10. Death To The Traitor!

“Lies… it’s a lie! They told me she was showing signs of improvement, I swear it!”

“Signs of improvement?”

Was everyone in this world upright and righteous? The answer was, obviously, no.

The salary Leo drew from House Arne was hardly a pittance. And yet, if every coin of it had gone toward curing Rio’s illness, why hadn’t she gotten any better? That was what had snagged my attention.

“What did they diagnose Rio’s illness as?”

“…Just a simple lung disease.”

I unfolded another letter and held it up to Leo’s face. This is what it said:

“‘Every time I cough, it feels like my throat’s burning blue all the way down… My fingertips go numb, and at night I break into cold sweats even as I shiver.’”

Eve had the right answer.

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

But outside of Eve and me, no one would be able to identify the illness so easily.

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

I said it flatly, as plain fact.

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

This is exactly what makes ignorance so terrifying.

“A medicine used for the wrong purpose is no different from a poison. All this time, under the name of medicine, Rio has been swallowing a poison that steadily destroys her lungs.”

Leo’s money had never gone toward his sister’s treatment. It had been bait, plain and simple, fattening the greedy bellies of quacks.

Leo wailed.

Rio’s death had always been a foregone conclusion. In the real history, after all, it was the backlash from losing her that bloomed the Demon Seed inside Leo.

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

I watched Leo sob for a while. Once he’d wept his tear ducts bone-dry and slumped into exhaustion, I spoke.

“That said — what I told you is half right and half wrong.”

“…What?”

“Rio’s not going to die. I’ve already taken steps.”

I handed the truth to Leo, who stared back at me dazed.

“I told you in a letter already. Brew the root of the Sun Herb and have her drink it.”

Where Luna Herb governed the curse of cold, the root of Sun Herb was the counter to the cold mana flooding her circuits in reverse.

I drew a fat pouch from inside my coat and tossed it at his feet.

Jingle.

A heavy clink of coins rang through the room.

“Sun Herb won’t be easy to come by, even with everything you’ve been sending home, so I padded it out. And for the record — this is all on credit. You’ll be paying it back.”

Leo’s face was a smear of snot and tears. Yet even through all of it, his eyes alone shone with hope.

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

I had no intention of playing the sucker who hands a traitor a free, no-strings second chance. Having a sick little sister and betraying me were two entirely separate ledgers.

“Unless the tangled mana circuit inside Rio’s body is unwound, the illness will relapse anytime. And that’s not something a mere herb can fix.”

I looked Leo dead in the eyes.

“Only if I meet with Rio myself and tune her mana can she be fully cured.”

“Th-then, even now—!”

“That depends on you.”

“Whether I go to see Rio, or leave her be without ever going at all. All of that hangs on what you do from here.”

Leo slammed his forehead against the floor, again and again, and cried out in the most groveling voice he could dredge up.

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

The sight of him wringing out these displays of loyalty was so overdone it turned my stomach.

“Lift your head.”

At my command, Leo flinched and raised his head.

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

Leo wasn’t the kind of man capable of swearing genuine loyalty to anyone. Him plastering a smiling mask on his face and toadying up to me? I had no use for that.

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

I’d already shown more than enough mercy. I’d spared a traitor’s life and thrown his sister a lifeline. So the next step was to remodel him, thoroughly, into someone useful to me. A dumb little puppet that just nodded along to everything I said was no good to me.

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

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

“Are you sure this is really part of your plan?”

“How dare a traitor doubt the Young Master!”

“S…sorry.”

Leo on my left, Elli on my right, both of them matching their strides to mine.

Ah, and Eve was running right alongside Elli too. Going through the motions of running, anyway.

I finished a full lap and stopped to catch my breath. 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 hauled everyone out here at the crack of dawn under the banner of rehabilitation exercises. And from here on, I meant to run this same routine every single morning.

As 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, surely!”

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?

I’d told her a few stories about my original world to satisfy her curiosity, and the result was… let’s just say she’d picked up a thing or two off the wrong shelf.

…She’ll be fine. Probably.

Whatever. I let it go.

Oh, and by the way, the reason Leo was limping comes with a fairly remarkable backstory of its own.

First: two nights back, Leo had turned himself in of his own accord and confessed the whole sequence of events leading up to that point. But the rest of Valerian’s faction in the manor still had no idea I’d seen through the entire thing.

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 here 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?

Officially, Leo was a man who’d served out his stint in the dungeon and only just returned to duty. And a dungeon is not a place that serves three square meals a day or doles out an hour of courtyard exercise.

…?

Even as I said it, something nagged at me as off somewhere. Still, a criminal strolling back with all four limbs intact simply would not do.

“Young Master, I’ve lost all feeling in my legs.”

“You’re fine. You’re not dead.”

So I’d been mulling over how to manufacture the look of a man fresh out of hard time. Just beating him up one-sidedly felt a bit distasteful, after all.

— Let me spar with him.

Elli, who’d caught on to my dilemma, tossed out a suggestion. Naturally Leo had 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 details of what followed. 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 was a bear even the kind of thing you could catch barehanded just by putting your mind to it?

I was starting to think Eve’s suggestion deserved serious consideration. In any case, 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 over the thought when, for the first time in a while, some plainly 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.

When I glanced at Eve, she was frowning and pointing off in some direction. Where her finger aimed, two servants holding a laundry basket stood snickering.

I just barely swallowed a snort of dry laughter.

To their eyes, Leo at my side looked like pure theater, an act staged by a spy Valerian had planted to lull me into letting my guard down.

Perfect.

This was exactly the picture I’d wanted. A situation where everyone was convinced I was the one being deceived.

Playing the oblivious fool, I gave the sweat-soaked Leo a light pat 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!”

Leo had been on the verge of forcing out some bitter-pill reply when his rubbery legs tangled beneath him and he pitched forward, face-planting with a spectacular crash. The servants watching from a distance pointed and howled with open laughter.

I clicked my tongue at the sight of Leo struggling 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?”

“His own side, you say? I’m on the Young Master’s side, am I not?”

At that, Elli, who’d been listening in, cut in.

“Which Young Master?”

“Young Master Arden, obviously!”

“Mm-hmm~ Is that so.”

As I watched the two of them dive straight back into their bickering, I was thinking there really isn’t a single quiet day around this place, and that was when it happened.

Thud!

At the sudden loud noise, everyone turned to look.

“A…aaah!”

The sound had come from the corridor where the servants who’d been laughing at us stood. There, the laundry basket they’d let go of as they fell had landed, of all things, square on top of their heads, and the wet sheets and clothes had wound around them so completely they looked like a pair of mummies.

“Pfft!”

The first to crack was Elli. Clutching her stomach and cackling, she finally managed to get out:

“Anyone watching would think they were the laundry and try to hang them out to dry! Their mouths were running, and now Heaven’s gone and dished out a punishment!”

“…Ahem.”

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

But I wasn’t watching the two who’d gone down. Something else had caught my eye.

A butterfly?

Somewhere between the two figures flailing under the laundry, a blue butterfly had appeared. It drifted slowly over to me and settled on the back of my hand.

Cold.

The butterfly was very, very cold. Nothing remotely like the temperature of a living creature.

The instant the thought crossed my mind and I reached to touch it, the butterfly dissolved into a single thread of water and was gone.

“…Looks like the plan needs a change.”

At my words, the two who’d still been cackling fell silent. For a moment I thought they’d finally grasped 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 anywhere around me.

Right. Eve was the only one.

You’re the only one.

The moment we stepped into the dining hall, the smell of warm soup and fresh bread, already laid out, hit our noses. Famished from the rehabilitation drills, Elli and Leo both swallowed without realizing it.

I took the innermost seat and signaled 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 is Mount Kumgang, exactly?”

“On a continent very, very far from here.”

At that, Elli nodded as though it all made sense and started ladling up her 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.”

Looking awkward, Leo picked up his spoon. But his attention stayed fixed entirely on me.

“You’re curious about the plan, I take it.”

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

“…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 soup-soaked bread in my mouth. And after savoring it slowly, I 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.”

My words must have struck Leo’s chest like a blade. In an instant, his face darkened.

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

That said, I had zero intention of softening my words to spare Leo’s 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 a fool being deceived by you. 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?”

It was the other two who answered my question, not Leo.

“Huh, that wasn’t it?”

Normally you two never make a peep, but the second it’s about slandering me, your timing turns suddenly perfect. Just perfect.