Iris objected, not on moral grounds but because we wouldn’t get paid. My sweet little sister was growing up.
“…One-tenth,” the prince said, almost in a groan.
“Wha—?” Iris asked, looking at him.
“One-tenth! For starters. A-ahem, you’re not wrong that having the defense funds suddenly dry up entirely would be problematic. We’ll continue providing one-tenth of the previous amount!”
“G-good heavens! With that little, we would hardly be able to…”
Iris was clearly distressed; the prince finally got a chance to wear a triumphant grin. “Well, you did put on a pretty good show for me…for a country bumpkin. Think of this as my way of thanking you! You want more cash? Then show me another good time!”
“Very well! Please bring in the next group of knights, then!”
The prince hadn’t expected this and was quick to walk it back. “Okay, no. You’re not gonna just keep beating up my soldiers! I said show me a good time!”
“A good time… V-very well, erm, you may borrow my treasured bamboo dragonfly for one day…”
“Are you makin’ fun of me?! That’s just a kids’ toy; that’s not what I’m talking about!” The prince growled at Iris, thoroughly worked up. “Tomorrow! Come back here tomorrow. I’ll have an opponent ready for you who’ll knock your socks off. If you win again, then I might see my way to a little more cash for you. Got it?”
Then he took his leave.
We left the castle and headed back to rejoin the others.
Iris, looking glumly at the ground, mumbled, “Elder Brother, I was only able to recover one-tenth of our support…”
We had come here originally hoping to not only continue to get money for defense but to ask them for something extra for an attack. It was understandably depressing to have our budget slashed instead.
“Don’t worry about it. One day, one tenth. Just keep going back every day, and in twenty days of threatening—er, talking with him, we’ll have twice what we started with. That’d be a big success, don’t you think?”
I was trying to cheer her up, and it worked: Iris looked at me, a smile blooming on her face. “I can’t help thinking it’s not going to be that easy, but I do feel better. Elder Brother, I hope I can count on you for tomorrow.”
“You sure can. Just so you know, I plan to actually do something tomorrow.”
That was how our days of negotiating began…
2
“Exterion!”
“Y-y-y-you’re kidding, right?!” The shout echoed around the training room. It came, of course, from the prince.
“Heh! Looks like you misjudged my little sister’s power. Believe me, no griffin is a match for Iris.”
“Y-you’re the one who got all upset, saying a caged griffin was cruel and unusual and against the rules!”
Lying before us at that moment was the body of the griffin, cut clean in half by a single blow.
A griffin. A monster the size of a house, who had wings and could fly and sometimes even made off with horses or cattle: body of a lion, head of an eagle. It was no dragon, sure, but it was still the sort of dangerous enemy that instilled fear in the hearts of most adventurers.
“Elder Brother, I did it!”
“Y-you sure did. That’s my little sister… Nice work.”
Iris wandered over to me with a big smile on her face, and I answered with only a little hesitation.
“Um, Prince Levy. So now you’ll…”
“Y-yeah, yeah, fine! I’ll give you more money, so put your sword away! Don’t point that thing at me!”
He was nearly in tears. Iris let out a sigh of relief. Her smile disappeared, though, at what the prince said next.
“But not much more. Between yesterday and today, I’m willing to give you fifteen percent of the support money. All right, now show yourselves out…”
“Impossible! At least make it twenty percent!”
“I s-said not to point that thing at me… Yikes, stay back! Your sword is touching my cheek! A-are you trying to threaten me?!”
I couldn’t blame Iris for unwittingly stalking closer to him with her sword.
“Threaten you? No, no, I’m only negotiating…”
“Then put the sword away!” the prince wailed, but in spite of this display, he was enough of a ruler that the “threat” didn’t work on him. I’d assumed he was a nasty little twerp, but maybe he actually had some guts.
Still, he constantly looked down on us as bumpkins. In that case…
“How about a contest with me, then?”
We had to wound his pride—that’s it.
“Wh-why would I want to have anything to do with you?”
“Now, now, don’t get the wrong idea, okay? I’ve done in a laundry list of the Demon King’s generals. And seeing as your knights and your griffin couldn’t even beat my little sister… Heh, I guess maybe if you brought in a dragon…”
Having had his bluff called, the prince gulped audibly, but Iris, who knew exactly how strong I was (or wasn’t), was looking at me like I was crazy.
Please stop gawking at me like that. My heart can’t take it.
“What I’m proposing is: Let’s play a game. You run a whole country of casinos. So you must be a betting man—am I right?”
Last night, after I got back to the inn, Darkness had told me everything she’d learned about the prince that day. According to her, this kid adored gambling and games of chance. It only made sense. Elroad was built on casinos, after all.
“You want to challenge me in a game? And I suppose if you win, you plan to ask for more money?”
“Yeah, pretty much. You know about doubling down, right? Going double on the stakes after you win a bet? That’s what I’m suggesting for you and me.”
I’ll give the prince a bit more credit. He was quick. He picked up on what I was doing right away.
Darkness’s information said he hated to lose. She might not be much use in battle, but for little daily tasks like this, she was surprisingly useful.
Incidentally, as for the other two, one of them had wasted all her allowance at the casino, while the other went back to the Duxion farm and used some cash Darkness lent her to hunt the remaining monsters. She was pretty pleased about it.
I didn’t expect either of them to be much use in the immediate future, so I let it ride.
The prince thought for only a moment before he nodded. “All right, if I lose, I’ll boost you up to twenty percent. And if you lose, what will you give me?”
Crap, I hadn’t thought about my bet. If an entire nation was asking for money, it wasn’t going to be pocket change. I had to come up with something just as valuable…
“Okay, I’ve got it. If you win, my little sister will give you a shoulder rub.”
“I’ll do my best, Elder Brother!”
“How stupid are you?! No one would want that! Money talks, ‘Elder Brother’! Pony up some cash or at least offer me something valuable!”
I didn’t have cash; that was why I was resorting to this.
Iris hesitantly took something out of her pocket. “Um, in that case, if we should lose, I would lend you my flying spinner for three days…”
“I told you, I don’t care about some dumb toy!”
That looked like the flying spinner I’d given her ages ago. I guess it still meant a lot to her.
“How about this: When you do lose, you get zero support money. Not a little less or whatever, just nothing. I’m only entertaining you here because you supposedly came to negotiate, so surely you can agree to that. I assume you’ll be coming back every day, so fine: No matter how much money you pry out of me, if you lose even once, it’s all gone. Still up to the task?” He smirked tauntingly at us.
Ah… So if we lost even one time, he would take all our money away.
Pretty good move on his part.
Or it would have been, if his opponents hadn’t been Iris and me.
“Okay, sounds good to me,” I sai
d. “I’ll set the terms of the contest, then.”
The prince looked totally startled; maybe he hadn’t expected me to accept so quickly. As he watched, I took a single coin from my purse. I put both hands behind my back, then presented the prince with my two closed fists.
“The game couldn’t be simpler. Guess where the hundred eris coin is.”
“…You’re betting everything on the most straightforward gamble in the world? Seriously, are you an idiot? You know you can’t take this back, right?”
He looked at me with outright pity, but this time Iris spoke up. “I get it, Elder Brother! You have incredibly good Luck! So we might just…!”
“…What?” That brought a bead of sweat to the prince’s forehead. But, recognizing that he couldn’t back out now, he stared at my fists for a long moment, and then…!
“This one… No, this one! It’s in this hand!” he said, pointing to my right fist.
Iris brought her hands together as if she was praying.
The prince’s eyes widened when he saw the smirk on my face.
“Buzz! Too bad!”
“Daaaammmiiiiittt!”
I made a show of opening my hand to reveal nothing inside.
“Well done, Elder Brother! Now we get twenty percent! Twenty!”
Iris was so innocently happy. But the prince, to our surprise, smiled as if he wasn’t bothered. “Don’t get too pleased over one little victory, okay? Unlike you two, I only have to win one single time. Brace yourselves for tomorrow!”
3
“Sacred Lightning Flare!!”
A bolt of bright lightning slammed down in the center of the training field. It dispersed in a blinding flash, kicking up a violent wind.
““Yeeeeek?!”” the prince and I exclaimed, covering our heads.
When the roaring stopped, there was a pile of rubble there. This was the sort of spell the Hero would use against the last boss.
“Elder Brother, I did it!”
The perpetrator of this terrifying phenomenon approached me with a broad smile on her face.
This time, Iris had been facing a crowd of golems. The prince, having decided that even the biggest, baddest opponent he could find would be helpless one-on-one, had switched to mob tactics, but…
“Great work! That’s my little sister. What do you think, Your Majesty? How about you stop all this nonsense and go back to helping us?”
“I saw you—you were covering your head and screaming just like I was. But in any event, if you want my support money, you’ll have to keep beating me. Right now, you’re up to twenty-five percent. What do you say? Got the guts to challenge me for another day?”
The prince kept smirking, but I wordlessly showed him a coin.
“Huh, some nerve! I don’t know how good your Luck is, but I’m the prince of a country that makes all its money from casinos. How long do you think you can keep beating the house?”
I didn’t say anything, just flipped the coin in the air. I snatched it as it came down and put my hands behind my back…
“…So long story short, we’re up to thirty percent. At this rate, we’ll have the funding back to normal by the end of the week.”
“…Geez, I don’t know whether to be impressed or what. Who knew that outrageous Luck of yours would save the world one day?”
Back from another victorious encounter with the prince, we were discussing the situation over dinner.
“Kazuma, Kazuma. Wanna go out with me tomorrow? We could hit the casino. I’ll call you ‘Lord Kazuma’ all day!”
“Pass. Didn’t you use up all your money yesterday anyway? The heck were you doing all day today?”
Aqua had burned through the allowance Darkness had given her almost immediately after arriving in town. But now she proudly showed me a bulging purse. “I was at the Adventurers Guild today. You remember how Iris killed all those monsters on the way here? Being as smart as I am, I collected the valuable bits and pieces from them.”
“So you sold the parts from the monsters she killed? Hand it over. I won’t insist on all of it, but give us at least half. I’ll make sure it goes to Iris.”
I reached for the purse, but Aqua grabbed it instead, curling around it defensively.
“Um, Elder Brother. I’m not an adventurer, so I’m not eligible to sell monster parts. It’s not that big a deal to me…”
“Sorry, Iris. If you give this lady an inch, she’ll take a mile.”
Aqua had apparently decided we were going to come after her, because she jumped up and got in a fighting stance. As she and I squared off, Megumin finished her meal, wiped her mouth, and said, “I will go along to babysit Aqua tomorrow. Otherwise, I’m sure she would run up a huge debt at the casino.”
Hmm, well, at least Megumin didn’t seem as likely as Aqua to develop a horrific gambling addiction.
“Me, I’m done investigating, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do tomorrow.”
Aqua perked up at that, slithering over to Darkness. “Say, Darkness, in that case, why don’t you come with us tomorrow? As a much more experienced casino-goer, I’ll give you all sorts of tips.”
“…You’re not planning to beg me for more cash as soon as you run out of money, are you?”
It looked like that was exactly what she was planning. Nonetheless, I ignored Aqua’s puffed-out, angry cheeks and said, “You guys do whatever. Let us handle the support funding. We’ll squeeze every last eris out of that punk prince.”
And so…
“Too bad! You lose again!”
“But hoooowwww?!”
It had been a week since Iris and I had started coming to the castle to “negotiate.” Iris didn’t have to fight anymore. They had run out of opponents. So that left me to battle for our budget.
The prince and I would have two bets each day. He just had to find the coin, nice and simple, and the very simplicity of it seemed to inflame his refusal to back down from the challenge.
“You did it, Elder Brother! Our defense budget is back to normal! Now we have to do something about what we originally came here for: the money for an offensive against the Demon King’s army…”
“Wh-whoa, hold on! I can’t give you money for that. Funding defense is one thing, but giving you money to attack the Demon King would cause all kinds of problems.”
I’d assumed the prince would be game for another round of betting, but he was surprisingly adamant about this.
“Oh, so you’re okay losing to me? You’re okay with everybody knowing that the high-and-mighty ruler of the country of casinos got owned by some no-name outsider?”
But no matter how mercilessly I teased him, the prince only snorted. “You think you can get me with such obvious entrapment? The only reason I kept taking your bets was that the worst that could happen to me was that things would go on just like they always have—and if I won, I would have an official excuse to cut off your funding. But our nation doesn’t want to antagonize the Demon King. There’s no way I can give you money to attack him.”
I was starting to think this prince was sharper than I had been giving him credit for. No choice. It was time to show my hand.
“You sure about that? You might win the next one, eh?”
“Nonsense. I’ve lost every single one of our bets so far; I have no reason to think I would start winning now. What do you take me for? I’m the prince of the Kingdom of…Casinos…?” His mouth fell open as if in slow motion. His eyes were locked on my right hand, which I held out, open, in front of him.
A few minutes ago, he had bet on my left hand and lost.
“Elder Brother, is it possible that the coin isn’t in either of your hands and never has been?” Iris asked, surprised, though not as surprised as the prince.
“You got it. You’re a smart girl, Iris. I’ll bet you remember what I said when I made that first bet, right?”
“What you said? Um… I think it was ‘The game couldn’t be simpler. Guess where the hundred eris coin is,’ right? …Oh!”
“Argh!” The prince seemed to get it at the same time Iris did.
“Yep: I said ‘where,’ not ‘which hand.’ I was asking about the location of the coin. And I put it in my back pocket every single time!”
“Wow! You’re so shrewd, Elder Brother! Nobody is as good at dirty tricks as you are!” Iris said, her eyes shining.
“That’s a compliment, right?”
“Yes, I think so.” Iris giggled, leaving me with the distinct impression that she wasn’t complimenting me at all.
“You lowborn—filthy—son of a—! How dare you pull such a cheap prank on me! Don’t you consider your actions a blemish on the name of royalty?!”
“Not at all.”
Seeing as I wasn’t a royal.
One hissing, furious breath escaped the prince when he saw my reaction. “…Grrr, this is why nobody likes country rats! Well, forget it. Shame on me for not seeing through your little ploy. I’m the one who’s supposed to be the ruler of a country of casinos. I’ll let you keep the money.” He never did rise to our bait. “I won’t be moved, no matter how much you mock me. The money for defense will continue as before but nothing more. That’s absolutely the end of it… Though, to be fair, it was Lugkraft who said we needed to end your funding. Me, I just didn’t want to get hitched to some girl from the sticks, so I went along with it. I regret that I never beat you, but hey, that was fun.” He sounded so casual. “Right, see you later, then. I’ll be praying you can beat the Demon King.”
I was still trying to process something I had never thought he would say when the prince ushered us out of the room.
“—And that’s the story. I have half a mind to smack that kid around a little bit.”
“Good. Well said, Kazuma. To think, a country like Elroad, whose only redeeming feature is its ability to bring in money, making light of a nation like our Belzerg! And to have dragged Lady Iris through this— I’ll kill that little brat myself!”
Back at the inn, I was having a secret meeting with Darkness and the others. Iris had gone to her room by herself, clearly depressed.
Gamble Scramble! Page 10