Leniss.
The Cygnus Guild’s financial officer—and its sole administrator.
Despite his pale, gloomy appearance, which made him look as though he spent his days plotting sinister schemes in the shadows, he was in fact more diligent and efficient than anyone else.
Now that the guild was firmly established, he handled only the financial work that generated fresh reports every day. But when Cygnus was first founded, Leniss had carried more titles than anyone could count.
Financial officer, chief administrator, judicial enforcer, legislator, urban planner, and more…
If Enoch Soser’s reputation was what had drawn so many talented people together, then it would not be an exaggeration to say that Leniss was the one who had made it possible for them to live like civilized human beings.
The members of Cygnus believed their city had been perfect from the very beginning.
What they did not see were the countless sleepless nights Leniss had spent behind that perfection, shaving years off his own life.
Because he was quiet and rarely left his room, no one seemed to appreciate how hard he worked.
But Sarah knew.
She had glimpsed his heartbreaking past through Star's Fragment.
Leniss was a fool.
A fool who knew nothing but work.
And that fool, who had devoted himself to the guild without ever realizing how badly he was ruining his own body, was destined to die in three days from accumulated exhaustion.
Alone.
With no one beside him.
Without its only administrator, Cygnus Guild would fail to appoint a replacement and gradually fall into neglect, losing the clean, orderly appearance it now took for granted. The streets would fill with filth and a stench unlike anything they had known before. Rats and vermin would swarm the sewers, spreading an unidentified epidemic among people already suffering from collective depression and unable to obtain medicine…
Destruction!
And so, once again, the world was apparently scheduled to face destruction for an utterly ridiculous reason.
Dragging Sarah back into an inescapable inferno along with it.
To prevent that tragedy, she had to keep Leniss alive somehow.
And the only way to make this work-obsessed ant rest was to solve the problem with the guild’s missing funds that had been tormenting him for the past few days.
To solve that problem, they needed to meet and question every person on Leniss’s list.
That was what they needed to do, but—
“…!”
Splash!
The instant the door opened, a wave of water drenched Sarah from head to toe.
This was already the tenth time today.
Apparently, she was finally receiving all the water she had desperately longed for in hell—and far more than she could ever have wanted.
“You brought an Antares to my house?! Are you insane?!”
The furious shout pierced through Sarah’s waterlogged ears.
After hurling insults at Leniss, the person inside slammed the door shut with a bang.
If there was one flaw in Sarah’s noble plan to help Leniss and save his life, it was that the people here hated immunes far more than she had expected.
“S-Sarah… Are you all right?”
Leniss, who had been suffering alongside her all evening, looked ready to cry.
Sarah roughly wiped the water from her face and turned to him with a smile.
“Of course. I’m perfectly fine. It’s refreshing, actually.”
Her bluish lips would have convinced absolutely no one, and calling this refreshing was complete nonsense.
But after repeating the same nonsense nearly ten times, it was beginning to sound almost plausible.
Perhaps feeling guilty that she kept smiling despite being treated so harshly, Leniss—already awkward at the best of times—became even more flustered.
“I’m sorry… They’re usually such gentle people. They wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Are all the gentle people dead?
Suppressing the thought that sprang immediately to mind, Sarah comforted Leniss, who looked as though he wanted the ground to swallow him.
“Why are you apologizing? The one who threw the water was that ba— I mean, that person.”
Even as she spoke, she did not forget to shoot a vicious glare at the firmly closed door.
“If only my magical circuits were working properly…”
Sarah lowered her voice as she muttered the words she had already repeated countless times that day.
She might have been acting like an innocent lamb in front of Leniss, but after an entire evening of being drenched in water and showered with abuse, she was in an exceptionally foul mood.
Those damned guild members seemed to hold some personal grudge against Sarah.
Every time they saw her, they hurled abuse without hesitation—calling her filthy, calling her demon spawn, telling her to drop dead.
It had been quite some time since she had last heard insults like that.
How wonderfully nostalgic.
Unable to stand by, Leniss had tried to explain that Sarah was harmless, but no one had even allowed him to finish.
Worse, the more he tried to defend her, the more they cursed him too.
“No… It’s all my fault.”
And yet Leniss continued blaming himself.
Watching him bite his already cracked and ragged lips again made him look unbearably pitiful.
“I knew this would happen. But your offer to help was so tempting that I just couldn’t…”
“…”
The sympathy Sarah had only just begun to feel vanished without a trace.
You knew?
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. But… we’re still friends, right?”
Leniss approached timidly and caught hold of Sarah’s dripping collar.
His eyes searched her face anxiously, and the desire in them was painfully obvious.
The desire not to lose the precious labor force that had finally fallen into his hands.
“Of course. I would’ve helped you even if they’d thrown fire at me instead of water.”
Otherwise, I’m headed straight back to hell forever.
The transparency of his motives actually made Sarah feel better.
After wiping her face one last time, she nodded willingly.
She liked people like Leniss—people with obvious desires.
At least people like that would not stab you in the back before they got what they wanted.
“R-Really…?”
Apparently sensing her sincerity, Leniss looked deeply moved, as though salvation itself had descended upon him.
“Yes. Really.”
Seeing how desperately he seemed to need reassurance, Sarah gave him exactly the answer he wanted.
No exaggeration—she would have nodded just as readily even if Leniss had openly declared his intention to work her to the bone.
Ah, I really didn’t mean for him to stay up all night.
Because even now, behind Sarah, the image of Leniss collapsed dead across his desk continued to follow her, along with an irresponsibly unconcerned Enoch Soser staring down at him.
Ah~ I really didn’t mean for him to stay up all night~
The tactless apparition of Enoch Soser repeated the same line like a parrot.
If only to shut that annoying mouth, Sarah had to keep going.
“But we should stop here for today. The sun’s already set, and… you look freezing.”
Leniss gestured toward Sarah, who was still dripping wet, then tugged at her collar again as he suggested they head back.
At his concerned tone, Sarah gave him a faint smile.
“Shouldn’t you be offering me your coat when you say things like that?”
Leniss immediately hunched in on himself.
“Sorry. I’m cold too…”
“…”
He clutched his clothes tightly to his chest as though afraid she might actually take them.
That sly instinct to protect his own interests while pretending otherwise felt almost like looking into a mirror.
“Ho. Ho. Ho. I was joking.”
Sarah laughed it off shamelessly and changed the subject with perfect composure.
“Will I really be enough on my own? At this rate, tomorrow will just be the same.”
“I’ll think of another way to narrow down the culprit overnight!”
Apparently relieved by the change of topic, Leniss immediately offered a solution.
Ah! I really didn’t think he would die!
At that exact moment, as though offering divine guidance that this was absolutely the wrong answer, the phantom Enoch behind her loudly lamented Leniss’s death.
“…That doesn’t sound like a good idea.”
Sarah shook her head gravely, accepting the apparent will of heaven.
If she left Leniss to his own devices, he would almost certainly start sacrificing his lifespan again.
As she wondered how to overcome this obstacle, Sarah finally voiced the thought that had been circling in the back of her mind.
“Instead, why don’t we ask Master who the culprit is? From what I saw earlier, he seems to have some idea.”
In the end, the thought amounted to asking Enoch for help.
Naturally, Sarah did not like the idea.
But it was the best solution she could come up with.
“Hmm. We can’t do that.”
Leniss, however, immediately looked reluctant.
“The Captain doesn’t do things for other people.”
“Why?”
“Because it isn’t his problem?”
What kind of petty reason is that?
Sarah frowned, unable to understand the mind of a hero capable of being stingy in such a bizarre way.
“Uh… well. Yes, you’re the financial officer, but shouldn’t he help when his subordinate is suffering so badly he can’t even sleep? It doesn’t seem like a particularly difficult problem for him.”
Isn’t that what a so-called hero is supposed to do?
It was an unusually exemplary thing for Sarah to say.
But the Enoch Soser she knew really had been that sort of hero, so she could hardly help it.
The kind of man who would practically throw a fit if he saw someone in trouble and could not help them.
Disgustingly kind.
“If something happens to you because of this, how is he going to take responsibility?”
It infuriated her that a man like that could stand by doing nothing while someone this important was on the verge of working himself to death.
When no one needed him, he behaved as though he intended to save the entire world, even going so far as to inevitably drive the Holy Sword through Sarah’s heart.
Yet now that someone actually needed him, why was he doing nothing?
Perhaps pleased that Sarah was getting angry on his behalf, Leniss smiled gloomily and twisted his body awkwardly.
“That’s exactly the sort of thing the Captain wouldn’t care about.”
“…?”
“The people he has to protect aren’t us. It’s the world.”
“Huh?”
But what followed was far too heavy to be spoken with a smile.
“Anyway, the world won’t fall apart just because a few people like us die. It wouldn’t seem urgent to the Captain. And if we relied on him every single time something went wrong, we’d become idiots incapable of solving anything ourselves. We should at least be able to handle this much on our own.”
Even while complaining about him, Leniss was somehow trying to justify Enoch’s behavior.
“Sometimes, when he comes by just to watch me struggle, or when I see him happily lazing around by himself, I genuinely want to poison him, but still…”
What followed made it rather unclear whether this could truly be called defending Enoch at all.
Even so, that seemed to be what Leniss was attempting.
“I r-r-r-res—”
Leniss began stammering badly as he reached the final part.
“Res…pect… him…”
Having somehow forced out the admission that he respected Enoch, Leniss wiped sweat from his brow with the expression of a man on the verge of vomiting.
“Ah… I suddenly feel dizzy…”
Breathing uneasily, he looked ahead—and then noticed that Enoch’s house was already close.
Relief immediately crossed his face.
“W-we’re here! Just a little farther and—huh?”
His cheerful voice abruptly turned questioning.
Sarah followed his gaze.
Then her face twisted.
Ugh.
Enoch was leaning against the entrance, kissing someone passionately.
The pair kissed without the slightest concern for anyone watching, giving off the unmistakably intimate air of lovers who had only just finished rolling around together.
“Seriously. He couldn’t even wait that long…”
Perhaps embarrassed by his captain’s promiscuous private life, Leniss cleared his throat loudly and muttered under his breath.
“It’ll be awkward if we go over there now. Let’s wait somewhere else for a while—”
His expression made it painfully obvious that he had no intention whatsoever of inserting himself between the two of them.
He had already started trying to slip away with Sarah.
“Huh?”
At least, he would have.
If Enoch had not handed the woman something as they finally pulled apart.
“Wait a minute…?”
Sarah’s eyes widened as she stared at the object passing from Enoch’s hand into the woman’s.
Clink.
The instant she took it, metal struck metal.
Both Sarah and Leniss immediately pricked up their ears.
Even from this distance, there was no mistaking that sound.
Money.
The object in her hand was clearly a coin pouch.
And a rather large one.
Large enough, in fact, to hold the missing 3,750 gold.
“Leniss. Could what we’re looking at right now be…?”
As the pieces fell into place in a completely unexpected way, Sarah slowly turned toward Leniss.
Leniss was staring at the same scene.
His gaze had already gone colder than a midwinter wind from the north.
“That bastard…?”
Whatever tiny shred of respect he had managed to preserve until moments ago had vanished completely.