Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 60: Slightly unorthodox negotiating tactic
"Cal, wait!"
Osman desperately shouted over his horse’s neck, but to no avail.
The noise made by the rushing wind was simply too strong for his voice to get out and reach the ears of the lady ahead. Especially not when the wind blew away from the girl, striking Osman right in the face.
’Oh, come on!’
Gritting his teeth both over his annoyance and due to the habit he developed while working under this unruly lass, Osman leaned his upper body down against his horse’s long neck, all the while making sure to rock his hips to the rhythm of his steps.
With the bow of his saddle now digging directly into Osman’s soft insides, it was a technique only the best of the best raiders could employ. While it wasn’t that hard to actually assume, to resist the constant rocking of the saddle’s stiff rim against one’s stomach without throwing up all over the horse’s neck…
That was a whole other skill only those with time for nothing but training in their life could afford to learn.
Yet, even when riding in this hellishly uncomfortable position for the sake of reducing the air drag and letting his horse run even faster… Osman could, at best, keep up with Lady Callane, soon giving up all hopes of ever catching up to her.
Today especially, the lady was in a great hurry.
By now, she had set everything up in motion, organizing the greatest expedition the lands under her family’s governance had ever seen. And while that didn’t mean much for a breadbasket of the kingdom as opposed to the lands known to be the breeding grounds for warriors, the troops she managed to gather were on par with the imperial elites.
After all, rather than scouring local villages to get men for her army, Callane went ahead and… hired the best of the best instead, organizing a small unit that wielded enough power to, quite literally, topple nobles like cards and even potentially threaten the kingdom itself!
What had to be the most unbelievable part of this job, however, was how she managed to keep all of her preparations relatively under wraps!
’No matter what, they are going to know, especially after I went ahead and told them exactly what I’m going to do,’ Lady Callane would say as the two of them talked while taking the two-day-long trip over to this one, very specific tavern. ’But that doesn’t mean I’m just going to tell them every detail there is. And by actively keeping the news from spreading, I can engage them in a game of cat and mouse for when the army will be already on the move.’
Breaching the Great Wall was a crime like not many others, lesser only than high treason or noble manslaughter, with the latter being an actually questionable contender.
But so was the act of manipulating the imperial laws by all those nobles that opposed them!
And if one side of the conflict now held the rules of the game in disregard, why should Lady Callane shackle herself with them for some unknown, foolhardy reason?
That line of thinking was exactly what sent the lady with Osman as her sole escort out into the forgotten outlands of her family’s estate, in the part where the noble house didn’t have the proper administrative reach to control everything. Yet, rather than heading to the known city of crime that fiercely resisted the removal of its authority…
Instead, Lady Callane rushed over to the tavern situated at the mouth of the road leading away from the city and towards the lands of her family’s neighbor, the fallen earl of Ostekratz.
Ever since the poor man’s lineage ended and the house was left in the hands of but his bastard daughter, all semblance of peace and order had vanished, with the empire’s place now becoming but a cancerous mark on the otherwise prosperous map of the kingdom.
With total anarchy on one end of the road and near-perfect autonomy on the other, finally approaching the inn, Osman couldn’t help but feel its outside was oddly… proper.
’I expected to see all sorts of mercenaries, hoodlums, and criminals here, but this doesn’t look half bad…’ he thought as he jumped off the horse and then grabbed the reins of Lady Callane’s mount before bringing them both to one of the binding poles located near the inn’s fence.
"What now, Cal?"
Turning his attention back to the girl as soon as he was done binding the horses down, Osman gulped down the sour taste left in his mouth after using one of his lady’s commoner-type cover names.
As lazy as it felt, to shorten Callane to Cal, it somehow became the lady’s preferred nickname when she put herself out in situations where her noble blood would be nothing but a disadvantage.
"Now, we do the usual," Callane shrugged her shoulders before pushing the long streak of her fiercely red hair behind her shoulder. Yet, her hands, rather than moving towards the handle of her simple, if not outright crude, sword… moved towards a set of relatively simple leather gloves she had stuck behind her belt.
"And that is?"
Despite being one of the lady’s closest confidants and her main bodyguard… Osman didn’t even dare to assume he would be able to figure out just what next quirky thought would come to that fierce, red head.
His lady… wasn’t known to be the example of predictability, after all, a fact most of the capital’s nobles would become sorely aware of after as little as just a single encounter.
Before answering, Callane turned to her man with a wide grin on her face, her hands occupied with removing the horse-riding gloves to make room for the pair of hardened-leather ones. And as she pulled them down, Callane’s smile grew more and more wicked.
"We are going to properly negotiate," Callane announced, lowering her hands as she approached the inn’s doors…
This chapter is updat𝙚d by freeweɓnovel.cøm.
Only to kick the massive wooden doors inside as leisurely as one would normally push them open, then smash her right fist into the open palm of her left hand right as she waltzed in.
"Hey, boys," Callane… No, Cal smiled, her fist striking the gloved palm of her hand again, "tell me," her grin now grew openly vicious, "whose mug do I get to smash to meet with the boss?"
