"They're all dead. Footman, Teare, Clayman… Even Laplace himself…" A single tear rolled down Kagali's homunculus face as she reported the cold, hard truth to Yuuki.
For once in his life, Yuuki's expression wasn't carefree. Rather, it was grave. Still, for his own sake, he tried to play it off with a light tone. "Yeah… We really screwed the pooch on this one, huh? Ever since that Rimuru came into town… I can't believe he managed to survive Hinata, and catch all of our clowns." He thought aloud, feigning calm, even though right now, all he wanted to do was scream and throw a massive tantrum.
In the last week, Yuuki's influence in the Western Nations had been essentially culled. Thoroughly and systematically, at that.
He'd lost Dhistav along with Clayman, his most useful team, the Moderate Harlequin Alliance, was completely gone, he supposed that, this time, Rimuru had simply been on the lookout for them.
Yuuki was highly regretting sending Laplace to the Tamed Monsters Initiative. He'd learned about Risa's little side project from a few of Rimuru's offhanded remarks and a bit of his own information gathering and realized that, if those monsters were all unleashed as any sort of organized military force, they'd likely be a terrifying enough threat to take on the entire Holy Church, including the Crusaders themselves.
Unfortunately, he'd obviously underestimated their danger ranking. Apparently, the place held a monster capable of completely mitigating Laplace's Unique Skills.
That was horrifying. Yuuki knew that Laplace was strong enough to hold his own against some True Demon Lords. He genuinely hadn't expected Risa to have managed to subordinate something that much stronger than herself. He'd figured that it'd be an easy job for the incredibly powerful Deathman.
And to make it worse, he'd been right to fear Risa's little Initiative.
As retaliation for the series of attacks that Yuuki had set up behind the scenes, Risa had, over the course of a single day, named each and every one of the Initiative monsters, even the ones that were already over A-ranked, renamed them the 'White Force', creating an entirely new, insanely powerful branch of Tempestian military, and teleported them all across the completely unprotected lands of Farmus (not that Farmus's full military might would have done much to stop them, anyway).
Within a week, all crime in the entire country had been efficiently and ruthlessly eradicated.
That, naturally, included the largest branch of Cerberus in the Western Nations, which had been based in the largely lawless, but spacious and well-placed Farmus.
Apparently, the raid had been swift and brutal. Yuuki had needed to actually hire somebody to learn what exactly had happened, because not a single person involved in Cerberus's actual operation inside the country had survived.
According to what Yuuki had heard, a male vampire with a long black cloak and short silver hair had simply opened the door to Cerberus's base, ignoring the guards completely.
Mainly because they were already on the ground, screaming about a high-pitched noise.
Then, everybody in the building died, except for the handful of illegal elf slaves that'd been inside the building at the time. A handful of monsters came and took them away.
An hour later, the vampire was gone, and a decent chunk of Yuuki's influence was gone with it.
Without the ability to use Farmus as a waystation, Cerberus's activities in the Western Nations were essentially dead, since it was built on the black market movement of specialty (and illegal) goods between the Eastern Empire and the Western Nations.
Yuuki didn't dare try to ship those goods through Milim or Rimuru's territories, so now that the route through the Canaat Mountains and Farmus was shut down, the only other possibilities were basically useless.
He used teleport circles to trade with Leon in his hellscape of El Dorado to the far south, but even a teleportation from the main continent down that far could only be done by someone with Otherworlder-level power reserves. Basically, it could only be used by people within a 'tier' or so from being strong enough to qualify for the title of Champion.
In order to use teleport circles to travel from the Empire to the West without traveling through New Farminus or and Demon Lord territories, the distance traveled would have to be nearly double that. Even Over-A Champions would struggle a bit to teleport all the way across that vast distance.
He could use sea routes, and that'd be a bit easier, but it still wouldn't be worth the effort placed into it.
No, Cerberus was officially dead. Just like the Moderate Harlequin Alliance.
Without Cerberus, his deal with the Rozzos would probably go next, leaving Yuuki with almost nothing in the west, apart from the Free Guild.
Honestly, part of Yuuki just wanted to scream in frustration.
But to keep Kagali from freaking out, he instead forced his peerlessly genius mind to work overdrive, considering the resources that he still had.
Unfortunately, deep in their respective depressions and thoughts, Kagali and Yuuki made just one final mistake.
They failed to notice the tiny, almost nonexistent magical signature from the small water droplet that appeared above the summoning circle in the next room, squeezing under the door and plastering itself inconspicuously to the base of an end table, right above the carpet in the very corner of the room.
A small piece of Pipo's body, just a few slimy cells, listening in on every single word that they said, sending it all to Mnemosyne for storage.
Kagali spoke first. "...Do you think we should cut our losses and flee to the Empire?"
"We'll be forced to in the near future." Yuuki admitted, "But not quite yet. I'm pretty confident that Rimuru hasn't figured out that we were the masterminds behind these little incidents, quite yet. There's no way the… you know… they talked, and I haven't left quite enough clues to prove anything definitively. That careful guy won't make any concrete moves until he knows for sure, and he won't dare do anything in public even if he does figure it out." Yuuki explained.
"Logical. Making an enemy out of the Free Guild would be rather problematic for a nation of monsters led by a Demon Lord." Kagali agreed.
"Exactly. Which means that we have some time. Don't you want to get back at those slimes a bit, before we're forced out?" He asked, a bit of a smirk on his face, "I have a few ideas."
"Absolutely. What's the plan?" Kagali was instantly on board.
"Uh-uh-uh. Let's talk about it on the way."
"Alright, then."