Enforcement (3)
"A mage, then…."
What greeted me as I burst from my room at the sudden boom and crack of gunfire was a towering wall of flame.
For better or worse, the temple stood far enough from the Ministry of Finance that the fire hadn't reached it. But the area around the official residences and the Ministry itself was nothing short of pandemonium.
A mage skilled enough to punch through the capital's air defenses would have to rank among the Empire's top ten at the absolute minimum….
I scanned the surroundings in a rush, but the culprit had long since vanished. Of course. He wouldn't have pulled a stunt this brazen unless he was that confident.
Tracking him now would be pointless.
He had almost certainly fled via spatial teleportation magic.
"T-Tax Collector, this is…."
Rhea, who had stumbled out of her room a beat too late, was still frozen in open-mouthed horror when the Saintess came running up with a cluster of priests, her voice sharp with urgency.
"Brother! Sister! The Ministry of Finance is—!"
"I'm aware. I can see it perfectly well from here."
"Shouldn't you be evacuating?! Anyone can tell this was aimed at the Ministry—"
"Is there anywhere in the capital safer than right here?"
"……"
The Saintess drew a short, incredulous breath at how utterly calm I sounded. Rhea looked just as stunned.
Of course, it wasn't as though I wasn't shocked. I'd half-expected something, but never that they would go this far—this insane. And how the hell had they managed to hire a monster of a mage like that in the first place?
A thousand thoughts spun through my head. But the damage was already done. Panicking and stamping my feet wouldn't change a thing.
"W-we'll be mobilizing every available person for rescue operations immediately. What will you do, Brother?"
The Saintess, still visibly rattled, pulled herself together enough to ask. I looked at the Ministry building as it burned, then spoke again, slowly.
"Nothing. I won't do a thing."
"What?! Tax Collector, what are you saying?!"
It wasn't the Saintess who leapt at that—it was Rhea, seizing my arm. I shook my head firmly and turned away.
"As of today, Rhea and I are dead."
And with those words, calculated to leave everyone reeling, I walked back into my room without a backward glance and shut the door hard behind me.
"W-what did you just say? Are you serious right now?"
"I am. At first light, announce that Rhea and I are dead."
Elena had come tearing into the temple with her face blackened by soot, and at my request for a death certificate she clutched the back of her neck.
"Have you lost your mind? Why? As if things weren't already—"
"Is there a shortage of personnel for the tax audits because of the attack?"
"Thanks to the fire precautions you put in place, the casualties aren't as bad as they could have been—but everyone's terrified of retaliation. The moment anyone gets assigned as an investigator, they're threatening to resign."
"So you want me to go out and conduct the audits myself."
"Yes! Who else is going to do it? We can't just sit here and take this!"
"Unbelievable."
Watching Elena rage only made my headache worse. The sudden terror attack seemed to have stripped her of any capacity for rational judgment.
"Is a tax audit really what matters in a situation like this?"
"Then what do you suggest? We don't even have proof that lunatic mage was connected to them. A tax audit is the only card we have left!"
"Is it, though?"
"What are you getting at?"
"For the first time since the Empire's founding, the capital itself has been attacked. This is no longer a matter of taxes. This qualifies as an act of rebellion—treason."
"T-treason…!"
"You know as well as I do that crimes involving treason don't require physical evidence."
Elena recoiled at the word, nearly collapsing. Fair enough—she'd spent her entire career on tax work, so the term was probably foreign to her. But it was a plain fact she needed to understand.
"The Intelligence Bureau, the Imperial Army, and the Royal Knights will already be moving. Even if we do nothing, the loan sharks and the nobles are finished."
"W-wait. Wait just a second! I don't understand—why would they pull something like this? This is pure self-destruction. Are they trying to die together?"
"Hardly. Isn't it obvious just looking at it?"
"Looking at what?"
"They hired someone with a few screws loose. I guarantee you they never dreamed that mad mage would 'solve' the problem like this."
"You've got to be kidding me."
Nobles were calculating, meticulous creatures. They would have known full well that submitting to a proper tax audit and taking their punishment by the book was far better than watching their entire houses burn to the ground. And yet they'd gone and committed terrorism out of nowhere?
No need to ask. They had clearly handed the job to some lunatic missing several bolts from his skull.
"Damn it—the Ministry is a complete wreck after this, and if those bastards get hauled in on treason charges, there's nothing left for us to do!"
Elena spat curses under her breath for a long moment, then clenched her fists and bit down hard on her lip.
"Treason isn't under the Ministry of Finance's jurisdiction."
"That's exactly my point. Doesn't that make you furious?"
"This isn't a problem that gets solved by reacting emotionally."
"Haa. I'm going to lose my mind."
Honestly, as someone who carried a resignation letter in his pocket every single day, I wasn't particularly angry. The urge to submit that letter was as strong as ever. But looking at it coldly, this incident needed to be considered separately from my desire to quit. I wasn't so lacking in empathy that I could write the whole thing off as a selfish cold-blooded bastard.
And more than anything else… I had developed a personal curiosity about that insane mage.
"Fine. I get what you're saying. But why the death processing?"
"I figured I'd play along a little—give them exactly what they wanted."
"Are you in your right mind?"
"Of course. I've never been more lucid."
"And what do you get out of this?"
"You should be asking what you get out of it—not me."
"Ha?"
Elena's expression, which had just begun to settle, twisted again. I ignored it and continued calmly.
"What? Didn't you say you wanted to land a proper hit on those noble bastards?"
"Stop dancing around it and just spit it out."
"There's nothing to spit out. I'll simply show you."
"I at least need a reason if I'm going to play along later."
"No need. All you have to do is stand in front of everyone tomorrow, announce that Rhea and I are dead, and shed a few tears."
"You're really not going to tell me to the end?"
"To deceive the enemy, you start by deceiving your allies."
Elena glared at me as though she wanted me dead, seething through her teeth. I rose from my seat, opened the door, and flashed her a grin.
"I'll handle what comes after. Minister, you just put on a nice elegant dress and go play politics…."
"There's a thorn in that sentence."
"Let's meet again soon—with good news."
"Huu… Fine. I understand for now. Take care of yourself."
And with that, Elena grumbled her way out, her face still full of dissatisfaction.
"Tax Collector, are you really going to be all right? The Minister looked extremely angry…."
Rhea, who had been waiting outside the door, came scurrying into the room in a fluster.
"Senior Secretariat Rhea. Do you not understand why I asked to be declared dead either?"
"Um. No. Honestly, I don't really get it. According to what you said, the nobles are all going to be arrested for treason anyway. I don't see why we need to go this far."
"Tsk. Is that so. I see it a little differently."
"You said the same thing to the Minister."
"Of course, a few of them will end up as dew on the executioner's block. But not all of them. And more importantly…."
"What else is there?"
"Mages who've completely lost their minds tend to have a strong perfectionist streak."
"Wait a second. A-are you saying you're going after that mad mage…?!"
I tilted one corner of my mouth up and nodded at Rhea's stunned face.
There were a great many eccentrics among mages. Psychos who lived and died by magic, you might say. Plenty of them had antisocial personality disorders. But because that fixation pointed exclusively toward magic, most of them just locked themselves in their rooms and rarely caused real trouble.
Every so often, though, you got ones like the mage who torched the Ministry—the kind who created serious social disasters. They were such oddities that the reasons and motives behind their actions were all over the place. It had never been made public, but there had once been a lunatic who wiped an entire village off the map just to test a new spell he'd developed.
And the most effective way to catch people like that was to lure them into dropping their guard.
If he finds out his target—me—is still alive, he'll drop everything else and hunt me down exclusively.
In my experience, the more screws a mage was missing, the stronger their perfectionism ran. Call it a compulsion. So if he heard that I was alive, or that the Ministry was still standing, he would almost certainly obsess over finishing the job completely. That would only make him harder to catch—and the damage would grow.
If I want to crush the nobles, the loan sharks, and that mad mage all at once, this is the best way.
In other words, from this moment on, I intended to become the unexpected variable for them—just as that mad mage had been for us.
Without a sound. Without a trace.
They had come for my life. It was only fair I paid them back in kind.