REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!Chapter 75: The Cipher
"You must be Tina." Lucian addressed her with his characteristic easy smile. "Lakyus mentions you often."
Tina's voice came out entirely flat, without any particular emotion in it.
But the impact it had on Lucian was not small.
"Ghost Boss's older brother... what a shame."
Lucian blinked.
"Pardon?"
"Too late to meet you."
Her delivery was completely deadpan, but something was shining in those eyes. She leaned forward slightly, as though examining a rare piece she had found past its ideal condition.
"If it had been a few years earlier, you would have been absolutely adorable. As things stand now..." She tilted her head slightly. "What a waste."
Lucian's thoughts came to a brief halt.
Right. He remembered now. This one was a shotacon.
What exactly is Blue Roses made of? he thought.
A chuunibyou captain, a muscle-bound warrior, a nation-destroying vampire loli, a shotacon ninja, and a ninja professor. That this team functioned at all was, in some sense, a genuine miracle.
He hadn't worked out what to say to that when two voices came almost simultaneously.
"Tina."
Lakyus's voice dropped slightly below its usual register.
She turned her head toward Tina, a smile still on her face. But in those pale green eyes, there was no trace of a smile anywhere.
"What exactly are you looking at?"
Tina turned and met Lakyus's gaze.
That flat face showed no change in expression. But Lucian noticed her body shift very slightly backward — the instinctive retreat of something that had registered a threat.
How much does she actually fear Lakyus? Lucian found himself genuinely impressed that his idiot little sister could project this level of presence.
"...Nothing, Ghost Boss. Just looking around."
"Is that so."
Lakyus's smile didn't shift. Neither did her gaze.
Tina looked away.
She picked up her teacup, lowered her head, and drank, no longer looking at Lucian.
Watching this unfold, Lucian felt something unexpectedly warm move through him.
Lakyus complained about him constantly these days. But when it counted, she still had his back.
"What's going on?"
Renner's voice came from his right.
Lucian looked over and found her head tilted slightly, those deep blue eyes full of curiosity.
Her gaze moved between Lakyus and Tina before settling on Lakyus.
"Lakyus, what did Tina mean just now? What does 'too late to meet him' mean?"
Her tone was perfectly simple, a curious child asking an unremarkable question.
But Lucian could see clearly that the corner of her mouth was curved just slightly, a trace of mischief concealed in the angle.
She understood perfectly well.
Lakyus's smile froze for an instant.
"It's nothing, Renner." Her voice came back to normal, but the tips of her ears had flushed the faintest shade of pink. "Tina was talking nonsense. Weren't you, Tina?"
She looked back at Tina. The warning in her gaze was considerably sharper than before.
Tina lifted her teacup. Her head didn't come up.
"...Right. Talking nonsense."
Her delivery was as flat as someone being made to recite lines under duress.
Renner laughed — a clear, pleasant sound, like wind chimes touched by a light breeze.
She didn't press further. She simply lifted her teacup and took a small, unhurried sip.
Lakyus set her teacup down with a soft click. The sound was restrained, but it pulled everyone's attention back precisely where it needed to be.
"Right. Down to business."
Her voice shifted into the crisp efficiency of a team captain. She turned toward Renner.
"Regarding Eight Fingers: we raided three villages that were cultivating drugs and burned the fields entirely."
Here Lakyus paused and turned to look at Lucian.
"You received my letter, didn't you? All the details were in there."
Under that mildly scrutinizing look, Lucian nodded quickly.
"Then I won't repeat it." Lakyus reached into a bag Tina had brought and took out a rolled parchment, spreading it across the table.
"We found this during the burn. The symbols are unreadable — some kind of written directive, I suspect. Renner, can you make anything of it?"
Lucian's gaze settled on the parchment.
Dense symbols covered the yellowed surface — not the writing system of any country he could identify. The arrangement looked almost random at first glance, but certain patterns repeated at notable frequency. An underlying logic was faintly visible.
Substitution cipher.
He had the identification before he finished looking. He had encountered similar puzzles in YGGDRASIL before the transmigration, and after arriving in the New World he had studied the cryptography of this era specifically — in preparation for the possibility of intelligence work.
The symbols on this parchment were numerous, but the encryption was not especially sophisticated.
Lucian said nothing. Renner could crack this effortlessly. And he had no desire to give her any further reasons to find him interesting.
"It's a substitution cipher."
Renner glanced at it once and delivered her conclusion as though commenting on the weather.
Then she rose, collected paper and a writing instrument, returned to her seat, and began working.
Sunlight fell across Renner's golden hair, setting that sweep of gold ablaze. Her refined profile caught the light at an angle that made it look almost translucent — the quality of something meticulously crafted.
Lucian's gaze rested on that profile for a moment.
If you only considered the surface, it wasn't bad at all. Shame about the soul underneath.
He was still thinking this when a sharp pain struck his foot.
Heavier than the punch from before.
Lucian drew a quiet breath and turned to look at Lakyus beside him.
Lakyus was sitting in perfect posture, sipping her tea with composed elegance. Noticing his gaze, she turned her head slightly and gave him an entirely innocent look.
...Fine.
Lucian returned his attention to the table and decided not to pursue the matter with his sister.
"It's a simple cipher — one character per symbol, so perfectly straightforward to decode." Renner's voice resumed, her pen moving smoothly across the paper.
"And we're fortunate that it uses the Kingdom's language. If the substitution table had been built around Empire-language text or something similar, it would be nearly impossible to crack. This one, though — you only need to work out a single letter, and from there you fill in the rest. With enough effort, anyone could manage it."
She said it as though it genuinely were that simple.
A complicated expression moved across Lakyus's face. Admiration, exasperation, and a faint undercurrent of unease, all at once.
"I wouldn't call it simple. You'd need to know tens of thousands of words just to get started, wouldn't you?"
"This is a written directive encoded in cipher. It wouldn't be written with elaborate phrasing, and it almost certainly wouldn't use unusual vocabulary. Something like this would be drafted plainly — words a child could read. So the range of options is actually quite limited."
Renner answered without looking up. Her pen moved quickly across the paper, producing a faint, steady scratch.
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