Chapter 69: Intermission, back to the office.

A few more days passed after that.

Yukomis, who was sitting in her office, was in a pretty bad mood.

She had simultaneously contacted all the imperial palace organizations that Ilesha was most deeply involved in, but she had only received responses that she was currently absent.

The Imperial State Church, which was currently preparing for a large event, had sent a reply that ‘She must be consulting with the quartermaster regarding the event budget’, and that quartermaster claimed that ‘He hadn’t seen her for a few days because she was busy preparing for the event of the State Church’.

In addition, the reply she had received from the chamberlain said, ‘I know that she went on a business trip to the capital area for a while’.

“What kind of f*cking business trip is it? Does that even make sense? Especially at this time?”

Yukomis muttered with a frown.

Every one of them were just claims that didn’t make sense.

Skimming through the letters, Yukomis concluded that Ilesha must have wanted to hide her destination.

Yukomis was slowly having to admit that she couldn’t find Ilesha.

She wanted to receive the holy sword as soon as possible, but when she thought about it, it wasn’t a particularly urgent matter either.

Sending rapid delivery wyvern mail like this in succession was a clear waste.

‘If Ilesha comes back to the palace, then I can send a letter again at that time and receive it…’

Yukomis shifted her gaze towards the display case in the office.

There was the holy sword, Pvanol, that Signa had left behind hanging there.

‘Something is making me angry…?’

She had dumped all her work on this side, so where did she disappear to alone?

Yukomis was someone who had almost never thought about ‘wanting to go out and play’ in her entire life, but rarely, this was one of those times. It annoyed her just thinking about how she had missed all the opportunities to see Signa in a swimsuit, splash around with her, and have a meal together with the menu that her sister had liked.

Ilesha was now gone like this, and the work was just endlessly continuing to flow to this side.

‘No, to some extent, it’s also my fault…’

Letting out a sigh, Yukomis put aside the meaningless replies from the imperial palace and skimmed through the documents that had flowed in today too.

“…The types have increased again.”

Not only the State Church event, but now even work related to Kiffle had flown in.

The temporary chief officer of Kiffle, where the mayor’s seat was currently vacant, was Ilesha.

She was the one who had originally asked Yukomis to investigate the two Kiffle mayors for corruption, she was the one who was looking for a person to become the new mayor, and she was the one who was commanding the practitioners.

Each of the envelopes had the Kiffle’s seal along with a note that said, ‘Needs Urgent Processing’.

Judging from the addresses they had passed through, it seemed that they had been sent to the imperial palace first, and then flown to Yukomis, who had been designated as her proxy because the approver was absent.

As Yukomis was indifferently turning the paper, an interesting content came into her eyes.

It was a petition to Ilesha…? No, it was a complaint.

‘…I suspect that the officer who commands the wyvern runway is corrupt. The commanding officer’s spending has noticeably become more extravagant recently, and their clothes have become expensive.

He was originally a humble and sincere person, but now he’s acting haughtily as if someone is watching his back, and he’s an arrogant person in everything. Last time, he even arbitrarily sent mail that had flown in from the north without a seal.’

“Is that the story of that officer in Kiffle who was being nice to the Solenas family?”

‘He is a soldier of the wyvern runway who should be pursuing fairness and the public interest more than anyone, but he has recently been arbitrarily giving convenience to ‘someone’ too often without proper documents.

In fact, I had enough suspicion from the time he conscripted a wyvern ‘at night’ without going through the proper procedures and lent it to someone of unidentified status. Only a vague status of ‘an attendant of the ducal family’ is written on the conscription consent document, and there is no specific explanation at all.

I even suspect whether this was really written by a person related to the Solenas family. The signature is… perfect as expected. The relatives of the Solenas family that I can think of are extremely limited. There is no one who could create this kind of document.’

“…What?”

‘Please read the flight permit from that date that I have acquired and enclosed. Everything is a perfect form, but that makes it even more suspicious.

There are very few people who can fluently create this complicated form at once without erasing or rewriting it. This makes me guess that the person who created this document is an experienced wyvern knight, or at least a military official.’

“This is the flight permit from that day when I lost consciousness in Kiffle.”

Now that she thought about it, it was a document that Yukomis had never seen with her own eyes.

‘It was clearly written that there was only one person on board that day, but clearly there was one more unidentified woman on the wyvern that day. If my suspicion is correct, it means that the commanding officer not only condoned the forgery of the ducal family’s signature, but also used the wyvern for private purposes.

I strongly suspect that the flight on that date was involved in some kind of crime, and that the officer is using the private profit created from that…?’

Of course, she wasn’t involved in a crime, and Yukomis was just hiding her identity at that time.

About half of the suspicions written in this letter were completely wrong, but that didn’t mean that there was no information contained here.

As Yukomis was reading the letter, she stared intently at the enclosed documents.

As was written in the letter, there was absolutely no corner that could be criticized in that document, no matter how hard she looked for it.

But… more than that, it was the handwriting that caught Yukomis’s attention.

That handwriting was truly a collection of strange and individual habits.

‘Bending the top of the straight stroke to write, the changes in pressure are very diverse. A strange habit of averaging the size of the letters. This unique handwriting, which seems to write all the letters ‘inside a square frame’…?

It was handwriting that was as if she was trying to write a completely different world’s language through the imperial language alphabet.

As far as Yukomis knew, there was only one person in this world who wrote this kind of handwriting.

‘But… no way. This is definitely not Karat’s handwriting. Then, the only person who accompanied him that day was Signa.’

Signa, not Karat, had created this, in her sister’s handwriting?

Feeling a chill run down her spine at the encroaching sense of unease, Yukomis picked up another document.

This time… it was a bill.

‘The fee for the portrait of ‘that person’ that you requested is 420 gold coins. Because it was a request from Your Highness, who is none other than you, I also wanted to call out a lower number than this, but as you said, because I didn’t skimp on the amount for the pigments that go into the hair and eyes, it turned out like this. Don’t worry.

I also remember that person’s impression well, so the color development will be perfect. Jet-black… beautiful black hair, and amethyst-like eyes, right.’

It was an extremely private letter. It wasn’t a letter that should have gone to Yukomis in the first place.

As Ilesha’s absence was prolonged, all kinds of letters were being dumped on Yukomis without even being properly classified.

That was also telling her how overworked Ilesha and the talents who were assisting her usually were.

They had more work than Yukomis, but they weren’t as fast at handling work as Yukomis.

Work had exploded after the Great War.

But because there weren’t many survivors among the imperial family and high-ranking nobles, a large amount of work had become concentrated on a small number of capable people.

Ilesha had always been returning to the imperial palace appropriately before it got to this point, but coincidentally, she was currently at the point where she had reunited with ‘that person’, whom she had thought she would never meet in Pranun, where she had left for a vacation of escape.

Earthly matters had been completely erased from her head.

‘What on earth is this receipt? She ordered five more portraits of the same person?’

And the handwriting in this letter was none other than the chairman of the trading company, Telarmo Rotelli.

He was someone who had a relationship with her sister, and thanks to his great business skills, he had a relationship that continued transactions with not only Yukomis, but also Ilesha.

Although the name wasn’t mentioned, it wasn’t hard to guess who this portrait was of.

The hair and eyes, which had been described without skimping on the best pigments…

It must be her sister without a doubt.

This bill made Yukomis’s heart restless in a completely different direction from the complaint.

To summarize, Ilesha, who had taken five portraits of her sister and disappeared somewhere, was currently in a state where even the imperial palace officials didn’t know where she had gone.

While holding the holy sword,

‘Wait a minute. While holding the holy sword…?’

Something was strange.

It’s, she couldn’t put it into words, but an unexplainable anxiety raised its head in an instant.

‘Moreover, this postscript written on the bill is…’

Postscript.

In the postscript that had been added after the chairman’s signature, these words were written.

‘By the way, I don’t know if I can even ask you this, but why do you need the remaining one shoe of that child’s shoe that you requested last time? From what I can see, it seems to be a shoe that was delivered to the Solenas ducal family. Of course, it’s not difficult to make a matching pair for the shoe you sent, but…?’

Yukomis vaguely recalled that Signa had lost her shoe when Ilesha had visited the mansion.

Still, she had said that she hadn’t been caught by Ilesha at that time.

She had said that they hadn’t faced each other directly.

Was that a lie?

Had Signa contacted Ilesha back then, or even after that, and had a private exchange?

‘I can’t be at ease.’

Yukomis made a decision.

‘Signa is a person who was born with a terrible luck that brings disaster anyway.’

At least one or more of those disasters had been created directly by Yukomis, but she tried to ignore that fact.

She couldn’t say for sure that something would happen, but…

Her gut feeling was warning her that if she ignored this anxiety and left it alone, something really big would happen.

Signa wasn’t there right now.

Ilesha had also left her seat, and the letter that Silissa had sent had definitely said that the holy sword would ‘forcibly make the current Signa grow’.

And letters that were suspicious in every way were being sent towards Ilesha.

Were all of these things a coincidence?

…Of course it was a coincidence.

But it was a coincidence, but it wasn’t a coincidence either.

As a result, everything that Yukomis was worried about was happening in Pranun in real-time.

“I have to go to Pranun.”