The Hero's Scheme
Human willpower can occasionally produce terrifying miracles.
Departing the Imperial Capital, our party reached the fief closest to the border in record time. A distance that express parcel merchants budgeted at least ten grueling days for, we devoured in barely forty-eight hours.
It was a miracle fueled by meticulously conditioned warhorses, excessive divine blessings, fodder thoroughly soaked in rare elixirs, and, above all else, sheer, unadulterated madness.
After a breakneck march that punishing, collapsing stone-dead from the saddle the instant one dismounted would have been entirely reasonable. Yet not a single soul among our pursuit squad fell out of formation.
The hardened knights were one thing, but watching former cardinals and elderly wizards ride hard with wild, bloodshot eyes glowing in the dark was an almost eerie sight to behold.
"Inspector, we've made it this far, but... scouring such a vast expanse of land seems impossible..."
A young bishop from the Holy Kingdom spoke up, his voice scraped raw and raspy from the road, but I shook my head to set his mind at ease. I had already worked out our strategy while galloping across the plains.
"People still live near the frontier," I replied. "Questioning just a few peddlers who supply daily essentials to the hamlets around here will give us our answer soon enough. Given how much effort our grand Hero put into assembling that party of his, there’s no way in hell he’d stuff them into some earthen dugout."
Knowing him, he was probably lounging somewhere right now, burdening the locals and dragging his feet. Locating his hiding spot was the only hurdle; apprehending him would be over in a flash.
"Let's move," I ordered, turning back toward our posse—a heavy crowd of hardened, middle-aged men with a sprinkling of furious youths. "Time to go hunt that bastard down."
As if they had been waiting for that exact cue, the men fanned out in swift, disciplined unison.
Inside a quaintly decorated village hall.
Hero Kwon Hee-jin was catching up with his party members for the first time in ages.
Or rather, he was trying to catch up. After all, quite a bit of tension and unspoken frustration had accumulated between them during their time apart.
Yet there were no tearful embraces or touching reunions to mark the occasion. The Hero sat with his chin tilted arrogantly at a practiced angle, wearing his customary suave smile, but with every passing second, maintaining that composure grew increasingly difficult.
Hah. Look at these ungrateful wenches.
Unlike the elf Silvina, the rest of his party looked to be in dreadful shape.
First was the female knight, Millia.
She was shifting her eyes anxiously, stealing hesitant glances in his direction.
"...Hero, how is your hand?"
"Manageable. It's only a pinky, anyway."
"The pinky acts as a fulcrum for the grip. In some respects, it's just as vital as the thumb... No, never mind."
She clearly had a mountain of questions she was burning to ask, but under the watchful gazes of the other women, she couldn't bring herself to speak freely. Given her relatively modest swordsmanship and the dubious circumstances of her recruitment, she had never held much standing within the party to begin with.
Whatever, she's easy enough to handle.
Then there was Saintess Claire.
She was radiating outright hostility. She wore the sharp, accusing look of someone who had caught wind of something dirty. Back when they had agreed to cover up the slaughter of the holy knights, they had been thick as thieves, but seeing this sudden turnaround, she had almost certainly been in secret contact with the Holy Kingdom.
She never listens for shit. Kwon Hee-jin clicked his tongue inwardly.
"Hero...! How could you do something like this?"
"Calm down, Claire. Let's just talk this through nice and slow."
Finally, Yuni the mage.
She sat clutching her wand to her chest, looking like someone merely checking the clock until she could bolt out the door. Normally brimming with curiosity, she had always pestered him with endless questions about the other world, but right now, she looked utterly devoid of interest.
At the very least, Silvina remained planted steadfastly by his side like a protective screen, ready to back whatever he said at a moment's notice.
Phew. Still, it hasn't completely gone to shit yet.
At least his worst-case scenario—the girls ditching the safehouse on their own—hadn't materialized.
The grand scheme he had concocted while dodging imperial patrols was something he couldn't pull off without the active cooperation of his party members.
"Look, girls. I'm sorry for leaving you all hanging out here for so long. At first, I just wanted you guys to catch your breath and take a break, but things dragged out longer than I expected."
"...A break? You call this a break?"
"Just shut up and listen for a second. I'm going to explain everything that happened."
The Hero began laying out his version of recent events with an earnest, heartfelt demeanor.
Of course, he didn't forget to season the tale with a healthy dose of convenient lies.
He claimed he had been on his way to an imperial audience to clear up the false report allegations when the Second Prince recklessly caused a massive disaster; that the Holy Kingdom suffered devastating losses, and because the prince dragged the Hero's good name into the mud, he had been scapegoated into public enemy number one for furious investors; and that an unhinged Empire was now hunting him out of blind hysteria.
"...So, as a consequence, you girls got lumped in with me and ended up taking the blame too."
"You shouldn't have submitted a false report in the first place!"
"You don't understand the market. I was trying to engineer a soft landing. The plan was to let the price gently deflate over three or four months. ...It only collapsed because the Second Prince and the Beast King went completely off script."
"......"
"Loosen up those scowls. What's done is done. We can't turn back time."
Naturally, none of the party members bought his flimsy excuses. On the contrary, the Saintess began to tremble, tears welling in her eyes as she choked on her words.
"So... are we just supposed to die? Branded as traitors right alongside you?"
She looked as though the slightest nudge would shatter her sanity to pieces.
Before her hysteria could erupt, the Hero raised a calm, placating hand.
"I get why you're pissed off, but hear me out for a second. There's a way out of this."
"I don't want to hear any more of your bullsh—!"
"I'm sorry, but weren't you happily tagging along and living off that 'bullshit' this entire time? Just listen to me one last time. If you still want out after hearing me out, I swear I'll let you walk away without laying a finger on you."
"......"
At the promise of being released without resistance, the female knight and the Saintess exchanged cautious glances. They seemed torn between giving the Hero one final chance to plead his case or trying to carve out their own path to survival—assuming any such path still existed.
Right then, the petite mage, Yuni, stood up with a lazy yawn.
"Hero. Can I wait outside? The mood in here is way too gloomy."
"Yuni... have you already made up your mind?"
"I'm sorry, but... things turned out like this anyway, didn't they? Count me out. It's not like I'm trying to run away; I just don't think I'm very helpful to you, Hero, so I'm heading back to the Magic Tower."
"The Magic Tower, huh?"
"I'll introduce you to a much more talented mage in my place."
The Hero hesitated for a fraction of a second before nodding readily.
"Fine. Go ahead."
"Uh... you're letting me off way easier than I thought?"
"What choice do I have? If your heart's already left me, keeping you here is pointless. Though, even if you head back to the Magic Tower, you'd better keep your head down for a while."
"What?"
The Hero stared at Yuni, a sly, mocking smirk curling his lips.
"There's an elder in the Magic Tower who made an absolute fortune off Kodana. Luceris, who served as Vice Master of the Magic Tower some nineteen years back. The old man is well past seventy, but he apparently had quite the knack for investing. Walked away with over fourteen billion lira in profit."
"......?"
Yuni cocked her head in confusion.
The Luceris he mentioned was a retired elder who had stepped down due to failing health. There were even persistent rumors that dementia had set in. No matter how accomplished an archmage might be, nobody conquered old age.
Hearing that a doddering old relic like that had traded Kodana was news to her.
"You didn't know? Well, I suppose that's natural. He dumped his holdings quietly in twenty separate batches, working entirely through a proxy. And he's not the only one. There's another retired elder who raked it in. He unloaded his stash back when the coins were hovering between one and two hundred million, so he's flown under the radar so far."
As the Hero's words sank in, Yuni's expression hardened into grim realization.
To her knowledge, the Magic Tower as an institution had never dipped its toes deeply into the Kodana frenzy.
Yet nobody paid attention to the private dealings of long-retired elders who could keel over dead tomorrow without surprising anyone.
For the Hero to possess intimate details of their private trades could only mean one thing...
"He-Hero...? Just what the hell did you do?"
"All that pocket change I slipped you for 'research funds'—where do you think it came from? Did you think the Goddess bestowed me a sack of seed money when she summoned me to this world? Come on, Yuni. You had to have guessed by now. Why act all pious and shocked?"
"......"
The Hero looked away from Yuni's stunned, drained face, pretending to inspect his nails.
He wasn't entirely calm either—his hands were trembling faintly from stress—but that gave Yuni zero comfort.
Regardless of his nerves, the inescapable fact remained: he held her leash tightly in his fist.
"...Then in the end..."
"Yeah. We're bound together by fate. But hey, if you really want to walk out, be my guest."
Yuni couldn't bring herself to say she was leaving. The female knight and the Saintess were also staring at the Hero with chilled, rigid faces.
"Want to hear the rest, Yuni?"
"...Yeah."
In the chilling silence of the hall, the Hero began unveiling his master plan.
"We're heading into the Demonic Realm."
Entering the Demonic Realm wasn't unprecedented in itself. Past Hero parties had occasionally spent over a year stationed within that blighted wasteland, waging brutal guerrilla warfare against demonkind.
However, Kwon Hee-jin's party had only ever stepped foot inside once: during the battle against the Underworld King. And even then, they had been escorted by dozens of veteran holy knights and two high-ranking bishops.
"...Hero, how could we possibly survive in that place?"
"I'm not saying we're actually going to live inside the Demonic Realm. I have a safehouse prepared right near the edge; we can stay there. But we won't just be holing up. I'm going to subtly leak rumors back into the Empire—whispers that our party discovered and raided a massive harpy nest inside the Demonic Realm."
"Why bring harpies into this out of nowhere?"
"Harpies have an instinctive hoarding habit when it comes to gold and shiny jewels. History says they used to raid imperial merchant caravans all the time centuries ago. All we have to say is that we stumbled across centuries' worth of plundered treasure."
"Do you honestly think anyone will fall for a lie like that?"
"They'll believe it in a heartbeat once I shove physical proof in their faces. Ancient gold coins and antique heirlooms minted before the Empire's wars of unification—I've got a whole stockpile of them."
If they convinced the public that vast fortunes could be salvaged from the Demonic Realm without ever having to march on the Demon King's Castle, the Hero argued, people would stop hurling stones at the Hero party and instead turn their greedy eyes right toward the border.
"Think they won't bite? They'll grumble and rage, but they'll swallow it whole. That's just how the investor psychology works. The more money people lose, the more desperate and impatient they become to win it all back."
Float another fraudulent scam to buy precious time, and use that breathing room to train until they were genuinely strong enough to venture into the Demonic Realm.
That was the Hero's grand strategy.
His party members stared at him with complex, deeply conflicted expressions.
The female knight Millia was utterly dispirited, unable to muster an argument; Claire had calmed down slightly, chewing over his words with an anxious frown; and Yuni remained fixated on the floorboards, refusing to meet anyone's eyes.
"When do we depart, Hero?"
Only the elf stood unmoved, as devoted as ever.
"Well. Let's see."
Surveying his gaunt, exhausted party, the Hero decided they would linger in this village for a few more days.
He needed to soothe the frayed nerves of his distraught companions—and, naturally, spend some quality intimate time with Silvina, the loyal elf who still worshipped him without question.
Coming here in person was the right move.
Initially, he had considered holing up in an isolated hideout and summoning them there, but seeing the fragile state they were in, keeping them on a tight leash personally had been the wisest call. If even one of these women had slipped away and spilled her guts to the authorities, his predicament would have turned completely hopeless.
He felt a twinge of guilt toward Yuni, but this was no longer a simple matter of preserving his harem.
He had to do whatever it took just to keep himself from being stoned to death in the public square.