The Commander... Caught on Hidden Camera?!
"Hngh... haah..."
The moment today's work was done, I fled to my room like I was running for my life. Even that wasn't enough—only after bolting the door two and three times over could I finally let myself breathe.
"Ahhh..."
And then, as if a plug had been pulled, the strength drained out of me all at once. I slid down the wall and sank to the floor. Not that I'd ever let anyone see me like this—looking like a scoop of ice cream left out to melt. But there was no one here. I still needed the right to be weak sometimes.
...Especially today.
"The attention is crushing..."
Alright, fine—I could accept that the girls' reaction to my little I-have-no-memories announcement had been a delayed explosion. What I had not expected was for them to camp outside my office until the second I clocked out. I'd even sent Rielly to shoo them away.
I understood it would be a shock, so I'd given them some free time before work started. And this was what I got? How was this any different from skipping work without permission?
...Or maybe not. The fact that they hadn't smashed the door down and barged in meant they'd held on to a shred of reason, at least. Was I supposed to be grateful for that?
Anyway, I'd panicked and run for it a little too hard this time, and now I genuinely felt like I was going to die. My nerves were already wrung dry from being pulled in every direction—if my body gave out on top of that, what was I supposed to do tomorrow...?
"...What else? I have to go to work."
There was far too much left to do. I staggered to my feet as my body screamed in protest, and dragged myself toward the bathroom. When you were this exhausted you were supposed to rest properly, and resting meant lying in bed, and lying in bed meant washing up first.
...Lately my daily routine had started to feel painfully standardized. Work myself to the bone, come back too tired to do a single thing I actually wanted, wash up, sleep, then go to work again... why did this feel so familiar?
I'd gone and possessed someone, and this was what I got? I was starting to feel a little cheated.
Still, the fact that I hadn't just hurled myself onto the bed the second I walked in had to count as tremendous personal growth. Rielly handled the cleaning every day, sure—but working in this piece-of-garbage body was hard enough as it was. Honestly, even if I committed the sacrilege of collapsing onto the sheets filthy a few times, nobody had any right to get on my case about it. Who did they think I was grinding myself into the dirt for?
...Well. For now, I'd take satisfaction in the fact that I'd taken one step closer to being a proper Commander.
More pressingly, I needed to wash before I could even think about sleeping.
"...Nnh."
I'd made it to the bathroom door, but my hands refused to go to the tightly fastened buttons of my uniform. If it were just me being overly self-conscious, that would have been a relief—but every time I stepped into this room, I could feel it. Eyes. I wanted to shrug it off, I really did... except the moment I so much as thought about taking my clothes off, it felt like every inch of me was being raked over, catalogued, missed nothing.
I'd even torn the entire room apart with my own two hands, too fed up to stand it anymore. I hadn't found a person. I hadn't even found a speck of dust. Which meant I'd dragged my already exhausted, post-work body through all of that... and gotten absolutely nothing for it. Passing out afterward like I'd been clubbed over the head had just been the bonus prize.
"Hahh..."
Just thinking about it made me angry all over again. Had I just gotten too sensitive from burning through my brain on all these plans lately? I really hoped that was it.
"...It's just my imagination. Right?"
Of course, searching the room again would only burn through what little strength I had left. So I pushed the uneasy feeling aside and peeled my sweat-soaked clothes off, one layer at a time.
Whirr—
...Even that moment was being captured by someone's eyes. But noticing as much was a rather distant prospect for a body that was, in the end, only human.
Inside a room where not a single lamp was lit, a pair of eyes sat fixed on the glow of a small laptop screen.
Given the occupant's official post, one might have assumed she was gathering intelligence on a person of interest. Or, failing that, that she was wrapping up leftover work. But she wasn't the type to be slow with her duties in the first place, her operatives handled most of the grunt work for her, and her personality being what it was, she would never have dragged leftover paperwork all the way back to her own room.
"Heheheh..."
And she had been dripping that suspicious little laugh for a while now. Who in their right mind would look at her and think she was working?
...The "person of interest" part, though—that might not have been entirely wrong. Because what filled the screen she was watching so intently, so completely that she had forgotten even to blink, was none other than her Commander.
"Yeah... that's it..."
After a brief, wary glance over her shoulder, the Commander began undoing the buttons of her uniform, one by one. And the moment that pale, bare skin was laid bare, the woman at the laptop seized the timing as if she had been waiting for it, scrolling the mouse wheel with her left hand to zoom the image in.
Her right hand, which by all rights should have been on the mouse, had drifted somewhere considerably lower—but then, no one would ever know what she was doing while she watched the Commander.
...And no one should.
"Haah... Commander..."
As the seals that had been restraining the Commander came undone one after another, that devastating body was finally revealed in full. A waist so impossibly slender you had to wonder how her organs even fit inside it. A chest that was surely putting that waist through hell. Hips and thighs you could not, under any circumstances, believe belonged to someone who kept her distance from exercise. It wasn't long before a certain insolent voyeur—one who was secretly filming her own superior—was thoroughly, thoroughly worked up.
"A body like that... hh... you've done a damn good job hiding it all this time..."
Wasn't that a disqualification for a Commander, honestly? If she'd just shown that thing off, even once, to every operative who'd suffered under her, unifying the Continent wouldn't have been a dream at all. And if she ever stepped down from the Commander's seat, I could just take her for myself... take that pretty body and... hhnn...
Just as a rather pleasant moment was arriving, accompanied by every kind of fantasy that a mere operative had no business entertaining—
Thud. Thud.
"...Hn?"
An uninvited guest had arrived, out of nowhere. They hadn't rung the doorbell, just knocked—probably trying not to wake the people in the neighboring rooms. Consideration for her, however, was nowhere to be found. Listening closely, that wasn't knocking. That was someone hitting the door with their fist. At least, that was how it sounded to her.
"Tsk. And I was just getting to the good part."
Barge in in the middle of the night, just like that—where had they learned their manners? Still, she couldn't exactly not answer, so she checked that the record button was properly on, then threw a coat on over herself, more or less.
She could loop that one clip all night and the evening would take care of itself. Not getting to see that pretty body in the flesh was a real shame, but it wasn't as if any of those other bitches would get to see it either. She'd just have to content herself with watching it like this, every day.
Of course, there was no reason to rush out and do her uninvited guest any favors. She dragged her feet as slowly as humanly possible all the way to the front door—and a voice called her name.
"Come out quietly while I'm still asking nicely, Director."
Rielly. Captain of Internal Security.
Firma was a military corporation modest in scale, yet its combat power was widely judged to rival that of an entire nation. Serving as Firma's eyes and ears, scraping together every scrap of news from across the Continent, then extracting only the highest-grade intelligence from that flood of information—the very backbone of information warfare. The genius among geniuses who ensured Firma always stayed one step ahead of its rivals.
Calia. Current Head of the Intelligence Department at Firma.
Even now, with her affiliation firmly locked in, her name still sat proudly at the top of countless factions' recruitment lists.
...And her precious happy time had just been interrupted.
"...What."
The door opened onto a short maid uniform cut out in all the usual places. That distinctive uniform of Internal Security, paired with light-brown hair, and Calia's eyes narrowed on instinct. Did the woman who called herself captain not have anything better to do? Of all the nights to show up. Of all the timings.
"You don't appear to have been asleep. Forgive my asking, but might I know why it took you a full ten minutes to come to the door?"
"You know I'm always like this. Got a problem with it?"
"Hardly. As if I don't know you."
Whether she could read Calia's mood or not, Rielly started needling her with the slow, deliberate patience of someone who knew exactly which spots to press. They had never been particularly close, but as heads of their respective departments they had at least observed a minimum of professional courtesy. Anyone could see who was in the wrong here. If Rielly was going to come at her like this, Calia saw no reason to play nice either.
"If you came here to pick a fight, get lost. Now."
"Mm. If you're going to use language that harsh, would you mind taking a look at this first, and then deciding?"
Calia snapped at her, irritation packed into every syllable—and Rielly, with some cryptic remark, started rummaging through her pocket. She'd brought something weird, by the look of it. What could possibly be important enough to come at this hour? And if she was going to show up unannounced and in a hurry, she could at least be polite about it. Since when did that tone count as asking a favor?
Heat climbed back into Calia's head. She was about to spit out one more line when—
"...What's that?"
A small black object was thrust in front of her face. It was so tiny she didn't recognize it at first, but the moment she looked closer, it was unpleasantly familiar. A cylinder no longer than the buttons on the side of a phone, with a lens fitted at the tip.
In other words... something very much like a miniature camera—
"This camera originally belonged to you, did it not?"
"Ah."
So that was it. No wonder the bathroom camera had gone dark a couple of days ago. The battery had been on its last legs anyway; she'd figured it had finally given up the ghost. Apparently not.
She'd been planning to just leave it—it's not as if she had a way back into the Commander's room anyway. Of all the people to get caught by, it had to be her.
"I trust you now understand why I've come."
And she hadn't even come running the same day. She'd waited. Which meant she'd traced the source first, obviously. If Calia was going to buy the thing, she should have bought it off the books. Why had she used company funds and left a paper trail...?
But getting flustered here would be amateur hour.
"To think you would dare inflict that filthy little hobby of yours on the Commander—"
"I can tell what you're thinking, but how about you come inside first and we talk?"
Calia pivoted so fast it was as if the last thirty seconds had never happened, smoothly steering the conversation onto a different track. The scowl vanished from her face in an instant, replaced by a fully equipped business mindset.
Of course, the person who had come looking for her was not the type to fold that easily.
Not that any of that mattered in the slightest.
"It's a little late for that kind of flimsy excu—"
"Don't you want to see the Commander naked?"
Because in the face of the card she had just put on the table, words had a way of dying in the throat all by themselves.
"..."
"Come in first. Let's talk it over properly. You wouldn't be losing anything, would you?"
The effect was extraordinary. Even the blade that had come to pass sentence on her hesitated, forgetting what it was there to do. She could pretend otherwise all she liked, but her eyes were already gleaming with want. That alone said enough.
Frankly, it would have worked on anyone in Firma. Call them a gathering of monsters, a military force, whatever you liked—peel back the surface, and all you would find was a den of beasts, starving for their Commander.
So of course.
"...Then I'll come in."
Of course it would work.
"It's been a while, Commander."
A few days later. After Rielly, Captain of Internal Security, had finished her stint as temporary Adjutant and returned to her original post.
"As you're already aware, I'll be serving as your Adjutant starting today..."
At the end of a razor-edged shadow war waged entirely beneath the surface, the victor appointed as the next Adjutant was—
"Head of Intelligence, Calia."
To no one's greater surprise than it should have been, none other than a certain voyeur.
"I'll be in your care from here on, yeah?"
...Perhaps it had been the natural order of things all along.