Chapter 22. This Much Is Easy (2)
Shuri could not, for the life of him, make sense of this situation.
“Da-ya! Da-ya-ya! (I told you, not there!)”
“Da-ya? (Not going where you're told?)”
“Da-ya-ya! (You wanna die?!)”
However he turned it over in his head, walking while being pummeled by his own baby cousin was wrong in every conceivable way. And it wasn't as if he were simply walking, either.
“Da-ya! (It's this way, I said!)”
“Da-ya-ya! (Can't even understand words, you idiot?!)”
…Or was he imagining it, the part where he kept getting sworn at?
And so Shuri wandered the ducal estate with Isaac in his arms. He had originally planned to dump the brat and retreat to his room, but the little demon absolutely refused to let him go.
What in the world was wrong with this milk-drinking infant, that he was this strong? He clung to Shuri's back, then dangled from his neck. If Shuri's grip loosened even slightly, the kicking would start again over how uncomfortable the ride was. When Shuri paused to wonder if he just wanted to play, Isaac would point somewhere with a glare that demanded, what are you looking at, get moving. And when Shuri dutifully carried him there, he'd kick his bottom again because it wasn't the direction he'd wanted.
Dammit all, I'm not turning into a talking horse for anyone!
The young lord of House Eshua, who had unceremoniously been reduced to a pack mule, was on the verge of tears. Of course, Isaac was still just a nursing baby. If Shuri truly wanted to, he could dunk him in the pond right now—
[Unhand nothing and move the King at once!]
“AAAGH!”
The moment such a thought crossed his mind, the Shadow Lich appeared. Dammit, so it wasn't a dream after all! Shuri had tried to deny reality, but the demonic beast really was following Isaac's orders. He had no idea why. Only one thing was certain: the instant he harmed this child, he would die at the Shadow Lich's hands.
Which was why Shuri felt like he was going insane from the sheer injustice of it all. What on earth did Uncle drag home? Had he been trying so hard to catch the Skeleton Demon King that he'd picked up a shapeshifted demon while he was at it?
But what defied belief even more was where Isaac had dragged him.
Why here, of all places?
Shuri trembled like a leaf before the looming second annex. This is the haunted house! It was a building even the family's own people avoided. No one had lived there for years, and Shuri himself had been scolded as a child for so much as approaching it. They say a bunch of the family died here… It was, in short, a cursed place.
So when Isaac pointed toward the garden beside it, Shuri wondered if maybe he'd misread the direction and secretly tried to turn the other way—
“Da-ya-ya-ya-ya! (Wanna die? What did I say about going straight?!)!”
—and was promptly beaten by the cousin on his back.
Which was why none of this made sense to him. Ugh, why are we going to a place even the head of the family has forbidden?! If the adults caught them, a scolding would be the least of his problems!
Isaac, on the other hand, was grinning up at the mansion.
One look at the gloomy, forlorn air of the place was enough to guess how long it had been abandoned. And now that he'd actually arrived, he was more certain than ever.
Magic cores. Stacked to the rafters.
There was far more here than what he'd sensed at first. The mana accumulated in this building was the kind that would take a decade—no, several decades—of dedicated training to amass. Which, in other words, meant that the corpses of hundreds, if not thousands, of demons had perished here.
Well, technically they're magic cores, not corpses. Details.
That said, he'd been a little surprised. No mere exorcist bloodline could pile up this much simply by virtue of its profession.
A war? No—honestly, at this density it was more like the demons had swarmed here of their own accord, moths to a flame. But if the Saintess's family had cast a summoning ritual to lure the demons in and slaughter them, it made no sense that they'd leave the place abandoned as a haunted house. If this were a demon-slaying ground, it would've been consecrated as a holy site ages ago. Clerics were the sort who'd slap a cathedral and a shrine onto any spot the moment it produced even one glorious deed, if only to spite the demons. Treating a place with this much history as a cursed dumping ground?
Plenty of questions, but none of them really mattered. What mattered was that magic cores were here. And even more importantly, that drinking them all down would grant him decades' worth of training in one gulp.
So Isaac gave Broom-Broom's hair a sharp yank. Broom-Broom shrieked—we can't go in there, we'll be in so much trouble if we're caught—and put up resistance, but one display from the Shadow Lich shut him right up.
Inside, the annex was even more desolate than its exterior, and it was, how to put it…
[Why, it's just like beholding your master's wretched, poverty-stricken castle of old.]
Shut up.
[Troubling, indeed. The magic cores appear to be within, but as expected of the Saintess's family—the entire building has been sealed, and every door is locked. I'm afraid entry is impossible.]
Why would it be impossible?
If it's locked, break it open.
Isaac looked at Shuri. Shuri was shaking harder than before.
“Look, this is far enough, okay? Let's go back… every door in this place is locked anyway, we can't even get into a room.”
“Da-ya!”
“Ugh, what now, what did you see THIS time?! Fine!”
Isaac's gaze had stopped on the high wall of the lobby where the staircase climbed toward the second floor—specifically, on the portraits hanging there. They looked, at a glance, like portraits of the successive heads of the family. As Shuri followed his stare, he puffed up, preening.
“You little brat, first everything else and now you covet the seat of family head? What, paying your respects to the great ancestors? Waste of time. Sure, in generations with only daughters they've brought in sons-in-law, but this generation's full of men! The next head of House Eshua will be yours truly—”
“Da-ya.”
Isaac wiggled his finger, and the portraits went flying with a mighty crash.
“AAAGH! The ancestors!”
Bang! Bang! CRASH!
As his revered ancestors went airborne and shattered against the floor, Shuri screamed. The ancestors! No, wait—what was THAT power just now?! No, that's not the point!
“Are you insane?! What did you DO to the great heads of the family! You're really trying to get thrown out of the house!”
But Isaac, who had swept away the offending portraits with his mana purely because they annoyed him, merely snorted.
The family head? Please. They were all going to be cleared out and replaced with his portrait eventually anyway. Besides, what Isaac needed wasn't the portraits—it was the spellwork embedded behind them.
GRUUUUNK!
“AAAAGH! Now what?!”
The moment the portraits came down, the entire mansion shuddered as if gripped by an earthquake. It was no earthquake, of course. The seal locking every room in the house had simply unraveled.
KUGUGUGUNG!
Looks like they deliberately wove the Divine Dragon's magic over this place to keep the family out. Dragon magic, demon magic—magic was magic, and dismantling it was the Skeleton King's specialty. Decryption was hardly worth the effort. The mechanism had been simple: remove the portrait anchoring the spell, and the locks dissolved puzzle-piece by puzzle-piece. Frankly, he hadn't needed to blast down every single portrait. They were just ugly.
Shuri, blissfully ignorant of all this, screamed that a ghost had appeared, and Isaac seized his hair and hauled him toward a nearby door.
“Da-ya, da-ya! (Come on, open it! Now!)”
“Ugh! The door's locked, I TOLD you… huh?!”
Shuri, shoved forward by Isaac's little hands, grabbed the handle—and his eyes went round as saucers. The door that should have been sealed swung open without resistance. And the moment it did, Shuri had apparently served his purpose, because Isaac scrambled down with a chorus of da-ya, da-ya and slipped into the room like a cockroach.
“Hey! You can't go in there!”
Inside the room, Isaac's eyes gleamed like diamonds. One, two, three, four—by his rough count, five hundred! And the quality was superb! With this much, recovering his body from the treasury would be no problem at all. And this was from rifling through a single room!
Shuri, who had chased right in after him, turned green.
“We have to get out, NOW. We're dead if we're caught! And don't you dare lay a finger on the magic cores! You look, that's all!”
Isaac stretched out a finger toward Shuri, who was hoisting him up to carry him out.
“Da-ya!”
“Huh?”
Despite himself, Shuri looked where Isaac was pointing. In that instant, Isaac released Whisper.
[KWAHAHAHAHA! Much obliged for the meal!]
Whisper poured out of Isaac's body and swallowed the magic cores whole in the space of a breath—a sight rather like a slime gobbling up its prey. But the moment passed, and Shuri turned back around and blew up.
“What are you—there's nothing here at all… AAAGH!!”
All he could do was scream at the bare, empty floor.
“The magic cores! Where did they ALL go?!”
At his shout, Isaac stretched out one tiny hand.
“Da-ya! Da-ya-ya-ya!”
He pointed behind Shuri with an expression of pure terror, and Shuri's head whipped around.
“What? Over there?”
[KWAHAHAHAHA! Sweet as honey, this one!]
Whisper slurped down another hoard of magic cores to the last crumb. And when Shuri turned back again and glared daggers at Isaac—
“HEY! There's NOTHING there! What exactly was supposedly—ack! Why did THIS room's stash disappear too!”
By the time every magic core in the room had vanished, Shuri looked like his soul had left his body. But he was no fool. The insistence on coming to this forbidden annex. The locked doors of a sealed mansion swinging open. All of it!
“Hey. You. YOU took the magic cores, didn't you!”
He seized Isaac by the collar, rough and furious. He'd only been dragged here in a panic thanks to the Shadow Lich, but when he actually thought about it, the brat reeked of suspicion. As the eldest son's child, Isaac was an enemy regardless—but more than that, what kind of sense did it make for demons to obey a human? In the Saintess's family, of all places?
“I'm telling the adults EVERYTHING! The moment they hear you can command demons, you'll be thrown out on your—!”
That was the exact moment it happened.
“Shuri!”
A familiar voice rang out from outside the mansion, followed by the thunderous footfall of adults.
“Shuri!”
Rillai, the servants, and several of the elders. Had they sensed a surge of mana and come running? They crowded into the lobby, visibly stunned. Naturally so. The portraits lay shattered across the floor, the mansion's seal hung broken, and the magic cores were simply gone.
But when even the elders began to murmur, Shuri smiled, thinking fate had finally smiled on him. Tell them everything. Best of all, the elders were on HIS side. With this, he could finally rid himself of that eyesore calling himself a Saint candidate, once and for all.
He pointed straight at Isaac.
“Uncle! Listen to me! That brat did ALL of this—!”
“Shuri! How could you do such a wicked thing!”
…Huh?
Shuri looked at the adults as though he'd taken a blow to the head. The elders were glaring at him with righteous indignation. Apparently the servants had witnessed him and Isaac heading toward the annex. To be precise, they'd been bothered by the sight of Shuri slipping off with the totem in hand and reported the truth to Rillai.
“We heard everything. You brought Isaac here, did you not?”
“N-no, I…”
The elders' eyes narrowed to slits at his stammering.
“You mean to deny it? The servants saw you carrying the child on your back straight to this building.”
Well—no—okay, technically I DID bring him here, but—
“There are traces of offensive holy arts cast in the corridor!”
“How could you even think of striking a child! And you dare call yourself a descendant of the honorable House of the Saintess?!”
No, HE was the one attacking! I'm the one who got hit!
“Not to mention you stole the totem and went looking for Isaac besides! And still you deny it?!”
No, okay, I DID go find the brat with the intent of tormenting him!
Just as Shuri was pounding his chest in frustration—
“Young master! It's terrible! The magic cores that were in the room—they're all gone!”
“!”
The words magic cores snapped Shuri back to his senses.
“That's right! It was that little brat! That brat did… wait, where'd he GO?!”
Just then, the sound of small fists drumming on a door echoed from another room.
“Da-ya! Da-ya-ya!”
At the desperate cries, like someone begging to be rescued, the servants gaped and rushed over. Rillai swept up Isaac, who had apparently been locked inside, into his arms.
“Shuri! This is too far! Locking up a mere child and tormenting him—have you no shame?!”
“???”
Locked him up? When exactly did I ever—?
Meanwhile, Isaac, having drained yet another room's worth of magic cores in the meantime, let out a small burp. The moment Shuri registered that innocent little smile, he saw red.
“Grrr, it wasn't me! He's the one who wanted to come here! The portraits too, the holy arts too, it was all HIM!”
“Who taught you that a cleric may lie, Shuri?”
“I'm not lying!”
“Then you claim Isaac, who cannot yet even use holy arts, did all this himself?!”
“I—I SAW him commanding a demon! He should be cast out of the family immediately!”
“Shuri! First cruelty and now you slander your own baby cousin!”
In the end, Shuri beat his chest in anguished injustice—and then, demanding Isaac produce the Shadow Lich at once, lunged for his collar.
“Are you going to keep lying?! Bring it out, RIGHT NOW!”
“Da-ya…!”
Isaac made a face of trembling, wounded innocence, as if to say what on earth are you saying—and Uncle Rillai's eyes flared white.
“SHURI!”
In the end, it was Shuri who burst into tears. From the safety of his uncle's arms, Isaac snickered behind his hand.
Well, don't feel TOO wronged. If you keep behaving, I'll let you lick the crumbs off the plate.
He'd been racking his brain over how to deal with the treasury's gatekeeper as it was. If the guardian really was an 8th-tier demon and a dragon, he would need a proper plan to reclaim his body. But with this much mana in his belly, that particular gambit was back on the table.
The Doljabi was fast approaching.