Chapter 10
After learning the somewhat bewildering fact that the ducal house would be ruined if one of the illegitimate children I'd met earlier became head of the family,
I entered the room the ducal house had prepared for me, guided there by Mist.
"Quite a sight."
An elegant, old-fashioned room greeted me as I entered with a cigar in one hand.
It was decorated like a room where royalty might sleep, to the point that I wondered whether I would ever sleep in a place like this in my entire life.
After casually glancing at the chandelier grandly hanging in the center of the room, I spoke to the woman who had been silently watching me ever since I entered.
"There are cigars in the car, right? Bring me some."
The five cigars I had carried on me as a matter of course.
But I had used up almost all five in my fight with the duke.
The only one left was the last one in my hand.
I didn't plan to smoke any more today, but it felt a little empty having none at all.
At my request, she lowered her head slightly.
"Yes, understood."
"Oh, and."
I pointed at the table in the otherwise empty room.
"Something to drink. I'm going to make cocktails, so bring me a variety if you can. This should cover the cost."
As I said that, I handed her a fairly generous sum of money from my pocket.
It was all money I'd received for commissions in the underworld or taken by turning the tables on organizations that had tried to kill me.
Surely I wasn't going to send her off empty-handed.
"...You can make cocktails as well?"
"Well, it's one of my few hobbies."
It was merely a hobby that had naturally come along with collecting cigars.
As I said that, I sat in one of the chairs provided in the room, then waved a hand and said,
"The cocktail-making tools are in the car, so you can bring them later at your leisure. Go on."
"Yes, understood."
Once she left the room, I sat in the chair, coated my airways and lungs with mana, and immediately took a single, deep drag from the cigar, which was already half gone.
The cigar burned down quickly.
When only the tip remained, I pulled a portable ashtray from my pocket and exhaled a lungful of smoke.
Hoooooo.
The smoke quickly took control of the surroundings.
Starting near the floor, the smoke soon climbed the walls, filled the ceiling, and began to take over the entire room.
"Hmm? Unexpected. I thought there'd be surveillance."
After placing the cigar, with only its tip remaining, directly on the ashtray, I used the smoke I'd spread to assess the room—and what I found was unexpected.
A truly perfect sealed room, without the slightest opening.
There was no secret passage, nor any eavesdropping device, judging by the absence of the distinctive mana such devices gave off.
'Ah, there is one, though.'
Closing my eyes and concentrating, I sensed a single spell hidden with truly remarkable subtlety.
A magic circle hidden behind the most splendid chandelier in the room.
I carefully extended my smoke and began examining the magic circle.
'An alarm spell?'
The shape of the magic circle I had been examining was very familiar, and I was momentarily taken aback.
It looked remarkably similar to the alarm spell I had accidentally touched when I went to the workshop of the mage who had tried to kill me, intending to kill him in return.
'How should I put it, these guys...'
They seemed to have far too little interest in the illegitimate children.
They just gave us a room with a single alarm spell etched into it and called it a day?
Even the way they had gathered the illegitimate children and dealt with them afterward felt unnecessarily careless.
"Does this make sense?"
Though the question was perfectly reasonable, I soon stopped thinking about it.
The illegitimate children had only been gathered today, to begin with.
“Well, judging by the duke's condition, he seems likely to live much longer than I imagined…”
They had said he was in critical condition, but the duke's condition when I saw him in person wasn't quite that bad.
Of course, he was critical enough that an ordinary person would have been on death's door.
But judging from the duke's enormous mana, it seemed he could live for at least another three years.
"..."
Thinking about the duke made me recall the fight from earlier once again.
The mana that had erupted like a waterfall the moment I realized his ability was a hallucination.
The duke, who fought by freely using both hallucinations and materialized hallucinations, was a truly formidable opponent.
Fortunately, I realized that attacks with substance would be blocked by my defenses, and unleashed a blow after experiencing death through his hallucinations.
That ended the fight.
“I hadn't used the enhancement from a restriction, though.”
The method of becoming stronger by providing information about myself was also my trump card.
The reason I hadn't used a restriction in my fight with the duke was clear.
Perhaps because the duke wasn't in his prime, it was a fairly manageable fight, so I hadn't felt the need.
The attacks from his materialized hallucinations were surprisingly weak.
His defenses were strong enough to block my attacks, but his offensive power felt weak in inverse proportion.
But even so, I knew perfectly well that what I had done was reckless.
"...Even thinking about it again, that was insane."
No matter how angry and out of my mind I had been, it was still a fairly rash thing to do.
If I hadn't experienced death once through reincarnation,
and if my pain threshold hadn't been elevated thanks to the torture-resistance training I had received in my previous life, it would have been impossible.
"Sigh, whatever."
I hadn't come to the ducal house to prove I was the strongest; I was merely trying to fulfill the contract Mist had offered me, so why should I worry about it?
Yeah, under normal circumstances, I had no intention of caring whether the illegitimate children fought among themselves or the ducal house displayed strange behavior.
I had only gone all-out with the head of the family because he had provoked me; I had genuinely intended to live quietly, like a mouse.
"..."
Entrusting my body to the chair, I began habitually reviewing the information I had learned.
A sort of hobby or habit I had possessed since my previous life.
Whoosh.
The smoke moving in time with my hand began transforming into letters.
[Crocus Academy]
Another set of smoke-formed letters appeared beside them.
[Romance Fantasy?]
The genre of the novel called the original work of this world.
There were three possibilities I could think of.
It was the world of the original romance-fantasy novel.
It was simply an academy-based world.
Finally, it was a world combining the two.
"The third."
It was only a guess, but the third possibility was a world combining [Academy]+[Romance Fantasy].
I hadn't read the original romance-fantasy novel, but I remembered the general story of the academy game I had played.
Of course, my memories were too old for me to recall the details.
So all I could do now was make inferences using the information I had seen.
Whoosh.
When I waved my hand again, the scattering smoke transformed into different letters.
[Underworld]
What kind of academy story would it be? One where the characters were attacked every day, yet students solved incidents capable of blowing up a city or even a country—something like a defense-procurement corruption scandal?
I couldn't remember the name of the game, but I remembered the general context of the story I had seen while playing it.
“At the beginning, there was definitely...”
I believe it started with some kind of drug crisis.
Once again, I waved my hand and added the keyword I had mentioned in smoke.
[Underworld]+[Drugs]
Now, here was the question.
The underworld—in other words, illegal activities—was originally said to be managed by House Nebla.
I had heard that from Mist on the way here to the ducal house, so it was probably certain.
Why would the underworld organizations under its control attack the academy?
Let's think realistically. How could nobody know about an illegal organization attacking [Crocus Academy], known as the finest academy on the continent?
House Nebla?
No, that couldn't be it. Considering House Nebla's influence over the underworld, which I had witnessed in the Imperial capital, there was no way.
Yet in the story I remembered, the academy had continued to be tormented helplessly by illegal organizations.
If one prerequisite were added, the story would become fairly plausible.
What if House Nebla had failed to properly control the underworld?
What if the organizations it had failed to control had targeted the academy?
Of course, there had been a separate mastermind who incited all of this, but I remembered the basic outline as being something like that.
"...What kind of cause and effect is this...?"
Once my thoughts reached that point, it seemed as though the root cause of the entire situation had originated in this ducal house.
Wouldn't all of this have been avoided if the duke had made a normal person his heir?
But I immediately shook my head.
"No. What can you expect from a madman?"
Right, my opponent was a madman who had suddenly tried to kill people with hallucinations under the pretext of a test.
He was the kind of person who couldn't be judged by standards like normality or rationality.
This was how I assessed the duke.
Such a duke making a rational decision?
Well, no matter how I thought about it, that didn't seem likely.
"..."
My thoughts began to grow complicated in all sorts of ways.
How should I put it? It felt as though fate itself were shouting, 'The ducal house is doomed without you.'
***
Mist, having received Abel's order, moved about rather busily.
She drove to a nearby city and purchased various cocktail ingredients and simple snacks.
After returning to the ducal house, she proceeded forward carrying liquor for making cocktails and numerous cigar boxes, her hands full.
It was a weight that would have made an ordinary woman—or even a man—groan as they carried it, but she didn't mind.
Naturally, as a member of the elite assassin unit with the finest skills in the ducal house, there was no way something like this would trouble her.
Thus, she arrived at Abel's room.
She carefully stacked the things she had brought in front of the room, checked the state of her disheveled clothes, and politely knocked on the door.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
"Lord Abel, I've brought the things you requested."
...
"Lord Abel?"
When there was no answer, she knocked on the door two or three times.
"Lord Abel, if you don't answer, I'll assume you're in danger and come in."
When she once again heard no response, she immediately lifted the hem of her maid uniform's skirt without hesitation.
Swish.
A beautiful, porcelain-like leg emerged, and the rising hem continued up to her thigh.
Shing.
With graceful skill, she drew the dagger hidden in her garter belt and slipped quietly and stealthily into the room.
...
What she saw was Abel leaning blankly against a chair, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information.
It was like looking at an office worker faced with so many things happening that they had no idea where to start.
“All right, I've decided.”
“Lord Abel?”
“I can't be bothered anymore. Let's just ignore it.”