The Baron's Unclaimed Legacy
"Suspicious items, you say?"
The branch manager's eyes went wide at the abrupt remark.
Arendt elaborated a bit further.
"For example…… items whose owners haven't come back to claim them in ages, and never paid the storage fees. Or things where nobody can even figure out what they're supposed to be used for. Something like that."
"Hmm……"
The branch manager fell into brief contemplation. Arendt waited patiently for his answer, and after a moment, the man's head bobbed in a nod.
"……There are. Items whose owners never came back for them."
Just as expected.
The corner of Arendt's mouth curled up ever so slightly.
Branch Manager Neumann added a caveat.
"However, nothing of unknown provenance, mind you. Each has its own story."
The manager glanced around once more, then dropped his voice even lower.
"They can't come back for them. You see, the gentleman who entrusted the items met with misfortune and passed away……"
"He passed away?"
When Arendt echoed the words, Neumann lowered his eyes, somewhat somber.
"It was several years ago now. I imagine you'd know of it, actually…… the death of Baron Porta."
"No, that's news to me."
"Really? Well, I suppose you are still young, Sir Arendt."
Neumann accepted this easily and nodded along.
"He originally ran a business here in the Imperial Capital, but as he grew older, he retired to a quiet mountain estate with a small retinue of household staff."
"And that's when he placed the items in the vault?"
"Yes, precisely. He said he intended to spend his remaining years in peace in the mountains…… but then, tragically, he was in an accident while traveling."
The accident had claimed the lives of the baron's entire household.
"And no one came looking for the items?"
"No. He had no children, and he lived with only his wife and a few maids. On the baroness's side, the family simply told us to dispose of everything as we saw fit."
Arendt nodded along, his mind already turning over the implications. The scenario had come into sharp focus. Outwardly he wore an expression of utmost gravity, but inside, his brain was running at full tilt.
Everything lines up perfectly.
Their goal hadn't been mere gold and treasure. A flicker of keen interest lit Arendt's eyes.
It was possible those items were really here.
"Could you show them to me, by any chance?"
"That's no trouble at all…… but might I ask why?"
"Oh, come now, we're hardly strangers at this point, are we? Besides, they're ownerless goods either way."
Arendt quirked his eyebrows playfully and jabbed Neumann in the side. His white fingers sank repeatedly into the man's thick layer of belly fat.
At that shameless display, the branch manager wore a briefly dumbfounded expression — but soon enough, he nodded readily enough.
"Well, fair point. I'll show you the way."
The two of them, as if by unspoken agreement, swept their eyes quickly around the room. In the middle of all the chaos, no one was paying the slightest attention to the pair quietly chatting in the corner.
Seizing the disorder, Arendt and Branch Manager Neumann slipped away unnoticed.
The manager led Arendt deep into the vault. Numbered iron doors lined the well-lit corridor in a neat row.
Arendt looked around. Unlike the outer halls, with their sculptures, ornaments, and chandeliers, this passage had nothing but a dark carpet spread across the floor.
"It would cause problems if anyone could hide in here, so we keep the corridor free of anything that might offer cover."
Neumann supplied the answer before Arendt could even voice the question. The walls, too, must have been built thick to resist any attempt at breaching them, because at some point the sounds from outside had faded away entirely.
Their footsteps finally stopped at one of the innermost rooms. The manager rummaged in his pocket, produced a key, and fitted it into the lock.
Clunk.
The moment the key slid home with a somewhat crude metallic sound, the edges of the door flashed and gleamed with light.
"Oh……"
"Biometric lock magic. We commissioned it specially from the Magic Tower. Only I and the certified staff can operate it."
Neumann added his explanation. After a short wait, a series of clicks and heavy clunks rang out, and the thick door swung open without a sound.
The moment Arendt and Neumann stepped inside, the dark interior brightened automatically. Clean marble flooring stretched out before them, along with display cases filling the entire spacious room, wall to wall.
It was like stepping into a museum. Nameless jewels, accessories dazzling enough to make one's eyes go round, ceremonial swords that looked expensive at a single glance — not a single item failed to catch the eye.
Even as he followed the manager deeper inside, Arendt couldn't tear his gaze from the treasures.
"This is our third-tier vault. Rather than assigning each client an independent vault, we store goods together at a lower price. The security is every bit as thorough, of course."
"Are the baron's things — the ones you mentioned — here too?"
"Yes. The family told us we were free to dispose of them, but that proved easier said than done."
Behind transparent glass, every manner of treasure caught the light and sparkled.
They walked a long way between the display cases before finally coming to a stop at the very back.
"Here we are."
The manager, leading the way, personally opened the glass pane of the display stand and stepped aside.
Arendt swallowed dryly and approached. The belongings of a man called Baron Porta were carefully arranged on red velvet.
A jewel box that looked ancient at a glance, a few rings and earrings — and then…… Arendt's eyes lit up with interest the moment he spotted the black leather gloves.
"Is something the matter?"
"Branch Manager, do you happen to know what these are?"
"I assumed they were simply a fine pair of gloves. Baron Porta said as much himself. Honestly, I did wonder why he'd bothered to entrust them here. Back then, though, the vault had only just opened, and we had plenty of people bringing things in out of sheer curiosity. I took these for much the same case."
That was exactly why disposing of them had proven so awkward. They hardly seemed likely to fetch a price at sale, yet actually throwing them away didn't sit right either. They had belonged to the deceased, after all.
Arendt let out a short sigh.
So to this man, they just look like ordinary items.
He turned his gaze back to the display stand. A pair of leather gloves with nothing remarkable about them beyond a certain age, along with a handful of equally antique-looking accessories.
To the eye, that was certainly all they were.
But Arendt was quite sure he couldn't call these things ordinary. For a moment, he couldn't even find the word for what he was feeling right now — and then it came to him.
Mana.
Faint, but unmistakably mana.
Branch Manager Neumann had never held a sword in his life. He was, even less, one of those rare mages an ordinary person might glimpse once in a lifetime. To his eyes, these items could only ever look like so many antiques.
Arendt, on the other hand — a promising young knight, no less — his body had sensed the mana before his mind caught up. Of course, even if something had struck him as odd, the manager never could have laid a hand on a client's treasured belongings, let alone sent them off for appraisal.
"May I touch them?"
"Yes, of course."
The manager agreed readily. Arendt hesitated a moment, then lifted the gloves with careful hands.
In that instant, he knew for certain.
The exact appearance described in the novel. The same size…… even the cool sensation at his fingertips.
This is it.
The true reason they had raided the vault. The item that, after falling into their hands, had visited nightmares upon the Knight Order.
They hadn't begun their activities in earnest until after the vault heist. Having seized an entire city, they styled themselves the "rebels." A wave of indiscriminate attacks followed, and the empire was eventually driven to the brink of civil war.
As battles raged across the empire, the rebels brought out their trump cards — and one of them was this very thing.
An artifact known as Frost-Tinged Touch.
A single gesture could freeze a dozen or more seasoned knights solid; entire villages that dared resist the rebels could be entombed in ice. It was anything but an ordinary pair of gloves.
Just what kind of man collects things like this? What on earth was Baron Porta doing?
Arendt swept his gaze over the other items with a faintly exasperated look. Even the earrings, bracelets, and necklaces gave off a hazy trace of mana.
Which meant that besides the gloves, most of what was stored here were artifacts. There was no chance such items had gathered here by accident — the baron must have collected them privately.
And knowing full well the chaos that would erupt if word got out that artifacts had slipped into circulation, Neumann had surely been told they were mere antiques before storing them away. After all, once something entered a private vault, no one could so much as approach it until the owner came to retrieve it personally.
"Sir Arendt? Is something wrong?"
"Ah…… no, nothing at all."
Having stood there for quite some time, Arendt drew a puzzled voice from the manager. He snapped back to himself, shook his head, and set the gloves down.
"Branch Manager, about these—"
"Are they dangerous?"
Arendt, who had been carefully laying the groundwork, found himself cut off mid-sentence.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I'm not blind, you know. If they were nothing, you wouldn't have asked to speak with me privately — and more to the point, there's another reason we never disposed of them."
Neumann turned to Arendt with an easy smile.
"Baron Porta's accident left quite a few questions unanswered. It simply wasn't the sort of thing to go chattering about, so we all kept our mouths shut."
This man is not one to take lightly after all.
Arendt put on a mildly rattled face.
"That was a rather sensible call. These are……"
"I won't hear it. I'll go on believing they're nothing more than moderately valuable antiques."
Neumann shut him down before he could finish. Arendt shrugged.
"Well, if that's how you want it."
"Besides, the family did say we were free to handle them as we pleased, so transferring them to you shouldn't pose any problem."
"……Let's be honest, shall we? You just don't want another mess like today's on your hands, do you?"
"Shall we call it…… killing several birds with one stone?"
Neumann burst into a good-natured laugh. It wasn't hard to see why. There had been an attack, Arendt had gone out of his way to dig up these items, and their owner had long since died in that accident.
Neumann was no fool, either — he'd roughly pieced together that this was what the attackers had been after. And pushing a step further, that carriage accident that killed Baron Porta might well have been their doing too.
For Arendt's part, none of this was a bad thing. Getting his hands on the item had been his goal all along.
Arendt dangled the gloves up again.
"I'll do that. For today, I'll just quietly take this one and come back for the rest later. If my subordinates came marching out of the vault carrying a treasure chest, the Knight Commanders wouldn't exactly stand by and watch."
"Please make it as soon as possible. I'd rather not be raided a second time."
"Our Commander's no fool either — he'll tighten up security around here for the time being. Don't worry yourself too much."
Arendt gave another shrug.
Capturing the attackers alive today was a substantial gain in itself. If he coaxed the prisoners gently enough to open their mouths, they might yet extract crucial intelligence about the enemy.
On top of that, he'd made the acquaintance of the East Vault's branch manager, and succeeded in smuggling out one of the weapons that would later become a genuine headache.
But that's only if things go well.
As Arendt made his way back toward the lobby with Neumann, his eyes cooled in an instant. If his suspicions were right, things were not about to unfold so smoothly.