Little Tyrant Doesn’t Want to Meet with a Bad End
chapter-281

An hour later, in the Dancing Butterfly Museum.

Exuberant butterflies could be seen weaving in between flowers while red roses flaunted their beauty. Walking amidst this wondrous scenery with a staff in hand, Roel found himself once again impressed by Charlotte’s amazing sense of aesthetics.

The Dancing Butterfly Museum was a renowned picturesque spot in the Saint Freya Academy, located less than an hour’s walk away from the central district. It had always been adored by female students, but very rarely would a Ringbearer choose it as their base of operations.

Unlike Roel’s Azure Manor, it was simply too expensive to maintain the Dancing Butterfly Museum.

The exuberance of the butterflies were a result of their high standard of living, be it the mini butterfly houses constructed all around the place or the massive magic barrier that was constantly maintained over the garden in order to regulate the temperature.

The maintenance fee for the infrastructure was so high that even the funding a Ringbearer received from the academy wouldn’t be enough to pay it off. Heck, the Ringbearer would even have to fork out a large sum of money from their own pockets too!

Clearly, this was something impractical to most students.

But Charlotte happened to be an exception.

When she heard that the Dancing Butterfly Museum had Nightglow Butterflies, she immediately made up her mind and chose it as her base of operations. The staff members tried to talk her out of it—it was actually not in the list of available buildings for the Ringbearers to select from—but no one could stop her from having her way.

What could the academy do against the willfulness of their number one donor?

The rights to the Dancing Butterfly Museum were eventually given to Charlotte, and she spent a month renovating it. None of the members of the Redrose Faction had moved in yet, so the surroundings were still fairly peaceful.

Roel breathed in the fragrance of the flowers and admired the butterflies perching on his shoulders. Behind him, an auburn-haired woman was carefully examining a blood-red envelope.

“Darling, is this envelope the only possession of hers you have?”

“Yes, this is the only clue in my hands. Is it possible to do it?” asked Roel.

Charlotte pondered for a brief moment before responding with a slight nod.

“Mm. She didn’t use her name or leave any specific personal information behind, but she did cast a spell on the envelope. That fulfills the conditions for some of my divination spells. However, you should know that the less demanding the conditions for the spell are, the more vague the results will be.”

“That’s fine. I just need a rough scope to work with,” replied Roel.

As he spoke, he took out a map of the Saint Freya Academy and laid it on the table. Charlotte directed a nod at him before taking out an old gold coin from the Austine Empire and walking up to the table.

“Using a gold coin minted several centuries ago in the Austine Empire should increase the accuracy of the divination a little. The rest depends on the mana trace she has left on the envelope,” explained Charlotte.

Soon, an intense mana pulsation began to ripple from her. The bloodline she had inherited from a lineage that traced back to the ancient era surged through her body as a starry sky formed behind her. The golden avatar of an ancient god holding a staff in one hand and a balance in the other manifested amidst the starry sky.

It was the Arbiter of Fate.

Ding.

Light gathered in Charlotte’s hand, and she flicked the dark golden coin into the air. It spun in an arc and fell onto the map on the table, where it continued to wobble a bit before finally toppling over. Where the coin landed was the result of the divination.

“That place is…”

Charlotte retracted her mana, and the golden avatar looming over her also dissipated into thin air. She walked up to the map and took a closer look. The coin was sitting on top of a residential dormitory located in the central district.

“This is the newly-built Third Residential Sector which provides single accommodations. Its proximity to the commercial street makes it a bit more expensive than the First Residential Sector, so it’s usually resided by the wealthier nobles, especially women,” said Roel as he recalled the information he had read on the academy’s blueprint a while back.

He walked up to the table and gently lifted the coin up, revealing the southwestern dormitories in the Third Residential Sector. His hanging heart finally settled down.

“Darling, is this really alright? If it’s a dormitory, there would be a lot of people there…”

“Don’t worry, this is enough.”

The Third Residential Sector was intended to cater to the wealthy students, so there were only five floors in each apartment and two residents on each floor. All in all, there were probably around a hundred students in its southwestern dormitories.

Among these hundred students, there couldn’t possibly be a second female student from the Austine Empire who happened to be skilled in conversion-type spells and had a close relationship with Cheryl.

As long as Roel was able to verify the identity of the blood envelope’s sender, finding her was no problem at all. He no longer had to move alone now that he had the backing of the Request Club and the Bluerose Faction.

I’ll definitely save the sender and apprehend those evil cultists!

Roel tapped his finger on the table as he affirmed his determination.

…

That evening, Roel walked silently under the orange afterglow of the setting sun under the accompaniment of his lonesome shadow.

After receiving the divination on the sender’s location from Charlotte, Roel immediately dispatched all members of the Bluerose Faction to conduct a secret investigation on the residents living in the area. So far, the members had already managed to cover half of the target group, and he should be able to get the results by tomorrow.

In the game’s plotline, the sender only met with her demise several days after sending out the letter, so there should be enough time for the Request Club to maneuver around. Thanks to that, Roel wasn’t too anxious about the matter.

He chose to put Paul in charge of the investigation, trusting the original protagonist to do it well. He wasn’t dumping the responsibility on others so that he could slack off, but that there was a net he had to start weaving.

Be it the teacher who picked out vulnerable graduate students or the evil cultists who experimented on them, what they did was unforgivable. Many had already fallen to their insidious schemes, and Roel felt that the least they could do for them was to avenge them.

It was just that there were many things he had to do in order to build a net tight enough to snag the evil cultists.

The first issue was the location. There was very little detail in Eyes of the Chronicler about the location where the evil cultists were residing other than the fact that it was a wine cellar in the mountain, and that was as good as knowing nothing at all.

The Saint Freya Academy was simply too huge, such that the areas outside of the central district were mostly mountainous areas. There was also no elaboration on whether the wine cellar was a public property or a private property. If it was a private wine cellar, it wouldn’t be listed in the records.

At this rate, he really might have to knock on every private household residing in the mountains of the Saint Freya Academy and ask to look at their wine cellar.

And that posed yet another problem—the evil cultists were no fools either.

If Roel started dispatching an army to comb through the mountains, they would surely start taking countermeasures and preparing for their escape. In the game, the evil cultists had already noticed that things were amiss the first time Paul and his team searched the forest for Cheryl, and that was why they were able to make a getaway ahead of time.

It was clear that those criminals were no amateurs. They were constantly on their guard and would move without hesitation. He couldn’t afford to have anyone prying carelessly around lest they alarmed them. So, he could only look for clues himself.

He did have a lead in hand at the moment—the coachmen.

As Roel walked with Cheryl’s portrait in hand, he felt something weighing down heavily on his heart. Perhaps, he might have been able to stop the tragedy that had befallen Cheryl had he recalled it earlier, but his memories about the game had long faded with time. Even for this ‘Blood Envelope Incident’, he only remembered it upon receiving the blood envelope, and he had to rack his head for a long time in order to recall some of the key details. Even so, much of what he remembered was still fuzzy and uncertain.

Under the clandestine operation of Geralt and a few other trusted students, the Request Club managed to find the coachman who had an impression of Cheryl earlier in the afternoon. After hearing the news, Roel decisively made the call to summon all of the coachmen who had been questioned over to the Azure Manor.

“The Azure Manor wishes to build an outdoor swimming pool. I’ll have to trouble all of you to transport rocks and soil here. We’ll be paying you two times your usual salary,” said Roel.

He wanted to keep the coachmen here lest the news about the Request Club looking for Cheryl started spreading. After that, he headed to the National Athenaeum of Wisdom to look for Margaret.

As an artificial spirit working in the academy, Margaret had comprehensive knowledge about all of the buildings in the academy. Roel quickly listed out the conditions for the location he was looking for, and it didn’t take long for him to receive an answer.

It was a mountainous area just slightly behind a carriage stop known as Fultes Stop, and it was known for its grove of fruit trees. Many nobles had constructed residences in the area a hundred years ago, back when there still was a craze for self-brewed wine, so most of them came with underground wine cellars too.

There were over thirty suspects in total, but after filtering out those with smaller wine cellars and residences that were located too close to the main road, the list of options were further narrowed down to three.

Of those three, one could be eliminated as it was a renowned haunted house amongst the student populace due to the murder case that had happened there a hundred years ago. While the academy barred the students from entering the residence, there would still be some who would sneak there in the middle of the night for the thrills.

It would probably have been more thrilling for them if they had known that true horror was not too far away from them. In a sense, it wasn’t wrong to say that they had a close brush with death though they would never come to know of it.

With this, Roel finally managed to narrow down the possible hideouts of the evil cultists to two locations—Louise Manor and Wil’s Apple Cider Factory.

Having deduced the potential enemy hideouts, it was time for him to turn his attention to the next problem—the manpower he would be using for the raid.

First and foremost, he had already decided that he wouldn’t use any outside powers in this operation.

Leinster had accumulated filth for far too long that the evil cultists had a strong foothold in the city. They might look subdued on the surface, but their intelligence network was not to be scoffed at. If Roel were to engage an external party in the raid, the evil cult could catch wind of the news through its sources and quickly make its getaway.

The same problem applied to the academy’s Emergency Rescue Team too.

The fact that one of the main culprits was a teacher in the academy meant that he couldn’t carelessly approach any internal organizations for help either.

Taking several factors into consideration, he eventually came to a decision.

Walking along the street lamps, the black-haired young man finally arrived at an exquisite palace. The sun had yet to fully set, and there were many people walking to and fro the open doors of the palace. The place was guarded by members of the Enforcement Division.

Naturally, they were all shocked to see Roel.

“That’s the First Grade’s…”

“What’s he doing here? Not to mention, he’s all alone!”

Hostile glares came from all directions, but Roel remained unfazed. A while later, a female student from the Enforcement Division walked up to him and asked with a polite but stern tone.

“I am a team leader in the Enforcement Division, Carolyn. May I know what business do you have with us, Bluerose Ringbearer?”

“You need not be so guarded against me, Carolyn. I don’t have any hostile intentions,” replied Roel with a brilliant smile to the taller woman standing before him.

“I’m here to have a cup of tea with my senior.”