The Debt of an Emperor

"Who would dare refuse when His Majesty summons them?"

"Quite right. And yet somehow I still feel uneasy, you see. You must come, understood?"

Put that way, Ezra could only nod with reluctant obedience.

What followed was nothing but useless, idle banter.

Ezra endured the Emperor's chatter with an expression of thinly veiled irritation, and the moment the man finally released him, he left the audience chamber at speed.

Only after Ezra had vanished well out of sight did the Emperor let his genial mask slip, driving his fist down onto the desk.

"The dignity of a sovereign, indeed."

His mind turned back to the night, mere days ago, when a pale and trembling Count Witton had requested an audience.

The previous Count Witton had been famous as the most loyal of servants to the former Emperor. Back when the old Emperor was still Crown Prince, he had left the palace for a short while—and in that window, the Third Prince, with whom he was locked in fierce rivalry, had raised an army against him. It was the then-Count Witton who had hidden the fugitive prince with nowhere left to run, dispatched word to allies across the provinces, and made it possible for him to survive.

When the prince at last ascended the throne safely, the old Emperor never forgot that debt and moved to elevate the Count's title. But the Count had politely declined the offer.

"What climbs high must one day surely fall. I wish for no such thing. If Your Majesty simply does not forget the loyalty of our house, that alone would be more than enough for me."

The previous Count Witton had truly been a saint among men! Refusing both the title and every gift offered, he had left the old Emperor with a permanent weight of awkwardness and guilt on his conscience.

Perhaps that was why.

The old Emperor had made a promise that no sovereign should ever make—a promise to grant the Count a single wish, whenever he might one day ask it of him.

And the true horror was that the promise remained valid even across generations.

The moment the current Emperor, James, laid eyes on that debt voucher bearing his father's own handwriting, he very nearly fainted on the spot.

Father, why on earth did you leave behind a bomb like this?!

Worse still was what the man actually wanted. Where the previous Count Witton had been a saint, the current one was a fool so hopeless it was painful to watch. He wanted to spend that absurd wish-right on nothing more than marrying his daughter off to Ezra.

But even that wish was utterly unacceptable!

The Emperor had sweated bullets trying to dissuade him, but Count Witton would not budge. If his wish were denied, the Count threatened, he would make the voucher public—exposing to the entire empire that His Majesty had refused to honor the dying wish of his own father!

James wanted nothing more than to beat the man to death on the spot, but outwardly he had no choice except to flounder and search for a way out.

Emperor or not, Ezra would never bend to his will. To think he, of all people, should decide whom Ezra married. His own throne wasn't even securely established yet—this was a summons to make a mortal enemy of the one man he could least afford to offend.

Ezra was a man capable of facing an entire army alone. If he commanded such a man into a marriage against his will and drove him, bitter and resentful, to turn his back on the throne, there was no telling what worse trouble would follow.

And so the Emperor resolved to take a coward's route.

Daisy had been rather busy since receiving the collar from the system. She had to eat like anyone else, so she'd taken on part-time work.

The job was at an apothecary not far from the Grand Duke's estate, and the moment the owner saw her credentials, he hired her on the spot.

At the apothecary, Daisy ran experiments even simpler than the ones she'd done at the Academy, compounding medicines by the dozen. She'd even contributed to improving the yield of a few formulations by tweaking their preparation methods.

Thanks to that, her wages doubled, and thereafter the apothecary owner begged her every single day to come on as a full-time employee.

"You're really not considering working here full-time?"

"I have other obligations, sir."

"Haah... talent like this, wasted. Fine, go on then."

Daisy bid farewell to Will, the apothecary's owner, and stepped outside.

"Phew. Showing off my skills was a mistake."

In truth, Daisy had deliberately flaunted her abilities. She needed the money!

Rent on this street, where the Grand Duke lived, was far, far too expensive.

The cramped little room she rented cost a full ten gold a month.

Ten gold was double what she'd paid near the Academy. Her part-time wages covered little more than the rent itself.

She was a human being who needed to eat and clothe herself, so more money was an absolute necessity. Hence the deliberate display of skill.

Unfortunately, she'd misjudged the dosage of her showing-off, and now she'd landed herself in a mildly annoying situation.

Why does my workload only ever seem to grow?

Daisy returned home, changed her clothes, and headed back out—this time toward the café near the Grand Duke's townhouse.

The building had originally been a nobleman's townhouse. Years ago, a wealthy old widow had bought it at extravagant cost, declaring that gazing upon the Grand Duke's face every day would surely grant her a long life. Tragically, when word reached her that the Grand Duke—having heard the rumors—had abandoned the townhouse and moved to his estate on the capital's outskirts, she collapsed from grief and died.

For years afterward, the building sat unsold, rumored to be cursed. Then, not long ago, the old woman's daughter had decided that rather than let it sit idle, she might as well make money off it, and she'd renovated the place from top to bottom, opening a café.

And the reason this café thrived was none other than this: despite charging more for its coffee than anywhere else in the district, word had spread that one could sit comfortably inside and watch the Grand Duke's face as he came and went down the street. Noble ladies, hearing the rumor, had gradually flocked there for a chance to glimpse him even once—turning it into a veritable landmark.

Fortunately, the old woman's daughter remembered her mother's fate well, and never went around boasting that she was trading on the Grand Duke's face for profit.

Thanks to that, Daisy could keep tabs on Ezra's movements with relative ease. And since she had the perfectly legitimate excuse of sitting in the café drinking tea, it was even fair game.

As she thought this and reached into her bag for her novel, it suddenly occurred to her that Ezra had once cursed her as a creepy stalker who shadowed him everywhere.

Do you have any idea how many women trail after you? And for the record, I'm the one desperate to sever all ties with you.

But there was something Daisy didn't know.

Though the café had been open for several months now, it had never once crossed Ezra's mind that the place was, in fact, a hideout for women observing him.

Daisy sighed and called out Status Window in her mind.

Thanks to what she'd learned from Bee, she no longer had to wait on tenterhooks, wondering when the window might appear.

Every time she watched the clock tick down, anxiety crept up on her, but Daisy forced herself to stay calm. She slipped her hand into her bag and touched the collar she would have to fasten around Ezra's neck.

The best method, of course, would be to put it on while he was unconscious.

Should I drug him and knock him out?

But according to the rumors in this place, no poison known to man worked on Ezra.

Rumor or not, Daisy—who had seen him fight on several occasions—didn't think it was a lie at all.

And yet Amy's poison got to him, didn't it.

Back then, Daisy had been trapped inside a monster's stomach. She'd analyzed the digestive fluid smeared over her own body and confirmed it carried toxins.

Fortunately, nothing lethal. But anyone without her slight resistance to poison—resistance built up through years of alchemical practice—would have broken out in hives and been scratching themselves raw in the most undignified way imaginable.

And decisively, there was what he'd screamed at her that time.

At the time, her anger had drowned out any real comprehension of his words, but when she picked his accusations apart, he seemed convinced he'd been felled by some special drug of her own making.

You overestimate my skills far too much.

It was true she was somewhat better than the average alchemist, but she was hardly a prodigy capable of astonishing the world.

Either way, the most plausible theory at present was this: Ezra did have a strong resistance to poison—but not a perfect one.

With such thoughts in mind, Daisy gazed out the window as always, waiting for Ezra to appear. Judging by the murmuring around her, he had finally left the Grand Duke's estate that morning.

Ugh, so do I have to catch the split second he steps out of his carriage?

No. With this many people fawning over Ezra around here, if she approached him in front of them all, she might be the one who got torn to pieces first.

Which left only one option: slipping in at night and fastening the collar on him under cover of darkness.

But I'm not a thief—how exactly am I supposed to sneak in?

The added requirement of infiltrating without waking the famously light-sleeping Grand Duke only made matters worse.

Bee, is there really no other way?

Daisy called out to Bee in her mind, but the system remained silent.

After days of summoning it repeatedly and interrogating it, she'd learned one thing: when a question fell outside what Bee was able to answer, it simply ignored her call entirely.

Useless piece of junk.

To puff itself up as if it could do anything, then backpedal the moment she actually asked for something, claiming it could do nothing at all.

She honestly suspected it wasn't trying to help her at all, but rather scheming to enrage her until she dropped dead.

Hah. Fine—sneaking in at night was the answer after all.

She was trapped in an endlessly repeating life anyway. Even if she got caught this time and killed, she'd simply wake up and live again. What was there to worry about?