574
That night, Ms. D finished dinner, said goodbye to her business partners, and left the mansion surrounded by maids, taking a carriage to the inn she had booked for the night.
She had originally established partnerships with certain local organizations as a great noble from Intis on the Northern Continent. Now that the city was beginning to lean toward the Balam Empire, she naturally could no longer openly stay in the mansion. Although she was also a member of the Aurora Order, with so many eyes aware of her noble identity watching her, failing to take even a few precautions would still cause trouble for her partners.
She had already used her connections to reserve the inn's best suite-roughly equivalent to an upper-midrange room on the Northern Continent. After all, the price spoke for itself: just one pound a night.
The ordinary rooms, meanwhile, often contained nothing but moldy bedding, pillows and mattresses stuffed with straw, and old, broken furniture.
After settling the carriage and horses and waiting in the inn's lobby for a while, Ms. D's spiritual intuition stirred slightly. She saw two figures slowly approaching from the far end of the dim street.
"...Mr. X."
Ms. D stood up and called out his title with some hesitation. "Sorry, you don't look very well."
Not merely unwell-he looked terrible!
The man before her now, with his haggard face, vacant expression, and strange stains on the corners of his clothes, was utterly different from the Mr. X she remembered. What was more, beside him stood Enzo, a marionette who was plainly from the Northern Continent, making this "Marionettist" look as though he had truly become a Northern Continent man's Southern Continent attendant!
"..."
Mr. X did not answer.
Ms. D hesitated, then remained silent until he walked up to