A Tsunami Begins with a Small Wave
Karma's party had set one last item on the day's itinerary: settling a late lunch at a nearby restaurant before heading home from their final round of shopping at the bookstore.
"Hah. The boss of Serpe really does have guts to burn, huh."
Someone found it beyond absurd that Karma, whose daughter had been attacked only the day before, could stroll the streets without a care in the world—that very daughter in tow. That someone was an assassin dispatched by Yata, the dark guild operating from beyond the empire's borders: the sole killer left in the duchy, charged with eliminating the culprit who had wrecked their operation. Her name was that of the jewel which matched her eyes—eyes the color of spilled blood. Ruby.
"There's a limit to how numb to danger a person can get."
The only reason she left the two of them alone was that her mark was, first and last, the meddler's life—not the women of Serpe. Had they been the targets, she would have slipped into that bookstore already, put them both down, and walked out without so much as a ripple.
"...So, what exactly is this mysterious meddler to Serpe, anyway?"
One person, or possibly two—an identity still unknown. Of this much she was certain: at least one of them had ties to Serpe.
"Hm?"
Ruby, tailing the pair with her presence smothered to nothing from a building a little ways off from Karma, spotted the boy who had come out of the bookstore last and tilted her head.
"Him, though..."
He was the boy who had appeared in the mansion out of nowhere as of yesterday—conspicuously absent from the Serpe membership roster that Yata and the Grizzlies had supplied.
"Looks a touch younger than me... and he's carrying blades."
For all she knew, Karma had simply taken pity on a homeless boy and hired him on as a servant. But with two sheathed blades strapped to his waist, the boy read less like a menial and more like a bodyguard.
"A pipsqueak packing a Gurkha blade."
It was an exotic weapon one rarely glimpsed inside the empire, but a common enough sight in Wicheon, the eastern nation far from imperial soil where Yata kept its home base—so she placed the blade in Gul's hands at a glance.
"How adorable."
Pfft. At the sight of a boy younger than herself playing bodyguard and toting steel about, Ruby let out an involuntary snort.
Did he take up a sword out of loyalty to that little miss?
Between Gul's age and the fact that the Gurkha he carried was no weapon a child could simply pick up and master, Ruby concluded he was no bodyguard at all—just a boy dreaming of someday being the knight who guards his princess.
"...Something about that rubs me the wrong way."
And where anyone else might have smiled at such earnest, childish devotion, Ruby's expression curdled—cold and sour, as though some vital pride or old scar had just been nicked.
"Mission, schmission. Maybe I'll just kill that brat of a daughter while I'm at it."
Gul aside, the sight of Peri—possessing everything a person could want, parents, wealth, love—yet scowling about as though she were the one going without, prodded raw at Ruby's sense of entitlement and her inferiority complex.
She was a cold-blooded assassin capable of carving through a major mafia on her own, but she was also still a young girl who hadn't learned to leash her emotions all the way. And so, with that inferiority complex boiling over, a faint thread of killing intent leaked out of her by accident.
Leaked was a generous word for it, in truth—a negligible release, the kind that might earn no more than a faint chill from someone standing face-to-face with her.
But—
!
The instant it slipped free, the boy who until that moment had been trailing Peri and Karma with a face like a mask swung his head around with the sureness of an owl that has caught a mouse's footfall—aimed precisely at the spot where Ruby was hiding.
What—?!
The boy she had dismissed as nothing had reacted to her killing intent. Flustered, Ruby smothered her presence to hide her position and threw herself off the building in the same breath.
…
Her leap was reckless to the point of folly, and at the same time wise. Gul's gaze, which had been a hair's breadth from pinning her and would have caught her had she hesitated even a heartbeat longer, ultimately never registered her existence at all.
"Aren't you coming?"
At the sound of Peri's voice, pouty with impatience, Gul had no choice but to turn back.
"Aaaagh, my stall!?"
"Ugh... it hurts..."
Thud. As it happened, Ruby had come down spread-eagled into the tent of a street vendor wedged up against the building wall—a stroke of luck that spared her any shattered bones, though it couldn't absorb the fall entirely. Moaning at the ache knifing through her lower back, she laughed all the same, hollow and disbelieving.
"Haha... so it was that kid..."
So the one with the flower field for a brain hadn't been that boy at all—it had been her. She couldn't help but rue her own greenness, the sheer folly of failing to recognize a dangerous enemy standing right in front of her.
That look—one she could hardly believe had come from a boy younger than herself. A look that had made even Ruby, who had taken any number of lives and counted more than a few assassins in Yata stronger than she was, shrink back for an instant.
And then she understood: the one who had botched the kidnapping, the one who had disturbed the corpses they'd hidden away—it had been Gul, all of it.
"Some girls have all the luck..."
Parents who adored her, status, money—and now, on top of it all, a knight to guard her flawlessly. And still Peri carried on as though the world had cheated her. Ruby's disgust for the girl settled another degree deeper.
"Hey, you! Stop right there! You've wrecked my whole day's business—how do you intend to make this right?!"
Jingle—
Ruby, plainly tired of the vendor's racket, fished a leather pouch out of her coat and tossed it to him.
The man opened it with a baffled frown—and found imperial coin inside, enough to make a genuinely considerable sum.
"Keep all of it. Just don't go whining to the guards over nothing."
"...Of course not, miss!"
The moment the money changed hands, the merchant who had been spitting and bellowing not a minute past was beaming with joy. At the sight of such a convenient soul, Ruby grimaced, shuddered, and left the stall behind.
Meanwhile, Yata was not the only party trying to learn more about Gul.
"You can't find him?"
The imperial family's personal shadow unit, Cerberus, had likewise taken an interest. The raids that singled out slave markets alone, at timing too theatrical to be coincidence, had drawn their eye—and with them, the boy's existence.
"Yes, sir. We've confirmed the slave market raid in the Rung Duchy, and another clash with unidentified assailants nearby—but oddly enough, that's where the trail ends. Nothing since."
"The Rung Duchy... The ducal house, the security force—how in the hell does a place not have one trustworthy soul in it, informants included?"
Gladius sighed at the report, which had fallen well short of expectations. The problem was no lack of skill on the part of Natasha, his right hand—it was the Rung Duchy itself, and its deeply uncooperative attitude.
"Could he simply be dead by now? Killed off by Serpe, perhaps?"
"Serpe? Ah—right, the ducal house's little plaything?"
Supposedly the largest mafia in the duchy—but famous only within the duchy's borders, its influence barely a ripple in the capital—so it took Gladius a moment to place the name even with it spoken to his face.
"Those damn dukes. What the hell are they wolfing down, that they have to bury every last scrap of it this deep?"
The crown liked to preach integrity and clean hands as the noblest of aristocratic virtues, but ideals and reality were different animals; nearly every noble of any real standing filled his coffers by one scheme or another. Naturally, the empire knew all about it. But auditing and punishing every last infraction would have swelled into endless work and earned the aristocracy's grudges—so the court merely turned a blind eye, so long as no victims surfaced whose numbers or visibility made a cover-up impossible.
A ducal house, of course, enjoyed a tolerance for such things that lesser nobles could scarcely dream of—yet the Rung family, whether because they were tangled up in sins of their own, remained uniquely uncooperative. Cerberus, Gladius at its head, had no stake in the duchy's dirty books; their mandate was the safety of the imperial family, not the eradication of graft. But the Rungs' obsessive stonewalling was enough to get under anyone's skin.
"On that note, Commander—since the Rung Duchy's come up, something else blew up there today."
"Again? Don't tell me it's that kid we're after."
"No, sir. The security force seems to suspect him, but it reads differently to me. Have a look."
Natasha handed over the summary report on the Grizzly family massacre she had just finished drafting, walking him through what sort of outfit the Grizzlies had been and what state they'd been left in, until Gladius had the full picture.
"If a demon's latched onto a place, it really latches on..."
A few details smelled off, but even so—three ghastly murders already, in what should have been a reasonably peaceful duchy, each one past unpleasant and straight into skin-crawling. Even as an outsider, Gladius felt a genuine pang of sympathy for the local security officer stuck holding the case.
"...Something's rotten behind the scenes here. Natasha—kid aside, dig into this one too."
"As you say, then..."
"Good. Send a team."
"The Vice-Commander has already refused—turned it down flat—and there isn't a soul with free hands as it is..."
Just as Natasha was beginning to wonder whether she'd have to step in herself, Gladius abruptly rose from his desk.
"?! You can't be serious?! With all due respect, you're the Commander?!"
"Relax. I have that much sense of duty, at least..."
A sudden, sour premonition drained the color from Natasha's face, and she cut him off before he could get another word out.
"Ah—right... Then why, might I ask, are you standing up from your desk...?"
"I'll do the persuading myself."
"You mean the Vice-Commander? You honestly think the Vice-Commander will listen to you?"
"Eh, I'll talk the Vice-Commander around one way or another. There's fresh work on the table now, after all. This much should satisfy the Vice-Commander that it's a matter worth moving on."