A Traitor, a Knight, and a Con Artist Differ by a Single Move
The Callion Empire had always been a country where conflicts large and small never ceased.
For ages, the empire had reigned as the master of the continent.
But a nation's external strength was never a measure of its internal peace.
Across a territory so vast it bordered on absurdity, the touch of a single emperor simply could not reach everywhere.
It followed, naturally, that the nobles' power would swell—and the nobles who had grown so powerful proceeded to compete over their own rice bowls in turn.
The result was territorial wars erupting here and there across the empire, and feuds big and small flaring up along the borders.
By the time the current emperor took the throne, the situation had escalated to the point where an outright civil war would have surprised no one.
It was the First Prince, newly invested as Crown Prince, who swept up the empire on the brink of ruin.
Having ascended to the position the moment he came of age, he managed to bring the nobility to heel in a matter of only a few years.
It could easily have spiraled into a power struggle between emperor and crown prince, but the current emperor was not a particularly greedy man.
The aging emperor was, in fact, delighted to watch his successor prove himself capable.
And the crown prince, for his part, served the emperor with utmost devotion—so power naturally concentrated in the hands of the two of them, and an unprecedented peace settled over the empire.
But that peace began to crack within ten years.
One day, a carrier hawk of unknown origin arrived bearing a message for the crown prince.
The note it delivered contained nothing but a date, a time, and a single location.
Sensing something deeply amiss, the emperor and crown prince stationed the knights they trusted most in ambush at that very place.
And on that day, at that hour, a man appeared at the location written on the note.
The Order shadowed him in secret, and their surveillance bore fruit: they confirmed a gathering of unidentified individuals holding covert meetings.
The knights quietly apprehended several of them.
The plan was interrogation—but the attempt ended in failure.
Every last one of the suspects taken into custody killed themselves.
Worse, once the organization realized it was being tracked, it began moving with even greater caution, and its tail grew harder than ever to catch.
They could not so much as guess at the identity of the anonymous informant, and time simply slipped away, helpless and unrecoverable.
Just as everything stagnated, nothing resolved, nothing moving forward at all…
He threw the stone.
Laios regarded Arendt with troubled eyes.
The wrecked, disheveled state he'd been in when thrown into the underground prison was nowhere to be found; he had returned to his usual pretty, composed countenance.
Those golden eyes, so difficult to read, held nothing but cold chill—utterly indifferent.
This had all begun, surely, for the purpose of purging a traitor within the knight order.
Even now, the situation differed little from the trial.
Arendt stood at the center of a meeting room set aside within the premises.
The door at his back was blocked by knights of the Third Order, while Laios and the other commanders sat facing him.
Behind them, too, knights stood at rigid attention in rows.
In other words, Arendt was currently all but surrounded, packed in tight on every side by armed men.
Anyone else would be feeling the pressure.
But Arendt showed no trace of it whatsoever.
He didn't even bother concealing his hostility toward the men ringing him in, and his insolently tilted posture practically radiated ease.
Kendrick von Leandros, Commander of the First Order, seemed to have reached a similar assessment.
After studying Arendt for a long while, Kendrick's mouth curled upward with a short, deflating puff of air.
"Well then. Can you keep your word? We've swallowed insults from you—being called fools, no less—and still attached your measly little life back on and propped you up in this room. If you don't prove worth all that, we'll have a problem."
"You'd better hope I do."
Arendt met him with a smile every bit as frosty, refusing to yield an inch.
"After all, that's the only way I can make up for even one of the stupid things I've done so far."
At the same moment, Kendrick's bearded face twitched almost imperceptibly.
The First Order knights standing behind him jerked their hands as if they'd draw their swords any instant.
"Why, you insolent little—"
"Enough."
One lazy lift of his hand settled them, and Kendrick laughed in sheer disbelief.
"Truly… I felt it at the trial as well, but you are audacious to the point of excess."
"Thank you for the compliment."
Arendt, if anything, puffed out his chest and answered with perfect shamelessness.
At that, Diana, who had been quietly observing the exchange, cut in with a shrug, severing the conversation between the two.
"Sir Kendrick, you'd best stop feeding on pointless banter. From the look of it, you're only going to get dragged under."
"Mmm. Perhaps I have grown old. Struggling to handle even one ill-mannered whelp."
Kendrick groaned the complaint aloud and scratched at his own head.
Arendt rolled only his eyes, sweeping his gaze over the people arrayed before him.
The knights, thoroughly worked up, were all glaring at him as though they'd tear him limb from limb on the spot.
Well, I have their attention.
Stationing sword-bearing knights before, behind, and beside him seemed to be their way of declaring that any foolhardy move would cost him his head immediately.
And then, the three commanders seated in the seats of honor directly ahead.
The three staring him down wore three different expressions.
Kendrick carried a subdued curiosity beneath his easygoing face; Diana held cautious vigilance behind an impassive gaze; and last of all… Laios wore complexity draped over a cold, unreadable mask.
Now it was time to live up to their expectations.
Starting with the first line that would seize every heart in the room.
Arendt tossed it out without warning.
"They're after the vault."
All three commanders' eyes went wide at once.
It meant the topic he'd produced had hooked successfully into their ears.
Laios, the first to recover his expression, asked as though confirming the fact.
"…The East Guild's vault, you mean."
"Is there anything else in this imperial capital worthy of being called a vault?"
The East Merchant Guild ranked among the empire's top five commercial syndicates, raking in enormous profits through distinctive ventures run out of the capital and other major cities.
That venture was the East Vault.
The vault operated on a simple model: it safeguarded jewels and valuables too risky to carry on one's person—gold coins, family heirlooms, and the like—for a storage fee.
Anything that hoards treasure becomes a natural target for thieves and bandits, but time and again, the East Vault had defended its clients' assets admirably.
It was the fruit of pouring staggering sums into hiring only the finest mercenaries.
Thanks to that, the vault's credibility soared to the very heavens, and the East Guild was enjoying unprecedented prosperity alongside it.
Kendrick, who had been blinking blankly for a moment, furrowed his brow.
"The vault, all of a sudden? I thought they'd gone quiet all this time."
"Gone quiet? Haha… don't tell me you actually thought—"
Arendt let loose an unmistakably mocking laugh.
Just as one affronted knight opened his mouth to snap at him, Arendt struck first.
"Do you perhaps recall the incident where a jeweler in the capital burned to the ground?"
"What?"
"The Cedric family's estate being ransacked clean by unidentified assailants, and… ah, right. There was also that affair where an old widow's entire inheritance passed straight into a con artist's hands."
Arendt went on, even counting the incidents off on his fingers.
The knights' expressions grew puzzled at the string of irrelevant-seeming tales.
Diana rested her chin on her hand and spoke.
"I remember. But what do those cases have in common with this one? The perpetrators were all apprehended, no less."
"They were. But what about the goods those men spirited away?"
At the sharp question fired straight back at her, Diana's mouth closed for a moment.
After a brief pause, she answered plainly.
"…They were never recovered."
"From those men's perspective, it wasn't a bad trade. They gave their lives for a grand cause they believed in, after all."
Arendt spoke with his arms crossed, posture slanted with insolence—reckless and loose as ever.
Yet somehow his voice alone rang out with an almost eerie clarity.
Clear enough that everyone in that room found themselves leaning in without meaning to.
"They flee first, deliver the treasure to their stronghold, get caught, and lose their heads—that's the pattern, I'd wager. What those men want is funding. The malcontents, the ones nursing grievances against how the empire is governed, gathering together and scheming to turn the world upside down. So at this point in time, their identity is…"
Arendt let the pause fall, smooth and deliberate.
The listeners tensed without realizing it.
At some point, everyone in the meeting room had begun hanging on his every word, waiting only for his lips to part again.
"I'd say we can define them as the Radical Rebels."
The air in the meeting room went cold and still.
Kendrick, who had been stroking his jaw, asked.
"And the day of the attack?"
"Tomorrow."
Arendt answered without a flicker of hesitation.
Into the silence where even breathing had ceased, Kendrick's groan of a sigh erupted.
"Hah…"
Ordinarily, this was a truth that would only have come to light after a vault stuffed with noble gold and treasures was picked clean, and after a village on the capital's outskirts had been razed to ash.
And in the aftermath, the knights would have had to fight a battle verging on open war against the occupants who'd made that seized village their base.
The casualties from that campaign had been considerable.
Not this time, though.
Because there was someone here who already knew how the story went.
Having finished his report, Arendt crossed his arms and waited for their response—as if to say, go on then, if any of you have something to say.
Diana, who had been watching him in silence, clicked her tongue softly.
Arendt von Eckhart is the criminal here. We're the ones who should be pressing him.
And yet he had seized control of the room's entire atmosphere in an instant.
Granted, none of the looks directed at Arendt could remotely be called friendly.
But…
No one can offer a single rebuttal.
Her eyes narrowed to fine slits.
Every one of his sneering words and gestures had dragged all attention onto him.
His voice, brimming with the conviction of his own rightness, made his claims impossible to doubt, and those cold, calculating eyes glinted as though they might swallow the room whole at any moment.
The same thing he did at the trial?
Back then, she had taken it for the last desperate thrashing of a man facing death.
But evidently, it hadn't been only that.
Diana let out a hollow laugh.
"…Truly absurd. What on earth did you do? Enemies would never hand over intelligence like that willingly."
"I slipped gold coins into their pockets and played the sympathetic ear. I've got my own plenty of grievances against His Majesty the Emperor, you see, so I asked them to let me in on it."
Diana's face stiffened almost imperceptibly.
"You dare speak words that sully His Majesty with that mouth?"
"Why? Was there some other way? Honestly—who knows how many civilians would have died if it weren't for me? Reacting too late, the knight order would have taken casualties too."
The knights' jaws dropped open—for a slightly different reason than the silence just before.
Arendt hammered the wedge in, bold as brass.
"If you want to accomplish something big, you have to know how to be a little dirty. Lick the enemy's heel if you have to, or pretend to."
"…Is that any kind of talk for a knight?"
"What about it? You cursed me as a traitor, and now you expect knightly virtue from me on top of it?"
At Kendrick's baffled question, Arendt simply shrugged.
Kendrick, mouth opening and closing as if struck speechless, soon broke into a hearty laugh and shook his head.
"Well… fine. I take your meaning. If I keep sparring with you, it'll be my uniform that gives out, so let's return to the matter at hand."
Kendrick's deep-green eyes sank back into seriousness.
"That place is not easily breached. If they're targeting it anyway, it means they have the forces to crack it. We won't have an easy time of it either—and with the attack tomorrow, we're short on time to prepare a suppression operation as it is."
"Why think about it so complicatedly?"
Arendt curled his lips into an insolent smile.
"Let's start with the standard play. We know where they'll strike, so we go first and wait for them."
"Ho. And after that?"
Kendrick asked as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
As if he were certain Arendt would have an answer ready.
Arendt caught it easily in return.
His curved lips settled into an even more impish line.
"As it happens, I have a very good idea."