Dobby Is Free

A week had passed since the monster air raid began.

Seoul was finally starting to shake free of the attack’s shadow and prepare for reconstruction.

Countless people had died. The damage had been far worse this time because the monsters had seized the base stations and twisted every line of external communication to their liking.

The nation grieved. Then it turned its fury on the demonkin who had orchestrated the whole thing.

To soothe the angry public, the government rolled out a propaganda campaign centered on Usa—the hero officially credited with single-handedly subduing the demonkin.

Was I bitter that they had stolen my credit?

Not really. The under-the-table rewards had been generous enough, and the idea of every citizen in the country knowing my face held zero appeal. I hadn’t invented the alias Lucifer for fun; having my real face plastered everywhere would have done me no good at all. From the government’s side, they could hardly parade a complete stranger of a little girl and an A-class villain as national heroes either.

In any case, even after Usa left, the government continued to funnel quiet support my way. The part I liked best was the research funding they set aside for me.

Back when I had been developing Darwin with Yekaterina’s backing, I had already poured hundreds of billions into the project and still come up short in a dozen places. Research institutes are money-eating hippos; a single trivial experiment could burn through a fortune an ordinary person would need years to save. The cost of building Darwin itself had been downright terrifying.

But the government just cracked the window open a little.

Thanks to that, I was able to expand the research facility itself on a massive scale.

The government’s eyes on me are a bit of a nuisance, though…

It seemed the National Intelligence Service had stationed ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠agents near me. Being watched by the very organization I had once belonged to felt strangely full-circle—though of course the details of this world’s NIS were quite different from the one I had known.

All in all, it was deeply moving.

Still… isn’t that a little much?

I spotted the people on the opposite building watching me through telescopes. An ordinary person would never have noticed them at that distance, but with Darwin synchronized to me they stood out as clearly as if they were standing right in front of me.

“Haa… Laplace.”

“Do something about those guys.”

The lights in the opposite building went out, plunging the watchers into temporary darkness. At the same time the wireless curtains automatically lowered, cutting off their line of sight.

“That’s a little better.”

I sat down and started thinking about what I should do next.

The government has already finished digging into my identity, right?

When Usa had shown up, the demonkin and I had been in the middle of wrapping up our fight. Even if they could only guess at the full extent of my combat power, figuring out who I was would have been child’s play. They might never uncover the second identity of Lucifer, but learning that I was a slave belonging to the Wittelsbach family would have been easy.

Under normal circumstances I would have had to return to the Wittelsbach estate…

The timing had simply overlapped.

None of the other details really mattered. Everything except my name had been slapped together from whatever seemed convenient. I couldn’t even remember who my parents had been, so I had simply taken the surname of the Wittelsbach family that had owned me. I had no idea what my actual birthday was either. Roughly fifteen or sixteen years old, so I had picked a month and day in the same year as Julia and made it mine. That date happened to be my birthday from my previous life, so maybe it held a little meaning after all.

What mattered was that the ID itself had changed.

I had heard it was a product of magical engineering that applied real-time status changes to the card through magical processing, but this was the first time I had actually watched my own status rewrite itself. How often does anyone get to see the identity they were given rewrite itself while they are still alive? For most people the most dramatic update they ever see is a change of address or an extension of the card’s ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠validity period.

I had experienced something a little more unusual than that.

Citizen of the Republic of Korea…

Until now I had been a non-citizen. I might have owned property and held basic rights, but I had lacked the single most important thing: citizenship. If my status had returned to that of a full citizen, there could be only one ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠reason.

The Wittelsbach family must have paid out my final wages.

They had cleared every last bit of debt I still carried and released me from slavery. There was no longer any need—or any reason—to go back to them.

…

Except for that brief stretch after my reincarnation when I had been sold at auction, I had spent ten full years living as a servant of the Wittelsbach household. Now that freedom had finally been handed to me, I had no idea what to do with it.

Should I go see them one more time…?

They would be wondering whether I was alive or dead. For all I knew they might already have held a funeral for me.

“Huh…?”

In that moment my eyes landed on a photograph hanging in a frame. It showed the main gate of Sirius Academy—something I had seen countless times in the media—along with a group of people I didn’t recognize.

Come to think of it, I had promised myself that once I was free of slavery I would enroll at Sirius Academy.

Julia said she was going there too…

And Iris, the girl I was secretly sponsoring under the name Lucifer, was also scheduled to take the entrance exam for Sirius Academy.

“…Meeting them at the academy might not be so bad.”

I had been reborn into a world I hadn’t even known existed, and so far all I had done was housework, study for the academy entrance exams, and clean up commissions on the dark web where every kind of scumbag thrived. Honestly, until the day I actually enrolled, I wanted to rest a little. Travel. Do the things I felt like doing.

No matter how calmly I act, the mental shock from this last incident must have been bigger than I thought…

I had seen plenty of people die, but they had all been mercenaries, heroes, or villains. Not ordinary civilians who knew nothing. Now I understood why every government in the world forbade heroes from involving civilians.

Yeah… Julia won’t die just because I’m not there, the debt is paid, and it’s only a year of separation. Until I enter the academy I’ll just do whatever I feel like.

Things like building ways to strengthen Laplace’s capabilities, or gathering specimens with genes Darwin might want to absorb. It felt less like rest and more like inventing new work for myself, but it was work I wanted to do.

“Kind of like collecting hidden pieces… All right. First up—rare creatures?”

And so began a rest that was not really a rest, lasting until the day I entered the academy.

While Seo-hyun used the Leviathan under Yekaterina’s control to gather every rare creature she could get her hands on, a new hero ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠rose to become the talk of the town.

The figure suddenly celebrated as a hidden hero was neither the S-class hero Usa nor any of the other A-class heroes. Astonishingly, it was a single hacker.

Once the cleanup was finished, the government had investigated why the casualty count from this particular invasion had been so unusually high. The answer, of course, was the seizure of the base stations. The appearance of a new type of monster that could freely manipulate communication devices had filled people with terror.

Monsters normally destroyed every electronic device in their vicinity; the idea that one could actually use electronics had always been considered impossible. That was why radio-based communication had remained a purely human domain. But if monsters like the ones that had just appeared ever showed up in large numbers, they could seize the entire communications network—and some experts even warned that a monster capable of using nuclear weapons, humanity’s last resort, might one day emerge.

Even setting that nightmare scenario aside, if a monster of the kind that had just appeared simply used a commander’s electronics to issue false orders to subordinate units, an entire city could be reduced to ashes in an instant.

Yet while investigators were still looking into the base-station-seizing monsters, word spread that someone had waged cyber warfare against them and drastically reduced the damage. Using satellite communications, that someone had warned people that the base stations had been compromised and had routed traffic around the central stations so that proper communication could resume. On top of that, the same person had remotely taken control of unmanned turrets that had stopped functioning and used them to help drive back the demonkin—an achievement no one else had managed.

When it became clear that the unidentified hacker who had fought a cyber war against monsters while the government itself was paralyzed belonged to neither government nor corporation, the public went wild over the birth of a new hero. People demonstrated, demanding that the nation recruit the mysterious hacker at any price; the demand even climbed onto the national petition board and racked up an impressive number of votes.

Government-affiliated hackers failed to produce the results the public wanted. Just as the identity of the hacker who had helped the citizens was beginning to fade into regretful obscurity, one ability user succeeded in guessing who it was.

People who had never even heard the name Lucifer listened to the testimonies of those who remembered and to the reasonably solid evidence presented, and they nodded. In a single stroke, Lucifer—who until then had been famous only among specialists—was etched into the public mind as a genius hacker who worked in the shadows.