Chapter 228 — Friends, Reunited
Duke Randert and Bayul sat facing each other in Priest Wagner's office. It was the first time father and son had met since summer vacation began.
For a stretch of time that could be called short, a remarkable number of things had happened. In his hometown of Hamilton, a mine had collapsed and the crimes of Bayul's cousin Derek had been brought to light. Back at the academy after the semester resumed, Bayul had taken a blade from an assailant, died, and come back to life.
And that wasn't all.
His friend Quinn had willingly given up her own life to save him. Only because Bayul had used the Eye of the Ocean to bring her back did the two of them — and the Duke himself — avoid spending the rest of their days crushed beneath the weight of guilt.
But even that wasn't the end of it.
The academy chairman and a student were actually dragons in disguise, and a servant was actually a demon in hiding. Duke Randert was already at his wits' end trying to figure out what to do about them.
On top of everything else, his son Bayul had inherited the power of some legendary Spirit King the Duke had never even heard of.
And then there was that girl who had appeared out of nowhere at the end, unleashing torrents of water while laughing with childlike innocence. The only ones startled by her were Duke Randert and Ian — which meant everyone else had already known about her.
All things considered, the Duke was determined to find out everything that had been happening to his son, starting today.
"Father, please have some warm tea. Your hair is still wet."
"Are you worried your old father might catch a cold?"
"That's not it, but... Innocent did douse you with water just now."
Even thinking about it now, Bayul found the whole thing absurd. He'd never dreamed that the spirit's prank would reach his own father. He had told her not to do it again, but even after becoming an Intermediate Spirit, she hadn't changed one bit. As soon as his talk with his father was over, he fully intended to give her a proper scolding.
"Will this do?"
The moment Duke Randert finished speaking, every trace of moisture vanished from his hair. It was hardly astonishing — he had simply been too distracted to bother with it. Something like this could do him no harm whatsoever.
"I'm sorry..."
Bayul knew perfectly well his father couldn't catch something as ordinary as a cold. It was simply that the Duke had been put through something he never should have had to experience because of him.
Regret was washing over him in waves — if he'd known something like this would happen, he should have told his father everything from the very beginning.
"What have you to be sorry for? The fault is mine for not noticing sooner."
"No, I should have told you about the spirits in advance. There's still so much I don't know myself, and I meant to explain things gradually... and it ended up like this."
"Explain it to me now, then. I'm ready to listen."
Duke Randert had watched with his own eyes as the water that had flooded the sanctuary vanished in an instant. He was a knight, not a mage, but even he could tell it was no mere magic.
The girl called Innocent had clearly been moving at Bayul's command. What kind of power lay hidden in his son? A quiet tension coiled in the Duke's chest.
"I'll start from the very first time I saw a spirit."
It was bound to be a long story. Beginning with the day he had glimpsed Innocent during class and fainted, Bayul calmly and methodically laid everything out so his father could follow — meeting Shame and Tempesta, and encountering Spinel back home in Hamilton.
Then he went on to explain what spirits actually were, why they were called the harmonizers of the natural world, and everything else he knew, holding nothing back from his father.
"...So you're telling me that the absence of spirits broke the order of nature, and that's what brought the world to this state?"
Duke Randert's face showed his shock plainly. He simply could not believe that dreadful natural disasters had been sweeping across the continent because of beings whose very existence he'd never known until now.
"I completely understand why it's hard to believe, Father. It was hard for me to believe at first, too. But you saw it with your own eyes, didn't you? The way Innocent made the water disappear in a heartbeat. Honestly, that's nothing. Innocent can make it rain — and she can make the rain stop."
"She can... stop the rain?"
"It was difficult when she was a Lower Spirit, but now that she's an Intermediate Spirit, she should be capable of it. She's a bit of a whirlwind, but she's responsible, and she's a good one."
"Astonishing. That a spirit can do such a thing..."
The Duke was still in a daze. Then a letter he'd received from Priest Wagner some time ago suddenly surfaced in his memory. In it, the priest had written that on the very day Bayul fainted and was first brought to the temple, strange phenomena had occurred.
Water had surged up in torrents, fierce winds had battered the windows, and the candles had flickered on and off endlessly. When he read that tree roots had burst from their pots and writhed like living serpents, the Duke had found himself, strangely, thinking of his dead wife.
He didn't know why.
Perhaps it was simply because of the way his wife had looked in her final moments.
That eerie scene from that day had overlapped with the contents of the letter, leaving the Duke adrift in confusion for a long while.
"Is your body holding up?"
By now the Duke had at least a rough understanding of what the Four Spirit Kings were. His son had not awakened all of their powers, but Bayul had been frail since childhood, and the Duke worried whether he could endure carrying them.
"Of course. I'm stronger now than anyone."
Bayul smiled and went on to explain why he had been forced to live as an invalid all those years.
"You're telling me it was never an illness at all?"
He'd thought there was nothing left to surprise him, yet the shocks kept coming. When he learned that an excess of divine power had been slowly destroying his son's body, Duke Randert was dumbfounded.
"And I never knew...!"
Determined that nothing should go wrong, he had summoned a priest without fail, month after month, to perform rites. It had all been his own doing. He had assumed his delicate son was simply seeing and hearing things that weren't there — to learn it had been the spirits all along was a staggering blow.
"I'm all right now. If nothing else, thanks to you sending me to Carrington, Father, I was able to learn everything. Thank you."
"No. I should have discovered it from the start. How much you must have suffered all this time. Bayul — I am truly sorry."
He had let a perfectly healthy son live as a sickly child for sixteen years. He could tell himself he simply hadn't known, but as a parent, the Duke felt sorry, and sorry again, without end.
"Father — people like me are apparently called Spirit Users."
Bayul deliberately brightened his voice, hoping to lighten the mood.
"Spirit Users?"
"Yes. People who borrow the power of spirits and make it their own. A very long time ago, such people were apparently called Spirit Users."
"Spirit Users, hm..."
Duke Randert turned the word over in his mind. It was certainly one he had never heard before. Once this whole affair was settled, he would have to look into spirits and Spirit Users in detail himself.
"I wonder — how did Mother come to have the Eye of the Ocean?"
"And that pendant as well."
Though his eyes had been closed at the time, Bayul had felt with absolute clarity the burst of intense light from the pendant. It was something he had long suspected — his inheritance of the former Spirit Kings' power had to be deeply connected to his mother.
"I wish I could tell you everything, straight and whole, myself."
But Duke Randert knew no more than Bayul did. He had loved his wife more than anyone, yet those had been years of war. Their time together had been scarce, and when he finally returned to his family home for the birth, his wife had passed away delivering the twins. There had never been time for the kinds of conversations he now wished they'd had.
"I've already told you everything there is to tell about your mother. But lately a thought keeps coming to me. What if she, too, was a Spirit User — like you... That's the thought."
"Mother? A Spirit User?"
"Yes. And if not that... then it occurs to me she may not have been human at all."
"...!"
When his father gave voice to the suspicion Bayul had been quietly nursing alone all this time, he could only stare in shock.
"Father, do you mean to say you also think Mother might have been a spirit? Like Innocent?"
The two were strikingly alike, with their blue hair and blue eyes. To the Duke's eyes, Innocent could have passed for Yvette as a young girl without a doubt.
"I've now met not one but two beings I never expected to lay eyes on in my lifetime. Maybe that's why I can no longer bring myself to be certain that Yvette was human."
Still, that was only an inference from circumstance — far too early to conclude anything.
"It finally makes sense to me as well, why you've developed an affinity with the God of Despair."
Death had revealed himself only as a demon. The Duke had never exchanged a single word with him, but the situation spoke for itself.
"The chairman and Eli are problems enough, but what worries me most is that he is no ordinary demon."
Dragons, at the very least, stood on the side of protecting the human realm. Through the Dragon Words, he had even made a direct pact with Bayul — that Quinn alone would be saved, and then he would vanish.
That left Death.
Why a Demon God — not merely some rank-and-file demon — had gone so far as to disguise himself as a human servant and lurk in this place, the Duke could not begin to fathom.
"Father, actually, about Death, the reason he..."
In explaining the spirits, Bayul hadn't yet gotten around to Death. He was just belatedly starting to explain the situation when a sudden commotion broke out beyond the door.
"...What on earth is that noise?"
While Bayul frowned, Duke Randert identified the source of the ruckus at once.
"Rita, it would seem. Let's go hear why she's raging about like that."
"Rita is here?"
Rita should have been at the mansion by now, not here. Bayul had barely managed to appease her with the promise that she could come once his father's visit was over and Quinn was saved, sending her home just a few days ago. He had even asked Bar and Amon to keep an eye on her, just in case. What could have happened in so short a time?
Following his father, Bayul hurried out of the office.
In the temple corridor, the Full Moon Knights — Ian and Hayes among them — along with Bayul's friends were waiting for the father-son conversation to end.
Beyond the group, who brightened at the sight of them, Rita's ringing voice thundered through the hall.
"Hey, Death! Did you hear what I said? You're fired! Fired!"
"Um, Master... even so, isn't firing us going a bit far?"
"Bar!"
"Yes, Master!"
"You're fired too."
"Gah! M-me too?!"
"Amon, the same goes for you!"
"I'm sorry, but... why me?"
"You're asking me why because you genuinely don't know? Do you honestly not know what you brothers did to me?! Pressing down on my neck — my fragile, delicate neck — until I passed out!"
"...I wouldn't exactly call it fragile..."
"Without me, our young master would clearly stop eating properly, so why do you keep stopping me from going to him?! How many times do I have to tell you that I need to be there taking care of him!"
"We were only following orders..."
"Save it! All three of you brothers are fired! I will never, ever forgive you. Do I make myself clear?"
Rita's eyes were blazing. As far as Bayul knew, when Rita got like this, absolutely no one could stop her.
"There seems to have been a bit of a misunderstanding with my brothers. I'll apologize on their behalf. I'll clean even harder, too. So could you maybe see your way to calming down?"
Death even flashed a smile of gleaming white teeth, but it was useless. Bar and Amon groveled at his side until their hands and knees were worn to nothing, but they could not overcome a Rita whose fury had shot all the way to the top of her head.
"What in the world is..."
Those who knew Death's true identity watched the scene with their jaws hanging open in disbelief. As if in answer to their astonishment, Rita's venting went on and on, and the Death brothers' apologies showed no sign of ending either.