Criminals Destroy the Evidence
"Ahh, that hit the spot~"
Even though I'd turned up late to my own welcome party — the guest of honor, no less — the servants were such good-natured people that not one of them so much as scolded me.
Even gone slightly cold, the kitchen's cooking was excellent on the strength of its faint lingering warmth alone, and everyone heaped warm hospitality and attention on me in equal measure.
Part of it was the good first impression I'd made on the head butler. But I was also the youngest soul in the entire mansion — Peri excepted — and that rascal Karma had let it slip, ever so casually, that I'd come here because of my parents' debt, which apparently had bought me a fair amount of sympathy.
'Well, it's not exactly a lie, so there's no pressing need to correct it.'
Just as the butler had said, this really did seem to be a good house — one that treated its servants as genuine members of the family. If I'd found myself an ordinary job, I might even have planned to bury my bones here.
"...So from tomorrow, the real work begins, huh... Haah..."
It had all happened in a daze — no, in truth I'd had no other option and simply been saddled with the role — but in all my life, never mind guarding anyone, I had scarcely ever watched over a living soul.
Everything Grandfather had ever taught me was how to break things, how to run them down, and how to run away myself. Protecting was a lesson he had never once given.
'Knowing that old man's temperament, I doubt he ever watched over anyone in his life, either.'
Knowing him, he'd probably knocked his targets out cold in the name of "protection," gone through their pockets, and bolted.
Knock, knock.
Running from the guards had been a violently athletic affair; blood had seeped through my bandages and plenty of spots had worked loose, so I was in the middle of unwrapping it all and binding on fresh wraps when someone knocked at my door.
"Who is it?"
After a month of living alone, I found myself reflexively bristling, hackles rising at the sudden visit.
But on reflection, I didn't live in this house alone — and besides, I had yet to receive anything but clothes, so there was nothing strange at all about someone dropping by.
"..."
Knock knock.
"Um... who is it?"
Knock knock.
But getting no answer to "who is it" — nothing back but parroted knocking — even in someone else's home, surely I was entitled to be on my guard.
"..."
There had been servants around my age sitting at the table earlier. Some kind of mischievous prank, maybe?
"Haah..." I was a child myself, and it wasn't as though I'd ever hated this sort of game — but after so much blood lately, all I could feel was the bone-deep tiredness of having to play along.
"Coming, coming~"
Creeeak.
"What business could anyone have at this hour of the ni—...?"
"Y-you really are here...!"
The unannounced visitor didn't even reach my height — and I was the youngest person in this house — for the instant the door swung open, the first thing to fill my eyes was a crown of thick, snow-white hair.
I dipped my chin slowly, lowering my gaze, and there was her face: a girl hunched in on herself like a rabbit, and yet firing out a look so brimming with expectation it was almost overwhelming. The face of Peri, whom I was to protect starting today.
"U-um, do you remember me...? You saved me this morning, Big Brother..."
"Ah. That..."
The day had already served up more than its share of surprises, but this was a whole new breed of absurd, and I cast about blindly, glancing every which way.
'Was she being chased again?'
My own thought, and yet a fantasy too ridiculous for words. This wasn't some back alley — what kind of kidnapper crawls into a mansion in the heart of the noble quarter? Anyone with the skill and gall to manage that would have stormed Serphe headquarters long ago and settled accounts with Karma himself.
"...Please, come in first..."
I couldn't begin to guess why a girl who should have been asleep in a room on the second floor had walked all the way out to the servants' annex and turned up at my door, but I wasn't about to leave her standing outside. With the stiff politeness of a relationship I hadn't yet learned the shape of, I ushered her in.
I hadn't expected company, so the room was nowhere near in order — but with so few belongings to begin with, so long as I gathered up the cast-off bandages and stray clothes, it would look presentable enough.
"S-sorry, I only just moved in and haven't had a chance to tidy — one moment..."
"N-no, it's my fault... for coming without a word... Um... those bandages... are they because of me...?"
Peri, who had been trying to spare my blushes as I sheepishly cleaned up the trash, found her eyes snagged instead on the bloodstained bandages wadded in my hand. The violent tremor running through her voice and hands — was that guilt?
'...You really don't need to worry that much.'
If I absolutely had to break it down, the wrecked state of my body right now was forty percent guarding Peri, forty percent raiding Serphe, and twenty percent pushing too hard hunting for evidence until my wounds tore open. Her share didn't even come to half.
"Has that son of a... that is, how much has your father told you...?"
Being polite to adults was second nature to me, but I had never once spoken formally to someone my own age — let alone someone younger — and something about it chafed.
"I, um... I am Gul Raven, charged as of today with guarding you — er, with guarding the young lady. Please, just call me Gul."
"G-Gul big brother! I'm Peri... let's get along..."
"There's no need to call me 'big brother,' my lady. You stand above me — 'Gul' is quite enough. Speak as comfortably as you like."
"I-I'm going to call you big brother... it's just easier that way..."
"That won't do."
"Huh?"
Peri — who hadn't bothered hiding a scrap of her admiration for, and fondness of, the savior who had appeared in her hour of desperation — visibly startled at how frigidly firm my tone was.
"This concerns your dignity, my lady, and your father's. If a subordinate is treated as anything other than a subordinate, the people around you will start to whisper."
She had come, it seemed, hoping to get close to me, and for that I was sorry — but I had to keep her safe, no matter what. And to protect her perfectly, I intended to draw a strict, unbreachable line between us.
"And young as you may be, a lady calling on a man's room at night is a breach of every propriety. Unless you have some special business, please return to your room."
"B-but I only came to say thank you..."
"There is no need for gratitude. Guarding you is my job. I expect a certain payment from your father, and this is the labor I must put in to earn it. I have no wish to be thanked — and you needn't thank me."
So that she would see me not as some friendly big brother from the neighborhood she could lean on, but simply as hired protection — a matter of work and nothing more — I demolished her budding hopes head-on.
"And just so it's said: from now on, please do not go moving about without so much as a single maid at your side. For the man responsible for your safety, these surprise excursions are a serious problem. Even with every precaution taken, this morning still happened. I would prefer not to live through a repeat."
It was an attitude cold enough that even I, saying it, thought it bordered on excessive. And the naive ten-year-old who heard it—
"...Hic—!"
SLAM—
"...Perhaps I should have broken that to her a little more gently..."
Naturally, she failed to hold back her tears and fled. This wasn't so much drawing a line as declaring war, I vaguely reflected, the regret arriving far too late — but with her already gone, everything was too late.
"Haah..."
Awkward as it was, her protection was already my charge — so, at the very least so she wouldn't notice, I slipped soundlessly out the window and shadowed her every step until she was safely back in her room.
And then, a few hours later, Karma — having heard all about how his daughter had come home weeping so piteously she all but flooded the corridor — barged straight into my room, and I, irritation spiking, flung a pillow into his face.
"They got found out?"
"Yes... the guards flooded into the streets so suddenly that we had no choice but to hide portions of the bodies under walls and floor tiles... They found them."
"Hm. For the peacekeeping force of Rung Duchy — famous for playing soldier on the commoners' tax money — they've been unusually busy."
BANG. Listening to this exchange — the subordinate flatly reporting the failed concealment, the superior joking along in perfect leisure — the man seated across from them snatched the toolkit off the table and hurled it.
"Is this really the time to be swapping jokes?! That's not what we agreed on! You swore you could deliver that Serphe bitch to me, guaranteed!"
"Well, on that count, a hundred mouths wouldn't be enough to argue. We verified the route and the caliber of the guards watching the brat before committing a single man. Why it failed... I do wonder..."
The man who had commissioned these people to abduct Peri — Cruel — was the boss of the Grizzly Mafia. Grizzly was, so the story went, the second-largest criminal organization after Serphe — though measured against Serphe, its power barely registered at all.
Even beneath a glare fit to spit fire, the two men from the organization he had hired didn't so much as twitch — if anything, they treated their own client like an errand boy.
"You think the peacekeepers can trace it back to us?"
"If they bring in high mages from the capital, or the duchy itself takes a hand, perhaps — but I doubt that will happen. Even then, the hiding spot was only stumbled upon by chance, while they cleaned up after that raid at the slave market nearby."
"True, we got complacent and just took one on the chin. But what of it."
Even if the guards had learned something, unless they discovered who they truly were, House Rung would bury the matter on its own — no cause for concern, the man reasoned, shelving the thought with a snicker as he side-eyed Cruel, who was still glaring daggers at him.
"Are you bastards even listening to yourselves right now?! How do you intend to take responsibility!? Forget striking Serphe — now they'll be twice as wary! And you still have the gall to— ghk—!"
Shunk. Mid-roar, something sank deep into Cruel's throat with a wet, severing sound.
The voice that had been rattling the walls fell silent, and Cruel soon felt blood spilling over from his neck like water from a burst pipe. Slowly, he turned around.
"Shhh~ They say birds hear the talk of day, and mice hear the talk of night. Well, that's what they say — me, I simply can't abide it when rats get to eavesdropping."
Standing behind him was the taciturn assassin from the subordinate's side — the very one who had been reporting the situation until moments ago.
The instant Cruel registered that his throat had been opened, the assassin who had played the role of the superior pressed a finger to his own lips with a guileless little smile, as if to say: quiet now.
"How will you take responsibility, you ask? No need to worry, Mr. Cruel. This attempted abduction will go down in the record as something your people planned and your people botched. And just in case, I've planted one of your men's arms at the scene — so whether it's the guards or Serphe doing the asking, no one will suspect it wasn't you."
"And as for you — you will have been murdered by subordinates terrified of Serphe's retaliation over the failure. Your remaining men will then kill each other off fighting over your seat, until only a handful survive to slip away without a sound and vanish from the world. Well? What do you think of my scenario?"
With gestures as exaggerated as any stage actor's, the man asked for a review — though the critic of this script was not to be Cruel.
"Serviceable. Though the surviving subordinates slaughtering one another is a touch contrived. I believe that portion needs reinforcing."
Shff—
Once the script was settled, the subordinate simply drove force into the blade still buried in Cruel's throat, severed the head clean through, and let it drop to the floor. Wiping Cruel's blood from the dagger with a handkerchief drawn from his back pocket, he laid out his impressions — and at that frank, merciless review, the superior's mouth turned down in a slight pout.
Clap, clap—
"I thought it was rather good, actually? Leaving things unexplained simply whets the imagination, doesn't it? All sorts of delicious interpretations are bound to spring up. I'd call that a point in its favor."
With the applause that rang out from a corner of the room where, until that very moment, no one had been, a young and cheerful girl — utterly mismatched to the somber mood — beamed and delivered her glowing verdict.
"I knew you'd be the one to understand! Well then, everyone — see the script through as written. I'm counting on you."
Pleased by the girl's praise, the man ordered his two subordinates to carry out the instructions — and as the pair left the room, just before descending to slaughter Cruel's men waiting below, he called the girl to a halt.
"Wait. You stay."
"Why? Is there something else you need from me?"
"There is. That oaf in there will end up shouldering every last bit of the blame for this — but if we go home empty-handed just like this, the higher-ups will take the loss of face poorly."
"Then shall I eliminate Serphe for you?"
"No. Do that, and there'd be no reason to write a script at all."
A girl not yet out of her teens had asked, perfectly deadpan, whether she should wipe out the duchy's largest mafia single-handed — and the man did not dispute her confidence for a second.
"We leave the empire the moment this business is wrapped up. You stay behind and eliminate, at the very minimum, the one who turned the abduction into a washout — and the witness who botched the concealment."
"Yessir~"
"Make them pay, and pay dearly, for meddling with Yata. It seems the Elder has his expectations pinned on you as well."
Yata. A name that had begun in the empire as a simple mercenary troupe, transplanted its roots overseas a good few decades ago, and now made the entire continent tremble in fear — the name of an assassins' guild.