The Banquet
Everything had unfolded according to my plan.
Two days passed, and Sir Kaiden arrived with the rescue party.
I had expected it would take them quite a while to reach me, but the team under Sir Kaiden’s command found me in no time at all.
— Figured you’d be right around here if it was you.
Sir Kaiden conveyed as much with nothing but the shape of his mouth.
— Try keeping your appointments next time.
He seemed to have decided I was hardly the sort to die easily in a place like this—that I had simply gotten so absorbed in training I’d lost all track of the days.
“Sir Kaiden! We’ve got a victim over here!”
“Hm?”
Sir Kaiden’s brow furrowed at the report. He tipped his head slightly to the side and asked with his eyes alone.
What the hell is that?
— An assassin.
Sir Kaiden’s mouth fell open a fraction.
— Ah. Of course…
Sharp as ever.
“Secure the survivor! We’re getting out of this dungeon!”
— Yes, sir!!!
The rescue party carefully extracted me, limp and unmoving as if unconscious.
Perfect. Just as planned.
As far as anyone was concerned, I was now a fledgling Guardian who had been ambushed by an assassin and miraculously survived thanks to the timely intrusion of a Demon Spider.
The rescue party would naturally go around talking about everything that had happened today. That way, the butler’s higher-ups wouldn’t grow any more wary than necessary.
Even if this whole affair did leave them nursing a grudge, they weren’t about to take a butcher’s cleaver to a chicken.
“Looks like he put up one hell of a fight, huh?”
“For a guy who’s supposedly the toughest nut around, he sure got lucky.”
Snickers drifted over from the knights who had tagged along with the rescue party.
“Didn’t they say he wiped the floor with our chicks?”
“That’s just because our chicks are a little lacking. A man in solid armor’s always going to hit harder than some guy who just straps on a sword, right?”
“…You think so?”
People always put more weight on what they experience firsthand than on stories they’ve only heard. That much was inevitable.
Go on, spread it far and wide.
So the butler wouldn’t decide the scheme had gone sideways and try to skip town under cover of night.
With that thought, I quietly closed my eyes.
Once we returned from the dungeon, the natural course of events turned me into a professional malingerer.
My limbs were perfectly fine and I had no visible injuries to speak of, yet they insisted I needed absolute rest and confined me to bed without so much as a chance to argue.
Fortunately they neither restrained me nor confiscated my belongings, so I settled into a lazy existence of lying in bed and chewing through the pills whose effects were slowly wearing off.
Two days into my bedridden life, a few knights came by to take my statement.
“I was lucky…”
I lowered my head in a thoroughly dejected voice.
“I still don’t understand why. A sharp blade came flying out of nowhere. I just ran for my life in a panic, and then…”
The excuse was simple enough: ambushed by an assassin, survived by pure luck.
No one questioned it.
That was simply how Guardians were treated, and the man who had attacked me had been a level 23 assassin. An assassin of that caliber—assuming he came loaded with the full suite of first-strike advantage, ambush, throwing weapons, and poison—could go toe-to-toe with a front-line dealer of similar level without any trouble.
Not a single person imagined I had actually beaten him through skill and then staged the scene to look like a Demon Spider’s handiwork.
The investigation wrapped up without further incident, and before long my brother came to visit under the pretext of checking on the patient.
“So that’s how it went.”
“What exactly do you mean by ‘that’s how it went,’ Edwin?”
Ordinarily he would have been tapping the palm of his hand with the sheath of his sword by now, but for the moment he was still willing to treat me as a patient—malingerer or not.
“Did the butler make a run for it, by any chance?”
“Are you trying to tell me he’s the real culprit?”
I nodded and casually handed over the evidence I had pulled from my belongings.
My brother examined what I had given him, then scowled and clenched his teeth.
“…And why are you only handing this over now?”
“Because I trust you’ll handle it juuust fine on your own.”
The fact that I had been attacked by an assassin inside a dungeon managed by the count’s house would make for a considerable advantage in negotiations.
Using the incident as a cudgel to strong-arm the count’s family, however, was the move of an amateur.
If I borrowed the knowledge of my previous life, the ranks of nobility in our kingdom roughly corresponded to China’s five ranks of peerage. Bringing excessive pressure to bear on a count’s house—clearly a tier above a viscount’s—would leave a bad aftertaste no matter how justified the pretext.
The real problem was the damage to the count’s prestige. If the story got too widely broadcast, the Remington house would earn a reputation as an incompetent lot who let their guests come to harm.
In other words, it would be doing the butler’s higher-ups the favor of fattening their own purses.
To avoid that, we needed to paper over the count’s failings. At the same time, we could hardly pretend nothing had happened. If we did, the label that stuck to our own family would be that of a house so cowed by another’s prestige that they couldn’t even open their mouths after one of their own nearly died.
Which meant this was the moment for my brother, acting as the lord’s proxy, to put in some real effort.
“Why do you keep putting me through these trials, Edwin…”
My brother’s entire body trembled.
“Ah, dear brother…”
I looked at him and let the corners of my mouth lift. The fine set of teeth I had inherited from Father made their natural appearance in the world.
“That is simply the weight of being the eldest son.”
Thwack!
A knuckle-rap sharp enough to trigger a Guardian’s barrier came flying at me. By now, though, my pain resistance had risen enough that it barely registered as a tickle.
“In a sense this is exactly the kind of work a lord’s proxy should be doing, isn’t it? Just more practical experience.”
I wasn’t wrong, brother mine.
So put the sword sheath down…
“Haaah…”
“Ah—one last thing.”
I caught my brother just as he was turning to leave in silence.
“What now?”
“While you’re at it, casually suggest they invite us to a banquet as an apology. And if you can, make sure they know I’d like to explain the circumstances directly to the party involved—so Miss Ariella makes an appearance at the table as well.”
For the first time, a wry smile broke across my brother’s complicated expression.
“Well, I suppose you are of that age. I’ve heard Miss Ariella takes after the countess a great deal. She’s bound to be beautiful. Not as much as Rena, of course.”
He nodded as if he understood everything and turned away.
Ordinarily he was a fairly sharp, hard-edged sort of man. But whenever romance got mixed up in things—no doubt the influence of my sister-in-law—his thinking turned remarkably simple.
Of that age, my foot…
Ugh. I am never becoming like my brother.
With that thought I settled back onto the bed and carefully chewed two pills at a time.
They were grain powder sweetened with sugar, and aside from the way they made my tongue tingle and my head spin, they made for a pretty decent snack. One at a time had started to feel a little underwhelming; two at once brought the intensity roaring back.
“Heh heh heh…”
If I just lay here and casually ground up my status-ailment resistance proficiency, my brother would tidy up the entire incident on his own and bring me nothing but the fruits.
Ah—so this was the sensibility of that “one-click” trend from my previous life.
Not half bad, I decided.
Life is full of twists of fate.
The head of the once-respectable middle-aged gentleman known as Butler Harold was now mounted on the city wall.
The precise charges were never made public, but bribery, tax evasion, and a whole assortment of other crimes had been piled on top of one another.
Whatever tortures he had endured before the end, the salt-and-pepper hair that had once sprouted from his head had turned pure white, as if someone had dunked his scalp in bleach during a waterboarding session.
“…I owe you in more ways than one.”
He must have lived a life that was, in its own way, not lacking—until a single moment of greed cast him into hell. While I was reflecting on the man’s life, Sir Kaiden scratched the back of his head with an awkward expression.
Surprisingly, he had been involved with the butler in some capacity. Nothing that crossed the line, of course; it seemed the butler had simply made him a quiet offer. Given Kaiden’s easygoing air, the man had probably figured a little palm-greasing would be enough to reel him in.
After careful consideration, Sir Kaiden had ultimately refused to cross that line.
Perhaps meeting me had left some significant impression on him. That was why I had put in a good word for him in return. He was far too valuable a talent to lose his honor and end up a wandering knight. Besides, we had grown somewhat fond of each other by then.
In the end, the butler had taken every last sin with him to the grave.
“They stripped me of the deputy commander’s post. What kind of debt is that?”
“They didn’t take your sword. That’s more than enough of a debt.”
A knight lives by honor and dies for loyalty. Having one’s sword confiscated is a social death sentence; it leaves a man with no choice but to live as a mercenary.
In the terms of my previous life, it would be like a distinguished professor at a first-rate university getting tangled in scandal and ending up teaching middle-schoolers at a cram school. If the man was talented enough, he might even earn more than the famous professor ever had—but his honor would be thoroughly trampled.
Mercenary Kaiden, huh…
It would suit him better than I expected.
Naturally half-curly, messy hair and a stubbly beard that looked as if it had been trimmed with an electric razor. An air so light it seemed he might have been drinking since noon.
“What are you grinning about? Thinking something weird again?”
“Ah, I was simply reflecting on a friend I’m grateful for.”
“A friend you’re grateful for… the assassin?”
Sharp as always.
“Hey, but seriously—how did you beat him? Sure, assassins are weak against heavy armor, but that guy had cleared eight more Trials than you. Even a knight of the same level would’ve had to stay on his toes against him.”
The question carried absolute certainty that no Demon Spider had ever barged in. Naturally. He had spent an entire day in the dungeon with me as my guide; he knew perfectly well I would never lose to something like a Demon Spider.
“Ah, hang on.”
Sir Kaiden held up his left hand and pressed his right to his forehead, sinking into thought.
“Throwing techniques would’ve been useless, and the poison wouldn’t have worked either. Against you—the guy who toys with our chicks—you might’ve even had the edge in close quarters… Wait.”
The man who had asked the question reached a conclusion all on his own.
“Is the Guardian class actually an overpowered blessing?”
That cut surprisingly close to the heart of the matter.
“Ah, maybe that’s going too far. Either way, you’re an absolute nightmare for the assassin type. Scary. Really scary.”
While Sir Kaiden and I were trading something like a post-incident debrief, the proud lord’s proxy of House Revan finally made his appearance, having somehow managed to wrap everything up neatly.
“Welcome, Your Excellency the Lord Proxy.”
“Tch.”
My brother clicked his tongue as if annoyed, ignored me completely, and exchanged various formalities with Sir Kaiden. In short: his younger brother had incurred quite a few debts, and as both lord’s proxy and older brother he wished to express his gratitude.
After a long, tiresome exchange of the sort only nobles could produce, my brother at last delivered the answer I had been waiting for.
“It’s done. I made sure to bring up the points you mentioned as well.”
“Oh, I knew I could count on you, brother.”
Spirit mages were a talent that only blossomed in those of a certain bloodline; they could form contracts with spirits even without undergoing the Rite of Elysion’s Blessing. Word had it, however, that Miss Ariella—the youngest daughter of this house—had yet to show any real promise as a spirit mage.
If I could solve her problem, House Remington would find itself bound to us in a relationship they could not easily cast aside. Looking ahead to the catastrophe that would arrive in five years, securing the Remington count’s family as allies was simply good arithmetic.
I had my reasons for everything I did.
“Mother was married at an age three years younger than you are now. It’s about time you started thinking seriously about these things.”
And yet my brother was talking about this.
My head hurt.
Knowledge from a previous life isn’t always a blessing…
This sort of thing was commonplace in the noble society of this world, but every so often the knowledge of my past life produced a jarring cognitive dissonance. Our mother had married at fourteen and given birth to my brother at fifteen…
If I pursued that line of thought any further, the respect I held for Father might start to crack, so I quietly folded the matter up and buried it deep in my chest.
“Her Ladyship has said she will soon hold a banquet to welcome us. She added that it would be a chance for a light greeting and some pleasant conversation.”
“Well done, brother.”
Wow. He really must have gone through a lot.
Thanks to him I had offloaded every bothersome detail and secured nothing but the best possible outcome.
All right, then. Time to meet the young lady of rumor.
A red-bean bun without the red bean filling.
It was time to meet Miss Ariella, youngest daughter of the Remington count’s house—the house of spirit mages.