“Baby! Please!”
Oh, for—this is going to drive me absolutely mad.
‘She was always so well-behaved—why is she acting like this all of a sudden!’
“Kyaang—!”
Without warning, baby had bolted clean across the garden—and cleared the white fence entirely.
“Baby!”
I cleared the fence after her in a neat frog-jump and stood there with my mouth agape.
Baby was leaving the Queen Consort’s palace entirely.
‘No!’
Once outside the Queen Consort’s palace, I would genuinely have to conceal myself on the way. Not that it would be especially difficult—but I did have a conscience.
‘The whole reason I’m here in the first place is because of baby. If something goes wrong, it all falls on me.’
If baby caused an incident—my fault. My mistake.
If I made mistakes, Knox would scold me.
And that would travel straight back to Father.
And then Calypse would say:
‘Didn’t I tell you it was dangerous? You’re confined to quarters until further notice.’
“He’s never actually said that to me—!”
Calypse had never once said any such thing, but most of the reckless little children in the novels I had read had been put on house arrest by their parents at least once.
The thought was horrifying. I felt my cheeks tremble.
No.
I was the perfect golden daughter. From this moment forward—Spy Mode, fully engaged.
I raised my small hamster-blade of a hand and targeted the retreating baby.
Current distance between baby and myself.
There was no way I could catch her immediately.
In that case—
‘I’ll have to shadow her without being seen and wait for the right moment to pounce.’
Right. Let’s go.
Swift in strategy. Cold in execution.
Whoosh—
I scanned my surroundings.
From here onward was the sloping stretch of ground connecting the Queen Consort’s palace to the main palace. Small mercies—baby had chosen a secluded, out-of-the-way path rather than the main promenade.
I trotted after her, and before long the rear face of the great main palace came into view.
‘Baby. Please.’
Please don’t go into the palace. Please veer off into the forest behind it.
I prayed with everything I had—baby sniffed at the air, nose twitching busily, wrinkling—
And walked directly away from everything I had hoped for. She slipped, undetected by the gate-knights, through a rear door left slightly ajar.
“…Ha.”
Crouching behind a nearby tree, I stared after her with the expression of someone confronting total ruin.
Baby—why, of all possible places, did it have to be the main palace?
The servants’ quarters. The kitchens. The indoor garden. The ballroom. There were so many genuinely interesting places to be. Why here?
Sweat was forming in my eyes.
‘Father—is this what raising me was like for you?’
It hadn’t been so very long since we’d been together—but in that moment, a surge of wordless, bottomless gratitude washed over me for Calypse, who had taken me in.
Regardless—I had to see what that little devil. I mean, that little devil of a kitten was doing.
I circled to the corner of the palace wall and scaled it with a careful, inch-by-inch crawl.
And then—one cockroach, pressed absolutely flat against the ceiling above the rear entrance.
If any of the knights thought to look up, I would be seen immediately.
But—
Thwip—
I flung a pebble I had pocketed earlier toward the far opposite side.
“What was that?”
The knights, mid-yawn, scowled and wandered toward the trees.
Thud—
I dropped silently through the gap, confirmed the corridor was empty, and stepped down from the wall to stand on solid ground.
“Ba-by.”
“Mya~?”
I called it in a low warning tone, and baby—who had been flicking her tail with leisurely satisfaction—turned to look at me.
In those perfectly ordinary-looking brown eyes, mischief ran like a clear current.
Approximately ten minutes later.
“That little—that cat.”
At the end of a rather vigorous chase, baby’s title had undergone certain revisions.
Whether I was upset about it or not was entirely beside the point—baby had spent ten whole minutes trotting up and down staircases with boundless enthusiasm, and her final destination was none other than—
The king’s private reception room.
‘If I’m discovered, I’m finished.’
Up above. Where a ventilation shaft connected to the ceiling.
I swallowed a thick lump of dread and looked down at the cat below me, feeling my mind go completely, searingly white.
Baby—why, in all of creation, did you choose His Majesty the King’s reception room?
The servants’ quarters. The kitchens. The indoor garden. The ballroom. There were so many genuinely interesting places to be—why. Why here.
Sweat was forming in my eyes again.
‘Father—is this truly what raising me has been like for you?’
It hadn’t been that long since we’d been together—but in that moment I felt an overwhelming and wordless gratitude toward Calypse, who had taken me in and loved me anyway.
In any case—I had to see what that little devil—I mean, that little devil of a kitten—was actually doing.
Peek—
I pressed one eye carefully to the gap in the ceiling at an angle.
Baby was sitting in the shadowed corner of the room.
‘There is a cat right there—why is no one noticing?’
Of course they weren’t noticing. The reception room was enormous as a courtyard, and that little creature was still a baby.
The room was quiet. And baby was watching something.
‘…What?’
Following baby’s gaze—
I spotted a sofa and a low table set in the center of the room.
And on the sofa—a grey head and a brown head.
Viewed from the ceiling, it was impossible to make out faces with any clarity—but the grey head almost certainly belonged to the king.
And then.
“Shall we not begin to assess its efficacy, Your Majesty?”
A flinch ran through me.
A familiar voice sent a small tremor through my small hands.
‘Could it be—’
My heart hammered with premonition. The grey head crossed one leg over the other and spoke.
“What is the current situation? Has the madness-amplification compound been released throughout House Krost’s territory?”
Madness-amplification compound? House Krost’s territory?
My brow furrowed deeply.
Why were House Krost’s territories and the madness-amplification compound being spoken of together—and why were Duke Foss and the king sitting side by side here in private?
That Duke Foss and Calypse despised one another was common knowledge even to passing dogs on the street. The king would know better than anyone that he needed to tread with extreme care between those two.
And yet—the king, fueled by jealousy of Calypse who was hailed as the kingdom’s greatest hero, had been conducting secret dealings with Duke Foss.
Oh—and for reference, all of this was exactly what had been written in the original story.
What I could not understand was the timing. It was far, far too early.
‘So it really is true—saving Lucas changed the flow of the original story.’
In the original, the madness-amplification compound had been developed by House Foss when the male lead was approximately eight years old.
‘The male lead should only be seven years old right now…’
Most likely, my confrontation with Marchioness Lilis at the succession trials had set something loose prematurely.
‘Marchioness Lilis must have used a compound that was still in development—and it must have worked far better than anyone expected.’
Damn it all.
‘The things I do are reshaping the world around me like this.’
Calypse and Lucas were almost certainly fighting on the front lines in the north right now.
‘Because of me… my family is in danger.’
The small, round hand pressed flat against the floor trembled faintly.
There was nothing I could do for them right now.
I wanted to hold on—but the sand was streaming through my fingers whether I willed it to stop or not.
Meanwhile, Duke Foss continued to speak—perfectly calm, knowing precisely the nature of what he was doing, and caring not at all.
“If the madness-amplification compound has proven effective, we will begin full-scale black-market distribution. The current situation in the north is one we engineered ourselves, but…”
Duke Foss paused for just a moment.
And then the corner of his mouth split open in a grotesque smile.
“Once the compound begins spreading through black-market channels at random—tracing its source will become very, very difficult.”
“But—are there truly people out there who would want to drive Creatures into a state of madness?”
“Does Your Majesty not know the answer to that better than I do?”
“…Ahem!”
At the duke’s pointed question, the king cleared his throat elaborately, as though he had no idea what was being implied.
The northern nobility, who knew firsthand what Creatures were, understood their danger intimately. But nobles from other regions had no real conception of them whatsoever. Which had led to a quiet trend among upper-tier nobles—keeping small, oddly adorable-looking Creatures as exotic pets. A practice quietly flourishing in dark and secret corners.
I had known about that from reading the original story too, and actually, come to think of—
Thud.
In the middle of following that thought to its end, something struck me at the back of the neck without a sound, and my vision went dark.
* * *
At that hour.
“……”
The gaze of the cat, crouched motionless in the shadows, lifted toward the ceiling where the presence had just vanished.
Now was the moment.
