The Dustveil Heiress
Belka Dustveil's presence shifted in an instant.
“...How did you know?”
The completely transformed Belka asked me. Her voice, her tone—everything was drastically different from before. Cold. Dark. Her face, her speech, her entire atmosphere. It was as if she had become an entirely different person. The abrupt change even sent a brief chill down my spine.
But I didn’t let it show.
“Does that really matter?” I replied, keeping my tone perfectly composed.
“......”
Belka offered no response to my answer. She simply stared at me with those dark, unreadable eyes. So I smiled and added, “You’d be better off dropping it.”
“......!”
Belka’s body gave a faint twitch.
“......”
She still said nothing. But I already knew what she was thinking. Right now, she was trying to kill me. Or more precisely, she was looking for an opening to do so. I had sensed the faint killing intent she harbored.
“You know what happens if I die here, don’t you?”
“......”
Even then, Belka remained silent. It was the reaction I had expected. She wouldn’t respond favorably. After all, her true identity was both a closely guarded secret and a critical weakness.
Belka Anrirel. Her real name was Belka Dustveil.
Dustveil.
Most people wouldn’t bat an eye at the name. They had never even heard of it. But anyone who did know the name would be stunned into silence the moment they learned it belonged to her. Because the name Dustveil carried that much weight.
Dustveil. A family far more unknown than known. Its true nature was the one that ruled the empire’s underworld.
To the uninitiated, that might not sound particularly impressive. But the true power of Dustveil lay in its absolute control over that underworld. They owned nearly all of the empire’s vast criminal empire—literally, not figuratively. Every major back-alley operation, syndicate, and shadow organization of any significance answered to them.
It sounded impossible when said out loud. Dominating the criminal underworld of even a single region was difficult enough. To control the entire empire’s? And yet the most terrifying part was that almost no one knew they existed. Publicly available information on Dustveil was virtually nonexistent. Their members, their strongholds, their structure—none of it had ever been uncovered. I was certain even the empire’s famed intelligence service knew nothing of real substance about them.
Which was why so few people realized how chaotic the family’s internal affairs had become lately.
The current head of Dustveil had announced his intention to retire. A succession war was now underway to determine the next patriarch. And the girl standing before me was one of the leading candidates.
Outside of Dustveil’s own members, no one knew Belka’s true identity. I was certain of it. Not “almost no one”—no one. That was exactly why she was reacting this way.
Her head must be exploding right about now.
Belka’s mind was no doubt racing at full speed. How had I learned about her and Dustveil? Had someone leaked information? Could she kill me without repercussions? If she couldn’t, what should she do instead? How would this affect the succession race? She would be running through every possibility, calculating every variable.
But it was pointless. I knew her identity because I had played the game. Without even identifying the source of the information, she would never reach the right conclusion.
Anyway.
“Don’t worry. I have no intention of revealing your identity.”
I meant it. I had zero plans to expose her. If I did, Belka would throw everything aside and come at me with full force to silence me. That would put me in danger. My current body wasn’t strong enough to handle the full might of Dustveil. If it were, I wouldn’t have come to her like this in the first place.
“...What do you want?”
Belka’s tightly sealed lips finally opened. Her voice was icy.
I answered, “I told you. I came to accept a request.”
It was the truth. For now.
“...Then why reveal that you know my identity? Couldn’t you have just quietly taken a normal request?”
I shook my head. “The requests you showed me had terrible compensation.”
The jobs Belka had offered me were probably among the better-paying ones in her catalog. The sort of requests she wouldn’t normally show someone on a first meeting. But since she couldn’t predict what the infamous trash Kyle Berwen might do, she had shown me her best options without holding back.
As I had said, the pay was decent. By academy student standards, at least.
The main clients of Belka’s “brokerage business” were academy students. While the students here were undoubtedly talented, they were still students. The requests were rarely very difficult, and the rewards were set accordingly. Even the better ones didn’t offer exceptional compensation.
Such amounts might be a great help to students struggling to get by, but my situation was different. I had tuition, dormitory fees, and living expenses to worry about. The rewards she had shown me would only keep me from starving—they wouldn’t actually improve my circumstances.
In short, I needed requests with much higher payouts.
And Belka had exactly what I was looking for: requests from Ardentis’s real underworld.
Why had Belka—the successor candidate of that Dustveil—enrolled at the academy in the first place? For the diploma? To build connections with the empire’s nobility? Hardly.
She had two real objectives.
The first was information. The academy gathered countless promising individuals—most of whom would go on to shape the future of the empire, or even the entire continent. Belka’s primary goal was to gather data on them: their personalities, preferences, weaknesses. Her brokerage business was merely a tool for that purpose. Standing in the position of an information broker made it easy to obtain students’ personal secrets and rumors.
The second objective was to seize control of Ardentis’s underworld.
Ardentis was a city the empire had poured tremendous resources into developing. Its public security was far better than most cities, but even here the underworld existed. Wherever people gathered, dark desires followed.
Currently, however, the underworld of Ardentis had no king. The empire’s surveillance was too strong for any major faction to send in serious forces. As a result, the city’s shadows had become a chaotic battleground—a veritable Warring States period. Countless groups were fighting for dominance, and even foreign powers had slipped in.
Belka’s second goal was to swallow up that masterless underworld.
To summarize: while attending the academy, collect critical information on important figures and conquer Ardentis’s criminal underworld. That was Belka’s true purpose.
She was currently a second-year. Over the past year, she would have been diligently working toward her goals, and she was still doing so now. On the surface, she gathered information through her brokerage. Behind the scenes, she was building organizations, expanding her forces, and steadily claiming territory in the city’s shadows.
“Give me a request from the underworld.”
What I wanted were those dark-side jobs. Their compensation was far better than the ones her public brokerage offered. Of course, they were proportionally more dangerous.
“......!”
A flicker of shock passed through Belka’s eyes at my words. Then—
“...On what basis?”
She asked sharply, almost accusingly. On what basis should I give you those kinds of requests?
It was a reasonable question. After all, I was Kyle Berwen—the talentless, garbage-human scoundrel. There was no reason to trust me with dangerous, high-stakes underworld work.
But.
“Is there any need to trust me?”
The premise itself was wrong. Trust wasn’t necessary when handing out such requests. Jobs involving the underworld were never simple. They were all dangerous. Most carried genuine risk of death. If I couldn’t prove myself? If I failed? Simple. I would die. Nothing more, nothing less.
In other words, Belka had nothing to lose. Even if my death became an issue, she could erase all traces of her involvement without difficulty.
“......”
Having understood that, a glint of interest appeared in Belka’s eyes. I met her gaze and extended my hand toward her.
“I look forward to working with you. Let me say this in advance—this deal will benefit you greatly.”
I smiled as I spoke.
“......”
Belka simply stared at me without answering, but I could tell. She had accepted my proposal. My smile deepened.
...For the record, she never shook my hand.