Cracking the Code
The encryption magic came apart with almost insulting ease.
Oscar read the emotion that flickered across Jake's eyes in that instant, and spoke.
“Don't you dare feel like the money was wasted. It looks easy, I know, but I'd wager there are only a handful of mages in the entire region who could have done it.”
“He's right. For the record, I couldn't do it either.”
When Kilian piled on the support from the side, Jake shook his head vigorously.
“N-no, it never even crossed my mind. So the materials from inside my father's office are…?”
“Safe. Let's confirm that now, shall we?”
“Ah, yes!”
He opened the briefcase and drew out a diary and a stack of documents.
“Most of the documents are ledgers. The kind that record the corruption of politicians and corporations.”
“Would it be fair to assume their exposure would cause quite a stir?”
“……No, I'm actually surprised by the opposite—they're nothing of the sort.”
Jake shook his head and explained.
“I couldn't say for a scrupulously honest city, but in Baran, this level of graft doesn't even register. As you well know, it's a city lined wall to wall with politicians and corporations gone mad for money. I simply cannot wrap my head around someone murdering my father out of fear that *this* much corruption would see the light of day.”
“……”
So even children a little over ten years old in Baran City matured this early, did they?
For a fleeting moment, Oscar saw Lloyd overlapping in the boy's face.
Having studied him quietly for a moment, Oscar asked,
“And the diary? Anything there?”
“Oh! Let me check.”
Taking the advice, Jake opened the most recent entry in the diary.
June 10th.
It's almost two years since I took office as mayor of Baran City.
The paper the other day called Baran a city of liquor and gambling. Was I ashamed of that? Not in the slightest!
Compared to the days when we were known as a city of drink, gambling, and narcotics, it's enormous progress. All of it is the work of the citizens, of me, and of my partner, Marc.
Two years remain in my term. By then, Baran will be an even better city.
July 2nd.
Something is off.
We rolled up a fairly sizable drug-smuggling ring, and yet the amount of narcotics flowing through the streets refuses to drop below a certain floor. I'll stake my word on it—that is not a level that can be sustained by a few lone dealers peddling their wares diligently.
I ought to investigate this part quietly, on my own.
August 22nd.
Over the past month and a half, we've rounded up and interrogated close to a hundred individual dealers.
The results stunned me. Every single one of them had no idea whose drugs they were actually selling.
Does that even make sense?
Whoever we're up against this time is more thorough and better organized than anyone we've caught so far. I don't know how far up the chain the body connects, but at the very least, it must be a major corporation or a political heavyweight.
I think it's time I talked to Marc about this.
August 24th.
Spoke with Marc last night.
……Something is off. He carries himself as if he already knows everything I investigated independently. If I'm wrong, I'll get on my knees and apologize—but until then, I'm putting a tail on him too.
September 1st.
Marc Sweet. That filth. That vermin.
He was the body all along. He is, in fact, an executive of the empire's largest drug cartel, 'Happy End.'
The betrayal is beyond words. I want to storm over there, grab him by the collar, and demand whether he's even human.
……But I must hold back. The future of six hundred thousand citizens of Baran hangs on my choices and my actions.
September 18th.
Tomorrow, the treatment center for drug addicts opens its doors.
One day before the ceremony, tonight, I'm scheduled for a private meeting with an official from the Imperial Palace. If I make it safely through today, I'll be able to wipe 'Happy End' clean away for good.
All of it—for a better tomorrow for Baran City.
There, the diary ended.
It wasn't hard to guess why.
“……September 18th was… the anniversary of my father's death.”
Jake forced out each word with difficulty, his voice thick with tears.
He bit down hard on his lip, refusing to accept reality.
“I can't believe it. Uncle Marc swore he would catch the killer himself. He patted my shoulder in front of the gravestone and told me not to worry, that he'd carry on my father's will……”
“……”
Marc Sweet, the man who had deceived both father and son, was an executive of a drug cartel.
Worse, he was the runaway favorite to be elected the next mayor.
Oscar gently patted the head of Jake, whose crocodile tears now fell freely.
“Don't worry. He will pay what he owes, and pay it properly.”
“……It won't be possible. Least of all in this city.”
Eyes without so much as a thread of hope in them—far too mature for a child. Oscar looked into them for a long moment, then spoke.
“Don't give up. I'll make it happen.”
“……Really?”
“Of course. You don't think we became mages of one of the Four Great Magic Towers for nothing, do you?”
Oscar put on a deliberately exaggerated expression and declared it with booming confidence.
It was, after all, the only comfort he had to offer this boy—a promise.
Just then, Kilian stepped closer and muttered with a furrowed brow.
“The situation's worse than I thought. You're saying that if nothing changes, Baran City falls to a drug cartel.”
“No—this stopped being Baran's problem a while ago.”
The city's population was around six hundred thousand.
Tourists, on the other hand, exceeded thirty million a year—and that number was still climbing.
“What happens if Marc Sweet, once he's mayor, sets his mind to turning those tourists into addicts?”
“……They'd return home in a state of addiction, so the drugs spreading there would only be a matter of time.”
The real problem was that this would happen across the nation simultaneously.
If it came to that, the situation would spiral beyond anyone's control—and it would mean that this vast empire could genuinely lose a war against drugs and collapse.
Kilian's gaze turned to the diary.
“Then this diary is the only weapon that can stop his election.”
“Whatever it takes, we have to protect it. Master Jake, do you happen to have a communicator at home?”
“……We do, but it can't reach outside the city. They've been running a security inspection across the whole municipality since yesterday—citing line failures from a surge in call volume. Looking at it now, I suppose even that was all part of the plan.”
Outgoing calls cut off entirely?
Oscar frowned for a moment, mulling over alternatives, then spoke.
“A crystal. You don't happen to have a calling crystal, do you?”
“……A calling crystal?”
Jake gave him a curious look.
“You can't possibly mean that antique they stopped using decades ago?”
“That's the one.”
Calling crystals predated the development of magitech communicators.
Needless to say, real-time voice communication was impossible on one. All it did was display, in numbers, the fact that someone was looking for you.
But since it sent those numbers by burning the user's own mana, it would still work just fine even now.
“My father's hobby was collecting antiques, so there's one lying around… but why all of a sudden?”
“Bring it to me right now, please.”
“S-sure, just a moment.”
Jake hurried off somewhere and returned a good dozen minutes later with the calling crystal in hand.
When Oscar took the dust-caked crystal and fiddled with it, it began to glow blue.
“Good news—still functional.”
“Yes, my father only ever collected pieces in excellent condition……”
“That settles it, then.”
Riffling through his memory for a moment, Oscar punched in a long string of numbers, quick and practiced.
Watching him with a blank stare, Kilian asked,
“And when exactly did you learn to work one of those? That's the sort of relic I've only ever seen in books.”
“……I learned it in advance, for situations like this one.”
A relic, honestly. Barely a few decades ago, this had been cutting-edge technology.
After the crystal flashed a few times and dimmed again, Kilian murmured,
“I trust your elders will arrive on schedule, then.”
“That's the idea.”
He apparently assumed Oscar had summoned the elders of the White Tower.
Oscar saw no particular need to correct the misunderstanding.
Iron-rice bowls.
That was what people called the Empire's civil servants—a bulletproof profession, one you could not be fired from short of committing an enormous crime or watching the Empire itself fall.
And among even those, there existed one place known as the mithril rice bowl—or, less charitably, the salary-thief department. That place was the Calling Crystal Management Department.
“Haaaahm.”
The department chief, half-swallowed by the back of his chair with his feet up on the desk, did nothing but string together one lazy yawn after another. Occasionally, he scratched his back with a long stick.
After several days of observation, the astonishing truth was this: from clock-in to clock-out, that was the entire extent of the man's duties.
“Um…… Department Chief?”
The department's newest hire—its rookie, and now its sole team member—ventured cautiously.
“Hm? What is it.”
“What exactly is it that we do here?”
“……What we do?”
Roll, roll. Tap, tap.
Swiveling his chair sideways and massaging his own shoulder with the stick, the chief asked,
“Did I still not teach you what our work is?”
“No, sir……”
Three days into the job, and he had learned precisely nothing.
“Must be a fresh-graduate thing—so much ambition. How many years did it take you to pass the civil service exam?”
“I passed on my first attempt, at sixteen—the youngest age at which one is even eligible to sit for it!”
“……Wait, why would they send an elite like you to a hole like this?”
Looking visibly put out, the chief straightened up in his chair and began to speak.
“You know anything about this department?”
“Yes, sir! I heard that hundreds of people once worked here! It's an honor to serve in such a storied institution!”
“Little punk can flatter, can't he.”
The chief snorted and pointed at the calling crystal sitting on the desk.
“Right. When this crystal starts to glow, numbers will appear inside it. You write them down and decode them. That's the job.”
“That seems terribly cumbersome.”
“It does by today's standards, sure. But before magitech communicators came along, this thing was what connected the world. You can't go traipsing around a whole city just to find one person, can you? Back then, you'd send your personal code through one of these, and the other party would go, ah, so-and-so is looking for me, and come find you.”
“So if numbers appear, we're the ones who have to go running?”
“As if. A calling crystal's second function is that you can combine the numbers to form actual sentences. That's how people used to send urgent news to distant regions.”
“Ah, so we're in the business of delivering messages, then.”
“Exactly. When someone sends numbers, we decode them into a sentence and report it upstairs—nothing more. This office is linked directly to the Imperial Palace, so the crystal codes themselves are top-secret. Unless you're a Tower Master, a duke, or the head of a storied sword house, you will never learn them.”
Finishing, the chief shrugged.
“Of course, not a single message has come through in the last eighteen years. That's why the department's headcount kept getting cut. Honestly, I didn't expect we'd ever see a new hire again.”
“I see……”
“Right, then—catch.”
He handed the rookie a binder of truly staggering thickness.
“Impressive, isn't it? I used to have this thing memorized cold, back in the day. It's gotten a bit fuzzy now.”
“Wow…… you're incredible, sir.”
The rookie's eyes lit up as he took the binder—looking, somehow, like a man determined to memorize every last page of it himself.
Watching him, the chief let out a quiet chuckle.
“Read a while, and if quitting time comes, wake me up.”
“Yes, sir! Sleep well!”
A short while later, once the chief began to snore, the rookie threw himself into the book.
“So even number combinations alone can compose sentences this vast……”
There were even trap sentences designed to keep hostile factions from cracking the codes—occasionally it took a seventeen-digit sequence just to convey a two-letter word.
Seeing this, I have to admit technological progress is a good thing. These days, you just place a call and it's done.
Giving thanks for the march of technology, he turned another page—
when suddenly, the calling crystal flashed, blazing with light.
“Uh… uh……?”
Torn between waking the chief and jotting the numbers down, the rookie panicked as the digits began to change—and started scribbling them down first.
“One, seven, thirteen, two, five, six……”
He transcribed a full two hundred thirty-six numbers, then immediately shook the chief awake.
“Haaaahm… quitting time already?”
“No, sir! The calling crystal lit up!”
“……What?”
The chief's sleepiness evaporated in an instant, his whole expression transformed.
“You're not joking, are you? The numbers? Did you write them down?”
“Y-yes, sir……”
Overwhelmed by the sudden shift in atmosphere, the rookie handed over the paper, and the chief hurriedly began to read the numbers aloud.
“17132 is Baran… 256324512 is Happy and End—which in this case we read without the space as Happy End… city takeover, narcotics, scenario?”
Perhaps his body remembered what his mind had forgotten—the moment he read the numbers, the sentence assembled itself.
“Baran City at risk of takeover by Happy End, the empire's largest drug cartel… followed by an ongoing scenario to distribute narcotics nationwide……?”
The instant he finished decoding, the chief shot to his feet and shouted.
“Son of a—! Get me connected to Public Security, NOW!”
It was the moment the Calling Crystal Management Department finally did its job—after eighteen years.