Tingen City, 2 Daffodil Street.
The smell of newspaper ink mingled with the damp rising from the rain-soaked street, making the air somewhat acrid.
Klein tapped the front page of the Tingen Chronicle with his knuckles. Its headline was alarmingly large, printed in the kind of heavy black type the Loen Kingdom had only used when declaring war on the Feysac Empire.
The king's betrayal: A conspiracy against a national hero.
He read the newspaper three times over. He recognized every word, but put together, they gave him the impression of an absurdist play.
The king and the prime minister, two names at the very pinnacle of power, were now printed on cheap paper alongside two blurry photographs that resembled portraits of wanted criminals.
The reason was that they had envied a merchant's reputation, going so far as to sell state secrets and collude with foreign powers in an attempt to murder him.
This writing... was far too third-rate.
Klein took a sip of the black tea in his cup. It had already gone cold, and the bitterness of cheap tea leaves spread across the back of his tongue.
He recalled the encrypted intelligence circulated within the Nighthawks squad a few days earlier, two days after the attack on the docks.
Backlund's harbor had suffered a Beyonder attack and sustained heavy losses, but the specific details were vague.
Combined with the information about the king reported afterward, if there was nothing fishy behind all this, he, Klein Moretti, would eat his black top hat on the spot.
There was just one thing he could not understand.
If all of this had something to do with that mysterious fellow transmigrator of his, the man named Edwin Howard...
With evidence capable of sending the king straight to the chopping block in his