“Eliminate.”
An ice spear more than twice my height cleaved through the air.
“Ghk!”
I caught a brush of cold at my back and glanced behind me.
“That took ten years off my life. I almost got caught.”
The ice spear I had dodged with the help of my skill had lodged itself in the wall. A thick layer of ice had painted the wall a stark white.
To subdue intruders by trapping them in ice without damaging the walls that protected the relics.
It was an ability befitting the guardian of a vault.
“To think you dodged that. You are no ordinary intruder.”
“You do not seem like an ordinary spirit either.”
Possessing an ego meant it was at least a mid-grade spirit.
And considering it could wield magic on this scale in the material world rather than the Spirit Realm, it was likely a high-grade spirit.
“You have judged correctly. In my prime, I was a spirit that encompassed an entire mountain range!”
Pride brimming in his voice, the expression on the ice statue changed with impressive agility.
“That is rather sad.”
“…What do you mean?”
“Whatever your past glory may have been, you are just a watchdog for a little storeroom now.”
Crack.
The ice fragments that I assumed made up his brow twisted with an audible crunch.
“You dare prattle on as you please, petty thief.”
Long ice formed in his hand. It was identical to the icicle spear he had thrown at me before.
“This works out well. Valtrion promised to set me free once I repelled a thousand intruders. You shall be my offering.”
“…Excuse me, but how many people have you caught so far?”
“Two hundred and seventeen. If I defeat you, you will be the two hundred and eighteenth.”
Why did I suddenly think of my friend Jongho, who had lost his rental deposit to a fraudulent lease?
Dmitri’s ancestor must have been quite the con artist.
How else could this absurd unpaid exploitation of a high-grade spirit be explained?
“You still have a long way to go. Catching one person like me will not even make a difference, so could you not just pretend you never saw me?”
Boom!
He answered with action rather than words.
The wall of ice created by the thrown spear was unlike the previous one, which had been intended only to capture me.
Sharp spikes rose all over it, as if it meant to tear apart any living thing trapped inside.
“I guess I struck a nerve.”
I was certain now.
His speech and the statue’s appearance might make him seem like a solemn old man, but in truth, he was a child who lived according to his whims.
“You little rat! You dodge and weave well enough!”
At least there was one fortunate thing: his attacks consisted solely of ice spears, making them extremely predictable.
Compared with Luciana’s erratic, lightning-fast swordsmanship, they were enough to make me yawn.
“For a Great Spirit who ruled over a mountain range, your attacks are awfully sloppy.”
“Grrk. If my power had not been sealed, I would have captured the likes of you long ago.”
The problem was that I had no way to attack him, either.
Tute, which was all-purpose against humans, was useless against a spirit.
“H-Hey, where are you going? Stop right there!”
“What thief in the world stops just because someone tells him to?”
So I chose the thirty-sixth stratagem: run away.
As I ran deeper into the vault, the statue chased after me at a speed no less impressive than mine.
“Keep running if you wish! You are human. You will tire first!”
He had a point.
I had built up a little endurance through my sparring matches with Luciana, but I could not compare to a high-grade spirit supplied with endless mana by nature.
“Really? We will not know who tires first until the end.”
If I had no chance of winning, I would not have engaged him in the first place.
I might be in a real world now, but I was still a veteran player.
I only had to find a way through.
In theory, a spirit could use magic power without limit, so long as it had nature to draw upon.
But this was House Valtrion’s underground vault. There were no mountains, glaciers, or trees from which a spirit could draw mana.
Yet that statue was rampaging about without the slightest burden. Somewhere in this vault, there had to be a device sustaining the Snow Spirit’s power.
In other words, there had to be a source.
Pant, pant.
Would my stamina run out first, or would I find the spirit’s battery charger first?
It was a race.
“You were tenacious, but this is as far as you go.”
How long had I been running? My chronic problem, my Vitality stat, finally caught up with me again.
And at the very end of the vault, I reached a dead end, allowing the Snow Spirit to approach from behind.
“Let us finish this.”
“That is what I was going to say.”
“…What?”
But then—
“I found it first, by a hair.”
I had reached Room 1.
From the deepest part of the vault came an energy similar to that of the Snow Spirit.
“House Valtrion certainly does not disgrace its name. To think you had such a precious spirit stone.”
In this place, where even after looking high and low one could find no trace of nature, there was a jewel that had been sharing its mana with the Snow Spirit.
Even inside its tightly secured safe, it could not hide its radiance. Light spilled out through the gaps.
“So that is what you sought. You meant to remove the source of my power.”
Only now did he realize what I was after, and he looked at me mockingly.
“It is useless. That safe is covered in three layers of high-grade sealing magic that will stop the heart of anyone who touches it. Only a blood relative of House Valtrion may unseal it by offering their blood.”
The spirit sneered as though asking what someone outside House Valtrion could possibly do.
Of course, that mockery turned to shock in an instant.
“Wow. That is quite the impressive biometric lock.”
“No, how?!”
“That is a trade secret.”
[Security Magic Detected. Releasing.]
I slipped the plain golden rod back into my pocket.
No matter how high-grade the sealing magic was, it was nothing more than a meaningless barrier before Tute, the master key.
The pure white jewel in my hand gleamed brilliantly, proudly announcing its existence.
What a shame.
The Snow Spirit, realizing it too late, hurled the spear in his hand to stop me, but he was already too late.
“Goodbye. Retire and rest deeply in the Spirit Realm.”
Crash!
The spirit stone I threw to the floor shattered in the most literal sense.
“You will regret this….”
With the spirit stone that supplied his magic power gone, it was only natural that the Snow Spirit could no longer maintain his form.
Leaving only a final dying curse, the ice statue crumbled into powder from the head down.
“Well, now that the watchdog is gone, shall we start the relic party?”
At last, the relic vault was quiet.
I stretched and leisurely looked around.
First things first, I needed to get back to Room 108 and stick it to Dmitri.
Then I could take my time looking through everything and clean out every useful relic.
***
“Then we charge in!”
Alex led House Valtrion’s elite soldiers in formation as they entered the vault.
“What is with all this fuss?”
Following behind was the young master, grumbling as he gave them a hostile look.
“The Snow Spirit guards the vault. What can a thief who is only good at disguises possibly do? All we have to do is dispose of the corpse. You only made a simple matter into a bigger one.”
Perhaps Young Master Dmitri was right.
But an inexplicable unease had taken root inside Alex.
Intuition.
It was flimsy grounds for concern, but Alex trusted his intuition deeply.
It had served him well when he was surrounded by monsters or demonkind, and again as he rose from an ordinary soldier to a vault guard.
That intuition was screaming at him.
It warned that the thief who had escaped his notice so completely might do something outrageous inside the vault.
“Young Master, if you encounter the Snow Spirit, I ask that you try to persuade him.”
“I understand for now, but you should prepare yourself. From letting a thief into the vault to laying hands on a noble like me, I will hold you to account for every last thing.”
…This would probably be his final duty.
Alex swallowed his bitterness and led the soldiers onward.
Though they had every reason to question a man being browbeaten by the noble he served, the soldiers faithfully followed his orders.
“Stop.”
Suddenly, Alex’s knightly senses picked up a presence before anyone else did.
Then Dmitri, followed by the soldiers, noticed it as well and one by one drew their weapons.
“You there. Identify yourself.”
“Tch. I have only looted one thing, and the pests are here already.”
The strange figure in a bizarre golden mask clicked his tongue as though regretful.
His voice was filled with static, making it impossible to tell whether he was male or female.
Even his build was unclear. It felt as though Alex were trying to make out someone beyond a veil of fog.
“Th-That is the Amplification Orb!”
Even amid all that, the relic in the stranger’s hand made its presence abundantly clear.
A fist-sized orb with a pinkish glow.
Dmitri recognized it at once as the heirloom his father had shown him when he was young, an orb that aided one’s growth.
“Put that down and surrender at once.”
“Do you really think I will obediently listen just because you tell me to?”
The stranger merely laughed at Alex’s threat. The polite yet mocking tone was an added provocation.
“After dealing with the Snow Spirit, I now have knights and private soldiers to deal with. This is far too much trouble for the payoff. I have to take this, or there would have been no point in coming all this way.”
At the stranger’s unconcerned words, everyone held their breath.
“You dealt with the Snow Spirit?” Dmitri asked stupidly.
Alex felt exactly the same way.
The high-grade spirit had guarded this place without change for hundreds of years. To think it had been defeated so easily.
“…Who are you?”
At Alex’s tense question, the stranger burst into laughter and clapped his hands.
“It is funny to laugh now that I have already been found out, but what thief reveals his identity just because someone asks…?”
As he spoke, the stranger abruptly stopped laughing and stared blankly into the air.
What was that? Did he have an accomplice?
Alex followed his gaze to see whether there was something there, but he saw nothing.
Every one of the stranger’s actions seemed to conceal some elaborate scheme. Alex’s nerves frayed as he sharpened his focus.
“I see. That does suit a Phantom Thief.”
Nodding as if answering someone, the stranger soon spread both arms wide and shouted for all to hear.
His movements were as theatrical as a clown’s.
“Since you asked, I will kindly answer. My name is Frost Mane! I am the Phantom Thief who came to loot House Valtrion’s vault.”
“He is insane,” Dmitri muttered, speaking for everyone.
Anyone would think the same upon seeing a thief proudly declare he had robbed them and reveal an alias that sounded like something a child would make up.
Assuming he was merely a madman, Dmitri clicked his tongue and gestured.
“What are you waiting for? We do not have time to listen to a lunatic’s nonsense. Recover the Amplification Orb and bring him before me on his knees!”
Only after his shout did the soldiers snap to their senses.
But cold sweat ran down Alex’s forehead.
Even as the encirclement gradually tightened around him, the stranger merely grinned.
“I would have liked to have a little more fun, but I will take my leave for today. Tighten your security next time, or I will clean the place out. Well then!”
A thick black cloud billowed out around the stranger as he finished speaking.
“W-What is this?!”
“Do not step on my foot!”
The cloud rapidly grew, spreading among the soldiers until they could not see even a foot ahead.
“Stay calm! We need to catch that lunatic first!”
Even amid the chaos, Alex tried to calm the soldiers as he searched for the stranger.
Amid the muddled presences, he had to find the unfamiliar one.
“Where did he go?”
Yet even a trained knight’s senses could not locate the stranger’s presence. It had vanished completely.
By the time they could see again, it was already too late.
“…We are ruined.”
Would he be able to keep his life?
Not only had he personally let the thief into the vault, but he had also failed to stop that thief from making off with a relic.
Alex laughed hollowly as he fidgeted with his sword.
***
“The world is becoming dangerous. I thought Phantom Thieves were only a tale of the West, but one has appeared in the North.”
In Luciana’s hands was a newspaper whose front page covered the theft I had committed the night before.
[House Valtrion Looted by a Single Thief. Is Its Security Adequate?]
“Do things like this happen often in the West?”
“More often than you would think. There is a wicked man there called the Sand Mole who even targets ducal houses. He has been caught now, though.”
I sold out my mentor’s name and poured Luciana some tea.
At the same time, my gaze was fixed on the Status Window hovering above her head.
[Emergency Quest Conditions Met]
[You have successfully made a name for yourself as a Phantom Thief.]
[Skill ‘Double Reputation’ has been unlocked.]
It was time to check the results of last night’s haul.
The scent of the tea seemed especially sweet.