Once Upon A Time In Buckingham

Swordsmanship is the queen of Kung-Fu, and Quick Sword is the queen of swordsmanship.
-Carl Friedrich Gauss-

/<That concludes my report.>

Noon. Buckingham.

Sword Queen Victoria, her face much more at ease, listened to the Direct Message of Mycroft Holmes, the spymaster of the British Intelligence Butler Agency, in her curtained study.

“You have worked hard. I will gather the relevant parties separately and commend them, so take note.”
/<As you command.>

When Mycroft answered, pitch-black ink surged up from the floor and swallowed his body.
The SIS spymaster vanished in the blink of an eye.
No matter when she saw it, it was a bizarre unique weapon and Kung-Fu.

As expected of a man of the Holmes family. His looks were outstanding, and his talent was exceptional.
That thought came to her, but the Queen also knew that the character of Mycroft Holmes and Sherlock Holmes far surpassed that of ordinary people.

“…He was not someone I wished to owe, but this time it cannot be helped.”

Victoria recalled the day she played Sword Debate Chess with Sherlock Holmes at the royal ballroom.
If she had not calmed her heart in time by recalling her consort Albert’s face, she might have fallen into Qi Deviation from surging hatred and her Inner Demon.
Sherlock Holmes held back even less than the Heavenly Demon Red Dragon, Phileas Fogg, and it had no mercy.

Phileas Fogg’s Sword Debate chess, unlike his epithet, was utterly orthodox.
Victoria and Albert lost to him because Fogg possessed vast Kung-Fu knowledge, spanning not only orthodox arts, but also unorthodox arts and arts from beyond the borders, and even demonic arts.

But Sherlock Holmes was different.

The way he chose only vicious moves no one had ever heard of or seen was the very image of a demon rakshasa.
Queen Victoria had defeated notorious dark-path Sword Debate chess players many times, yet the seven matches she played with Holmes were enough to inflict culture shock.

In truth, if the Little Heavenly Demon pulled such things in a Sword Debate chess match held in the marketplace, there would be no problem.
The overly immersed opponent would simply rise, smash a chair down on the Little Heavenly Demon’s head, and a life-and-death duel would begin.

But the Little Heavenly Demon did something that those of common bones could never dare imitate.
With despicable play and Sword Debate fit for a back-alley chess club, he provoked and mocked living power.
From that, the Queen understood.
Mycroft, the SIS spymaster, had sworn loyalty to the nation and the Queen, so he was easy to handle, but the Little Heavenly Demon was a genuine madman worse than his brother.

“No, he is even worse than his master.”

His master, the Heavenly Demon Crimson Dragon Phileas Fogg, was a figure who could be spoken of as the strongest across European Murim, excluding a few forbidden lands such as the Schwarzwald.
Yet Fogg kicked away the offer to appoint him as a Knight of the Turntable and simply left for somewhere.
Whether he inherited his master’s nature of refusing to follow power, or whether he was like that from birth, the Little Heavenly Demon also had not a trace of respect for divine right of rulers to be found.

However, his ability was something she had no choice but to acknowledge.
And also the fact that he held the heart to devote himself to the greater good.

“…In many ways, it is talent without precedent.”

If she had not acknowledged the Little Heavenly Demon, the Queen would not have agreed to hand over the stakes she wagered on Sword Debate chess to him.
The Cold Jade Bed was one of the precious treasures of the Westminster Ancient Tomb Clan.
And beyond that, she was even giving the secret manual he demanded because Queen Victoria had her eye on Sherlock Holmes’s potential.
Even if his character was terrible enough to invite a strike, there was no way the Heavenly Demon would choose some half-baked man as the successor to inherit his Kung-Fu lore, so his Kung-Fu talent was certain.
Besides, had the Little Heavenly Demon not devoted himself selflessly for London without asking any compensation all this time.

Sherlock Holmes, in place of the British government, Whitehall, which could not deploy its full capacity for diplomatic reasons, worked with Mycroft to set the plan’s framework and secretly carried it out, achieving results beyond expectation.
In the process, the Tsar’s true intent, previously unrevealed, was exposed, and Russia’s ambition to gain an ice-free port was also thwarted.
This time, perfectly.
By burning the golden apple tree hidden at Lake Ladoga.

“Hoo hoo…”

Having dismissed even the maids and left herself alone, the Queen laughed with ease.
This was surely a harvest beyond what she expected.
She thought she could give up one or two coastal villages so long as London did not burn, but thanks to the Little Heavenly Demon’s plan, Great Britain got through without any notable damage.
With this, Russia would withdraw from the very center of the Great Game’s stage.
As a result, the one to seize Eurasian hegemony would be Great Britain.
As the Little Heavenly Demon and the others established chivalry, the nation they lived in gained political and diplomatic advantage.

“There is no need to call it by such a ridiculous name as the Great Game. From now on, it should rightly be called the Great Britain Party.”

It was a soliloquy with no one to hear it, but Victoria was grinning, as if something delighted her greatly.
The Holmes brothers had truly done their work this time.
The younger brother stopped the Vermilion Phoenix’s approach, and the older brother burned the golden apple tree.
What expression would Alexander III be making right now, after daring to threaten her by speaking of war.

According to the SIS spymaster’s report, golden apples were precious elixirs that could not be easily found even if one combed the entire world.
If the tree had remained intact, the Tsar could have waited for the Vermilion Phoenix to return someday and dreamed of expanding his influence, but now that the apple tree had burned, he would truly only see an ice-free port in dreams.
The late Alexander II would have hidden the greatest arrangement of his life at Lake Ladoga with the heart of ‘even if I die in a terror attack tomorrow, I will plant an apple tree,’ and now that his successor Alexander III had ruined it, his heart would not be at ease even beyond the River Styx.

But there was something else that gave Victoria the greatest satisfaction.

“…As expected, I wasn’t wrong.”

London proved its strength on its own.
Detective, postman, undertaker, businessman.
Though the Butler Agency stepped forward on the surface, those who saved the city from the Vermilion Phoenix’s threat were all people who held their places and lived ordinary lives.

And then, a far greater problem they could not touch.
For example, the rampage of the dragon veins.
Two of the Knights of the Turntable chosen by the Queen herself moved directly to Scotland and resolved it.
No matter how strong one was, the body was only one.
One could not protect Great Britain alone.

Queen Victoria was not an ordinary individual.
She was the Sword Queen of Gibraltar Temple, the head of the Westminster Ancient Tomb Clan, and furthermore the Queen Of The British Empire who ruled the British Empire.
A queen lived a life entirely different from duelists who wielded power only as their will pleased.
Upon her small shoulders, she bore the heavy burden of a nation’s glory and prosperity.

If the Queen leaned into extreme evil, sparing no means to pursue only her own advancement, or chose extreme righteousness, intoxicated by the Greater Good of establishing chivalry through Kung-Fu and never looking back at reality, what trajectory would the historian’s pen draw.
The extremist heretical faction that led the nation to ruin.
Or the protagonist of extremist righteous tyranny.
History would judge, through ages to come, the tyrant who ruined countless lives through wrong choices.

Because she knew that, Victoria long ago chose the path of acknowledging her own limits.
Only in an age of war was the wisest and strongest Kung-Fuist recorded as a great ruler.
Victoria, who had tasted defeat to the Heavenly Demon Crimson Dragon, keenly realized that one could not change the world with individual Kung-Fu might.
The ideal Great Britain she wanted was a nation that could move forward without a queen.
And through this incident, Victoria could know that London had not betrayed her faith.

-Click.

The Queen reached out and opened her desk drawer.
When she opened the miniature safe inside, a small golden key revealed itself.

“Well… even if things went wrong, there was a contingency.”

It was true that Victoria did not doubt the mettle of all those living on Great Britain’s land, including the Knights of the Turntable, but that did not mean she had failed to prepare for the worst.

“…I still wish to postpone seeking ‘their’ help until the final moment.”

After staring at the key for a while, the Queen’s gaze turned toward the study floor.
Even now, in that deep, dark underground, secret training that no one knew of would be underway.
Among the many mysteries London held, their existence, the most secretly concealed, must not be exposed to the outside lightly.

It hadn’t been long since Whitehall began granting permission for Yun-Qi Locomotives to run even underground, but Victoria was already worried that foreign spies who envied Great Britain’s prosperity might uncover the wonders beneath the earth.

The first key opens the road leading to the Pagoda Grove.
The second key opens the gate of the Hall of Eastern Seal.
And the third is the one Victoria holds.
The final key, which grants the chance to face the wall.

She had thought that no one would dare try to seize them, since the first and second keys were guarded by the Home Secretary and the chief Kingswood ranger, respectively.
Yet Sir Harcourt, after encountering an unknown master, was defeated without even managing a proper strike.

“…Could it be one of the disasters the Heavenly Demon Red Dragon warned of?”

If the eyewitness testimony was all true, the one who attacked the Home Secretary might be a stronger man than herself.
She did not know what monster he was or where he sprang from, but if he was a member of the main enemy Phileas Fogg was searching for, it made sense.
If that guess was true, then no matter what, she could not hand over the key.
Facing them was something only she, who had reached the Unrestrained Realm, could do.

“Did the Little Heavenly Demon say he was summoned by Harcourt and saw that man…”

If Fogg had told his disciple about the enemy’s identity, she would need to summon the Little Heavenly Demon and hear it.

“It seems I will call him two or three more times before the promised month is up. I will have to grant him more time to learn the secret manual.”

She had promised that if he could learn the Ancient Tomb Clan’s divine art within a month, she would tell him the secret of herself and Albert, but she still had not delivered the secret manual.

The thought made her feel sorry toward the Little Heavenly Demon, but only for a moment.
The Queen decided to finish what she ought to do as the leader guiding Great Britain.

“Poppins.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”

The study door opened, and the loyal maid appeared.

“See to it that the reward is delivered to the Little Heavenly Demon before today is over. The contents of the reward are as follows. First, gold equal to his body weight, and—”