The Mastermind Is Always A Typical Higher Up

The moment Justus pledged his loyalty to me in the hallway was the moment I knew my life had taken a permanent and irreversible turn for the worse. I had spent weeks trying to get rid of the guy, and my reward was gaining an eternally loyal, heavily armored sidekick who now looked at me with the kind of doe-eyed reverence usually reserved for saints and unlimited snack bars.

I finally managed to get him to stand up, and we walked back into my office. The atmosphere was thick with a tense, awkward silence. Marie, Eliza, and Edgar all stared at us. They had clearly heard his booming, hallway-shaking vow.

“Is everything alright?” Marie asked, her eyes sparkling with a dangerous level of amusement. She knew exactly what had happened, and she was already enjoying the future chaos.

“Everything is fine,” I said, trying to sound casual as I collapsed into my chair. “Justus just had a minor... crisis of faith and decided to change his management. He works for me now, apparently. Don’t worry, I’m already regretting it. Now, where were we?”

Eliza, never one to be sidetracked by something as trivial as a man’s entire worldview collapsing, got right back to business. Her gaze was fixed on Justus, but her questions were for the whole room. “We were discussing the Slime Dai Maō Karuto. Sir Justus, you were about to be forthcoming with information.”

The change in the paladin was immediate. Before, he had been a defensive wall, protecting the honor of his institution. Now, he was an open book. A very sad, very betrayed, and very talkative open book.

“I will tell you everything I know,” he said, his voice heavy with the weight of his treason. He spent the next hour detailing the inner workings of the Holy Kingdom’s power structure. He explained that the Slime Dai Maō Karuto wasn't just a simple heretical sect; it was a secret society, a cancer that had grown within the heart of the church for decades, festering in the shadows. They had their own rites, their own hierarchy, and their own twisted interpretation of the holy texts.

I listened, my eyes glazing over as he went on about schisms and papal decrees, trying to process it all through the only lens that made sense to me: my old corporate life.

So, the Holy Kingdom is the parent company, I thought, as Justus explained their doctrine of "holy trials." The Pontiff is the absentee CEO on the golf course. The Grand Order of Paladins is the overzealous Security department, obsessed with rules but blind to the real problems. And the Slime Dai Maō Karuto is the disgruntled, hyper-aggressive Sales team from the third floor, the ones who think the company has gotten soft and want to trigger a hostile takeover by starting a war, which they believe will be great for quarterly profits.

“They are fanatics,” Justus concluded, his hands clenched into fists. “They believe that only by plunging the world into another great conflict, another age of suffering, can they purify it and restore the glory of the old faith.”

“A deeply flawed and dangerous philosophy,” Eliza commented, her pen never stopping its relentless scratching on her black slate. “But a philosophy is not a plan. Who is their leader? Who has the influence, the network, and the resources to place those runes in the Royal Treasury? A movement of this scale requires a mastermind.”

Justus hesitated, the name catching in his throat. This was the final betrayal, the one that would sever his last ties to his old life. “Their leader… I do not know for certain. They are a secret society, even within the church. But their ideology, their very scripture, is championed by one man. A cleric of immense power and influence, held up as a paragon of virtue.”

“Who?” Marie pressed, her voice gentle but firm.

“He is… a Grand Cleric, renowned for his piety and his… administrative skill,” Justus said, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. “He preaches endlessly about the glories of the ‘age of trials’ and the valor of the saints who fought in the old wars. He speaks of peace as a sickness, a spiritual complacency that must be burned away by the fires of hardship.”

As he spoke, a fuzzy memory started to surface in my mind. It was a memory from weeks ago, back when my life was simpler, before I had a paladin for a roommate and an auditor for a shadow. The memory of the Holy Kingdom’s envoy arriving at the castle. Justus had been there, but he hadn’t been alone. There was another figure, stern and imposing, draped in the white and gold robes of a high-ranking cleric.

“Wait a second,” I interrupted, the pieces clicking into place with a depressing, inevitable thud. “The envoy that came with you when you first arrived. There was an old guy in a pointy hat. Looked like he’d been sucking on a lemon his whole life. He gave a long, boring speech about sacred missions and holy burdens, and how my power was a ‘divine tool to be honed through trial’.”

Justus’s face, already pale, went completely white. “Grand Cleric Alistair,” he whispered. “He… he was my mentor. The one who sponsored my mission to Lysvalde.”

There it was. The mastermind. The villain of our story wasn’t some shadowy, hooded figure in a dark fortress. He wasn’t a cackling demon or a world-ending monster. He was a bureaucrat. A high-ranking, paper-pushing, respected old cleric who had been standing in the same room as us from the very beginning, judging me with his cold, pious eyes.

The mood in the office shifted. This was no longer an abstract investigation into a faceless faction. We had a name. A target.

Eliza immediately began a new line of questioning, her voice sharp as a razor. “Grand Cleric Alistair. What is his official position within the Pontiff’s court? What are his duties? Does he have access to the Holy Kingdom’s treasury? What is his travel history for the last year? I need everything you know, Sir Justus.”

Marie was already in a quiet, intense discussion with Prime Minister Vince, who had reappeared in the doorway, his face grim. The political fallout of accusing a Grand Cleric from a rival nation of state-sponsored terrorism was going to be… messy.

Justus stood in the middle of it all, a man adrift, grappling with the fact that the man who had taught him everything he knew about justice was the very heretic he would now have to hunt down.

And me? I just felt tired. Profoundly, cosmically tired.

Grand Cleric Alistair. I thought, slumping down in my chair. So the main villain is a glorified middle manager who thinks a little global suffering is good for team morale. Of course he is.

I hate this. I hate this so much. I had my life all figured out. A quiet job, a big paycheck, a lifetime tax exemption, and an endless supply of free bath services. But the plot, the relentless, narrative-driven plot, just wouldn't leave me alone.

But… at least he wasn’t a Demon King. He was just a bureaucrat.

And if there’s one thing my miserable past life in the soul-crushing corporate world had prepared me for, it was how to deal with annoying, over-ambitious, and deeply misguided middle managers. This Alistair guy had no idea who he was messing with. He was about to face the full, unbridled power of my max-level apathy.