The Demanding Customer
—Oh, shall I calculate the exact number of days that have passed?(￣▽￣)
‘No, that won’t be necessary. Just stay quiet.’
Cold sweat trickled down the nape of my neck from the sheer tension. To be perfectly honest, what I was pulling right now was the definition of being an obnoxious, entitled customer.
How long had it even been? After receiving the token card from Lisianthus as payment for our deal, less than a week had passed before I met Bibi and fell into a coma. Even after finally regaining consciousness, I had been confined to the Empress’s palace under tight security to keep the Emperor and his consort from playing any underhanded tricks. On top of that, with Duke Castrein’s protection wrapped around me, it was only natural that Hecate’s Tavern would find it difficult to approach me rashly. A prospective client who was supposed to be living a quiet life had suddenly become the hottest topic in the empire; anyone with half a brain would know better than to make contact uninvited.
However!
They were the ones who originally promised to seek me out within a week, meaning they were the ones who broke the terms of our agreement first. I intended to seize upon that excuse to squeeze out every extra advantage I could.
Even with my mind made up, my modest, ordinary conscience pricked at me. Hush, conscience, sit down for a minute. Right now, I am an entitled nightmare! My soul is that of a boomer demanding to see the manager!
“I mean, really! If your client is essentially trapped in the imperial palace like a caged parrot, shouldn’t you naturally keep an eye out for an opening to make contact? Huh? Forcing a paying customer to travel all the way to this distant branch office instead!”
Beneath her veil, the woman’s lips twitched faintly. Beside her, the tavern employee wore an expression of sheer disbelief.
“Look at this! Just look at it!” I jabbed an accusatory finger in the air. “This is a commission voucher for Hecate’s Tavern—a VIP pass, no less! I tried to submit a request at the main branch in the capital, and it still hasn’t been resolved!”
I pointed emphatically around the room. Debbie’s eyes went wide as saucers as she watched me throw a fit worthy of a belligerent drunkard.
“I am imperial royalty, you know! Do you take me lightly just because I’m young? If I hadn’t come looking for you myself, you would’ve taken your advance payment and simply vanished into thin air! That’s outright theft! Is this any way to run a business?!”
“…So,” the woman began, her voice dripping with incredulity, “our caged-parrot customer traveled all the way out here just to commission a request from us?”
Completely undeterred by her exasperation, I brazenly held my ground. “Ahem! That’s right!”
Throwing around one’s status to browbeat the staff at Hecate’s Tavern was usually a fool’s errand. This was a place where even high-ranking nobles dared not throw their weight around. In truth, even with a VIP token in hand, shrieking at the top of my lungs here was utterly reckless. The voucher permitted a single high-priority request, but there were clear boundaries.
‘Its limitations were always very strict.’
True to their nature as an intelligence brokerage, their commissions were strictly meant for locating or verifying information. Originally, I had planned to gather a modest piece of intel and call it a day. But who could have predicted that a massive bomb would go off during the Offering Festival, which was supposed to have been entirely peaceful?
The woman muttered under her breath, shaking her head in amusement. “When that little client pleaded with us to send someone out on a private dispatch, I wondered what on earth was going on, but to think it was this…”
‘Little client?’
My ears perked up instantly. The only person who fit the description of a ‘little client’ was…
‘…Don’t tell me, Bibi?’
I swallowed hard. Had our precious little Bibi already extended her reach into Hecate’s Tavern?
“Very well,” the woman said, leaning back. “Shall we hear what kind of request warrants such a grand spectacle, Your Highness?”
“Hmph. Well.” I cleared my throat with a dry cough and unfastened the Emoticon Sword from my waist. As I unwrapped the cloth binding it, the radiant hilt and blade revealed themselves in all their dazzling glory.
—Huh? Master?( ˈ ∘ ˈ )? Why are you exposing my pure, beautiful, and noble body to a complete stranger?
Ignoring the blade’s babbling, I addressed the woman. “This entire region is remarkably prosperous, isn’t it? The markets are flourishing, and so many goods change hands daily that people say no single person could track them all.”
“Did you come to make a request, or did you come to test our capabilities?”
Though her veil concealed everything above her jawline, it was obvious she was an extraordinary beauty. Her tone held a feigned sharpness, though she did not genuinely appear offended. If I were in her shoes, watching a powerless princess who had recently been causing scenes everywhere show up, playing dumb, and talking absolute nonsense, I would also want to poke around and see what she was really after.
It had been a brief exchange, but one thing was abundantly clear: Hecate’s Tavern possessed the capability to track every transaction conducted in this city in real time. Even the illicit ones under the cover of darkness.
“My request is simple,” I said steadily. “I need information on the buyers who would purchase this sword in absolute secrecy, regardless of the price.”
The woman’s gaze shifted instantly. Right on cue, the sword began to vibrate violently in protest.
Hum, hum-hum, hum-hum-hum!
—M-M-Master! Me?! Sell me, who was forged solely for your sake?! To some random stranger again?! Why! Whhyyyyyyy! 〣( ºΔº )〣?!?!?
‘Ack, shut up! It’s bait to catch our enemies! I’m not actually selling you!’
—Sniff, waaaah, waaaaaah! 。：(；´∩｀；)：。Liaaaar! How could you abandon someone as cute as a winter bunny and as bright as summer sunshine?! You always called me useless, and last time you even left me behind! You let me bounce from the hands of strange women to strange men, and now you’re going to sell me off completely?! Aaaaagh, woe is meeeeee!
The terrified sword threw an absolute tantrum in my mind. Watching the blade rattle against the table, the woman narrowed her eyes.
“It seems you haven’t reached an agreement with the sword itself. More importantly, isn’t that the legendary holy weapon said to have saved the imperial palace from ruin? And you intend to sell it off?”
“I said I need ‘information on prospective buyers,’ didn’t I?”
My voice sounded brazen, even to my own ears. No matter how brilliant Hecate’s Tavern was at gathering intelligence, they wouldn’t casually keep a pre-compiled roster of private buyers eager to discreetly purchase such a conspicuous, one-of-a-kind sacred relic—unless it had already been placed on the black market.
The whisper the Young Count of Cortez had shared with me had proven invaluable.
‘Hecate’s Tavern likely holds information on the black market where I was injured,’ he had told me. ‘Though they refused to accept our family’s commission regarding it.’
Hecate’s Tavern was an intelligence guild, but they were remarkably selective about which clients and requests they accepted. It was their foundational survival policy. Since their primary patrons were wealthy merchants and influential nobles, they took great care never to invite the collective wrath of those factions. Getting caught in a crossfire of vengeance between rival houses—only for one side to blame them and scream, ‘We were ruined because that tavern sold our secrets to our enemies!’—was a risk they refused to take.
In other words, what I was doing right now was pushing an unreasonable demand right into their faces.
“Just what did you discuss with the Young Count of Cortez that prompted you to come here and play the fool, Princess?”
“Hecate’s Tavern is a renowned organization,” I replied, unbothered. “But have you ever considered this? No matter how much information you hoard, surviving solely by evading dangerous commissions won’t mean a thing if someone decides to swallow Hecate’s Tavern whole.”
“…What?”
Her voice sounded genuinely taken aback. The tavern fell dead silent.
“Naturally, people might notice that House Castrein frequently makes good use of Hecate’s Tavern,” I continued smoothly. “They’ll wonder just how much backing you truly possess, or whether you’re secretly harboring a syndicate of assassins in the shadows. What happens if someone spreads rumors like that and launches a concerted attack? You rejected the Young Count of Cortez’s request out of fear of immediate danger. But do you honestly believe none of the clients you’ve turned away harbor a grudge against you? How long do you think such a passive defense strategy will keep you alive?”
In the original novel, Hecate’s Tavern had suddenly transformed into an enemy of the protagonist at a certain turning point. Overnight, the reputation of a dignified, discreet shadow network did a complete reversal. They began accepting degrading, bottom-tier jobs they previously wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole. They recklessly leaked classified intelligence that disrupted markets and threw the entire realm into turmoil. When civil war broke out and inflation soared, driving commoners into starvation, they accepted requests from predatory merchant cartels, assisting them in hoarding grain and selling it at dozens of times its value.
Once the war concluded and a proper sovereign ascended the throne, there was no way such treacherous deeds would ever be forgiven. The tavern and those merchants would have been publicly executed as an example. Since they were far too intelligent not to foresee such an obvious outcome, their sudden degradation meant only one thing: they hadn’t changed willingly.
The entire organization had fallen into enemy hands. Their leadership had been usurped.
“If you believe you don’t need to worry about ordinary foes just because you maintain a mutually beneficial relationship with House Castrein behind closed doors, you are sorely mistaken.”
I offered a faint smile and whispered into my mind.
‘Can you glow right now?’
—Sniffle, hiccup… M-Master thinks that no matter what happens, I will always obey your commands… like some… purely devoted, unquestioning sword… which is completely true, but still! Aren’t you being far too cruel?!(┳◇┳) Sniff, my link to Gloriana’s Insignia is severed right now, so I can’t shine very brightly though…’
‘As long as you can manage something, that’s plenty! Dramatic presentation is everything in this world. Come on, please?’
A soft, golden radiance pulsed across the blade. Compared to the sun-like brilliance that had incinerated the demonic beasts during the siege on the palace, it was little more than the flicker of a firefly, but in the dim interior of the tavern, it was more than bright enough. I let a confident smirk touch my lips.
“Because the real trouble begins when your enemies are anything but ‘ordinary,’ wouldn’t you agree?”