Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume11 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 8===

Explosion after explosion sounded as colorful light filled the night sky.

“Honestly, don’t make it sound so easy.”

The Vanderbilt lady sighed inside the Rose & Lily.

The rose was the Winchell family’s symbol and the lily was the Vanderbilt family’s. That was enough to know what a close connection she had to the ship, but she was still only a guest at the fireworks festival. Winchell was the one running it and their maids were moving about through the ship. And since this was the “normal” Winchell family (i.e. not Heivia), it was not exactly a pleasant atmosphere for a member of the opposing Vanderbilt family.

(Well, Vanderbilt also has its issues with the main family and the branch family. And that’s only getting worse recently. I’m the only heir to the main family, so if I died, the riffraff from the branch family would gain more influence in the inheritance issue.)

And even if she had been the one running the show, it would have been unreasonable to have the fireworks prepared by craftsmen around the world fired randomly into the night sky while completely ignoring the original program.

She had only succeeded by working up the manager’s fears by eloquently convincing him that holding onto all the unnecessary explosives might be considered intent to fight, thus leading the Object to attack them.

For a noble woman, knowing how to protect her family without picking up a weapon could be seen as a necessity.

And the more she pushed things, the more her position on the ship was worn away.

The scales were tipping.

Once it crossed a line, the savage-looking nobles would tie her up and give her to Azureyfear as a present to ensure their own safety.

She did not have much time left.

But she could not escape Azureyfear by boarding a helicopter or lifeboat to flee the ship.

What could she do?

After some thought, she slipped through a staff only door.

Like all luxury cruise ships, the Rose & Lily had a large server and satellite communications facility for casino card readers and day trading. She stepped into the server room that had communications equipment lined up like shoe lockers or bookcases.

She compared the numbers of the many guest rooms with the letters on the servers and traced her fingers along them while walking through the room. She finally stopped at a certain point.

“This is the one.”

After the sudden attack from Azureyfear’s Object, quite a few voices had filled the party deck. Most had been groundless bluffs and ways of protecting oneself, but one of them had caught her attention.

''“Why is this happening? This wasn’t part of the plan. I was promised absolute safety…”

(What a fool. I’m guessing he fanned the flames between Vanderbilt and Winchell, gave Azureyfear some help, concealed all sorts of information for his own sake…and then got caught in the crossfire at the very, very end.)

Once she took aim, she could more or less guess who it was.

Now she needed something to confirm her speculation.

The Vanderbilt lady pulled a handheld device from the chest of her dress. She had borrowed it from those pretending to be spies in the Winchell Countermeasures Office. She connected it to the server’s socket with a cable and monitored the communications of a certain room.

However, she was not intercepting the data from a suspicious mastermind’s room.

As a noble, she had been taught not to do anything that risky. “I have no memory of that. My secretary or butler did it all.” That was something all nobles had to learn.

However…

“If I place a camera in my own room, it doesn’t count as spying.”

That was why she was viewing her own room.

If the mastermind was fanning the flames between Winchell and Vanderbilt for his own benefit, then he would be constantly monitoring the actions of those in both families. If she could find some trace of that, she could find a clue leading back to him.

All of this qualified as justified self-defense.

Nobles and royals had to defend the people who served them, so what qualified as self-defense was quite broad. As per the concept of ''noblesse oblige'', the greater one’s authority, the greater their responsibility, so they carried the customary obligation to actively protect those under their care. Of course, just like the Island Nation’s idea of Kiri-Sute Gomen, it was only ever interpreted in ways that benefited the privileged classes.

“Now, now, now. Who was it that assigned the rooms for this fireworks festival? Rather than breaking in after I checked in, it would be a lot easier to place me in a room that already had a data-stealing gimmick installed in the wireless router. Whoever was in charge of that must have been bought.”

She had no specialized data processing skills, but she detected a suspicious looking entry on her device and sent it to the Countermeasures Office to hand it off to a great number of personnel. She had no idea what kind of magic they used, but a long list of results came back in no time. They may have actively search out the technicians who had completely failed as a member of an organization and thus could not be left in the military. In other words, they were the kind of hackers that could only live in the world of a movie.

A somewhat vulgar smile came to the girl’s lips when she finally spotted a certain name within the deep, deep electronic forest.

“I knew it.”

It was the same as the person who had spoken on the party deck.

As one could guess from his careless statement, he was a Legitimacy Kingdom VIP who the press often targeted as a mass-producer of gaffes. She felt like the spinning compass was finally pointing in a single direction. She shifted her focus from the Rose & Lily’s internal network to the external internet connection. After sending another request to the Countermeasures Office, another answer came back almost immediately.

She had asked for back issues of an electronic newspaper saved by one of the major communications companies.

She found an article from around when the conflict between families had grown beyond a secret feud and into full-on military conflicts.

(This is even more obvious. The Vanderbilt and Winchell families have conveniently clashed twenty-one times around the same time he made some kind of gaffe. That diverted people’s interest from that less interesting news and allowed him to escape taking any kind of responsibility.)

Nobles and royals seemed to believe in bloodline above all else, but there were always exceptions. If a family was deemed unable to protect its people, the entire family would “fall” and lose its noble status. Or if an individual was considered an exceptionally harmful example to the public, they would be “banished” from their family. And when banished, producing any children could spread their genetics and spark revolt during succession issues, so they would be charged with inciting rebellion. In other words, they were legally castrated. Heivia had gone against the wishes of the entire Winchell family and yet he had not been banished. That showed just how far one had to go to be banished, but it also meant that one could have the protection of their privileged class taken away if they did go that far.

This man had wanted to escape banishment.

But instead of closing his loose lips, he had covered it up with an even larger commotion.

This was a safety device for him.

No one from the heads of the families to the families’ butlers knew what had started the centuries-long conflict between Vanderbilt and Winchell, but someone had definitely been using it in recent years.

“Now, then.”

(Where should I strike to drive out some actual dirt?)

She decided on the things connected to the Vanderbilt family. And even then, she limited herself to the sports clubs, beauty parlors, restaurants, and salons she normally visited, not the private property. If they all had a similar setup to her room on the ship, the data would all be gathered in one place after traveling through several different servers. If necessary, she could have Heivia check on the places the Winchell family tended to visit.

Simply gathering the data was meaningless. It had to be analyzed to use it. If he was gathering the data on both families in one place and quickly determining how to drive the two families into an even larger conflict each time he made a gaffe, he would need greater analysis than even the weather forecast.

And the more a unique weapon was used, the more one could see the unique outline of the person using it.

The facilities that could pull that off were limited and the people with connections to those facilities were even more limited.

Once she knew what she was after, she only needed to send a request to the Countermeasures Office. Then she would only have to wait. They would use their specialty to swiftly hunt down the flow of money behind this. They would find all the necessary evidence.

She did not think this would fully resolve the problems between Vanderbilt and Winchell, but she could nip at least one disaster in the bud.

But…

“…?”

(The communications cut off now!?)

She was not using the sketchy Wi-Fi at a café. She was using the satellite communications antenna the cruise ship used for casino card reading and day trading. She doubted the signal would go down that easily.

Just as she began to think the mastermind was blocking the signal, the answer reached her.

She heard a loud explosion.

“Oh, all those fireworks Master Heivia asked me to have launched are acting as chaff.”

The pieces of copper and other metals had reached a certain density in the air and started to disturb the signal. It ended up harming her position, but she could not resent it when it was a request from her fiancé.

She could no longer send a request to the external Countermeasures Office.

She could not rely on those experts, so she would have to find another way on her own.

Instead of finding the analysis facility from the multiple points of data leakage, she would have to find some more direct evidence.

(The wireless router they tampered with in my room. Whether they modified the software communications log or the hardware, it would be fastest to get the device itself.)

That meant her adventure was not yet over.

She would have to return to her room when she had no idea when the nobles would give into their fear of Azureyfear, overpower her like a mob, and make a human sacrifice out of her.

She gave a truly annoyed sigh, but immediately took action.

It was the weakness introduced by her love for her fiancé that drove her to action.

And as she left the server room, she muttered a certain name.

“Flag Eggnog…”

That man was almost certainly guilty.

She was aware he often made gaffes, but rather than shut his loose lips, he had thoughtlessly and arrogantly decided to hide his problem behind a war between nobles. He was truly a terrible example for his people.

And with that in mind, the young lady moved her lips as a trail of tense sweat ran down her cheek.

“Or perhaps I should call you ‘Your Excellency’. Isn’t that right, Mr. Royal?”