10. Death To The Traitor!

“Lies… that’s a lie! They told me there were signs of improvement, I swear it!”
“Signs of improvement?”

Is everyone in this world just and righteous? The answer is, obviously, no.

House Arne paid Leo no small salary. So if all of it, down to the last coin, had gone toward curing Rio’s illness, why hadn’t she gotten any better? That was what had caught my attention.

“What did they diagnose Rio with?”
“…Just a simple lung disease.”

I unfolded another letter and held it up in front of his eyes. It went like this:

“‘Every time I cough, it feels like my throat is burning blue all the way down… my fingertips go tingly, and at night I get cold sweats even though I’m shivering.’”

Eve had it right.

“Blue-colored phlegm, numbness in the fingertips, and chills.”

But nobody besides Eve and me would be able to identify this illness easily.

“This isn’t a lung disease. It’s a disease called Blue Fever.”

I said it as plain fact.

“A rare illness that shows up now and then in children whose bodies aren’t built to handle mana. The ordinary doctors wouldn’t recognize it if they got dragged back from the grave. And these people fed her lung-disease medicine just because she was coughing?”

This is what makes ignorance so terrifying.

“Medicine used for the wrong thing is no different from poison. All this time, Rio’s basically been swallowing poison called medicine, dose after dose, and it’s been eating away at her lungs.”

So Leo’s money had never gone toward treating his sister. It had only been bait to fatten the greedy bellies of quacks.

Leo wailed.

Rio’s death had been a foreseen future. In the real history, after all, it was the rebound from that death that made the Demon Seed bloom in Leo.

Of course, that was the ending of a world where I never possessed Arden’s body.

I watched him sob for a while, and only once he’d cried his tear ducts completely dry and collapsed from exhaustion did I speak to him.

“That said — what I told you is half right and half wrong.”
“…What?”
“Rio’s not going to die. I’ve already taken steps.”

He just stared at me, dazed, so I gave him the truth.

“I already sent word by letter. Told her to brew the root of the Sun Herb and drink it.”

If Luna Herb governs the curse of cold, then the root of the Sun Herb was a specific against the cold mana flooding her circuits in reverse.

I drew a thick pouch from inside my coat and tossed it at his feet. Jingle. The weighty clink of coin rang through the room.

“Sun Herb is going to be hard to get even with what you’ve been sending home, so I added more. For the record, all of this is on credit — you’ll be paying it back.”

Leo’s face was smeared with snot and tears, yet even through all that, his eyes alone sparkled with hope.

“Don’t get the wrong idea. Sun Herb is, at best, emergency first aid.”

I had no intention of being the kind of sucker who hands a traitor an unconditional second chance. Having a sick younger sister and betraying me were two separate matters.

“Unless the tangled-up mana circuit inside Rio’s body gets unwound, the illness can come back any time. And a mere herb can’t fix that.”

I looked him straight in the eyes.

“For a full cure, I have to meet Rio in person and tune her mana myself.”
“Th-then, if you went now—!”
“That depends on you.”

“When I go to see Rio — or whether I don’t go at all and just leave her be. All of that depends on what you do from here on.”

Leo slammed his head against the floor, again and again, and cried out in the most groveling tone he could find.

“A-anything! I’ll do anything! If the Young Master tells me to be his dog, I’ll crawl on all fours if I have to—!”

He was forcibly squeezing out this display of loyalty, and it was so exaggerated it was nauseating.

“Lift your head.”

He flinched and lifted it.

“Cut the disgusting fake act. It’s making me sick.”

Leo wasn’t capable of swearing genuine loyalty to anyone. So the sight of him forcing on a smiling mask and toadying up to me? I had no use for it.

“Don’t play the loyal hound, don’t play the penitent. You’re a selfish, calculating bastard by nature, aren’t you?”

I’d spared a traitor’s life and extended his sister’s lifeline, so the mercy I’d already shown was overflowing. The next step was to thoroughly remodel him into someone useful to me, because I had no use for a dumb little puppet that just nodded at everything I said, either.

“Use your selfishness for my sake. If you want to save Rio, that is.”

At the moment, I was running through the garden. Not alone, of course.

“So this is really part of your plan, right?”
“How dare a traitor doubt the Young Master!”
“S…sorry.”

Leo was on my left and Elli on my right, both matching their strides to mine.

Ah, and Eve was running alongside Elli too. Well, going through the motions of running, anyway.

I finished a full lap and stopped briefly to catch my breath, and once it had settled, I turned to Leo.

“Anyone who isn’t a fan of Arden’s Running Crew is welcome to lodge a complaint.”
“And then?”
“Immediate expulsion.”
“…The traitor will shut up and run.”

I’d dragged everyone out here at the crack of dawn under the banner of rehabilitation exercises, and I planned to repeat this routine every single morning from now on.

When we started running again, Leo grumbled under his breath.

“But shouldn’t the injured party — meaning me — be all the way at the back?”
“You mean the traitor party, don’t you!”

Elli and Eve glared at the limping Leo as if they were about to murder him.

You two are about to start shooting lasers out of your eyes. And Eve, what did you just say?

She’d been curious, so I’d told her some stories about my original world, and the result was… let’s just say she’d picked up a few things from the wrong shelf.

…She’ll be fine, probably.

It wasn’t important, so I tuned it out.

Oh, and by the way, the reason Leo is limping involves a fairly remarkable backstory, which goes like this.

First: two nights ago, Leo had voluntarily turned himself in and confessed the full sequence of events up to that point. But the rest of Valerian’s faction in the manor still didn’t know I’d figured the whole thing out.

In other words — to the servants on Valerian’s side, it still looks like Leo is in the middle of deceiving me.

In which case, what I had to do was simple.

— Wouldn’t it be a little too unnatural for someone just released from the dungeon to come back looking perfectly fine?
— …Excuse me?

According to the official story, Leo had finished his stint in the dungeon and just returned to duty. And a dungeon is not a place that serves three square meals a day or hands out an hour a day of exercise time in the courtyard.

…?

Even as I said it I felt something was off somewhere, but at any rate, a criminal coming back with all four limbs intact was simply unacceptable to me.

“Young Master, I can’t feel my legs.”
“You’re fine. You’re not dead.”

So I’d been mulling over how to manufacture the look of a man back from hard time in the dungeon, because just beating him up one-sidedly felt a little uncomfortable, after all.

— Let me spar with him.

That was Elli, who had picked up on my dilemma. Naturally Leo reared back in protest, his pride bristling, but—

— Senior Leo, have you ever caught a bear with your bare hands?
— What?

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk!

— W-wait a second—
— I promise I won’t break any bones.

I’ll spare you the explanation of what came after. It was simply too brutal. The wretched fate of a traitor, you might say.

To think she wasn’t joking when she said she’d hunted bears.

But is a bear even an animal you can catch barehanded just because you decide to?

I was starting to think Eve’s suggestion deserved serious consideration. The more I learned about Elli, the more astonishing she became.

Who on earth is going to believe that this delicate-looking little thing beat a bear to death with her fists?

I supposed this counted as a kind of gap moe, in its own way. I was chuckling to myself at the thought when, for the first time in a while, some clearly malicious chatter reached my ears.

— That Leo bastard, he’s running with a limp.
— Honestly, Arden’s a real dimwit too. The guy beside him was trying to kill him just a few days ago, and there he is, happily running alongside him without a clue.

I glanced at Eve, who frowned and pointed a finger off somewhere. There, two servants holding a laundry basket were snickering.

I only just held back a snort of dry laughter. In their eyes, Leo at my side was an act, a spy Valerian had planted putting on a show to lull me into complacency.

Perfect.

This was exactly the picture I’d wanted: a situation where everyone believed I was the one being deceived.

So, playing none the wiser, I gave the sweat-drenched Leo a light tap on the shoulder.

“How’s the leg? Looking better than I’d have thought, actually.”
“…Huff, huff. No way! I — I’m about to collapse any seco—akh!”

He was just mustering that bitter-pill answer when his rubbery legs tangled beneath him and he face-planted with a spectacular crash. The servants watching from a distance pointed and burst into open laughter.

I clicked my tongue as Leo struggled to his feet covered in dust.

“How much bad karma does a guy have to rack up before even his own side laughs at him like that?”
“My own side? I’m on the Young Master’s side, aren’t I?”

Elli, who’d been listening alongside us, cut in.

“Which Young Master?”
“Young Master Arden, obviously!”
“Mm-hmm~ Is that so.”

The two of them launched right back into their squabbling, and I was thinking there really isn’t a single quiet day around here when it happened.

Thud!

At the sudden loud noise, everyone turned to look.

“A…aaah!”

It had come from the corridor where the servants who’d been laughing at us stood. They had fallen, and the laundry basket they’d let go of had landed, of all things, straight on their heads. The wet sheets and clothes had wrapped them up so completely they looked like mummies.

“Pfft!”

Elli was the first to crack. Soon she was clutching her stomach and cackling, and finally she got it out.

“Anyone who saw them would think they were laundry and hang them out to dry! All that running their mouths, and now Heaven’s gone and punished them!”
“…Ahem.”

Leo cleared his throat and turned his face away, but he couldn’t quite hide the twitching corners of his mouth.

I wasn’t paying attention to the two who had fallen, though, because something else had caught my eye.

A butterfly?

Between the two figures flailing under the laundry, a blue butterfly had appeared from somewhere. It drifted slowly over to me and alighted on the back of my hand.

Cold.

The butterfly was very, very cold. Absolutely not the temperature of any living creature.

The instant I thought that and tried to touch it, it dissolved into a single thread of water and vanished.

“…Looks like the plan needs a change.”

The two who’d still been cackling went quiet at my words, and for one moment I thought they had finally registered the gravity of the situation.

“Was there even a plan to begin with?”
“I’m hungry, Young Master!”

There isn’t a single sane human being around me.

Right. Eve is the only one.

You’re the only one.

As we stepped into the dining hall, the smell of warm soup and fresh bread, already laid out, struck our noses. Elli and Leo, ravenous from the rehabilitation exercises, swallowed hard without realizing it.

I took the innermost seat and gestured with my eyes for the two of them to sit as well.

“Let’s eat first. Even Mount Kumgang isn’t worth seeing on an empty stomach.”¹

“Where’s Mount Kumgang, anyway?”
“On a continent very, very far from here.”

Elli nodded as if she understood and started ladling up soup. Beside her as she wolfed it down, Leo sat fidgeting and stealing glances at me.

“What. Is there something on my face?”
“N-no, sir.”

He picked up his spoon, looking awkward, but his attention stayed completely fixed on me.

“Curious about the plan, huh?”

As if he’d been waiting for it, Leo set his spoon back down.

“…Honestly. Yes.”
“Then let me start with the original plan.”

I tore off a small piece of bread and dipped it into the soup.

“Obviously, the centerpiece of the plan was you.”

I put the soaked bread in my mouth, savored it slowly, and only then went on.

“Brother Valerian probably wasn’t expecting anything from you in the first place.”
“…Why not?”
“Because Brother isn’t fool enough to take back a dog that’s already betrayed its master once.”

That must have driven into his chest like a blade, because his face darkened in an instant.

“Which means no one ever expected you to succeed.”

I had absolutely zero intention of choosing my words to spare his feelings. To a traitor, that would be a luxury.

“But I made a show of taking you back in. Brother’s people will think I’m still the idiot you’re fooling. That’s why I forced the morning runs on you, too.”
“That’s what it was?”
“What, did you think I was just bullying you?”

The other two answered in Leo’s place.

“Huh, that wasn’t it?”

Normally the two of you stay quiet, but the very second it’s about slandering me, your timing is suddenly perfect. Just perfect.