Pursuit

The courtroom fell utterly silent.

The silence earlier, while the Administrative Minister spoke, had plainly rested on some promise made under the table, some word passed in advance. This one just as plainly came from sheer consternation.

And no wonder. What kind of madman says a thing that mad to a member of the imperial family?

“…”

What none of them expected was that the Prince, the man it had actually been said to, showed no particular reaction at all.

He had sat quietly through all of it with his eyes closed. Now he only opened them, slowly, and looked at the other man with a blank face that didn’t hold so much as a shred of emotion.

“That is lèse-majesté, Aiden.”

His voice was gentle, and what he said with it didn’t stray far from that same calm track.

“Consider whether you are sure you can answer for your own actions.”

Yet there was a bleak chill in that voice, enough to stop even Aiden for a moment.

“You are free to stand in the way of my will and to set yourself against me. But do not insult me. Do not insult the imperial authority. That is no different from reviling the Empire and the subjects I carry on my shoulders.”

“…”

“As the next man to govern, how I am treated personally is bound up with the Empire’s prestige as well. Do not forget it.”

Pride and self-regard at representing the Empire were steeped into every joint of those sentences. He wasn’t speaking for his own sake, but as the man who stood for the body he carried on his shoulders.

It was unmistakably a warning.

If they were going to trade moves, they should trade them beneath the surface, not like this, tangled up in scandal and violence that knocked the Empire’s own order out of joint. That was the line that let the two of them go on ‘fighting peacefully’ the way they had been until now, and Aiden wasn’t to cross it again. And if Aiden came at him this violently, he would have no choice but to answer just as violently himself. Something along those lines.

Fair and aboveboard. Principle. Incorruptibility. A sovereign. A patriot.

Aiden turned over the keywords that had described the Prince in the original, and laughed wryly to himself.

A truly gentlemanly warning.

For a man who played such filthy tricks, he had an honest streak in the oddest places, and what came next proved it.

The Prince pursed his lips. Then, in a voice pitched for Aiden’s ears alone, he quietly whispered.

“—I respect you. Not only you; I respect every member of the Empire the same way.”

“…”

“So please don’t make me harm you. That way, when this is over, I can send you safely back to the life you had.”

What I want is not your ruin but that seat you’re sitting in, the Lionhearted’s groom. So do not come at me beyond that. So that I can go on respecting you.

…The paragon of virtue has deigned to show himself.

Truly a refined sort of hostility, wasn’t it?

“I will hear your rebuttal to the Administrative Minister’s accusation later. Now return to your seat—”
“False accusation carries a fairly heavy punishment under imperial law. Heavy enough that not even the imperial family gets out from under it.”

The problem was.

Aiden had not the slightest intention of being dragged onto a board the other side had set up.

“…What are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s me giving the warning, Your Highness. Not you.”

“…”

“Stop picking these shabby little quarrels. Before I pay you back twice over.”

This time the Prince’s blank face twitched.

Aiden was silent a moment. Then he spoke, a faint growl in his voice.

“The Lionhearted’s consort, Aiden Kellermain, accuses the Prince. It is you people who are pinning a false crime on Dame Noelle.”

He made sure every word carried clearly through the courtroom. It was a bombshell, and it froze the room far harder than anything before it.

“…”

And then.

Rad’s face hardened, and so did the Prince’s, because they must have grasped by reflex what Aiden’s words meant. This was a declaration of war, a fight picked out in the open, and that meant he had the confidence to back it up.

Of course, only a lunatic would do it. If he failed, he would have to hand over his life on the spot, because defying a member of the imperial family this far carried exactly that much weight.

But precisely because of that.

For this moment at least, what Aiden had just said carried both news value and the ring of truth. It was enough to neutralize an attack meant to spread scandal and send her reputation crashing down. The ‘social attack’ they had launched against Noelle in this room had lost every bit of its meaning, all thanks to what Aiden had just done.

That bastard…!

As Rad stared at Aiden, grinding his teeth inwardly, a voice dropped once more into the quiet courtroom.

“Set a separate date for the hearing. I’ll lay the whole thing bare for you there.”

“…”

“A moment ago you asked me whether I was sure I could answer for my own actions, didn’t you?”

Aiden looked straight into the eyes of the Prince, whose face had gone stiff.

“Have you checked whether you’re sure of that yourself?”

That whole business had happened only yesterday.

He had picked a great noisy fight with the Prince, and thrown in his own neck as the stake.

“…Wow.”

Katya, walking along beside him, let the word slip out and flapped over a page of the newspaper in her hand. She’d picked out papers from all different kinds of press houses, and whichever one she opened, the headline was the same: what Aiden had pulled in the courtroom yesterday.

“Impressive. The whole Empire’s watching, huh.”
“…Luckily they cut the part about me, though.”

That was probably Noelle’s doing, and beyond her the Emperor’s own connections being called in. One way or another, anything touching his personal circumstances had plainly been cut, which spared him becoming a celebrity on a scale he couldn’t even imagine.

It was a real blessing that this world had newspapers and television but no internet. Thanks to that, he was managing to hang on to some privacy, wasn’t he…

…Well, setting that aside.

Aiden sighed inwardly and called up the system window before his eyes.

It had just been updated, with yesterday’s incident as its starting point. When the ‘subjugation battle’ marked on the Main Quest would come still hadn’t appeared, but this much at least had changed. It was probably rolling along locked together with the Lord Protector, same as before.

“…”

The point that nagged at him was.

That phrase about the relationship ‘changing drastically’.

Katya had once had the same thing marked on her. She’d gone from growling at him like she meant to eat him alive to the two of them calling each other friends, and set side by side, before and after, that certainly deserved to be called a drastic change.

If there was a problem.

…Isn’t Dame Noelle already enormously friendly toward me?

Honestly, it would be no exaggeration to say she’d gone past friendly into something all but openly overprotective. He understood that she felt responsible for him, having brought him in and seated him in a place like this, but even so, it was enough to make even him flinch sometimes. If that was going to ‘change drastically’, it would surely leap another long stride in the friendly direction, and what on earth was he supposed to do then…

“…”

Honestly, it worried him a little. The moment right after yesterday’s stunt was proof enough.

…I got chewed out something awful.

The moment they got back to headquarters, hadn’t she sat him down and gone at him for hours on end? What on earth did he plan to do about the aftermath? If he kept behaving like this, there was no telling what might happen. It put her in a real bind, when her whole position was that she wanted to send him safely back into his family’s arms…

Of course, he could feel keenly that she was angry enough to bring him to tears only because she was genuinely worried about him, so he hadn’t been able to get a word out.

“Thank you.”

…Come to think of it, hadn’t she left him with something like that at the end?

“In any case, you did it for my sake, did you not.”
“…I didn’t know you would go that far for me.”

With that, Noelle had fled back to her room, adding only that if there was anything she could help with, he was to be sure to tell her.

…With her face gone scarlet, at that.

Hm.

He’d heard thanks from her before, back when she was thoroughly drunk, but this was the first time he’d heard it from her sober.

And, sorry as he was about it.

Grateful as he was for her offer to help with anything, this was one place he couldn’t bring her.

“Why?”
“Because what comes next is something only you can do, Katya.”

Katya, trotting beside him in short quick steps to keep up with his stride, grinned at that.

“…So it’s something only friends can do together?”
“Hm, something like that, I guess?”

It didn’t seem worth denying, so he went along with it, and Katya, her robe pulled down low, giggled and clung to Aiden. The way she stuck fast to one of his arms, as if she were claiming it, showed every sign that his answer had pleased her enormously.

…Is this the sort of distance friends normally keep?

The question rose up on its own.

Well.

He’d always thought she had trouble setting the terms of a relationship, but what exactly the word ‘friend’ meant inside her head confused even him at times. More precisely, he had no idea what she thought he was to her, either. It certainly didn’t seem to be romantic feeling, but it wasn’t ordinary friendship either, so what on earth was it…?

…Anyway.

Katya clinging to him far more than he’d expected was a matter he could take some time over and think about later. Before that, there was something else to take care of first.

The immediate objective is…

To bring to light that the Prince was attacking Noelle through incitement. That had to go through three stages in all: showing that the unlicensed weapons brought into the imperial capital had nothing to do with Noelle, and that the attack on the capital’s military headquarters had nothing to do with her either.

“…”

The fortunate part was that a single move could bring both goals dramatically closer. He only had to find one thing: the ‘action organization’ behind all three of those incidents, the point where they crossed.

He’d heard a hint about that before.

“If I can’t find it, whoever’s watching their back is a high noble at the least. You want me digging into that lot? Trying to get somebody’s neck chopped?”

Billy Hagen had told him that when Aiden asked him to look into who was smuggling weapons into the imperial capital. If an information dealer that capable said so and took his hands off it, then there was an organization out there with somebody watching its ‘back’.

Weapons brought in, hellfire bomb included; the Suppression Pillars used to abduct Katya; the roots needed to tear open a dimensional fissure…

Every one of those was hard to get through ordinary routes, so it was extremely likely that some organization existed to ‘manage’ such things as a package. And if it did, it would be holding a great mass of evidence that the Prince and the Administrative Minister had put it up to the work. That, at least, was the natural order of illegal business as Aiden had seen it in his years as a con man.

“Ah-ha— so you’re here hunting for their lackeys?”

When he explained the purpose, Katya nodded as if it made sense to her. However much she was a royal who’d slipped out beyond everyone’s notice, she was still someone who had lived in a palace overrun with covert struggle, and she seemed to know already how this kind of thing worked.

Getting goods like those and bringing them into the imperial capital without word spreading had to be done fast, with as few elite people as possible. Dangerous work that had to stay hidden was always put together with the fewest capable hands. And the place Aiden was walking through now could well be called the natural habitat of people like that.

…Here again.

The imperial capital’s black market.

For starting an investigation, there was nowhere better: a hotbed of crime beyond the law’s reach, overflowing with all but limitless information. Somehow it even felt good to be back. Come to think of it, wasn’t this where he’d first met Katya?

“So how are you going to find guys like that? Even if they’re around here somewhere, you’ve got nothing to go on right now, right?”
“Yeah, it’s like looking for a needle in a beach full of sand.”

They were hidden so tightly that even an information dealer couldn’t gather anything on them, so the comparison fell nothing short.

“So—”

Aiden gave a short laugh, because even to him the method he’d come up with was funny.

“—shall we try shoveling out all the sand? Then the needle will drop out too.”

Somehow, whenever he was with Katya, he felt himself turning more reckless than usual. Was it because he’d caught her habit of reaching for the most intense stimulus first, out of wanting to ‘feel’ anything at all?

“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Katya.” When Katya tilted her head and asked, Aiden answered as though it were nothing much. “Life’s been a bit dull lately, hasn’t it?”

“…”

The instant she heard it.

A smile like a little hellion’s spread across Katya’s face.

“…See, I was right to make friends with you.”

Not that anyone could know for certain.

Because one look made it plain he had come up with a tremendously ‘stimulating’ method.