---

**Crash!**

The cassette player shattered with a terrible sound. The player, spewing out a drawn-out voice like a dying gasp, soon completed its life cycle and was discarded. I hurled the broken player under the table.

I sat quietly in my seat, closing my eyes and swallowing my distress.

Whether it was the embarrassment of having my destructive act eavesdropped on or my simmering anger at being unable to verify even a single communication network after consuming this sad excuse for a meal, I couldn’t tell.

One thing was certain: the content of the call had fallen into someone else’s hands.

“……”

As I continued my silent contemplation, Francesca Ranieri, sitting across from me, stared at me intently.

Then she began to speak.

“I didn’t know you could crush a player with your bare hands. You’re surprisingly strong.”

“……”

“That was quite a sturdy item, you know.”

—

**Episode 6 – Omniscient Spy Perspective**

There had been a brief commotion, but the atmosphere quickly calmed down.

Since I hadn’t intended to intimidate Francesca Ranieri, I had no reason or need to pressure her.

She was surprised, but that was about it.

So, no one paid any attention to the wrecked player.

I remained in my seat, while the administrator from the Magic Tower Secretariat sipped from the punch I had prepared.

“……”

As I stalled for time, I pondered where the leak might have occurred.

“…Who provided it? That tape just now. The Magic Tower? The Empire?”

The administrator responded.

Neither, apparently.

“Not the Magic Tower or the Empire.”

“Then who is it? There are hardly any bold enough to eavesdrop on an Abas diplomat’s call in the continent.”

“Why do you assume I overheard? …”

The administrator crossed her legs and asked somewhat provocatively.

In truth, considering her expression and tone, it seemed closer to a genuine query of, “Why don’t you suspect me?”

I kindly answered her question.

“Because I know you lack the capability.”

Eavesdropping? That’s not something anyone can easily accomplish.

In the 21st century, with all sorts of wiretapping equipment available to the public, you might be able to find them on Amazon or eBay, but such markets didn’t exist here.

Above all, I wasn’t foolish enough to get caught up in such a lowly method.

“The call you just heard was made from a moving vehicle using a prepaid phone. It’s difficult to conduct audio surveillance on a moving target without mobile equipment.”

For example, there are satellites that can access civilian communication networks without the constraints of space-time, or reconnaissance aircraft capable of intercepting signals at low altitudes.

Such assets are difficult for even considerable nations to operate in a geographical sense.

In reality, in South Korea, even trying to use a single satellite owned by the country involves the Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Unification, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and police lining up for National Intelligence Service screening.

“High-performance intelligence assets are not something private enterprises can easily handle; they are national strategic assets.”

So it was impossible for a mere individual to handle such things.

Unless it were a signal intelligence collection van held by the 73rd Special Project Division.

“What if it was overheard from a nearby location…?”

“That makes even less sense.”

It’s not easy to eavesdrop even at close range while a vehicle is moving.

Unless it were a conversation directly between Veronica and me, communication is hard to intercept.

Why’s that?

“Telegraph poles and magic waves hinder communication interception. And that area had a lot of telegraph poles, with significant traffic contributing to similar magic waves. If not, it means that every time that side dialed my number, the base station recorded the call’s content.”

“……”

“As for how many prepaid phone SIM cards I’ve purchased from the Magic Tower, that suggestion makes even less sense. If it were going to be intercepted like that, the Public Order Preservation Agency or the police would have known beforehand.”

Do government bureaucrats surpass intelligence agencies and intelligence police in information-gathering capabilities?

That’s nonsense. Not even a name-less third world intelligence agency in this worldwide village operates at that level.

No matter how vast the gap between advanced and developing world intelligence agencies is—like comparing Usain Bolt to a high school star athlete’s 100m race—they certainly aren’t far behind ordinary civilians.

Thus it makes no sense that Francesca Ranieri has better information-gathering abilities than the Magic Tower. A novel written that way would earn scorn.

Rather, it would be a more realistic story that foreign intelligence agencies or the Magic Tower’s counter-intelligence organization delivered information to Francesca Ranieri.

Above all else,

“I’m not an idiot.”

I wasn’t the kind of fool who could get my communications thrown off by a foreign intelligence agent.

If that were the case, I would have already bit the dust in the waters off the West Sea or the South China Sea.

When one is upright, they have no shame or hesitation, and thus my question was effortlessly light.

“Who provided it? That recording tape.”

The alchemist’s response was no different.

“I had heard you were skilled, but… it’s better than I expected.”

As anticipated.

Someone had delivered the recording file to the alchemist.

So,

“Where did you hear that from again?”

“Where could it be…?”

“…Looks like you stuck the straw into quite a dirty place.”

That meant some bastard had leaked my information externally.

“Ah, how satisfying.”

—

Francesca Ranieri has my call content. That means someone spilled my information to her.

I had no idea which bastard that was.

There was no atmosphere to ask about it, and I wouldn’t expect someone to readily answer if I did, so I postponed finding the answer to that problem for later.

“What will you do now?”

I asked the alchemist sitting across the table.

“Well then, what shall we do…?”

The alchemist, draped in a bathrobe, looked at me with a grin. What a truly refreshing type of crazy. She gave off a slight resemblance to Veronica, perhaps because she was a little less mature; it didn’t quite match the same complete feel.

If Veronica was a crazy girl whose direction was unpredictable despite being communicative, then Francesca Ranieri was a crazy girl of unknown intent. Seeing this, there was something similar in her psychological inscrutability to Camila.

Somewhere between Veronica and Camila.

Francesca Ranieri was the girl existing at that ambiguous point.

“……”

By the way, I had no idea what this crazy girl’s supervisor, a representative from the National Security Agency, was doing right now.

Could it be that Sophia was slacking off?

That wasn’t the case. As far as I knew, Sophia was the type who always prioritized work. In other words, she was a workaholic.

Sometimes it was too excessive, leading collaborators to suicide or agents to die, but it wasn’t that uncommon for her to return to work nonchalantly after such incidents, so Sophia certainly wouldn’t be someone who casually slacked off.

Then was she perhaps captured or expelled by the Magic Tower’s counter-intelligence agencies?

This was a somewhat plausible story, but honestly, that wasn’t it either.

Sophia had been an operative active at the Magic Tower for a long time (she had recently claimed she was dispatched to cover for Fabio Verati) and as a non-official disguise holder unlike me, who was guaranteed non-arrest privileges, if she had been caught by the Public Order Preservation Agency, she would have already been long gone.

So then where did Sophia go?

Could it be that she handed it over herself?

“……”

No, no, that couldn’t truly be it.

Passing intel to a surveillance target. It didn’t make sense that this included information from a foreign intelligence agent.

The National Security Agency, which cooperated closely with the Abas Information Agency, wouldn’t allow that. That would mean Sophia acted unilaterally, and the Sophia I knew was not that kind of troublemaker.

Then the answer implied that another intelligence agency leaked something to the alchemist.

Why was that?

“I see, I see….”

The alchemist sighed and lounged as if exhausted.

“What’s important to the Colonel isn’t that….”

“……”

Thud.

A brown envelope was tossed onto the table. Like a die.

“You need information on La Cardinal… Specifically, information on the offshore funds of the Magic Tower Oracle…”

“…Who told you that?”

“Um… A passing Alabastro dropped it off by your bedside…?”

I ignored the alchemist’s nonsense and opened the envelope. Inside were documents related to La Cardinal’s import and export activities. To be precise, it contained records of funds generated from smuggling goods into the Magic Tower using a shell company.

Accounting ledgers.

“……”

I absently pushed the papers aside with my finger, slipping into a momentary silence.

After a while, Francesca Ranieri tilted her head and spoke up.

“You’re not looking at it…? It’s a gift I prepared for you…”

“How am I supposed to know if this is a gift from you or just poison set to finish me off?”

“You haven’t even touched the punch I gave you…”

So what gives me the confidence to down whatever you serve me?

“Hmm…”

The alchemist slumped in defeat, resting her chin on her hand as she stared at me.

The way she was seated made it look as if she was looking up at me, but in reality, neither of us was looking down or up at the other.

We sat across from each other, equally.

“As I heard, you’re quite cautious…”

I wondered if her gaze was similarly matched.

The alchemist watched me with an amused smile, slowly examining my reaction. It felt as though she was a very discerning customer checking a product, which made me a bit uneasy.

“Let’s not waste our energy over nothing. Seems like you know everything already.”

“What do you mean…? That I’m the one filling the Oracle’s back pockets…?”

“……”

“Or that Colonel isn’t actually a diplomat or a hero’s companion, but a spy…?”

The alchemist’s eyes narrowed into a sly grin. In the depths of those violet eyes, an unfathomable abyss shimmered.

Is that abyss just a trick of the mind?

Probably not.

“If I’m a spy, and you spill that I’m really just a smuggler filling the Oracle’s back pockets, who do you think would die first?”

“I’d probably die first…? Colonel has a home to return to, but I have no such thing…”

A pretty honest answer.

So much so that I was left wondering if it was even a lie or her true feelings.

With a melancholic smile, the alchemist continued.

“The Oracle holds absolute power within the Magic Tower… And since the current head of the Magic Tower is an imperial citizen, supported politically from outside, it won’t be falling anytime soon…”

The alchemist began to list the domestic and foreign circumstances of the Magic Tower with that same mournful smile.

“The real issue is the economy… Corruption among the ruling class exists in both democratic and monarchic nations to some extent… There’s a self-correcting mechanism in place, so it’s not a huge risk, but not for the Magic Tower… Here, in the world of magic, it’s a different situation…”

“……”

“Of course, while those risks exist, corporations won’t easily withdraw their investments… The infrastructure and transportation networks are good, making it quite attractive for distributing goods to the Empire after ships… With many businesses set up here, they wouldn’t want to lose their investments…”

The alchemist spoke with unrestrained fluency.

“Other countries could impose economic sanctions on the Oracle, but no matter how much the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs try to restrict trade and commerce… the market doesn’t always align with government interests…”

“……”

“Economically, the Magic Tower won’t collapse, and politically, it’s likely the same…”

The alchemist had by now become the administrator of the Magic Tower Secretariat.

“So ultimately, it seems I’m the only one who dies hitting the dragon’s spine… Colonel, as mentioned earlier, will be well-protected by the country…”

And just like that, she reverted back to being an alchemist.

“…….”

Francesca Ranieri took a sip of the punch before her. Just like my grandfather used to drink soju straight from the glass without any snacks.

Saying it like this makes me sound old, but that crazy girl is still in her mid-twenties.

“……”

Now that I look at it, she’s quite perceptive. She knows her place.

So I ask this.

“Why did you choose this adventure knowing what you do?”

So what do you want me to do, damn it?

“If you want to commit suicide, go see a counselor or jump off a building. I don’t get why you’re sticking your neck out like this to invite death, especially after going through all the trouble to concoct this expensive punch.”

It was a suggestion to cut through the pretense and speak plainly.

I asked.

“What do you want?”

The administrator replied.

“Well…?”

“If you keep acting like this, I might really kill you.”

The alchemist stated.

“At times like this, isn’t it more appropriate to ask not what I want, but what I want to do…?”

I looked at the remaining alchemist’s punch and my untouched one.

Then I asked.

“What exactly do you want to do?”

*

It started to drizzle in the cloudy sky at 2:37 AM.

Someone knocked urgently on the door of the Magic Tower’s representative office run by Abas.

“Who is it?”

“Representative, this is Lieutenant Jake from the Defense Attaché Office.”

As soon as the representative’s permission to enter was granted from beyond the brown wooden door, Jake rushed into the representative’s office.

Then he turned around and shut the door behind him.

“Lieutenant Jake. What brings you here at this late hour?”

“I apologize for the late visit, Representative.”

After verifying that the section chief was missing while scanning all radars in the dead of night, Jake dashed to the representative office, wiping the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand as he prepared to convey his message.

“So, what’s going on?”

“Actually, Colonel Frederick has gone missing—”

He froze stiff.

“Excuse me?”

The one who was said to be missing waved his hand while casually sipping whiskey from the corner of the representative’s room.

What the hell just happened?

“What the hell?!”

In the moment Jake was left dumbfounded after a rough night, the Operative downed his whiskey and placed the glass on the representative’s desk, then walked over and draped an arm over his shoulder.

“I had a good time, Representative. Please send my regards to the administrator.”

“……”

“What are you doing? Let’s hurry up and go.”

The Operative casually left what seemed like a farewell and walked out of the room.

Snapping back to reality due to the representative’s clearing of his throat, Jake hurriedly dashed out and followed the Operative’s lead.

“Section Chief! Where the hell have you been?! Yes!?”

“Oh jeez. Hey, lower your voice. The neighborhood dogs are going to start barking.”

“Where have you been?!”

“I got kidnapped for a moment right here. Took a detour before coming back.”

“What?”

“I met with an informant and an accomplice, you idiot.”

The senior Operative clumped down the stairs while the junior Operative hurriedly followed and asked.

“Kidnapped? Where were you?! The staff is all in a panic looking for you at this early hour—”

“Can the staff contact you?”

“What?”

“I said can they contact you?”

“…Well, of course, they can.”

“Perfect. Gather the staff wherever they are, and bring the analysis team over to Agaro.”

What the hell is going on?

Jake regarded the Section Chief with disbelief.

“…Why?”

Why indeed.

“What’s there for spies to get together and do?”

 

---