-beeeeeep!
"Ah, for fuck's sake."
Apparently the gods above had no interest in watching me enjoy a single peaceful moment. The second I rose from my chair, a fresh avalanche of work poured into my terminal.
"Pffft—hahaha—"
"…"
"Sorry, yeah."
Even Riel, who had been openly laughing at my misery, clamped her mouth shut the moment our eyes met and ducked her head. I accepted reality, felt about ten years older, and sat back down.
Then I saw the title of the new assignment.
Ghost Ship Confirmed
"…???"
A document whose title had absolutely no business landing on the desk of the Foreign Executive Ministry.
Why the hell is a ghost-ship sighting report coming to me?
Are the office slaves so overloaded they can't even do basic triage anymore?
Or are they just dumping random crap on me to screw with me?
Dozens of paranoid theories exploded through my head, but spinning fantasies off a title alone was a waste of mental energy. I cleared my mind and calmly opened the report.
A short while later:
"…Riel."
"What is it, Minister?"
I called her over, showed her the report, and kept my voice as level as I could manage.
"Verify the authenticity of everything in this report."
"What's the big deal? A ghost ship?"
She clearly couldn't understand why I was taking a tabloid-level document so seriously.
"I mean, I have no idea why something like this even reached your desk, but… do we really need to treat a piece of trash like this with that much gravity?"
Objectively speaking, she had a point. A ghost ship? In a setting this thoroughly science-fiction, why waste time on something so unscientific and superstitious?
"…Riel. Did you forget that we live in a theocratic empire?"
"Ah."
"That kind of materialist logic only works in materialist nations."
"…"
"In a place like ours—where souls are believed to exist and psionic users walk around in broad daylight—ghosts are perfectly possible."
…Of course, only moments earlier I myself had been mentally roasting whoever sent me a ghost-ship report. The reason for the sudden about-face was simple: the instant I finished reading the document, a new event window had bloomed in front of my eyes.
Ghost Ship?!
A single unidentified battleship has been spotted drifting along the border between the Kerzin Federation and the Sir-Hod League.
For reasons unknown, no living presence can be detected on the bridge.
The hull bears no national markings of any kind—only a faint weld scar on the bow where some emblem was once attached, the sole proof that this vessel once belonged to someone.
① Ominous presence—ignore it (Event ends)
② Investigate first; claim it if the opportunity arises (Linked event proceeds)
And not just any event—a choice-based one that practically reeked of free battleship if I played it right.
Riel narrowed her eyes and spoke in a cool, flat voice.
"Another event popped up, didn't it? There's no other reason the self-proclaimed rational Minister would react like this."
"…"
Hitting me with facts like that was just dirty. Still, there was no point denying it. I nodded.
"Yeah, yeah, all of that's true."
"…"
"So send a reasonable team and get an investigation started."
She still looked worried.
"But Minister… what if the Kerzin Federation completely loses it over this?"
"What makes you think there'd be a problem?"
"Well, after everything that happened with the Warlord recently… they might be a little on edge, yeah?"
I reached over and ruffled her hair, trying to put her at ease.
"We're not dispatching a fleet. Just a research vessel for a look-around."
"That's true."
"Our borders with the Kerzin Federation aren't closed. It shouldn't cause any real trouble."
She seemed to relax and nodded in agreement.
"When you put it that way… ghost ships—well, derelicts where the crew abandoned ship or got wiped out—aren't exactly rare, yeah."
That wasn't quite the angle I was going for…
Either way, if things went well we might walk away with a free battleship. Looking forward to the investigation results, I buried myself in work once more.
About a week later.
"Minister, about that ghost ship you mentioned earlier, yeah."
"Yeah? What about it?"
"Turns out it's an ancient battleship built during the Dark Age."
What I had assumed was a simple free-battleship event was, I was forcibly made to realize, something far bigger.