Just one thing… How were we gonna book it out of here? Maybe a little prudence wasn’t such a bad idea after all. You create a lot of problems for yourself otherwise. All the bravado in the world wasn’t going to solve them, was it?
✦ ✦ ✦
So.
As anyone could imagine, punching a government minister in the face presented a number of issues.
“My brother, my brother,” muttered Kaido, a few security officers behind him. “What did you do this time?”
He was on duty today—not even he could get away with skipping shifts all the time. Kaijin had given him an invite, but he’d refused…only to come to the nightclub anyway thanks to his brother’s boorishness. Simply running would have been an easy enough plan for us, but chances were it’d be doomed from the start.
“Hmph! That fool!” As four knights dragged Kaijin away, he shouted and pointed a wild finger at the minister. “He practically spat in the face of Rimuru, my client and the best patron I’ve ever had! What’s so bad about putting him in his place a little, huh?!”
Vester, for his part, hadn’t overcome the shock yet. He was simply staring at us, blood still dribbling from his nose. It looked both pathetic and a little comical. Never saw it coming, I guess. The surprise probably kept it from even hurting.
“Brother,” Kaido whispered with a sigh, “you don’t put a government minister ‘in his place’ like that… Either way, you’re all coming with me!” He nodded to his men, then took me aside for a moment. “Just stay calm, all right? I promise we’ll treat you well.”
I wasn’t planning to do anything else, of course. Before I left, though, I sidled up to the manager of the place and tossed five gold pieces into her hand. “There’s some for your trouble in there, too!” I said to the surprised matron. “We’ll be back!”
It seemed like a decent place, after all. Wouldn’t be nice if I never got to see the inside of it again.
So went my second arrest here in the Dwarven Kingdom…but I’m forgetting someone.
Gobta! He wasn’t with us at the club. Instead, he was atoning for his sundry idiotic behavior by undergoing what I liked to call “bagworm hell.” I’d thought about hanging him by his feet at first, but that just seemed like cruelty for cruelty’s sake, so instead I’d tied him up with Sticky Thread and let him hang from the ceiling.
“Wait!” he’d whined. “This is so mean, sir! I want to come with you!”
I’d showed him no mercy this time. “Enough, you fool! I can’t take any more of your blockheaded behavior! If you don’t like it, summon your tempest wolf buddy and have him help you out!”
Not that he could do it, I figured as I shut the door behind me.
A goblin was one thing, but a hobgoblin could probably go without food or drink for about a week straight.
Still, if we were going to be held for a while, I’d have to break out and get him down sooner or later. For now, though, I filed it in the back of my mind.
Was I being mean to him, maybe? I thought I was, for a moment. But it was all right. He could deal.
✦ ✦ ✦
The five us of were taken to the royal palace. Not that we were under very heavy guard. If anything, it seemed entirely voluntary.
We wound up having to spend around two days in the castle jail room. It wasn’t so bad—the food looked decent, and we had all the comforts we needed in the place. It was less like a jail cell and more like an urban apartment shared by the five of us. We weren’t treated too terribly, either.
“I just had to lose my temper, and now I’ve got all of you in here with me… I’m so sorry, guys!” Kaijin apologized.
But none of his dwarven friends minded too much, either.
“It’s fine, Kaijin! No problem at all!”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it, boss!”
“……”
“Besides, once we’re released, we want to come with you, Kaijin!”
“Yeah, can we come with you, Rimuru?”
“……?”
I wasn’t observant enough to tell what the third one wanted from me, but I got the gist well enough.
“Hah! Sure, we’ll take care of all of you! You better be ready, though… Once we reach the village, you guys’re gonna work!”
“Got it!”
We were already talking about life outside the big house. As prison terms went, it was pretty chill.
✦ ✦ ✦
It was the night of our second day.
“By the way,” it occurred to me to ask, “why did that minister have it in so badly for you, Kaijin? Was there some reason for it?”
Kaijin’s expression immediately soured. With a sigh, he began to explain. It turned out he used to be a captain in the palace’s royal knight corps—a leader of one of the seven armies making up the whole system. Three corps were devoted to behind-the-scenes work like engineering, supply, and emergency aid. Three more—heavy strikers, magic strikers, and magic support—played more of a starring role. The last one, and the most important, was the king’s personal guard. Kaijin had been head of the engineering corps, and Vester had been his second-in-command.
“He was the son of a marquis,” the dwarf moaned. “A noble title he bought with money. I think he must’ve been jealous of a commoner like me taking the head role. It was complicated, you know? It must’ve been humiliating to him, taking orders from someone below him. And I’ll admit that I didn’t care much about what other people thought about me. I was too busy trying to stay on the king’s good side. That’s when it happened.”
✦ ✦ ✦
The “magic-armor affair.”
At the time, the engineering corps was seen as the lowest of the army’s seven departments—barely producing any new technology for itself. Vester believed a kingdom rich in technology should have an appropriately famous corps of engineers, while Kaijin was more of a status-quo man when it came to research and development. Despite how intense their arguments got, they never managed to reach an agreement during their countless garrison meetings.
Along the way, the corps launched a so-called magic-armor soldier project with a team of elf engineers. Vester was hell-bent on making this project a success and boosting the corps’s position in the military pecking order. Kaijin warned him that he was proceeding too quickly with it, but even then, Vester had little time for the advice of a common-born man.
In the end, thanks to Vester’s arbitrary whims, an experiment went awry and led to a spirit-magic core running out of control—a very public failure and a bad setback for the project at an early stage.
Thus, despite some of the greatest minds of the world working on it, the magic-armor project ground to a halt. As head of the engineering corps, Kaijin wound up taking the heat for it, resigning from his position in the army. Not only did Vester make Kaijin the scapegoat; he even convinced his friends among the higher-ranked leaders to give false testimony against him. That, according to Kaijin at least, was the truth.