11. The Guardian

Leo had no appetite and only stirred his spoon listlessly through his soup, while beside him Elli, listening as if all this were somebody else’s problem, happily dunked her bread in hers and shoveled it into her mouth with great satisfaction. Between these two starkly contrasting figures, I laid out my plan.

“I’d been thinking of sending you to Brother Lucius.”

Elli, who’d been merrily wolfing down her bread, looked up in surprise.

“To Young Master Lucius?”
“That’s right.”

On the surface, Valerian and Lucius looked like a pair of brothers who got along quite well, and given how they’d hurled abuse at me in unison while I was coughing up blood, they had to be close. But the truth, if you wanted a twist, was that they couldn’t stand each other. Valerian regarded Lucius as nothing more than a half-rate inferior who happened to share his blood, and Lucius envied, resented, Valerian’s perfect talent and position.

I knew about this rotten little excuse for brotherly love with absolute certainty, thanks to the “interactive dialogue” attached to the loot you won in their boss fights. Kill Lucius first, go to face Valerian wearing the [Ring of Twisted Bone] you got from him, and Valerian would furrow his brow as if he’d just seen a piece of filth and say:

“Boasting that you killed a piece of trash whose only hobby was collecting other people’s bones — I see that is the crowning achievement of your sorry little life.”

The boss fight that followed would run at a much higher difficulty than normal.

It worked the same way in the other direction. Beat Valerian first, approach Lucius with Valerian’s signature [White Pendant] hanging from your neck, and this was what you got:

“Someday I was going to peel off Big Brother’s skin with my own hands and stuff and mount it in my room… and you — how dare you steal my joy from me?!”

Far from grieving his brother’s death, Lucius would erupt in deranged fury that his prey had been taken from him. That was how thoroughly the two of them loathed each other.

The funny part is, in the final battle, the two of them rise as undead together and fight side by side.

Only in death do they finally stand back to back. Ridiculous. In a way, you couldn’t get more gamelike than that as a setup.

And I was planning to exploit their twisted relationship.

“Brother Lucius is the kind of man who’d shake hands with the devil himself if it meant beating Brother Valerian. He’d even use you, traitor’s brand and all.”
“Y-you want me to play spy?”

I answered with a face like I couldn’t believe he was asking.

“What’s so shocking? Isn’t this your specialty? Or, well — if you were any good at it, you wouldn’t be sitting here, would you.”

Even at my joke, Leo’s expression stayed dark. The heat that had been rising off the soup could no longer be seen. That was how much time had gone by.

“As you know, Young Master, it’s already all over the manor that I betrayed you, went over to Young Master Valerian, and then came crawling back here.”

Leo hesitated, then added in a self-mocking voice, “…There’s no way Young Master Lucius would trust the word of a bat who flits back and forth between sides.”

He wasn’t wrong. A bank doesn’t lend money to someone with a bad credit history, and that was Leo’s current address.

“Right. He’ll never trust you.”

I locked eyes with him and went on.

“But not trusting something and not caring about something are two different problems.”
“Sir?”
“If you make contact with Brother Lucius, word will reach Brother Valerian’s ears before long. There’s no slipping past all the eyes and ears in this manor. But whether you can actually be Brother Lucius’s spy or not isn’t important.”

Elli, who hadn’t followed my logic, asked, “Why isn’t it important?”

I plucked a piece of bread from the basket she couldn’t reach and handed it to her, countering with a question of my own.

“If you heard a rumor that Leo had snuck off to a secret meeting with Brother Valerian again, what’s the first thing that would come to mind?”

Elli froze mid-reach for the bread. The mere thought of it must have soured her mood, because she shot Leo a withering glare, and under that murderous gaze he hastily dropped his eyes.

“I’d think, Oh, he’s gone and betrayed the Young Master again.”
“Exactly. That’s the whole point.”

The brand of a traitor doesn’t wash off easily. I’d taken Leo back, but that didn’t mean the crime had been erased. A criminal record stays on the books forever, and a history of betrayal trails after you the same way, like a tag pinned to your back.

Not that I’ve forgiven him in the first place.

To survive in House Arne, Leo would have to shoulder that tag for the rest of his life and be exploited because of it. And that was the whole point of this operation.

“What’s going to go through Brother Valerian’s head when the report comes in that Leo made contact with Brother Lucius?”

Elli mulled over the question, then offered her answer.

“This time the bat-bastard’s hopped over to Lucius’s side?”
“Bingo.”
“Bingo?”
“It means correct.”

A perfectionist who absolutely loathed the very existence of variables he couldn’t control. That was Valerian’s personality.

“In the end, Brother Valerian will call Leo back in. To grill him about what he and Brother Lucius talked about. And here’s the fun part —”

I drove the final nail into the now-rigid Leo.

“— you can tell Brother the truth, that nothing happened with Brother Lucius, and he won’t believe a word of it.”

“Ah…”

A long sigh escaped Leo’s lips. He’d just realized how vicious my plan was.

At that moment Elli, who’d been listening quietly, cautiously raised her hand.

“What if the two Young Masters get angry over all this and… kill Senior Leo?”

The possibility was very real. Killing a household’s servants on a whim was taboo, but slap one with a charge like “insulting the direct bloodline” and chopping off a single head was no trouble at all.

“Well, can’t be helped.”
“What?”
“S-sir?”

Elli and Leo gasped in unison, but I meant every word.

“Death is the only thing a traitor’s owed, anyway.”

Eve pretended to be looking the other way, like she hadn’t heard a thing, but I stubbornly continued.

“Who told him to betray me, huh?”

The plan had assumed from the start that “Leo dies” was one of its viable endings, because I could see angles where his death would crack open new openings to slip through.

“But — this plan’s getting scrapped. We don’t need it anymore.”

At those words Leo, who’d gone pale as a corpse, let out a sigh of relief. To my eyes, the meaning of that sigh was clear: I get to keep my life.

Elli, watching closely, couldn’t hold back her curiosity any longer.

“Why… is the plan suddenly changing?”
“It was a fine plan in every way except for one fatal flaw.”
“A flaw?”
“It was too vulnerable to variables.”

Beside me, Leo muttered, “Fine in every way, you say? If things go sideways I literally die… isn’t that the biggest variable of all, sir?” but I lightly ignored him.

I turned my gaze toward the window, and Elli followed my line of sight and looked out too.

Hordes of servants were bustling back and forth through the corridors with laundry and ingredients. Knights, each with a wooden sword in hand, were marching to the training grounds with thunderous battle cries. There were even outsiders in elaborate finery, here from early morning to admire the grandeur of this great house.

The enormous machine of House Arne was grinding away with relentless, deafening efficiency, not a single cog allowed a moment’s rest.

Except for us.

I propped my chin on my hand and gazed down at the scene for a long while.

“Leo, let’s say you spend your days running messages between Brother and me to drive a wedge between us. Where does that end?”
“Discord and suspicion between the two of you. A power struggle, probably.”
“Worst case, a bloodbath.”

Suspicion inevitably summons purges. Servants would be cast out for backing the wrong side, and knights would be sucked into factional warfare until they ended up turning their blades on one another. It would be like flinging a fistful of sand into the gears of a smoothly running clock.

Not that I give a damn what happens to any of them.

I’m no saint, so what do I care whether the people who looked down on me suffer or not? But from an efficiency standpoint, the story changes. If you clear a dungeon through grueling effort and the rewards come back halved, that’s basically a failed clear. I’m not trying to destroy this house. I want it intact, as a stepping stone of my own.

“I hate noise. It’s too much trouble to clean up after.”

Why bother breaking a machine that’s running just fine? You just have to swap out the master who pushes the power button.

Our daily routine didn’t change much.

“Could’ve gone a little easier on me, you know.”

Leo’s grumbling as he limped along was as constant as ever.

“What was that, hm?”

And Elli’s flash of temper at the sight of him was just as familiar. But the atmosphere among the servants who watched us had unmistakably shifted.

“Quick, let’s get past them.”

They no longer threw open jeers at us. No, they couldn’t anymore.

“Aaagh!”

The instant anyone so much as pointed a finger our way, some small accident would befall them as if by magic. They’d slip as though they’d stepped on a banana peel, or get drenched by water plunging out of nowhere, one unnatural mishap cascading after another.

Elli, who found the whole situation marvelous, asked me, “You really aren’t the one doing it, are you, Young Master?”

I shook my head. “No. It isn’t me.”

A bright smile bloomed across her face.

“I knew it! Do bad things and you get punished — that’s the rule!”

Realizing somebody is talking trash behind your back is a deeply unpleasant feeling, and Elli had been on the receiving end of more than mere trash-talk. She’d been outright bullied, so the toll on her must have been substantial.

She’s smiling brighter than ever.

I’d been trying to paint the white canvas that was Elli with a few strokes of gray, since she seemed to know far too little about how the world worked. But apparently the manor’s servants had already smeared her with plenty of black paint themselves.

If the world could be neatly sorted into “good” and “bad,” life would be convenient. But life isn’t that obliging.

I made a mental note that Elli’s continuing transformation deserved my close attention, then turned back to assessing the current situation.

The fact was, having someone who hadn’t revealed themselves out there helping me was not a good thing. The longer this unnamed figure kept up their protective acts, the more fatal the cracks in my “playing the weakling” act were going to become. If this kept up, it was a foregone conclusion that my brothers’ blades would soon be turning my way as they tried to figure out who this mysterious guardian was.

Why come back from the Empire?

The saving grace was that I already knew exactly who this guardian was. But going by the game scenario I knew, this development was entirely unexpected. In the original history, after this person left House Arne, they had never returned. Not once.

“That’s enough for today.”
“But we’re only halfway done?”
“You take care of my share.”
“What???”

Hesitating any further was the worst card I could play, so I made my decision and put it into motion. I needed to meet with Valerian.

Ah, but before that.

“I’m giving each of you an assignment.”

Leo and Elli stared up at me with anxious faces, but staring at me like that wasn’t going to get them out of an assignment.

The door to the study was heavy oak, and when I knocked, the rough grain of the wood pressed into my hand. After a beat, the view inside the room came into focus.

Eve approved of the atmosphere of this room.

Not bad.

The enormous work desk was buried under a mountain of paperwork. I leaned forward to peek into the tower of haphazardly stacked documents, half-wondering if Valerian was literally buried somewhere under there —

“Come here.”

A remarkably calm voice called out to me. Following it deeper into the room, I spotted a small table set in front of a window where sunlight was filtering in. Valerian was seated alone in one of two dark-wood leather chairs at the table, and on the other side, as if he’d known I would come, an identical chair was already arranged opposite him. Watching from a distance, I saw he was playing chess against himself.

“Don’t just stand there gawking. Sit.”

Something went ding inside my head.

The Invincible Legion Commander — Valerian of the game had been arrogant and merciless. He didn’t grant the weak so much as the chance to speak, and his gaze had been forever filled with the same contempt one might show a worm. But the Valerian sitting before me now was astonishingly calm.

As though under some kind of spell, I obeyed and took the seat across from him.

“Hmm. What to do about this.”

Even with me sitting in front of him, Valerian carried on the match alone.

It was strange. When I had first possessed this body, every time the soul of Arden faced Valerian it had erupted with a hatred like it would tear itself in two. But today it was unsettlingly quiet. How to put it? It was like an older brother quietly tracing old memories with a younger brother he hadn’t seen in a long time.

This was… a truly strange feeling.