Guild Master Kinap of the magicians’ guild snapped back to himself with a start.
“What—what have I been doing?” He looked around, to see other key members of the guild staff with the same expression.
They all had one glaring thing in common: they were informers for the progenitor vampire Tehneshia, making them not exactly comrades, but definitely coconspirators.
“Master Kinap, whatever is the meaning of this?”
“I can’t remember—I can’t remember what we were doing. How we got here.”
“Calm yourself, everyone. We’re in my home.” Kinap suffered from the same ailment as the others. He couldn’t remember almost anything from the last few days. However, he also hadn’t lost sight of what they needed to be doing. “Hold our intent firm in your mind, everyone. You know what we need to do.”
“What we need to do . . . yes! Yes, there is something!”
“We can’t sit around here talking! We must act!”
“Hold! Do not panic! All we be for naught if we rush into this thing!”
“Everyone! Gather the required proof and then send it via your most trusted messengers,” Kinap directed. “Do not use anyone directly in the service of either prince! They might destroy the evidence!”
“Well said. They might be opposed at the moment, but there’s nothing to say they won’t work together to conceal black spots on the name of Heartner.”
“Then we take it to the envoys from the other ducal domains?”
“That seems the only way! Now, everyone, to work!”
Kinap and his colleagues returned to each of their respective homes and gathered up all the evidence they could find of every crime and underhanded deed ever perpetrated in the domain. They then brought it all to the embassies from the other ducal domains. They were obeying a simple order, burned hard into the backs of their brains.
“Confess your evils and bring them into the light of the world.”
It was later revealed that the cause of the incident that literally caused Duke Heartner’s castle to tilt over and incapacitated Baron Ikks had been a collapse in the subterranean crypt beneath the castle, a place sealed by one of the heroes long ago.
Indeed, it had existed and remained intact for more than 100 thousand years, far longer than the castle above it, raising some concerns about why it would suddenly collapse. One body was recovered from the rubble—one Kanata Kaito—so the blame for the incident was placed upon him.
He had been robbing merchants across the domain, killing a significant number of people with high-level fire magic. The violent and reckless nature of his actions had led many to assume he was a follower of a Demon or Devil God. They assumed he had therefore been planning to revive the Demon King and somehow managed to break the hero’s seal. However, perhaps due to a falling out with unknown companions or some accident when breaking the seal, he then passed away.
When the current duke learned of all this, his mental state instantly deteriorated further. Up until that point, at least he was conscious every few days. Now he just moaned and did little else. He wasn’t going to make it past the coming spring.
That wasn’t all. Key figures from the magicians’ guild who had shown strong support for Prince Belton, including Guild Master Kinap himself, had visited envoys from other domains and started to confess all the crimes they had personally committed, both large and small. To make matters worse, they provided proof that they themselves were agents of a progenitor vampire.
This news hit the top echelons of Olbaum hard. The majority of officials had believed, in the end, that Prince Belton would be the one to take over as duke. Now it turned out some of his staunchest supporters were traitors to mankind. The evidence readily provided by Kinap and the others also proved that none other than the comatose Baron Ikks had been in league with the vampires.
Prince Belton swore that he hadn’t known this, and there was no evidence that the prince himself was a sympathizer. However, this incident shook the trust placed in Price Belton, not just among the nobles of the Heartner Domain, but also across the kingdom. It looked as if Belton couldn’t keep his house in order.
It was also discovered that someone had broken into the treasure vault and stolen a number of treasures. When compared to the size of these other incidents, however, the response was tepid, and the incident hardly investigated.
There were also numerous reports of people seeing a massive bird flying around at night, but those were written off as dreams induced by the stupor of drink.
Alda, God of Law and Life, had a multitude of problems. One of the bigger ones, perhaps, was the fact that Vandal—who everyone had presumed would stay in the south of the Vangaia Continent for at least a few more years—had crossed the mountains and appeared in the east. However, rather than any large-scale plotting, he seemed to simply be spreading the word of Vida, one small village at a time.
“Lord Alda, what do you think he is doing?” inquired Curatos, god of records. “I can’t believe he truly plans to become an adventurer.”
“I have no idea. Maybe attempting to create a base of operations in the Olbaum Electorate Kingdom?”
Worshippers served as the information network for Alda and the other gods. There was no way for the gods to learn anything that their followers didn’t know. They would have sent more divine messengers to gather better information, but many of the gods had lost their strength in the fighting with the Demon King and Vida and had yet to recover. Alda had his hands pretty full simply keeping the world running. They had a growing new generation of gods, such as Sleep Goddess Mirl, but they lacked the numbers they needed.