Chapter 38
The story continues off the page
The Last Dance Before Midnight
A masked dragon asks the lanternwright for one slow dance
Arken Empire, the underground prison of the imperial palace.
Soldiers dressed as guards shouted.
“Hey, it’s time for the shift change!”
“Ah, damn… Why aren’t you moving faster?”
“What are you talking about? I got here before the on-time bell even rang.”
“Ugh, you bastard. I’ll pay you back exactly what you did to me later.”
The guard, his face twisted with disgust, carried out the handover.
“More importantly, looks like this prison’s got some people in it again after all this time.”
“Come to think of it, you went out on the call, right? Are these really demon followers?”
The man asked about what he had felt while on duty.
No matter how he thought about it, they seemed like starving paupers, not demon followers.
“I don’t know about the ones we captured, but I was with actual demon followers.”
“Wow, they’re really demon followers? Isn’t that just what they call those agitators they beat up?”
“Looks like these ones are the real deal. We raided the place and caught them.”
“So real demon followers have appeared, and the country’s headed for ruin.”
At that, the replacement guard glared at him.
“Don’t go saying things like that just anywhere. If I report you, they’ll arrest you as a demon follower too, you know?”
“Oh, how frightening. Enough of that—let’s get this shift over with. I have to meet Ashley today.”
“I don’t know why you’re so fond of that tavern wench…”
The replacement was checking the occupancy chart for the guards when he suddenly stopped clicking his tongue.
“Hey, you idiot, you skipped someone and didn’t even count them properly?”
“What are you talking about?”
“We reported capturing twelve prisoners.”
The replacement pointed to the total and said,
“So why does it say thirteen?”
“What do you mean? There were thirteen when we brought them in.”
“What, you moron? We reported that we personally bound twelve of them and brought them inside. You think we counted wrong?”
“Are you saying I’m the one who’s wrong? I counted them as I put them in, one by one! Come take a look yourself!”
“Oh? Wanna bet one gold coin?”
“I’ll bet ten gold coins, you punk!”
“Deal! Ten gold. Have it ready, you bastard.”
The two, utterly convinced they were right, walked toward the cell where the heretics were being held.
They counted the exhausted group collapsed on the floor, one by one.
“One, two, three, four…”
After counting everyone from the far right to the far left, the winner was decided.
“There are twelve, you idiot!”
The replacement smacked the guard on the head.
“What? No way!”
Unable to believe it, the guard counted along with him.
“Huh?”
Just as the other man had said, there were only twelve.
“You nearly caused a huge uproar, you bastard. Were you drinking on duty?”
“I-I had a little, okay?”
“A little, my ass! Ugh, you bastard. If you don’t want to wind up in the brig for drinking on duty and dereliction, have ten gold ready, got it?”
“Damn. Tch… Weird.”
The guard tilted his head and looked through the bars.
The powerless paupers could only wait for the day of their deaths.
* * *
Meanwhile, inside the imperial palace,
“As I thought, this isn’t easy.”
Brown hair, a square jaw, and distinct features.
He had the sort of face that likely earned him more comments about how many women he must have made cry than compliments about his looks.
Jed Swallow.
He had slipped into a restroom to avoid people’s eyes and was staring at himself in the mirror.
“As if I need both eyes. Of course I do.”
He was extremely displeased.
Getting into the prison and getting back out of it—
both processes demanded skills only someone familiar with them could use.
‘And it’s not just anywhere. It’s the imperial palace.’
The moment they realized someone had escaped, an alarm would be raised.
And what would happen once the alarm sounded?
The greatest knights and mages on the continent would swarm to capture Jed, and then he would have no way out and really would be caught.
So he had to appear and disappear as smoothly as flowing water.
It was anything but easy.
So Jed drew on his experience and devised a method.
‘Like abandoning a partner at a party…’
The key was to quietly slip away while the other person was intoxicated by the atmosphere.
That would make them think what they had been watching was an illusion, so they would only realize what had happened once everything was over.
The process itself was easier than he had expected.
No, it was actually easier than abandoning a partner at a party and leaving them behind.
At least he wouldn’t be rampaging with a weapon while screaming the alias Jed Swallow.
‘Maybe I do have a knack for this.’
After escaping that way, Jed secretly entered the servants’ changing room, just as he had determined in advance.
At first, he had worried whether there would be a size that fit him, but there was no need.
The uniforms inside had been made to accommodate every size.
‘Looks like more than one person dies here.’
A life like a fly.
Dozens died every day, and their replacements took their places the instant they died.
It was possible because servants were treated as little more than consumables.
Jed did not welcome that.
Because it was not someone else’s story.
‘Ferda Valdrowa.’
He thought deeply about his superior.
‘What am I to that man?’
The man spoke so directly that he was rude.
But even that rudeness did not carry any malice.
Anyone else might have missed it, but Jed could clearly sense it in the nuance of his words.
‘He feels like someone meeting another person for the first time.’
Someone who had never properly communicated with anyone, who had only ever had one-sided conversations.
Those were the typical traits that appeared when such a person tried to communicate, and they appeared in Ferda as well.
Jed had sensed it just before the tea party, when Ferda had asked for advice.
-How do I talk to women?
He had never imagined Ferda would ask a question befitting a man his age.
Excited, Jed advised Ferda based on what he had done and experienced.
Ferda’s reply after the tea party, based on that advice, had been:
-You’re quite lucky to have that face.
Even now, he could not tell whether that had been an insult or a compliment.
In any case, for this operation, Ferda had dangled the claim that he possessed documents related to his little sister.
If that was not a lie, Jed would learn what their current relationship was.
“Phew, good. Shall we get to work now?”
After checking the mirror a couple of times, Jed began moving according to plan.
The moment he set foot in the imperial palace,
“Hey, you.”
A voice calling out to someone echoed through the corridor.
And Jed was the only one in that corridor.
“Who are you?”
Jed muttered under his breath.
Both eyes, my ass.
* * *
Ferda placed his hand on the Orb of Truth, and the Orb of Truth asked him,
-Do you swear that you neither follow demons nor obey their will?
Ferda heard the question and thought,
‘So much for the Orb of Truth.’
Ferda snorted inwardly.
The Sealed Vault also contained a record of how it had been created.
The record stated that the Orb of Truth was not a tool that saw through people and distinguished truth from lies.
‘What really matters is the voice reciting the oath.’
That voice, imbued with mana.
That voice that briefly shook one’s consciousness when one was distracted by the Orb of Truth—that was everything.
The orb merely determined whether the listener had been shaken by the content of that voice.
‘All you have to do is twist the meaning.’
Since Ferda had made a habit of hating everything first and asking questions later, he was very good at it.
-Do you swear that you neither follow demons nor obey their will?
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 a demonic grimoire.
But his heart belonged not to a demon, but to Valdrowa.
“I swear.”
The second question came flying at him.
-Do you swear that your visit to this vault is not motivated by personal desire?
All of this was for Valdrowa.
There was nothing to ask about.
“I swear.”
-Do you swear that you are loyal to the Empire?
‘The Empire…’
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 changed light was green.
Ferda withdrew his hand.
‘This is the procedure for entering the Sealed Vault?’
It seemed shoddy, but it was a sharp procedure that could catch anyone who did not know about it.
Even now, Ferda found it so absurd that he could not help snorting.
“Quite a funny device, isn’t it?”
As Ferda gazed down at it, Yuren slipped into the conversation.
“Yes, it is a funny device.”
Leaving that funny device behind, Ferda and the magic investigator went inside.
They descended the stairs for quite some time.
They went down an endless spiral staircase and finally set foot in the first Sealed Vault.
It contained storage cabinets, with sealed copper pipe containers stacked inside them.
It was the Records Sealing Repository.
It was where the Empire recorded its shameful secrets that must never leak outside, or major incidents that could have destroyed the continent.
Ferda had used the records here to lure Jed out.
‘I thought he would have arrived by now. Not yet?’
They had no way to communicate, so he did not know how things were proceeding.
He had to leave with nothing but faith that Jed would handle things well on his own.
‘Maybe this operation could have gone ahead without him.’
It was a joke he had tossed out himself, but it was not funny even to him.
Jed was absolutely indispensable to this plan.
“There is nothing here worth seeing. Besides, most of it is stuff you don’t need to know.”
The dismissive words contained a warning not to meddle carelessly.
Of course, Ferda had no intention of touching anything.
To lighten the mood, he asked Yuren a question.
“When you come into a place like this, don’t you ever feel like taking a look?”
Yuren nodded.
“Of course, I occasionally feel the urge to look. I may not seem it, but I have the temperament of a scholar.”
“So have you ever looked?”
“Not once. There’s no reason for me to learn things I don’t need to know and get myself into trouble.”
He was a man with a professional conviction rarely seen in this rotten Empire.
That was precisely why he could become a magic investigator.
After taking a brief look at the exterior, they soon moved on to the next place.
What mattered was the second Sealed Vault, farther below.
He descended there with Yuren.
As they went down, Ferda could sense it.
‘A familiar smell.’
The moans and seductive whispers emitted by concentrations of tenacious malice and curses.
They circled around Ferda like eels around a corpse sunk to the bottom of a lake.
Yuren, aware that they were descending deeper and deeper, asked Ferda,
“Are you all right?”
The answer here was not “Of course.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, haha.”
Yuren left his suspicions behind and continued walking.
He could not let it show that he sensed something.
His priority was to deceive Yuren by appearing insensitive, unable to feel anything at all.
The darkness grew thicker.
They tried somehow to illuminate their surroundings with candlelight, but it seemed impossible to drive away all that darkness.
It was an unusual presence, enough to make ordinary people recoil at the instinctive disgust and danger they felt.
Yet Yuren led the way inside.
Ferda followed him in.
As though he had pierced through a massive curtain, Ferda’s vision suddenly opened wide.
“……Huh.”
A gasp of admiration escaped him.
It looked less like a Sealed Vault and more like a secret storehouse of demon worshippers.
One object among them caught Ferda’s eye.
One of the books on the central display stand, utterly different in kind from the other odds and ends.
An object sealed with silver chains, its black cover seeming deeper than tenacious darkness.
‘Barbatos’s Shadowcraft.’
Though known by the epithet “the Secretive Demon,” he was still one of the great demons, so the seal on it was formidable.
“What do you think of this place?”
Ferda answered Yuren’s question reflexively.
“Perhaps because it is a place belonging to demons, it certainly gives off a disgusting aura.”
“Haha, there’s no need to force yourself to be polite. It’s filled with wonder more than disgust.”
Wonderful.
Yes, it truly could be nothing but wondrous.
The high-density mana radiating from the cursed grimoires and spellbooks.
Anyone would be enraptured if it enveloped their entire body.
It felt as though allowing it in even a little would send overwhelming power coursing through one’s body.
It whispered that it was like rain in a drought, more intense than release at the limit of depravity.
“No, it’s just disgusting.”
But Ferda answered firmly.
Even when he had lived on hatred, he had never once thought mana like this was pleasant.
Ferda, consumed by hatred in his heyday, had been the sort to destroy anything he could not possess.
Besides, this mana did not belong to Ferda and could never become his.
“Is that…… so?”
Yuren tilted his head.
“That’s a little strange… A mage of your caliber should at least be somewhat tempted…”
He turned his eyes to stare at Ferda.
His gaze was markedly different from before.
It was not because of the strange atmosphere circulating through the Sealed Vault.
He was revealing the true nature he had kept hidden.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that the two of us are here.”
Yuren set Gamigin’s Necromancy, which he had been carrying, down on the floor and turned around.
His face was filled with the vile murderous intent he had kept hidden.
It was a look that suited this room perfectly.
“I wrote a scenario on my way here.”
“Go ahead. Let’s hear it.”
“I came to the Sealed Vault with the Regent at his request, but he succumbed to the enchantment in this Sealed Vault, and I had no choice but to dispose of him… That’s the scenario. What do you think? Doesn’t it sound incredibly plausible?”
Ferda listened to him, resting his hand on his chin.
At those words about killing him, Ferda felt curiosity before fear.
“Do people kill without mercy here if they are bewitched by black magic?”
“There are no exceptions for black magic. Beneath the omnipotent Light, there is no mercy.”
A sardonic smile hung on Yuren’s lips.
“Even if the victim is the Regent of the Grand Duke.”
What a pointlessly inflexible country.
“If I die, you won’t make it out alive either, will you?”
“You needn’t worry about me. Unlike you, I have quite a few escape routes.”
An escape route for killing the Grand Duke’s regent.
Ferda was not curious about the route Yuren intended to use to escape.
What mattered now was that Yuren intended to kill him.
What benefit would come from that?
‘He seems willing to do this even knowing what will happen if I die…’
Unlike when he had merely been a prospective fiancé, Ferda was now engaged.
From taking Valdrowa’s surname to being practically family with a Red Dragon.
Killing that family would surely invite revenge, and that revenge would be directed at the Empire.
It was an act on an entirely different level from what those extermination squads who came pretending to nibble away at his wealth would do.
‘Could he actually want that?’
There was someone inside the imperial palace willing to do something that could throw not just the Empire, but the entire continent into chaos.
Suddenly, Ferda remembered the Orb of Truth he had passed through.
He had passed all three oaths.
The reason he had been able to do so was…
‘He seems to know the secret of the Sealed Vault.’
From the moment he entered, he had lied from beginning to end.
‘As expected, there isn’t a single good person among these Empire bastards.’
Trapped in this predicament, Ferda smiled.
“Why are you smiling?”
“It’s nothing. I just never thought the childish scenario I wrote would actually come true.”
“The scenario you wrote?”
Yuren tilted his head, still smiling.
“I drew up a scenario in which I stopped an investigator’s rampage as he tried to lure the Regent into a trap. Unlike yours, mine is actually happening.”
Ferda needed Barbatos’s Shadowcraft.
To obtain it, he had to kill the magic investigator.
Whether Yuren was truly upright or not was irrelevant to Ferda.
“Thanks to you, I feel less burdened by what I’m about to do. I can think of it as cleaning up trash.”
All traces of a smile vanished from Yuren’s face at those words.
“Do you think someone like you can kill me?”
What he said was, by the common understanding of mages, an unimaginable insult.
He was a master mage who had reached the fifth circle.
He was renowned across the continent and held a position high enough to rank among the Empire’s upper echelons.
But Ferda’s circle was only the third—he was merely a magic worker.
“If you don’t believe me…”
Mana condensed in Ferda’s right hand.
“Why don’t you see for yourself?”
Magic shot rapidly from Ferda’s hand.
A sphere too fast for any mage to anticipate flew toward Yuren.