In my previous life, I had never traveled abroad.
For that matter, I had hardly ever traveled within the country either.
While everyone else was going out to take pictures at O-star or making memories with someone, my memories were made in front of convenience-store cigarette displays, charcoal fires at barbecue restaurants, and countless stacks of delivery boxes.
‘It’s not like I never traveled at all.’
Still, when you were dating someone, you were bound to travel together.
‘I did go on one-night, two-day trips with my girlfriend. But then.’
After traveling a few times, I gradually came to dislike it.
‘They were all places she had already been.’
Not places I had been, but places my girlfriend had.
I didn’t know who she had gone with, but all the information I had painstakingly dug up online was a path someone else had already traveled.
‘She had traveled plenty before dating me, and even after we started dating, she often went on trips with her friends.’
Back then, I simply believed what she told me was true.
Even when she didn’t answer my calls late at night, I assumed she was sleeping. When she said she had gone to bed early at her lodging in Jeju Island, I thought she must have spent the day wandering around a lot.
‘I never imagined she would be having group sex at a pension with those “friends.”’
The truth was ugly.
I had thought that, even if it was a lie, she had simply been wandering around with female friends, laughing and stuffing themselves with food.
Perhaps I had wanted to believe that at the time.
But as the truth surfaced bit by bit, I ended up opening Pandora’s box.
The sorts of stories that only appeared on the internet had unfolded in reality.
—Still, can’t you overlook that kind of past? Anyone would think he was clean himselfㅡㅡ
That was the sort of comment people left online, but the deeper I dug, the more the stench rising from below made my head spin.
Her past had been—quite simply—spectacular.
She had even traveled abroad frequently and had casually let slip that she had gone to Australia on a working holiday during university.
When I asked to see some pictures from that time, most of them were photographs of scenery.
I only learned later, after we broke up, that some of those pictures could be found simply by searching for them online.
‘I turned my eyes away from the truth. The price was terrible.’
At the time, I had vaguely guessed the truth, yet I didn’t want to look directly at it.
I wanted to avoid bringing an uncomfortable truth to light and making us glare at each other.
That was when I realized:
‘Sometimes, closing your eyes to the truth makes life easier.’
The truth was always right.
But even if that truth was right, whether it was ‘convenient for me’ was an entirely different matter.
At least in the end, I miraculously managed to escape just before sinking into the mire. Either way, I had gained one lesson from life.
‘The truth is easier to bear when you ignore it.’
If you buried the truth, there was a high chance it would ultimately lead to ruin, but at least in that moment, it would make things easier.
Baron Gilbert was the same.
He had to be.
‘I had prepared an entire repertoire after racking my brains over how I would answer if he asked, but he didn’t ask about it at all.’
Honestly, that was what I had worried about most.
What if I had prepared a fake product, only for him to say he wanted to see the real thing?
If I was trying to sell something that didn’t exist, what could I do if he said he wanted to confirm that it was alive?
Even if I presented the things Jake had used as his supposed keepsakes, no one would know whether Jake Gilbert was alive, dead, or reduced to a blood bag with his limbs cut off until they saw him in person.
So I had thought up all kinds of excuses.
If the baron tried to threaten me.
If I told him to enter the dungeon himself if he wanted to see Jake so badly.
If I presented the trophies—Jake’s belongings—that were being stored in the assistant instructors’ storeroom as keepsakes.
I had prepared for all of it, but Baron Gilbert merely listened to everything I said and made no attempt to confirm Jake’s fate.
That was when I realized it instinctively.
This bastard really doesn’t care whether his illegitimate son is alive or dead.
He really wants the bastard to die.
And yet, he’s troubled by the dungeon itself.
I had prepared a few things to create a certain image for his sake, but—
“It worked.”
It had worked perfectly.
“Secretary. These prisoners are groggy because they’ve taken our aphrodisiac and are feeling heated, right?”
“Precisely, Assistant Instructor.”
I examined the naked man and woman we had sent into the dungeon over there.
I didn’t recognize either of their faces, but they seemed faintly familiar, as if I had seen them a few times while wandering around Baron Gilbert’s domain.
‘I think I saw them a few times in the brothel.’
The woman wasn’t a prostitute I had slept with.
The man wasn’t an adventurer who had been in my party, either.
But I could tell exactly what sort of work the woman had done.
Judging from the discoloration of her nipples and the condition of her body, she had clearly been a woman who sold herself in a brothel.
‘Well, it’s not like I slept with dozens of prostitutes.’
Though I had visited the brothel a few times, after my fourth visit or so, I stopped choosing women myself.
Instead, the prostitutes chose me, and they took turns having me as a customer.
“Phew.”
My tension eased enough for me to think about something else for a moment.
My nerves, which had been stretched taut like a bowstring, suddenly went limp.
Was it like the feeling of losing an erection?
“The negotiations succeeded. We’ve opened the way.”
“Congratulations. But… can we really consider the negotiations a success based on this?”
“We’ve only reached the stage where we’re still wary of each other, but have taken one step closer.”
I slowly brought the hands we had kept apart together in front of me.
“Jake Gilbert is no longer important. No matter what methods we use, we can send them the aphrodisiac, and they can send us people somehow.”
“…”
“Still, we have to fulfill the terms of the deal, don’t we?”
I pointed toward the back of the restrained man in the prison room.
“As written, until we meet again in a week, we’ll fight as ‘enemies.’”
Words had been carved into the man’s back with a knife.
The crooked letters were written to resemble demonic script as much as possible, with the message consisting mainly of keywords.
To summarize it simply, we were to maintain the standoff.
And during that standoff, we were to have a very brief period of peace.
Only the people involved in the negotiations would know what would pass between them during that peaceful interval.
“How thorough. Is that baron more accustomed to this sort of scheming than I expected?”
“Pardon?”
“They tested the aphrodisiac themselves, then sent the very man and woman they had experimented on back to our side. Naked, no less.”
I pointed toward the dimensional portal leading to the lesser dungeon, still floating in the illusion beside me.
“The baron is standing beyond that.”
“…”
Beyond the dimensional portal, whose gray mist fluttered in the air, the baron was undoubtedly there.
“A naked man and woman, soaked in aphrodisiac, come through. Naturally, either other people were watching over them from behind, or they brought them all the way here and sent them in. The baron and his soldiers should be at the place where I negotiated by now, shouldn’t they? They’re probably closer to the baron’s personal troops than a dungeon-subjugation force, though.”
“…”
“This is just my guess, but they probably tested the aphrodisiac and put them inside almost immediately afterward.”
“That…”
“They’re probably watching our reaction from behind them right now. Seeing what we do.”
“Should we send scouts?”
“No. There’s no need. We don’t need to go out, either. What they want isn’t to renegotiate immediately.”
The baron wanted to meet again in a week.
There was no need to rush out and encounter him right away.
“Interesting. I have no desire to play hard to get with another man, but playing hard to get with someone I consider a business partner is something I welcome.”
“…”
“He doesn’t want to give up either side? He’s greedy. Well, he must have some greed in him to occupy the position of baron and hold on to it.”
I put myself in the other person’s shoes.
“The baron judged this to be the best choice available to him. If that’s the case, why does the baron want things to proceed this way…?”
I tried to infer his choice from the perspective of Baron Gilbert, rather than the demon Azazel Dandelion.
“As long as he’s the lord of the land, he has no choice but to care about the opinions of his administrators, citizens, and adventurers. But he can’t negotiate by paying a million gold. So let’s continue pretending to suppress the dungeon.”
“Wouldn’t that mean declaring hostility toward us…?”
“No. The opposite.”
A two-track approach.
Feigning hostility while pursuing peace.
“His true desire is to become a good trading partner, but he can’t ignore the eyes of the world.”
Normally, it meant speaking of peace in front while preparing for war behind the scenes, but the current situation was the reverse.
“From now on, we’ll pretend to fight with our swords pointed at each other. To outsiders, it’ll look as though we’re snarling at each other while blood pours from our bodies. But beneath their feet, we’ll be trading by kicking aphrodisiacs and people back and forth.”
“…People will only see the upper half. No one will easily anticipate that even as we continue killing and being killed, a trade in aphrodisiacs will be taking place beneath it all.”
“Exactly.”
I wasn’t sure whether the comparison was accurate, but it resembled modern international relations.
Like how the United States and China maintained an economic partnership while keeping each other in check.
‘Given the historical setting, it would be more like the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War than the United States and China.’
Demons and humanity.
If we were caught, we’d be screwed, but if we weren’t, there was no problem.
“…I’m not getting too far ahead of myself, am I?”
If I were the baron, wouldn’t I try to do this?
That was my thought, not the baron’s.
‘What if it turns out he hasn’t thought about anything at all?’
I had considered that possibility, but perhaps all the baron had wanted was to send someone over and confirm something, and nothing more.
“……If that’s the case, I’ll have no choice but to make it so.”
Just as the baron was trying to arrange the game in his favor, I would simply lead it in a direction favorable to me.
‘We’ll turn ourselves into America, and Baron Gilbert’s domain into the Soviet Union.’
After the Cold War.
As for who won…
And there was one more thing.
Why hadn’t Baron Gilbert asked anything about ‘her’?
Eris Albatea.
Why hadn’t he asked, despite knowing that the daughter of Count Albatea had been taken prisoner?
Was he afraid that bringing it up would cause harm to the House of Count Albatea as well?
Or was it because, just like with Jake, it would benefit him if Eris were ‘dead’?
……
“Secretary.”
“Yes, Assistant Instructor.”
“We’ll maintain the status quo. I suggest that we treat those entering the dungeon as we have before, but prioritize incapacitating them and taking them prisoner.”
Capturing those who entered the dungeon wasn’t the role of the assistant instructors’ corps, but with the right explanation, I could adjust things according to our—my—policy.
“First, we capture them, then separate those who should die from those who shouldn’t. We’ve already sent several back alive, after all…”
I made a slight slicing motion across my abdomen with my hand.
“We can put the aphrodisiac inside their bodies and send them back.”
I had seen cases on the news where people hid drugs—aphrodisiacs, in this case—inside a person’s body and sent them over.
Wouldn’t that work?
“……Pardon?”
Lilith opened her mouth with a dumbfounded look on her face.
“Um, where exactly…?”
“Cut open their stomachs and put the aphrodisiac inside. They’ll take it out themselves.”
“…Assistant Instructor?”
“What?”
“Um, forgive me for asking.”
I wondered why she was asking despite knowing it was an impertinent question.
“Are you, in fact, human?”
“That’s an impertinent question.”
A hollow laugh escaped me at Lilith’s nonsensical remark.
“If I’m not human, then who is?”
I was merely an ordinary human with a little modern knowledge.