Chapter 38 - The sealed warehouse

The underground prison of the imperial palace in the Arken Empire.

Soldiers dressed as guards on duty shouted.

"Hey, shift change!"

"Ah, shit... why the hell are you dragging your feet?"

"What are you talking about? We got here before the on-the-hour horn even sounded."

"Ugh, you son of a bitch. I'll pay you back later exactly the way you did it to me."

The guard on duty carried out the handover with a shuddering look on his face.

"More importantly, it's been a while since this prison actually had some people in it."

"Come to think of it, you went out on the operation, didn't you? Are these really Demon Followers?"

The man asked about what he had felt while on duty.

No matter how he thought about it, they had seemed less like Demon Followers and more like starving paupers.

"I don't know about the ones we brought in, but they were with Demon Followers."

"Whoa, they're real Demon Followers? Isn't that just what we use when beating down agitators?"

"Sounds like those bastards are the real deal. We caught them in a raid."

"Real Demon Followers showing up... the country must be doomed."

At that, the man relieving him glared.

"Don't go around saying that carelessly. If I report you, you'll get dragged off as a Demon Follower right away, you know?"

"Oh no, how scary. Enough with that, let's hurry up and change shifts. I have to go meet Ashley today."

"I have no idea why you like that bar wench so much..."

The relief guard was checking the inmate roster for the guards when he stopped clicking his tongue.

"Hey, this bastard's so out of it he can't even count properly?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The report said we captured twelve prisoners."

The relief guard pointed at the total and spoke.

"Then why are there thirteen?"

"What are you talking about? There were thirteen when they brought them in."

"What, asshole? We reported that we personally tied up twelve of them and brought them inside. You think we were wrong?"

"Are you saying I'm the one who's wrong? I counted them as I put them in one by one! Come see for yourself!"

"Oh yeah? Want to bet one golden?"

"I'll bet ten golden, you bastard!"

"Okay! Ten golden. Get it ready, asshole."

The two of them walked toward the prison where the heretics were locked up, each fully confident.

They counted the collapsed, exhausted group one by one with their fingers.

"One, two, three, four..."

After they counted all the way from the right end to the left end, the winner and loser were decided.

"It's twelve, you moron!"

The relief guard smacked the guard on duty over the head.

"What? That can't be."

Unable to believe it, the guard on duty counted them too.

"Huh?"

Just as he had said, there were only twelve.

"You bastard, you almost caused a whole damn uproar. Were you drinking on duty?"

"I-I had a little, asshole."

"Like hell a little! Ugh, you deserve the stockade! If you don't want to go to the stockade for drinking on duty and neglecting your post, get ten golden ready, got it?"

"Argh. Tsk... That's strange."

The guard on duty tilted his head and looked inside the bars.

The powerless paupers were simply waiting for the day they would die.

* * *

Meanwhile, inside the imperial palace,

"As expected, this isn't easy."

Brown hair, a square jaw, and sharp features.

A face that looked like it would hear "you must have made plenty of women cry" more often than "you're handsome."

Zed Swallow.

Avoiding people's eyes, he had entered a bathroom and was looking into the mirror.

"Like hell I don't need both eyes. I do need them, damn it."

He was in an extremely foul mood.

The process of entering the prison and the process of escaping the prison.

All of it required skills that only people familiar with such things could use.

'This is the imperial palace, of all places.'

The moment they realized someone had escaped, the alarm would be raised.

What would happen if the alarm was raised?

The continent's finest knights and mages would swarm in to catch Zed, and then Zed would truly be caught with no way out.

So he had to appear and disappear as smoothly as flowing water.

It was not at all an easy process.

So Zed used his own experience to come up with a method.

'Like abandoning a partner at a party...'

The key was to slip away when the other person was drunk on the atmosphere.

Then it would make them think what they had seen was not real, and they would only barely realize it after everything was over.

The process itself was easier than expected.

No, it was actually easier than abandoning a partner at a party and leaving.

At least they would not scream Zed Swallow's alias while going berserk with a weapon.

'Maybe I actually have a knack for this.'

After escaping that way, Zed secretly entered the servants' changing room, just as he had scouted beforehand.

At first, he had worried whether there would be a size that fit him, but there was no need.

Inside were uniforms made to cover every size.

'Looks like more than one or two people die working here.'

Lives like flies.

Lives where dozens died as a matter of course, and the moment they died, they were immediately replaced.

It was possible because servants were treated as little more than consumables.

It was not something Zed welcomed.

Because that was not someone else's story.

'Ferda Valdrova.'

He thought deeply about his superior.

'What am I to that man?'

Judging by his way of speaking, he was a man so blunt he came across as rude.

But even that rudeness itself did not feel malicious.

Zed, if no one else, could clearly feel it in the nuances of how he spoke.

'He feels like someone dealing with people for the first time.'

Someone who had never properly communicated, and had only ever had one-sided conversations.

The typical traits that appeared when such a person tried to communicate also appeared in Ferda.

The moment he had felt that was before the tea party, when Ferda had asked him for advice.

["How do you talk to women?"]

He had never imagined Ferda would ask a question so fitting for his age.

Zed, excited, had advised Ferda based on the things he had done and experienced.

Ferda's answer after finishing the tea party based on that advice had been this.

["It is truly fortunate you have that face."]

He still could not tell whether that was an insult or a compliment.

In any case, for this operation, Ferda had dangled the existence of documents related to Zed's younger sister.

If that was not a lie, then he would learn what their current relationship really was.

"Whew, good. Shall we get to work now?"

After checking the mirror two or three times, Zed began moving according to the plan.

The moment he set his first foot into the imperial palace,

"You there."

A voice calling someone rang through the corridor.

And in that corridor, there was no one but Zed.

"Who are you?"

Zed muttered inside his mouth.

Both eyes, my ass.

* * *

Ferda placed his hand on the Orb of Truth, and the Orb of Truth asked Ferda.

—Do you swear that you do not follow demons, nor abide by their resolve?

When Ferda heard that question, he thought this.

'Orb of Truth, my ass.'

Ferda snorted inwardly.

The sealed warehouse also contained records of how this sealed warehouse had been created.

The thing embedded there, the Orb of Truth, was not a tool that saw through people and distinguished truth from lies.

'The truly important thing is the voice reciting the oath.'

That voice filled with mana.

That voice, which shook one's consciousness for a very brief moment when one's mind was distracted by the Orb of Truth, was everything.

The orb merely judged whether one wavered or not when hearing the contents of that voice.

'I just have to twist the interpretation.'

For Ferda, who had lived by deciding to hate everything first, it was an extremely familiar thing.

—Do you swear that you do not follow demons, nor abide by their resolve?

The voice asked again.

"Regent? Are you all right?"

Even Yuren seemed to find it strange and asked Ferda.

Now he had to answer.

Ferda needed the ancient demonic tome.

But his heart belonged not to demons, but to Valdrova.

"I swear."

The second question came flying.

—Do you swear that your visit to this warehouse is not born of personal desire?

All of this was for Valdrova.

It did not even need to be asked.

"I swear."

—Do you swear that you are loyal to the Empire?

'The Empire.'

It had to fall.

"I swear."

A moment later, the Orb of Truth, which had been glowing blue, began its judgment, and its color changed.

—Verified.

The light had changed to green.

Ferda took his hand off it.

'This piece of crap is the sealed warehouse's passage procedure?'

It seemed shoddy, but if one did not know, it was a procedure that struck at a blind spot and forced them to fall for it.

Even thinking about it now, Ferda found it so absurd that he could not help snorting.

"It is quite a funny object, is it not?"

As Ferda stood quietly looking down at it, Yuren slipped into the conversation.

"Yes, it is a funny object."

Leaving that funny object behind, Ferda and the magical investigator went inside.

They descended the stairs for a long while.

After going down the endless spiral staircase, they finally stepped into the first sealed warehouse.

There, storage shelves and sealed copper pipes stacked inside them filled the space.

It was a sealed record archive.

It was a place where records were kept of the Empire's disgraces that must not be leaked outside, or of great incidents that could have destroyed the continent.

Ferda had used the records here to lure Zed in.

'I thought he would have reached it by now. Not yet?'

It was not as if they could contact each other, so he did not know how the situation was going.

He could only go forward trusting that Zed would handle it on his own.

'Perhaps this might have been an operation that did not need him.'

Though he had thought it himself, it was not even a funny joke.

Zed was absolutely necessary in this plan.

"Even if you looked at them, they would be nothing interesting. Besides, they are full of things you do not need to know."

His words, as if speaking of something worthless, contained a warning not to touch them carelessly.

Of course, Ferda had no intention of laying a hand on them.

To change the atmosphere a little, he threw Yuren a question.

"When you enter a place like this, do you not think at least once that you would like to see them?"

Yuren nodded.

"Of course I do occasionally feel the urge to look. I may not seem like it, but I am a person with a scholarly temperament."

"So, have you ever looked?"

"Not even once. There is no need for me to learn things I do not need to know and trouble myself."

He was a man with a professional conviction rarely seen in the rotted Empire.

That was why he could also become a magical investigator.

After taking only a brief look at the exterior, they immediately moved on to the next place.

What mattered was the second sealed warehouse located even farther below.

He went down there with Yuren.

As they descended, Ferda could feel it.

'A familiar smell.'

The groans and seductive whispers shed by crystallizations of thick malice and curses.

They circled around Ferda like eels surrounding a corpse sunk at the bottom of a lake.

As Yuren also grew conscious of how it was deepening, he asked Ferda.

"Are you all right?"

The answer here was not "of course."

"What do you mean?"

"It is nothing, haha."

Yuren set aside his suspicion and walked again.

Ferda must not show that he was sensing something.

First, he had to deceive him by showing the dullness of someone who sensed nothing.

The darkness grew thick.

The candlelight tried somehow to illuminate their surroundings, but it seemed impossible to drive away all that darkness.

It was such a peculiar energy that ordinary people would instinctively feel physiological disgust and danger and retreat.

However, Yuren entered first.

Ferda followed him inside.

As if he had pierced through a massive curtain, Ferda's vision suddenly cleared.

"... Hah."

An exclamation escaped him of its own accord.

For a sealed warehouse, it looked like a secret storehouse for demon worshippers.

Among them, one object lodged itself in Ferda's eyes.

One of the books placed on the central display stand, on a completely different level from the other trash.

An object with a black cover that seemed deeper than the thick darkness, sealed with silver chains.

'Barbatos's Shadow Art.'

Though Barbatos had the alias of an insidious demon, he belonged to the Great Demons in his own right, so the strength of the seal was high.

"What do you think of this place?"

At Yuren's question, Ferda answered reflexively.

"Perhaps because it is a place of demons, it certainly gives off a repulsive energy."

"Haha, there is no need to force yourself to be formal. It is filled with awe rather than repulsion."

Awe.

Yes, it could only be truly awe-inspiring.

The high-density mana emitted by cursed grimoires and books of sorcery.

If that wrapped around one's entire body, anyone would be enthralled.

The feeling that, if one allowed it even slightly, overwhelming power would circulate through one's body.

It whispered that it was like sweet rain in a drought, and more intense than release at the very limits of desire.

"No, it is only repulsive."

But Ferda was firm.

Even when he had actually lived on hatred, he had never once considered this kind of mana good.

When Ferda had been at the height of his hatred, if he could not possess something, he destroyed it.

And this mana was not Ferda's, nor could it ever be.

"Is... that so?"

Yuren tilted his head.

"That is a little strange... A mage of your caliber should be at least somewhat bewitched..."

He turned his eyes and stared at Ferda.

The look in his eyes had changed quite a bit from before.

It was not because of the strange current flowing through the sealed warehouse.

He was revealing the true nature he had been hiding.

"Well, it does not matter. What matters is that the two of us are here."

Yuren set the grimoire of Gamigin's Necromancy he had been holding down on the floor and turned his head.

His face was full of the disgusting killing intent he had kept hidden.

It was truly a fitting look for this room.

"On my way here, I wrote a scenario."

"Let me hear it, at least."

"At the Regent's request, I accompanied him to the sealed warehouse, but he succumbed to the bewitchment within this sealed warehouse, and I had no choice but to dispose of the Regent... That is the scenario. What do you think? Does it not seem truly credible?"

As Ferda listened to that, he cupped his chin.

At those words saying Yuren would kill him, the first thing Ferda felt was not fear, but doubt.

"Do people here kill without mercy if someone is bewitched by dark magic?"

"There are no exceptions when it comes to dark magic. Beneath the almighty light, there is no mercy."

A cold smile settled on Yuren's lips.

"Even if that person is the Grand Duchess's Regent."

What a truly pointlessly strict country.

"If I die, you will not get out alive either."

"There is no need to worry about me. Unlike you, I have quite a number of escape routes."

Escape routes after killing the Grand Duchess's Regent.

Ferda was not curious about what path he would use to escape.

What mattered now was that he was trying to kill him.

And what benefit would come from that.

'He seems to be doing this even though he knows what will happen if I die...'

Unlike when he had merely been an intended fiancé, Ferda was now her fiancé.

From the fact that he bore Valdrova's surname, he was practically family with a Red Dragon.

Killing that family would certainly give birth to revenge, and that revenge would be directed at the Empire.

It was an act on a completely different level from those Purge Squad bastards who came pretending they merely wanted to nibble away at some wealth.

'Does that mean he wants that instead?'

There was someone inside the imperial palace who was willing to do something that could shake not only the Empire, but the entire continent.

Suddenly, Ferda recalled the Orb of Truth he had passed through.

He had passed every oath.

The reason that had been possible was...

'It seems he knows the secret of the sealed warehouse.'

Ever since entering this place, he had lied from beginning to end.

'As expected, there are no good bastards among the Empire's people.'

In the midst of this situation where he was cornered, a smile settled on Ferda's lips.

"Why are you smiling?"

"It is nothing. I simply never imagined the childish scenario I wrote would actually come true."

"The scenario you wrote?"

Yuren, who had been smiling, tilted his head.

"I had drawn up a scenario in which I stopped an investigator who ran wild after trying to lure the Regent in and trap him. Unlike yours, mine is actually happening."

Ferda needed the grimoire of Barbatos's Shadow Art.

To obtain it, he had to kill the magical investigator.

Whether he was truly upright or not made no difference to Ferda.

"Thanks to you, I feel less burdened. I can think of it as cleaning up trash."

At those words, the smile vanished completely from Yuren's face.

"Do you think someone like you can kill me?"

What he had said was an insult beyond imagination by the common sense of ordinary mages.

He was a Master Mage who had reached the 5th Circle.

He was not only known across the continent, but also stood high enough to hold an elevated position within the Empire.

But Ferda's Circle was merely the 3rd Circle, and he was only a Magic Walker.

"If you cannot believe it."

Mana condensed in Ferda's right hand.