Cid felt like something was off.
He lifted his coffee and took a sip, discreetly glancing at the cute girl in front of him as she happily enjoyed her coffee and chocolate. A strange sense of unease lingered in the back of his mind.
He had definitely forgotten something.
Otherwise, there was no reason for things to feel this strange. Of course, if he could forget it, then it probably wasn't that important to begin with.
But what exactly had he forgotten?
"Hey, Cid-kun, I didn't know you were this trendy. You already bought something that just came out? And what's this, a limited-edition clock?"
What clock???
Kanade's voice reached his ears, but Cid couldn't quite understand what she meant.
What limited-edition clock?
Did he look like the kind of sucker who would waste money on limited editions?
Puzzled, Cid looked toward the source of her voice.
Kanade was standing beside his desk, staring at the small clock with forty divisions sitting on top of it, along with the limited-edition fountain pen made of solid gold that he had picked up from a mansion last night.
"...Oh. That."
Cid fell silent for several seconds, then took another sip of coffee and finally realized what he had forgotten.
He had neglected to put away both his collection and the loot he picked up last night.
How careless of him.
Cid nodded thoughtfully, silently set down his cup, and rose to walk toward Kanade. One hand remained behind his back, fingers loosely curled as slime emerged and formed a crowbar in his grasp.
"Yeah. Those cost me quite a fortune."
As if. I found them.
To keep those useless guards from tracing this back to me, I'm afraid you'll have to be sacrificed, Kanade.
I'll treasure the brief and precious friendship we shared.
With that thought, Cid stepped behind Kanade and began searching for the ideal angle.
"Well, I think you might've gotten scammed, Cid-kun."
Just as he was about to swing, Kanade's confident voice reached his ears.
Cid immediately stopped.
"What do you mean?"
The crowbar vanished from his hand in an instant.
Cid stepped forward and looked at Kanade with genuine confusion.
"Heh heh. Cid-kun, I might not personally use these things much, but I've seen plenty of people who do. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that this fountain pen is fake."
"That shouldn't be right. It looks pretty expensive..."
Cid stared suspiciously at the golden fountain pen.
After searching that entire mansion, this was one of the most valuable things he had managed to find.
Its artistic design and brilliant golden sheen practically screamed that it was a luxury item of the highest quality.
He still couldn't understand how such a massive mansion had contained only two or three genuinely valuable objects.
Did the owner only live there once every few years?
The carpets and paintings had all been ruined by blood, leaving almost nothing valuable that could actually be carried away.
And that guy called himself a marquis?
What a joke.
"Hmph. That just shows how inexperienced you are. Look, Cid-kun. There isn't a single Mitsugoshi Company mark anywhere on this fountain pen. With Mitsugoshi Company currently dominating commerce across the various nations, the lack of their mark alone is enough to prove it's fake. The weight is wrong too. Compared to the solid-gold fountain pen I once handled at the home of a certain important person, this one is much heavier..."
As she spoke, Kanade picked up the fountain pen, weighed it in her hand, then passed it back to Cid.
"Oh. I see..."
Cid immediately calmed down.
He weighed the pen in his hand.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with it.
The problem was Kanade.
He could tell with certainty that the pen in his hand was solid gold. Its weight matched his calculations perfectly.
In other words, the one Kanade had encountered before was the fake.
Realizing this, Cid looked at her with a hint of pity.
How tragic.
She took such pride in her worldly knowledge, only for that knowledge to have been built on a fake.
As for whether his pen was officially licensed or some kind of counterfeit, Cid couldn't care less.
Gold was gold.
He had always thought so-called limited editions were just another way to trick people into spending money anyway.
"Wait. What about that limited-edition clock you mentioned?"
Cid casually changed the subject.
He had suddenly become curious about why Kanade showed so little interest in the clock.
Not to brag, but that thing had nearly destroyed the world only a few days ago.
Now she was standing in front of an identical clock, yet her reaction was this mild.
Cid felt a little hurt.
"Oh, that? That's fake too."
Kanade glanced casually at the antique-looking clock beside her.
???
"Fake?!"
Cid shouted instinctively.
For a moment, it felt as though his brain had completely crashed.
What did she mean, fake?
What was fake?
This was a top-tier collectible he had stolen directly from the Throne Angel. All it took was moving through seven divisions to destroy the entire world.
Kanade being fake was more believable than this clock being fake.
"Yeah, it's fake. Look. Just like the fountain pen, there's no Mitsugoshi Company mark anywhere on it..."
Kanade casually picked up the clock, pressed down on its back casing, and turned it around to show Cid.
But Cid was no longer paying attention to that.
Something else had caught his attention.
"What do you mean it doesn't have a Mitsugoshi Company mark? Is it supposed to have one?"
Cid sucked in a sharp breath and exclaimed before he could stop himself.
"Eh? Cid-kun, you seriously don't know?"
"Am I supposed to?"
Cid smiled without any warmth.
He wasn't stupid.
From what Kanade had said, he had already thought of one possibility.
Now he was simply confirming it.
"Cid-kun, you're really strange. You bought a counterfeit version of Mitsugoshi Company's God of Magic Commemorative Edition Clock, but you don't even know the original exists..."
Kanade looked at him with disdain, proudly puffing out her chest as she showed off her rather shallow knowledge.
"The God of Magic Commemorative Edition Clock is exactly what the name suggests. Netheril and Mitsugoshi Company jointly released it to commemorate the Lord of Netheril saving the world. Officially, there's nothing special about it. It's just a commemorative model. But apparently, there's a rumor that keeping one at home can improve a child's Magical Power affinity..."
Cid stopped listening halfway through.
The moment he realized there were now countless clocks throughout the world identical to his precious top-tier collectible, his vision went dark.
Even worse, somehow the situation had been completely reversed.
His genuine article had become the "counterfeit," while piles of so-called authentic versions were being bought and displayed in people's homes.
He nearly fainted on the spot.
"Then I suppose... not many people are buying them, right? After all, the original nearly destroyed the world, and having forty divisions clashes with the current twenty-four-hour system, doesn't it?"
Cid asked cautiously.
If there weren't many in circulation, he might still be able to spend money to buy all of them back and destroy them.
Some objects were valuable precisely because they were unique.
He had to preserve the uniqueness of the one in his possession.
"What are you talking about, Cid-kun? The fact that the original nearly destroyed the world is exactly why so many people want one. Add in the rumor about improving Magical Power affinity, and even though they're ridiculously expensive, they still sell tons of them every day. That must be an unbelievable amount of money. I'm so jealous..."
By the end, Kanade sounded openly envious.
Cid, meanwhile, was practically on the verge of losing consciousness.
For the record, the clock in Cid's possession was nothing more than a remote control.
Aside from restarting the world, it had no other function whatsoever.
In other words, as long as no one moved its hand, the supposedly world-ending clock looked completely ordinary from the outside, aside from its unusual forty divisions.
Originally, Cid had never needed to worry about people failing to recognize it.
He was certain that there was only one clock this distinctive in the entire world. Anyone who had ever seen it would remember it.
That meant he only needed to casually reveal it at the right moment for everyone to understand just how impressive it was.
But now there was a problem.
Without actually moving its hand, Cid had absolutely no way of proving that his was the genuine article.
If anything, because the original was naturally crude in its construction, his version actually looked more like a cheap counterfeit compared to the reproductions.
And if no one could recognize a top-tier collectible, what was the point of collecting it?
To destroy the world with it?
That damn Gamma!
He was going to faint from anger!
"What's wrong, Cid-kun? Why did you suddenly collapse like that?"
Kanade tilted her head in confusion as she looked at Cid lying on the floor, clutching his chest.
"Nothing. I just suddenly realized that damn counterfeiters deserve horrible deaths."
"Ah. That really is rough..."
Kanade looked at him sympathetically.
Naturally, she assumed Cid was venting his hatred toward whoever had sold him a counterfeit.
"Cheer up. Getting upset won't help anything. Why don't you introduce me to that friend of yours first? Maybe they can figure out a way to get back the money you were scammed out of..."
"Seriously?"
"Counterfeits are cheap. I want one too."
"Hah."
Cid let out a disdainful snort.
He immediately dropped the act, stood up, and brushed off his clothes.
"Let's talk about why you're actually here. What do you want? Don't tell me Christina gave you my address just so you could come over and freeload on my snacks."
Cid had obviously never told Kanade where he lived.
The only way she could possibly have found this place was through Christina.
And Cid seriously doubted Christina had gone out of her way to give Kanade his address purely so she could come here for free food.
"Nothing major. Christina-sama just asked me to tell you to come to a meeting at noon so we could discuss how to find the missing subjects."
"When?"
Cid blinked.
He looked at Kanade, who was still sitting there as casually as ever.
Then he looked out the window at the sun, which had already passed its highest point and begun drifting westward.
He instinctively asked the question again.
"At noon..."
Kanade froze with the coffee cup halfway to her lips.
She slowly turned her gaze toward the sun.
Then she pulled out her phone and checked the time.
Her expression changed instantly.
"This is all your fault, Cid-kun!"
"My fault?"
"Of course! If you hadn't slept until the sun was already high in the sky, I wouldn't have needed to wait outside for you, and then I wouldn't have ended up sitting here having afternoon tea afterward!"
"How did you manage to blame that on me?! You unreasonable, barbaric woman!"
"Hah? And here I was kind enough to comfort you. You're the one with terrible character and not a shred of manly responsibility, Cid-kun!"
...
By the time Cid and Kanade hurried to the building Christina had brought him to the previous day, the entire place had already been sealed off.
...???
"What happened here, Cid-kun?"
Kanade stared blankly at the building ahead, which had been cordoned off by the Royal Capital Guard.
Then she turned to Cid, who looked every bit as confused as she was.
"Why are you asking me? Who am I supposed to ask? Let's find Christina-san first."
Cid narrowed his eyes in confusion.
He admitted that the commotion he caused last night had been a little excessive.
But no matter how far things had gone, there was no reason their "unbreakable" alliance headquarters should have been sealed off because of it.
At least on the surface, last night's events had absolutely nothing to do with them.
Fortunately, Cid quickly noticed Christina standing near a wall off to the side, staring at their sealed headquarters with an extremely grim expression.
"Ah, Cid, Kanade. You're finally here. I was starting to worry that something had happened to you two as well."
The moment Christina noticed them, a faint smile appeared on her beautiful face, and some of the tension left her body.
"Good afternoon, Christina-sama. I never imagined you cared this deeply about me. I'm truly moved. Don't worry, Christina-sama. Even though Cid-kun was incredibly rude and delayed us again and again, I still managed to bring him here."
I was wrong about you, Kanade.
Cid shot her a contemptuous look.
It was clearly this shameless woman who had wasted time and made them late, yet she had somehow dumped all the blame onto him without hesitation.
She really had no shame at all.
He would definitely get her back when the opportunity arose.
"Kanade, you don't have to make it sound so dramatic. Your safety matters more than anything else..."
Christina broke out in a cold sweat as she listened to Kanade's shameless flattery, then turned toward Cid.
"Good afternoon, Christina-sama. But when you said 'as well' just now, what did you mean?"
Cid had noticed something odd in Christina's wording.
It made sense for her to worry something had happened to them because they were late.
But adding "as well" implied that something had already happened to someone else.
When Cid brought it up, Christina's gentle expression stiffened slightly.
After a moment, she exhaled and pointed toward what had been their headquarters.
"Someone infiltrated this place last night and did something that caused the Royal Capital Guard to seal off our headquarters."
"What did they do?"
"They killed one of the members of our alliance and hung the body from the entrance..."
Cid noticed that Christina clenched her teeth as she spoke, forcing the words out one by one.
"Wait. Christina-sama, are you saying...?"
Kanade, who had been busy flattering Christina a moment ago, finally seemed to understand what was happening.
Her eyes widened as she stared at Christina in disbelief.
"Yes. If I'm right, this was probably a warning from them. A warning telling us not to investigate any further."
Christina looked at Kanade and nodded dejectedly.
Then anger rose through her voice.
"How dare they?!"
Even Christina herself could barely believe it.
How could the [Thirteen Nightblades] dare go this far?
This was the Royal Capital of Midgar.
Behind their alliance stood almost every noble family whose territory had been affected by these disappearances.
How could the [Thirteen Nightblades] dare murder someone so openly?