“But still, the situation is highly suspicious,” I concluded, “since we have no evidence to rule it out.”
At the end of all our conjecture, that was most true, and Nia nodded in agreement. For a moment, we were both silent, before Nia lifted her head.
“What we need to think about right now is not what sort of person Balthazar is, but what we’ll do if our hypothesis proves true or false.”
“I see. You’re right.”
She seemed to have come to terms with things, and I nodded back. The important thing at the moment was to figure out what we were going to do next. Of course, if things went down the way we thought, then things might end with us investigating Balthazar, but this wasn’t the time. It wasn’t something we should be thinking about right now.
“First of all, we need to figure out just how soon they’ll realize that their plans to sabotage our supply chain have failed. Then, we need to figure out what they’ll do about that, and in turn what we’ll do about them. Either that or decide if we’re going to strike them before that,” Nia began.
“We already know what we’re doing, though, don’t we?” I said. “We’ll figure out how much time we have until they learn what happened, and then how we’re going to use that time, right? I’m sure they aren’t going to just give up, after all.”
“Yes. Even if our hypothesis is wrong, I doubt they would give up on trying to take the territory back.”
“For now, we know that Gorthuk is definitely going to find out within the next few days, since he’s apparently near the border. After that, he would probably have to send word to Balthazar and ask for further orders, but...” I said before trailing off.
What was Balthazar going to do when he learned what happened? What was Gorthuk going to do, seeing as he probably knew how Balthazar might react?
“Hold on, is Gorthuk even going to be honest about what happened? From what I’ve heard about Balthazar, he sounds like he would flip his lid and get totally out of control if he learned that he’d failed.”
“Now that you mention it, that’s true. He would definitely shift the blame off of himself and give Gorthuk a tongue-lashing. And, unfortunately for Gorthuk, he wouldn’t be able to go against him, even if it was irrational.”
“And we know what someone crafty would do if that was the case. Most of them would try to gloss over their failure somehow. Which would mean that Gorthuk would be thinking...” I trailed off again, mulling it over.
I knew that Gorthuk was selfish, and that for a merchant to have a reputation, they had to be relatively intelligent. He wouldn’t outright lie and say it went well, since he’d definitely get found out later. If I had to guess, I thought he would probably report that things weren’t going as fast as they hoped in order to buy time, because it was clear that this ploy wasn’t the end of things.
“He’d have enough time for Balthazar to finish hiring mercenaries, probably,” I continued. “That would mean Gorthuk would use that extra time to hire more private troops and retry their scheme. Or, he could send no report at all before doing that. Whatever the case, the chance he tries again is high.”
“Which would mean that the timing of this attempt would change depending on how he decides to react. It unfortunately seems that everything depends on him,” Nia murmured, frowning slightly.
Cute. Wait, stop that, Ark!
It was true that if we waited on them, all we could do was just react. That meant that we would have to prepare ourselves for them to come at us at any time, which would necessitate patrols, which would just tire us out physically before doing the same mentally. It would obviously be the much better choice to just go at them on our terms. We’d gone through all the trouble of catching their spies, so it was looking like we might be able to take the initiative instead.
“Then why don’t we try to bait them with something again? They’re greedy, so they’d probably bite.”
“But we’ve already used such top-of-the-line bait with you, Lord Ark...”
I wasn’t going to complain about her calling me bait. I’d said “again” because I was thinking the same. Plus, calling me “top-of-the-line” was sort of a compliment, I suppose, and I’d taken on a similar role a number of times back in the Special Battalion anyway.
“If we were on the battlefield, they would’ve bitten at me being bait a couple of times, but...”
“That may have been because they weren’t able to share information so quickly out on the battlefield... No, wait. I think we might actually have even better bait than you.”
“Nia,” I said slowly. “This better not be you offering yourself up.”
Nia seemed to have had a brilliant idea, so I immediately put my foot down. She was probably just like me, ready to put herself in danger at once if it would help us, which was why I rushed to stop her.
But she shook her head at my reaction. “No, it’s all right. It still isn’t a good time for them to find out about me. I was just thinking that there was even better bait. The only problem is that we would need to ask for His Highness’s permission first...”
“Oh? Looks like things might get pretty large-scale here.”
“Yes. If all goes well, we might even be able to drive Balthazar to move his men sooner. We would need to prepare for that, so I could never do it purely on my own.”
I was relieved to see her talk like that, since it meant that her usual courage had returned. That was why I smiled at her.
“Then let’s hurry up and contact His Highness,” I suggested. “He might even get unreasonably angry with us for not telling him about something so interesting sooner.”
No, he wasn’t the sort of person to say anything unreasonable. He only got that weird with me. Which was fine.
Nia giggled at me. “Then we’ll need to send him a letter as soon as possible. My plan is...”
When I heard what she was thinking, my eyes widened. And then I was absolutely sure of one thing: His Highness would definitely go along with this.