Chapter 7
Chapter 7
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: uly
Chapter: 6
Chapter Title: The Incompetent Minister Wants to Retire
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"I am utterly sick of it."
Succumbing to a lethargy so deep that even drawing felt like a chore, I incinerated every one of my sketches, rose from my seat, and retreated toward the somber archives of the Intelligence Department.
Being a repository of secrets, the place held no whimsical novels or colorful magazines like a common library, yet leafing through the ancient, dusty records offered a decent form of entertainment—and above all, it served as a perfect vessel to kill time.
That was the reason I made a habit of dropping by periodically, always ensuring I carried a pot of freshly brewed, steaming hot tea with me.
It was not for my own indulgence, it goes without saying.
Rather, it served as a small, silent consolation prize for the unfortunate soul tethered to that gloom.
"Ah, Minister..."
The very instant I stepped into the dim vault, I was greeted by the weary manager, Lisana Simon.
I wordlessly offered her the tea, noting that the dark hollows beneath her eyes had grown even more cavernous since our last encounter. She offered a frail, ghost-like smile, clearly radiating a quiet delight.
"Thank you... truly, you do not need to trouble yourself with this every time..."
If you possess the breath to utter such protests, you should first dedicate yourself to finding a moment of proper, restorative sleep.
She was a woman of formidable capability as a manager, but at the same time, she was a relentless and severe workaholic.
I had long since lost count of how many times I had arrived here on a whim only to find her collapsed and unconscious from sheer exhaustion.
I harbored a desperate urge to force her into a mandatory vacation so she might rest adequately, but I knew this workaholic would only break into tears if I did so.
She would wail with such intensity that she would be on the verge of passing out again, leaving me with no choice but to withhold her time off.
"What manner of records are you searching for on this day...?"
I could not bring myself to confess that I was there merely to shirk my duties in front of someone toiling so fervently, so I mumbled the name of a random, obscure document.
She immediately, and with mechanical precision, rattled off its exact location.
"That particular file resides in sector J-19..."
Lisana possessed a frighteningly perfect recall. In other words, she held the entirety of the vast Intelligence Department archives within the confines of her mind.
Every document's serial number, its precise position on the shelf, and its innermost contents were etched into her memory.
How was it that someone so brilliantly talented was relegated to managing dusty archives while a man like me held the title of Minister?
Ah, that is right. I was nothing more than a blatant parachute appointment.
As much as it wounded me to admit it, the sheer unfairness of the world hit home with a stinging clarity.
"But why that specific one...? Ah! S-sorry, I have spoken far out of turn!"
You are not the one who has overstepped—I am the one slacking off while you sacrifice yourself to your work. Not that I could ever voice such a thought aloud.
I proceeded to the sector she had indicated and, in a matter of moments, located the requested document.
To kill the hours as I had originally planned, I took the file to a secluded table and began to read. Soon thereafter, the faint, rhythmic sound of regular breathing reached my ears.
Turning toward the source of the sound, I discovered Lisana had passed out once more, face-down upon her cluttered desk.
"Suu... suu... mmph..."
She looked as though she had finally found a blissful, uninterrupted sanctuary in sleep.
I had not spiked her tea with sleeping pills or any such thing, yet she invariably drifted into slumber after consuming the tea I brought.
Whatever the underlying reason might be, as long as she was finally catching some much-needed rest, it could only be a good thing.
I harbored a desire to cover her, but since there were no blankets in sight, I shed my own jacket and draped it over her small frame before quietly resuming my reading.
A few hours later, when the time to quit finally rolled around, she still had not stirred from her sleep. I returned the documents to their original places, careful not to produce even a whisper of sound, and slipped out of the archives like a shadow.
"Nng...?"
Waking slowly from her deep nap, Lisana blinked dazedly as she surveyed the quiet room.
The sun had already descended below the horizon, and with the Minister gone, she found herself entirely alone within the archives.
But the jacket draped over her upper body—his personal jacket—still radiated a lingering, comforting warmth.
All those blankets she had secretly stashed away in the corners had finally paid off in her mind. Burying her face deep into the fabric of the jacket, Lisana inhaled a long, trembling breath.
"Sniiff... haaah... sniiff... haaah..."
Clutching the jacket with a desperate strength, her entire body trembled as she sniffed the garment with a fervent, almost hungry intensity.
The hotter her own body grew with emotion, the tighter her grip upon the fabric became.
"Minister..."
It was not as if she deliberately chose to doze off every time he visited.
She suffered from a chronic and severe insomnia, rarely finding the solace of sleep under any normal circumstances.
Yet, strangely and inexplicably, she always fell into a deep slumber with ease whenever the Minister was near.
At first, she had even harbored a suspicion that he had slipped potent sleeping pills into the tea to knock her out cold.
"But there were numerous times I fell asleep even before drinking the tea, so that theory could not possibly be correct..."
Normally, a superior would scold a subordinate for the sin of dozing off while on the clock. She would have had no defense if he had chosen to fire her on the spot.
But the Minister had never once uttered a word of blame or reprimand for her falling asleep.
Far from it—he invariably ensured his own jacket was draped over her before he made his quiet departure.
"Am I truly getting some form of special treatment...?"
As far as her knowledge went, no one else in the entire department had ever been treated with such tenderness by him.
It was not merely a product of her wishful thinking; his cold demeanor toward other staff and agents was starkly different from how he acted with her.
Imagining how profoundly happy she would be if he truly was favoring her, a shy smile crept onto Lisana's lips—
"You look as though you are enjoying yourself immensely, Lisana."
"Eek?!"
She jolted back in sheer horror, realizing that Celine had entered the archives and was now staring down at her with cold, ghostly eyes.
But Celine ignored her shock completely, reaching out her hand for the jacket still held in Lisana's arms.
"Hand it over at once. I shall return it to the Minister myself."
"N-no, I will take it back myself..."
"What did you just say?"
"...Here it is."
Utterly overwhelmed by Celine’s formidable and sharp presence, Lisana sullenly surrendered the jacket. Celine snatched it with a brisk motion and cast a suspicious glance around the silent archives.
"What manner of documents did the Minister come searching for today?"
"Um... the ancient records regarding the 'Parus Village Mass Disappearance Incident' from the Clamor Minor Kingdom two years ago..."
"Parus Village?"
It was a name that rang familiar to Celine’s ears as well.
It had occurred right at the dawn of her tenure as the Minister's secretary, making it stick firmly in her memory—a truly mysterious and chilling case.
It had not been a bandit raid or a common massacre; the entire population of a small village had vanished overnight without leaving a single trace behind.
It had even created minor waves of concern in foreign countries, the Empire included.
"Why that specific file, all of a sudden?"
"I-I do not know the reason..."
"Hmm. Did the Minister officially check it out?"
"N-no. There is no checkout record on the log, so he probably read it here and put it back in its place..."
Deciding to verify the matter for herself, Celine demanded the exact location of the file.
Sure enough, it was exactly where it belonged. She brought it to the table and skimmed the pages, but nothing immediately stood out to her eyes.
'Even back when the tragedy occurred, the Minister must have harbored a bad feeling about it—he dispatched elite agents himself.'
But even the Empire's finest Intelligence agents had failed to uncover the cause, and the case had eventually faded away, unresolved and forgotten.
'Why look into it again now? There must be a profound reason if it is the Minister who seeks it.'
Celine knew she could never hope to match the sheer depth of his thinking.
She knew she would never truly catch up no matter how hard she strived, so she at least vowed not to get in his way—to simply follow his lead.
'The Minister never engages in anything pointless or trivial. What is it? What am I failing to see?'
Lately, she had noticed he had been burning his personal documents with increasing frequency.
Instead of ordering her, his own secretary, to shred them, he performed the task himself—which could only mean they were top-secret matters.
She burned with a desire to know what they contained, but she knew she could not dare to ask him.
'I do not want to disappoint him in any way. I simply do not want to let the Minister down!'
Trembling with an intense and growing anxiety, Celine's eyes suddenly landed upon the name printed at the very top of the document.
Clamor Minor Kingdom, Parus Village Mass Disappearance Incident.
Clamor Minor Kingdom.
The very country where the Anti-Noble Faction had recently smuggled in and distributed 'Fairytale' from the capital.
Fairytale had first emerged into the world exactly two years ago.
"!"
Springing to her feet with a sudden epiphany, Celine rushed out of the archives at a breakneck pace.
Indeed, I am nothing more than a perfectly regular guy.
"Parus Village was originally a small, unremarkable hamlet with no notable products, but a few months before the residents vanished, the entire village had suddenly grown extraordinarily wealthy."
According to Celine’s deductions, the reason was that the entire population had become deeply involved in the production of 'Fairytale.'
Or at least, that was the most likely and logical explanation available.
"So the residents probably were not just vanished—they were systematically silenced. The grave problem is that this very same horror could happen here in the Empire."
Celine spread a detailed Imperial map upon the table with a sharp movement.
Several small, inconspicuous villages were marked with ominous red dots.
"Recently, we have seen villages within our Empire that grew rich overnight just like Parus—and we have already secured a Fairytale production site in one of them."
She raised her pen and decisively crossed out one of the circled villages with a large X.
"Even more shocking, it is not just limited to the Empire. We have picked up undeniable signs of the same phenomenon in the Labor Kingdom, the Palcitas Republic, the Fraus Holy Kingdom, and other nations."
Whoa. This was far larger than I ever imagined.
"This is a pattern of behavior we can only describe as the Clamor Minor Kingdom gone completely mad. If all of this comes to light, it is as good as declaring war on the entire world."
The sheer, terrifying scale of it had me fidgeting with my hands without even realizing what I was doing.
Celine was truly amazing, a league above the rest.
I had happened to read that very same document just recently and had not noticed a single suspicious thing about it.
But she had pieced together the grand, terrifying picture from mere scraps of scattered information.
Is this the insurmountable difference between a regular guy and a true genius?
I genuinely thought she was incredible, but her grim report was far from over.
"...Or there could be a mysterious third force using Clamor as nothing more than a convenient front..."
Oh, that could very well be the truth of it too.
I nodded along, trying to appear as though I was following her logic.
But so, what did she truly expect me to do about it?
Should I simply hand the Minister position over to her then and there?
I would welcome such a development with open arms.
"If a third force is indeed at play, we would need to launch a full-sweep investigation across the entire Empire to catch their tail. The Intelligence Department alone cannot possibly handle a task of this magnitude—we would need to petition His Majesty to mobilize the Imperial Army..."
Wait, what did she just say.
Ask His Majesty the Emperor directly?
Move the might of the Imperial Army?
Me? Erwin Barrmut?
Just the mere imagination of such a high-stakes scenario made me want to puke right there on the rug.
I froze up completely, fumbling with my fingers in a panic, but luckily, Celine offered another, less terrifying option.
"...That said, making such a massive fuss might tip them off and send the masterminds into hiding. It would be better to pursue them quietly with just our own forces for now."
I was saved! My life was spared!
I cannot help my reaction!
It is simply too scary for me!
Yeah, I am truly sorry for being such a cowardly Minister!
"We shall begin by launching a covert investigation around the village where Fairytale was originally produced."
Afraid she would say anything more even more daunting, I nodded frantically, shot to my feet, and bolted from the room at top speed.