11. The Guardian

Leo had no appetite, and dragged his spoon listlessly through his soup. Beside him, Elli listened as if it were someone else’s problem entirely, happily dunking bread into her bowl and shoveling it down with deep satisfaction. Between these two starkly contrasting figures, I laid out my plan.

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

At that, Elli, who had 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 well enough. Given how the two of them had hurled abuse at me in unison while I was coughing up blood, that was the picture they had to project. But the truth was just the opposite. The two of them couldn’t stand each other.

Valerian regarded Lucius as nothing more than a half-rate inferior who happened to share his blood. And Lucius, for his part, envied, even resented, Valerian’s flawless talent and position.

This rotten little excuse for brotherly love was something I knew with absolute certainty, thanks to the “interactive dialogue” loot their boss fights could trigger. Kill Lucius first, then go to face Valerian wearing the [Ring of Twisted Bone] you’d looted off him, and Valerian would knit his brow as though he’d just laid eyes on 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 far higher difficulty than usual.

It worked the same way in the other direction. Beat Valerian first, then walk up to Lucius with Valerian’s signature [White Pendant] hanging at your throat:

“Someday I was going to peel off Big Brother’s skin with my own hands 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 fly into a deranged rage that his prey had been stolen out from under 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, nothing could have been more gamelike as a setup. And I was planning to put their twisted relationship to use.

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

I gave him a look like I couldn’t believe he was even 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 steam was no longer rising off his soup. That much time had passed.

“As you’re aware, Young Master, the fact that I betrayed you and went over to Young Master Valerian, then came crawling back here, is already common knowledge throughout the manor.”

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.”

Leo wasn’t wrong. No bank lends money to a man with a wrecked credit history, and that was Leo’s standing now.

“Right. He’ll never trust you.”

I locked eyes with Leo and went on.

“But not trusting something and not caring about it are two different problems.”
“Sir?”
“If you make contact with Brother Lucius, the fact will reach Brother Valerian’s ears soon enough. It’s impossible to slip past all the eyes and ears in this manor. But whether you can actually be Brother Lucius’s spy isn’t the point.”

Elli, who hadn’t followed my logic, asked.

“Why isn’t it the point?”

I plucked a piece of bread from the basket, the one Elli couldn’t reach, and handed it to her as I countered 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 look 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. Taking Leo back hadn’t erased the crime. Just as a criminal record stays on the books forever, a history of betrayal trails after a man like a tag pinned to his back.

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

For Leo to survive in House Arne, he’d have to carry that tag for the rest of his life and be used because of it. And that was the whole point of the operation.

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

Elli turned the question over, then offered her answer.

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

Valerian was a perfectionist, the kind of man who couldn’t abide the existence of a single variable beyond his control.

“In the end, Brother Valerian will call Leo back in. To interrogate him about what was discussed with Brother Lucius. And the most delightful part of all is—”

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

“—even if you tell him the truth, that nothing happened with Brother Lucius, Brother won’t believe a word of it.”
“Ah…”

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

At that moment Elli, who had 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 with a charge like “insulting the direct bloodline” on the books, lopping 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 made a show of looking the other way, as if she hadn’t heard a thing, but I pressed stubbornly on.

“Whoever told him to betray me?”

From the start, the plan had treated “Leo dies” as one of its viable endings. I could see angles where his death would crack open fresh gaps for me to slip through.

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

At those words Leo, pale as a corpse, let out a sigh of relief. To my eyes its meaning was clear: I get to keep my life.

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

“Why… is the plan suddenly changing?”
“It was a fine plan in every way except 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 breezily ignored him.

I turned my gaze toward the window, and Elli followed my line of sight to look out as well.

Servants bustled back and forth through the corridors in droves, laden with laundry and ingredients. Knights marched to the training grounds with wooden swords in hand and thunderous battle cries on their lips. Even outsiders in elaborate finery had come since early morning to admire the grandeur of the great house. The enormous machine of House Arne ground away with relentless, deafening efficiency, and not a single cog was allowed a moment’s rest.

Except for us.

I propped my chin on my hand and gazed down at it all 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; knights would be dragged into factional warfare and end up turning their blades on one another. The whole thing 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. Why would I care whether the people who looked down on me suffered or not? But from an efficiency standpoint, it’s a different story. Clear a dungeon through grueling effort only to have the rewards come back halved, and you’ve basically botched the clear.

I’m not trying to destroy this house. I want it whole, intact, as a stepping stone of my own.

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

Why break a machine that’s running just fine? You just swap out the master whose hand is on 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.”

The servants no longer threw open jeers our way. 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 that plunged 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 Elli’s face.

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

Realizing that someone is talking trash about you 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 heavy.

She’s smiling brighter than ever.

I’d been meaning to paint the white canvas that was Elli with a few careful strokes of gray. She knew far too little, I’d thought, about how the world really worked. But the manor’s servants had apparently already smeared her with plenty of black paint of their own.

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 situation at hand.

The fact was, having someone out there helping me without showing their face was not a good thing. The longer this unnamed figure kept up their protective stunts, the more fatal the cracks would grow in my “playing the weakling” act. If it went on like this, it was a foregone conclusion that my brothers’ blades would soon turn my way as they tried to work out who this mysterious patron was.

Why come back from the Empire?

The one saving grace was that I already knew exactly who this guardian was. And yet, going by the game scenario I knew, this development was entirely unexpected. In the original history, once this person left House Arne, they 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. I made my decision and set it in 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. Staring at me like that wasn’t going to get them out of an assignment, though.

The study door was made of heavy oak. When I knocked, the rough grain of the wood pressed into my hand. After a beat, the room inside swam into focus.

Eve approved of the room’s atmosphere.

Not bad.

The enormous work desk was buried under a mountain of paperwork. I leaned in to peer into the tower of haphazardly stacked documents, half-wondering whether Valerian was literally buried somewhere underneath.

“Come over here.”

A remarkably calm voice called out to me.

Following it deeper into the room, I spotted a small table set before a window where sunlight filtered in. Valerian sat alone in one of two dark-wood leather chairs. 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 realized he was playing chess against himself.

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

Something went ding inside my head.

The game’s Invincible Legion Commander, Valerian had been arrogant and merciless. He hadn’t granted the weak so much as a chance to speak, and his gaze had been forever filled with the contempt a man might show a worm.

But the Valerian sitting before me now was astonishingly calm.

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

“Hmm. What to do about this.”

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

It was strange.

When I’d first possessed this body, every time the soul of Arden came face to face with Valerian it had erupted in a rage fit to tear itself in two. But today it was unsettlingly quiet.

How to put it? Like an older brother quietly tracing old memories with a younger brother he hadn’t seen in a long while.

This was… a truly strange feeling.