Chapter 2 — 감찰국
Part 2, Chapter 39
Inspectorate
『In the end, things turned out just the way you predicted.』
[Humans, by nature, are thinking animals, you know.]
Elric tapped his temple, smug.
Mephisto scowled, clearly hating the sight, but Elric looked utterly confident.
Strictly speaking, it was the obvious outcome.
The Inspectorate had no choice but to assassinate Chens to shut him up.
And since Chens had been a deputy director of the Inspectorate, they wouldn’t have sent some middling nobody to do the job.
The result?
We’d hooked a whale: the Deputy Director of Division 1. A whopper of a catch.
That was why he’d summoned both Nameless and the Red Lion.
At minimum they might have to face a deputy director—at worst, the Director of the Inspectorate himself.
From start to finish, Black had danced right where Elric had set the board.
『To use a man like that, one who surrendered and swore to help you… Tsk, tsk. The Merbinger temperament, as ever…!』
[Huh? Why him? He was planning to slaughter everyone in Huillan anyway. Why should I care beyond that?]
If Elric hadn’t stopped him, he would’ve led the charge in the massacre.
Elric felt no particular pity over Chens’s death.
“So. What now, Director of Division 1?”
Elric turned to Black with a wicked smile.
“…”
His face already looked like death.
Being cast off by his master made him feel even more wretched.
But something else weighed on him more.
My family… At this rate, even my wife and kids will be in danger…!
Collusion with the Demonfolk was a capital crime, with collective punishment on the table.
Cold-blooded or not, his family was precious beyond measure.
“Why the silence? I’ll take that as consent.”
Elric drew a scroll from his coat and reached to touch it to his sword.
“…I’ll kill you.”
“What was that? Speak up, dweeb.”
Black’s low murmur reached Elric’s ear.
Flinch.
Black energy began to writhe off his body. Sensing something dire, a few quick-witted souls tried to flee the hearing chamber.
Bloodshot lines crawled through his eyes.
“I’ll kill you, Merbinger!”
Kwooooom!
With a short cry, power exploded out of Black.
Crunch, crackle—
His body began to warp rapidly. He was initiating demonization.
If it had come to this anyway—
He’d see it through to the end.
If I cut down the Merbinger who keeps tripping me up at every turn… the Fourth Prince might cover me. Saving my family—that’s the only way!
Black had decided to wager his life on this final gamble.
His frame swelled to several times its former size.
Multiple arms and legs, grotesquely overgrown.
There was nothing human left to see in Black.
“Kyyaaaa!”
“Run!”
The lawmakers and reporters inside the chamber made a break for the exits.
Crash!
Smashing the central podium where he’d stood, Black lunged straight for Elric.
“I’ll crush you where you stand!”
He swung a massive claw.
Clang!
“…!”
Nameless’s blade, beside Elric, and the Red Lion’s blade, from the gallery, crossed and stopped the claw cold.
Elric, as if he’d expected it, stood there with his hands behind his back.
His gaze held nothing now.
Not even a sneer.
“You bastards…!”
Sparks flew as Black’s claw ground against the two swords.
The Red Lion, Andre Winds, looked at Black’s twisted scowl and smiled coldly.
“At last, I can pay back the humiliation your lot gave me.”
It was the Inspectorate that had smeared him as colluding with the Demonfolk when he’d been keeping to himself, and weaponized that lie to paint him a rebel.
Considering Division 1 had been at the center of it, there couldn’t have been a more fitting place for revenge.
“Your head—mine.”
Thud!
Andre battered Black’s arm aside and then charged straight in.
Ssshhh—
Black’s brow twitched.
“Impudent cur! A cripple dares talk about taking my head?”
The Red Lion, once called the “Pillar of the East” that held up the Empire—his fame had faded long ago.
His specialty had been that protean swordplay, switching freely between both hands.
But with one arm gone, few believed Andre could ever be himself again.
And the arm he did have now was merely a prosthetic Elric had attached.
“Why so much yapping?”
Andre moved with a tranquil expression.
Swish, swish, swish!
A quicksilver rush of swordwork.
Black knocked every strike aside, scowl deepening.
How… how is a one-armed swordsman this strong…!
The weight behind each stroke was more than he’d expected.
Pain rang up Black’s arms, making him grit his teeth. Just as he wondered how to counter—
Flinch.
Black jerked back in a hurry.
Andre’s blade cleaved deep through the space where Black had just stood.
Whooom—
Dozens of separated sword auras scattered in a rough spray.
What if that had hit?
The thought alone sent a chill down his spine.
He’s back to the prowess he had before he lost his arm—no, maybe beyond…!
Outside of Division 0, the directors of the other thirteen divisions of the Inspectorate are often compared to the Eight Lions.
They operate in different spheres, so they rarely clash, but the symbolism of being heads of their factions invites the comparison.
Black, however, had always privately believed that the Inspectorate, which operated on the front lines, stood above the Lion Houses.
He’d figured the directors, anonymous as they were, simply lacked chances to make their sobriquets known—and that flattening some “lion” would be easy any day.
All the more so now, with demonization multiplying his martial might severalfold.
And yet—
For the first time, he wondered if that wasn’t the whole story.
The offensive didn’t stop there.
Whoom, whoom—
“Damn it!”
Backpedaling, Black planted his feet.
Crackle!
No matter how fierce the Red Lion was, he still had only one arm.
If one hand was hard to handle, then he’d answer with far more hands.
Demonic energy burst from Black’s many arms like chain lightning.
He drove a fist at Andre, now right in his face.
Demonic thunderbolts flew from every direction.
Andre didn’t even try to dodge.
“Hff!”
Instead, gripping his blade tight, he twisted in place and swept it in a great circle.
Whrummm—
The sheer force and pressure knocked all of Black’s arms aside.
“Guh!”
“Lose to a dog who crawled to the Demonfolk?”
Ssshhh!
Andre’s blade became a streak of light.
“Could you still call yourself a lion?”
Thud!
The light lanced straight into Black’s glabella.
“Im…!”
Crick, crack—
From between his brows, fissures crawled across his face, down his neck, and over his torso.
“…possible!”
Black seemed to thrash, desperate to live.
Crunch!
Fssshh—
He crumbled into fine fragments and scattered across the floor.
Andre quietly withdrew his sword and slid it back into the scabbard, then turned his gaze elsewhere.
To where the Golden Lion and the Black Lion, Kromhel, sat.
—Lose to a dog who crawled to the Demonfolk, and could you still call yourself a lion?
Andre’s words hadn’t truly been for Black.
They were addressed to the one who styled himself the lions’ chief—and to the man seated in the next seat.
Naturally, Kromhel’s face tightened, if only slightly.
The Golden Lion alone offered a faint smile and replied.
“You’ve grown much.”
“…”
Andre gave a slight bow to his former liege, then turned to his current lord, Elric.
On the floor lay only the shattered remains of Black’s body.
All who saw it thought the same:
As of today, the Red Lion, whom everyone thought had fallen, had returned in full.
Like the Blue Lion, he had made his comeback.
Andre fixed his gaze on Elric, who had given him new strength and a new chance.
Elric flashed a grin at a vassal who had done far better than expected.
* * *
Free Revolutionary Army main camp.
The command tent crackled with a keen, sharp tension.
The Battle of Huillan, launched as the kickoff to the revolution’s true stirrings, had ended in a crushing defeat.
Above all, the death of Jeff—one of the movement’s pillars—seemed to say the road ahead would not be easy.
“We’ll have to rethink the plan.”
The leader of the Free Revolutionary Army skimmed the reports and let out a short sigh.
“This is bad. Very bad.”
He remembered the soldiers he’d seen today.
Discipline taut, but with a bitter edge they couldn’t hide.
Jeff’s death had hit them that hard.
How to revive this broken momentum?
The thought alone gave him a headache.
Just then—
“Reporting.”
An intelligence agent in a black hood appeared as if from nowhere and knelt on one knee.
“More to report? What is it?”
“It concerns the hearing.”
“The hearing?”
The leader held out his hand.
The man quickly drew a newspaper and a stack of papers from his coat and handed them over.
Why bring me common junk like that?
But the moment he glanced at the paper, the leader understood.
A third-rate tabloid rag that relayed events in the Imperial Capital in real time via the arcane communications network.
But what was written this time was anything but just another rumor.
The means was closer than I thought.
The further his eyes ran down the page, the higher the corner of his mouth lifted.
By the end, a satisfied smile sat there.
Thup.
He folded the paper and leaned back in his chair.
“You may go.”
“Yes.”
With that brief reply, the agent vanished without a trace.
“…”
Drumming his fingers on the desk as if pondering, the leader kept his gaze fixed on the headline.
The gist was simple.
Evidence had surfaced that the Inspectorate had colluded with the Demonfolk, and the bureau was facing its greatest crisis.
Naturally—at the center of it, as ever, stood Elric Merbinger.
“Good.”
The current had shifted from a completely unexpected quarter.
Blood will tell, after all. He rammed straight into the Imperial House without blinking.
Merbinger had set himself against the Inspectorate at Huillan.
With him pushed to the forefront like this, word of what happened at Huillan would spread across the land, one whisper at a time.
That meant the revolutionaries’ room to maneuver would grow.
The leader rose, clasped his hands behind his back, and murmured.
“The Inspectorate will be tied down for a while, too busy to meddle outside…”
By its nature, the Inspectorate had been the biggest shackle on the Free Revolutionary Army, who did most of their work in the shadows.
Thanks to Merbinger—unexpectedly—their range of movement had loosened.
And if they fanned this into a blaze, seeding distrust of the Imperial House that stood behind the Inspectorate…
The revolution would proceed all the smoother.
He had no intention of repeating the failure at Huillan.
There was only one sure card for that.
“Time I took a little trip.”
A smile played on his lips.
“First stop, Gility. Time I met that friend.”
The Talent-Devouring Mage