The Assassin's True Target
The meeting took place in the bishop's office. It was the largest space available where a group of roughly ten could sit together and discuss the situation while maintaining security.
"Hayes."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"Begin."
Of everyone gathered here, Hayes was the only one who had been present at the scene on the day the Crown Prince was attacked. She had seen and heard a great deal more than Ian, whose arrival had been delayed by enemies tying him down. The Duke needed to know the circumstances of that day in far greater detail.
"I will explain."
Hayes reported the sequence of events—from the moment the ambush began until she lost consciousness and collapsed—swiftly and precisely, without a moment's hesitation.
How the enemies had wielded the schotel and flamberge with practiced skill, weapons knights rarely touched these days. How the enemy commander's ability had been in no way inferior to her own. And how a flame-haired girl had suddenly appeared in the middle of the battle.
She did not omit the final act either—how the man had bitten into his own forearm and smeared the blood across the tattoo on his chest, whereupon a surge of black energy engulfed him and he grew terrifyingly strong.
"In the end, he crumbled to ash and vanished. The remaining masked men slit their own throats shortly after."
It was Ian who had witnessed the man's final moments. As the memory surfaced, Ian's fists clenched tightly.
"Turned to ash and disappeared..."
"Your Grace, what he did was akin to a ritual for invoking the power of the demonkin. If that is why his body left no remains behind, it all fits together."
"I know."
Duke Randert, a veteran of countless wars, had witnessed enemies transform like that on more than one occasion. They sold their souls to the demonkin in exchange for a brief taste of overwhelming strength. Had the man been so desperate to see his mission through that he would resort to such a scorched-earth gambit?
If there existed a master strong enough to overwhelm Hayes, the Duke could not possibly have been unaware of him. The list of such individuals was short enough to count on one hand.
"You never saw his face?"
"He kept the mask on until the very end. If a body had remained, we could have identified him. I am sorry."
"It's no fault of yours."
How could that have been Hayes's failure? The true problem was that a master stronger than her had appeared in the first place.
"Your body took quite a beating."
On the surface, Hayes looked perfectly fine. The shoulder pierced by the flamberge and the face ground into the floor had both fully healed.
But the inside was another matter. The flow of mana through her body was still sluggish. That alone spoke volumes about the caliber of opponent she had faced. It would take time before she recovered her full condition.
"I failed to protect my subordinates properly. All of it was my failing."
Hayes begged the Duke's forgiveness for her sins, her expression carved from stone. The Full Moon Knights dispatched to guard the Crown Prince this time had numbered twenty-five in total, herself and Ian included. Only five of them had survived. As the one in command of the mission, Hayes bore a crushing weight of responsibility for what had happened.
"The Crown Prince is safe, which means you fulfilled your duty. The deaths of our men are a bitter loss, but they fell fighting for the Crown Prince—a soldier's honorable end. What we must do now is not blame ourselves, but find the ones behind this."
Arrangements for the fallen knights' bodies to return to Hamilton had already been made. A joint funeral would be held there, and separate condolences delivered to each family. Nothing could truly ease that grief—but it was the least the Duke could do.
"Could Emperor Royan truly be connected to this?"
With Carrington in a state of emergency, a Dwyer spy had been captured out of nowhere. The man hadn't appeared anywhere on Sadad's list of suspected Crown Prince assassins, and privately he found it baffling.
"They sent a delegation and visited in person just recently, and now they do this? What exactly are they playing at? I simply cannot understand it."
Even if the assassination had succeeded, they stood to gain nothing from it. A utterly pointless enterprise.
Unless, of course, they wanted war again. With the current Emperor's position rock-solid and Duke Randert standing firm behind the Empire, killing the Crown Prince would not shake the nation's foundations.
"An interrogation may yield answers. But first, there is something you all need to hear."
Duke Randert revealed the true reason he had summoned his men.
"The targets, it seems, were never the Crown Prince."
"...What do you mean by that?"
"If not the Crown Prince, then what did those men climb the Academy walls hoping to kill?"
"Your Grace, surely you don't mean..."
Ian alone seemed to have an inkling, his eyes going wide. Bayul had died in the Crown Prince's stead that day. Had the assassins' true purpose been Young Master Bayul all along?
As if to prove Ian's suspicion correct, Duke Randert spoke.
"It was Bayul."
"I beg your pardon? Young Master Bayul?"
To his bewildered subordinates, the Duke relayed what he had heard earlier from the Crown Prince and Professor Rothius.
"Ian, what's your read on it?"
In the instant the blade pierced Bayul's heart, Ian had been the closest person to the scene after the Crown Prince. The distance had been considerable, but with Ian's eyesight, he could well have seen it.
"The Crown Prince is right, Your Grace. Bayul was standing practically beside him, which means His Highness would have been well within the assassin's range as well."
Ian's face was etched with shock. He had simply assumed the assassins had come to kill the Crown Prince, and that assumption had blinded him. Looking back now, everything was strange—so strange it made no sense, exactly as Professor Rothius had pointed out.
"Their commander did shout orders to take the Crown Prince's head, did he not?"
"Yes, Your Grace. I heard it clearly."
Hayes nodded in confirmation. They had, in fact, launched a ferocious assault on the Crown Prince—though Bayul had been right beside him at the time.
"So it was a staged assassination they had planned all along."
Sadad, who had been quiet since the Duke first mentioned Bayul, finally spoke, his eyes glinting.
"If this is true, then the reason Emperor Royan came with that delegation begins to make sense."
"Yes. It was to divert attention."
"He drew every eye to himself, then used the opening to smuggle a horde of assassins into the Empire. The Crown Prince was merely a performance, a decoy to conceal that Bayul was the real target. And frankly, it's far more convincing that way."
Had they come straight for Bayul's throat, the Dwyer Empire would have found suspicion impossible to escape. Across the entire continent, Emperor Royan was the most famous bearer of a grudge against Duke Randert.
His nation had lost the Ten-Year War, and the Duke had crippled his father, Prince Regent Barachel. If revenge was what he wanted, Bayul was the only possible target—the Duke's sole surviving son.
Even so, it was recklessly bold. Whatever they might feel in private, the two nations were officially on friendly terms. What could have suddenly driven the change?
While his subordinates each wrestled with the question, Duke Randert delivered the answer as plainly as if he were handing it over.
"Prince Regent Barachel took his own life."
"...!"
At the Duke's sudden revelation, the subordinates who had known nothing of it flinched, shoulders jerking in shock.
"I wondered why Emperor Royan was delaying the funeral and concealing the death. My conclusion is that he needed to keep it quiet in order to carry this out. The moment Barachel's death became known, the eyes of the continent would turn to Dwyer—self-evidently so. However bold an operator Royan may be, even he would have found that too great a risk before such a move."
"Do you know why he took his own life?"
It was Sadad who spoke up in the Duke's place.
"As everyone knows, the palace where Barachel resided was guarded so heavily that even visits from his own children required advance permission. After his defeat in the Ten-Year War, he never once set foot outside—and there was even a period when rumors circulated that he had died."
And yet even Prince Regent Barachel had been forced to show his face on occasion.
Exactly once a year.
On the day that marked the end of the Ten-Year War, he had been required to sign the Penance Oath as the principal instigator of the conflict. It must have been the most humiliating moment of his year—but for the people of the continent, it was a day to remember the peace they had won and rejoice once more.
"And every time, three or four corpses slipped out of Barachel's palace in secret."
"Corpses?"
"Mostly maidservants."
No one needed the rest spelled out. They would have been the objects of Barachel's fury, victims of his rampages. His brutality had been common knowledge for a very long time.
"This is only my speculation, but I imagine Barachel's mind deteriorated year by year. He must have longed for the days when, whole in body, he commanded the continent's fear. To be trapped in that palace as a cripple would have been unbearable for a man of his temperament. In the end, I suspect that is precisely what drove him to take his own life."
"Did the enemy corpses yield any recognizable faces?"
"Not so far."
They had gathered even the ones who had killed themselves at the last and were working through the identification, but every single one had a deep scar across the face, marring recognition—whether deliberately or by design was unclear. It meant these were assassins managed and raised with total, meticulous care from head to toe.
"We also tried narrowing down candidates from the wounds found on our fallen men, but every injury was inflicted by a schotel, so that path is equally inconclusive."
"So everything we have is circumstantial."
"We will search all the more thoroughly."
Their targets, believed to be the Crown Prince, had in truth been Bayul. His life was every bit as precious, of course—but to the Full Moon Knights, the difference was as clear as night and day.
Bayul was the son of the lord they served. In other words, the enemy had struck at their liege himself. Since the end of the Ten-Year War, no provocation like this had ever stained the history of the Full Moon Knights.
"First, we should interrogate the man we captured earlier. Perhaps something will come of it."
"I will question him myself."
The Temple of Despair was an ancient structure that had stood long before the Academy was ever built. Though no longer in use, its basement held a prison where fallen priests, heretics, and criminals had once been confined. The Dwyer spy was locked away there.
Duke Randert, lost in thought, rose to his feet.
"Your Grace!"
Just then, the door burst open and one of his men rushed in, breathless.
"The prisoner in the underground cell has taken his own life!"
"What? Suicide?"
How many times had he heard that word today alone? As anger clouded the Duke's face, the man stiffened and forced out the rest of his report.
"He suddenly went into convulsions, foamed at the mouth, and died on the spot. It appears he had a vial of poison hidden on one side of his mouth. I beg your forgiveness."
They had searched only his body—that had been the fatal oversight. They should have gagged him as well. A bitter, costly mistake.
"That man was a courier, meant to carry word back to Emperor Royan. That's why he risked everything to slip out of the city. One look at him said fleeing was the wrong choice—so he chose death instead."
"And he was the last thread we had—!"
"There will be more spies. Not all of them will have fled. Comb Carrington from end to end and find every last one of them!"
To charge anyone with a crime, evidence was indispensable. And once undeniable proof was in hand, the Dwyer Empire would become a rat cornered in a hole.
Personally, the Duke despised war—but if necessity demanded it, he was more than capable of starting one himself.
And when that day came, it would be the day the Dwyer Empire vanished from the continent for good.