With the matter settled, he took back his own clothes and apologized to the children in advance for making them wait.
First he wanted to check the documents and gather direct evidence of the bandits' crimes. He opened a drawer and found an interesting set of notes. One glance at them might make you think he had hit the jackpot, but no. Jin had absolutely no idea what he was reading. The language was unfamiliar to him, so he would have to rely on Hakama for help. Even then, he could not place why these bandits had been using a Corruptor at all.
To confirm his suspicions, he inspected the torn remains of the monster he had defeated. That way he could access the cameras of the surrounding nanomachines floating in the room. Jin wanted the records of the last week at the very least, and he stumbled across footage worth having.
Apparently one noble had come to them with the monster and refused to elaborate on his intentions for the creature. Instead, he had left them a little nugget. This conniving villain had hinted at the demise of the country coming soon. Jin took note of the detail for later.
Outside the containment level, the children who had escaped were regrouping, and Poire was reunited with her little brother. The two of them embraced in a long hug, relieved that neither of them had been badly hurt.
She turned and addressed Jin as a god, thanking him for everything he had done, while he refused to accept the name.
Aside from that, he was curious about the people in red uniforms who were currently seizing the bandits. Apparently they were guild staff members. In fact, the man with the majestic hair and beard standing close to them was the guild master of their city.
That same man became interested in Jin and walked over to ask whether he had had anything to do with the incident. When Jin confirmed his contribution, the man introduced himself formally as Padrak, the guild master, and thanked him for his efforts. He took one look at him, stunned that anyone could defeat such a large number of people without taking a single hit. Despite wielding the appearance of an inferior species, Padrak could tell this man was no laughing matter.
The guild master shared that the incident had resulted in heaps of damage. Bandit extermination requests were at an all-time high. That made Jin curious, because he assumed any lord would do his best to prioritize the capture of bandits. The guild master laughed, and argued that not even the lord had that level of authority.
Dealing with crime was considered the duty of the guild members, the ones who swore their loyalty to the king. Even if Lord Shapion, the ruler of the land, were to commit crimes, they would have to report the situation to the king, unlikely as something like that seemed. Padrak was confident in his assumption.
Jin, meanwhile, was comparing the situation to a hundred million years ago, and realizing that a lord amounted to a mayor while the guild acted as the police.
Even so, Lord Shapion was not someone who could be trusted easily. Jin decided to surrender all the documents he had recovered from the bandits, asking whether they might be of any use to the guild. The guild master read one of them and immediately realized it was a proper list of everyone who had traded with the bandits. Thanks to that list, they could easily arrest the whole group.
Curious, Jin asked whether the city lord's name was also on the list. But impressively enough, Lord Shapion's name was nowhere to be found, which made him a clever villain who hid his tracks.
For now, Jin could not do much about the situation. He had helped free the slaves, so he wanted to know what would become of them. The guild master assured him that the guild would take responsibility for returning them home safely, if a missing person report had been filed. For those who had no such thing, unfortunately, there was nowhere to go.
The system was rotten, because it refused to account for cases like Poire and Nino, who had lost their parents. So Jin asked about a shelter to keep them in. Shockingly, this era did not even have a shelter in town. Padrak could only find work for the children, but because they were both classified as inferior, doing even that would be difficult.
The kids were sulking while Jin sat with his disappointment that it was all the same in this world. He did not want to leave them alone, even if there was nowhere for them to work. Then an idea came to him, and he asked whether the two of them would be willing to work somewhere if they had the chance. Poire agreed to try, which made Jin remember the Holy Knight Argus, who had once offered to help them if they ever needed it.
In the royal capital, Argus was on his way back when he suddenly felt a chill out of nowhere. Arriving at his residence, he told his team to rest up for the day, and returned to his own quarters. He was welcomed by an entourage of maids and butlers greeting him with pride and glory.
The first thing he did was ask for an update, and from the reactions of his servants the Holy Knight could gather that something must have happened. The butler apologized for troubling his master when he had only just returned. While this was going on, his sister watched the scene from above with a glaring look.
Argus received the report and got an immediate headache. The situation was far worse than he had thought it would be. An invader had appeared inside the capital and wreaked havoc. The question of how it had got in mattered less to him than the question of who had helped navigate the beast inside. His best guess was that it was someone from Harness Academy, a place teeming with suspicious people plotting their demise.
Regardless, he was in dire need of comrades to control the situation in the capital.