My Next Life as a Villainess

by Satoru Yamaguchi

  She really was serious when it came to myths.

  “So we can’t get any hints about it...” Cyrus said sadly.

  “Well, maybe the Library Department Director could tell you something more,” Alice said after thinking for a while.

  As everyone looked at her excitedly at hearing that, she started looking a bit troubled.

  “I can’t make any promises though. When I went to ask about it, all the answers I got were so roundabout that I thought that there was something being hidden there. I didn’t learn anything new, though, so I just gave up. But maybe you’ll have more luck than I did.”

  That was exactly what we wanted to hear, so we decided that the next day we’d be going to the director to ask about the forbidden library.

  “Thank you for your help,” Cyrus told Alice.

  “I was so excited about being able to talk about the Ministry’s myths after so long, but you only asked me about one of them...” she said, puffing up her cheeks in disappointment.

  “But we heard what we wanted, so that’s...” Cyrus started to say, confused.

  “But I want to tell you more!” said Alice.

  The bad feeling I’d got looking at the vice-director’s expression had now been justified. Alice was a very peculiar girl. I realized that she wouldn’t be satisfied until we listened to her, and I was the one who had brought her here, so I spoke up.

  “Tell me more, then. I’ll listen,” I told her.

  Cyrus looked disconcerted, but Alice was smiling enthusiastically.

  The former went back to his department to finish his work, while the latter stayed with me, Maria, Dewey, and Sora to tell us more scary and mysterious stories about the Ministry.

  Before long, I regretted offering to listen to her. She kept talking and talking well after our workday was over and until the sun had completely set. Eventually, Cyrus had to come back and rescue us.

  Plus, for a few days after that, I couldn’t walk to the toilet alone at night.

  The next day, the whole “covenant search party” met in the conference room. Even Larna, who had been MIA for a while, finally showed up at the Ministry and was dragged along by Cyrus. He filled her in about the forbidden library, since she wasn’t there to hear about it the day before.

  “One of the Ministry’s myths? That could be an interesting lead,” she said after listening to Cyrus’s explanation.

  “Are you knowledgeable about that kind of thing?” I asked her.

  “Well, not as much as Miss Alice, but I do know about a couple of them. For example, there’s one about the screams that you can hear in the middle of the...”

  “Please, we’ve heard more than enough about that,” I promptly interrupted her. After what had happened the previous day, any mention of the scary myths surrounding the Ministry gave me chills.

  “Everyone knows how obsessed Miss Alice is with that kind of thing. She’s a weird one, isn’t she?” Larna said, grinning wryly.

  “...Yes. She told us about a bunch of terrifying stories,” I said with a pained expression.

  With that, Larna started telling us more about Alice. As it turned out, she was well-known throughout the Ministry for being obsessed with weird and terrifying stories, such as the Ministry’s myths. What’s more, she knew no greater happiness than retelling these tales to other people. In one word, she was weird.

  If only I’d known about that, I could have avoided having to sit through her stories...

  Larna noticed the sadness on my face, and in a backhanded attempt to comfort me, said, “Don’t beat yourself up though; all newcomers fall for it the first time.”

  The conversation finally steered away from Alice. “Anyway, this is the first time I’ve heard about the forbidden library,” Larna said.

  “It seems that, for the most part, only people in the Library Department know about it, and they generally consider it to be a baseless rumor,” Cyrus said.

  “Of course they don’t care for myths and fables... Most people in that department are straight-laced realists,” Larna commented, and I remembered the librarian who had laughed at the idea of the forbidden library. She had been the one to mention it, and yet had quickly dismissed it as nothing more than a rumor.

  “However,” Cyrus said, “it seems that the Library Department’s director tries to avoid questions about it, so it’s possible that there’s something more to find there.”

  Larna’s pupils widened a little. “You expect me to believe that Daurand, that prissy coward, knows anything about myths? Please.”

  It seemed that Daurand was the name of the Library Department’s director.

  “That would definitely be unlike him,” Cyrus replied, “but I thought that it would still be worth the effort, so I went ahead and contacted him. He said he would be free in the afternoon today.”

  Cyrus really worked fast.

  “You really work fast, huh,” said Larna, apparently thinking the same thing as me. “If that’s the case, let’s go meet him later today,” she continued.

  “What? You plan on coming too?” Cyrus asked, confused and clearly disappointed.

  “Of course. You’re a talented guy, Cyrus Lanchester, but I’m better at getting information out of people,” Larna said, ignoring Cyrus’s clear chagrin.

  “...Fine,” he said, restraining himself from saying anything else with what looked like a considerable effort.

  Larna nodded, and then said, “Good. Then you, I, and Katarina will go.”

  “Wait, why should I go?!” I asked. Surely Cyrus and Larna would be enough on their own?

  “The fact that you’re Duke Claes’ daughter is known throughout the Ministry. We can leverage your rank’s influence to pressure Daurand into talking. Don’t worry, you won’t need to do anything. You can just sit there and listen.”

  “Did you just say ‘pressure him into talking’?” I asked, feeling like I had just heard something pretty shady.

  “If he doesn’t want to talk about it, then we need to compel him somehow, right? So we either need some information to offer him in return, some weakness of his to blackmail him with, or influence to coerce him,” she said, sounding like a much better villainess than I could ever aspire to be.

  Much to my dismay, since I wanted to go back to delivering packages as soon as possible, it was decided that we would keep looking through books until the afternoon.

  After several unsurprisingly fruitless hours of labor, it was time to meet with the Library Department’s director, and Cyrus and Larna made me follow them into an office where the director was already waiting for us.

  I looked at him, with his business haircut, black-rimmed glasses, scrawny physique, and generally tense demeanor, and I felt that Larna’s assessment of him as a “prissy coward” was pretty apt.

  “Thank you for having us,” Cyrus said.

  “Why, I don’t mind at all,” Daurand replied, with an expression on his face that said that he did mind, and quite a lot at that.

  After Cyrus and Larna, it was my turn to greet him and introduce myself, at which point Daurand was visibly shaken. Larna had already told me that he came from the family of a not particularly wealthy viscount, which made the title of duke all the more impressive to him. I’d already met several peculiar department directors at the Ministry, but none quite like him.

  Larna, peculiar department director extraordinaire, started talking to Daurand, whose face had become even more tense.

  “We want to know about the forbidden library,” she said without mercy.

  “...Yes, I heard as much from Lanchester. I wonder why’d you go through the trouble of asking me about such a silly rumor,” he said, trying and failing to sound nonchalant.

  “We’re on a special mission straight from the higher-ups. So, where’s the forbidden library?” Larna asked, speaking as if she knew that what she was looking for did indeed exist.

  I was surprised by her boldness, but I just sat there in silence as instructed, waiting for the
director’s answer.

  “Larna... there is no such library. It’s just a fairytale,” he said after a short pause, visibly troubled. “As are most of the Ministry’s myths. You’re wasting your time.”

  “That’s not the case,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Huh?!” Daurand and I said in unison. Cyrus remained silent, but he also looked surprised.

  “There is no smoke without fire,” she said, sounding pleased at our surprise. “Even myths have a basis in reality. Take the one about the nightly screams as an example. Tired employees, forced to deal with piled-up work without pause day and night, scream their anguish in the hallways. That’s the truth that the myth is based upon.”

  That was one of the stories that Alice had told us the previous day, and, while I was surprised to know that it was real, I was glad to know that the screams didn’t belong to ghosts or whatever.

  “And that applies to most other stories in the Ministry,” she said, looking straight into Daurand’s eyes. “So, where’s the library?”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about it,” he said, avoiding her stare.

  “That’s a shame. In that case, give us permission to search the library on a day when it’s not open to the public,” she continued.

  “Th-That’s...” he said, fumbling for words, and Larna grinned.

  “What’s the problem? We’re just going to nose around a bit, especially directly under the library’s floor,” she said, making Daurand’s eyes twitch with worry. “Is anything the matter?” she asked with an even larger grin.

  After staying silent for a while, the Library Department’s director sighed. “How much do you know?” he asked.

  “Only as much as I just told you. We could break the entrance open, but it would probably be best for everyone if you just opened it for us.”

  “Your information network is really impressive,” he said, sighing again. “Fine. I shall see you to the forbidden library.”

  “Very well. It seems that I won’t even need to tell your wife that you secretly had lunch together with a young, pretty librarian,” Larna said, making Daurand’s face turn even more pale than it already was. In a perfect villainess move, she had also planned to blackmail him if necessary.

  In the end, we got the power to enter the forbidden library without either me or Cyrus having to do anything. I had a feeling that with this, we were one step closer to getting the covenant.

  Daurand told us that the other librarians didn’t know about the forbidden library, so he would show us the entrance after everyone had finished their work for the day.

  “Miss Larna, how did you know that the forbidden library was underground?” I asked while we were walking back to the meeting room.

  “Know? How would I know that? I just took a guess.”

  “Whaaat?!” I screamed, shocked at her reply. Cyrus had frozen in place too.

  “I looked at the floor plans for the library, and they matched the actual dimensions. Remember that the Ministry is full of smart people — if the plans were off, someone would notice. I figured that it could have stayed reasonably hidden all along if it were underground, so I just bluffed and pretended I knew all along. He was fooled so easily that I didn’t even need to use any of my other strategies to get him to talk. What a waste,” she said, disappointed.

  Larna wasn’t very serious about her job, and she was often scolded by her subordinates, especially Raphael. But listening to her now, I thought that maybe she was more talented than she let on.

  I also remembered that one of my department colleagues had told me that “Larna is easy on her allies, but merciless to her enemies.” Daurand wasn’t exactly an enemy, but I still felt bad for him.

  We kept organizing all the information at our disposal until the workday was over, and then all six of us made for the library.

  There was no need for all of us to go there, but, maybe because the forbidden library was too interesting to pass on a chance to see it (I, for one, was pretty excited about it), nobody offered to wait in the meeting room for the others to return.

  Daurand was standing alone, looking grim, waiting for us. “I thought only the two directors would be going inside!” he said, sounding aghast. He obviously hadn’t expected six people to show up.

  “Is that a problem?” Larna asked, and he was immediately cowed.

  “Well, it’s a small room, so...”

  “We’ll just go in one by one.”

  “But it’s very dusty, so it’s not ideal for young boys or girls to go there...” he said, looking at Maria and Dewey.

  “We would not mind,” the two said in synch, Maria looking fierce and Dewey looking offended.

  I was also offended by the fact that I didn’t get so much as a glance when “girls” were mentioned, but Sora patted my shoulder and told me not to think too much about it.

  “I see,” Daurand said with a defeated sigh. “Come along, then.”

  We followed him to the ancient book corner, and then he stepped behind a bookcase, probably to press some kind of switch. We heard a click and, after a moment, the bookcase started moving slowly and loudly.

  After almost a minute, the movement stopped and a staircase leading underground was revealed to us.

  There sure are a lot of hidden rooms in this world. I wonder if it’s trendy or something. Back in that mansion we entered when I was still at the academy, we found what we were looking for after discovering the hidden room, so I’m sure the same will happen this time too. Covenant, here we come!

  “This way,” Daurand said, stepping onto the staircase, and we followed him.

  I wondered why he’d let us all come in at once despite saying that the room was small, but once we were inside, I realized that there was actually plenty of room.

  The room was large, and full of shelves that were stacked with books. It was about as big as the library — we called it that even though it was basically just a room with several books in it — in the town where I used to live before I was reincarnated.

  I also thought that there must have been some magic at work over the place, because, despite being underground, it was tidy and well-lit. It was incredible that such a place could be hidden under the library without anyone noticing.

  “This is incredible,” said Maria, unable to contain her awe.

  “They call it the forbidden library, but as you can see, it’s just a perfectly normal collection of books. Now that you’ve all seen it, we can go back,” Daurand said while we were still gazing at the room around us.

  What? We just got here, and we still haven’t had time to look for the covenant! I thought, and Larna gave voice to my complaints.

  “No, we still need to search it. We came here to look for a book, and we can’t leave until we know whether or not it’s in here,” she said.

  “And what book would that be?” asked Daurand, with an annoyed expression on his face.

  “I can’t tell you the details, but it’s a book about lost magic,” she replied, and he sighed yet again.

  “You could have told me that earlier! There’s no book about lost magic in here. You’d better search elsewhere.”

  “Wait,” said Larna. Now she was the one with a worried expression, for once. “You mean you know the content of all the books kept in here?”

  “I haven’t read all of them, but I at least know what kind of books they are. So I can tell you that the book on lost magic that you’re looking for is not here.”

  “...But we do not know much about the book that we are looking for. Please let us check, even just for a bit,” said Maria with a determined look in her eyes.

  When asked by a pretty young girl, Daurand couldn’t just refuse her as coldly as he had Larna. “Well, but...” he said, blushing and mumbling. While he was still coming up with an appropriate response, our trusty Larna had already walked to the shelves and was now flipping through the pages of a book.

  “Oh, would you look at this...” she said to hersel
f, sounding interested.

  Daurand, upon hearing that, ran over to her and snatched the book out of her hands. “Y-You’ve seen it, right? All the books in here are of the same kind as this one. So now you know that the book you’re looking for is not in here,” he said, sounding extremely nervous and looking dangerously red in the face.

  “What do you mean?” Cyrus asked.

  Larna, grinning, took another book and handed it to him, telling him to take a look.

  As soon as he opened the book, Cyrus blushed.

  “Daurand, explain this! Why are books such as this kept inside the sacred library of the Ministry?!” he asked with the book still in his hand.

  “That’s why I keep them hidden in here!” Daurand replied, pulling at his own hair.

  “I see... but why are you keeping them in the first place? And you don’t mean to tell me that all of these books are like this one, do you?!”

  “They are,” he replied, grimacing. “Every last one of them.”

  “...This is unbelievable. But why? Who would do this?”

  “Generations of library directors have collected them, little by little, as cultural artifacts.”

  “...There’s something wrong with the Library Department...”

  “I, myself, was shocked at first! The previous director brought me here and showed me these books, saying that they’d been passed down from one director to the next. What could I do?”

  Cyrus and Daurand were talking fervently, but I still had no idea what was going on. I looked at Larna for an explanation.

  “The only thing these books tell us is what fetishes the library directors of old were into. These are erotic books,” she said casually.

  “Larna, please, couldn’t you choose your words better?” asked Daurand, who was gnashing his teeth.

  “Erotic books?! All of them?!” I blurted out loudly in surprise.

  “That’s not something a noble lady should say out loud,” Sora commented, but how could I help it? Who wouldn’t be surprised at this huge room being completely full of erotic books?