Preparations for Opening
Midway through an ordinary day for the Velos City Guard.
"Kalian?"
"What?"
"Nothing, it's just—you've been looking happier lately."
His fellow guard said it with a faint smile. The words stopped my stride without my meaning it to, and I sank into thought.
"Do I really look that way?"
"I'd say it's more that something's come back into your eyes. And stand up straight for once, will you? It's exhausting just watching you slouch around."
"……"
I couldn't bring myself to answer. However badly I wanted to deny it, reality doesn't lie.
Two gold coins. The weight of a laborer's entire year of wages. I spent one of them, fully and completely, on Sophia's medicine. Once we switched from the cheap remedies to the expensive kind, my sister's condition began to steady, little by little, and she could breathe far more easily than before.
The other coin went toward the debt—and the moneylenders who had threatened us day after day changed their attitude overnight.
"You could've just paid up from the start."
After that single remark, they never pressed us again.
…All it took was two gold coins. The weight of the world had begun, ever so slightly, to shift.
And lately, whenever he had a spare moment, that businessman—the one called Eugene—had taken to visiting our home. He'd casually bring fruit or bread for Sophia, sit with her, keep her company. Officially, it was so no moneylender could kick up trouble while I was away at work.
At first, his kindness made me uncomfortable. Who do you think you are, butting into our lives like this?
But watching Sophia's laughter grow, watching her chatter to me about the conversations she'd had with Eugene like a little girl bursting with stories—there was no denying it anymore. Somewhere along the way, he had quietly rewoven the fabric of our daily lives.
Which was exactly why his offer kept circling back to me, refusing to leave.
Come work at a business called Bloom. Sell your charm, and make real money.
…But I'm a knight. A man sworn to carry a sword and uphold the Empire's law and honor. How could someone like me stray onto another path?
And yet. For all that I was a knight, I had never once managed to make Sophia smile the way that man did.
…Honor? What good is that to me now? Two measly gold coins turned our entire situation around.
Once again, Eugene's words surfaced in my memory.
—Honor? Of course it matters. But it will never put food on the table, and it won't make your life any richer. Standing in front of the family you love, what good is honor supposed to do you?
I pushed back at the time, but now I had no choice but to admit it. Yes. In the end, what matters is money. Not honor, but abundance. Protecting the people you love comes down to that, and nothing else.
I set down my sword sheath and rose from my seat. Then, without a moment's hesitation, I set my feet toward the place where that businessman could be found.
Kalian appeared without warning at the tavern where we'd been holed up.
"Is the offer you made back then still valid?"
He raised the very subject of Bloom's business that he had rejected so stubbornly—and with a deadly serious expression on his face, at that.
The sight of him nearly undid me. Ahh… so the last piece of the puzzle finally clicks into place.
But this was a time for business, not for laughing. Mustering every ounce of composure I owned, I answered with a smooth smile.
"Of course it's still valid. Though if you'd come much later, you'd have been unceremoniously struck from the list. In that sense, Kalian, you've made your decision with all the swiftness befitting a true knight."
"The name of knight doesn't matter much to me anymore."
"Oh ho… is that so?"
Kalian looked me dead in the eye, his gaze unwavering.
"I've learned, bone-deep, how terrifying a force money is. If it's for my sister's sake… if it means earning real money, I'll do anything."
At that answer, Louis, who had been standing nearby, widened his eyes and let out a low whistle.
"Whoa there, 'I'll do anything' is a scary thing to say, don't you think? Not that Bloom's the sort of place to make you do anything that frightening."
"Louis is right. And let me add my own thought, Kalian."
"…And what would that be?"
"Living for your sister's sake is noble, but every now and then, try living for yourself. Besides, I suspect Sophia might want exactly that for you more than anything."
At my words, Kalian's face clouded over into deep contemplation.
I clapped my hands together loudly, once, and broke the mood.
"In any case—welcome to Bloom. Things are about to get very busy for you, Kalian."
Kalian drew a long breath, then nodded.
"Yes. That is exactly what I hoped for."
With Kalian's recruitment settled, the matter of bringing in players was nearly resolved. That said, our numbers were still sorely lacking.
Right now it felt less like a staff roster and more like a jewelry box of collected aces, but in my experience, the more players, the better. That way, when an unexpected problem inevitably cropped up, there'd always be a substitute to throw into the breach. With that in mind, I was still weighing whether to run another recruitment drive… but for the first opening, five would do. I had a specific vision in mind, and anything beyond that would be surplus.
Separate from hiring, two problems remained on my list: training the players, and securing our customer base.
"Louis, how's your end of things coming along?"
"Hehe… I've been working the crowds hard, so worry not. Think of it as—everyone's practically already through the door."
"You're serious?"
"I am. And it's not just the women working at the Treasury—the nurses at the clinic in the commercial district look positively drowning in stress, too."
Well… of course they were. That's what being an office worker means, everywhere and always.
Stress begins the moment you drag yourself in early every morning. Stress from the work itself. Stress from placating your superiors. And if you go hunting for the one scrap of happiness in your day, you might find it in the time it takes to eat a meal?
Ordinarily, you'd vent all that stress on the weekend, or in whatever free hours you could scrape together… but this world has precious few amusements for blowing off steam.
Keep digging at that gap, and the road will open up on its own.
"Though I do think things would go easier with a real showstopper."
"A showstopper, huh…"
Louis's feedback gave me pause. He had a point—with a genuine showstopper in hand, we'd pull in customers far more effectively than a hundred rounds of empty sales talk ever could.
Then the answer was simple. All I had to do was maximize what would catch a woman's eye instantly—something Bloom could put front and center right this minute.
And to my mind, that was the players' very, very nice faces.
Honestly, I'd selected them primarily for charm, but when you're hiring players, a handsome face is simply the baseline you build on—there was no getting around it.
So, to showcase that even harder…
"Louis, call the players together. All of them."
"Sir? Every one of them?"
"Yes. A good idea just came to me."
All we had to do was capture those faces, exactly as they were, onto paper.
The Empire's technology was leagues ahead of other nations. And right now, we needed exactly that technology.
What technology, you ask? Since the plan was to show off the players' faces, the answer was obvious.
"Photography… that really is a fine idea."
Louis nodded after hearing me out. Where my old world had photography, this one had photography-craft.
Its quality paled next to modern photography, naturally—but for the purpose of recording a person's likeness and showing it to others, it was nothing short of revolutionary. Newspapers and magazines made their main use of it… but surely no law said we couldn't?
"In the end, what matters is what people see with their own eyes."
I crossed my arms and smiled.
"One photograph can hit harder than a hundred explanations. Keep telling a woman a man is 'gorgeous' and she'll only half believe you—but put his face in front of her, and she's convinced on the spot, isn't she?"
"Boss? I follow the logic, but—I'm mafia, you know?"
"And I'm still serving in the city guard, so having my face go public would be… a bit…"
Fion and Kalian both raised objections. But I had a plan for that, too.
"Fion, you'll wear a mask."
"A mask?"
"Yeah. Honestly, I think you'd be fine just showing off that brooding aura of yours. If anything, I figure the mask makes it look even more stylish."
"Hm. Well, if the Boss says so, so be it. Come to think of it, wearing a mask does make the whole problem rather moot."
With Fion squared away, I turned my eyes straight to Kalian.
"Kalian—your worry is the guard finding out, isn't it?"
"Yes. If something like that were to happen…"
Kalian couldn't finish the sentence. He only clenched his fist, hard.
He'd declared with his own mouth that his post as a knight no longer mattered much, and steeled himself for this—but at his core, Kalian was a knight, through and through, and honest to the bone. Of course he wanted to keep any rumor linking him to the guard from spreading.
And the thing was, I loved that about him. The negotiation between his nature as a knight and the work of a player—that two-sided tension was the very heart of Kalian's appeal.
I tapped the table lightly with my finger and grinned.
"No need to worry yourself sick. For one thing, we have no plans to run our sales pitch to the city guard anytime soon. And photography is all a matter of angles, anyway. Done right, a blurred silhouette can work as a selling point in itself."
Besides, I intended to apply a touch of retouching to Kalian's photo. And if it still felt wrong to him, I'd simply cut it—the other four players would deliver the showstopper on their own just fine.
Kalian, hearing all this, wore the look of a man quietly overwhelmed with gratitude. As if to say thank you for accommodating him.
Well… there was really no need to be moved. My concern, as ever, was purely business efficiency.
Looked at through that lens, keeping the players' heads in the right place was critically important. Think about it—if a man spends all his energy dreading being hunted down at his day job, his mind will inevitably be stretched in that direction. And a distracted man can hardly deliver his true worth as a player, can he?
In any case, photography-craft wasn't only about faces. The whole external image mattered in the end—which was how we came to visit a tailor shop.
"Now then, try on whatever catches your fancy, gentlemen—all of it."
Consider it, incidentally, a matter of upholding the players' dignity.