Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

Elara lined them up on her desk—all damaged beyond function now, thanks to judicious application of heavy objects. Three small mechanical cockroaches that had been watching, listening, recording everything.

"Someone spent at least fifteen hundred gold on surveillance," Elara said quietly. "Minimum. Possibly more depending on enchantment quality and recording capacity."

"That’s a lot of money just to spy on you," the System said.

"No. That’s a reasonable investment in intelligence gathering." Elara studied the devices. "Fifteen hundred gold to potentially learn my strategies, my alliances, my vulnerabilities? That’s incredibly cost-effective. Whoever commissioned these understood return on investment."

She picked up one of the destroyed constructs, examining its internal mechanisms. "The question is: how much data was already transmitted? These things need to offload recordings somewhere. There must be a retrieval mechanism—either they physically return to a base station, or they transmit remotely, or someone periodically collects them."

"How would someone collect them? Wouldn’t you notice people entering your office?"

"Not if they had legitimate access." Elara set down the device. "Servants clean this room. Guards patrol outside. Demerti comes and goes. Any of them could have been retrieving data periodically."

"So we’re back to: everyone is suspect."

"Yes." Elara began writing a new list. "But we can narrow it down. These devices were placed before I started my reforms—the placement locations suggest they’ve been here months. Which means whoever commissioned them had access and motive before my recent activities."

She tapped her pen against the paper. "That eliminates people who only gained access recently. It also suggests this wasn’t a reactive measure—someone planned surveillance of me before I became an obvious threat."

"Why would they do that?"

"Either they predicted I’d become dangerous, or..." Elara paused. "Or they were monitoring me for someone else. Someone who wanted information on all the princesses, not just me specifically."