Tutorial - 6th Floor
Unlike the last time around, I had stacked up an impressive record of merit, and I had a set of excuses prepared that actually held together.
Even if things went wrong, slipping away wouldn't be a problem. Hiding a flicker of interest, I looked from the butler to the man who appeared to be a servant, putting on a face that said I had no idea what any of this was about.
Jules tried to conceal a hint of dismay as he spoke.
"The lord is... furious, I'm afraid."
So the lord isn't usually the type to lose his temper?
If the old butler was this rattled, that guess was probably right.
"Yes!"
"Ah — my apologies, Yoo Shin-hoo. I must step out for a moment. Would you wait here?"
"Understood. We'll stay here for now."
"Attend to Yoo Shin-hoo's party. I shall return."
The old butler left the room at once.
Left behind in the drawing room, I asked the servant to prepare a meal. Once both the servant and the butler had gone, the party exploded.
"We worked ourselves to the bone completing that request, and now we're being treated like thieves? That's going too far!"
"Exactly! If we'd had something like that, we would have used it already! And besides, Oppa would never steal anything!"
Sorry. I did it.
I decided I would be taking that particular fact to the grave.
"Shin-hoo, you really didn't steal it?"
Compared to the Na sisters, who were boiling over, Joo Ha-yeon asked the question carefully.
"Unnie! Don't tell me you're actually suspecting Shin-hoo?"
Na-yeon stared at Joo Ha-yeon as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing.
"No, I don't think he would either. But... you know. Kim Insil and Park Nam-young..."
At that, Na-yeon's expression flooded with dismay.
"B-but Shin-hoo would never do something like that... no, I mean, e-even so, if it was for his comrades..."
Na-yeon began to waver at Joo Ha-yeon's words. I had, after all, spent this entire time presenting myself as the kind of leader who would throw his own body on the line for his people. She seemed to think it was entirely possible I had risked stealing an artifact for my comrades' sake.
At the same time, she looked genuinely confused about whether that would even violate her own principles.
Stealing was wrong — but if he'd done it for his comrades, was it still wrong? No, it was still wrong. But could she condemn Shin-hoo for it? The benefactor who had sacrificed so much to help them?
I decided to test her. I let my face go heavy.
"...If I had?"
They flinched. The look on every face in the party changed at once.
I asked it looking straight at Na-yeon.
She was as flustered as a person could be.
"Th-that's, I mean..."
Her principles had collided with her benefactor's actions. And because she already understood the motive, she knew stealing was wrong and still couldn't bring herself to condemn it on the spot.
Even though the theft of the ring — or so they currently believed — was actively causing the party trouble in real time, Na-yeon never did manage to say a word. Na Seoyun, who had worn a look of shock for a moment, grabbed my clothes.
"I-I'm sorry, Oppa. I'm sorry I called you a th-thief..."
"I'm sorry... Seoyun."
I gave her a lonely little smile and stroked her hair. She looked up at me as if to say it was all right.
"No, no, Oppa. Even if you were a thief, I..."
"I was lying, you know."
"...What?"
"Huh?"
Every pair of eyes in the party locked onto me.
Na-yeon, who hadn't been able to answer at all. Na Seoyun, whose eyes had gone wet. Joo Ha-yeon, who had closed her eyes with a grave expression, and Nam Eun-ju, who had bowed her head. All of them stared at me.
"I said I was lying. I didn't steal that Ring of Life or whatever it is. I didn't even know the thing existed. How was I supposed to steal it?"
"You... you—!"
At my words, the women — Na-yeon in particular — twisted their faces and glared at me.
"Come on. After we finished the fourth floor and came to the fifth, how much time have I even spent off on my own to pull off a theft? We were ordinary people until not that long ago, you know? We don't know how to do that kind of thing. I'm a little hurt, honestly."
"Even so, pulling a joke in a situation like this! That's going too far!"
Faced with Na-yeon's fury, I had no choice but to put on an apologetic look and say I was sorry.
"She's right! Party Leader, I didn't think you were like this — how can you have so little tact? Pulling a stunt like that at a moment like that...!"
Even Nam Eun-ju was laying into me.
As far as I was concerned, it hadn't been a joke at all. I had needed to find out how much Na-yeon and Na Seoyun relied on me, how much they trusted me — and whether they were capable of rewriting their own principles for my sake.
Na Seoyun was fine. Her dependence on me ran deep, she trusted me, and even if I wasn't particularly moral, she had immediately said it was all right and tried to comfort me. The space I occupied in her heart was larger than I'd expected. It might have been because she was young, but if I maintained this and drew closer still, she would probably become someone who supported me completely.
Na-yeon, on the other hand, wasn't there yet. The level of it bothers my conscience, but it's him, so I suppose it can't be helped. If the motive had been worse, she might well have condemned me.
For now, that much was acceptable. In the future, it wouldn't be. If situations like this kept repeating, there was a chance she would leave.
I needed the thing called me to grow larger inside Na-yeon, until I became a complete exception. I had to make her support me unconditionally and follow me to the end, telling herself that whatever I did, there must be a reason.
Otherwise, handing her an ancient spirit was a little too dangerous. I needed to make her wholly mine.
I'll have to pay a little more attention.
Making someone completely yours was never easy. I was thinking that over when a servant came in, and the women had no choice but to start eating. They could hardly keep tearing into me in front of the help.
A good while later, the butler came to find us.
"...I apologize."
"Has the misunderstanding been cleared up?"
"It has, and it hasn't."
"What do you mean by that?"
"The matter has grown enormously. Upon inspection, the missing items were not one or two. I am sorry, but Yoo Shin-hoo's party will be unable to leave the castle for some time."
"...Just how much has gone missing, exactly?"
The old butler hesitated for a long moment, then, as if he had no other choice, laid the situation out.
"...A great deal of treasure, the lord's collection, and... one of the family heirlooms has disappeared."
His expression was heavy.
"...An heirloom, you say?"
I performed a gesture of complete astonishment.
The others looked startled as well, but also faintly puzzled. Fair enough. They had no real grasp of what an heirloom was worth in a place like this.
One of those heirlooms was the Sword that Protects Melid. As far as I knew, it was no ordinary object. Its function as a blade was beside the point. The Sword that Protects Melid was one of the articles that represented the lord's legitimacy. Stretch the truth only a little, and you could use it to seize an entire house.
Of course, a great many conditions would have to line up — but right now, a great many of them already had. The castle was in an extremely dangerous state. If the goblins razed it as things stood, the ruin of the entire domain was only a matter of time. Exploit that opening, and a single heirloom could swallow a whole territory.
Disguise a proxy as Melid blood, prove legitimacy with the heirloom, and have the neighboring nobles collude to fabricate the rest, and it wasn't entirely impossible. That was how precious the Sword that Protects Melid was as a symbol of House Melid's right to rule. In peacetime it would have been an impossible method — there were other heirlooms, and the family could have resolved things on its own — but given the timing, they had every reason to be on edge.
Johann had stolen the most valuable heirloom in the secret vault. There was a chance this was a scheme to swallow the entire domain. The neighboring nobles would handle the fabrication. And even if they didn't, it would still fetch a staggering price. Whether this was a commission from some noble or a plan he had hatched himself, I had no way of knowing. Even in my first life, the story had never been uncovered that far.
I put on a face that said there was nothing for it.
"I've heard before what a noble house's heirloom is worth. And given the present situation... it can't be helped. Very well. We'll cooperate as fully as we can."
"Thank you for your understanding."
The old butler bowed to us and hurried out.
To my bewildered party, I explained the value of a medieval heirloom — not that I actually knew whether heirlooms in Earth's medieval Europe had been quite this important — and told them the situation appeared to be such-and-such.
"...This is dangerous."
Joo Ha-yeon clocked immediately that we were in a bad position.
"We're already suspected of stealing the lord's treasure, and now an heirloom has vanished on top of it... if this keeps going, we'll..."
"The investigation is going to continue for a while. We won't be an exception. There's no way this is the end of it."
At my words, every face in the party went taut.
"They said the lord flew into a rage over the missing heirloom. The old butler was shaken. He isn't the type to anger easily, the lord. And yet he did. The investigation from here is going to be a lot more thorough."
I laid out the guess I had made earlier.
"I said this before, didn't I? That Inventory doesn't seem to be a common ability. In fact, we've never seen anyone besides ourselves using it. Has anyone?"
"...No, we haven't. Just like you said from the start, Shin-hoo, we've been careful to keep the Inventory hidden."
Something I had told them before: hide the Inventory as much as possible. This mattered. NPCs either took it for a spatial pouch or judged it a special ability. You have a power like that and you still lost your luggage? From the first meeting, you start looking strange. You draw suspicion.
And the present situation was the worst it could be. If the Inventory came to light now?
The others caught my meaning without any trouble.
"...We'll have to keep it hidden, then..."
If we got caught, it would become a nuisance. Getting out, honestly, wouldn't be that hard. With my current abilities and an Artifact Bomb, fleeing the castle wouldn't be particularly difficult.
But the others wouldn't see it that way. They would think getting caught meant it was over.
"It's a little unfair, honestly... who on earth would do this to us... Johann, after all?"
Joo Ha-yeon seemed to suspect Johann as well, on account of what had happened on the fourth floor.
"He was a good person who helped us... would he really have done that? He's the one who introduced us to the Tower from the second floor, and he taught us all those camping skills..."
Na-yeon's reaction was a little more ambivalent.
I didn't come out and name Johann, because of her. It would do her more good to reach the conclusion on her own than to have me point the finger.
Na-yeon hadn't struck me as the type to trust people easily from the start, but she needed to learn how to be suspicious of the System.
In the early days, strangely enough, a lot of people assumed that any NPC the System introduced was one of the good guys, and never considered they might be betrayed. A case of modern gamers' fixed ideas turning into poison. If a tutorial NPC taught you survival skills from the start, built you a place to sleep, and let you rest, most people thought this is an ally — almost nobody thought this bastard might be using us and planning to sell us out.
That was why the tutorial difficulty was hell. If people just knew how to be a little suspicious, the tutorial death rate would be less than half of what it was.
Either way, I stressed to the party once more that they were to say nothing about the Inventory.
We were outsiders. If the heirloom wasn't found, the entire castle would be turned upside down, and we were very likely to come under a high-intensity investigation ourselves.
For the moment, we still had the accomplishments we'd piled up, and while they knew we had a sliver of motive where the Ring of Life was concerned, the rest was hard to pin on us.
The entire warehouse had been cleaned out, for one thing. How were five of us supposed to empty a storehouse that size in a short time? Check the records and it would be obvious we hadn't had the hours. Three days had been barely enough to clear the Underground Waterway. As far as I knew, we were also the only people who had come in from outside in the past month. On top of that, goblins had cut off the traffic of merchants and vagrants through this whole area. Even travel to the neighboring villages had been reduced to a minimum.
There had been nowhere to stash that much stolen goods, and no way to smuggle them out. Not unless the existence of the Inventory came to light.
A lot of circumstances had lined up in our favor.
A full investigation began at once.
Servants, maids, attendants, soldiers — each of them was sent to an interrogation room. The only exceptions were the knights who had sworn loyalty to the lord, and the old butler who had served him for so many years. Questioning their loyalty would have been fatal to the lord himself.
We were questioned again as well, but since the others genuinely knew nothing, it passed without any real trouble. The investigators found it hard to suspect us, though they did go over us carefully — the ring had come out of my room, after all, and we were outsiders.
The strange part was that we'd been questioned separately from Kim Insil and Park Nam-young. Or rather, I wasn't even sure they were being questioned at all. Whenever I asked, I only got evasive answers.
Had they been excluded entirely because they were patients? It was true that the two of them looting a warehouse was next to impossible.
Day after day slipped by with the castle turned upside down. The intensity of the investigation climbed with every sunrise, and the faces of the knights and the old butler grew more and more drawn. The lord gave vent to his rage several times a day.
Around the fifth day of the full investigation, the old butler came to find us, his face contorted.
He had Johann with him.