Mel-Repub, Senior
"So, the Bureau's still standing?"
Logan asked, his face considerably more relaxed than before. I answered like the green recruit I was supposed to be.
"That's classified—"
"I'm your senior by decades. Did those bastards not even tell you my name when they sent you in? Even retired as I am. Tsk."
Logan clicked his tongue and clamped a fresh cigar between his teeth. Judging from the atmosphere, he seemed to have left the Security Bureau quite a long time ago. Good news, that.
"May I ask how you knew?"
"How did I know? You reek of Republican blood, boy. It could only be the Bureau."
The Empire's front lines were, so to speak, a catch-all dumping ground. Demons, black mages, heretics, zealots—an assorted jumble of everything.
The Republicans were one of them, of course. The smell of them clung to the skin.
"And then there's how you tagged a Republican I couldn't even find. You've got too much fire for your own good. What do you think you're doing, running wild like that already? You caught a Republican the moment you walked in."
Logan wagged his cigar at me and launched into a lecture. I deliberately stiffened my face.
"You expect me to just watch when I spot a Republican?"
The skin around Logan's eyes crumpled all at once.
It was a smile. A smile that looked even more ferocious than a scowl.
"Sharp head on you, for the young generation. Good work. Republicans must be caught and crushed every time they show their faces. Leave them be and they'll crack the egg."
Logan nodded, looking thoroughly pleased. It seemed I'd scored fairly well.
"Heard about Unit 42?"
"...What, exactly, have you heard?"
"Those bastards didn't brief you on this either? Well, I suppose if they had, you'd never have passed the Chairwoman's screening. That old woman is such a damn hassle."
From Logan's grumbling, I could piece together at least some of the Bureau's situation.
So they minimize the information given to an infiltrator in order to slip past the Chairwoman's gaze.
The Chairwoman was an Archmage and a witch to boot. She was meticulous enough to hide a magic circle inside the guard employment exam itself.
Which was presumably why the Bureau kept its intel to a bare minimum when planting agents.
"But surely you were told about the Rifts."
"Yes. I've absorbed the general information."
"Rifts are dangerous places. Even professors go missing in them. But here's the thing. A single squad of ordinary guards enters a Rift, and only one goes missing—the rest all come back."
"Unit 42."
"Right, Unit 42. The entire squad got swallowed by the Rift, yet they lost just one man and returned unscathed."
The corner of Logan's mouth lifted. A sneer.
Returned unscathed from a Rift?
There were two ways out of a Rift.
The first was to capture the Anomaly and close the Rift.
In practice, this was the only method. The Anomaly was the Rift's heart, its key, its door. Without capturing it, there was no exit.
And yet, very rarely, there existed a way to leave without capturing the Anomaly.
By making a deal with it.
If you bargained with the Anomaly—the master of the Rift—you could walk out without ever subduing it. But the odds were so vanishingly slim it was a true once-in-a-lifetime scenario.
Still, I was certain this had been the latter case.
Because that's the only way to explain why the villains are all clustered in Unit 42.
Even before this, the concentration of villains in Unit 42 had been suspiciously rich. But if one of its members had struck a bargain with an Anomaly inside the Rift, it made perfect sense.
"It's Republican work. No doubt about it."
Logan's words snapped me out of my thoughts.
His eyes had widened—eyes anyone could see belonged to a paranoid. But Rifts were a kind of natural disaster. They could not be manufactured by human hands. Even the Republic couldn't meddle with a Rift itself.
Still, I chose not to say so, and instead gave him the words he wanted to hear.
"Those goddamn Republican bastards."
"Finally, someone who speaks my language."
I could practically feel Logan's affection meter climbing.
"First, melt into Unit 42. Republicans are suspicious by nature; approach them too eagerly and they'll only burrow deeper into hiding."
"Yes, understood."
"And especially—"
Logan pointed at me with a thick index finger, his eyes gleaming like a beast's.
"Keep a close watch on Evelyn."
At Logan naming Evelyn outright, I swallowed without meaning to. Apparently it read as a natural reaction, because Logan grinned.
"If you need backup, light this. A Sword Master will arrive before it burns out."
Logan rummaged through his coat and produced something—a cigar lacquered blue.
A cigar that summoned a Sword Master when lit. I snatched it from his hand without hesitation.
"Ah, one question, if I may."
"What is it?"
"When Unit 42 entered the Rift—was Milo with them?"
"He was. Apparently he lost his memory from some side effect of the Rift. Whether that's true, I couldn't say."
"It will be true."
"How can you be so sure?"
Milo doesn't have the intelligence to pull off an act—
I forcibly swallowed the answer and softened it into something presentable.
"A hunch."
"Hunches matter. They're signals from your unconscious. Verify Evelyn thoroughly, you hear me?"
Logan rose from his seat, then faced me and snapped a salute.
"Destroy Republicans."
"Destroy Republicans."
When I returned the motto, Logan smiled contentedly.
"I'll mop up anything moderate, so do your best out there."
His idea of "moderate" and mine were probably worlds apart, but I saw no reason to say so.
"Yes, sir! I'm counting on you, senior!"
He was a remarkably reassuring senior to have.
The moment Logan vanished, a thoroughly on-edge Milo crept over.
"S-so, what did he say? Did we get made? Ningiri?"
Apparently assuming Logan had come because of the mana-stone bombing at the entrance ceremony, Milo was practically vibrating with anxiety.
"No. We weren't made."
"Phew, phewww. Bastard nearly gave me a heart attack. I can't live like this, jumping at shadows."
Milo wiped the sweat off his forehead and sagged in relief.
"Well, that's what happens when you don't live clean."
"You little sh—"
"Sh?"
"Sh-one, sh-two, sh-three, sh-four?"
Milo mumbled, avoiding my eyes.
I headed back to the guard post with Milo, and the first thing to greet us was Hanswel, absolutely livid.
"Milo, I distinctly remember emphasizing it how many times. Never slack off on the job. And instead, you abandon your post entirely?"
Hanswel adjusted his glasses and fired off words like a submachine gun.
"I didn't slack, I—"
"Oh? Then what exactly were you doing?"
"Well—"
Milo glanced at me. When I shook my head, he clamped his mouth shut, the picture of misery.
Hanswel's eyes grew sharper still.
"Do you have any idea how short-staffed we were with you gone? Setting a poor example for the youngest is one thing, but you drag him along to shirk work too?!"
"...I apologize."
"Sorry in words every single day. This won't do. Milo—one-on-one focus interview. Now."
Thus dragged away, Milo didn't return until late in the evening.
When he did, he looked like a man fresh out of a torture chamber—dazed, hollow, even given to a dry, hacking cough.
"I never talked. Not till the end."
Milo declared it with grim resolve.
"Good job."
"Heh heh. They may tear my mouth open, but they'll never make me open it."
Milo beat his chest and strutted like a war hero.
Anyone watching would think he'd endured a hostile nation's cruelest interrogation. In reality, he'd done nothing but get nagged at. I was biting back laughter when Milo abruptly dropped his voice.
"So. What's your objective?"
An unprecedented wariness had flared to life in those eyes.
"Objective?"
"Why someone with your skills bothered to join the guard squad in the first place."
Milo shifted his weight, coiled and ready to lunge the instant I gave him cause.
I answered, subtly clenching my fist.
"Classified."
"Classified AGAIN! What is this nonsense!"
Milo exploded in fury. The way he was working himself up, I thought he wanted another round with me.
He didn't lunge.
"You don't seem like a bad guy, so I'll let it slide."
"Much appreciated."
"And there you go being sarcastic again—"
It wasn't sarcasm.
Removing Milo looked like it would be a genuine hassle.
"So? What's next?"
Milo asked in a resolute voice, somehow looking excited about it.
What's next, indeed.
The entrance ceremony was over now. In game terms, the intro had ended.
Just the intro, and already— absurd, but the real problem lay elsewhere.
A Rift opened, but there was no Erosion.
Rifts were passages connected to the Outer Gods. When one opened, its influence spilled onto the continent—a phenomenon called Erosion.
Yet this Rift had produced none. Proof it wasn't a true Rift. Even in Hard Mode, Erosion this early was impossible.
So why had an incomplete Rift opened at all—
Because of Evangeline, obviously.
An incomplete Rift required a medium. This time, the media had been the "Central Library" and "Evangeline."
And of the two, Evangeline mattered more. She was the protagonist, after all.
I'd assigned Andy to watch her, but it felt insufficient. Andy had never been surveillance specialist to begin with.
I needed a dedicated professional glued to Evangeline's side.
Just then, someone knocked at the door.
A sharp-featured handsome man—Ludrik of Unit 42. To me, far more familiar as the Spear Ghost.
"A report came in. During new student escort, did you refuse a student's request for a ride?"
Ludrik asked in a flat, toneless voice.
Raven, then.
While escorting the new students by carriage, I had blocked Raven from approaching Evangeline. Apparently he'd ratted me out for it.
"That damn smug-faced punk! He actually filed a report? He's not even a man—"
"Write a formal statement of apology, deliver it to the student, and obtain her signature."
Ludrik delivered the message and vanished on the spot. A living textbook of business, and nothing but business.
Well, that works out nicely, actually.
Raven was an assassin raised by the Full Moon—a man who might one day become the King of Assassins.
Perfect material for the dedicated surveillance I wanted on Evangeline.
To win Raven over, I needed time to speak with him alone. The trouble was, Raven was always surrounded by people. The only time he was truly alone was inside his dorm room.
And the problem was the dormitory's security.
It was a place where students lived, so the defenses were ferocious—absolutely carpeted with high-grade magic tools, with guards stationed thick on the ground. Even I would have found sneaking in difficult.
But right now, I had no need to sneak in at all.
I was the guard force assigned to that very security.
"Milo, tomorrow's duty is male dormitory security."
"Yes, sir. Wait, no! I've told you before—this is NOT how you divide up shifts!"
"Exactly. Tomorrow's duty is male dormitory security, then."
"I'm seriously dead. Hanswel will kill me."
"You won't die."
"I WILL die!"
Hanswel's one-on-one focus interviews must have been truly lethal, because Milo's resistance was fierce.
Time to dangle a carrot.
"In exchange, I'll teach you Aura."
"...You mean it?"
Milo's eyes began to sparkle like a boy's. I studied him carefully.
He must have received Aura as a Rift reward.
Rift rewards weren't granted to players alone. NPCs who cleared a Rift received them too—a sort of party mechanic.
However, NPCs had no quest window, so they couldn't select their rewards directly. The reward didn't vanish for it; it was auto-selected and banked internally, then absorbed naturally over time as they trained.
Because of this, most NPCs never even realized they'd been rewarded. They simply noticed that "growth came faster after a trip to a Rift."
But that method took far too long, and plenty was lost along the way.
There was, in fact, a faster method with no losses at all.
Forcing the absorption.
It was a rather tedious job, but I'd be dragging Milo around with me from here on anyway.
And I needed to calibrate the zero point on my students before I started teaching them, too.
"There are two ways. One is tedious, scholarly, and slow. The other is fast and effective."
"Obviously the fast and effective—"
"Figures. That's what I thought too."
"Hold on, why are you loosening your fist? No—why are you loosening your FIST?!"
Sensing that something was off, Milo shouted in alarm.
I didn't bother explaining in detail.
That way was just too tedious and scholarly, after all.
Instead, I chose the clean and efficient route.
"Just take the hit."
Milo, hands raised in surrender, was absolutely delighted.