The sun had set and night had fallen upon the royal capital. Seira and I had gone out to a pub on one of the capital’s main streets. The place was packed with workers like us who had gotten out of work for the day.
And one particular person inside the establishment was already three sheets to the wind.
“I knew we’d find you here,” I murmured.
“Mnuh...?”
When I called out, the blonde woman who had been face-planted on the table looked up. Her eyes were having trouble focusing. From the looks of things, she had already emptied quite a few mugs of alcohol and was absolutely sloshed. After a few moments, she finally realized we were the ones who had spoken to her.
“Oh hey, Sieg, Seira,” Spinoza muttered listlessly. “What are you guys doin’ here?”
“We figured you’d be at a pub—it’s been about a week since we’ve even seen you.”
She eyed us dubiously. “I ain’t in the Guard Corps anymore, y’know.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t hang out anymore,” I said. “You didn’t think we were just work buddies, did you?”
Spinoza’s eyes shot open wide in bewilderment for a split second before a smile surfaced on her face.
“Heh. You two are makin’ me one happy gal. Had no idea ya felt so strongly about me.”
“I’m here too, you know...” Fam murmured, suddenly appearing from behind me as if out of nowhere.
Spinoza instantly lurched backward. “Whoa, you scared the shit outta me!”
Fam chuckled softly. “I am Sieg’s shadow, after all. I’m always by his side,” she explained. “Quitting the guards changes nothing about that.”
True to her statement, not much had changed with Fam since she had been expelled from the Guard Corps. She had been evicted from the barracks, but she had never slept in her own room anyway. She had always slept in my room, either up in the ceiling area or under the bed, and had continued to do so. She would even sneak along behind us when we were out on patrol, despite no longer officially being a guard.
We seated ourselves at Spinoza’s table. Once our food had come, I said, “I still can’t believe you did that, though.”
“Did what?” she asked.
“Punched Leobolt in the face like that.”
“You lashed out at him because he went after Fam, didn’t you?” Seira said, continuing my train of thought. “You two are always fighting, but that made me realize you really do care about her. I think it’s absolutely wonderful that you’re so concerned about your comrades.”
“You got it all wrong, stupid,” Spinoza grunted in disgust. “Why would ya think I’d do anything for her sake? That’s dumb as hell.”
“But...”
“Leobolt rubbed me the wrong way from the first damn moment I set my eyes on him. That just gave me a good excuse to deck his ass.”
Seira let out a sudden giggle at that. “Oh, I see!”
“Hey... What the hell’re you laughin’ at, Seira?”
“Oh, nothing. Just thinking about how bad you are at admitting things to yourself,” she said, then put on a sunny smile. “I really like that about you, you know.”
“Hmph,” Spinoza grumbled, looking away uncomfortably.
“She’s blushing,” I pointed out.
“She is,” Fam agreed.
“Oh, shut up!” Spinoza snarled. “I ain’t kiddin’... I really did do it for myself.”
“Oh yeah?” I teased.
“That bullshit he spouted made somethin’ snap in me. There was no way I could just let that slide—so I decided to sock ’im good.”
“You mean what he said about Fam?”
“That too, but I was talking about somethin’ before that. He was sayin’ that the reason people can’t follow an honest path is ’cause of their own weakness.”
“Yeah.”
“‘Even if people can’t change the environment they were born into, they can change themselves’—says the privileged-ass noble. Freakin’ hilarious,” Spinoza snorted in annoyance. “People born into legitimately terrible environments only get to take the nasty paths in life—there ain’t no other options. Hell, they don’t even realize they’re doing anythin’ wrong, usually. They’re just out there in the wild without a compass.”
“Are you talking about back when you were a bandit?” I asked. Leobolt had mentioned back then that Spinoza had been a member of a bandit gang.
“Maybe, maybe not...” Spinoza murmured, sidestepping my question. “Either way, that bastard Leobolt’s been puttin’ way too much effort into diggin’ up people’s buried pasts. You just know he’s a major tryhard like that in the sack too.”
“I didn’t really want to have to think about that,” I muttered.
“The scariest thing about you, Spinoza, is your ability to say things like that with a straight face,” Fam added in disgust.
“Anyway, what are you going to do when you run out of survival funds?” I asked. “It’s not as though you have any savings—you’re already in perpetual debt to pretty much every place out there.”
“Eh. I’ll manage somehow.”
“Do you even have money to stay at an inn tonight?”
Spinoza didn’t look at us, nor did she respond.
“That sounds like a ‘no’ to me,” I sighed, smiling weakly. “Listen. Come back to us, Spinoza.”
“C’mon, you heard what Leobolt told me,” she groaned. “As long as he’s in charge, the guards don’t need hoodlums like me.”
“He did say something along those lines,” I admitted.
“The only types of people in the world are predators and prey. This time it was my turn to be the prey. So there ain’t no goin’ back for me,” Spinoza told us. “I could put up with guard work when Bolton was the boss, but like hell am I ever gonna take orders from Leobolt again.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” I said, nodding.
Then, a staff member walked by, and I decided to order a drink.
“Whoa, Sieg, you sure about that?”
“About what?”
“Didn’t Leobolt ban drinking for you guys?”
“Yeah, I guess he did,” I stated casually.
When the drink came out, I immediately took a sip, then posed a question to Spinoza. “You just said you’d never take orders from Leobolt again. That means you’d come back if he wasn’t commander, right?”
“Huh?” Spinoza’s eyes widened. “Hey, what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“I meant exactly what I said. If Leobolt stepped down, I bet you’d come back to the Guard Corps, wouldn’t you?” I repeated.
“You plannin’ on forcin’ him out, then?”
“We sure are.”
My response blew Spinoza’s mind. “Whoa, no way...”
Both she and Fam were ace members of the Guard Corps. Without them, our ability to deal damage was drastically reduced. Leobolt, however, had prioritized removing all elements of concern to him, at the cost of lowering the overall strength of our forces.
I had no doubt that Leobolt would continue to enact reforms. If we kept following his ideals, the entire Guard Corps would end up coming to a screeching halt. We needed to replace him as commander before our organization collapsed from the inside. That was the conclusion all of us had come to together.
“You realize how popular he is, right? He’s got those guard fanboys—and the townspeople treat him like some kinda hero,” Spinoza grumbled.
“All that’s starting to get a little shaky, though,” I informed her.
“Huh?”
“After you left, he kept on enacting new reforms. Apart from one group of devout loyalists, pretty much everyone else is getting fed up with him.”
After he had cleared out the people who had broken his rules, Leobolt had clamped down even harder. The guards were absolutely exhausted, both physically and mentally.
“They’re all afraid to speak up right now because they’re afraid someone will report them. That might change, though, if they had someone to take the lead.”
“On top of that, he’s already approached the council about raising taxes on the people to give the Guard Corps a bigger hiring budget, apparently,” Fam chimed in. “If we dress up that fact a little bit and leak the info to the citizens, they might start changing their opinion of him as well.”
“What, so we’re supposed to go around shoutin’ from the rooftops?” Spinoza asked.
“Of course not, silly. The people can disseminate the info perfectly fine without our help. If you add enough oil to a rumor, it’ll spread like a raging wildfire,” Fam responded.
“You scare the hell out of me sometimes,” Spinoza told her.
“Well, information warfare is my specialty,” Fam said with a tiny grin.
I turned back to Spinoza. “There was something you said to me earlier. You said that there are only predators and prey in the world—and since you had ended up as prey, you couldn’t come back.”
“Yeah,” Spinoza affirmed with a nod. “What of it?”
“I’m no predator, and I’m not prey either. I’m a protector. And I promise you this: as your squad sergeant, I’m going to protect your place with us,” I declared. “We need you, Spinoza.”
Spinoza stood there absolutely dumbstruck.
“We really miss you being around,” Seira agreed.
“I can concentrate better with a little bit of noise in the background,” Fam admitted.
Falling silent, Spinoza turned her head downward and remained that way for a while. When she finally looked up again, she turned to me.
“Hey, Sieg. Let’s arm wrestle.”
“Arm wrestle?”
“Yeah. If you win, we’ll do this your way.” She fixed her gaze on me in challenge.