Exam Preparation
Leila frowned as Rai approached and cast a soundproofing spell, already worried he'd gotten himself into some new mess. The utterly untrustworthy man sat down beside her and pulled out a bag of cookies he'd swiped from the headmistress's office. He'd gone to the trouble of putting up a soundproofing spell, so he clearly had something to say—and yet he said nothing at all, just sat there eating cookies at his leisure.
Wondering what on earth he thought he was doing, Leila glared at him as he ate with a look of pure bliss, then spoke first.
"If you're about to say something weird, get lost. No—you're already getting on my nerves, so just get lost."
Rai glanced at the face of a woman who was cursing him out in so many words, then started chewing again. Leila was about to snap at the sight of him staring at her while saying nothing and just working his jaw when he finally spoke.
"You know the Lizard of Viridian and the Fallen Knight of Bane?"
"...The fixers who used to travel around with a kid?"
Leila answered, recalling a pair of fixers whose activity reports had gone silent—wherever they'd died. They were the sort of idiots who piled up grudges wherever they went and still had the leisure to drag a child around with them, but their skill was nothing to sneeze at. They'd been famous for their exceptional work even before Leila had been commissioned, and even with their trail gone cold, the Empire still kept them on its watch list.
"Yeah—not anymore. They got a bounty on them in the Empire?"
"...I don't know the details, but no. Their operating territory wasn't the Empire."
As she'd said, the two of them had worked the east-central continent, moving between the Keilen Kingdom and the Bel Federation. They'd never been involved in a single affair that touched the Empire.
Rai nodded at the news that there was no bounty and went on.
"They're here. In Legandia."
"What?!"
Famous fixers being in the city made Leila shoot to her feet in alarm.
Fixers were similar to mercenaries, but vanishingly few people actually called themselves that. Unlike mercenaries, they operated in small numbers, and they handled everything a client wanted—from simple escort work all the way to assassination.
But the jobs that warranted calling a fixer were usually dirty ones. The mere fact that they were here meant something was about to happen, one hundred percent—and Leila, already on edge from the Black Snake's attack on Emilia and the panty pervert who'd made a fool of the guard, looked ready to bolt out the door that instant.
"Sit down, sit down. Hear me out."
Rai forced the agitated Leila back into her seat and continued.
"They've retired. Looks like they settled down here."
"And you believe that?"
"Have to. Their skills have gone to hell. I just went a round with them."
Leila's eyebrows climbed. There'd been no separate report from the guard, and yet this man was saying he'd already been in a fight. Why could this man never have a single quiet day? The moment things seemed to settle down, he always stirred something up.
Anger was creeping across her face, and Rai was wondering whether he ought to make a run for it when Leila spoke in a voice gone cold.
"How strong are they now?"
"Hmm... about a tenth of what they were at their peak? The two of them came at me together and couldn't last ten exchanges. Looks like they got hurt pretty badly taking down the Six Fingers."
"Those two were the ones who dealt with the Six Fingers?"
New facts kept dropping, and Leila's face went slack with surprise. Selma and Clay had said it so matter-of-factly that Rai had assumed everyone already knew—but seeing her reaction, he shut his mouth.
The Six Fingers had been a cellular organization spread across the entire continent, a public enemy that every nation found a headache. The criminal syndicate formed by six clans had been so elusive that even the Empire had never managed to pinpoint its leaders' locations, let alone deal with them.
Raiding known hideouts only ever netted small fry, and some countries had simply given up and left them alone.
The Six Fingers had grown so arrogant they'd boasted that even the Empire's emperor couldn't catch them—until, one day, they vanished. It wasn't that the entire organization disappeared. There were simply too many of them scattered across the continent to uproot in a single stroke.
But their leaders, the six clans, were slaughtered to the last. The scenes of massacre—where every last one of them, man and woman, young and old, from their hired hands down to the animals they kept, had been butchered—were more than even veteran soldiers could bear.
The Six Fingers' leaders, whose identities were unknown even to anyone outside their own clan, were unmasked one after another, draped in red blood. One had been a high noble. Another had been a clergyman. Beside each corpse was writing that named which Finger they had been, along with a full record of their deeds.
Investigate the clues written in the blood of the slain, and it truly was the Six Fingers—and everyone on the continent sang the praises of the hunter who had hunted them down.
Even the last remaining Second Finger had offered up his entire fortune to a nation in exchange for protection. The Sachsen Kingdom, tempted by an astronomical sum, had accepted the request and locked him in a fortress under the pretext of imprisonment, stationing thousands of soldiers around him.
Not long after, the Second Finger was slaughtered, and the soldiers guarding him took heavy casualties as well.
According to the survivors' testimony, it had been a monster, or an army of blood—the stories were so wild and contradictory that the identity of whoever had massacred the Six Fingers was never uncovered.
With the Six Fingers gone, the remaining cells either merged with one another or were absorbed into other organizations, so it couldn't be said their influence had vanished entirely. But at the very least, the continent-spanning syndicate known as the Six Fingers was gone, and no criminal organization of comparable scale had emerged since.
It had been such a massive incident that the Empire had a detailed report on file. Ever-diligent Leila had read that report, and she had even tried to guess who could have possessed such terrifying power.
And now she was hearing the truth from a man she would never have expected—and the usually rigid Leila's expression went blank.
Rai rather liked the stupid look on her face, but he figured he'd said more than he should have and started watching her carefully. She snapped back to herself at once.
"Were those two really that strong?"
"At their peak, even I didn't want to fight them if they were together. Being a married couple, their coordination was ridiculous."
"And their current skill is as you just described, without a doubt?"
"Yeah. I swung for real, going for their necks, and they couldn't even block it. I was the one who stopped, actually—caught me off guard."
Leila watched Rai flail his arms and legs as he explained with ridiculous theatrics, and fell into thought.
Rai, reading the room in silence, waited for her to speak.
Anywhere Rai had been, the Empire might investigate, since his whereabouts would all come to light. Better to disclose it in advance than be flagged as a suspicious person in the middle of an inquiry—that was Rai's thinking, and he'd gotten the two of them to agree before sharing the information with Leila.
Besides, if she triggered the slave compulsion, he couldn't lie anyway.
After a long stretch of deliberation, Leila looked at Rai with cold eyes.
"Why tell me?"
"Because I trust you."
"Cut the crap and say it straight."
"It's true. We've already got all kinds of unsavory types showing up and stirring things, and now the infamous Lizard and Fallen Knight combo makes an appearance? Of course the military's going to put them under surveillance. Felt a bit harsh on a pair who threw everything away to retire. So I'm telling you, since you're someone I can actually talk to."
From everything he'd seen of Leila, Rai believed she would handle it wisely. She was a bit rigid, but she was sharp. The way she emphasized order and procedure was because that was the most efficient approach—not because she lacked the brains to change the rules when the situation called for it.
Leila, who hadn't expected to hear that they could actually talk, was briefly startled, then collected herself.
"And what do you get out of this? An accomplice for an escape?"
"I have no intention of escaping. They feed me, they house me, all I do is play with the kids, they pay me well, and there's no risk of getting fired. Where else am I going to find a gig this good? I'm putting down roots here."
Rai shrugged, then looked her straight in the eye again.
"It'll sound sappy to people of your generation, but this is the kind of romance you get between people who've crossed blades. If they're going to die, I'll be the one to kill them—I can't stand watching them suffer at someone else's hands. That's why I'm so beloved across all nations."
"..."
It was sappy, just as he'd said.
But the look in his eyes carried genuine feeling—he truly didn't want those two to be disturbed.
If only I'd been born a little earlier, I might have walked the same Era of Strife they did.
A pang of regret brushed through Leila's heart, and she shook her head, focusing on the matter at hand.
"So you want me to handle this information by myself?"
"How you handle it is up to you. How far up the chain you report it, or whether you sit on it alone—that's all your call. I won't get involved. I'm just a slave, after all~"
Watching a man who had once torn through the Era of Strife drop to his knees in a pose of surrender, Leila felt irritation surge up again at how flippant he was.
A man who possessed both the skill and the personality she hated to admit.
Even now, he was pulling this frivolous act because he already knew what she would decide. As if he were mocking her.
Her insides boiled, but it was better not to report it up the chain, just as he intended. This was something only she, Celenas, and the one she served needed to know.
However much their skills had declined, they were figures who had defined an era. Even past their prime, their mere existence was a considerable advantage. She just didn't like that things were unfolding the way he'd predicted.
Rai met Leila's axe-eyed glare and grinned.
"Fine. I'll handle it on my end. Can you arrange a meeting with them later?"
"Whyy~? What's the ruuush~?"
"...Drop that fucking way of talking before I just go public with the whole thing."
Looks like he'd succeeded in pissing her off—rough language burst from her mouth. Realizing he shouldn't push it any further, Rai shut up, and Leila continued.
"I'd like to see them sooner rather than later. I've heard enough on that subject. Attend to your actual duties."
"Yes. As a slave, what would you have me do?"
"Haa—are you even preparing for the exams?"
The semester was nearly over. Before they entered the midterm break, the academy students had to be evaluated on everything they'd worked for, and academy instructors always found themselves wrestling with the exams when this season rolled around.
This was a prestigious academy, so every single exam fed directly into an instructor's evaluation. Come exam time, the instructors were every bit as exhausted as the students.
Leila, already buried under both her military duties and academy work, had been losing her mind under the workload lately.
Among all the instructors at the academy, Rai was the only one out gallivanting around meeting old friends.
"Mana control I'll do with Touchdown. For tactics, I haven't thought of anything yet."
"You're seriously going to use that tabletop game?"
"There's no game that demands mana control like this one. We'll have the winners from each class gather for a postseason, even. Doesn't just hearing that get you fired up?"
Unable to comprehend this man's sensibilities, Leila looked at him with a complete lack of enthusiasm.
"Fine, never mind that. What about basic tactics?"
"That lecture is just too boring."
Watching an instructor declare his own lecture boring left Leila speechless. She let out a sigh, and Rai, looking thoroughly dejected, started to whine.
"All I do is read from the textbook. And more than half the textbook is just insulting me."
Come to think of it, it was only natural he wouldn't like the lecture, given his position.
In the Era of Strife, battles between the Keilen Kingdom and the Empire alone numbered in the dozens. Add in the smaller local engagements and it climbed into the hundreds.
The Empire had invested so heavily in its military, with an entire Tactics Division dedicated to research, that it had possessed unshakable confidence in warfare. And the one who had smashed that confidence to pieces was the Devil of All Nations—Rai himself.
Naturally, every battle against him had been endlessly analyzed and refined by the Tactics Division. How to counter his tactics, how to imitate them, condemnation, praise—countless opinions had been exchanged and compiled into books for future generations.
But because the books were written from the Empire's perspective, Rai's tactics were invariably assessed as underhanded and cunning. Some volumes even dismissed them as tactics no human being ought to associate with.
That opinion was especially common regarding the tactic of setting the Dukan Plains on fire with the attitude of if we're going down, we're all going down together.
There had been tactics so absurd they earned praise as well as criticism, but Rai could hardly be expected to enjoy reading books like that.
"The second I walk into that lecture, all anyone talks about is how to wreck Elliot's forces. How am I supposed to get excited about that?"
"From the Empire's standpoint, that's only natural."
"Right. Yeah... you've got a point."
Rai nodded—and a sly smile spread across his face. Leila, already worried about what he was about to pull, was met with a bright, sunny smile.
"Then I'll just give more points the better they wreck Elliot."
"..."
"That's what the Empire wants, isn't it? This'll be fun."
At Rai's offer to let the students pit their tactics against Elliot himself, Leila couldn't decide whether the academy students were lucky or cursed.