A Very Unorthodox Rescue
"Ah, why are you hitting me? Ow!"
"Are you out of your damn mind? If you want to die, die alone—why drag the rest of us into it?"
Glenn seized Arendt by the collar and shook him like a rattle, but not a single soul stepped in to stop him. Even Richt quietly averted his eyes, doing nothing but heaving sigh after sigh.
In the end, Arendt had no choice but to wriggle free of his senior's grip by his own power.
Shaking Glenn off in one sharp motion, Arendt brushed down his clothes and let his irritation burst out.
"Ugh, seriously. I go out and put in all that hard work, and this is the treatment I get?"
"Hard work? HARD WORK? What exactly did you do to make everything turn into this?"
"What exactly happened to what, now?"
Arendt shrugged with shameless ease.
"Whatever the process may have been, I'd say the results are pretty perfect, wouldn't you?"
"……"
The knights, who had been growling like wild dogs a moment before, went slack-jawed in an instant.
"By now they'll be in an absolute frenzy trying to find the fakes among all those gold coins. And once word of that leaks out, this place is finished too."
What if someone carrying that money got caught by the Security Department in another territory, and let slip that the counterfeit coins came from here?
For those running the gambling den, that would be nothing short of a catastrophe.
The situation outside was plain to see without even bothering to imagine it.
The mercenaries hired by the den would be sweating buckets right about now,堵 no—scrambling to seal the entrances and control who came in and out. Depending on how desperate things got, they might even have to search the customers' money pouches directly. And the furious protests from the customers that would inevitably follow? Those would be entirely their problem to deal with too.
"Their security over here is probably stretched thin by now…… they'll have a few men left, sure, but that's nothing you seniors can't handle."
In other words, they had slipped completely out of the enemy's surveillance net.
And then—
"Also, I'd say this place was more than enough to accomplish our objective, wouldn't you?"
At that single remark, delivered with a curious weight, the knights snapped back to their senses.
This was a pitch-black underground prison. The kind of dank, miserable dungeon where people did the locking up—never the kind anyone had ever imagined being locked in themselves.
The front was sealed with an iron door fitted with bars, and flimsy walls, gnawed here and there by rats, closed off the space on all sides.
And from beyond them now came a stir of movement none of them had noticed until this moment. Saif, for his part, just rolled his eyes around in bewilderment.
"……Don't tell me. For real?"
"……There's been a commotion for a while now. Could someone else have been brought in?"
As if that one murmur had been a signal, a feeble voice drifted over from beyond the cell.
That was the beginning.
"Is something happening out there?"
"Surely there isn't a fight breaking out……?"
Frightened voices began to seep out from all directions.
Arendt allowed the corner of his mouth to curl up slightly, as if to say, there, see?
"What did I tell you? Objective accomplished."
Why is this actually working?
How on earth does a method like this work?
Confronted with a reality they couldn't believe, the knights could only gape stupidly and glance around in a panic. Only Arthur and Richt—familiar, if that was the word, with situations like this—looked upon them with something like pity.
The sympathetic glance Saif, who had already been thoroughly broken by Arendt once before, threw their way was a bonus.
Meanwhile, the urgent voices beyond the cell kept coming.
"Could it be…… you're from outside? What's the situation like?"
"Situation? Not all that different from when you lot got thoroughly bamboozled by those scumbags and thrown in here. We did give their backsides a good kick on the way, so comfort yourselves with that for now."
Arendt answered without missing a beat, then tilted his head slightly.
"It'd be better for everyone if we discussed the details face to face. We need to find out whether the person we're looking for is in here, too."
"Face to face? How?"
"What's so difficult about it?"
When Arthur asked with a faint crease between his brows, Arendt simply tipped his head toward the wall.
"Surely you're not going to tell me you can't break through a flimsy wall like that?"
"……"
The knights' faces curdled.
"If that's too much trouble, feel free to while away the time until they come back for you."
But as had been true throughout this entire journey, their options were not exactly plentiful.
In the end, the knights chose to spit curses and roll up their sleeves.
They'd had their weapons and swords confiscated when they were dragged in, but honestly, that wasn't much of a problem.
A prison built to hold violent criminals would have been constructed a good deal more sturdily. This place, however, existed to cage debtors drowned in gambling losses.
A wall of a slapdash prison thrown up with partition boards across a wide open space could be smashed through easily enough with a few strikes infused with mana.
Despite the thunderous boom, boom! of the assault, there was no reaction from outside the cells. Just as Arendt had said, the guards had apparently rushed off to deal with the chaos above.
For them, that was a stroke of good fortune either way.
When one wall came crashing down in a heap, the gaunt man imprisoned in the chamber beyond blinked at them in sheer disbelief.
"Wha— no. This is……?"
"Are you injured anywhere?"
The sight of the wall that had held him captive for so long collapsing so anticlimactically was absurd, but he nodded all the same.
The bare-knuckled rescue operation carried on for quite a while after that, until at last…… even the final wall came down.
"This is the first time in my life I've ever done a job so brainlessly……"
Glenn muttered gloomily, staring down at his dust-caked hands.
Sure, the results were good, just like that bastard Arendt said. But was this really how things should be done?
Yet whatever his misgivings, watching the people shuffle in and gather in the largest chamber, Glenn found he no longer had the heart to blame the little wretch. Without his radical cure, it would have taken them far, far longer to track down everyone locked away in here.
"Twelve in total. I believe that's all of them."
Having gathered the people in one place and counted every head, Arthur reported to Richt. The huddled group looked up at the knights with anxious eyes.
Richt made a low, groaning sound.
"Fewer than I expected."
"Anyone not here was probably shipped off to forced labor elsewhere."
That was when Saif, who had been keeping suspiciously quiet, slithered into the conversation.
"Forced labor?"
"Yes. Usually, when people can't pay off their debts, that's how they're made to work the money back."
"……That man's right. Anyone who could still move got dragged outside."
A boy who had been cautiously watching the exchange finally spoke up. He looked to be barely in his mid-teens, and he had his even younger sister clutched tight against his side.
Arendt's brow knitted.
"Why is a kid in here?"
"Father ran up a debt…… so we were locked up in his place. They said they dragged him off to some quarry."
The children were hostages, held so their father couldn't run.
The knights' faces hardened. Judging by appearances, the others were in much the same straits.
Even at a glance, several elderly people who looked like they'd never touched dice in their lives were mixed in, and the rest had apparently come along with companions to gamble, only to be imprisoned here while their friends were sent off to the labor site.
Tsk. Clicking his tongue, Arendt addressed them.
"So—is there a priest called Declan here? Any of you seen him?"
"He was taken elsewhere too."
This time the answer came from an old man in shabby clothes, slumped where he sat.
"Thought he was just some common young fellow come to gamble like the rest of us. Only found out later he was a priest. He said prayers for us, and then—said he couldn't bring disgrace on the temple, and insisted on sending himself to the labor camp in our stead."
"Sir, do you happen to know where that camp is?"
"I don't rightly know…… but I'd wager it's the same place they took my son."
The old man shook his head slowly at Richt's question.
Then the man who had asked the very first question raised a hand hesitantly.
"But—who are you people, exactly? Did the Security Department send you to rescue us?"
"No, we got captured too."
At the words that tumbled out of Arendt's mouth without a flicker of hesitation, the entire room fell speechless.
Even the knights, come to think of it.
The man, who had been gaping and flapping his lips, finally collected himself enough to stammer out a question.
"What? But then how did you…… break the prison so easily……?"
"What, you got a complaint? Is there some law that says people who can smash through prisons aren't allowed to gamble?"
"……"
There was clearly nothing left to say to that.
Once the room had gone quiet, Arthur heaved a deep sigh and scratched his head.
"That one's got a filthy mouth, but he won't do anything that'll get you hurt, so rest easy."
In any case, the plan to conceal their identities as a precaution had already been relayed to the rest of the group. So long as these people weren't fools, they'd understood the unspoken message: ask no further.
With the situation settled, Richt spoke up again.
"Is there anyone who knows the location of the labor camp?"
"It's a quarry, about three days' journey from here."
A pale-faced young man raised one hand as he murmured the answer.
"I know because I was taken there and back."
"Then why are you here?"
"I collapsed while working…… so I was swapped out with someone from my group."
Arendt nodded absently.
"Figures. A quarry shouldn't be that hard to find, then. What about the Communication Crystal Ball?"
"Thankfully they didn't take this one. The weapons were all confiscated, though."
They had departed the Imperial Palace with a day's buffer, which meant Laios and his party should have been drawing near by now.
Richt drew out the Communication Crystal Ball he had kept carefully hidden against his chest.
The crystal orb emerged into the dim light of the prison. Cracked quite spectacularly, right down the middle.
"Huh?"
The strangled sound escaped Richt's own lips. Every knight froze solid. Even Arendt, caught off guard by a development he hadn't predicted, went wide-eyed.
"……"
A hellish silence descended.
"Wh-why is it in that state?"
"……Come to think of it, I did knock into a wall earlier."
Richt managed to answer Ryder's halting question.
Apparently it had shattered during all that chaos.
They had been dragged along by the collar without so much as a single proper act of resistance, after all.
Ordinarily, shaking off men like that would have been no trouble at all. But once they'd grasped Arendt's intent, they'd had no choice but to surrender their bodies meekly to the enemy's rough handling.
With that, no one could bring themselves to speak.
They'd found the missing people and manufactured a pretext to storm the place with forged coins. All that remained, they'd assumed, was to call in the knights outside and wait to join forces.
"We're screwed."
Arthur said flatly what everyone was thinking.
The imprisoned people, too, seemed to sense that something had gone badly wrong, and began exchanging uneasy glances.
Saif, his face drained white, strode up to Richt.
"Th-then what do we do?"
But what answer was there to possibly give him?
The eyes of the knights fixed on Richt slowly began to fill with disrespect.
You couldn't even keep track of one crystal ball? Under the weight of those reproachful stares, Richt felt the sting of injustice. Who could have seen this coming? It had all happened because Arendt went on a rampage.
With more than a little resentment, Richt shot a sidelong glance at the cursed apprentice knight—the instigator of it all.
Arendt, arms crossed, had been staring at the floor for a good while. At last, he spoke.
"Mister Saif. You know the lay of the land around here at least, don't you?"
Saif, suddenly singled out, nodded along in a daze.
Eyes half hopeful, half fearful, all converged on Arendt.
And Arendt did not disappoint them.
"Well, no helping it now. We punch straight through."