Let's Live Kindly
The modest little scam I'd pulled just to scrape together some cash had ballooned into an absurd dilemma that now blocked my path cold.
One hundred thousand florins.
A fortune so vast I could loaf and feast until the day I died without ever spending it all had landed in my hands.
Along with the condition that I stop Count Montpellier from seizing the city.
I'd tried to fleece one loan shark and ended up making an enemy of the absolute power in the region.
On top of that, Count Montpellier was a fresh young traitor dreaming of military revolt and dynastic change, and I had already promised to join his plans.
If I showed him even the slightest disloyalty, he would silence me to hide his wicked ambitions.
Physically.
Then I would have to flee to some other French city even smaller and cozier than Montpellier, or escape altogether to a country where I couldn't even speak the language.
Our little hometown with nothing to its name would of course be reduced to ashes.
So rising against the count for the sake of Loan King Billy's survival was out of the question.
Count Montpellier was greedy, not a complete monster of a human being.
His greed just happened to be for the throne; he was nowhere near as evil as those human scum who build private prisons in their basements.
So it seemed like I could simply smash the loan king and swallow the investment funds whole—but if things were that easy I wouldn't have been fretting from the start.
Gutting the loan king right now would be insane.
Not because I feared revenge from the thugs he hired, but because my official patron was Count Montpellier.
That Count Montpellier was eyeing the city of Montpellier was a fact no one didn't know.
Debating the intellectual level of medieval citizens or the limits of information media was completely meaningless. He'd built a fortress right next to the city and even moved his command there—how could they not know?
This was a far more blatant declaration of intent than stray dogs marking territory with urine.
If I had to compare, it was like being wheeled up to the checkout counter in a shopping cart, just waiting for the line to end.
If you couldn't grasp the situation with a bunker planted right in front of your base, that wasn't a lack of awareness—it was a lack of intelligence.
Therefore most of Montpellier's citizens knew the count's purpose, and I was receiving that very count's patronage.
If someone like me suddenly took down the top figure in the moneylending world, considered a big shot in the city, this wouldn't be a genius inventor girl delivering hot justice—it would become Count Montpellier's invasion of the city.
Then of course the count's rebellion preparations would hit snags, and if the rebellion failed, I as an accomplice would lose my head.
Just take the investment money I'd already extracted and disappear?
Then the loan king who'd been robbed of his precious money would go around spreading badmouth about me everywhere.
Adding the slander that the count was sending his agents to extort the city's money.
Naturally I'd become a credit risk, and the count's rebellion would also suffer major setbacks.
That would actually be more damaging than gutting the loan king.
So to survive, I needed to run a business that was modest enough not to raise the count's suspicions yet respectable enough not to raise the loan king's, supporting the count while also hindering him—
"...Ah, I want to die."
Would that even work?
I heaved a sigh that could sink the earth and buried my face in the bed mattress.
This damned hard problem kept spinning around in my head.
I'd long since abandoned any ambition of solving the problem itself, yet no plausible escape route appeared, so thoughts just kept chaining one after another.
Who the hell had tangled things up this dirty?
I wanted to go find my past self who'd thoughtlessly tried to pull a scam and smack her on the back of the head.
"Hwaaaah..."
"Saintess?"
As I lay rolling around on the bed, Rebecca, who had been quietly offering prayers, checked on my condition with a puzzled expression.
"Are you still fretting?"
Her habitual kindness in worrying about my well-being was truly appreciated, but to escape this ridiculous dilemma I ultimately had to find an answer.
Even now the loan king's patience would be dwindling little by little.
It was troublesome.
Analyzing the board and setting strategy wasn't my specialty.
All I'd learned following my senior was mindless charges and reckless handling of affairs, so while I'd become fairly good at improvisation, the price was that my intelligence had dropped.
Clearly until high school I'd been a talent in the top 1% for preparedness and systematic thinking, but hanging out with that weird unnie had contaminated my way of thinking.
So if I looked into it, falling into this dilemma now was all my senior's fault.
If I'd still been the careful type like before, I'd have prepared an exit strategy completely before starting anything, but I'd been infected by someone who starts first and thinks later, ending up like this.
She was already dead so I couldn't go hit her, and I was just randomly angry and dizzy for no reason.
"Yes. I was worried when money was going out, but having too much money come in is also a worry."
It wasn't that I hadn't thought of other ways to consume this huge sum.
But depositing it in a bank would mean paying storage fees instead of interest, with no guarantee of safety, and with banks in that state there was no way a systematic financial system existed.
Using it for relief, I doubted the market could handle it, and thanks to the count's ambitions, the sustainability essential for relief work was also impossible to guarantee.
The remaining option was just cash-slamming, but as I said again, that cash-slamming was sealed because it was likely to raise the count's suspicions.
In the end, going around and around, back to a situation with no answer.
"Should I just use this money to open a bank?"
"I am merely a Lantern Bearer, but I absolutely cannot tolerate the Saintess laying hands on moneylending...!"
"I know. I just said it because I was frustrated."
I'd even considered opening a bank myself, but there would be too many people who'd just take the money and lie down like they only live for today, so I gave up.
And if I introduced high-interest rates and forced collection policies like the third-tier financial sector, I'd immediately be acting as a loan shark.
And using the money ripped from Loan King Billy as capital to switch careers to loan sharking was an obvious declaration of war no matter who looked. It would be better to just go throw a glove in his face myself.
...Wait a second. Throw a glove in the face?
What class of people originally did that kind of action?
"We need to go to the library, so change clothes. Right now."
"Y-yes?"
"No time, hurry!"
I sprang up from the bed and hurriedly changed into outdoor clothes.
I shoved my feet haphazardly into the shoes I'd roughly taken off, grabbed the dress hanging by the bed and threw it over my pajamas.
I tossed the matching hat onto the bed casually and started running like mad toward the library where Grandpa Pates would be.
"Saintess, why the library all of a sudden—"
"This won't do. Carry me on your back!"
Even so it still felt time-pressured, so I asked Rebecca, whose steps were much faster than mine, to carry me.
I had no room to care about the humiliation of being carried by a girl much younger than my previous life's self.
All my nerves were focused on grasping that thin thread of inspiration.
"Rebecca unnie. If you fought knights, who would win?"
"...In a chaotic melee on complex terrain, I could take down thirty Plain Knights, or even five Senior Knights. However, in a clash on open plains, victory would be hard to guarantee."
"Then what about those Loan King flunkies we saw earlier today fighting knights?"
"Even a squire serving a knight could cut down ten of them alone."
Good. An answer more perfect than I could ask for.
I'd forgotten because the only people I'd met since coming to this neighborhood were the traitor sapling and the priests of a fallen order, but originally in medieval Europe, the ones in charge of military force were the knights wearing armor and holding swords.
And this world was a fantasy world where mana and other races actually existed.
A dual-core killing machine clad in sturdy heavy armor, equipped with both physical strength and mana, would be a monster that could shatter the balance of power just by existing.
I hadn't seen knights fight with my own eyes, but anyway they'd be incomparably stronger than back-alley thugs.
"Saintess, what brings you at this late hour—"
"I need a map that divides the territories held by nobles so I can see them at a glance."
"I shall bring it at once."
Then I didn't need to struggle to show investment results.
I just needed to recruit one free knight without his own land, then through his house make a show of drawing in other lords.
Count Montpellier would think I was doing my best to win over the southern lords, and Loan King Billy would think I was preparing a card to check the count.
Of course in reality it was neither; I'd just gain one more card I could handle as I wished.
Yes.
I really didn't want to admit it, but this time my senior's words were right.
If your hand is trash, raise the stakes. That's common sense, right?
A big lie can be covered with an even bigger lie.
To survive in this insane era, I willingly decided to step into the swamp of madness.