“So, in short, you drove him off by being very good with your tongue.”
That was Noel’s immediate assessment after I told them the story of how I had repelled Hephaes.
Mina gave Noel a wicked smile and said,
“Wordplay is the true charm of contracts.”
“People also call that fraud, you know. Still, I assume you have no intention of committing fraud against the royal palace, so I think it would be best to begin delivering the goods soon. If you want to smoothly receive your reward for winning the duel against Prince Gilford, it would be better to show them some trust.”
Coldly speaking, the only thing the royal palace could take issue with on our side was the delivery of the golems.
Once we finished delivering them, it would become difficult for them to meddle with us.
“The royal palace didn’t pay a single coin for development, yet they sure have a lot to say.”
At Erica’s indifferent remark, Noel looked slightly troubled, but she did not refute it.
Now that I thought about it, maybe they had planned to let us run on passion alone and then quietly take the finished product once it appeared.
“As expected, we should just flatten them.”
“If you do that, Professor Reina will come running right away.”
“Then we should flatten them in secret.”
Perhaps because she had experienced Reina’s grip strength this time, Mina backed down a little.
It was more of a joke than something serious, but Noel quietly said,
“I understand how you feel, but please restrain yourselves. It is not as though everyone in the royal family is wicked, and there are many people in the palace who support you, Lord Aizen.”
“I don’t really know much about that. I have a lot of people on my side?”
“Did you feel anything while speaking with a member of the Abatus family this time?”
Something I felt while talking with Hephaes.
“Just looking at his appearance, he had the kind of looks that made it easy for people to like him, but when you actually saw him, he had this strange air that made you not want to get close.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s about all I can say for sure… If I speak only about what I felt here, he pretended to be polite but was rude, and seemed humble but was greedy?”
At my words, Noel’s and Erica’s eyebrows rose slightly.
Then, soon after, they smiled bitterly and said,
“So at first, you were trying to put it in a reasonably favorable way.”
“We only talked business, so I don’t know what kind of guy he really is. I should be careful.”
Noel looked at me for a moment, then smiled faintly, but clearly and brightly.
“You really are strange, Lord Aizen.”
She had the face of someone saying, Very well done~
Then she made her expression serious again and said,
“The magic of the House of Count Abatus is magic of life. Perhaps because of that, I’ve heard they run many businesses and extend their reach into fields like healing and beauty, earning enormous income through them. On the surface, that is.”
So there was more behind the scenes.
Judging by Noel’s uneasy expression, it didn’t seem to be anything clean.
“It’s better not to know what’s behind it.”
In Mina’s case, she seemed to know for certain, and she spoke with an expression that said she didn’t even want it brought out into the open.
A few things immediately came to mind, but I figured it would be better for everyone’s ears if I said nothing.
“And whether it’s due to the effects of their magic or simply their nature from birth, they’ve long been famous for continuously producing handsome men and beautiful women. They even say they don’t age easily. Perhaps because of that, from olden times, many members of the Vespia royal family have taken people from that family as their spouses.”
They called it life magic, and it seemed to have effects related to youth.
The fact that they were a family favored by the royal family because they were beautiful was no ordinary matter.
“It’s no different for other families. There are probably some among the bloodlines or ancestors of the Duchy of Nexia and the Phoenix Margrave’s family too.”
So they were a family preferred not only by the royal family, but also by high-ranking nobles.
I had thought the high nobles were unusually good-looking on average, and it seemed that was because many of them had Abatus blood mixed in.
Since this was a society with a class system, I supposed that by the time you were a high-ranking noble, your marriage partners would often be limited to other high-ranking nobles.
And among them, if there was a family particularly outstanding in appearance, enough that people everywhere welcomed them as spouses…
“If you use them as the standard, aren’t the kingdom’s high nobles all basically cousins?”
When I asked that, thinking that if there were so many handsome men and beautiful women that they formed blood ties here and there, Noel seemed unable to deny it. She simply closed her mouth and nodded quietly.
Of course, the Abatus family probably wasn’t some household with hundreds of children, so it wasn’t as if every family had an Abatus member in it. But it wasn’t hard to imagine that a family frequently marrying into high-ranking noble houses would be entangled in all sorts of interests.
“As expected, looks are a cheat key.”
“I don’t know what a cheat key is, but beautiful appearances, the etiquette learned as an old prestigious house, and even the family’s funds. There is a reason their power has grown so strong that it’s hard to believe they are only a count’s family. Some say they remained counts simply because, being court nobles, they never had the chance to distinguish themselves in battle and rise further. There are also rumors that they did it deliberately to avoid paying more taxes.”
And perhaps they simply felt no need to climb any higher.
A count was already a title that would have you treated as a distinguished guest anywhere, and if a family in that position had its hands in all sorts of places, they might well wonder, Why bother?
Honestly, the explanation that they didn’t want to pay more taxes sounded plausible too.
“…Abatus, the people merchants.”
“Hm?”
“That’s what merchants call the House of Abatus when they’re insulting them.”
Mina did not explain further.
Noel quietly looked at me and said,
“In any case, they are a family with tremendous power and influence, but on the other hand, they also have many enemies. There are many people in the palace who dislike Count Abatus as well. I believe those people likely took measures so that you would not be pressured any further, Lord Aizen.”
“If you think about it, Hephaes Abatus is merely a member of the count’s family, not the count himself, and he doesn’t even have a title. Yet they managed to force him in as the palace’s representative.”
Erica said that the truly absurd part was that Hephaes, who had no title to begin with, had come as their so-called representative.
“Normally, in order to be qualified as a representative of the royal palace, one must be at least a viscount.”
“So someone who isn’t even at that level could still come swaggering in as a representative.”
Is this country all right?
On the other hand, I understood what Noel meant.
It meant their power was so great that even a mere member of the family with no title could boldly come as a representative.
It was only natural that many people hated them.
‘At that level, if I’d handed over the blueprints, they would have intercepted them midway, wouldn’t they?’
The way he had tried to coax me into becoming a member of his family back then, and the way he had told me to hand over the blueprints when I said I would.
It seemed that choosing to hand them over through another route because I didn’t like him had been the right answer after all.
“This is why politics gives me a headache.”
Honestly, I was no longer interested in the debate between Noel, who said the royal palace had wanted to help but couldn’t because Count Abatus’s hands and feet interfered, Erica, who said it wasn’t so bad since they were at least conducting other political negotiations behind the scenes, and Mina, who said that didn’t change the fact that they hadn’t paid a single coin.
I would just avoid getting any more involved with them and do something more important.
“…so if necessary, the chancellor could have come and applied pressure, so this much should be…”
“Uh, Aizen, what are you doing?”
“The next-generation machine.”
Cyclops was Cyclops, but the truly important part of the contract between Mina and me lay elsewhere.
Namely, that Mina would support me when I developed the next machine too.
Mina and Noel, who had been deep in their debate, immediately became interested and started looking at the sketch I was drawing.
“Oh, this is… different from Cyclops?”
“Of course it has to be different from Cyclops.”
As I answered Noel, Mina picked up the sketch.
She scrutinized the various phrases I had written down, seemed to implement them in her head, then passed it to Noel, and Noel and Erica looked at the sketch together.
“Don’t tell me this…”
“I came to a conclusion after fighting that one-eyed giant last time.”
Tapping the sketch, I said coldly,
“Cyclops alone definitely isn’t enough.”
Cyclops itself was a sufficiently powerful weapon, but even so, its shortcomings had become visible.
Because I had focused on productivity, versatility, and operability, it was a good machine, but at the same time, that also meant it had no outstanding specialty.
When fighting large monsters with almost no difference in size class, there would inevitably be areas where it was pushed back.
“Big monsters can ignore the machine gun to some extent and charge in, and they’re tough, so it turns into close combat.”
And with monsters that huge, every part of them was practically a weapon.
In simple strength, they matched Cyclops, or in some cases possessed strength that exceeded its output.
Some even had the intelligence to judge the machine gun as dangerous.
Once the battle began in earnest, the enemy started by knocking away the machine gun, so I couldn’t just assume monsters were all stupid and fight carelessly.
‘And even with the machine gun, I have to empty almost an entire magazine to bring one down.’
I had finished off the one-eyed giant with gunfire at the end, but that had only worked because I poured every shot into it while it was already dying. If it was still in good condition, there was a high chance it would endure the hits and force close combat.
In conclusion, if it turned into close combat against a large monster, Cyclops could not guarantee superiority.
The fight with the one-eyed giant had been an excellent case study that taught me Cyclops’s limits precisely.
“Couldn’t you just overwhelm them with numbers?”
“If two units fight and create a situation where one gets damaged, I thought it would be better for two units to fight and both come out unharmed.”
I answered Erica’s question with exactly what I had thought.
If two units faced one, they would eventually bring down the large monster. But if one of them was destroyed while engaging in comparatively disadvantageous close combat and only one remained, that still didn’t seem profitable.
So if we assumed close combat would occur almost inevitably and prepared for it…
“It would be right to respond with a close-combat model.”
While thinking of the best I could do at the current level,
I pointed to the sword sketch I had drawn on one side and said it.