Chapter 209
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 209
Phase. 1
There was a time when she had nightmares almost every day.
“……My Lady.”
“…….”
“My Lady?”
“Yes?”
At the sound of someone calling her name, Lara Cinebier Etarque, the Lord of Hastin, was pulled from her deep reverie.
“You’ve been staring into the distance for some time. I was worried you might be feeling unwell…”
Reassuring the maid who had spoken with caution, Lara glanced down at what she was holding.
A teacup.
Right. She had been enjoying afternoon tea on the balcony after lunch.
…Lately, she thought, I’ve been spacing out more and more.
Her serene expression returning, Lara elegantly brought the cup to her lips.
She already knew the tea had gone cold and was no longer fit for drinking. As the days grew colder, everything turned frigid in less than three minutes. Perhaps it was finally time to put an end to these outdoor breaks.
Setting down her teacup, she slowly rose from her seat. The balcony where Lara had been sitting was on the third floor of the castle, offering an unobstructed view. Forgetting the cold, Lara gazed out at the landscape of Hastin.
Normally, winter was a season where most activities ground to a halt, save for hunting. This year, however, Hastin was different.
From a single glance, she could see dozens of residents hard at work.
The sounds of children spinning tops and the rhythmic striking of hammers echoed endlessly. Even as the weather turned freezing, the people did their absolute best to rebuild.
After disaster had swept through the territory, Hastin was gradually regaining its vitality.
It had been a truly hectic time. Though she now had the leisure to drink tea like this, she couldn’t count the number of sleepless nights she had endured before the territory regained even a semblance of stability.
…Yes, she could never forget it, even if she tried.
Just a few months ago, this place had been a land of death, ravaged by the undead.
Directly ahead, the field where a hooded tenant farmer now stood had once been a dumping ground where hundreds of corpses were piled high.
Over there, the gardener expressionlessly pruning the branches had lost his entire family that day.
The dungeons beneath the castle, sealed under double and triple locks, were where the undead had once butchered her people. And the massive, now-leafless tree beyond that building was where residents, unable to bear the trauma of the disaster, had hung themselves like fruit from a branch.
It had been barely a few months.
“……”
I really can’t get used to this.
Her tendency to space out was undoubtedly because of these thoughts. Too much had changed in such a short time. Whenever the sense of dissonance grew too severe, she would find it hard to breathe.
And yet, now, everything was seamlessly…
“It’s peaceful.”
“It is all thanks to you, My Lady,” the sharp-eared maid answered without a moment’s hesitation.
No… that wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear.
This peace was the result of her making a contract with a devil, receiving a staggering amount of food and funds to rebuild.
“How much longer do you think it will take for the town to be fully restored?”
“W-Well, I believe most of it will be finished by the time spring arrives.”
The maid’s voice trembled slightly as she answered. It must have been a difficult question, but Lara shared her sentiment. By spring, the restoration would be mostly complete.
The town was returning to normal.
The living filled the voids left by the dead. With abundant supplies, people from other regions were even coming to settle here, turning it into a land of life once more.
Lara, too, had put in a great deal of effort.
Although she still lacked experience as a lord, she was no longer the utterly helpless ruler she had been back then. She, too, was desperate to survive.
Whenever she felt like giving up, she would cling to the words the pink-haired girl had said to her.
“It’s cold.”
“Winter is fully upon us now.”
The weather felt unusually bleak today.
“What is my schedule for today?”
As Lara finished speaking and let out a soft cough, the maid draped a prepared coat over her shoulders. The coat, imbued with warming magic, gently melted away the chill in her body.
“You have a dinner scheduled with the captain of the ‘Lug-eje Imperial Subjugation Squad,’ who has been staying in the territory for the past few days. Also, the bard invited to the dinner has a poem he urgently wishes to present to you. That will likely take place after the dinner.”
A dinner, then. Since she had just finished lunch, she had about four or five hours of free time.
“I should go inside and rest.”
It was a strangely ominous day.
Just vaguely ominous, for no reason at all. She felt as though something terrible would happen if she kept wandering around outside.
Dismissing the maids who offered to follow her, Lara entered the castle alone.
The castle was unusually quiet. Perhaps because about thirty percent of the guards had been mobilized for the town’s reconstruction, the hallways felt exceptionally empty.
And as she turned a corner…
“…….”
Lara’s breath caught in her throat.
With her airway constricted, she couldn’t make a sound. Her premonition had been right. Her body trembled.
Calm down. I have to calm down.
I mustn’t panic.
She swallowed quietly, making sure not to make a sound. As her tension eased slightly, she was finally able to breathe again.
Lara forced her expression into one of calm.
“You’ve arrived, Sir Knight.”
“You’ve become quite a fine lord.”
At the end of the hall, Patrick was waiting for her.
* * *
“I didn’t come to cause trouble, so you can relax.”
The moment Lara saw Patrick, she had turned and guided him to a secret space within the castle.
There were two such places in the castle. One was the family sanctuary connected to her bedchamber, and the other was an underground escape route used to flee in secret if the castle fell.
The place Lara led him to was the family sanctuary.
Once she deactivated the hidden mechanisms concealed behind the banners in her bedchamber, a door rumbled open. From its appearance to the groaning sound it made, it was no different from a monster’s dungeon. Patrick chuckled before stepping inside.
“You’ve become a fine lord,” Patrick repeated, echoing the words he had spoken when they first met moments ago.
The position makes the person, as they say.
It seemed Lara was someone who lived up to that adage quite well.
He had already been impressed by how her initial clumsy demeanor had vanished, but walking down this corridor, he couldn’t help but be surprised once more.
“Did you do all of this?”
He had wondered why the energy of the dead was so thick. Now he saw why. Along both sides of the corridor stood suits of armor, each holding a spear with a severed head impaled on its tip.
“From the left: my grandfather, my great-uncle, my maternal uncle, and my cousin… They are all traitors to the family,” Lara explained, her voice chillingly cold. It was her family’s abdication of responsibility that had forced her to become the Lord of Hastin in the first place.
“This is quite the decorating scheme.”
Humans who survived an encounter with Swallow always ended up with a piece of their mind missing. Being worn down to this extent didn’t even qualify as insanity.
Accepting the situation calmly, Patrick arrived at the small room they called the sanctuary.
Before Lara could even formally kneel and greet him, Patrick cut straight to the chase.
“There are a few things I need you to do, and quickly.”
“What kind of things…?”
“First, a question. Do you maintain friendly relations with Pertens?”
Pertens was the territory closest to Hastin. After a brief hesitation, Lara nodded.
“Since the food you sent was more than enough, I sent aid to Pertens as well. I believe the Lord of Pertens holds a favorable opinion of me.”
A capable lord who had defended her territory from an undead invasion. A cold-blooded lord who had personally executed the traitors of her family.
Because these two images coexisted in Lara, the Viscount of Pertens treated her with the utmost respect. His attitude bordered on awe, effectively establishing a hierarchy between them.
“Then write a letter of recommendation immediately and notify the Lord of Pertens. Since Hastin doesn’t have a teleportation hub, we will head to Pertens in exactly two days to use theirs.”
This was the first reason Patrick had come to Hastin. To wrap up this matter, he would have to go to Rium regardless.
However, the distance from the Primordial Core to Rium was by no means walkable. Even by carriage, one would have to traverse nearly the entire continent.
Patrick was different from Swallow.
While Swallow had apparently shattered teleportation hubs due to the black mana in his body, Patrick didn’t possess a large amount of mana, allowing him to use them. Naturally, that was also the fastest way to get to Rium.
The closest human territory to Rium was a vast county called Rebeck. Fortunately, it had a teleportation hub as well.
“Our destination is Rebeck. Make sure the preparations are finished within two days, by any means necessary. Time is of the essence.”
“Understood.”
Lara replied without a shred of hesitation. She no longer asked for reasons as she might have in the past. Patrick nodded in satisfaction.
“And there is one more thing I need you to investigate.”
“Whatever it is, just say the word.”
“It’s something only you, as Lord Lara, can do.”
Patrick untied a pouch from his waist and placed it on the table. From the clinking of metal against metal, Lara knew what was inside—gold and silver.
When Lara looked up at Patrick, unable to grasp his intentions, he spoke in a playful voice.
“Tomorrow, I need you to meet with some other lords.”
“So suddenly…? No, what should I do when I meet them?”
“There’s some information we need to obtain.”
*
The moment Patrick saw Scobina’s severed head, he had thought:
I must figure out their intention.
Why would they go out of their way to send Scobina’s head here?
There were generally three reasons for decapitating an enemy on the battlefield and sending their remains.
First, to show respect to the enemy.
Second, to demoralize their forces.
Third, to provoke them.
The first option is ruled out. This would imply sending the body so they could hold a funeral, but if that were the case, they wouldn’t have mutilated the corpse.
That narrowed the possibilities down to two. Since neither side had even clearly identified the other’s forces, trying to demoralize them made no sense. Eliminating the second option left only one.
This was a blatant provocation.
To understand the situation, he would ultimately have to go to Rium, but simply heading there now would mean playing right into the enemy’s hands.
Since there was a high probability that the provocation hid a trap, Patrick had no intention of complying meekly. He still possessed a weapon of his own: the time Bathory had bought for him.
He had to make the absolute most of it.
For now, the only information they had consisted of a few fragmented facts.
First, the wooden box was made of Yggdrasil. A box made of Yggdrasil was highly likely to have been sent by the leadership of Rium.
And…
「Rium has dispatched an envoy.」
There was that piece of information.
Why send an envoy? The answer was obvious. The Empire, with whom they had been on bad terms for ages, had its capital vanish overnight. They would have sent an envoy to assess the situation.
So where did they send them?
Rium was a closed nation. No matter how excellent their own intelligence network was, from a common-sense perspective, even gathering rumors circulating among humans would be a daunting task.
The news of humans. What kind of news was spreading at the time?
Swallow destroyed Riaze.
Hexabel of Sand Hell has disappeared.
Nilkumbal has fallen.
So where would they send the envoy?
If it were me, I wouldn’t have sent them to just one place. I would have split them up and sent them to multiple locations.
The reason for sending an envoy was to prepare a response, and responding was always a race against time. Rather than leisurely visiting one place after another, it would be far more efficient to dispatch envoys to multiple locations simultaneously.
They might have sent one to Sand Hell, or to the remnants of the collapsed Nilkumbal. Perhaps both.
Above all, they would have wanted to hear the detailed circumstances from humans first. There was a chance they had also sent an envoy to the human territories of the Empire.
If so, where?
Preferably to the territory that had undergone the most change.
「The Anselm Duchy.」
Coincidentally, Anselm was also one of the territories where large-scale military movements had taken place. Even if Rium’s envoy had gone to another territory, there was no way the Duke of Anselm, currently the most influential figure in the Empire, would have failed to catch wind of their arrival.
Of course, Rium’s envoy might have avoided direct contact with humans, and Patrick’s prediction could be wrong, but…
…it was well worth investigating.
“You don’t necessarily have to meet the Duke of Anselm directly. It could be another lord who is close to him, or even someone two or three degrees removed. Just find out the list of VIPs who have visited Anselm and the Duke’s schedule. By any means necessary. Any means.”
And so, a day passed.
Returning from her banquet, Lara handed all the information over to Patrick. Upon receiving it, Patrick smiled with amusement. He raised his index finger toward Lara and continued.
“Lastly, I need you to do just one more thing.”
“I will do everything in my power.”
“Please make me a wooden box.”