Sunlight washed over the pristine cobblestone streets of Londinium, though the bright Victorian morning did little to thaw the underlying tension gripping the city.
In the center of a bustling public square, a small crowd had gathered around a municipal bulletin board, their attention captured by a newly posted announcement.
It was a recruitment flyer, stamped with the seal of a nation called Kjerag, offering exorbitant salaries for university graduates willing to take up government administrative work.
The citizens of Londinium stared at it in sheer disbelief.
Whispers rippled through the onlookers.
Where exactly was Kjerag?
The skepticism in the air was thick enough to cut with a knife.
“A government civil servant position?
Openly recruiting off a street board?” one man scoffed, crossing his arms.
“Does a deal that sweet even exist?”
“I haven’t even heard of Kjerag,” another muttered, squinting at the fine print.
“Where is it?
Is it far from Londinium?
Is it even half the size of Victoria?”
“Hmph.
If you ask me, there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” a Feline bystander chimed in, his tail flicking dismissively.
“It’s probably another scam cooked up by some unscrupulous factory, trying to trick desperate kids into becoming black-market laborers!”
“Exactly!
You can’t trust these things,” a second Feline agreed with a vigorous nod.
“Let me tell you, my cousin’s classmate—a proper university graduate—got a shiny offer a while back to be an electronic engineer in some city out in the Tara region.
The benefits looked incredible on paper, so he packed his bags and went running.
And guess what happened?”
“What happened?”
The first Feline clicked his tongue, shaking his head with a look of deep pity.
“The second he crossed the border, he vanished.
Lost all contact with his family.
By the time his folks finally tracked him down, he was lying in a ditch with both his kidneys carved out!”
“Ugh!
Disgusting.
But what do you expect?
Tara has always been a lawless cesspit full of bad seeds!”
“Exactly!
That’s why our Londinium gentlemen stand head and shoulders above the rest of the world,” the first Feline boasted, puffing out his chest.
“When my ancestors marched into the capital behind the Aslan King, they secured enough prestige to cover my livelihood for the rest of my days!”
The moment the words left his mouth, the second Feline lunged forward, clapping a hand over his friend’s mouth and pressing a frantic finger to his own lips.
He cast a terrified, sweeping glance across the square, his voice dropping to a harsh hiss.
“The King’s matters—watch your mouth!”
The boastful Feline’s eyes widened in sudden realization.
The color drained from his face as he nodded rapidly against the hand.
“Right, right.
Speak carefully. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Speak carefully.”
The two men cautiously surveyed the surrounding pedestrians.
After confirming that no passing patrol guards or plainclothes watchers were paying them any mind, they yanked the brims of their hats low over their faces and hurried away from the square.
They were so eager to escape that they entirely failed to notice the figure sitting quietly on a bench at the far end of the plaza.
A girl with striking golden hair watched the two Felines scurry off into the alleyways.
Once they were gone, she pushed herself up from the bench and walked casually toward the notice board.
Ever since the last Aslan King was hanged by the neck in Parliament Square, the entire atmosphere of Londinium had suffocated under this exact brand of paranoia.
The city council nobles had seized absolute control of the capital.
They issued sweeping decrees prohibiting any Grand Duke from entering the city limits without explicit permission, effectively barring the gates and carving out their own isolated, untouchable kingdom within Londinium’s walls.
But governance by force was never a simple task.
Perhaps driven by lingering guilt, or perhaps desperate to violently erase the King’s remaining influence and crush any spark of rebellion, the city council had flooded the streets with spies.
They monitored the populace’s every whisper, every transaction, and every stray glance—especially any information concerning the “King.”
Overnight, a word that had once been uttered daily with pride by countless citizens had become a lethal taboo.
Vina felt a deep, lingering ache in her chest whenever she thought about it.
When the nobles first launched their bloody rebellion and imprisoned the King, Vina—a direct blood relative of the Aslan royal line—had been secretly smuggled out of the palace by a handful of desperately loyal royalists.
They hid her away in the sprawling, chaotic slums of the lower city, burying her among the common people.
The indiscriminate massacre of every remaining Aslan within the palace walls followed shortly after.
That slaughter meant that she, despite being so young at the time, was very likely the last living descendant of the Aslan bloodline.
She had lived completely incognito ever since.
She buried her birth name, Alexandrina Victoria, deep in her heart, adopting the simple moniker of Vina.
She became just another inconspicuous street wanderer scraping by in the shadows of Londinium.
There were thousands of orphaned wanderers just like her in the slums.
No one paid a second glance to a dirty, scowling blonde girl, which allowed her to slowly grow up in relative safety.
But her fragile peace had recently been shattered.
Her neighborhood had been caught in the crossfire of a vicious turf war between rival gangs.
The ensuing battle had sparked a massive fire that swept through the block, reducing Vina’s humble, ramshackle dwelling to ash and forcing her onto the streets once again.
She had originally planned to head toward the East End to try her luck in the territory governed by the Glasgow gang.
But as she passed through this square, the hushed, terrified conversation of the two Felines had caught her attention.
Standing before the board, Vina scanned the flyer.
Hiring administrative staff.
Those with reading and writing skills preferred.
Strong welcome to those familiar with government work and possessing a certain literary foundation.
Also welcoming recent university graduates to apply.
Guaranteed salary.
Better treatment for larger numbers…
Vina read the text silently to herself, a faint, cynical smile tugging at the corner of her lips.
Given her royal identity and subsequent life in the slums, she had absolutely zero experience in hunting for a proper, legal job.
Yet even she could see how glaringly suspicious this advertisement was.
By the standard metrics of government civil servants, the requirement of merely possessing basic reading and writing skills was absurdly low.
And what established government actively sought out fresh, inexperienced university graduates to run their administration?
In Vina’s memories of her imperial father’s court, the civil servants she had seen were exclusively middle-aged, overweight, balding men with shifty eyes and silver tongues. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Not a single one of those traits aligned with a bright-eyed university student.
And the phrase ‘better treatment for larger numbers’?
It sounded less like a prestigious government recruitment drive and more like a wholesale vegetable market.
Vina shook her head, her golden hair shifting over her shoulders.
It was no wonder those two Felines had been pointing at the flyer in disgust.
Looking at it through a pragmatic lens, they were entirely right; this thing screamed of a trap designed to lure desperate youths into black-market factories, or worse, a front for organ harvesting.
She glanced up at the name of the recruiting unit again, her brow furrowing slightly.
‘Kjerag?’
Unlike the two Victorians who had immediately questioned the nation’s existence, Vina actually had a vague impression of the name.
Kjerag wasn’t a territory within Victoria’s borders.
It was a sovereign nation situated far to the northwest, nestled in harsh, freezing mountains.
If she recalled correctly, the entire country was fiercely isolationist and worshipped some obscure, ancient religion.
Vina rubbed her temples, trying to force more details to the surface, but her mind came up blank.
It couldn’t be helped.
All her knowledge of Kjerag stemmed from the Terra geography lessons forced upon her by her childhood royal tutor.
At the time, she had possessed zero interest in the political geography of distant snow-covered mountains.
She had spent the vast majority of those lectures either skipping class entirely or sleeping soundly at her desk.
Standing in the square, she felt a sudden, wry sense of irony.
It felt exactly like sitting down for a critical examination, realizing the tutor had explicitly covered the material, and knowing she had slept through the entire lecture.
Just as Vina was racking her brain, trying to squeeze one more useful fact from her childhood memories, a crisp voice rang out from just behind her shoulder.
“Hey, miss over there!
What are you doing?”
Vina flinched, snapping back to reality.
She shifted her weight, glancing back from the corner of her eye.
A young girl dressed in the crisp, immaculate uniform of the Londinium mounted police was walking briskly toward her.
Vina’s heart hammered against her ribs.
Did she even need to ask?
Whether this officer had somehow seen through her disguise, recognized her as the last Aslan, or was simply here to interrogate her about the gang fire in the slums a few days ago, the result was the same.
Vina absolutely could not afford to be caught, and she certainly could not let herself be dragged into a Londinium police station!
Once the heavy iron doors of an interrogation room closed behind her, getting back out alive would be nearly impossible.
Panic overriding logic, Vina didn’t hesitate for a single second.
She reached out, violently tore the Kjerag recruitment advertisement off the bulletin board, spun on her heel, and bolted down the street.
Behind her, the mounted policewoman’s startled shouts quickly faded into the distance as Vina vanished into the labyrinth of the city.
Left standing alone in front of the vandalized notice board, the mounted police officer, Grani, blinked in utter bewilderment.
She clutched a stack of warning pamphlets to her chest, her ears drooping slightly as she pouted at the empty street.
“Am I really that scary?” Grani muttered to herself, kicking a stray pebble across the cobblestones.
“Can doing routine anti-fraud publicity actually terrify people into running away?”
[Rhodes’s Note:
Enjoying the operation so far, Doctor?
(This daily grind literally pays the landship’s rent!
to use the links!)