Chapter 244: Flower (2)
The Sentinel Knight Order had changed a great deal from the old days.
And those old days were only six or seven years ago, so it would be no exaggeration to say the place had changed beyond recognition.
The buildings the senior knights had all complained needed repairs. The lake park and walking trails they’d griped about, crawling with insects.
The inconvenience of a thirty-minute walk just to reach the cafeteria.
Those days of squabbling daily over meeting rooms by seniority because space was short, and lamenting the lack of budget.
The knights who, in the end, lost their passion and decided to live comfortably off their salaries, like self-employed businessmen.
All those ills and rotten habits, piled up in layers over decades, had been resolved.
The old building had been perfectly rebuilt, and a new wing now stood in harmony with it. On the lot right in front of the order’s headquarters, a top-class café and restaurant had opened, and a daycare had even been established, not only for knights but for the staff as well.
Now there was so much space to spare that every Administrative Officer had a private office, and the budget, too, was reliably disbursed so long as one proved results.
Commander Chiron, unexpectedly, drew no distinction or discrimination between commoners and nobles. If anything, he even showed signs of intending to carry on part of his predecessor Anton’s vision.
Most likely, this was thanks to the infusion of enormous capital and the transplanting of authority.
The saying that generosity flows from a full storehouse is plainly true, and authority keeps that storehouse all the safer.
The Operations Officers, Administrative Officers, and Agents now took boundless pride in the very fact that they worked for Sentinel.
But until Maximilian joined, Sentinel had been in decline.
Because nearly every bureaucrat in the imperial palace regarded the knight order with distaste.
A knight is prosecutor and defense counsel at once, police officer and soldier, legislator and executor.
Extralegal authority to intervene in nearly every administration and system of the Empire, under the banner of being a ‘watcher’.
Of course, a knight like Julian couldn’t simply wield all of that. A commoner like Hannah, even less so. There were appearances to mind, and in the first place there is a vast difference between having authority and using it.
The crux was ‘qualification’.
The more authority one holds, the heavier the responsibility becomes.
Yet a single man in this knight order, Maximilian Ebenholtz, could shoulder so heavy a position alone.
No, he volunteered to shoulder it.
“──Such is the man your son has provoked.”
Julian looked at the Chancellor of Zestfall University seated across from him. Joshua’s father. The man opened his mouth, his face pale.
“I will resign every position I hold. So please, I beg you…….”
Julian met the plea with a dry question of his own.
“Did you even read what the flyers said?”
A Blue Rose Society flyer lay on the table. Among its lines, some phrases stood out, particularly sharp.
[Let the Empire awaken, this Empire that usurps the achievements built by minority races.]
[If the Aran are truly superior, why must they prove their superiority by taking what belongs to others?]
The Chancellor hung his head.
“These flyers carry fierce grievances against the「Imperial Citizenship Law」, and against every form of discrimination in the Empire.”
The Imperial Citizenship Law was a solemn decree sanctioned by the Emperor, and the name embedded deepest between its lines was Maximilian Ebenholtz.
“Julian. For the sake of our old friendship, please…….”
The Chancellor’s voice trembled.
Old friendship. At those words, Julian quietly tilted his gaze.
Once, in Zestfall, he had met a woman.
Had it been love? Or some slightly different feeling?
Whichever it had been, he had known Joshua’s sister.
“Sir Julian.”
Just then, an Operations Officer entered. He spoke clearly, as if to make sure the Chancellor would hear.
“Sir Maximilian has requested a meeting.”
In that instant, the Chancellor’s face wavered.
“……Tell him I’ll come to him shortly.”
“Yes, understood.”
The Operations Officer withdrew, and silence settled over the office once more.
Despair crept into the Chancellor’s face.
“If…… Maximilian steps into this case himself. It won’t end with Joshua alone.”
Beheading of the entire family. Or execution of everyone involved.
Julian did not look away from that fear-laced gaze.
***
I looked at Joshua, locked behind bars.
Ah, they weren’t even bars anymore. Special Magic Glass, they called it; from inside you couldn’t see out, but from outside you could see everything within.
So even Sentinel’s dank, gloomy underground prison had come this far.
“Capital and technology really are something.”
I didn’t know the exact principle, but apparently they had coated it with a thin layer of Mana Stone powder during construction. In any case, it was Lorenzo Academy’s latest invention.
I asked Julian, who stood beside me.
“Did you read the flyers?”
“I did.”
“What did you make of them? They claim to be the conscience of the Empire.”
Julian answered evenly.
“Conscience and mockery are entirely different things.”
I chewed on those words.
Julian always spoke in broad strokes. As if skipping over things, as if hiding implications in the spaces between his sentences.
Perhaps it was the Empire’s razor-edged circumstances that had made him into so ambiguous a man.
“Sir. May I formally take over this case?”
“……The case files.”
Julian handed me a folder. Documents recording the investigation so far.
“Read them, by all means. But the transfer, I refuse.”
“…….”
I looked at Julian.
Suddenly, a question came to me.
Was Julian truly someone this Empire needed?
Weighing it carefully— he was neither necessary nor unnecessary.
He was simply someone who ‘was’ there, in that place.
A man always wavering.
A man who looked terribly precarious, yet never collapsed. And for that very reason, a man who never changed. Because he wore the face most likely to change, and in the end, never did.
A worn-out signpost.
Watching him, I couldn’t help doubting whether it was safe to follow.
But a knight who, at the end of it all, had only ever pointed toward the right path.
Yet the Empire never acknowledged that look of his, that ‘look of a man about to change’.
“Carry on.”
Julian turned away and disappeared up the stairs of the underground prison.
Left alone, I opened the file.
The Blue Rose Society’s flyers, steadily scattered across the entire capital. And a witness’s testimony. A composite sketch drawn from that testimony.
That was the decisive evidence in this case.
I said to the Operations Officer standing beside me.
“Bring in the witness first.”
…….
“…….”
I quietly studied the witness the Operations Officer had brought in. The witness sat inside the interrogation room, beyond the Special Magic Glass.
──Thump.
A familiar beat rose from the bottom of my heart.
The witness’s true nature was, unmistakably, clear.
“…….”
I checked the documents again.
Julian’s report was flawless. Nearly every surrounding circumstance had been recorded in airtight sentences.
Time of sighting : between one and one-thirty in the early morning.
Presence of light sources : condition of the streetlamps. Phase of the moon.
The witness’s particulars : street cleaner. Forty-three years old.
Given those conditions, the composite was far too precise. But a composite is drawn from the witness’s testimony.
A night watchman would have shone a flashlight on the face, so testifying wouldn’t have been difficult.
But a street cleaner in the small hours…….
There was no need to carry this line of reasoning any further in the first place.
Because the thing was Ezenheim.
For whatever reason, they were trying to cut down the blue rose known as the conscience within the Empire.
What did severing that flower actually gain them?
I couldn’t know yet, but at the very least, I could tell what bait they had thrown.
Rustle.
Turning to the next page, I found Joshua’s statement.
[I had no intention of mocking or ridiculing Knight Maximilian. That vulgar print was not drawn by me, and…….]
Julian had no ability to sense Ezenheim the way I did, and even so, in that split second, he had caught the fabrication in the circumstances.
That was why he was going so far as to invoke his Detention Authority to protect them.
“Um, sir.”
The Operations Officer called to me carefully.
“……What will you do?”
I watched the Ezenheim beyond the glass, fervently repeating its eyewitness testimony.
“It hardly matters.”
I had not the slightest intention of dancing to their tune.
“The Expo, with less than two weeks left, matters far more.”
Even knowing the witness was Ezenheim, I couldn’t know what they were ultimately after.
But someone far better than me in that arena was already on their trail—
“The rest, I leave to Knight Julian. He refused to hand over the case anyway.”
“Ah…….”
“We are staying out of this one.”
Thap.
I closed the file.
***
“Are these people out of their goddamn minds?!”
Knight Hannah’s office.
Bang!
An Administrative Officer slammed the papers down in fury. The faces of the other Operations Officers staring at the ‘flyer’ were no different.
“These fucking lunatics, seriously.”
“Wow, just looking at this pisses me off.”
“…….”
Amid the outcry, Hannah stayed silent. But her mind had already gone cold.
The other knights probably felt much the same.
Dare Tan himself had brought in the material, which meant the flyers had spread through the entire knight order.
“……Haah.”
Hannah pressed her boiling temper down with a sigh.
Spread across the table were prints caricaturing Maximilian in mockery.
“They must have a death wish.”
A low murmur, laced with killing intent.
“As it is, there’s already a lot of talk among the knights, ma’am. This Blue Rose Society or whatever it is…….”
An Operations Officer added.
It wasn’t only because the target was Maximilian. Daring to insult a Sentinel knight and sneer at the order the Empire had built, this kind of stunt was a challenge to all of Sentinel.
“Mobilize every informant. The distribution was fairly organized. There’s no way this was one person acting alone.”
Hannah ordered.
“—Yes, ma’am!”
The Operations Officers answered in loud voices. Their voices, too, were thick with fervor. The ideological system they had studied in order to join the Sentinel in the first place had ‘Under the Moonlight’ for its very foundation.
“……Vermin.”
And yet, it was a strange thing.
Crude drawings on paper had merely scratched at Maximilian, yet Hannah felt as if her own skin had been cut.
A commoner with no connections, no background.
What had raised that nameless existence to knighthood was the order Maximilian built.
So mocking him was the same as insulting everyone who lived within that order, and Hannah herself.
——Rrrip!
Hannah tore the flyer to shreds and let out a hot breath.
***
Preparations for the World Expo had reached their final stretch. Artworks from the Empire’s painters arrived one after another, and the inside of the exhibition hall began to fill with Aran aesthetics.
I was inside, supervising, when.
“Max! Max!”
Outside the construction fence, someone was hopping up and down, calling my name.
“Max! Max!”
What is he, a frog?
“Max! Max! Maaaax!”
Ah, fuck, this bastard.
“Wax! Max!”
“……Bring him in.”
Reutern II shot over like an arrow and glued himself to my side.
“Max! It’s been ages!”
“Yes, Lord Reutern.”
“Can I look around inside?! I’m dying of curiosity here!”
I could tell him it was absolutely secret a hundred times, and by the next day he’d have blabbed it to the whole world.
I shook my head.
“No. You may not.”
“What, don’t be stingy.”
“Please enjoy the exterior only. Security reasons.”
Reutern pouted and lifted his gaze upward. He scanned the upper reaches of the Imperial Pavilion, still nothing but bare framework, then grumbled.
“But it’s not as tall as I expected? After all that big talk about building the tallest thing on the continent.”
“You may look forward to opening day. For now, we are hiding our power.”
A national pavilion hiding its power. A power-hiding pavilion.
“What, how anticlimactic.”
Reutern shrugged, his interest apparently already cooled.
“Anyway, listen, I brought a whole crowd of palace nobles this time. Dozens of them. We’re going to play around here until opening day!”
Every single word out of his mouth was noise I didn’t want to hear.
“And you know, Max, I saw how you decorated your house! It was really something. The color photographs the Imperial Guard fellows took, I mean. The palace was in a complete uproar!”
Reutern’s eyes sparkled like a child’s.
“Yes, is that so.”
“I’d love to have my own annex done up like that too…….”
He trailed off, sneaking glances at me.
“I will send you the architect who built my residence, later.”
“Thank you! That’s my Max! Well then, I’m off to see Prozen!”
As if he’d never cared about the Expo in the first place, Reutern pattered off into Prozen’s glittering downtown.
——Click. Clack.
Into the space he left behind came the sound of heels, somehow drawing my gaze.
It was Sonnet Kandel.
In her hands she carried a lavish bouquet of roses in many colors, and oddly enough, in the spot facing me directly, a blue rose had been set.
“How pleasant to see you in a foreign land, Knight Maximilian.”
I let out a wry laugh, looking at that flower.
“It seems quite a few people from the Empire are coming.”
“Yes. The numbers will keep growing until opening day. Every relevant Minister will attend.”
Sonnet added, her eyes indifferent.
“The Bertems, the Grossmans, the Runsellots, they are all preparing to come.”
Which meant every great house of the Empire would gather.
If a terror attack broke out, it would be a disaster.
“Her Highness Imperial Princess Justine will come as well. And…… His Majesty, too.”
“…….”
My gaze wavered for a moment.
“His Majesty, in person?”
“Yes. He won’t show himself officially, but he will certainly be watching this stage. And if His Majesty comes, that means Sebestian comes too.”
Sebestian.
So, after all this time, I would see my father again.
Sonnet held out the bouquet and asked.
“Are you confident?”
I lifted my head and looked up at the sky.
“Yes. I am.”
An architecture of light.
From my memories before the Regression, I knew the faces of the people who had stood beneath that sanctuary.
Everyone wore the same expression beneath the pillars of light.
Ideology stripped away, class erased, nothing left but the disarmed face of a human being craning their neck to look up at the sky.
Before such beauty, human beings do not know how to resist.
Ages may change, but the heart beats in the same place, so the art that worked before my Regression will work now, without fail.
And now, when no one has yet seen it, it will strike all the deeper.
“To His Majesty the Emperor, to everyone who gathers there.”
And to my father.
To you, who know nothing of architecture, nothing of literature, nothing of art, nothing of music, nothing of love, nothing of sorrow, nothing of joy.
“I suppose I ought to give you all a day you will never forget.”
Across my lips, a smile I hadn’t intended began to spread.
~~~
Join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/cdZPxPVrXW