The Saintess herself had joined the battle.
Realizing that the situation had turned against them in an instant, the spies immediately began searching for a way out.
But they had hardly any time to think.
‘From the looks of it, every guard in the trading company is coming this way.’
‘That guy we definitely brought down with poison earlier is running over here perfectly fine.’
The spies recalled the rumors spreading through the world.
That the Fifth Saintess of the Saras Order was an incompetent woman who had bought her position with money.
That, befitting the family of a ravenous ghost that had bought over a baronial house and slowly swallowed it whole, all she knew how to do was earn money and spend money.
That she had so little talent for magic that she had undergone baptism just so she could use divine arts.
Most of them were nothing but negative rumors.
Deep down, they might have thought she would make for an easier opponent precisely because such a Saintess was attached to this place.
But once they actually faced her, the spies had no choice but to completely revise their assessment.
‘If she can heal her allies this quickly, we have no chance of winning.’
The spies carried many magic tools with them, but there was a limit to their number, and most of them were focused on suppression—inflicting paralysis or poison.
Even so, every one of them was a high-quality magic tool. Even with a skilled healer present, they should have taken quite some time to deal with. Considering how long it had taken to get here, the men they had subdued should still have been receiving treatment for a good while, yet they were already getting up and charging over.
In a word, she was on a different level from common sense.
“Judging by your faces, I guess you believed only the part about the Fifth Saintess being incompetent.”
With a hint of bitterness in her voice, but with a proud and cold expression, Mina quietly folded her arms.
“You’d better not misunderstand. Money only makes possible what has potential. It doesn’t turn the impossible into the possible.”
Having said that, Mina formed a hand seal.
As she watched the guards running at the forefront grow stronger under her blessing, Mina quietly added,
“I became a Saintess because I have enough ability to be the Fifth Saintess.”
The Saintess, who had solidified her position amid the countless jeers and contempt carried by most of those rumors, opened her mouth.
And the spies, seeking a breakthrough, threw daggers toward Mina.
‘Even so, each of these guards is weak on their own. All we need is for that Saintess to be gone.’
What was powerful was the Saintess’s divine arts, not the guards themselves.
In fact, even while fighting hand-to-hand under her blessing, the spies were not being pushed back easily.
As the elite among the Empire’s elite entered the intelligence unit, their combat ability was incomparable to street swordsmen.
However, they had no time to fight at leisure, so they chose the simplest forced breakthrough: injure or kill Mina.
But then a rock suddenly rose up and protected Mina, causing the attempt to fail.
“You’re late.”
“Weren’t you the one who promised to come? If anything, I think I got here faster.”
A cold voice, though tinged with welcome because an enemy stood before them, overlapped with the irritating voice they had been hearing since earlier.
“Aizen Arclight…”
“You’re not even being polite anymore?”
The situation was turning even worse for the spies.
Aizen had arrived.
****
Once I realized they had changed their target, what I did was simple.
In a sense, I prevented what was practically a tradition: the theft of a new model.
If the Cyclops fell into the Empire’s hands, things would become troublesome, so there was no time to delay.
I ran quickly into the factory, immediately shouted instructions to the gatekeeper, and sprinted all the way to the hangar in one go.
There, I immediately found Mina, who was leading the trading company guards in stopping them, blocked the dagger they had thrown, and joined her.
“By the way, you could have blocked that much, couldn’t you?”
“A delicate girl like me can’t block things like that.”
Mina said it calmly, but that was a lie.
There was no way Mina didn’t know what position she held.
“As if a Saintess famed for her divine arts would stand on the front line without any countermeasures.”
She probably realized I had arrived and simply stood there, but Mina was absolutely not the type to step onto the front line without a plan.
To begin with, it was absurd for a divine arts practitioner or healer, who should be protected in the rear, to recklessly go to the front line. And if such a situation truly happened by chance, a healer had to retreat no matter what.
The moment Mina openly stepped forward, she must have already accounted for any counterattack from the spies.
Then Mina smiled and said,
“I’m a Saintess, so I’ll fall back.”
“Do as you like.”
Even with countermeasures, there was no reason for a Saintess to keep standing on the front line.
Besides, there was information only I knew right now.
“Why don’t you surrender quietly? I sent someone to the residence, so they’ll come running soon.”
On my way here, I told the gatekeeper to run toward the residence and shout that spies had gone to the factory.
By now, the knights should be running while shouting a five-minute standby emergency…
“…Why are you suddenly trembling?”
“Sorry. I triggered my own trauma.”
In any case, reinforcements were coming.
To begin with, the temporary residence wasn’t very far from the factory.
The time we had to buy, and the time left to the spies, was extremely short.
That meant the move the enemy could make was effectively only one, and they would only get one chance.
“…It’s do or die!”
They immediately set off smoke, and the men started running straight toward the Cyclops and the Knight.
Since they had been trying to seize them somehow since earlier, they were a little closer to the two machines, and climbing up took only an instant.
And naturally, there was no one who would just let that happen.
“That’s our property.”
Mina expressed her displeasure briefly and formed a hand seal. Soon, light shot from her hand and struck the surfaces of the Cyclops and the Knight, beginning to shine.
Because of the flash that burst at extremely close range, everyone, including the two spies, flinched and stopped for a moment.
And because Mina had covered my eyes as soon as she formed the hand seal, I was unharmed and quickly began to run.
“What kind of idiot would hand it over with his eyes wide open!”
I picked up one of their magic tools that I had grabbed on the way here and quickly threw it.
The rope that had paralyzed us earlier wrapped around the body of the nearest spy, and the spy climbing toward the Cyclops was bound by the rope, electrocuted, and fell.
The man who fell began trembling as if his body had been paralyzed for a moment, and I immediately started running up toward the Knight.
I chased after the man who had stopped about halfway up the stairs made purely for climbing onto the machine, with only supports in place. The opponent, who had barely recovered his sight, seemed to make up his mind and quickly threw himself into the air, shouting,
“Please, reach…!”
Realizing that he would be caught by me if he stayed where he was, the man made a gamble.
Something like a wire shot out from his fingertips.
The desperate gamble, attempted without even a proper running start, flew through the air. The wire seemed to lose strength in midair as though it would fall uselessly to the ground.
Thwack.
Of all things, the end of the wire landed precisely on the Knight’s head.
And the man, falling through the air, began pulling hard on the wire that had attached.
Just like that, he succeeded in landing near the entrance to the Knight’s cockpit.
“You damned bastard!”
“It’s definitely around here somewhere…!”
Naturally, the cockpit was not normally left open.
So the man quickly began feeling around the Knight’s body, searching for the mechanism to open the hatch.
The moment I finally succeeded in chasing him up to the same level,
“This is it!”
The hatch began to open, and the man threw himself inside.
As a last gamble, I quickly generated a rock bullet and hurled it, but at that moment, the hatch closed.
“Ah, seriously. I could’ve ended this cleanly…!”
At the very end, the goddess of fortune had taken his side.
The switch to open the hatch from outside took time, but he had managed to find the switch to close it precisely.
If he closed it like that, then from our side, we would have to get close and operate it in order to open it, I thought.
Vroooom.
Then the vibration began to rumble through the machine, as if he had started the Knight’s engine.
-“It’s done. Finally, finally… This power will belong to the Empire as well…!”
The spy’s voice came from inside the Knight.
He had managed to activate it after all.
Just as I was thinking my luck was particularly bad today, and that it would be nice if at least one fortunate thing happened soon,
“Ugh… uuuugh…!”
-“Ugh… uaah…?”
Pained groans began to come from the spy caught outside and from inside the Knight.
****
When he succeeded in boarding, he felt as though he had gained everything.
When he succeeded in activating it, all that remained was to return.
‘If I can just take this back…!’
The moment he thought that,
He felt a sensation as if something inside his body were twisting.
Cold sweat began pouring out of him.
Every nerve in his body was screaming that he needed to vomit up the contents of his stomach at any moment.
‘What is this? A curse? Poison?’
If something could happen this suddenly, he could only think of those two possibilities.
However, he had no idea when he could have been hit by either.
‘…Even if it were a curse, my magic tools should have defended against it. And if it were poison, I have resistance to most deadly toxins…!’
He could not figure out when or how he had been affected.
Unable to adapt at all to the change that had come over his body, the spy groaned in agony.
Meanwhile, Mina approached Aizen’s side.
-“He’s writhing like crazy in there. What did you do?”
-“I thought it was about time. So it was just as expected.”
A calm voice came from outside, but none of that mattered.
Thinking that escaping like this would be difficult anyway, the spy grabbed the control stick in front of him, intending to control the golem and eliminate both of them.
He did not even need the arms. If he simply moved forward and fell, he could kill them both.
Thinking that, he squeezed out the last of his strength and pushed the control stick forward.
[Unauthorized access detected.]
[Please fill in the following characters for activation.]
The spy’s eyes widened involuntarily at the string of text that suddenly appeared before him.
‘Authorization?’
Had there been another condition required?
But his mind, halted by pain, could not come up with the answer at all.
Still, believing there was hope yet, he tried to fill in the string as instructed.
[A □ has bloomed in the □.]
“What?”
As he looked at the characters lined up as if asking him to choose the correct answer, the spy’s body froze.
The elation he had felt just moments ago plummeted in an instant.
Feeling as if all his strength were draining away and his mind were going numb, the spy watched the situation outside projected on the wall thanks to the built-in magic tool.
-“Ugh, huuugh…!”
His comrade was twisting his body wildly.
He was sweating coldly and looked as if he might spew something out at any moment.
‘What on earth is happening…!’
Just as he thought he was reaching his own limit as well,
-“Seriously, what did you do?”
-“I threw self-defense powder.”
-“I’m asking what that is.”
The Saintess’s question, somehow brimming with interest, could be heard faintly, and Aizen Arclight’s voice soon followed.
-“It’s powder made by drying potato sprouts well and grinding them up.”
What came to mind was the battle before they came here.
The powder Aizen had suddenly thrown.
Not something meant to blind them, but a killing weapon prepared with the intent of bringing the enemy down with poison.
-“You’re spies. You’re not going to call it cowardly, are you?”
‘That… insane bastard.’
The spy clutched his stomach, horrified by an opponent who had started by throwing poison powder at them.