The Scoundrel Prince Sold Out the Empire - Chapter 40

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

Episode 40: His Return (3)
Reyanna’s brash smile grated against Zion’s nerves.
She’d assassinate him with everything she had—that much was certain.
No matter how many times he turned it over, that was what it meant.
Zion pushed himself up from the bed and looked at Winter.
The adjutant with the ledger seemed quite pleased with his own decision.
“Employment is…… on hold.”
She had to be sent away. By any means, any excuse.
No matter how valuable a subordinate or ally she was, he had no hobby of paying a salary to an assassin and keeping her at his bedside.
But Winter seemed absolutely unwilling to accept this.
“On hold? What aspect fell short, Your Highness?”
Winter snapped the ledger shut.
“If it’s skill, she has skill. If it’s manners, she has manners. If it’s salary, we can pay! You won’t find merchandise this fine anywhere in the Empire. Just hire her already.”
“……This prince doesn’t keep just anyone at his side. Trust is necessary.”
“Well said, Your Highness!”
The hearty reply came from the person in question.
“Therefore, I’ve prepared a token of trust on my way here! Please wait just a moment!”
Reyanna strode out of the room, then returned dragging something behind her.
A bound man.
A gag in his mouth, rope around his body.
He was trussed so expertly that his squirming form looked exactly like a cocoon.
“He’s been watching this room from the rooftop across from the hotel for three days now. I saw him again today, so I brought him in while I was at it.”
‘Brought him in? A person?’
As the gag came loose, the man thrashed about.
“No, it’s a misunderstanding! I simply have a hobby of observing birds…….”
“Is that so. How fortunate.”
Reyanna dumped the contents from the man’s pockets onto the table with a clatter.
One cylindrical monocular telescope, a notebook the size of a palm, two wax-sealed letters.
The monocular had Mana Engravings densely packed into it.
A magical observation device that could read lip movements from a hundred paces away.
“You certainly observe birds in great detail!”
“…….”
This time Winter unfolded the papers taken from the man’s possession.
Numbers and symbols covered every inch.
Times of entry and exit at the hotel, the carriage Zion used frequently, movement patterns of Winter and Daien.
“Bird-watching? Your taste runs to large wingless birds that walk about, it seems. Quite refined.”
Winter grabbed the prisoner’s ashen hair and forced his face up.
The motion was clean, the cry brief.
“Please, have mercy…….”
“Mercy? Of what?”
Zion looked down at the man’s hair.
Ashen gray.
That meant Deber.
‘A spy, then.’
Likely working for the Ninth Prince.
The eyes watching over the Worthless Prince in the Imperial Capital had apparently followed him all the way to Seiael.
Zion waved his hand dismissively.
“Dispose of him as you see fit.”
“Yes! I shall handle it with utmost dedication!”
The man’s complexion turned deathly pale.
For someone with a passion for bird-watching, he was remarkably timid.
“Do you see, Your Highness? This is the state of security in Seiael these days. One cannot even take a walk without a bodyguard.”
Winter pressed forward as if he’d been waiting for this moment. Amusement colored his voice.
‘He’s delighted. Having placed a bomb in another man’s bedroom.’
“Moreover, her only requests are room and board and a modest salary. For this level of skill, that’s a bargain—no, an absolute steal.”
‘Well, she has her real profession to attend to anyway. Hmm.’
Now that he’d caught the Ninth Prince’s surveillance operative, there was no justification for turning her away.
What could he do.
‘If I refuse without reason, he’ll think something’s off.’
He’ll wonder if the Ninth Prince has caught on to something.
The moment the Liberation Army grows suspicious, the accumulated trust built by a nameless royal bloodline crumbles along with it.
The mere thought of such a development was horrifying.
“……Reyanna. I entrust you with the honor of protecting the Crown Prince. I’m counting on you.”
It was a surrender.
“I shall do my utmost in his service!”
Her ringing reply echoed in his ears with doubled meaning.
I shall do my utmost in handling this for you.
* * *
Days later, Zion stood at a construction site near the Governor’s Office.
It was a work site that had once been an execution ground and was now being expanded several times over.
Large excavation mages lifted earth in bulk, and Magical Binding Material hardened like stone as soon as it was poured.
If one had to name the thing that had become fastest in the world since Magical Engineering became commonplace, it would be construction, without question.
With one machine doing the work of a hundred men, scaffolds could spring up in the blink of an eye.
With each tremor of the earth, dull vibrations rolled up through the soles of his feet.
Ten machines had pushed through in ten days what hundreds of workers would have struggled with for a month.
“Quite the spectacle, isn’t it.”
Now, where was it again? In any case, somewhere far off in a desert nation, they said there were ancient ruins called pyramids.
Burial structures of royal blood, or so the stories went.
The execution ground rising before his eyes was fundamentally no different.
After all, it was destined to become the ground for a royal corpse—one that was dead, or soon would be.
‘The problem is that royal corpse is me.’
He strolled through the construction site with hands clasped behind his back.
Publicly, he was a worthless prince so delighted by the Crown Prince’s execution that he’d come to observe the preparations.
In truth, it was reconnaissance.
Thump, thump.
From the edges of the incomplete viewing stands came hollow sounds at regular intervals.
Below the platform, two drainage channels ran parallel.
From the Temporary Detention Facility to the north to the scaffold stood three iron gates.
Two alleys could serve as escape routes, and one was easy for troops to blockade.
From the Governor’s Office balcony where the nobility would sit, the entire plaza was visible, though the western bell tower obscured part of the view.
He committed to memory the entrance route, where the platform stood and faced, which line the soldiers would occupy—every detail.
‘Getting in will be easy enough. Getting out—that’s the real problem.’
Though the Third Prince’s objective was to capture the senior cadres of the Liberation Army.
Which meant he needed to systematically plan escape methods and evasion routes.
‘From here to there…… Hmm. Roughly three hundred paces to the troop line, I’d reckon.’
The distance to the platform, the blind spots from the nobility’s view, the back entrance where supplies came and went.
With each new line added to the diagram in his mind, another incantation of the magic he’d need that day grew in his memory.
‘I’ve gathered enough of the layout… but the real problem is where the actor should stand.’
Glancing back, he caught sight of his guard—Reyanna.
The moment their eyes met, she bowed respectfully.
It was rather like conducting reconnaissance with an assassin at his back.
‘Hmm? What’s that now.’
Through the roar of the excavation machine came the scrape of dragging chains.
From the north end of the plaza, Deber prisoners shackled at the ankles were being hauled out.
Some were barefoot, some had ribs exposed beneath torn prison garb, their bruised faces crusted with dried blood.
As they drew closer, the stench of stale sweat and rotting wounds overpowered the smell of Mana Oil.
“These are the condemned for today, then.”
Reyanna reported matter-of-factly.
But Zion suspected their true feelings aligned nonetheless.
‘Revolting.’
So he’d intervene.
“Reyanna. Bring me the one in charge of them.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
Moments later, she returned with a military captain.
“A subject of the Empire humbly meets one of the Divine Race! I am Captain Ethin!”
He let the name pass in one ear and out the other.
“Captain. What about them?”
“Dissidents scheduled for execution.”
Deber dissidents whose necks would fall before the Crown Prince’s in the coming execution. Most were those who’d conducted demonstrations for the Crown Prince’s release or actively played the dissident’s role—incorrigible lot, according to the captain’s explanation.
“I see.”
Zion swept his gaze across the Deber prisoners with quiet deliberation.
Matted hair unwashed and crusted, faces hollowed and earth-colored, clothes reduced to rags.
Blood and mud caked together, suppurating wounds and their unmistakable stench.
“This won’t do in the slightest.”
“Pardon? Ah, yes—the ones meant to be executed alongside the Crown Prince on the day of the ceremony, we’ve kept those looking more presentable. Ha ha ha, for atmosphere, you need the proper numbers, after all…….”
“We will decide otherwise.”
The captain’s words died mid-sentence.
“I beg your pardon……?”
“Execution is not granted. These wretches will see the Worthless Prince meet his end before they’re permitted to meet theirs. Do not presume to alter the sequence.”
“But—but sir, my superiors have ordered——”
“Your superiors? So there exists in this Deber someone standing above the Crown Prince himself? Do tell me the house and name of such an illustrious personage. My own name is Liobelt, for your reference.”
The captain’s face drained to ash in a heartbeat, and he cried out desperately.
“No, sir! I shall carry out your instructions precisely!”
“And another thing.”
Zion pinched his nose shut.
“The Crown Prince despises foul odors. See that these miserable wretches are scoured clean, even if you must douse them with water. What use is a festival of execution when we’ve stacked rags before it?”
The officer bolted from the room as though shot from a cannon.
Buckets arrived in quick succession at the stockade, and the prisoners were suddenly drenched in a torrent they could not fathom.
An elderly man with white hair in the corner of the stockade stood drenched, staring across at Zion in bewilderment.
His eyes spoke a question: Am I to die, or am I to live?
With his hearing enhanced by Mana, Zion caught the whispered words of a young prisoner beside the old man.
“……Grandfather. Are we being spared, then?”
“Who knows. But I’ve never heard of them washing a man before hanging him.”
A fragile something—almost relief—rippled through the drenched stockade.
‘Correct. You will not lose your lives this day. That much I promise you.’
By the time the execution ceremony arrived, these prisoners would be forgotten either way.
Winter would handle the extraction from the ledgers seamlessly enough, one by one. He’d need to arrange for their placement with the Liberation Army afterward as well.
‘Through Reyanna…… no. Abandon that notion.’
For the record, Reyanna stood at a distance, her teeth clenched so hard her jaw ached.
She burned to strike this Empire’s Worthless Prince across the face for forcing these wretched souls to witness their Crown Prince’s death to the very end.
‘Vice Commander. Why do you test me so?’
* * *
The old man walked leaning on a tattered umbrella rather than a cane.
Though no rain fell, no one regarded an umbrella-bearing elder with suspicion.
Such was the nature of the lower districts: a place where weary people gathered, too exhausted to care about anyone else’s affairs.
‘Conditions have deteriorated considerably in my absence.’
This was the Slum District. Which is to say, Seiael.
Aristh had returned to the royal capital after decades away.
His reason for coming? Naturally, preparation for the execution ceremony.
‘The opening move is already made.’
Reyanna had slipped safely into the shadow of the Ninth Prince.
She now possessed eyes and hands positioned closest to observe and, when the moment came, to end the Worthless Prince.
‘With eyes in place and hands in place, next comes the mouth.’
So tonight was the time to make the second move and secure that mouth.
“You’re late.”
A low, measured voice. They met in a room at an inn, where the soot-laden light from a stairwell lamp spilled through the darkness.
“Forgive me my rudeness in being tardy from our very first meeting.”
Aristh set down his umbrella and extended a weathered hand.
Toward Winter Flowering.
“Master Flowering.”
“Don’t call me master. I hold no credentials. And don’t treat me with false familiarity. Not when you’ve coerced me into this meeting.”
Winter’s reason for meeting Aristh here in secret.
Recently, the Liberation Army had forced his hand: either grant them an audience, or they would send a false letter of denunciation to the Prince.
Given that the Empire’s worst Worthless Prince would throw the realm into chaos over even an anonymous tip that Winter harbored dissent, it was a rather rational form of coercion—one that allowed them to summon their target without resort to physical force.
“Call me Winter, then, and be done with it.”
“I will as I please. But why summon me at all? You’re out day and night trying to resurrect your nation—so why torment an innocent Deber youth rather than the Empire itself?”
Aristh delivered a reply of stark simplicity.
“Because we require your assistance.”
“Assistance? You blackmail someone to seek help? Does the Liberation Forces lack such talent?”
Aristh removed his hat and revealed his face.
“This old man’s name is Aristh Leisyal.”
“……!”
For an instant, the gambler’s poker face cracked.
The last duke of House Leisyal.
A name spoken with reverence even among the Liberation Forces’ high command.
The bounty on his head alone reached three hundred million Ruon.
“Why would someone like you possibly want me……?”
“The answer is obvious enough.”
To gain two by the price of one move.
“Mr. Winter.”
A piercing gaze bore down upon him.
“Will you not lend your hand for the liberation of our homeland?”

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————