The Magic Tower Master
“A dog, you say?”
“That’s right, my boy. You can’t catch a fox bare-handed.”
Romons folded his arms, looking thoroughly pleased with himself.
“You need a hound that can track the fox by scent.”
“I see.”
“A breed called a foxhound.”
…A hound, huh.
Hound.
“Well, if you’re ever interested, just say the word! We could go together!”
“Yes, of course.”
After making that open-ended promise, I glanced down at my place and found a slice of cake that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
A chocolate cake topped with a cherry.
So it was dessert time already.
“Mother, I should really be—”
“Sit and finish it.”
When is this ever going to end?
“I’ll eat it later…”
“Then you can have it in your room.”
Mother summoned the head chef and had the cake boxed up.
She casually packed an entire whole cake rather than the single slice.
Even if my stomach did empty out later, that seemed like far too much.
“I’m sorry, but I need to leave right away.”
“Leave?”
“I have to head back up north.”
My parents believed I had been living in the Royal Capital lately, so I gestured upward as I spoke.
“I only stopped by briefly because I had something to tell Father. I’ll visit properly when I have more time.”
“You came all that way just to turn around so soon…”
For some reason, those words seemed to please Father immensely.
“Very well. What is it you wanted to tell me?”
“Father, I—”
The moment I began, Father raised a hand.
“Hold on. Let me speak first.”
“Ah… yes.”
“I have something I wanted to say to you face-to-face as well. That’s why I kept writing to ask when you would come, yet you never replied.”
“…I’m sorry.”
“Never mind that. You’ve come, so that’s enough.”
Enough. Meaning things had been far from fine before.
“Daywin.”
“Yes, Father.”
“You must take the Hasgard Spirit.”
His tone turned suddenly grave.
“…….”
It was exactly the matter I had come to raise—and the entire reason I had stopped by the house.
“I think so. Your mother thinks so. Your brothers all think so as well.”
The Hasgard Spirit.
The Iron Spirit.
“My contract is nearly finished. It’s time I passed it on.”
“The family’s treasure… to me?”
“I know full well none of you wanted to inherit it. From ages past, the Iron Spirit has always gone to the head of House Hasgard. For my sons to be so lacking in ambition…”
Father cleared his throat and continued.
“But what choice is there? A successor must be named before the contract ends.”
There were two ways to pass on the Iron Spirit.
Either the contractor designated an heir…
Or the contractor died before the contract expired.
In my previous life it had been the latter.
No one left to give it. No one left to receive it.
Only me.
“We have decided on you, Daywin.”
Not “I,” but “we.”
My elder brothers—who by rights stood ahead of me in the line of succession—had stepped aside.
“So don’t even think of refusing—”
“Yes.”
“Hm?”
“I will inherit it.”
“Wh… what?”
“I came here to speak of that very thing, Father.”
I met Father’s eyes squarely—eyes the same color as my own.
By order of precedence I stood farthest down the line, the third son at the very bottom.
Even so.
Shamelessly.
“I must have it.”
Silence settled over the room for a long moment.
“Well thought. Truly well thought, little brother.”
Then the eldest Hasgard smiled and nodded.
“And I’m sorry. That weight will now rest on your shoulders.”
The weight.
The Iron Spirit’s peculiar trait.
Spirits operate strictly according to contract.
My contract with the Light Spirit lets me wield it freely until the day I die, with no price to pay.
An unfair contract so overwhelmingly in my favor that only the Goddess’s mercy could explain it.
But that Light Spirit is the sole exception among those I have contracted.
Ordinary spirits, in exchange for power, tend to be thoroughly unreasonable.
Veronica’s Spirit of Abundance demands money from its contractor.
The Hasgard Iron turns its contractor into a slave of the battlefield.
The condition is that the contractor must constantly keep the body moving and remain ready for combat—so the iron never rusts.
Fail to uphold the terms, and the spirit crushes you with weight.
Comically enough, it simply makes you gain weight.
That is why Father can never stay lean.
In my previous life I had lived on the battlefield exactly as the Iron Spirit desired, so I never paid the price. This life, however, would be different.
As Diere had said, there might come a time when I would have to bear that weight.
I would have to keep moving so the iron never rusted.
It would take me farther from the idle life I wanted, yet I already had a contract condition in mind.
“I understand the terms of the contract. Even so, I cannot give it up.”
“…Very well.”
Father slowly nodded.
“Daywin, hearing you say that… I’m glad. Seeing that side of you as well…”
Father and Mother both wore expressions of quiet satisfaction.
I finished the evening meal and rose.
It was time to rejoin Amelia and Kairon.
Ah—before that.
“Paris, take care of this for me.”
“Isn’t this the cake Her Ladyship packed for you…! Dispose of it? Absolutely not!”
“No, I don’t mean throw it away.”
“Then eat it, young master. Quickly, before Her Ladyship takes offense.”
“I don’t have time right now. And I can’t spare the hands to carry luggage. Just send it to the place I tell you. Ah—it might spoil, so use a delivery runner.”
I pulled money from my wallet and pressed it into Paris’s hand.
“Ah, so you’ll eat it once you return home. Yes, understood. Though I do worry whether the runner can match the timing…”
“Excuse me.”
I took the pen from Paris’s breast pocket and scribbled an address on the cake box—inside and out.
“Send it here.”
“The address is rather… long, I see. At any rate, I’m relieved you aren’t discarding it, young master.”
Paris lowered his voice.
“As if I would. I have no confidence I could weather the aftermath.”
“That is certainly true. After all…”
I returned the pen to his pocket.
“I’m off. Take care.”
“Then, young master. I shall await the day of your return.”
I waved a casual hand over my shoulder without looking back.
It was time to head for the Magic Tower.
Ever since I had seen the fox’s face, a hot, restless feeling had been burning in my chest.
The Five Lanterns of the Death God Cult.
The five high executives.
In my previous life, with me gone, there had only been four. One seat left vacant.
Snake, Fox, Ghost, Demon.
Medusa, Nine-Tailed Fox, Banshee—and Kairon.
Had I joined them, my position would probably have been something like Fallen Holy Knight.
An angel would have paired nicely after a demon, but the developers surely wouldn’t have written something that cringeworthy.
They seemed to have drawn the Five Lanterns’ motifs from monsters and spirits of myth and folklore.
The strange part was that they had turned every being traditionally depicted as female into a man.
Perhaps that had been my junior’s personal taste.
The fox had claimed the Tower Master was already dead.
Yet from the way he had tried to “stab” the Houndry men to death, he clearly had not yet consumed the Tower Master.
He had eaten the First Prince and used that power to kill the Tower Master—that much seemed successful.
The fox absorbs those he eats and steals their abilities.
There is a thoroughly nine-tailed-fox-like cooldown of one hundred days, however.
Not even a hundred days had passed since he consumed the First Prince; that much was certain.
He had killed the Tower Master but had not yet been able to eat him.
If he already had, the situation would be dangerous. For now, it was not.
In other words—
He was weaker than when I had met him in my previous life.
He had eaten neither the Tower Master nor Blash.
Hoping for more information, I checked Ending Preview and found that every ending involving the Nine-Tailed Fox was one of the landmine endings.
Ending (28) – Only Rebecca
That ominous ending—the only one written entirely in bold.
Daywin and Ester.
Kairon and Amelia.
The Nine-Tailed Fox was Rebecca.
Except for Veronica, the sole heroine without a landmine ending, the Five Lanterns and the heroines were linked.
Rebecca, the Nine-Tailed Fox, the First Prince, the Magic Tower, the experiments.
Everything felt tangled together.
And everything had to end.
“So this… is the Magic Tower.”
The first floor.
Amelia covered her nose against the foul stench.
The interior was pitch-black, yet the source of the smell was immediately obvious.
Blood.
The reek rose from the pools of blood left by the corpses of mages scattered everywhere.
“Hello! Is anyone there—!”
“Amelia.”
The moment Amelia raised her voice, Kairon stopped her.
“Don’t make noise… carelessly.”
Kairon felt along the first-floor walls as he spoke.
He dabbed a finger in the blood spattered on the wall and looked back at Amelia.
“…Not long ago.”
After that he examined the condition of the bodies.
The wounds were so varied it was impossible to guess what weapons had been used.
Some bodies looked bludgeoned; others looked slashed.
The only certainty was that whether they had been beaten or cut, every death had been finished in a single blow.
“Hmph. Just as Hasgard predicted—something did happen here.”
Without a word Kairon took her hand and guided it to his waist so she could hold on.
“Ugh.”
“…Let’s go up. Don’t fall behind.”
“Damn it, again…”
Amelia followed with a resentful look on her face.
“You’ve been strange for a while now, Brother. You, I mean.”
“……?”
“Ever since the Magic Tower came up you’ve seemed on edge. Even now, you look overly sensitive.”
“…….”
The two of them climbed the stairs slowly, hands on the walls.
Second floor, third, fourth.
The mages lay dead in the same fashion.
The change began on the fifth floor.
A single candle barely lit the space.
Kairon led the way toward the candle and found a mage dead with a matchbox still clutched in his hand.
He carefully examined the matchbox the mage was holding.
“The matches… not a single one used… so how is the candle…?”
At those words Amelia hopped up and snatched the matchbox.
Then she read the cursive writing on it and nodded.
“Of course. These aren’t matches for lighting fires. It’s a communication magic tool. The shopkeeper’s name from the store next to the academy is written here. Never expected to see one in a place like this.”
She stuffed the matches into her pocket as she spoke.
“A communication… magic tool?”
“Yes. He must have been trying to call for help. Hmm. Yes. Brother—it seems we share the same thought.”
With her hand still in her pocket she turned to look at Kairon.
“They were cut down before they could even alert the outside.”
At that, Kairon bit his lower lip.
“From the first floor all the way to the fifth. In one breath.”
“…….”
“No signs of holes in the ceiling or floor. Meaning they climbed the stairs just as we did. For that, it was far too fast.”
“…Let’s go.”
With a troubled expression Kairon headed for the next floor.
Eighth floor.
Amelia found another matchbox made by the same person and lifted it.
“Here there are signs of use. From the eighth floor up they at least had time to call for help. And—”
She pointed at the stairs.
“From the eighth floor onward, something is definitely different.”
A trail of blood ran up the stairs leading to the ninth floor and beyond.
Following that blood trail brought them at last to the top floor—the fifteenth.
“You said you’d found me, but I never expected you to get here this quickly.”
A man sat casually beside a corpse whose legs had been severed, his fox ears twitching.
The blood trail that began on the eighth floor clearly belonged to that corpse.
Both legs cut off, then dragged all the way to the top floor.
A hollow end for the Magic Tower Master.
The fox, lounging, lifted only his eyes to stare fixedly at the face of Kairon—who was playing Daywin.
“I knew it would be you.”
He let out a soft laugh.
“I sent Karma and he failed. I sent the twins and they failed too. I thought I was the one hunting you this whole time—but to think. I was being hunted as well.”
“What are you talking—”
“I like this so much…!”
The fox’s high-pitched voice cut straight through Amelia’s.
“If I’d known you were this good, I would’ve come to meet you sooner, Daywin!”
Amelia’s brows drew together at the name.
This bastard… he can’t see through the ring…
“Such a shame, really. If that snake bastard’s plan had worked, we never would’ve met like this. We might have been raising a toast together to celebrate taking the Magic Tower.”
“Amelia.”
As if deciding he had heard enough, Kairon stepped in front of her.
In that instant the Nine-Tailed Fox snatched a wand from the Tower Master’s coat pocket.
The moment he flourished it, the Magic Tower warped grotesquely and the floor beneath Kairon’s feet vanished.
Thud!
With nothing left to stand on, Kairon plummeted.
Not merely to the floor below.
Farther.
Farther still.
The sound of his fall echoed for a long time.
“Bye-bye!”
The fox staggered to his feet and called down into the gaping hole.
Then he slowly turned his head to look at Amelia.
The smile was gone. The fox now radiated a chilling aura, as if he were an entirely different being.
No—not even a being that could be called human.
“Ah, I’ve got one of those too.”
He suddenly pointed at Amelia’s finger, then raised his own right hand.
A royal ring sat on his finger.
“You… my eldest brother…”
“Yeah. I needed him to kill this guy.”
Thump.
The fox casually kicked the Tower Master’s corpse.
“Needed him?”
“See, I never planned on killing any other royals besides the First Prince. I didn’t need anything except that guy’s ability. But just now I changed my mind.”
The fox unfurled his tails and took a step closer.
“If you’re gone, I think I can take Daywin with me.”
“‘Not needed,’ is it. I don’t keep this power because I need it either, for the record.”
Amelia brought the back of her hand to her mouth and bit down hard.
Blood poured freely, soaking the back of her hand and then her palm as well.
“Oho.”
“What a truly admirable father. They say if it was a woman he didn’t care whether she was a barbarian or a demon—he just dragged her to bed.”
Amelia gripped the hammer’s haft with her blood-slick hand.
“Thanks to that I was born, but as you say, I’m not exactly fond of it. Hardly a fitting ability for royalty.”
Amelia’s maple-colored eyes blazed a vivid red.
In that instant—
KRAAAANG—!
The hammer she swung with one hand smashed into the fox’s skull.
“After all, a royal who can produce strength like this… isn’t it rather vulgar?”