Chapter 70: Honestly, I’m Brilliant (I Think...?)

Freya’s replica went into standby, in a manner of speaking, after all those scenes she hadn’t remotely planned for and that had come one after another without giving her a moment’s respite.

She already had the perfect excuse in the form of a sudden illness, after all, so she simply stayed in bed in her room at the Paydragon estate, enjoying a thoroughly earned rest after such a grueling mission.

Myriam, the maid who had shown her to that room on the first day, looked after her with impeccable devotion.

And Freya could allow herself all of this with a perfectly clear conscience, because she had ticked every single box of her outing and her original plan.

She certainly wasn’t the sharpest mind in this world, but she had at least learned to think a little further than the end of her own nose.

All it took was putting herself in Baron Frarken’s place.

Picture it. A young apprentice hero you believed naive, penniless and hanging over a cliff edge gets sent into supposedly hostile territory. A place where you’ve already lost a fair number of men without ever getting a scrap of information out of it, and men who, incidentally, were considerably stronger than that boy was in his current state.

You write him off as dead. You even confirm the news publicly, which suits you enormously.

Then he comes back.

Alive, in perfect health, and accompanied by a supposed survivor of the village of Veille whom he immediately takes under his wing. That same village nobody was ever meant to walk out of.

And this man, who had never once been able to refuse you anything, now turns down every one of your invitations and sidesteps every approach.

He must be going completely out of his mind, imagining a thousand and one scenarios~

But that wasn’t all.

Because Freya knew perfectly well that the very foundation of noble politics consisted of planting spies in rival houses, particularly the nearest ones, purely as a precaution. From everything she’d read back on Earth, it was an utterly routine practice, practically an administrative formality between neighbors who despise each other politely.

So she’d spent several evenings with Aldric going through the profiles of his own household, purely as a precaution, precisely.

Numerous profiles, so to speak. For a noble house in decline, it hadn’t taken very long.

They’d gone back through every hire one by one, as far back as Aldric’s memory allowed. Who had been taken on by whom, on whose recommendation, at what point, and to replace whom.

And there it was.

One profile stood apart from all the others. Both in the circumstances of her arrival in the house and in the inconsistencies within what Aldric himself said about her without even noticing.

Three discreet knocks at the door.

"I’ll set the glass here, madam. It’s a medicine provided by the house physicians, for your health."

Myriam placed it on the bedside table with flawless delicacy, without the slightest sound against the wood, even taking the time to turn the glass so the handle faced the right way.

"Thank... thank you... koff... koff... so much..."

"Not at all, madam."

She stepped back twice, performed an immaculate curtsey, then left the room, closing the door so gently that the latch made almost no sound at all.

Freya then got up, took the glass, and walked out onto the balcony before pouring it over the railing, the water scattering in the air before landing somewhere in the garden below.

Second-rate patterns here too, apparently...

Yes, the profile that stood apart was none other than Myriam.

Aldric knew it just as well as she did. So why hadn’t he gotten rid of her?

Because she was infinitely more useful this way.

Because a spy whose existence you’re aware of stops being a threat and becomes a channel. A channel running straight to the baron’s ear, into which you can pour precisely whatever you like.

So since his return, Aldric had strict instructions to do everything in front of her.

His personal training, first of all, and that new strength come out of nowhere. Because he had, after all, doubled his levels, going from thirteen to twenty-seven, which made him several times stronger, several times faster, several times everything. His skills had followed the same curve, his mana having grown so much alongside them that even his most basic techniques now looked completely disproportionate.

His sudden knack for reading situations and thinking ahead, next. Then his legendary naivety, which seemed to have evaporated as if by magic.

And finally his brand-new violet pepper business, which he took great care to discuss out loud in the corridors, preferably whenever a certain maid happened to be within earshot.

All of it only sharpened further by Freya’s little excursion into the underworld of Evangel.

Because Myriam would certainly mention a late-night outing, and the baron’s men, who had to be scattered all over the city and the underworld alike, would report the rest.

And then the baron would have nothing left to do but ask himself questions.

Why does a simple traumatized village girl go down into the underworld alone? How did she know the way, and more to the point the password at the bar? And if the young Paydragon gave it to her, why hand it to a mere peasant? Who did she go down there to see? How long did she stay? Why, on that exact same day, did a riot tear through the gaming district? Why, on that exact same day, did the queen of pleasures suddenly start hiring more men while becoming considerably more active than usual? And why on earth did she go down there with a suitcase and come back up without one?

Freya smiled, still leaning on the balcony, savoring every one of those questions she pictured looping through a head that had surely stopped sleeping already.

And the cherry on top, obviously.

The men sent to follow her, who had simply vanished in the space of a single night.

Because that was the crucial part. Three men, one of whom could level an entire alley in a single movement, were not supposed to disappear against a peasant girl in tears.

So either they failed against somebody else, or the peasant girl was no peasant girl. And either way, it doesn’t work out in his favor~

All that remained was to let every one of these pieces assemble themselves inside the mind of an already nervous man.

The baron, unable to work out where the apprentice hero’s new abilities had suddenly come from, whether commercial, physical or even mental, would inevitably arrive at the same conclusion. That those abilities had always been there. That the boy had been hiding them from the start.

In other words, that he, the baron, had been the one played for a fool all these years.

Then would come the rumors, which Kyiara would see rise to the surface within a few days. The village of Veille, the hired men, the misdeeds.

And the baron would then wonder where all of it had leaked from, and who might be working in the shadows to make him pay for it.

Finally, there was Veille itself.

Because nobody had ever recovered a single body there. Freya had had them burned, and Aria had taken care of scattering the ashes far away.

An entire village emptied of its people, without one corpse to show for it.

So what’s he going to tell himself, do you think? That survivors are still walking around somewhere? That the village maybe never fell at all? Or worse still, that somebody came through behind his men to tidy their work away, and therefore has something to hold over him? Whichever answer he picks, not one of them is going to help him sleep tonight~

She caught herself laughing out loud on the balcony.

All of this would lead him toward several hypotheses, but two of them would inevitably rise above the rest.

The first: a shadow standing behind the young Paydragon had been manipulating him from the beginning, had let the baron believe he was leading the dance, and was quietly steering him exactly where it wanted him.

The second, far worse: his own shadow, the one standing behind his own seat, had been playing a double game with the Paydragon from day one in order to bring him down.

Oooh, he’s going to go completely paranoid, and he’s going to act hard, very hard, and above all very soon~~ I can’t wait, I really cannot wait to see what he does!

She stretched at length on the balcony, thoroughly pleased with herself.

Then again... all of this is only guesswork. He might very well do something else entirely. Let’s just see where it takes us, I’ve done what I came here to do for the next few days.

She headed for the bed and let herself drop onto it face down, arms and legs spread like a starfish, the smile still fixed to her face.

Honestly, what a brilliant little Dungeon Overlord I am~ Let’s just rest, and enjoy whatever’s going on back at the dungeon.

And that was how Freya’s replica proudly resolved to do absolutely nothing for the next few days, lounging in silk sheets with nothing but an illness for cover.