“Search for Prince Herscherik immediately!” Grim ordered his minions, staring at the charred annex in the distance. Watching his underlings hurry toward the building, Grim returned to his manor with a saddened expression and heavy steps.
When he reached his manor, his servants shared a look with each other. If something were to happen to the king’s beloved prince on Grim’s land, he would be held partially responsible, even if there was no negligence on his part. Considering that, the servants could understand why their master’s steps faltered. Then, they realized that their master losing status might lead to them losing their jobs in turn, and they let out a collective sigh of anxiety.
Grim trudged all the way to his office and closed the door behind him. The room was barely lit, but Grim wasn’t bothered by that. While the fire raging through the annex had been extinguished, half of the royal guards that had accompanied the prince were killed in the process. Even though the prince wasn’t included in the line of bodies retrieved from the wreckage, Grim was certain of the prince’s demise—which, in turn, signified that Grim had avoided his doom by a narrow margin.
“I did it...! I did it! Ahahahahahaha!” Grim laughed uproariously from the relief of being alone in his room. The count didn’t doubt that he had succeeded in assassinating the prince by hiring those thugs, saving his own skin in the process. The official story would be that robbers broke into the annex while the prince slept and set the building on fire after looting everything that wasn’t nailed down. The royal guards slept soundly, exhausted from their long journey, unable to save the prince as he burned to death. Drugging the royal guards was a nice touch. Grim didn’t expect the royal guards, the elite among knights, to simply do nothing while the prince died in the fire. While they’d invalidate his whole scheme if they managed to save the prince, it might have been too suspicious to have the entire travel party die in the fire without any resistance. So, Grim had drugged the guards’ meals just enough to make them believe they were merely tired. As expected, the guards mistook their drug-induced lethargy for exhaustion. This made them lackluster night watchers, allowing the thugs to easily deal with them.
His Excellency will deal with the king. Dealing with the nobles will be annoying... Well, the prince had no patrons. I can spin this however I please. Things would not have been so easy if Grim had been forced to eliminate the First Prince, whose mother was the princess of an allied nation, or any of the other princes whose mothers were all from powerful noble families. That being said, it was a serious matter that a person of royal blood, albeit a prince born of a peasant mother whose existence no one acknowledged, had died on his land, even accidentally. All the same, Grim was a member of the minister’s faction of nobles. Barbosse had made moves to gain leverage over the other nobles in case of situations like these. Grim only had to request the minister take steps to quell any commotion he expected the assassination to cause, just as he had done for the incident with his predecessor. While there were power struggles within their faction, Grim believed he could easily deal with any other aristocrats who attempted to improve their rank at his expense.
“How surprising that the prince’s butler was Shadow Fang...” Everyone in the underground knew that moniker, and Grim had learned of his existence through his occasional dealings with the underground guild but was never able to afford his services. Luckily, one of the thugs he had hired through the underground guild to manage the townsfolk knew about Shadow Fang’s career change. “I’m saved!” Grim thrust his fists into the air. He barely kept himself from toasting to his successful endeavor with the best liquor in his cabinet to maintain his cover while the search for the prince was being conducted.
Then, someone interrupted Grim’s celebration. “That’s good to hear.”
Grim froze at the sound of a childlike voice coming from a dark corner of the room. As if to thaw Grim’s frozen thought process, the lights came on in the office. In the corner, on the genuine leather sofa that Grim had specially ordered himself, sat the very prince he thought was dead. Herscherik smiled at the count, his legs leisurely crossed.
“H-H-H—”
“I hate to burst your bubble, but I’m still alive.”
“How!?” Grim finally squeezed out.
Herscherik only shrugged and looked up at Kuro standing beside him. “I have a very talented butler, as you well know.”
Kuro accepted the compliment with a smile and turned to Grim with a cold expression.
Upon being surrounded by the hired goons, Kuro had promptly taken them all out. He struck anyone who charged at him with a single blow to a vital organ or artery; the archers he slew with a single thrown dagger right between the eyes. Even the goons that had remained hidden were executed with a slit throat as Kuro silently appeared behind them. In a mere half a minute, Kuro was the only one standing in the woods.
After eliminating them all, Kuro made his way into the burning annex, kicking down the door to Herscherik’s room before picking up the prince, who was curled up in the corner under a blanket, and diving out of the third-story window and into the forest. According to Kuro himself, reaching the third floor of a burning building was much harder than fighting that pack of goons. No one saw Kuro leap from the window amidst the chaos of the fire. Herscherik, however, was forced to endure a roller coaster-like 90-degree drop, which led him to remain limp as a corpse in Kuro’s arms.
“15 was too easy,” Kuro said matter-of-factly. “Double them next time, and you might buy a full minute.” His implied threat was that there wouldn’t be a next time.
Hearing this, Grim began shaking as if a bucket of cold water had been dumped onto him in the dead of winter. He crumbled to the ground as he was struck with the realization that there was no way out for him. No one had ever escaped Shadow Fang.
“Now, Count Grim. It’s time for you to answer some questions. I guess you don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to... but then, I’ll just execute you right here and now for the attempted murder of royalty.” To the count, the prince’s smile seemed like the grin of a devil. “First off, why did you do this? I don’t remember any animosity between us when I arrived.”
When they had first arrived, Grim seemed all ready to charm Herscherik with a lavish welcome. At the end of the night however, he had committed arson and attempted assassination. Herscherik had to know what prompted such a sudden change of heart.
“Because... Your Highness had that pocket watch...” Grim feebly admitted, having given up on the ruse.