Vol 4 Chapter 39 – The Underground Prison【Vol 4 – Stop Shion’s Fabricated Engagement】

No matter how much you use breathing techniques to erase your presence, it’s not like your opponent suddenly goes blind.

So when you’re in a situation where you need to slip past everyone coming from the front, it’s impossible to just walk through. But that’s fine—there are always ways around it.

“I’ll create an opening, so let’s jump in together when the moment comes.”

“…? Got it.”

I positioned Nagisa in the guards’ blind spot as she tilted her head in confusion, then stood before a massive tree. It was one of several positioned to block the view of the underground prison from the surroundings—so thick around that even if I stretched both arms around it, my hands wouldn’t come close to meeting.

After confirming no one was nearby, I raised my index finger in the air. Then with a light swing of my arm, I thrust that finger into the tree trunk.

BOOM——————!!

The tree exploded from my finger strike, blown apart into millions of wooden fragments. Of course, by then I was already long gone from that spot. While the guards stood dumbfounded, I slipped through their blind spot with Nagisa and dove through the door.

“We managed to get in smoothly. —Wait, what’s wrong, Nagisa? Why are you holding your head?”

“Ah, don’t worry about it… My master’s absurdity just gave me a headache, that’s all…”

“What’s that supposed to mean!?”

At the very least, I shouldn’t be hearing that from a former prince (and beautiful girl) who happens to be an assassin.

Descending the damp stone stairs, we found cells with iron bars lining both sides of the corridor. Combined with the faint light Nagisa carried, I searched for human presences but found none. Apparently, we were the only humans in this underground prison.

“Is no one imprisoned here? But then why the heavy guard…?”

“…This feels creepy. Master, isn’t this enough? Let’s go back.”

“No, wait. Look, Nagisa—iron shackles and leg irons are installed in every single cell.”

Would a prison that already has iron bars really need iron shackles and leg irons in every cell? Sure, some prisoners might get violent, so I’m not saying they’re unnecessary, but the cost of equipping every cell with shackles and irons isn’t free. Besides, you could just bring them when needed.

Yet they’re installed in every cell, which means they’re used that frequently. Moreover, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see bloodstains soaked into various spots throughout the cells.

“Traces of torture…? Nagisa, what do you think as an assassin?”

“I haven’t got a clue. I specialize in killing—torture is completely outside my field.”

“I see.”

To polish assassination skills to Nagisa’s level must mean there’s no room to study unnecessary fields. Well, setting aside the debate about whether to hone torture or assassination techniques…

After walking through the underground prison for a while, we reached the end of the corridor. The entrance to the room beyond was sealed with an imposing iron door.

“No human presence beyond the door either. And no traps… I think.”

The door wasn’t rusted or anything, so it didn’t seem like it had been abandoned for years. I had a bad feeling, but after coming this far, not opening the door wasn’t an option.

“I’m opening it, Nagisa.”

—And then, we witnessed it.

The interior, built like a laboratory, had shelves carved into the walls lined with bottles of various sizes. Mixed among the sealed containers of poisonously colored liquids were chimera fetuses and monster eyeballs. Scattered around were clubs for beating animals to death. Saws for grinding bones. Meat cleavers. All of them were so caked with bloodstains that no amount of washing could remove them.

“…What is all this…?”

I had no words to answer Nagisa’s stunned whisper. But one thing I could say for certain:

—Far more than I, Shion, or the former prince Nagisa ever imagined, this country’s current royal family might be harboring a great darkness.

Vol 4 Chapter 40 – Ten Gold Coins Per Night【Vol 4 – Stop Shion’s Fabricated Engagement】

Several days after arriving in the imperial capital, Yuna-san came to visit the inn where we were staying.

Yuna-san is currently lodging in the royal palace along with Shion as the princess’s attendant. Ideally we’d meet daily to exchange information, but to avoid the neighboring country’s eyes as much as possible, we’d decided to meet every few days. Incidentally, Nagisa was out in her maid outfit gathering information.

“Well, well, quite a nice inn you have here.”

“It’s a high-class hotel frequented by provincial nobility, the kind where rich people with maids stay. Normally someone like me wouldn’t lodge in a place like this, but since Nagisa is posing as my maid…”

“What are you saying? Master, you’re the mentor of both myself, the First Knight Commander of the Succubish Kingdom, and my senior disciple who is a princess. By rights, you should be given guest quarters in the royal palace, and even with the current circumstances, you should at least move to the empire’s finest luxury hotel.”

“No way. Places like that have national spies watching them.”

“That level of surveillance would be nothing to you, Master, wouldn’t it?”

“…Just thinking about staying at an ultra-luxury hotel where one night costs a minimum of one hundred gold coins makes my back itch…”

More to the point, I’m the type who doesn’t care how shabby an inn is. In extreme terms, I could use a bench in front of a church as a hotel substitute. Call it a bench hotel, or “benchotel” for short. I didn’t hole up in the mountains for nothing.

But this time, given that I’m staying with Nagisa in her maid outfit, I needed to choose an inn where having a maid along wouldn’t seem strange. In other words, a high-class hotel. Incidentally, the room I’m currently staying in costs ten gold coins per night. That’s about the same as the average monthly income of a typical farming household. Higher-tier rooms go for fifty or a hundred gold coins, and some even cost several hundred gold coins per night. Rich people are terrifying.

“How’s Shion doing?”

“Incredibly irritated. She’s on the verge of exploding with dissatisfaction.”

“…What on earth happened?”

“All sorts of things. Yeah, all sorts…”

The exhausted-looking Yuna-san’s account was, well, pretty terrible. For example, no matter how many times Shion’s side said “We have no record of this pact in our country,” the neighboring country claimed it was our fault. And when we asked to see the document recording the pact, they wouldn’t show us the original or even a copy. According to Yuna-san, she almost said multiple times, “It’s obviously a fabrication, so just show it already.”

Additionally, the neighboring country’s bureaucrats made no effort to hide their condescending attitude toward us as a small nation. The representative, Crown Prince Vacanamessh, kept staring at Shion and Yuna-san’s chests with a troubled expression for some reason. And to top it all off, he even asked about their three sizes and cup sizes.

“And it was just so, so! Really and truly… disgusting…!”

“That’s… my condolences, I suppose… or something…”

“And to make matters worse! That bastard crown prince said, ‘Are those huge tits real? Let me check,’ and tried to grope my senior disciple’s breasts!!”

“What!?”

“When my senior disciple and I glared at him with enough intensity to kill, he finally backed off, but… it could easily have started a war right then and there…!”

They’d really suffered tremendously. I’m a commoner, so until now I’d thought somewhere in my heart, Shion says she doesn’t want to, but political marriages are normal for nobles, right? But when the other party is this much of a dud, that argument doesn’t hold up. Even I want my disciple to have a happy marriage.

“—However, the fact that Shion hasn’t come here despite all that is proof of her growth.”

The old Shion would cling to me saying “Master, Master” whenever something difficult happened. If it were the Shion from back then, she would have rushed to me along with Yuna-san without considering the possibility of being discovered. Thinking about it that way, the current Shion has become a proper adult—

Or so I was thinking when Yuna-san shook her head with a sour expression.

“No, my senior disciple tried to follow me here with tremendous force. My senior disciple was supposed to dine with the prince tonight, but she was trying with all her might to ignore him completely. You have no idea how much effort it took me to make my senior disciple hold back…”

“She hasn’t grown at all!”

“Well, that’s how things are on our end. What about you, Master?”

“Let’s see. On my end—”

I explained what Nagisa and I had investigated over the past few days, centering on the royal castle. When I mentioned the strange underground prison in the castle, Yuna-san made a bitter face.

“Hmm… That could be traces of torture, magical experimentation… or perhaps human experimentation…”

“I wonder which it is? I don’t know anything about magic, so I can’t even guess…”

“I’m not an expert either. It’s concerning, but we still don’t have evidence to definitively say anything.”

“That’s true.”

“To take it to an extreme, all our speculation so far might just be us overthinking things, and it’s entirely possible they were just experimenting with magic using frog blood…”

Yuna-san said that, but her expression eloquently conveyed that she didn’t actually believe it. Probably, but something suspicious was hidden there. At that moment, I was intuitively certain of it.

Looking back later, it was far more than just suspicious.