Karma System.
At its foundation, it was a system where, by inserting restrictions that were detrimental to oneself, one obtained specialties that could be beneficial.
However, the Karma System was not limited only to character creation at the start of the game.
That was how Reuban explained it.
“Th-then what is it?”
“The Karma System can also be added according to your patterns of behavior during play.”
So that was how it worked.
As someone who had chosen otaku, low self-esteem, and commoner, I had no choice but to act passively in every situation. Because I was the one who had decided that.
Conversely, if you lived like an otaku, your self-esteem kept falling, and your status dropped miserably, then naturally you had no choice but to become an otaku, develop low self-esteem, and become a commoner.
It was only natural.
That the life you chose would change the life you lived from then on.
If you shut yourself in your room and played games all day, you had no choice but to live a pathetic life. I knew that better than anyone.
But if he was bringing this up at this point...
“By robbing the bank, wh-what are you trying to get? R-robber? Thief?”
Just what kind of karma could he possibly get by robbing a bank?
“Something better than that.”
Reuban glanced toward Ian again, then met my eyes.
“How much do you know about the Academy’s bank?”
I could confidently say I knew less than most people.
I’d never particularly needed enough money to try taking out a loan, nor had I ever stored a large sum of money in the bank. The most money I’d ever kept in a bank was only for a short time, when I received sponsorship.
I’d poured all of that money straight into customs, so now I didn’t have much left.
It really was fortunate that life at the Academy barely required living expenses.
When I didn’t answer, Reuban nodded to himself.
“Do you know who operates the Academy Bank?”
Wasn’t that too obvious a question?
“Th-the Academy w-would, right?”
Because that was common sense.
If the name of the bank was the Academy Bank, then of course the Academy would be the one operating it in the first place.
“The Academy Bank isn’t formally operated by the Academy. It’s a club activity created by students.”
Excuse me?
No, then everyone was storing money and even taking out loans from a private bank made by students?
And the Academy acknowledged that?
“The Academy guarantees the autonomy of students as much as possible. If you look hard enough, there’s probably even a gambling club. Anyway, that’s not the important part.”
What, there was a gambling club too? Did they have gacha?
Reuban snapped his fingers in front of my eyes.
“All currency is digitized anyway, you see? I’m not saying we should actually rob a bank and steal money. What we’re going to steal isn’t money, but the ledger.”
“The ledger?”
“Right. The ledger. Our goal is to steal the ledger containing the bank’s transaction records.”
A hologram rose from Reuban’s smartwatch.
“Basically, the Academy Bank operates by receiving sponsorship from various nobles and merchant families, lending that money to students, and then collecting interest.”
“Y-you know a lot about it.”
“There’s a route where you become a member of the bank too. If you go that way, you either get cut down while trying to make the bank independent from the nobles, or a war breaks out and sweeps you away.”
So the bad endings were all nothing but brutal.
Wait.
Then did that mean war breaking out was practically set in stone if we just stayed still?
No, Reuban had said it. A normal ending where the Empire was maintained, the allied nations remained, and he himself could survive definitely existed.
Maybe that meant that war only didn’t break out in the normal ending, or even if war did break out, no one died because of a smooth peace agreement.
“What are you thinking about?”
“N-nothing.”
Whether it was overthinking or the right answer.
Either way, I had no intention of asking Reuban. Even if I asked, he wouldn’t tell me anyway.
“S-so, by stealing the ledger, what k-kind of karma do we get?”
“I don’t have any reason to tell you that much, do I? In any case, you’re getting paid.”
No, my most fundamental question was something else.
This was reality, so would the Karma System honestly be applied the way Reuban thought just because we stole a ledger?
Not that it was my problem.
Reuban waved his hand through the air and dragged the hologram. The image of a person appeared.
“The person you could currently call the president of the Academy Bank is this guy. Darka Sinis.”
Darka Sinis.
I didn’t know the name Darka, but I had definitely heard the family name Sinis recently. So recently that it would be a problem if I didn’t remember it.
“He must know J-Joshua Otto.”
“Oh, what? You know about that kind of thing?”
“I’ve h-heard of it, at least.”
The Sinis County.
A family that had the Otto Viscounty as its vice-county, and in practice operated its county as the Otto Viscounty. At the same time, a family active on the southern front.
It was only natural that they were connected to Joshua Otto, whom I had met during the midterm exam.
“Well, it’s not bad that you know. Darka Sinis is a third-year, and among the Academy’s third-years, he’s probably the richest and has the tightest security.”
“Probably?”
“There are quite a lot of assassins who target graduates of the Imperial Academy.”
Did that mean I’d have to deal with things like assassins by the time I graduated too?
I didn’t like that.
“Th-then how do we rob the bank?”
“Since all currency and ledgers are stored in a database, the word bank doesn’t imply the concept of a building. The database containing that currency and those ledgers is the bank.”
Tap, tap.
Reuban tapped his smartwatch with one hand.
“We steal the smartwatch.”
“I’m in.”
“Yeah, good thinking. We could use the extra hands, hm?”
Huh?
Reuban and I slowly turned our heads.
Ian nodded while meeting Reuban’s gaze.
“I’m in.”
“Where, uh. From where did you hear?”
“Stealing the ledger.”
In other words, he’d heard almost everything except the parts he shouldn’t have.
I glanced to the side. Senior Aila was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, after finishing her conversation with Ian, she had stepped away to let us talk among ourselves.
Though she probably hadn’t expected us to talk about robbing a bank in the spot she had vacated.
“We’re stealing something, and you want to join?”
“I don’t know why that counts as stealing something. Its location is just changing.”
The moment I heard that, I covered my face with my palm.
This crazy master of thievery bastard.
“Anyway, I’m in. If we’re going to vaguely aim for prizes, it’s more comfortable to pull one big job and then wash our hands of it.”
Did he just definitely say a big job?
He definitely did.
“Uh, um, really?”
Reuban looked flustered, then dry-washed his face and fixed his expression.
Being caught was being caught, but in any case, more people helping was a good thing. Or else, now that he had been caught, he had no choice but to take him along.
That was that.
At first, I’d had absolutely no intention of getting involved in this kind of theft, but if Ian said he was joining, then the story changed a little. Because Ian seemed like he would be extremely serious about this sort of thing.
A thieving bastard who even stole the Imperial Family’s thruster probably wouldn’t hesitate to steal someone else’s smartwatch.
If I couldn’t stop him, then at least someone was needed to make him keep the minimum line.
To begin with, now that I had heard the story, there was no way to back out. That was the promise we had made.
“I-I’ll do it too.”
“You’re the one who said that this time, right? Not Ian?”
“Th-that’s right. But I have a question too.”
“What is it?”
“Do you have a p-plan?”
Of course he did. There was no way he would suggest stealing first without even having a plan.
Reuban nodded.
“I’ve got about three, but two of them are rejected.”
“Wh-what are they?”
“One is beating him up and taking it.”
Was he insane?
He was calling that a plan?
“Why not do it?”
Ian looked at Reuban with an indifferent expression.
“If you just smack him on the head once...”
“No, if we hit him hard enough to send him to the hospital, that would be a real big problem. Obviously, we can’t do that. It was a joke.”
“Just lightly...”
“I said we’re not doing it.”
Ian put on a slightly regretful expression, then nodded.
“Is he, uh. Is he always like that?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have it easy either.”
Reuban looked at Ian as if dumbfounded, then raised three fingers. And immediately folded one.
If he was going to explain it like that, shouldn’t he have had his hand up from the start?
“The second is infiltration. We sneak into Darka Sinis’s room at dawn and steal the smartwatch without anyone noticing.”
That sounded somewhat realistic.
“Less realistic than beating him up and taking it.”
Huh.
“Uh, why?”
Wasn’t it much better than beating him up and taking it?
When I voiced my question, Ian looked down at me with the expression of someone gazing at a truly foolish human being.
“Every cadet’s room is opened and closed by the Academy’s special devices. The windows are the same. It’s obvious that hacking is impossible, and if physical damage is inflicted, the safety device activates immediately.”
I felt like I had heard of a safe that worked like that.
A safe where, if someone tried to force open the safe door, the safety device inside the safe would instead activate, making it impossible to open by any method.
“It’s only natural. The Academy spends billions of credits to train a single elite pilot.”
I’d heard that training a fighter pilot alone required over seven hundred million, so training a Titan pilot would cost even more. Suddenly, I understood the safe-like issue.
Since cadets were the most expensive things in the Academy, of course they had to be put in safes.
“So, what’s the third?”
At Ian’s question, Reuban grabbed the hologram of Darka Sinis. When he slowly opened his clenched fist, what remained in his hand was only the hologram of a smartwatch.
“We steal it.”
No, so how are we stealing it?
This was so frustrating I could die.