Bull in the Barracks
CRASH! BANG!
Royal guards came storming into the otherwise peaceful 3rd Knight Order quarters.
The knights still inside jolted upright at the sudden commotion, eyes going wide with shock. Before they could even ask what was going on, one of the guards cried out in desperation.
"It's terrible! Sir Arendt von Eckhart has killed someone!"
"What?"
"He killed—killed people! Four of them, no less!"
Collective idiotic noises rippled through the remaining knights. The first among them to come to his senses was Laios.
"Arthur!"
"Y-yes, sir!"
Startled out of his wits, Arthur answered in a snap and moved like lightning. Following the guards back, what Arthur came face to face with was Arendt, locked in a standoff against an entire crowd of royal guards.
"I was the one who got attacked! Me!"
"This lunatic of a knight—I knew something like this would happen sooner or later!"
Arendt snarled at the guards who had him surrounded, while the guards brandished their weapons and shouted back menacingly. Taking in the scene, Arthur could feel himself growing faintly dizzy.
It's not like we're trying to catch some beast that escaped its pen.
Yet somehow the sight felt strangely familiar. Something he'd witnessed as a very young boy—a mad bull smashing through the fence at the village stable, while the adults ran around in a flap swearing they'd catch it. But once the beast was actually cornered, none of those grown men dared get close, terrified of taking a horn to the gut. Honestly, considering Arendt's usual conduct, the situation didn't seem all that different.
What snapped Arthur out of his idle reminiscing was the sound of Arendt's patience finally starting to run dry.
"Oh, come ON! If that's how it is, then just attack me already! Last man standing gets to tell the story!"
"Hey—hey, hey! Calm down!"
Arthur sprinted headlong into the crowd. Spotting Arthur's face, Arendt huffed and sheathed his sword. Up close, he didn't look entirely unscathed either. Blood was trailing in a lazy stream down his junior's forearm. Arthur clicked his tongue and flapped his hand in exasperation.
"Disperse, disperse! Deal with the bodies, throw these guys in a cell!"
"Sir? But Sir Arthur—!"
"You lot collect a salary and you still can't read a situation? Did all your training fall out of your head because all you do is stand guard duty? Do you not SEE the corpse holding a knife right there?"
Arthur delivered a solid kick to the backside of the guard who'd been trying to protest. Only then did the royal guards begin sheepishly putting their weapons away. Arthur barked one more time.
"And get moving already!"
Having successfully defused the situation, Arthur herded Arendt back to the quarters. Laios swatted away every other knight who came sniffing around out of curiosity and concern, then took only Arendt, Arthur, and Richt into his office.
Even while receiving first aid from Richt, Arendt spent a good while fuming and bristling, unable to swallow his indignation.
"You're telling ME something? A mad knight? To the guy who got ambushed?"
"Well... they just didn't know what they were looking at. Cut them some slack. To an ordinary person, it might look pretty alarming. You were disguised as a royal guard's attendant, weren't you?"
"What did I even do? Ow!"
Arthur offered his awkward consolation, and Arendt, glaring at him with eyes full of irritation, suddenly shrieked at the sharp sting shooting through his arm.
"That HURTS!"
"All done, so quit your whining."
Richt put away the remaining bandages and tossed Arendt a clean shirt. Arendt grumbled under his breath while hurriedly pulling it on. Watching him in silence, Laios finally spoke.
"Any other injuries. Will it hamper your movement?"
"I'm fine. It's not like anything's seriously wrong."
Arendt replied curtly as he fastened the buttons. In his original world, wounds like these would have meant a mad dash to the hospital for stitches. But in this world, humans tempered by mana operated on an entirely different level of physical resilience and recovery. On top of that, the bandages used on him were the kind that dramatically accelerated a mana user's natural healing. By tomorrow or the day after, there wouldn't be a trace left.
The real problem, of course, was the mana he'd forcibly dredged up from the pit of his stomach until he was ready to vomit—but that too was easily resolved. Arthur cracked open a recovery potion and plugged it straight into Arendt's mouth.
"So. What's all this chaos about?"
Arendt couldn't answer right away, busy swallowing the potion that had abruptly flooded into his mouth. After gulping down the sports-drink-flavored liquid, he held up the empty bottle and spoke.
"I was just out for a walk and heading back. When I turned down an empty path, those bastards jumped me out of nowhere. Every last one of them used an Invisibility Scroll, and they'd even set up a barrier."
"Anything suspicious come to mind?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?"
Everyone fell silent. Fair enough. Honestly, no one in their right mind would have answered 'no idea' under the current circumstances. Arthur clicked his tongue.
"This is what you get for fooling around all the time."
"Send assassins after a knight just because he was a bit cheeky, and I'd say the one acting outside the bounds of common sense is them. Anyway."
Arendt, mid-grumble, suddenly dropped his voice into a strange, pointed emphasis.
"The thing that needs our attention right now isn't that. Their Invisibility Scrolls. Do ordinary assassins normally carry those around?"
"No. Skilled assassins are masters of stealth to begin with, so they have no reason to bother. Against anyone who can handle mana, the things are useless."
Arendt had proven that firsthand, personally. Arthur let out a low groan of thought.
"And low-grade assassins couldn't afford to get their hands on one anyway. Unless a client supplied them directly, that is."
"Which a man of Marquis Grig's wealth could easily manage."
Richt, who had been quietly listening, added his piece.
"Perhaps the intent was never to kill him at all."
"Exactly. Assassins capable of infiltrating the imperial palace would be genuinely skilled fighters."
Arthur nodded.
"If you've got enough money to hand magic items to a whole squad of assassins, you could afford to hire one true master and still have change left over. If the marquis actually wanted him dead, that would've been the smarter choice."
In the end, it seemed safe to interpret Marquis Grig's goal not as killing Arendt, but as beating him to a pulp to break his spirit. From start to finish, it had been a move dripping with pure malice toward him.
Arendt scratched irritably at the back of his head.
"That aside—doesn't that method, using Invisibility Scrolls, remind you of something?"
"Yes. It's similar to how the ones who hit the East Vault operated."
Laios nodded. It might be coincidence, but that possibility deserved serious consideration. There were two routes through which Invisibility Scrolls were produced.
Arendt recalled the contents of the novel. Most magic items were produced by the Magic Tower, and Invisibility Scrolls were no exception. They were supplied to civilians for hunting and to nobility and the imperial family for military operations. Precisely because of that, they were strictly managed to keep them out of private crimes—serialized the moment they were made, with an exceedingly rigorous process governing everything from manufacture to distribution.
But that didn't mean they were impossible to obtain. Mages who committed crimes within the Magic Tower were expelled from the magical community, and those cast-outs began producing illegal scrolls and selling them off to assassin unions and bandit gangs. Items made that way were nearly impossible to trace. Few people could make them, which drove the price several times higher than ordinary scrolls—yet demand persisted steadily, for exactly that reason.
But it wasn't as though there was no information to be dug up at all. After a moment's thought, Laios spoke.
"The items confiscated during the East Vault incident—do we still have them?"
"They should still be pending disposal. We haven't identified the mastermind yet."
As Richt answered, Laios began issuing instructions with crisp precision.
"The Invisibility Scrolls they used should still be in evidence as well. Compare them against what today's attackers carried. Even spent ones retain some residual mana."
"Understood."
"And."
Once the discussion had wound down, Laios raised a new topic. Arendt had a rough idea of what was coming next.
"About the wounds left on the assassins."
Arthur and Richt both found themselves looking at Arendt without quite meaning to. In truth, more than anything else, this was the most important matter at hand. The assassins had been knocked unconscious with parts of their bodies frozen solid. It was nowhere near the season for ice, and calling it a battle scar left by Arendt, a swordsman, would have been far too strange.
Laios asked calmly.
"Was it you?"
"Obviously. Who else would it be?"
Arendt replied with a flat expression.
"I'll explain later. Explaining things is tiresome right now."
"...Very well."
After a brief pause, that was Laios's answer. Richt and Arthur each started to say something, then simply shut their mouths. Apparently they had no intention of pressing further.
The Commander has his suspicions, then.
Arendt had handed an artifact over directly—there was no way they hadn't grasped the situation by now. Arthur, who had fought Betchel alongside him, was the same. And Richt was hardly the type to push himself forward while those two kept quiet.
"I'll patch together some excuse and issue a gag order."
"Good. Carry on."
Richt spat out those words, gave a small bow as if to say he had his own duties to attend to, and left the office.
Thud.
The door closed, and Arthur changed the subject.
"A formal protest or lawsuit will be difficult, won't it, Commander?"
"Undoubtedly. But we must try regardless. The crime of turning a blade against a knight of His Majesty the Emperor is never a light one."
Laios replied with steel in his voice, as if steeling his own resolve. Arthur nodded along. A solemn, almost funereal air settled over the room.
The one who shattered that atmosphere was, of course, Arendt.
"Then shouldn't you start by locking up those royal guard bastards from earlier?"
"Would you shut up. Please."
Arthur growled through gritted teeth. But Arendt, as always, brushed him off cleanly and added with a shrug.
"If you're not going to do that, then don't bother talking about official complaints or lawsuits. Why waste effort on meaningless gestures?"
"Meaningless, you say?"
"You think torture would get those bastards to open their mouths? The marquis will just swear up and down he knew nothing about it. So leave them be."
Besides, Marquis Grig couldn't be allowed to end up in prison just yet. Laios, of course, had no way of knowing Arendt's thoughts, and his brow furrowed deeply.
"This is not something to simply let pass. Interrogating the assassins should yield information. Make them testify to who hired them, and—"
"Who said anything about letting it pass? We handle it ourselves."
Arendt cut Laios off mid-sentence. Laios, who had been speaking in complete earnestness, froze solid on the spot.
"All that talk of judgment under the law—there's no guarantee it'll actually land a blow, and you'd go through all that hassle and waiting for what? Why bother?"
A flicker of something cold passed through Arendt's golden eyes as he perched on the sofa. A grim murmur followed, almost to himself.
"Ignoring a fight someone walked all the way over to pick is just bad manners. I'll make sure he ends up wishing he were dead instead."
"..."
Laios, whose mouth had been opening and closing as he searched for a reply, gave up on finding one and let out an enormous sigh instead. After a short silence, he finally forced the words out.
"Arendt."
When Arendt looked up, Laios added flatly,
"Just don't do anything that gets you arrested."
"..."
At some point, the Commander's hand had slipped into his pocket and back out—and now it held a stomach medicine. Arendt blinked dumbly at it several times. Arthur's jaw dropped open.
"W-w-wait just a moment, Commander! Does that mean you're simply going to stand by and watch that lunatic run wild?"
"..."
"Commander, you can't! That guy doesn't know the meaning of the word 'moderation'!"
Laios remained utterly unmoved. When Arthur stared at him with hollow eyes, the Commander subtly averted his gaze and began a staring contest with the empty air.
While the two of them waged this tug-of-war that wasn't quite a tug-of-war, Arendt stole a glance at Laios. They hadn't pressed him about what he was hiding. They hadn't grown wary of him. Which meant, at the very least, that these people did not see him as a threat.
Put another way: he was trusted.
Untouched East Vault savings, plus Arthur the survivor... and now, a trusted traitor—Arendt von Eckhart. He'd suffered an unexpected misfortune, but on the whole, the story was heading in a not-unpleasant direction.
With a smile no one else could see, Arendt sank deep, deep into the sofa.