The Banquet, the Seduction, the Meteor (3)
“Seriously, it’s summer but it’s fucking freezing… No wonder drinking culture developed so strongly in the North.”
“J-Jurchen, siiiir….”
“What, you idiot? Don’t cling to me reeking of booze after getting shitfaced. If she smells a woman on me, she’ll sniff it out like a damn ghost.”
“Th-that’s not it─! C-Cryan, please go find Cryan for meee…! It’s dangerous, I’m telling you….”
“…Why? Where the hell did that guy go?”
“Th-these hairy guys said, ‘Show us the honored one downing a shot of vodka,’ and he couldn’t refuse, so he went along with it… Then he got completely caught up in the mood and now he’s gone off to wrestle them shirtless─.”
“Him? That guy?”
“That person… when he gets drunk, his temper is on another level…?”
The three imperial drunks had fallen into the alcohol pit.
Eclipse, Jurchen, and Cryan.
Among them, Cryan had reached a state of total intoxication, proving to everyone exactly what kind of blood ran in his maternal line.
Even while repeatedly creating fantastical pigeon feed.
Eclipse, worried about Cryan, had desperately searched for Jurchen to retrieve him…
But when she arrived at the scene,
All she saw was Cryan, shirt completely stripped off, grappling with people on the ice like some kind of barbarian while receiving thunderous cheers.
“You think being big makes you hot shit?! Kha ha ha hat─?!”
“…He’s lost it.”
She had no idea who suggested it, but the fact that he had even smeared pig’s blood on his face was completely at odds with the refined image he usually showed.
‘And he calls me a damn maniac? Birds of a feather, I guess.’
If left like this, there was a very high chance that by tomorrow morning he would either have some body part broken or would have vanished beneath the ice and died a natural death.
Cryan─!
Cryaaan──!
However.
Jurchen was not Yohan. He had no intention of ruining a perfectly good atmosphere just to pull out Cryan, who was being celebrated with wild cheers and manhandled by those terrifyingly built men.
So while he was stomping his feet in frustration…
“What? You weren’t dead? Students? I told the juniors to finish you off properly before I left.”
“Hilken…. Lady Hilken!”
“Hoho. Very good, Jurchen. It seems you’ve properly taught Eclipse how to address me. This is perfect discipline. As a reward, this Hilken, whose mood has been improved by alcohol, shall grant you one wish.”
“A wish? Great. Then please get Cryan out of there….”
“…Wait, why is the Crown Prince over there?!”
“How should I know?”
Hilken, who had also been thoroughly enjoying herself, spotted him and immediately retrieved the man.
Drag─.
“Let go, let go, you son of a bitch─!”
“My, my. Hilken is not a dog. To think you would demote me to such a wretched status. The abuse of power is so thrilling I might wet myself, Your Highness the Crown Prince!”
“Then just piss already…!”
“Your excretory organ will freeze solid, you know?”
In the end.
The four of them who had gathered like this somehow managed to calm Cryan down.
All that remained was a messy after-party where his alcohol-soaked mind spewed whatever nonsense came to it.
“…Sigh. Senior Yohan told me to do it, but maybe it was too much for the cadets.”
“N-nooo, Lady Hilken…. It was still fun. I didn’t know drinking could feel this good. I’ve wasted half my life─.”
“Okay, I get the context. That’s enough, Eclipse.”
“…Yohan, Yohan─.”
And so the end of their drunken ramblings naturally turned toward the black giant who had thrown them into this banquet under the guise of a drinking party without a single word of warning and then disappeared.
“By the way, have you guys seen Yohan anywhere?!”
“My, my. Now you’re speaking exactly like Student Jurchen, Your Highness the Crown Prince?”
“M-me? I don’t talk like that. Lady Hilken. The way that idiot Cryan is acting right now is simply his true nature finally coming out.”
“………That bastard Yohan.”
“Well, this is perfect timing since we’re bored anyway. Your Highness. Would you care to explain in detail why Senior is such a bastard?”
When Hilken asked that, Cryan scooped up a handful of ice from the ground nearby, crunched on it noisily, and spoke.
“That guy’s rotten to the core. He tries to control everyone else’s woman problems however he likes. But the moment he himself ends up in that kind of situation, he just spins in circles. It makes me want to kill him.”
“H-huh…? Cryan, did something happen to you?”
“After the field training ended. I told him several, several, several times that I had no face left to see Lady Gremory and wanted to run away for a while….
That son of a bitch ignored all of it and dragged our master into the dormitory anyway. Said he’d show me some spicy flavor or whatever. So I got dragged into Master’s alternate dimension and what the fuck is this stre─.”
“U-uwahhh…! Stop, stop right there….”
“And then that damn bastard is all lovey-dovey with the young lady, but when it actually matters he doesn’t do a single thing…!”
Gulp─.
And when Eclipse heard this story…
She instinctively sensed that a deliciously juicy incident was unfolding. She secretly pulled out the low-alcohol fruit wine she had brought and began drinking.
Because.
As the cherished doll of the women’s group and someone who got along decently with the men’s group, sitting right in the middle, she was the only person capable of listening to the situation between the two and deriving synthesis from thesis and antithesis.
Anyway, the one who reacted again to Cryan’s rage-filled words was Jurchen.
“Hey. But you, who’s saying all that, also jumped into the story about me and that… ‘that guy,’ didn’t you? Cryan.”
“I did.”
“Then what was that?”
“Hypocrisy.”
“Do you really want to die? Do you have any idea how much mental suffering I went through because of that? Well, you probably don’t. None of you here would have any clue….”
“No. You stupid lizard. Let’s not confuse who we should be killing, okay? At most, I’m just an accomplice to the crime and a petty thief who’s pickpocketed a few times. But Yohan, who has been leading all of these incidents, is a death-row convict who deserves the ultimate penalty.”
“…Oh ho ho. Everyone, it seems Senior Yohan has accumulated quite a lot of grudges?”
And what Hilken said after hearing all of this…
Was an idea so simple that it would never have occurred to her if she weren’t drunk.
“Then shouldn’t we just get revenge? Hohoho.”
“Revenge?”
“Lady Gorgo is busy making bets on drinking contests in the center. Lady Karalin has vanished without a sound, but I know exactly where she is. It’s a kind of secret spot.”
“…Oho.”
And.
Cryan, as if he had instantly grasped what she was suggesting,
Let his green eyes glow with a brilliant blue light.
“Besides, even if Senior doesn’t know, the young lady is drunk. If we push him into a place where no one will come, something interesting is bound to happen. What do you all think? Just saying.”
“Do you not know where that chamber pot bastard is?”
“He told me to have our students bite him and then disappeared, so how would I know? But I think we can find him….”
“Spirits─.”
Flash─!!
And without the slightest hesitation, Cryan poured every ounce of power he could muster into releasing his souls to begin searching for Yohan.
They were scouting spirits.
“U-uwahhh?! Why are there so many souls?!”
“How many livestock do you think were slaughtered in this city today? This is just me gathering them, Eclipse. Go on, hide as well as you can. I’ll chase you to the ends of hell to find you.”
“But… what do we do after we find him…?”
“That bear won’t come quietly, so we’ll kidnap him.”
“Kidnap that person?”
“We just need to catch him off guard for a moment. There’s nothing impossible about it. Hilken has ‘Attraction and Repulsion,’ after all.”
The same power she had used to pull Eclipse during field training.
With that, she could move someone from extremely close range in the blink of an eye as if teleporting them…
So they just needed to seize the opportunity and drag him over.
Anyway, Cryan was a man with a quick mind.
***
The number of people who wanted to kidnap me, Kim Yohan, was far too many.
Just thinking about it brought countless suspect groups to mind.
For example…
The forces under Vankite.
Or the opportunists in the capital plotting a counter-coup.
Or the demon army forces who must have heard the news that I killed the Six Swords…
Shagalor, who undoubtedly wished for my death more than anyone.
And if not them, then His Highness Rexas, who desperately did not want me to leave.
All those faces kept flashing through my head.
But speculation was always just speculation.
The only way to be certain was to check directly.
Whoosh─.
The most suspicious thing was the sensation that had wrapped around my entire body, as if I were being sucked in.
The moment I confirmed that the potato sack over my head wasn’t tied particularly tightly and that there were no restraints on my body, I spoke.
“I’ll kill you, whoever you are. Since you’ve touched me, I trust you’re prepared for the fact that you have no tomorrow.”
With those harsh words, I shook off the suspicious figures binding me and began stripping away everything they had put on me.
However…
“Run. We’re fucked.”
“Agreed. Let’s bolt.”
Swish, swish─.
“…Huh?”
The ones who had kidnapped me fled into the bushes without even looking back, so fast that I couldn’t even think about chasing after them.
‘What the hell are these bastards doing…?’
But I still had to get to the bottom of this, so the moment I tried to take a step to pursue them…
“Wait…”
I immediately realized where I was.
‘…This is the place the young lady always came to cry.’
A cliff overlooking the royal castle in plain view.
Yet from below, it was perfectly hidden from sight.
A place perfect for being alone.
Whenever the young lady wanted to cry, she would secretly come up here.
Whenever she suffered something sad from His Highness Rexas.
Whenever she was ignored, insulted, and looked down on by Shagalor…
Or whenever the immature Abel, who couldn’t even grasp the weight of the throne, gave her that look and said, “You’re working hard. But Sister, you won’t be able to return to this seat anyway.”
Every single time.
But the young lady never wanted to show me that side of her.
So she would come here every time without saying a word.
Well, even so.
Wherever she went was still within the palm of my hand.
Just as she could predict all my actions,
I could confidently call myself an expert on her behavior.
But.
That was precisely why I couldn’t understand.
‘The only ones who know about this place are me and the young lady… Could it be stalking? Or did she call for me…?’
If I had to guess,
The probability that the young lady had called me here seemed slightly higher.
And sure enough.
The unusually long and slender blue hair visible in the distance was more than enough to give me the intuition that she had summoned me.
I wasn’t sure if it was because the alcohol had risen and clouded my rational judgment.
But that was what I ended up thinking.
So I quietly softened my footsteps and approached her…
Then gave her a little surprise.
“Karalin.”
“O-oh my─?!”
She turned around in surprise toward where I was.
But the moment she confirmed it was me,
She gave that signature decadent smile, as if relieved.
It seemed Karalin had drunk quite a lot.
Her entire body was flushed red, making the area around her look unusually warm today.
I said to her,
“Young lady, so this is where you were.”
“O-oh my…. I didn’t tell anyone I was here.”
“…Good heavens, look at the state you’re in! Aren’t you cold?! I’ll go get a blanket right away─!”
“No. The blanket is fine. I’m not cold at all.”
“…Pardon?”
“It’s been so long since I’ve been in the North, so I wanted to feel this cold with my own body… I don’t know. I don’t really understand it myself. I just felt like doing it.”
Yet even during this conversation, the question she posed to me threw my mind into confusion.
She hadn’t told anyone.
Could it be that she hadn’t called for me after all?
“But it’s fine. You came at just the right time.”
However.
My question was shattered to pieces by her next words.
Head gradually growing hotter.
“Want to sit next to me?”
“…Um, is that really okay─.”
“Why wouldn’t it be….”
