When work ended, Seiichirou had pestered Norbert to hurry, and they were currently inside the medicine shop. It was a tiny store filled with the unique smell of medicinal herbs.
Seiichirou had really wanted to buy more, but he didn’t have enough money on hand, so he just bought as many bottles as he could. Each one was sixty rula, or 1,500 yen, which was a decent price, but with how effective the tonic was, it was a steal. Seiichirou handed the money over with a grin. As long as the bottle remained sealed, the tonic could last for a year in a cool, dark place.
“You’re from the royal palace, aren’t you? I appreciate you fetching these for the Royal Orders.”
The thirtysomething-year-old man who appeared to be the apothecary seemed to have jumped to that conclusion after seeing Seiichirou and Norbert arrive in their official uniforms, without stopping to consider that one person would buy ten bottles for themselves. Seiichirou didn’t particularly feel the need to correct him, so he didn’t deny it.
Ding, ding.
Having finished his errand, Seiichirou had just been about to turn around and head home when the sound of a bell rang out, and the door to the medicine shop opened.
He saw a black-clothed man—Aresh, commander of the Third Royal Order—and another man in similar clothes with light blue hair enter the store.
“Whoa! Commander Indolark and Vice Commander Rhoda!”
The usually frivolous Norbert immediately stood ramrod straight. Following his example, Seiichirou took a step back and straightened his posture as well.
“…Huh? Well, what do we have here? It’s the Funnel Department! What are you doing in a place like this?”
The man who spotted them was not Aresh, but the blue-haired man in his thirties or thereabouts who had been called Vice Commander Rhoda. He must have been a part of the Third Royal Order as well, but he had few prominent muscles to speak of. His eyes drooped downward slightly at the outer corners, and there was a noticeable mole under one of them, almost like a teardrop. He was a fairly handsome man.
Correction: The man beside him was so beautiful that Vice Commander Rhoda only appeared to be “fairly” handsome. He was certainly attractive enough on his own.
“Well, uh, I’m just showing Sei…just showing the new hire around town,” Norbert answered nervously.
“Oh!” the man with the mole said, clapping his hands together. “Is this guy the Holy Maiden’s tagalong?”
It seemed the news had reached as far as the vice commander of the Third Royal Order.
“Hmm…,” he continued. “Even though you’re from a different world, there’s nothing special about you. You’re just an average guy.”
If anything, Seiichirou’s looks—the shadows under his eyes, the listlessness to his gaze—made Rhoda think that this other world was worse off than he had originally imagined. But from Norbert’s perspective, even with his worn-down appearance, Seiichirou was looking a lot better than he had before.
“Say, Aresh, you’ve met the Holy Maiden, right? How’d she look? Was she as haggard as this guy?”
“No, she seemed normal. If anything, I’d say she looks like the daughter of some wealthy aristocrat.”
Then who the heck is this guy…? the vice commander thought.
Orjef Rhoda tilted his head, wondering if this otherworlder was the sort of manservant they had all imagined him to be, but Seiichirou, totally unaware of that, was still fixated on the phrase Funnel Department.
Funnel did not particularly give off a good impression. Plus, the Accounting Department handled money. So then, was someone “funneling” the royal palace’s money somewhere else…? That couldn’t be—the offender would have certainly gotten arrested, and it would have been the end of that. Something wasn’t making sense about that nickname being thrown around so openly. Seiichirou resolved to ask Norbert about it once they parted ways with them, but the second he walked past Aresh on the way out, the man muttered a bombshell so quietly only Seiichirou could hear.
“You… The prime minister has his eye on you.”
“!!”
Seiichirou instinctively looked back, but Aresh was ordering something from the medicine shop, not paying him any attention.
“Sei? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing…”
Seiichirou shook his head. They bowed toward the two knights and left the store.
Well, it does make sense…
The commander had overheard his conversation with the Holy Maiden—with Yua—and the knights outside the room might have heard it as well. If they had, the kingdom would probably consider Seiichirou a nuisance who was attempting to give the Holy Maiden unnecessary advice.
His words hadn’t gotten through to Yua, the one they had been intended for, but he couldn’t do anything about what had been done.
Right now, more than anything else, Seiichirou needed to focus on doing what he could.
That, of course, was his work.
“Norbert, there’s one other place I was going to stop by, so you can head home without me.”
“Huh? No way; I’m fine! I’ll go with you! Where are you going?”
Seiichirou had felt bad for keeping him out for so long, but Norbert, unsurprisingly, had insisted on accompanying him. Just who ordered Norbert to follow Seiichirou around?
“I think it’s going to be boring…”
Norbert dismissed this, so Seiichirou headed for the street vendors.
Σ Σ Σ
The next day, the Accounting Department was in a slight uproar.
“What?! You’re finished already?!”
“Yes. Please give me my next task.”
Just like the day before, Seiichirou looked unwell but was strangely animated. He had quickly finished sorting the documents and had checked the ones that had contained very detailed calculations.
With one hand on a mysterious tool, Seiichirou was truly in his element—he polished off the calculations with incredible speed. He could always do it mentally, but with an abacus, Seiichirou was a different beast entirely.
He was pleasantly strumming the custom-made abacus he had ordered from the young boy at the street market.
He was going to be dealing with a lot of tedious calculations, and his efficiency would suffer if he was just doing them in his head. He wanted to use a data analyzing software, but he knew that would be utterly impossible. At least with an abacus, he could still make decent progress with his work.
Not just that, but there were nutritional tonics that could erase his fatigue.
That’s right! No matter how much I work, I’ll never get tired!!
My body won’t get heavy! My stomach won’t hurt! I won’t feel nauseous! I won’t get migraines! My neck, shoulders, and back won’t go numb!
I can work as much as I want!!
What a wonderful world this is!
Seiichirou was truly ecstatic.
Helmut, overwhelmed by Seiichirou’s incredible speed, gave into Seiichirou’s insistence and assigned him more and more work.
The job of the Royal Accounting Department was to manage the treasury, allocate money to each department’s budget requests, and manage that money. Consequently, the Accounting Department received applications from various departments every day. Seiichirou and the others checked the detailed budgets, classified them, then presented them to Helmut, who would then stamp and store them.
That was how Seiichirou immediately noticed it.
“Isn’t this budget application strange?”
The first thing that struck Seiichirou as odd was that the amounts on the documents submitted were always clean, round numbers.
While they might have been justifiable on a draft budget, he wondered why they were being used on retroactive requests. Nevertheless, Seiichirou speculated that perhaps this kingdom simply didn’t have any consumption tax and carried on.
Then he noted the sheer volume of request forms that were being sent in and the disproportionately short working hours of the employees. Because this was an issue of work style in general, Seiichirou reflected and thought it wouldn’t make sense to compare this against the common practice of another world.
Finally, the applications were being sent excessively from one department in particular.
“These three requests from the Third Royal Order for ‘training expenses’ are exactly the same, but the amounts are all different. Moreover, they all exceed ten thousand rula.”
Seiichirou hadn’t seen the knights at work and had only glanced at the prices of weapons in town, so he couldn’t say for certain, but requesting over thirty thousand rula in the four days since Seiichirou had arrived here seemed excessive.
“Yes, they submit all their requests under ‘training expenses,’ so it’s fine if they all have different amounts,” Helmut said with a smile.
“…What?” Seiichirou asked, his temple twitching.
“The knights are very busy, you see, so they don’t have time to draw up such detailed request forms,” Helmut said, holding Seiichirou’s gaze as he gave his stamp of approval on each one.
Grab!
“Huh?”
Helmut widened his almond-shaped eyes slightly. Seiichirou had just wordlessly grabbed his dominant hand.
When Helmut quietly looked up, the young man who had been summoned just a few days before from another world was looking down at him with glazed eyes.
“Ko…Kondo?”
“…Please take them out.”
“What?”
Helmut hadn’t caught the words Seiichirou had muttered while still holding Helmut’s gaze. But when he asked Seiichirou to repeat himself, he saw the man suddenly widen his eyes.
“Please take out the total annual budget and the budget allocation documents from last year!!”
Seiichirou couldn’t believe his eyes.
He was shocked to hear his boss wonder out loud if they even had documents from last year. Then, when Seiichirou went to the cabinets he had been tidying up the past few days, turned them inside out, and found the documents, he started seeing red when he saw the actual contents and sloppy bookkeeping.
“What are these request amounts…? This is almost the entire budget… We were only barely able to afford it… And these requests… Entertainment expenses? Meal costs? Brothel fees? Why was this much money requested and approved for a watch…? Who was this watch for…?”
As Seiichirou sat buried under a mountain of documents, muttering, a strange dark aura radiated from him. The other Accounting Department employees stood frozen in the corner of the room, wondering if this otherworlder could use magic.
“But there’s nothing we can do about it, Sei,” Norbert called out in a cheerful voice.
He was either trying to break the tension, or he simply couldn’t pick up on Seiichirou’s palpable frustration.
“…What?”
Totally imperceptive to the menace in Seiichirou’s voice—Seiichirou, a man who was never disrespectful—Norbert continued.
“I mean, we’re called the Funnel Department. We just move things along—we categorize budget requests and send them down the line.”
The Funnel Department… Here, surrounded by papers, Seiichirou finally understood what the nickname from yesterday meant.
It’s not embezzlement… It means we’re just a conveyer belt!