Kenji (Narrator): The warehouse was a tomb of empty wood. I stood in the center of the hollow space where the Ceremonial Armor was supposed to be. According to the ledger I had digitized in my mind the room contained assets worth fifty thousand gold crowns. According to my eyes... it contained straw. Dust. And the distinct smell of rat droppings.
Liora: It's all gone. My father wore that armor at his coronation. Goro didn't just steal supplies... he stole our history.
Kenji (Narrator): I adjusted my imaginary glasses. I felt a twinge of something in my chest. Pity? I suppressed it. Pity was an inefficient variable. It clouded judgment. I needed to be cold. I needed to be a compiler.
Kenji: [clear throat] The inventory variance is one hundred percent. The physical count is zero. The book count is fifty thousand. This isn't theft Princess. It's an accounting error. A deliberate one.
Liora: An error? You call treason an error? You look at this empty room and you see a math problem?
Kenji: The world. Is. A math problem. And right now the equation doesn't balance. If the assets aren't here they were liquidated. Converted to cash. And cash leaves a trail.
Kenji (Narrator): I walked toward the heavy oak doors. We were done here. The warehouse was just the symptom. The disease was in the paperwork. We returned to the Quartermaster's office. Getting in was easy. The hard part was the vault. It wasn't a metal safe. It was a shimmering barrier of purple energy blocking a heavy iron door. It hummed with a low menacing frequency that made my teeth ache.
System: Object: Mana Barrier. Security Level: High. Encryption: Arcane Seal version 4.0.
Liora: Stand back. This is a Level 5 ward. Only the King or Goro can open it.
Kenji: No alarms. We need to audit him. Not fight him.
Liora: You can't pick this lock Kenji! It requires a magical signature! A password written in blood!
Kenji (Narrator): I looked at the purple barrier. To Liora it was a wall of deadly magic. To me... it was a dialogue box. This Sheet is Protected. Enter Password to Unprotect Sheet. I sighed. Typical middle-management paranoia.
Kenji: [sigh] I don't know the password. And I don't have his blood. But in my world... when you forget a password you don't smash the computer. You just copy the data to a new sheet.
Kenji (Narrator): I focused. I didn't try to break the barrier. I ignored it. Select All. The grid lines in my vision expanded passing through the purple barrier as if it weren't there highlighting every scroll every ledger every loose coin inside the vault. Command: Copy. I felt a massive drain on my mana. Copying an entire room's worth of data into the clipboard was heavy lifting.
Liora: What are you doing? The barrier is glowing brighter!
Kenji: I'm not opening the door. I'm duplicating the reality. Paste. Values.
Kenji (Narrator): Thrum. The air pressure in the room dropped. There was a sound like a giant intake of breath and then... pop. The barrier didn't break. But in the center of the room a shimmering translucent copy of the vault's contents materialized. It wasn't physical paper. It was pure data rendered as light. Stacks of glowing blue scrolls. Piles of phantom gold.
Liora: [gasp] You... you cloned the vault? Is this an illusion?
Kenji: It's a backup. I just pasted the values into a new workbook. The protection settings didn't copy over. Now. Let's see what he's hiding.
Kenji (Narrator): We walked into the ghost vault. I treated the floating data as a Table. Ten thousand transactions. If we looked through this manually it would take weeks. But I had Conditional Formatting.
Kenji: If he's embezzling he's likely double-billing. He submits one invoice to the King for payment and then submits the same invoice number again for a fake order to pocket the gold. It's the oldest trick in the book.
Liora: Double billing? How do we find two numbers that match in a pile of ten thousand?
Kenji: We don't. We make them glow.
Kenji (Narrator): I raised my hand. I navigated to Home. Conditional Formatting. Highlight Cells Rules. Duplicate Values. Show me the lies. SNAP. The sound was like a dry twig breaking. The blue light of the hologram shuddered. Then color began to bleed into the data. Red. Deep angry crimson red. It started as a few spots then spread like a virus.
Liora: [gasp] By the Gods... It's... it's bleeding. The books are bleeding.
Kenji: He didn't just double bill. He triple billed. Look here. Castle Wall Repairs. He charged the crown four times for fixing the same wall.
Liora: He's bleeding us dry! My soldiers are dying in rusted armor because this... this leech is buying vacation villas!
Kenji: Wait. This is just the petty theft. This is just greed. I want to see the Outliers.
Liora: Outliers?
Kenji: The transactions that are too big. Too strange. System. Top Ten Items. Show me the money.
Kenji (Narrator): The table shifted. Ten rows shot to the top of the list glowing a toxic radioactive green. I read the first one. Item: Strategic Consulting. Vendor: The Shadow Guild. Cost: 50,000 Gold Crowns.
Liora: The Shadow Guild? That's... that's an assassination ring. A myth.
Kenji: [clear throat] It's not a myth. It's a vendor. Goro paid them fifty thousand crowns. That's enough to buy a castle. Look at the date.
Liora: The 12th day... Kenji that was the day my father fell ill. The day the King collapsed.
Kenji (Narrator): The silence in the room was heavy. Suffocating.
Liora: He didn't just steal... he paid them. He paid the Shadow Guild to poison the King.
Kenji: It fits the data. Asset disposal. He's liquidating the leadership.
Kenji (Narrator): I pointed to the next item on the list. Item: Pest Control. Vendor: The Shadow Guild. Cost: 5,000 Gold. Date: Yesterday.
Liora: Pest control? We don't have pests in the castle. The Captain of the Guard... he went missing yesterday. We thought he deserted.
Kenji: He was deleted. For five thousand gold. Goro is cleaning up the variables that don't fit his new equation.
Liora: He killed them. He killed my father's captain. He poisoned my father. And he wrote it down? He wrote it in a ledger?
Kenji: Criminals always keep records. Because they don't trust each other. They need proof of payment.
Liora: I'm going to kill him. I'm going to find Goro and I'm going to cut him down.
Kenji: Stop.
Liora: Do not stop me Accountant. This isn't about math anymore.
Kenji: If you kill him now... you lose. He has the Council in his pocket. If you attack him without proof they will call you a tyrant. They will say you went mad with grief.
Liora: I don't care!
Kenji: I. Do. Because I don't want to be executed as an accomplice to a coup. We catch him in the act. He's going to the Council meeting tonight isn't he?
Liora: Yes.
Kenji: Then we go there. And we don't just tell them he's a traitor. We show them. I can apply the formatting to him. If Traitor equals TRUE then Highlight Red. We turn the Great Hall into a spreadsheet Liora. And we filter him out.
Liora: [sigh] You are a cold man Kenji. My father is dying and you are planning a presentation.
Kenji: Emotions are noise. I need a clean signal. Do you want to cry... or do you want to win?
Liora: I want to win.
Kenji: Good. Let's go. I hope you have a stapler. Because we're about to attach some serious documentation to his face.
System: Quest Updated: The Final Audit. Objective: Expose Goro at the Council. Difficulty: Legendary.
Kenji (Narrator): I opened the door. The red glow was gone from the room but it was burned into my retinas. I had seen the blood in the data. And for the first time since arriving in this world I wanted to balance the books. Not for the gold. But for the variable that Goro had tried to delete. The King.