Chapter 78: More Experts? (Patreon)

Three full days had passed since the Royal Selection officially began, and the Six Tongues' temporary outpost in the commercial district still blazed with light, its staff grinding through the small hours.

Stacks of freshly delivered intelligence piled up on Russell's desk, drawn from every conceivable source — visitation records handed over by Iron Fang, confessions Emilia had dragged out of suspects with Elsa in tow, and, most numerous of all, reports filed by the Six Tongues' own informants.

Those informants worked with an almost obsessive thoroughness. Running all over the royal capital these past few days cross-checking accounts was one thing, but if they overheard even a street vendor's idle gossip that struck them as worth noting, they'd scribble it into a report and rush it straight to Russell.

Anyone else, faced with such a chaotic mountain of scraps, would have gotten a splitting headache just looking at it.

Not Russell, though.

As a spymaster who'd spent over a decade in this trade, he'd long since learned how to zero in on what actually mattered amid an ocean of noise.

And it didn't take him long to sense that something here wasn't quite right.

After three full days of relentless crackdowns, the Beloved Children's network across the royal capital had essentially been turned upside down. Most of them, cowed by "Mother's" personal appeal for surrender delivered in the throne hall, had chosen to turn themselves in without hesitation. The rest had either been rooted out or given up by their own.

In short, the infiltration network Capella had spent decades building throughout the royal capital had been gutted in the span of a few days.

Part of that came down to how the Beloved Children were structured. Their core motivation was simple obedience to Capella's own orders — sure, there were plenty of true believers who'd joined willingly, but far more were poor souls who'd been forced into the fold.

An organization like that has no fixed creed, no real program — it holds together purely on a shared fear: people too afraid to die, too afraid to flee, too afraid to defy Capella.

While Capella's power stood at its zenith, that structure had seemed unshakable. But the moment its leader died, the whole system was bound to collapse.

By rights, Russell figured this farce should be winding down fast. The trouble was, the past few days had brought no fewer problems in the royal capital — if anything, more, including outbreaks of extreme, violent attacks.

This morning, at an apple stall in the commercial district, the stand belonging to a fruit vendor named Kadomon Risch had exploded.

By his own account, he'd noticed someone acting suspiciously nearby and was about to call the guards over when the man, sensing something was wrong, suddenly swelled up like a balloon — and then detonated.

This wasn't an isolated case. Just yesterday, Iron Fang mercenaries working through a watch list had gone to check on a spice merchant who'd recently arrived in the royal capital, and encountered something similar. At first the man seemed perfectly composed — he even opened his warehouse himself and invited the mercenaries in to search it.

But once they found a stash of black crystal shards tucked into a hidden compartment — clearly outside any legitimate trade channel — the merchant said only one thing.

"The end has come. None can stand against it!"

Then his face split into an expression of feverish, ecstatic joy.

A heartbeat later, the entire warehouse erupted in a violent blast that tore the roof clean off.

Two of the Iron Fang mercenaries, standing too close, were flung into a roadside gutter by the shockwave and came up caked in mud — but at least they walked away mostly unharmed.

The report currently in Russell's hands described yet another incident cut from the same cloth.

The Six Tongues informant who wrote it had been tailing a used-book peddler — a man who ran a modest street stall but, judging by his clothes, wasn't exactly poor. Yet at night he kept slipping off toward the slums.

And every time he came back, the reek of Witch's miasma clung to him.

At first the informant simply thought the man seemed off and tried tailing him a while longer. But once the peddler realized he was being followed, he deliberately led the informant into a deserted alley.

Then he turned around and bared his teeth in a grin.

Something about it set off every alarm bell the informant had, and he turned and bolted.

Almost the instant his foot left the ground, a thunderclap of an explosion tore through the air behind him — the book peddler had gone up in a fireball right there in the alley.

The informant survived, though a flying plank from the blast caught him across the back. That night his superior made him write out a three-page self-criticism.

Its title: On the Necessity of Kill-on-Sight Protocols When Encountering Witch Cult Members.

That self-criticism had also landed on Russell's desk.

The tone was earnest — equal parts lingering terror at his own narrow escape and scathing condemnation of Witch Cultists.

'This operative believes that, when dealing with individuals connected to the Witch Cult, the threshold for lethal force should be relaxed — at minimum, we must ensure we can strip them of their capacity to cause destruction.'

That was the report's final conclusion.

Russell read it through and wrote only two words at the bottom.

Approved.

If these hidden bombers kept getting stirred up, casualties were only a matter of time. These were extraordinary times, and extraordinary times called for same-day resolutions — fanatics who self-detonated the instant they were exposed had no intelligence value left to offer anyway. Better to put them down on the spot.

This was exactly the kind of enemy Russell hated most.

The greedy, the ambitious, the ones with families to protect — those you could always talk down with the right leverage. But it didn't work on people who weren't afraid to die.

And this wasn't how Capella's Beloved Children usually operated, either.

Russell sank into thought.

Envy, Sloth, Greed, Wrath, Gluttony, Lust, Pride — seven deadly sins in all. Like calls to like, dragon to dragon, tiger to tiger, vermin to vermin. Looking at the worst-case scenario, there had to be at least seven Sin Archbishops out there, one for each Witch Cult sect.

A single Lust-affiliated branch of the Beloved Children had already thrown the nation of Lugnica into chaos. Heaven only knew what kind of storm it would take if several Sin Archbishops crawled out and started causing trouble together.

Still, Witch Cultists weren't all cut from the same cloth. Capella's branch of the Beloved Children had plenty of half-hearted fence-sitters in its ranks. But if you wanted the most fanatical, the most devout, that title unquestionably belonged to the Sloth Sin Archbishop's faction — Petelgeuse Romanée-Conti's people.

Russell had picked up a fair bit about this particular Sin Archbishop — the most active one in nearly a century — from Six Tongues informant reports and the kingdom's own records on Witch Cult activity.

Despite claiming "Sloth" as his sin, the man's methods were anything but lazy. Over the past hundred years he'd caused the kingdom no end of headaches.

A flicker of unease crossed Russell's expression. If the faction now operating covertly in the royal capital turned out to be Petelgeuse's own, this would be a nightmare to handle.

Try to talk to him about the future, and he'll tell you the future begins after death.

Try to talk to him about self-interest, and he'll tell you his interest is loyalty to the Witch Cult.

Try to talk to him about family, and he might just ask you back: what does family matter, when the Gospel is everything?

Worst of all, nobody knew what this pack of fanatics lurking in the royal capital was actually after.

Russell tapped two fingers against the desk, summoning a Six Tongues clerk waiting outside the door.

"Director Russell?"

"Seal this batch of materials separately. Scale back the search operations for the time being — we don't want to spook them into scattering. And remember, this stays strictly confidential."

"Understood!"

"Knowledge of this is to be limited to our Six Tongues core members for now. And one more thing — I need to pay a personal visit to Lady Emilia. She has to be informed of this as soon as possible."

The clerk froze for a moment.

By rights, the person best suited to handle this should have been Captain Marcos, who commanded the Royal Guard, or Grand Duke Crusch, who carried enormous prestige both in the military and in the royal capital's political circles. Failing that, informing Anastasia would have worked too.

Why, of all people, the silver-haired half-demon?

Of course, the clerk didn't dare voice any of these thoughts aloud.

The last person who'd called Emilia a "half-demon" in public was still bedridden at home, reportedly having suffered such severe mental trauma that he could barely speak clearly anymore.

Russell paid the clerk no further mind. He simply gathered up the sealed documents and headed for the door.

Not that he needed anyone to tell him — by rights, given their power and resources, Crusch and Marcos were indeed the most suitable candidates.

But this wasn't a situation where brute authority settled anything.

First, the true scale of this new threat remained unclear. If word spread widely, the royal capital would immediately be gripped by a fresh wave of panic.

Having just weathered the purge of the Beloved Children, people were already jumping at shadows. If rumors started circulating that "there's still a bunch of Witch Cultists out there who blow themselves up," the enemy wouldn't even need to lift a finger — the royal capital would boil over into chaos all on its own, like a pot of stew left on the fire too long.

Second, neither Crusch nor Marcos could actually spare the manpower right now.

Crusch was mobilizing troops for the campaign against the White Whale while also assisting with the reconstruction of the Council of Wise Men. Marcos, meanwhile, was conducting an unprecedented internal review of the Order of Knights — word had it the Royal Guard alone had lost more than half its members in the process.

That wasn't to say most of the Royal Guard had actually been infiltrated by the Beloved Children. It was more that the whole ordeal had rattled Marcos badly enough that he'd used the opportunity to overhaul discipline across the Order of Knights as well.

Anyone whose swordsmanship was mediocre and whose character didn't match the title of knight got tossed out immediately, even if there was no evidence whatsoever tying them to the Witch Cult.

In the tangled, deeply entrenched web of interests running through the royal capital, plenty of noble sons had secured their places in the Royal Guard purely through family connections.

In the original timeline, Natsuki Subaru had once pointed out that becoming a knight was, for most of them, nothing more than an accident of birth — and he hadn't been wrong. If anything, he'd struck a nerve deep enough that Julius had challenged him to a duel just to shield him from the vengeful noble sons who'd otherwise have come after him for it.

It could fairly be said that the current Royal Guard wasn't only riddled with Beloved Children infiltrators — it was also stuffed with plenty of useless layabouts who didn't remotely deserve the title of "knight." In a word, the whole institution had rotted clean through.

Ordinarily, out of deference to the families backing them, Marcos would have had to look the other way. But not anymore. Now all it took was pinning even the faintest suspicion of Beloved Children ties on someone, and they were gone on the spot.

What's that? You say you're not involved? Prove it, then.

You can't? Well, unfortunately, in a crisis like this, the presumption runs the other way — guilty until proven innocent. Nobody's talking about ending your biological life, mind you. Just your political life, your entire knightly career. Retire immediately and go home — count yourself lucky the Order's showing you that much mercy.

Even Heinkel Astrea, father of the current Sword Saint, had very nearly been swept up in it, coming within a hair of suspension and investigation. It scared him badly enough that he fled town to lie low for a while — though given how thoroughly useless everyone already considered him, nobody actually saw him as a threat, and he managed to hang on to his post as vice-captain.

One could only imagine how thin the Royal Guard's ranks now ran after such a sweeping purge — though at least reliability was no longer in question.

As for Anastasia — well, professionals in the same line of work tend to charge full price for favors. Russell got along fine with her personally, but at a moment like this, handing something this sensitive over to a merchant from Kararagi was hardly a wise move.

Never mind the debt of gratitude it would leave hanging over him — it would be a humiliation for the nation of Lugnica.

Something this significant happening right in the royal capital, and the best they could do was hand it off to a foreign merchant's private mercenaries to sort out? Would that not suggest Lugnica itself had run out of capable hands?

Even accounting for how strange Lugnica's current matchmaking system already was, that would be taking absurdity too far.

If word of that got out, the nation of Lugnica would become the laughingstock of all four great kingdoms.

Emilia carried none of that baggage.

Russell had read her file. Born in Elior Forest, within Roswaal's territory, known as the "Witch of Frost" — a native daughter of Lugnica through and through. Her background alone raised no red flags.

Yes, her silver hair and half-elf features were identical to those of the dreaded Witch of Envy, whose name alone made people blanch. But since she'd been personally vouched for by Roswaal — a nobleman with a family history of unwavering loyalty to the crown — nobody would dare whisper a word against her. If anything, it held real potential as political capital.

After all, the idea of a witch running for King of Lugnica was, on its own, sensational enough to grab everyone's attention.

And then there was the twist that a girl who looked exactly like the legendary world-ending Witch turned out to be gentle and kind-hearted — that kind of contrast was practically guaranteed to draw eyes.

As for raw strength, Emilia's retinue included Elsa Granhiert, an assassin who'd once given the kingdom nightmares, and she'd even formed a contract with the Spirit of Fire, one of the Four Great Spirits. By Russell's reckoning, she was, hands down, the strongest of all the Royal Selection candidates he knew of.

And her temperament put him at ease, too. Russell was confident that if he handed this matter over to her, the half-elf would pursue it with everything she had, get to the bottom of it, and do everything in her power to avoid harming innocent bystanders along the way. Under the current circumstances, she was, without question, the safest and most suitable choice available.

By the time Russell stepped out of the Six Tongues' temporary outpost, the sky had already begun to lighten. On the street outside the warehouse, a few beastfolk mercenaries were already out making their rounds, and somewhere in the distance came the occasional rumble of a ground-dragon carriage passing by. A handful of early-rising vendors had already lit their lamps and set up their stalls.

On the surface, at least, the royal capital seemed to be settling back into order.

But Russell knew better. The calmer the surface of the water, the murkier things could be running underneath.

Before long, he arrived at a luxurious inn in the commercial district. Since Roswaal kept no residence of his own in the royal capital, Emilia had no choice but to stay here for the duration of her visit.

Russell reached the door of Emilia's suite. Before his knuckles even touched the wood, something made him pause — and, with a faint smile, he glanced back over his shoulder.

"Now this is quite the welcome, very much your style — 'Bowel Hunter' Elsa Granhiert."

He didn't so much as flinch at the violet-black curved blade resting against his neck. He simply reached up, pressed a finger to its spine, and pushed it aside.

"Oh my, if it isn't Mr. Russell. My apologies."

Elsa's smile never wavered as she slipped the blade back beneath her cloak — her tone carrying precious little actual regret.

"I thought maybe some fool with no sense of self-preservation had come to make trouble for the young lady again."

"I can see Lady Emilia has a rather dedicated knight looking after her."

Russell laughed lightly, stepping aside to let Elsa move past him. She pushed the door open, and the two of them walked in together.

"It's been a while, Lady Emilia."

"The nation of Lugnica needs your strength once again."