“Why?! Why are you here?! Still, that doesn’t matter! There’s no way that Zeltoble’s underground merchant guild will allow this!”

“No, I’m afraid he’s not someone the merchant guild can lay a hand on. If you had actually watched the fight at the coliseum earlier, weapons merchant, I’m sure you would have realized that.”

He’d just shown up when something unexpected happened and improvised without having actually checked the situation himself and then ran off to confiscate the slaves.

“I represent my family when I say that we feel the recent issue at the underground coliseum was trivial, and we declare our opposition to the penalization of Rock Valley’s Party. Yes sir.”

“The accessory guild that I oversee declares its opposition, as well.”

“What? Why?!”

“Because while you were working behind the scenes to decide who would win the competition, we were working behind the scenes as well. Yes sir.”

“What are you implying?!”

“Let’s see . . . First, you make a nice profit off of the tournament . . . and then you take the brats that Nadia was harboring and throw them into the auctions at the peak of the price bubble to make a nice profit there, too. Does that sound about right? After figuring out a way to kill off Nadia, of course.”

“Sounds just about right to me. That’s why I was being extra careful, you know. That’s also why I used my underground connections to have the children’s slave curses removed,” Nadia chimed in.

Seriously? I could never quite understand what this woman was thinking. If she already knew what was going to happen, why hadn’t she tried a little bit harder to do something about it?!

“Now then, let’s talk business. Umm . . . weapons merchant, is it? We’re going to win the tournament after winning tomorrow’s match. The money that we’ll get from that is pretty much equal to Nadia’s debt. I’m going to use that money to buy Nadia’s freedom, so the Lurolona slaves that you and Nadia were holding on to become mine.”

“Hell no! Why would anyone give up a cash cow like that?! Do you have any idea how much those slaves are trading for right now?!”

Meh. I was fully aware that he wasn’t going to agree to my terms, of course.

“How the hell did you get those two on your side, anyways?!”

Oh yeah . . . I hadn’t introduced myself, now that I thought about it. I guess it would be difficult to figure out who I was, considering the company the slave trader kept, and the shenanigans of the accessory dealer, after all.

“Everyone at the coliseum has already figured out who Rock Valley’s Party really is, you know? Whether they’re the real thing or not is another thing, of course.”