Read Novel Full Chapter 221
Here’s the chapter. Enjoy~
Chapter 221 – Mission Tightrope
“Hello.
“Sorry to interrupt. Is Ecla-dono here?”
When we entered the Adventurers’ Guild, the sparse group of adventurers looked at us and then at Haru-san, the receptionist. She approached us, leaving the counter in the hands of an unfamiliar woman who looked like a rookie receptionist.
“Yes, she’s here!”
Her smile is somehow frightening.
Haru-san takes our arms in hers and leads us straight to the stairs. The adventurers give me and Myrril a lukewarm look. They look at us as if they were watching cattle being dragged to the slaughterhouse.
“Guild Master? Takifu-san is here, you know?”
“Ohhh!”
After she knocked on the guild master’s room on the second floor, several stagnant voices could be heard from inside the room. Before I could wonder why multiple… the door opened, and I saw four people lying face down around a pile of papers on a table.
“Well, well, Your Majesty the Demon King. You are here early.”
The “Witch of Sarz,” Ecla-san, has returned to her old condescending ways after being forced by me to clean up the mess. I knew that as the guild master, she would be in charge of cleaning up the situation, but what about the other three?
As expected, one of them was Ivan-san, the captain of the guard. Yes, there would be reports and explanations and so on. He looks troubled but not too damaged, as he survived the crisis as a member of the guard.
The other two were a bit surprised.
“Why are you two here again?”
Inos-san, the handsome man who has also lost some weight… or rather looks worn out, is the new guild master of the Merchant’s Guild. And then there is the hidden powerhouse of the Merchant’s Guild, the old lady employee, Kerg-san.
“Why, you may ask?”
Inos-san smiled weakly, while Kerg-san, who seemed to have a lot of spirit, had enough time to smile and offer us a seat. I sat down on an empty seat with Myrril and gave Haru-san some handmade sweets as a souvenir.
The sweet smell and the amount of sweets distributed to all the staff members made me smile, but for a moment, I was met with a look that said, “I won’t be fooled by this, you know. Well, it seems that way.
“Takifu-san, are you aware that you are a part of this?”
Inos-san tilted his head and looked at Ecla-san.
“Oh, no. The Demon King doesn’t believe that he destroyed Sarz. That’s a problem.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not sure how I could have destroyed Sarz when I was trying to protect it…”
Myrril looked over at the four of them, looked at me, and let out a small sigh.
“No, you destroyed it.”
“Huh?”
“Though we were unaware of it, it was done by us. No, in Takifu’s case, maybe you were aware of it, but you tried not to think about it.”
“You know that, don’t you?” “You really know, don’t you?” The four people plus Nojaloli-san stare at me with a look that says that. When I look away for help, I get the same look from Haru-san, who has a cross-shaped blue stripe between her eyebrows, “You do understand, don’t you?” Like I said, I don’t know.
Because even if the Adventurer’s Guild and the Merchant’s Guild don’t cooperate, you see, there is a top executive of this city in the Sarz administrative district…
“No way.”
“You finally figured it out.”
Maybe the administrator was involved in a big crime committed by a big merchant company? Which one? Where were they involved? Which one? I’ve never been involved in an administrative district, so I don’t even know their names or faces.
Ecla-san pointed at Kerg-san with a stunned look on her face.
“That’s right, Your Majesty. Thanks to you, we’ve let the festering pus out, but as a result, the Merchant’s Guild, the Adventurer’s Guild, and the Sarz administrative district are all dysfunctional. The reason I asked Kerg to come here today is because of her experience as the senior administrative district political officer when she was on active duty.
Formerly a high official? That explains why I felt there was a big difference between her and the others.
“If there is no one to take the place of the scum we have eliminated, we will have no choice but to install Kerg as the acting town administrator of Sarz.”
“As you can imagine, it’s hard to do that all the time. If only I could train a replacement and have him take over.”
“That’s a very optimistic view. I was thinking the same thing, but I have been the guild master for seven years now.”
The reproachful faces of the two women made the two men look away. I don’t want you to look at me like that. We are not from the Republic.
Ivan-san smiles and waves his hand at me.
“No, I want to make sure there’s no misunderstanding, but I’m grateful to you and your group for destroying the criminal organization in Sarz. I thank you on behalf of all the officials in this city.”
“Well, if that’s the only part I agree with you on. I thought it was a massive criminal scheme… involving the major Sarz merchants Peyblois and Beynan, plus the Bandit’s Guild.”
That explains it. Maybe that’s it. Oh crap, I must have mixed it up with yesterday’s corpse!?
“Yes, there was a district manager mixed in with that pile of corpses. …So you’re going to let me out of your nice pocket, right? And the broken chain of events?”
“No, it’s not like that was an admission of involvement…”
“That’s like an admission. Really… you’re a man whose every thought comes out on your face…”
“That’s right. When honesty goes too far, it’s a strategy.”
Ecla-san and Myrril are being very rude to me, but that’s not what I’m worried about. Among the people I killed, there was one who was an important figure in the administration…
Oh, there he is. The well-dressed old man in front of the Wolf’s Tail Pavilion, surrounded by shield-bearers. I thought he might be an executive of a bandit guild or something.
When I told him what he looked like, Ecla-san nodded, and Ivan-san groaned.
“Oh, that’s the guy. That’s O’Phanon, the district chief of Sarz. According to the guard’s report, he’s been missing since the night before you left for Roses. Along with his four bodyguards. And the mercenaries and adventurers hired by the Bandit Guild.”
“According to the guards, they entered Sarz, but there is no record of them leaving. There is no place to hide such a large number of petty criminals in the small town of Sarz. If that were the case, it would be obvious who did it.”
That’s right. It’s not the scum guards of Roses, so if the castle gate guards were doing their job properly, they would know who was coming and going. I’ve never seen a bad guy, so I underestimated the officials of this world.
“Ivan let a little guy named Helgin, the resident guard of the bandit guild that the Battlecry had captured, go. He was really upset about the disappearance of the people involved, so I knew they didn’t want it to happen. I wondered what was going on…”
“So.”
“I came back from getting rid of Helgin, and the next thing I know, I’m getting reports that Roses has been destroyed.”
That’s how they found out. I threw up my hands in surrender. Originally, I was not so serious about hiding or pretending to be innocent. It was just a simple, silly way of hiding something because it was too much trouble.
“What you did is okay. It’s over now, and they deserve to be killed. But didn’t you get something from the bandits’ hideout? Or at the guild headquarters in Roses?”
“Uh, and… yeah, maybe.”
Seeing my pensive face, Haru-san, the receptionist, held out her hand. When I placed a pile of papers or something like that on it, the four people around the table held their heads in their hands with a deep sigh.
“The official documents of the Republic. There’s a service contract, a non-disclosure agreement, a performance report… and this one is stamped with a binding magic seal.”
Haru-san checked them one by one as she placed them in front of Ecla-san and the others. I can’t read all of them, but since the Bandit Guild tried to find and recapture them with their bloodshot eyes, they must contain something that reveals the truth of the incident.
“So I guess it must contain something that reveals the truth of the matter. We’ll have to think about the cleanup later.”
“You see…”
“Stop, Ivan. This is a matter of trust. If you had touched him back then, the Demon King wouldn’t have given it to us so easily.”
“I doubt it. Takifu might have given it to you more easily than you thought. You didn’t ask him, so he didn’t talk about it.”
Ivan-san looked confused when Myrril-san told him this.
“But he wouldn’t have come back to Sarz, would he?”
“That would have been the end of the story!?”
“That is how it is with people who have nothing to lose. At that time, you were not my enemy, but I did not consider you one of my own either. No one would be willing to share profits with such a partner at a loss.”
Unlike Ivan-san, who sank with a thud, Ecla-san looked at me and Myrril and smiled with an amused expression on her face.
“Why are you depressed, Ivan? I think what you did afterward changed the demon king and queen.”
Well, maybe so. When I left to escort the Calmon family, Sarz was still just a “not bad town; I stopped by for a while.” It wasn’t out of a sense of duty to Ivan-san and the others that I came all the way back to Sarz…
“The main reason we came back to Sarz was because of the Wolf’s Tail Pavilion.”
“””Eh.”””
“I would have liked to stay in Lafan if it weren’t for the excellent food and friendly landlady. I could have stayed in another country if I wanted to.”
In response to Myrril’s strange comment, Ecla-san sank down with the others.