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Volume 8 Chapter 3 Part 2

Translator: Kell

“Eld. I apologize for asking you to come all the way here,” the king said.

“Well, I’m supposed to be a knight,” I replied. “And I want to hear what happened after our last meeting.”

The king and I were in the palace’s reception room. You wouldn’t normally expect this kind of casual language between a king and a knight, but this isn’t really a formal audience or anything. I’ve been speaking with the king in this tone for some time now, but in a formal audience with eyes all around me, I would likely speak formally.

On a side note, Sachylis was waiting outside.

“Is a reward even something that can be negotiated?” I asked. The question has been bugging me.

It was normal for a knight to receive rewards for their work, but I thought such things were decided by the king.

“We don’t usually negotiate, of course. I decide the rewards for the knights, and not one of them complains. But that’s not how it works when it comes to you.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. The reason I don’t negotiate with knights is because there is a huge difference in power. I can’t treat you like a normal knight, when you have the power to destroy a whole nation by yourself if you wanted to.”

Okay, now you’re just exaggerating.

While it’s true that in a short-term localized skirmish, I don’t think I’ll lose against anyone in this kingdom… But I don’t exactly have unlimited mana and stamina.

There is no one who would not run out of strength after being attacked twenty-four hours a day without even a wink of sleep. It doesn’t matter that I’m a Sage. Humans have their limits.

Of course, if I had the cooperation of the Count Meigis army, I might be able to take over the royal capital and set up a puppet government. Not that I or Count Meigis have any plans to do that.

“By the way, what were you going to give me if I didn’t ask for anything?”

“See, that’s the problem. I’m having a hard time deciding. It’s usually merit-based, but to be honest, I don’t know how to evaluate your recent accomplishments. We have precedents, of course. Normally, it would be based on the number of enemies and their armaments. But the enemy this time was too unprecedented. If we can’t evaluate the feat, we can’t decide on the reward either.”

He has a point. In terms of numbers, the enemy was so few that it couldn’t even be called an army. The only people who saw the enemy directly were me and some members of Count Meigis’s army. If we wanted to, we could lie about the enemy’s strength as much as we wanted.

Those who possessed Awakened Skills and Sandstorm were troublesome because of their Skills, not their equipment, so you can’t even assess their strength by examining their gear.

“If you want verifiable evidence, we defeated three enemies at the volcano, and another three that occupied the city. That’s all. Not really the number you’d expect from a band of knights. Maybe from a party of adventurers sent to exterminate bandits.”

“If you look at their number, it’s not much,” the king said. “However, it’s a different story when those three people in the city of Raijis annihilated an army of 500 people. In addition, they were completely unharmed. If we converted their strength to ordinary soldiers, the number would be unimaginable.”

The king scanned a document labeled “Investigation Report on the Battle at Raijis”. It seemed to have been prepared by the kingdom’s Intelligence Department, but judging from his words, I guess they had not gathered that much information. Even an Intel Department can’t investigate something that no one knows about.

The only people who know about the enemy’s strength are us who actually fought them and the enemy. Even among my troops, only a few actually saw them.

“What does that document say?” I asked.

“It says, ‘We don’t know anything.’ The rest is just an explanation of why we don’t know anything. Like the equipment of the enemy, the surrounding terrain, and interviews with people who might have information. We don’t have any information about the enemy at the top of Mount Raijis, in particular.”

“Anything from inside the Empire? Sure, we’re the only ones in the kingdom who actually know, but they might have an idea.”

“All we’ve learned about this case is that it’s classified information. No investigation into classified intel has ever been successful. As soon as we start the investigation, the investigator goes missing.”

I see. So we can’t probe classified information. Maybe there’s someone in their classified intel department who can use Search Enemy.

Using spies in a world where one can identify an enemy with a single Skill is definitely not viable. Barely anyone knows about Search Enemy in the kingdom, but it’s safe to assume that the Empire has some understanding of the Skill system, since they even made use of Awakening.

The battle at the volcano indicates they haven’t exactly mastered them, though. At any rate, the Empire definitely has more Skills than the average soldiers of this kingdom. There are several other Skills that can identify hostiles. Assuming that the enemy can’t use a single one of them would be a bit too optimistic.

“You should probably stop using spies, then,” I said. “You’ll only be sending them to their graves.”

“I think so, too. If you have any advice on how to do secret investigations, I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Depends on how they’re identifying the spies. If the enemy can use their Skills effectively, then sending spies in their ranks is basically impossible. If all you want to do is just get in touch with someone who knows classified information to get confirmation, there’s a slim chance you could pull it off. But even then, if the target gets even a little bit suspicious, they’ll use their Skill to confirm their suspicion, and it’s over. So it’s practically impossible.”

Getting in touch with people who might have intel is among the absolute basics of espionage. If that worked, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. It’s clear that the enemy has countermeasures for espionage. They could be assigning someone with Search Enemy to those who have classified intel.