Chapter 17
Several months had passed since Duke and Ari’s spar.
A lot had happened during that time.
Rex and Ari were active as adventurers.
Their story as adventurers was not particularly extraordinary.
When Rex registered as a novice adventurer, he was mistaken for a woman and joined an all-female party, causing quite a commotion,
Ari, who had been lowering herself in the hierarchy because of Rex’s orders, once caved in the solar plexus of a senior adventurer who had sexually harassed her,
and there was the very, very minor incident of Ari destroying an entire clan when things escalated slightly.
Throughout all those events, I, the final boss…
‘Ah, I’m bored.’
I was melting away from boredom in our room at the inn.
Why wasn’t I participating in that event?
‘What would I even do joining a children’s talent show?’
Ari was only a baby tiger to me. To ordinary people, she was a mountain tiger prowling the streets.
It was easy to misunderstand, but the average combat power of adventurers was not particularly high.
A tier-one mid-rank adventurer was only on the level of a lower knight,
while a tier-two high-rank adventurer was on the level of a mid-rank knight.
A third-tier adventurer was an S-rank adventurer, admired by citizens and rare throughout the world, but within a domain, they were still merely on the level of a high-rank knight.
In other words, Ari, who had registered with the Adventurer’s Association only a week ago, was an invasive species in the adventurer ecosystem.
This was because adventurers in this world were merely stepping stones for finding fortuitous opportunities.
Unless one was born a noble, it was difficult to find fortuitous opportunities such as elixirs or masters, so commoners became adventurers and prayed to encounter some opportunity somewhere.
Thus, when one person in ten broke through the first-tier wall, they stood at a crossroads,
where they had to choose whether to change careers and become a lower knight or remain a mid-rank adventurer and seek one more opportunity.
The same applied afterward.
Whether to become a mid-rank knight or a high-rank adventurer.
Whether to become a high-rank knight or an S-rank adventurer.
That was how they made their choices.
As a result, even the strongest adventurers reached only the fourth tier at most.
From the fifth tier onward, there was no need to be an adventurer. One could simply become a lord.
In any case, in such an environment, a third-tier baby tiger stood at the very top of the food chain.
Thus, any trouble one would naturally(?) encounter while working as an adventurer was resolved entirely by her.
That was also why I had nothing to do.
‘It’s their stage. I can’t step onto it.’
So I quietly stayed out of it.
Wouldn’t stealing her opportunities for growth lower my dignity?
Besides, I had another role to play.
For the sake of that role, I had no choice but to spend most of my time in the room.
‘It should be about time…’
As I folded a sheet of paper thirteen times with telekinesis to relieve my boredom, someone knocked on the door.
Knock, knock.
Sensing the presence beyond the door, I hurriedly threw the paper into my subspace.
Then I took out an item I considered important.
<The Theory of Excuses—Author: Agnotos>
It was a book written by some famous philosopher, legal scholar, thinker, and… anyway, more or less famous person from that distant elven kingdom.
Of course, that wasn’t because I understood it. It was a prop.
The bookmark had been fixed at page 245 for fifty years now.
I leaned back in my chair, opened the book, placed it on the desk, and cleared my throat.
Only after I was ready did I speak to Ari, who was presumably standing on the other side of the door.
“Come in.”
Creak.
The door opened with the squeal of its old hinges.
Ari stepped into my room with a serious expression.
She was wearing a black-and-white combat uniform rather than her usual maid uniform.
The moment I saw her, my heart began pounding with excitement.
‘What should I teach her today?’
Ever since I formally accepted her as a disciple after our last spar, every day had been blissful.
“I look forward to learning from you today as well!”
As I admired the crown of her head, I naturally remembered our first lesson.
The first lesson took place a week after our spar.
When the newbie who had asked me to teach her didn’t contact me for an entire week, I grew dejected.
Then, when she suddenly came to ask for instruction a week later, I nearly died.
- “I cast off my fixation on the past, as you told me, Duke. I thought that was the minimum qualification I needed.”
She had listened carefully to what I said at the very end of our spar, corrected the flaw, and only then come to ask me to teach her.
‘Aaaah. I’m going to die of bliss…’
It wasn’t that she wanted to get her lessons for nothing. Her attitude of trying to correct her own flaws and coming to ask me only when she still couldn’t do so…
‘That’s too sexy.’
made me excited. (Mostly in the sense of being a seasoned player.)
After that, she continued visiting my room whenever she had free time.
Our training went through three main stages.
First, we exchanged Zen-style questions and answers in the room,
then I explained the connection between that day’s flaw and the Zen dialogue,
and finally, we went into the backyard to practice it in actual combat.
I used to wonder whether even physical training needed a process like Zen dialogue, too, but I realized the answer as I reached higher realms.
In battle, one’s mental image accounted for half the outcome, and Zen dialogue was how one corrected that mental image.
So although the process was boring for me as well, I was raising her step by step this way.
“- In other words, being fixated on speed will only put you at a disadvantage. Do you understand?”
When today’s lengthy Zen dialogue finally ended, she nodded as though she understood.
“Speed isn’t everything when it comes to technique.”
“That’s right.”
Today’s topic was deception.
Her technique was excellent, but it was too honest.
Because she had never encountered anyone who could react to her technique, she had simply thrown every attack as quickly as possible, but that had its limits.
The movement of the shoulders, the spacing of the feet, the direction of the gaze, and the angle of the waist.
If one took all those things in at once, one could roughly predict the next movement.
Once an attack could be predicted, one merely had to get there ahead of time and wait, no matter how fast it was.
That was why I was going to teach her how to deceive her opponent.
“Sir, I’ll wait in the backyard.”
She immediately headed for the backyard.
As always, I put on my cloak and followed her.
When the two of us arrived in the backyard, Rex was waiting for us.
However, he was not acting as the referee.
[Why meee…]
Rex was going to train alongside Ari as well.
The reason was simple.
‘The king can’t be taken out that easily.’
Ari and I were here, but there was no such thing as absolute certainty in this world.
Of course, there was another reason, too.
‘I know you can reach the third-tier level.’
By the end of the original story, Rex possessed third-tier combat power.
When his Interface ability reached the tenth tier, the fact that his own combat power was only at the third-tier level was rather serious, but in any case, it meant it was possible.
‘I’m not making an unreasonable demand.’
I had merely told him to support Ari from beside her and fight alongside her.
‘I think there’s a saying about a stray dog learning to recite something after thirty years.’
I couldn’t quite remember it, but I was aiming for an effect like that proverb.
Unaware of my loyal intentions, Rex shouted with a tearful expression.
“Save meee…”
Rex pleaded while streaming tears and snot.
As always, Ari seized the opportunity, took out a handkerchief, and wiped his nose for him.
At the same time, Ari naturally fondled Rex’s thigh, satisfying her own desires.
A dying liege, a self-indulgent maid, and a loyal knight training the two of them.
‘Hmm. It’s peaceful today, too.’
It truly was a peaceful daily routine.
.
.
.
‘Watching those two flaunt their affection makes me want one of my own.’
***
‘Ah. I’m sleepy.’
At a luxury hotel in the inner city of Karognar,
a beautiful woman rose from a queen-size bed, rubbing her bleary eyes.
She hated the beds in this domain.
The bed was not the only problem.
She simply hated everything about this domain.
The wealth concentrated in the lord and his superhuman followers was never reinvested into the domain.
Instead of choosing to enrich the domain, they chose to exploit its residents even more.
Naturally, oil extracted from a withered fruit could not compare with oil extracted from a plump one.
As a result, everything in this domain was so backward that it could not even compare with her Sneria Domain.
‘Haa…’
And it wasn’t only this domain.
Purely in terms of prosperity, her Sneria Domain was the richest in the kingdom.
The problem was that she was weaker than the other lords because she actually cared about the domain she ruled.
Therefore, she used personal connections and contracts to protect it from the other lords who were constantly watching for a chance to seize it.
Luxury goods, high-end household products, gourmet food, and so on.
She won the favor of lords absorbed in hobbies and extravagance with such goods, making them unable to bear the thought of letting her domain go to waste, and then secured mutual protection contracts.
If her domain was attacked by a lord, another lord who would be jealous of the attacker’s prosperity would then have no choice but to help her.
In other words, she used the jealousy between other lords as a weapon rather than relying on their trust in her domain.
This resulted from the fact that each domain’s military power depended on the personal might of its lord.
She continued walking a precarious tightrope by using the personal relationships between the various lords in this way.
All of this happened because she was weaker than the other lords.
Tap, tap.
She sighed as she applied cosmetics brought from her domain.
“Haa…”
Of course, she knew it well.
She knew how dangerous the ideal she was clinging to was.
She also understood that the usual approach among lords was to grow strong themselves first and then protect their domains, their own lands.
But…
'I can’t exploit land left in that state.'
The empire had collapsed in a civil war, leaving scars of war across the land.
The lords continued exploiting it without a care, but as someone born a commoner, she could not bring herself to prioritize her own growth.
Before that, she had become part of the resistance to make people like herself happy, and abandoning the people now would mean abandoning the very ideals that had shaped her, so it was impossible.
That was why she had grown her domain while even creating the previously nonexistent concepts of welfare and reinvestment.
'I don’t want to work…'
The neighboring lords were vile, and reality was harsh.
But the reason she could not abandon this method was that the retainers who had followed her all this time and most of her domain’s residents recognized her efforts.
-
Thank you, my lady. Thanks to you, I’ve been able to live the best life imaginable.
Knowing that what was merely a fleeting moment for her was an entire lifetime for her citizens, she had no choice but to do her best.
That alone allowed her to play the perfect ‘Shadow Queen’ even today.
‘Ah. Come to think of it…’
Recently, someone new had begun to recognize her efforts.
She felt sorry toward those who had supported her until now, but a single acknowledgment from this new person filled her with a satisfaction she had never felt before.
“I miss Sir Duke…”
Unable to suppress her feelings, the words slipped out of her mouth.
Her cheeks flushed faintly, and she looked around in case someone had heard her.
Fortunately, because of her unassuming nature, she did not bring attendants with her, so no one had heard.
“Ahem.”
She finished applying her makeup and changed her clothes.
The girl who had hated going to work while half-asleep had, before she knew it, become a proper queen who managed a domain, and she left the room.
“Lady Sneria. I have a report.”
A retainer who had been waiting for her early in the morning brought her a stack of papers.
“I’ve summarized the incidents occurring in Karognar Domain.”
She sipped coffee in the dining room and examined the documents her retainer handed her.
She had come to renew the contract with this domain, but separately from that, she had planted her own informants throughout it.
The lord of this domain was so confident in his personal might that he knew nothing about the importance of information warfare.
More precisely, he believed ordinary soldiers contributed nothing to war, so he did not care whether anyone investigated or not.
Thanks to that, aside from the inner city where the lord lived, she could gather information on the domain without attracting any suspicion.
‘What an idiot.’
She planned to smuggle any useful techniques, know-how, or talent from this domain into her own.
She sipped her coffee while examining the report written overnight by a junior knight who had been saddled with the grunt work by his senior.
The first page.
‘A slave liberation movement?’
A wandering order of knights that had suddenly appeared was freeing slaves throughout Karognar Domain.
They set fire to slave traders’ caravans, planted a black snake flag atop them, and disappeared.
The lord had tried to capture the order after the slave trade, the domain’s primary source of income, began suffering, but they were so elusive that he had failed to catch them.
‘Interesting.’
She would have hated it if it were her own domain, but because this was someone else’s, she sincerely enjoyed reading the report.
‘I should consider hiring them for our domain later.’
She thought knights overflowing with such a sense of justice would surely share her ideals.
She left a note on that page and moved on to the next.
‘A report on the last known whereabouts of Duke Urwick.’
This was something she had ordered because the domain where Duke Urwick had disappeared a year ago was this one.
But she skipped this section without reading it.
It was a meaningless report now.
Then one particularly interesting report caught her eye.
‘The research city that had been laundering people for this domain suddenly became a ghost town?’
The main source of income for this domain was human trafficking.
As an extension of that, the domain also laundered people.
Human laundering referred to making someone disappear by blaming their disappearance on bandits or orcs if they happened to pass through this domain.
It was a service mainly provided to jealous nobles.
Through this business, Karognar Domain obtained fortuitous opportunities ceded by other nobles, and it even made efficient use of the missing people as test subjects.
This was an open secret among the lords.
Hana was disgusted that a domain like this was right next to hers, but she was powerless to do anything about it.
Then, all of a sudden, that city became a ghost town.
‘Count Karognar will be running around in a frenzy in a few days.’
The local officials of this domain were fundamentally lazy.
Thanks to a loyal informant’s diligent investigation, she had discovered the research city after it became a ghost town, but the count’s close aides were unlikely to do the same.
Most of them were too busy training and exploiting the cities or regions under their charge to pay any attention to the research city.
It would probably take several more days for the news to reach the lord’s ears.
‘Do I really have to tell him?’
She pondered it for a moment, then shook her head.
‘I can’t do that bald man a favor.’
She slipped the page containing that information into the shadows.
Where no one could see it.
By the time she finished checking the report, only one report remained.
She tossed a dry scone into her mouth and checked it.
<Fourth-Tier Fiend Discovered>
Her eyebrows twitched.
She read the report with a tenseness unlike anything she had shown before.
- A fourth-tier fiend has appeared.
- The fiend has occupied a city, and its estimated race is ogre.
- The fiends following that fiend are primarily humanoid monsters such as goblins and orcs.
- Numerous third-tier fiends have also been observed among the fiendish group.
Her expression darkened as she read the report.
A fourth-tier fiend.
It was not common, but neither was it rare.
In other words, if a lord was incompetent or deliberately neglected the matter, a fiend would appear with some probability, while otherwise, it was safe to assume one would not appear.
This was because, unlike humans, fiends had cannibalism as part of their culture.
Fiends accumulated power quickly through cannibalism, and many of them could even rise by one tier after sleeping for a night.
Therefore, ordinary lords dealt with fiends before they came anywhere near the fourth tier whenever possible, in order to maintain their authority as lords.
‘But what is that bald man thinking?’
It was hard to believe Count Karognar was unaware.
Because fiends accumulated karma quickly, they were also more likely to be exposed through sheer bad luck.
Usually, even reaching only the second tier through cannibalism accumulated enough karma for eyewitness reports of the monster to pour in.
‘I can’t believe he didn’t know it might reach the fourth tier.’
The bald man’s close aides were lazy, but they were quick when it came to matters directly connected to power.
If so, there was only one possible conclusion.
‘That bald old man… he’s insane.’
The count was taking a gamble.
He was probably raising the fiend to the fifth tier and planning to break through his own wall by subjugating it himself.
‘Come to think of it, I heard the man was perilously close to the end of his natural lifespan.’
Count Karognar was currently level 59.
Gaining just one more level could extend his lifespan and even rejuvenate him to some extent, but the problem was that the count had no time left.
‘I can’t believe he’d do something this crazy.’
If things went wrong, the fiend could defeat the count, eat him and his retainers, and become the lord of this region.
Of course, the count was taking this gamble because he was going to die anyway, but for her, there could be no greater nuisance.
‘If things go wrong, a cannibalistic fiend domain will appear right next door.’
Naturally, those fiends would invade her domain or secretly kidnap its residents.
There was precedent for it, so this was not mere paranoia.
‘What should I do…’
She emptied her coffee cup and fell into thought.
The fiend was still only fourth tier.
At present, she and her retainers were strong enough to subjugate it.
Her personal combat power was fourth tier, but through coordination with her retainers, she could display fifth-tier power.
‘The problem is the count.’
It was unlikely that the count would allow her to operate in his domain.
That fiend was probably one the count was carefully raising, so he would have placed watchers on it as well.
In other words, secretly subjugating it was impossible.
She groaned and began pondering how to deal with the fiend.
Then, suddenly, a person’s face flashed through her mind.
A knight of justice who did not need to obtain the lord’s ‘permission’ and would gladly subjugate that monster.
Her heart began pounding violently.
‘First things first: I’m going to ask him.’
She naturally began wondering what she should offer him in return.
‘Right. Since I asked him for a favor, I have to repay him.’
What should she give him?
‘Yes. How about inviting him to my domain?’
She could give him the finest treatment while he stayed at a luxury hotel for about ten years.
Her domain happened to be the richest in the kingdom, so she would be able to entertain Duke and his liege without disappointing them.
For the record, the fact that the hotel was an annex of her mansion was not particularly relevant.
‘This is repayment, and nothing more. Yes.’
She unilaterally decided on her repayment and prepared to contact Duke.
She believed that the knight of justice she trusted would never refuse this request.
***
This was an untold story from the original work.
Originally, Hana had been unable to rely on anyone.
Even so, karma did not operate so carelessly.
In the original story, by sheer ‘coincidence,’ Rex and Hana, who were active as adventurers, defeated this fiend, and that became a snowball that set Rex’s fate rolling.
This was something even Duke did not know.
However, karma operated a little differently in this world.
In the original story, the highest result the Dice of Fate could roll to punish that fiend was an encounter with Rex, but that was no longer true in this world.
The Dice of Fate, which would originally have been a ten-sided die, changed into a twelve-sided die and began to roll,
Roll, roll…
Before long, the die stopped—with higher numbers indicating more severe punishment for the fiend.
12>Unfortunately for that fiend, a result that should never have existed in the original story had appeared.