Chapter 77
Villain’s Conspiracy (1)
“Is the contents of this letter true?”
Southern Leinrant.
The border region adjoining the Empire.
Most of the goods entering from the Empire had to pass through this place, making it one of the most developed cities in the North.
Its scale rivaled even Leinrant City, the central city of the ducal territory.
As for wealth, it had already surpassed it.
“Y-Yes, Count... The Duke personally ordered me to deliver it...”
The symbol of House Buchenheim was the bear.
The fiercest beast in the North was their emblem.
Yet the sight of him grinding his teeth and trembling looked less like a bear and more like an enraged boar.
Bang—!
The moment the messenger thought that to himself, Count Buchenheim slammed his fist onto the desk.
Craaack—!
“U-Ugh?!”
With a single punch, the wooden table shattered into pieces.
A monstrous level of strength possessed by only a handful of knights in the city.
The messenger, witnessing that power firsthand, barely managed to stop his legs from giving out.
“After getting rid of Lady Helian, they’ve become unbearably arrogant!”
The Count reread the contents of the letter before crushing the parchment in his fist.
What had arrived for him was a military order from Heinkel.
It stated that an inspector would arrive alongside thirty Leinrant knights, and ordered him to open the castle gates.
“They dare bring a knight order into my territory under such a pathetic excuse!”
Count Buchenheim threw down the Duke’s letter and gnashed his teeth.
“A reinvestigation into the incident from twenty years ago?! After everything was already settled...!”
As he fumed in rage, someone approached him.
A gaunt man wearing glasses.
It was his adjutant, the one responsible for managing the castle’s administration.
“Count, but these people are...”
“I know!”
The thirty knights accompanying the inspector.
They were Leinrant’s Hammer of Siege Warfare, the Spiked Hammer Knight Order.
And the one commanding them was Delline Leinrant, heir to Leinrant itself.
One of the three knight orders that had killed Helian together with Heinkel.
“To think they’d send the knights they deployed in the Paul Wyvern civil war to us...!”
The reason his clenched fists trembled was not anger alone.
Anxiety. And fear.
It was the first time in decades that Leinrant had taken such an aggressive stance.
“Count, at this rate, the meeting scheduled in two days...”
“Tch, it can’t be helped.”
Though the Count frowned, he soon bared his yellow teeth as if this development suited him instead.
“I’ve received the letter, so leave.”
“Y-Yes...?”
The Count waved his hand dismissively, as if he had nothing more to say.
“U-Um... Count?”
“Hm?”
The messenger, shrinking in on himself, awkwardly forced a smile.
“Y-Your Grace ordered me to bring back an answer no matter what... so, a response...”
“...A response?”
It was an unmistakable order to leave.
Yet the messenger still stood there smiling nervously.
“Y-Your Grace ordered me to bring back an answer no matter what... so, a response...”
“...A response?”
The smile vanished from the Count’s face as he slowly raised a hand.
And then—
Thud—!
Before the messenger could even finish speaking, a kick slammed into his stomach.
It came from one of the knights lined up beside the Count.
“Kgh, cough...!”
“It seems the main family has gotten awfully full of itself, Count.”
The young knight, with a vile-looking face, grabbed the messenger by the collar and yanked him upright.
“If you’re told to leave, then leave quietly. How dare a filthy commoner run his mouth in front of his betters?”
Even while being threatened by the knight baring his teeth viciously, the messenger only waved his hands awkwardly with a strained smile.
“Haha! N-No, nothing like that...! How could I possibly...!”
Smack—!
Before his answer could finish, the knight backhanded him across the face.
Watching the messenger tumble across the floor, the knight dusted off his hands as though finally satisfied.
“That’s enough.”
The Count spoke in a deliberately composed tone, and the knight bowed his head before returning to his place.
“The main family’s messengers are sturdy. Normally, he’d be dead already.”
Sneering at the staggering messenger on the floor, the Count continued.
“A response? If they want one, I’ll give it to them.”
Count Buchenheim then raised his voice toward the messenger.
“Tell them to come if they dare! Neither Count Buchenheim nor the Imperial Knight Order will sit idle!”
Helian, the central pillar of their faction, was gone.
Yet he remained confident.
‘If you intend to bring knights into my territory, then that’s exactly what I want!’
Behind him stood the Empire.
If matters escalated into civil war, then just as they had in Paul Wyvern, the Imperial Army would descend upon Leinrant territory.
‘And I’m not some fool like Helian.’
A woman who lost her sanity the moment her son died, becoming a monster drunk on power.
That was what happened when one grew overly attached to blood relatives.
‘I won’t make the same mistake you did, Helian.’
Having finished his thoughts, the Count barked at the messenger once more.
“If you’ve heard enough, then get out! Otherwise I’ll personally teach you a lesson...!”
“N-No, sir!”
The messenger hurriedly scrambled to his feet and fled the Count’s office.
“Hmph. Idiot.”
Mocking the departing man, Count Buchenheim hurriedly began making preparations.
There wasn’t much time left if he wanted to move the funds hidden underground out of the territory.
.
“Ah, damn... that hurts like hell.”
Hallway of Count Buchenheim’s mansion.
Still rubbing my stinging cheek, I walked toward the first floor of the estate.
“No, seriously, why did the facial control mess up? It worked fine during testing...”
Muttering to myself, I grabbed my face—more precisely, the doppelganger spirit wrapped around it.
Crrrk, crrrk!
Like peeling off a layer of skin, my face slowly tore away.
“Pwah—!”
The entire layer peeled off, revealing my real face beneath.
A doppelganger that mimicked another’s appearance using ectoplasm.
This was a simple disguise created by applying that principle.
“Seriously, of all the times for things to go wrong... I almost got caught.”
Getting beaten up was fine,
but the moment they hit my face, I panicked a little.
Thankfully the spirit body held up.
Woooooo—!
While I muttered to myself,
I finally received a reaction from the Banshee I had released into the mansion beforehand.
“Did you find it?”
The voice came from beneath the mansion.
From the underground passage connected to a secluded room on the first floor.
“Good. Dragging things out was worth it.”
I smiled in satisfaction and immediately changed direction, heading toward a remote corner of the estate.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?”
But only for a moment.
As if he had been following me, one of the knights approached and grabbed my shoulder.
“You bastard, so you really are a spy from Leinrant...!”
The knight spun me around to check my face.
“Uh... huh...?”
The same clothes as the messenger from earlier.
But the face reflected in his eyes was not that of a frail young man.
It was the face of Klein Leinrant.
Well, my hair was still dyed black.
“K-Klein Leinr...!”
Just as the startled knight managed to get that far—
“Shhh.”
I placed a finger over my lips.
The moment I did, his words stopped completely.
“Mmph... mmph?!”
The knight’s eyes widened instantly when no sound came out.
“Mmgh! Mmghhh—!”
But just because he couldn’t speak didn’t mean he couldn’t act.
He immediately tried to shout for the servants and maids moving throughout the mansion.
However—
“Everyone without mana has already fallen into my grasp.”
Only then did a streak of fear appear on his face.
“That means there’s no one in this mansion who can help you.”
Klein Leinrant.
Rumors of what he had done during the Paul Wyvern civil war had already spread far and wide.
Despite his desperate cries, not a single servant who passed by us even glanced in our direction.
It was as if they had never noticed our existence to begin with.
“Ah... ah...?”
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
I spoke to the knight, whose face was filled with confusion.
Now that I had fully absorbed the demonic energy of the obsidian ring,
my demonic energy was more than enough to dominate the minds of ordinary people.
Sssssss...!
Through the knight’s pale ear, I slowly poured my demonic energy inside him.
There were no interlopers here.
No necromancers capable of sensing demonic energy either.
So deliberately, slowly, I wore down his mind while stimulating his fear.
“Ah, ahh...!”
“Do not resist.”
His eyes shook aimlessly like those of a broken puppet.
“U-Ughhh...!”
“Accept it. Do not run. Listen to my voice.”
My voice was no longer that of the living.
It had become the voice of the dead.
—If you do that, you will be freed from this fear.
I whispered slowly into the trembling knight’s ear.
The demonic energy enveloping his brain grew denser and denser, casting darkness over his once-clear will.
“Ahh...”
A sigh that sounded almost like lamentation.
The corners of my lips curled upward when I heard it.
—Now then, repeat after me.
I spoke as though soothing a frightened child.
—The messenger I was watching safely left the castle.
“The messenger... I was watching... safely... left the castle...”
As if the mind control had worked perfectly, the knight repeated my words with empty eyes.
—No one entered the secluded room on the first floor.
“No one... entered... the secluded room... on the first floor...”
—There is nothing wrong with the mansion. And you saw nothing.
“There is nothing wrong... with the mansion... I saw nothing...”
The voice of the dead flowed from my mouth.
After repeating it, the knight released his grip on me, turned around, and disappeared.
Creeeak...!
With the nuisance gone, there was nothing left to stop me.
An old annex tucked away in one corner of the mansion.
Entering it, I lifted the dust-covered carpet and pulled open the wooden door hidden beneath it.
—This is absurd.
A necromancer walking through the heart of enemy territory as though it were his own home.
Watching the situation unfold, Raven spoke in disbelief.
—To think a so-called knight order failed to prepare any countermeasures against necromancers.
A single necromancer was taking control of the entire mansion.
If I truly wanted to, I could assassinate Count Buchenheim right now.
“Seriously.”
I agreed with him while recalling memories from my previous life.
The Archimond Incident, when millions of undead invaded the continent.
That brutal war.
“Back then, infiltrating like this would’ve been impossible.”
I remembered the allied forces who had become experts at killing undead and necromancers alike.
If my opponents had been them, I probably wouldn’t have even been able to approach.
There would always have been mages stationed nearby using detection magic.
Thinking about it that way, Raven’s reaction was understandable.
“Still, thanks to that, things became a whole lot easier. Don’t you think?”
As I said that and walked through the underground passage, my target finally came into view.
“Found you.”
Lying before me was an old skeleton.
The skeleton of a man chained up, one who had clearly struggled for a very long time.
—Is this him?
“Yeah. We found the right place.”
Answering Raven’s question, I called out the owner of the remains.
The elder brother of the current Count Buchenheim, Devin Buchenheim.
—Keldin Buchenheim.
Woooooo—!
Restless spirits recognize those who guide them.
Hearing the cry of the unfamiliar soul responding to my voice, I condensed demonic energy into my right hand.
—I call upon this pitiful spirit, trapped by schemes and unable to depart for decades.
As I spoke, a glowing blue contract circle formed between me and the skeleton.
—Let us make a deal.