Having already expected his outburst, Emilia wasn’t surprised at all. “Relax… It’s not like I’m asking you to take over the world or anything… Just make sure that the current government of Red Dusk loses their support, and a new one comes into power within the next thirty days, that’s it.”
Tom pointed a finger at his own face in disbelief. “I get what you’re saying, but… how am I supposed to get any of that done?!”
The crimson-haired girl blinked at him innocently. “I was told that you were an ambitious and powerful man, and someone with significant weight in Red Dusk. Did I… make a mistake?”
Looking at the girl’s slightly sullen expression, Tom suddenly felt his heart thump in terror. ‘No no, wait, this isn’t going how I wanted it to at all!’
Quickly readjusting his mind as best he could, the ex-chief intelligence officer coughed. “I-It’s not that I don’t want to or can’t do it, but it’s just… Right now, I have no way to know how many people on my side are still there, and how many have already been secretly weeded out by the president, you know?”
He couldn’t help but secretly breathe a sigh of relief when he saw the gorgeous girl looking convinced by his words. “I-I’ll do what I can, but I can’t promise how effective it will be, or how long it will take to really get the results you expect, so—”
Emilia snorted haughtily. “Don’t make me regret saving your life, mister. If it was easy, why would I bother keeping you alive?” She grinned. “If you really can’t get it done… no issue. I’ll just have to take what I want by force. It won’t be the first time, anyway.”
Tom almost coughed out a mouthful of blood in anger. ‘This overconfident bitch!’
Did she even know the consequences of declaring a war on Red Dusk now? Even if Blue Dawn could miraculously pull off a victory, it would be pyrrhic at best. It would be a wonder if the final victor didn’t get taken over by some other foreign power!
Unfortunately, no matter how against it he was, Tom was well aware that no matter what he said, the stubborn little girl in front of him would remain completely unaffected.
After all, with so many sycophants by her side, it was no surprise that her ego was already hundreds of times larger than her brain. And in the current position, he was probably no better than an insignificant peasant in Emilia’s eyes.
The greatest city in the world wasn’t built in a day, and Tom knew the importance of being patient and waiting for the right time. ‘If I want things to change… I will have to take things step by step.’
One day, this trove of treasure would be his, no matter what.
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After Tom was taken away, Sam couldn’t help but nudge her little sister curiously. “I do get what you’re planning on doing, but is that guy really reliable?”
Emilia turned to her with a confident grin. “Oh, don’t worry, despite how he looks, he does have enough connections to pull this kind of thing off. Not to mention, didn’t Noelle already arrange—”
The older girl sighed. “That’s not what I’m worried about, you know? What I was really wondering was… well, uh, his intentions…?”
Emilia blinked. “Ah…”
Turning to look at Crystal, who was guiltily avoiding looking into her eyes, she sighed. “I won’t deny it, but you have to understand that just because some people intend to harm me, doesn’t mean they have the ability to really do so.”
Naturally, with the heroine’s ability, it was impossible for them to not know that Tom had already guessed some of Emilia’s ‘talents’, nor were they oblivious to how he coveted her.
In fact, even without Crystal’s ability, with how hungrily he stared at her body, it would be impossible for them to miss what he really thought of her.
For a man in his position to not even realize how heated his gaze was, let alone keep it under control… clearly, his greed for their precious princess had already far exceeded any acceptable levels.
Emilia had initially only wanted to cozy up with all her darlings after dealing with ‘the pest’, so she couldn’t help but give Noelle a pleading look once she saw that Sam wasn’t quite convinced.
The gray-haired girl sighed. “Alright, I hate to say it, but Emilia isn’t being unreasonable here, no need to bully her. Before Tom leaves, we’ll definitely be taking enough precautions to make sure he can’t pull anything ‘strange’ off once he’s out of Blue Dawn, and Mindy is also going to be by his side just in case.”
Aside from Emilia, the others couldn’t help but be surprised.
”But didn’t Emilia send Mindy to school? I thought she didn’t want to be involved in this type of matter after her final mission was done?”
Of course, technically Mindy was already past the age for ‘schooling’, being twenty-three, but with the orders of the empress, starting a sped-up curriculum from elementary school was but a breeze.
Formal education may not work well for its intended purposes, but it did wonders when it came to instilling people with a sense of ‘normalcy’, which was exactly what someone taught to be a discardable experiment needed most. Or so they thought.
Noelle shrugged. “I guess she enjoys excitement?”
Inwardly, though, she couldn’t help but roll her eyes. ‘If I tell them that she was too obsessed with Emilia to really be able to stay away from ‘helping’ her when possible, wouldn’t she get even more smug?’
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The popularity of the current president of Red Dusk among both the people and the members of the parliament had already been on the decline ever since the attempted assassination.
Of course, this was mostly because of his perceived ‘mismanagement’ of the issue, and not because they thought of him as malicious. After all, with his image as an overly cautious and even somewhat cowardly leader, no one believed that he would be stupid or daring enough to pull something like this off.
That is to say, most people of Red Dusk still believed that their president was either being misunderstood or being framed. His greatest fault right now was merely ‘incompetence’, which many blamed him for, but it wasn’t really something they found unacceptable in their hearts.
Until Tom returned to the commonwealth, that is.
The return of the ‘captured traitor’ who took part in the assassination of the neighboring empire’s Empress was enough to set off a storm in the commonwealth that was almost bigger than the actual event itself, and most people couldn’t even believe it when they first heard it.
”Is this for real?! How does he have the guts to come back here?”
”No no, there’s no way he came back on his own. Wasn’t he captured? The empress of Blue Dawn must have sent him back!”
”But why? Shouldn’t he have punished him herself? Her personality couldn’t be THAT soft, right?”
”I have a crazy guess here, but… could she be sending him here to see how we deal with him?”
”You’re probably right?!”
”I say he be dealt with in the harshest way possible!”
Naturally, most people didn’t want conflict of too large a scale. They knew it would only hurt their interests, and hardly ever result in substantial benefits. No one wanted that.
As one of the main ‘culprits’ who almost plunged their lives into chaos, Tom was already hated by most people in the Commonwealth.
What shocked them, however, was that after he was ‘returned’ to be presumably disposed of, the political party opposing their current president actually took the initiative to shelter him.
”There is a lot more to this than most people think, and we intend to bring the truth to light!”
Slowly but surely, more and more ‘facts’ related to the assassination were revealed to the people of Red Dusk, and the entirety of the commonwealth was shocked to discover that Tom wasn’t a heinous traitor, but a hero!
That’s right, a hero!
”Is it true that the president was the one planning to kill the empress from the start?”
”Oh dear, how miserable must he have been to know that a war was ‘inevitable’, he knew about it in advance, but there was nothing he could do to stop it because no one would listen?!”
”But to think he would go so far as to sacrifice himself… what a man!”
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