Try It If You Can
“Conditions?”
“Yes. There are a few.”
“How many, then? Out with them.”
Before speaking, I drew a gold bar from the Subspace Pouch. Golden light flashed in my palm, and Veronica nearly jumped out of her seat. I set the bar on the table and slid it toward Oskar. He took it up and turned it over in his hands. When his eyes found the mark engraved on its surface, his brow creased ever so slightly.
“As you can see, this isn’t something that can simply be spent.”
“Hmm. Indeed. Looks like some sort of seal — what is it?”
“The Magic Tower Master’s mark. The Central Bank almost certainly knows it, so they won’t exchange it.”
“Huh.”
Oskar let out a short breath as the gold’s origin became clear. Veronica, on the other hand, jabbed me in the arm and whispered,
“I heard the Magic Tower collapsed… and you just couldn’t resist looting it? Impressive. Really…”
She exhaled as though she had completely given up on me. She was leaping to her own conclusions. Not that she was wrong about the theft.
“So what do you intend to do with it?” Oskar asked, his gaze sharpening.
“Melt it down. You have massive furnaces here, and since you already deal in gold as a matter of course, no one will look twice.”
“Hmm. You’re not wrong… but how much of this do you have?”
He pushed the bar back across the table toward me.
“I haven’t counted precisely, but roughly two hundred.”
“Two hundred! No wonder you needed my furnaces!”
It was enough to buy an entire ducal estate outright. By weight, about two and a half tons. I hadn’t come all this way for nothing. Oskar was the only man alive who could launder a haul that large. Once every last bar was truly mine, money would never again be a problem. Economic freedom.
“T-two hundred… How much magic could I cast with that…? How many years of part-time work would that take…?”
Veronica folded her fingers one by one, trying to calculate the sheer destructive power of it. Then she arrived at a conclusion that left her reeling.
“I’d have to babysit for over six thousand years…”
“If you want to work six thousand years, you’d better live a long time.”
Or become undead.
“Why do you assume I’m going to spend my whole life doing odd jobs…?”
Ahem. Meanwhile, Oskar cleared his throat.
“I’ll lend you the furnaces. But as you well know… it’s dangerous work. Still, thanks to that pouch of yours, even the Central Bank will have no way of tracing where the gold came from. I’ll gladly do it.”
“I’m truly grateful.”
“How could they possibly expect it? A pouch small enough to hold two hundred gold bars is beyond their imagination. They’ll simply conclude that the Magic Tower Master’s fortune was lost when the tower fell.”
Oskar smiled, clearly pleased with himself.
“I’ve never cared for the Central Bank either. What do those priests know about money…?”
…As a former member of the clergy, that one stung a little. The Goddess Church no longer held the power it once did, but the Order still gripped the Central Bank like a mace. Credit springs from faith. That was the bank’s slogan. In any case — the king held the railways, the Church held the bank, and the great lords held the vote. Everything was tangled together that way. And since I was the one asking him to launder gold under the Church’s nose, I was hardly in a position to argue. Still, I couldn’t simply leave the Magic Tower Master’s fortune sitting there.
“The gold you brought will be the only filth to stain those clean books those obsessive purists keep so carefully. Haha…!”
Oskar laughed with deep satisfaction, then collected himself.
“Well then… what else?”
“As I mentioned, Veronica is a Spiritist. She converts jewels and money into magic.”
I gestured toward the girl seated beside me. Convert, or exchange — either word fit. Equivalent exchange. The more she spent, the stronger she became.
“And the magic’s properties change depending on which jewels she uses.”
Veronica nodded two or three times, looking thoroughly satisfied. Apparently I knew my stuff. Silver and gold meant explosions. Rubies meant binding. Emeralds meant reinforcement. I still remembered clearly how she had used them that way at the Dowon Festival.
“Oh-ho…”
Oskar tilted his head, intrigued as well.
“But there are still many jewels she has never handled. Veronica is young; she needs far more experience.”
To discover every limit and every application of her power, she would need to try every kind of gem at least once. Before I became her sponsor, she had been scraping by on part-time work — no chance of that. In other words, Veronica still didn’t know a hundred percent of what she could do. She didn’t even know her own ceiling.
“Even one of each would be enough. I would like Your Grace to give Veronica samples of every jewel in your possession.”
Oskar handled a greater variety of minerals than anyone else in the kingdom. I could have bought them myself, of course, but I wasn’t about to pass up a free chance to put every kind of stone in her hands.
“Huh…? You’re suddenly asking for that for me…?”
“Please.”
I bowed my head politely. Oskar remained unfazed; Veronica, by contrast, looked thoroughly rattled.
“Why are you being so nice all of a sudden…? You’re making me nervous…”
While Veronica’s eyes darted left and right and she shook my arm,
“Very well. You truly care for Miss Veronica, don’t you?”
Oskar agreed without hesitation once again. That only flustered her more.
“Lastly — the Light-Eating Stone you mentioned. If Veronica can mine it, I would like a share as well.”
“Of course. A portion of whatever Miss Veronica extracts will go to you. How much do you need?”
“Enough to craft armor for ten people should do.”
“Fair enough. If she can pull it out more easily than the methods we’ve been using, that’s a small price.”
Oskar shrugged as if it were obvious, the red fur of his cloak swaying. But the ease of his agreement was also proof that he still didn’t fully trust us. I hear you — now try it if you can. That was the message in the gesture.
“Is this really a good idea?”
Veronica asked once we reached the mine. She had changed out of her dress into work clothes, and with her rough speech and temperament, the outfit suited her surprisingly well. Tall as she was, she could make almost anything look decent.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I don’t think my sponsor would have wanted this.”
I flinched at that. That sponsor very much did want it.
“Well, think about it. He gave me this enormous scholarship so I could study, and I’m barely studying at all.”
“You’ve been fretting over that? The more I see of you, the more oddly principled you turn out to be.”
“Can’t help it. I can’t exactly be unprincipled.”
I was fairly sure that wasn’t how high and low were supposed to work. Anyway.
“It worries me. Is this really the kind of person he wanted me to become…?”
Simply put, she had nothing to worry about on that score. The other heroines used the same scholarship to buy swords or hire babysitters. Not a single one of them spent it on textbooks and living expenses.
“I rather think he’d want exactly this.”
“Working for a grand duke’s house is probably worth more than studying, sure. But still.”
Veronica narrowed her eyes and looked at me.
“At the end of the day, I’m helping you launder money, aren’t I?”
“……”
“Honestly? I’ve been suspicious ever since that train.”
She kept staring straight at me. Her sharp gaze felt as if it were boring all the way through to the inside.
“Ever since that crazy old man called you by that name.”
Marquis Fred’s unnecessary greeting. So I hadn’t managed to throw her completely off the scent after all.
“And the Southern Grand Duke — a great lord? The idea that Karma would have connections like that is weird enough on its own. Once I started thinking that way, it made sense why the other kids at the Academy follow you around. If you were him.”
Her eyes lit up as she took a step closer.
“But I guess not.”
Disappointment flooded her voice.
“You stole gold bars when the Magic Tower fell, and then yesterday you barged into someone’s place and wrecked it, right?”
Put that way… from Veronica’s perspective, I was pure villain material.
“He would never do something like that…”
“Empty your head and think only about what you stand to gain. In the end, if you get your hands on all kinds of jewels, you’ll grow stronger. Wouldn’t that make your sponsor happy?”
“Well, yes, but.”
Veronica heaved a long sigh.
“This isn’t how I wanted to repay him.”
“Repay?”
“Yeah. Repay.”
“Why do you need to repay anything?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course I do.”
She shrugged as if I had said something absurd.
“I can’t live in debt.”
Debt. Considering her contract with the spirit, the words made a certain amount of sense. She borrowed power from the spirit, and if she failed to offer money in return, the contract broke. Fail to settle on time, and the power vanished. She couldn’t live in debt — whether by choice or not.
“I may not be able to pay it back twofold, but I at least have to return what I received.”
“Then it wouldn’t have been sponsorship. It would have been a transaction.”
“Huh?”
“Sponsorship is sponsorship. He wants nothing from you. Probably.”
It had been for my sake. To raise the main cast and then step out of the picture.
“But can a person like that even exist? Someone who hands over that much money without expecting anything in return?”
It was nothing like ordinary charity, but I didn’t bother denying it. Now that things had come this far, I would keep the image intact.
“Someone like that might exist. Someone who simply wants to watch you grow.”
“…Yeah.”
Veronica nodded, her expression calm.
“So people like that… really do exist.”
“Why the sudden sentimentality?”
“Meeting Grand Duke Oskar just made me think about it more. That’s what’s normal, right? Judging people by their birth, by their family. If I’d told them where I came from from the start, they definitely would have looked down on me.”
“Well, probably.”
I didn’t deny it.
“Grand Duke Oskar is unusual, though.”
He didn’t merely care about lineage and birth; he went further, believing nobles were the chosen and therefore owed it to everyone to stand at the front and set an example. I had never met another aristocrat like him.
“But that man didn’t care about my birth or my family. No conditions, no price — he just helped me. He brought me back to life.”
Brought her back to life? I didn’t think what I had done was quite that grand, but Veronica clearly saw it differently. To a girl who had had no parents, no money, and perhaps no future, that scholarship had looked like something else entirely. An impossibly bright light. Light — and debt.
“Someday I really want to tell him thank you, but I can never seem to meet him.”
“Well… some people donate in secret, after all.”
Again: I am not that kind of saint. Not that anyone was likely to think so even if I didn’t make excuses.
“Honestly, what was I thinking? Imagining you were him.”
Veronica pressed a cold hand to her cheek, cooling the heat in her face. Then she rolled up her sleeves and prepared to enter the mine.
“Black flames, you say?”
A uniformed man with a massive coffin strapped to his back prowled the outskirts of Duke Julian’s estate. Chronos moved from place to place, gathering every scrap of information about what had happened there.
“I understand perfectly. A most enjoyable conversation.”
Karma’s black flames. The moment the rumor reached him, he had set out for Julian’s territory. He had been searching for Karma of District 6 in Marquis Fred’s lands when the intelligence fell into his lap.
It matches again.
What Chronos knew of Karma was that the man wielded black-and-blue dark magic. The same here. Evidence was scattered all over: a man had appeared with that very dark magic and killed Julian.
From what Chronos had heard from Karma himself last time, the man bore a grudge against Daywin Hasgard. And Daywin was Amelia’s knight.
Sir Karma, the more this one learns of you, the more impressive you become. By slaying the fiancé of Daywin Hasgard’s master, you mean to shatter him first in spirit, do you not?
Chronos’s mouth curved into a long, thin smile.
Truly a wicked man.