by Nikita Thorn
“Easy now. That was clearly an accident,” the samurai was saying as the guard pushed him into the prison cell and slammed the door shut behind them.
The Palace Guards gave them angry glares, but said nothing else before leaving the room.
“Brings back memories.” Ippei chuckled grimly. “This is even worse than the normal jail when you have no court ranks.”
Seiki wondered what his friend meant, but then noticed something strange about the place. A kind of exhaustion hung over his mind, which at first he thought was the effect from having been teleported by the Palace Guard. After a second, however, he realized that his energy was slowly draining.
Ippei was already sitting down cross-legged on the floor. “Yeah, these bars are enchanted to keep you zeroed.”
Seiki grabbed his remaining energy and struck the bars with a bare-handed Focused Strike. Unsurprisingly, the wood simply absorbed the impact and did not even shake. “Might as well spend it,” he said.
With Blood Rush, he knew he could always trade his health for almost a full bar of energy if he needed it, and some of his abilities would still be handy, even without a weapon.
The room did not look like a proper prison. There was no registration desk to check prisoners in, and from the lack of windows, Seiki suspected they were underground. It was as if someone had converted a storage room into a prison cell, and as Seiki studied the walls, he realized there were railings for sliding panels just outside beyond the wooden bars, which could serve as a false wall to hide the entire prison cell from view. There were no direct openings, which meant no post pigeons could get through either.
A horrible realization started to dawn on him. “This isn’t the Palace Jail.”
“No, we’re in some noble lord’s secret underground dungeon. Like I said, the Inner Palace is a scary place.” Despite what he said, the samurai did not look particularly worried. “You know, you can say the Demonic Clan is honorable in comparison.”
Seiki blinked. “Is that supposed to… like, say something about politics?”
“Maybe.” Ippei laughed. “And now we wait for the bad guy to show up and gloat. Oh, yeah, they always do that.” He then shook his head. “If Maru still ends up dead after all this, I’m going to be really pissed.”
“Why do this?” Seiki was not sure what the design was for except to make people feel utterly terrible.
“It’s a different kind of game,” said Ippei. “You’re not meant to fight.”
“So what are you supposed to do?”
Ippei thought for a moment. “Finesse?”
“Right…” said Seiki uncertainly.
“Some people really dig it.”
Just as Ippei had predicted, less than a minute later, the door to the room swung open, and in strode Chamberlain Mazutomo, accompanied by one more Palace Guard.
Ippei gave their captor a casual smirk. “Took you a while, Lord Chamberlain. You could have used the guards’ teleport service, you know. It’s a lot faster.”
“This is how you finesse?” said Seiki.
“Remember you are on Palace Grounds now, Unit Chief,” said the Chamberlain. “Your military ranks mean very little here until you learn how to behave.”
Ippei grinned. “We’re behaving with as much propriety as you deserve, Lord Chamberlain, like, ounce for ounce.”
“Watch your tongue!” cried the man. “I can have you thrown out like a common criminal.”
“Oh, as long as we pass Third-Rank Official Chiba on the way toward the exit, I’m perfectly okay with that.”
Chamberlain Mazutomo’s lips curled into a cold smile. “It seems like you would benefit from some education on what kind of behavior is expected of you, Unit Chief, which means you will have to miss the Ceremony Feast and stay here as my special guests until it is all over.”
“We weren’t invited in the first place,” Seiki pointed out.
Ippei burst out laughing as the Chamberlain’s face flushed in anger. The man was about to say something else when the air shimmered beside him, and another Palace Guard materialized, holding a white fox by the scruff of her neck.
“We’ve got her, Lord Chamberlain.”
Mairin transformed back into a human girl, freeing herself from her captor. “Hey, hey, ladies are to be handled with—”
The Palace Guard cleared his throat and waved his hand, and the kitsune shrank back into a white fox mid-sentence. That seemed to shock her, and the man took the opportunity to pick her up and toss her into the prison cell.
Mairin landed on her feet, spun around and growled as the door swung shut, before transforming back into a human girl to protest. “How did you do that?” The Palace Guard actually looked amused.
“You can’t fight Level 35 Elites,” muttered Ippei. “They know all your tricks.”
“Well, good,” said Chamberlain Mazutomo with a satisfied smile. “Now that’s taken care of. You sure the enchantment on the bars will keep that… unnatural thing in?” He gestured at the kitsune.
“Yes, Lord Chamberlain,” said the Palace Guard.
“Very good.” The man’s smile twisted into something terrible. “With the Festival going on, no one will miss you for a few days. In fact, I might ask the captain of my personal guards to drop by and ensure you have an entertaining time while you remain my guests. These walls are soundproof, you see. I’d really like to know how you sniffed out information on the sake.”
Mairin’s eyes widened. “Oh, admittance of guilt right there.” She then smiled brightly. “Well, like I said. It wasn’t hard. You couldn’t spell Kichigawa.”
The man let out a scant laugh. “See if you keep your attitude after my guard captain is done with you.”
“By the way, who in the world doesn’t know what a kitsune is? No wonder you can’t spell,” shouted Mairin after him as the man spun around and marched out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
“Admit you made a mistake and he’ll let you go,” said the Palace Guard quietly as he turned toward to follow the Chamberlain.
That offer surprised them. “You can, like, chicken out of this whole deal?” said Mairin.
The Palace Guard said nothing.
“Thanks, officer,” said Ippei. “I don’t think that’s happening.”
“Then I’m afraid there’s nothing else I can do for you.” The man left the room and locked the door behind him.
“Double locks,” said Mairin. “They really overestimated our Lockpicking skills, didn’t they?”
Considering that none of them had any Lockpicking skill, Seiki looked at his friends. “So, now what?”
“We wait for the torturer guy to come in and then we kill him with our bare hands,” said Ippei.
“What?” cried Seiki.
“I’m sure you can do it.” Ippei’s tone was serious and Seiki had no idea whether his friend was joking or not, until Ippei broke into a chuckle. “Foxy, you didn’t see him throw a Palace Guard without touching him. That’s a skill you need to survive the Inner Palace. Maybe you’ll actually do well here.”
“Uh, great? But, okay, seriously. What do we do now?”
His friends laughed at Seiki’s horrified expression.
“Well, we’ve now got evidence.” The kitsune smiled as she produced a flask of sake from her inventory: Bottle of Ostensibly Kichigawa Sake [instance item]. “I managed to grab one.”
“Ostensibly, all right.” Ippei chuckled.
“An instance item. That’s promising,” said Seiki. “So after we, uh, kill the guy with our bare hands, we do what?”
Mairin pondered for a moment. “Probably talk to Lady Shiharu. She’s gotta appear somewhere now, since she’s the only one we know for sure isn’t trying to… sabotage herself.”
“To be honest, who knows?” said Ippei. “Maybe she’s trying to sabotage herself, but then make it look like she’s the victim. A plot on top of a plot. That’s how Inner Palace quests go somet
imes.”
“Did you do a lot of them?” Seiki asked.
“No,” said Ippei. “And I wouldn’t have done any of them, but there was a glitch that allowed you to share group quests, and one girl was offering tours, for a fee, of course. I went on a few.”
Considering he would most likely be in the same situation of never having enough Reputation Points to enter, Seiki honestly would not mind a guided tour just so he could see what the Inner Palace looked like. “Did they fix the glitch?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Wait… actually, I don’t know.”
Approaching footsteps interrupted their discussion. Ippei leapt to his feet, and Mairin tucked their evidence back into her inventory.
“Do we fight?” Seiki whispered.
Ippei shook his head. “Let’s play it by ear.”
They all fell silent, holding their breath as a key clacked in the lock.
The door swung open, revealing a man in a Shinshioka Army uniform. He could not have been more than a few years older than Seiki, but the shadow of a beard on his cheeks added a few years. Seiki had been trying to imagine what a torturer would look like, and he had expected someone with missing teeth and a rabid gleam in their eyes. This man, however, looked completely normal, albeit exhausted, and perhaps extremely annoyed.
“You Clan Volunteers just can’t keep out of trouble, can you?”
Mairin cocked her head to study him. “If you’re Chamberlain Mazu-something’s torturer guy, you kinda need to look a bit more… deranged. Unless you happen to be a non-tropey kind of torturer?”
The man’s frown deepened. Seiki only now noticed that in his hand was not a key, but a set of slim metal devices loosely tied together with a leather cord.
Mairin’s jaw dropped as her eyes fell on the same thing. “You mean you’re here to lockpick… wait… okay, you’re kinda doing this torturer thing wrong.”
The man lowered his hand, letting his lockpicks jangle noisily, an irked expression on his face. “Give me one good reason not to let you rot in here.”
“There… isn’t one,” said Ippei.
The samurai was eyeing the man cautiously, and Seiki suddenly realized his friend was not trying to be facetious.
“Oh,” said Seiki quietly. There was no need for force when you could simply pretend to be an ally. “I would have totally fallen for this. Okay, no Inner Palace stuff for me.”
The man seemed taken aback by Ippei’s answer, but then the corner of his mouth lifted to form a smirk. “I see. That’s how you want to play it, Unit Chief? I have no more reason to trust you than you do to trust me. For all I know, you could be spies working for any of the lords and ladies of the Inner Court.”
“You know we’re not,” said Ippei. “Unfortunately, as players, we can’t say the same about you, especially when you have no label. So you’ll have to excuse our ignorance. For all we know, you could at any moment get a Rank 5 Demon label, and that would put us in a rather difficult situation.”
A spark of amusement lit up in the man’s eyes, and Seiki could have sworn he recognized the joke.
“At least we can all agree that standing here waiting for the Chamberlain to find us will do no one any good.” The man took a step forward, selected two out of the slim hooked metal bars on the leather cord and slid them into the keyhole on the prison door. “The problem with you Clan Volunteers is you see something, you want to do something.”
The man shook his head in annoyance as he continued to work the lock. “But sometimes, especially here, when you should be looking and listening…” He looked up at them as he enunciated his next words. “Doing is a mistake.”
“Oh,” they all said almost at the same time, as the lock turned with a bright clank and the door swung open.
Objective completed: Doing Is a Mistake, Not Doing Is a Bigger Mistake. Deciding to act rather than not often saves you a bigger regret. You have completed at least 3 objectives. You may now speak to Third-Rank Official Chiba to complete the quest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Not doing is a bigger mistake,” Mairin was saying.
They were following their rescuer down a dimly-lit corridor. Just as Seiki had suspected, the Chamberlain’s secret prison was underground, and the rest of the rooms in the area seemed to be used for storage. To his relief, the moment they stepped out from the tiny prison cell, their energy had started recharging again, and it was now up to about a tenth of his total.
“I think we’re on the right track,” said Mairin.
The man scoffed but said nothing. Instead, he held up his hand to signal them to stop. In front of them, the corridor opened into the next one, creating a small three-way junction. After peering around to make sure it was empty, he nodded to them to follow him around the left turn.
“Where are we going?” said the kitsune.
The man had a sardonic smirk on his face. “Why, the torture chamber, of course.”
“I like this guy,” said Ippei.
The man stopped again to peer around the next corner, and Seiki was starting to wonder how complicated the network of underground corridors was going to be, when he realized where they actually were.
“This is the underground sewage system… but, the Palace version?” Seiki had been subconsciously keeping track of the turns and the number of steps to the next one, and the space did not add up physically.
“Many of the nobles had taken advantage of the existing system and had converted parts of it for their personal use,” said the man.
“Okay, this confirms it.” Seiki stopped counting steps then.
“And I see it takes a lot of Lockpicking skills to get around.” Mairin stared in fascination as the man felt around a wall panel, slid open a piece of wood to reveal a keyhole, on which he again put his hooked tools to good use.
The unlocked panel led them to a much smaller corridor. It was still fixed with wood panels, but it was much dimmer, and smelled of old damp. Ippei was glancing around, looking a little bewildered. From his expression, Seiki guessed this was the first time he had seen it too.
“So we’re under the Palace?” If intrigue was indeed the main feature of the Inner Palace workings, Seiki supposed it made sense that a whole network of secret passageways existed right under it.
“Keep going.” The man clicked the panel shut after them.
“This is starting to look like a torture chamber,” said Mairin, as they continued down the dim, creaky path.
Their rescuer offered no conversation. The path ended after a forced left turn, with six narrow steps leading up to a wooden door. The man pressed his ear to it for a moment, then unlocked it. “This part is tricky. Stick close to me and be quiet. Oh, and shoes off.”
Seiki did not see the man removing his own shoes, but they had disappeared. There was no point arguing, and so they did as they were told and stuck their footwear in their inventory.
With one last glance to make sure they were ready, the man pushed the door open, and Seiki nearly had to shield his eyes as bright light poured in.
“Quick!” the man whispered, waving at them to follow him up the steps.
Welcome to Mamori Hall!
Beyond the door was a spacious hallway of yellowish wood. After a claustrophobia-inducing underground journey, the contrast was disconcerting, and Seiki felt a strong urge to press himself against the wall. The man closed the door behind them, allowing the panel to gracefully merge back into its spot. Even when Seiki knew it was there, he could still not see any tell-tale that would distinguish it from other surrounding panels.
The other side of the corridor was a shoji room, and light conversation could be heard from behind it.
Seiki had no idea where Mamori Hall was or what it was for, but he could guess it was used as high-ranked administrative offices. It reminded him a little of the military headquarters on the other side of the Palace, but perhaps a little newer, and much more extravagant.
The m
an was about to lead them further, when he let out a curse under his breath. “Don’t move,” he said. With a wave of his hand, the world blurred.
You are hidden in Cloak of Night! Any movement will cancel the effect.
Seiki would have been surprised had he not recognized it as something similar to what Kiku had used to conceal them in the Shussebora Cave. The effect here seemed stronger, and the sound around him seemed distorted as if he was underwater. It, however, did not make him feel any less exposed. Turning the corner around the shoji room was no one but Chamberlain Mazutomo.
Their rescuer bowed deeply, his face expressionless. “Lord Chamberlain.”
The nobleman made no attempt to hide his look of resentment. “Ah, Captain…” He paused, just long enough to get his point across. “What is it again?” From his tone it was clear the lapse in his memory was intentional.
“Tsukuda, Lord Chamberlain.”
The nobleman let out a slight scoff. His eyes passed directly over where Seiki and his friends were standing to fix on the bowing man. “I thought Yajima sent you lot to Fuoka for reinforcement.”
Tsukuda straightened up, but kept his eyes low. “The Commander called some of us back for the Festival, Lord Chamberlain.”
“After I explicitly told him no extra help is needed here. What a debacle.” The Chamberlain let out another slight breath. “Does your commander have difficulties comprehending simple, direct orders?”
There was once again a deliberate pause, and Seiki could feel Tsukuda squeeze his fist as he realized a reply was expected of him. “I’m afraid I have no comment to make on that matter, Lord Chamberlain.”
“Well, pass on a message for me and tell him I believe him an uncouth fool. Will you do that, Captain?”
Tsukuda shifted, and perhaps that had been a mistake. A cold smile appeared on the Chamberlain’s lips. “Captain Tsukuda. Did you not hear what I just said? Answer when your superior speaks to you. I asked you to pass on my message to your Commander.”
Seiki fought down the urge to punch the Chamberlain in his face. Beside him, Tsukuda clenched his jaw, drew a deep breath and said, “I will do that, Lord Chamberlain.”