12-5 At The End Of Their Flight

They were still inside the royal capital.

Those two had been marked quite thoroughly.

But that pet operative of theirs was a problem.

The rough-looking spirits kept shouting, “Let me handle him, no, I will,” and it was already getting noisy as hell.

Yap yap yap, shut the hell up.

You buzzing flies of May can get the hell out of my way.

I’ve got bigger things to worry about than that.

The place they were hiding was probably one of the ducal house’s safe houses.

Heh, so it was in the slums inside the royal capital.

Pretty clever, I’ll give them that.

Maybe it was a remnant from when they were doing shady business.

Then again, maybe they were still doing it now.

But that lawlessness ended today.

Still, I just could not get too close.

I only hoped that bastard could not detect me either.

I teleported nearby and quietly watched the situation from a short distance away.

Thinking something like this might happen someday, I had steadily and painstakingly increased my teleport points through direct visual confirmation whenever I had free time.

How should I put it… when you do work involving kids, sometimes you start wanting a little time to yourself.

At times like that, I came to the royal capital and steadily worked on making a teleport MAP like this.

It was not really work suited to the young, but I was an old man with stronger loneliness tolerance than most, so I was fine.

And then, before I knew it, I would start missing the Beast-Ear Garden terribly, and when I went back and patted the heads of the children who came piling onto me, I would feel ready to do my best again.

Now then, for that reason, I could not allow even a single strand of hair of anything that threatened my or the children’s safety.

I sent inside the latest ultracompact camera pod, one equipped with detection nullification.

It was not like that guy had teleportation magic.

He had been spotted quite a few times while fleeing too.

Apparently they had escaped using something like a secret passage from the royal palace known only to royalty.

Because of that as well, the Albatross Kingdom no longer had the option of leaving those people alive.

I managed to confirm the appearance of the pet operative.

He looked every bit like the sort of man who would be sly as hell.

Compared to Rick, who had at least truly been an S-rank adventurer, he was far smaller fry, but as a threat to me and the Beast-Ear Garden, this one ranked higher.

Through the camera infused with my own magic power, I could also use Appraisal and the Item Box through the link.

I tried appraising him, but it looked like he did not have Fly, much less Teleport.

In case he somehow managed to flee, I at least put a marker on the bastard through the camera, just to be safe.

He had the exact sort of sly face that looked like he would abandon the duke and his son and run off alone if it came down to it.

The bastard had all sorts of equipment on him, so I quietly stripped it off and collected it through the Item Box via the camera feed.

I left only the conspicuous sword at his waist, so he seemed completely unaware that anything had happened.

He was the only one I was going to kill here.

For my own reasons, I had decided that.

Operation start!

Using the camera feed as my guide, I instantly teleported inside the building that blended perfectly into that slum district.

First, right there on the spot, I took away the man’s sword with Storage.

The man frantically groped around for his other weapons.

But his hands only grasped empty air, and beads of sweat began to form on his brow.

Since I was glaring right at him, he could not run either.

If anyone could escape from this situation, it would be only the three remaining teleportation magic users in the world besides me and my companions.

As for the duke and his son, I had gifted them the Kasumi Net that had done such fine work back in the Rick incident.

All the while, I never took my eyes off the man facing me.

“You lowly rare visitor, you washed-up adventurer!”

That Bighton bastard was cursing me foully while stuck neatly in a sandwich position, but I ignored him.

Unfortunately for you, I am not some suspicious “washed-up adventurer,” but a perfectly active adventurer even now.

I have no intention of being treated like some noble like you.

I am, at least, an “honorary” marquis, after all.

A man like that deserved a punch just to shut him up, and no divine punishment would come of it, but this was too critical a moment, so I left the fool alone.

Before the man could escape, I casually shot him dead with a pistol-type magic gun, taking advantage of the fact that he was still confused and slow to react.

More matter-of-factly than ever before.

A twenty-millimeter rifle Stone Bullet, spinning in a high-speed vicious spiral, blasted straight through his heart.

I did not hesitate.

No matter what, this was the one man I absolutely could not let escape.

As I looked at him, now a corpse with a gaping hole blasted through his chest by the magic round, sprawling pathetically on the ground while spewing blood everywhere, I remembered the bandit I had first killed with a spear, and my face twisted a little.

But mercy was useless.

Ever since I began fighting against the Empire, I had made it a point not to dwell on pointless things in moments like this.

If this man escaped, then it would be my children who would turn into corpses.

If, by some chance, something like that happened because of my own foolish sentimentality, then I would never forgive myself.

I collected the corpse with Storage, grabbed the captured duke and his son, and returned to the royal palace with teleportation magic.

Then I threw them down before the king.

Having just watched their trump card get casually killed right before their eyes, the two of them were terrified.

They knew there was no longer any road left to save them.

His Majesty the King understood.

He understood why I, who had already confirmed whether my license to kill was still valid, had brought these two back alive instead.

His Majesty closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and declared clearly.

“You plunged the kingdom into a crisis of survival, and on top of that, fled without accepting judgment for your crimes. It is no longer possible even for me, your own kin, to shield you. House Bighton is hereby abolished, and you two shall be executed by beheading tomorrow morning at dawn. As for the disposition of the other members of the ducal house, that shall be determined after a thorough investigation. Lord Jolly, will that suffice?”

“Brother!”

“Uncle!”

The two cried out to His Majesty the King as if clinging to him, but His Majesty maintained an almost stubborn expressionless face and remained silent.

This was what it meant to be a king.

“Let go of me, you mere common soldiers!”

“Damn you, you commoner. May you be cursed!”

Still shrieking abuse, the two of them were this time dragged away by a pair of ordinary national soldiers, not the Kingdom’s Knight Order.

They were no longer royalty, but merely being treated as criminals.

Jolly nodded in satisfaction at this decision.

“With this, the kingdom too shall remain secure. Do take the utmost care not to commit any discourtesy toward Sacred Elion-sama.”

His Majesty the King also seemed relieved, and glanced my way as if to say, “I leave it to you.”

Yeah, yeah, I am already doing my best, from taking care of her milk (magic power) to taking care of what comes out the other end (purification magic).

But as for Elion-sama herself, she had not a shred of dignity to speak of.

At the snack area, she had cream stuffed all the way up her nostrils and was snorting proudly.

Touya was diligently taking care of that little sister of his.

Eri was still off somewhere after being carried away by the princesses.

Well, that sort of thing was the usual with her.

She had brought new cooking tools and sweets, and also Aoi-chan’s handmade decorative art and wrapping samples, so there was no way she would let royalty get bored.

That too had been part of today’s strategy, to scatter those things around the palace and advertise House Orston.

So the timing worked out just fine.

Surely the queen would wind up coming wherever Eri was anyway.

For that sort of thing, you had to start with the palace’s fashion leader first.

Just now, I had committed murder with a pistol, and in addition, intentionally sent at least two people to the execution scaffold.

Depending on the findings, other members of the ducal house might be facing capital punishment as well.

And yet, for all that, I felt calm enough that even I thought I was being strangely matter-of-fact.

Probably because I had protected what was precious to me.

This was likely the kind of scene I would have to face again from here on too.

I was still not used to scenes where people bled by my own hand.

But I did not intend to force myself to recoil from it either.

Since ancient times, people had continued fighting to protect what was precious to them.

And in that process, they had honed terrifying instincts.

There was risk equally for the hunter and the hunted.

In that exchange, the one who gained even the slightest advantage over the other survived.

In my case, the base was the abilities I inherited from my grandfather and the “ones” who had stayed by my side thanks to those blessings, but it was my own effort that honed them to the utmost.

I would go on fighting from here as well.

For the sake of what was dear to me, to protect the people precious to me.

My grandfather, who traveled through Manchukuo overflowing with bandits on business, then threw himself alone into opening new land in that harsh frontier before the war, surviving again and again while coming close to death many times.

My grandfather, who during the massive U.S. air raids of the Second World War displayed an ability like the Seventh Sense while inside an air-raid shelter, and, while the others left, saved his family’s lives through stern leadership as head of the household and sheer force backed by special abilities.

That spirit and those abilities are within me too.

Protecting what must never be lost, I will go on surviving here in this other world.