Anton
Anton
The whole district. It was a vague statement, hard for anyone to take at face value.
So the party's reaction was, consistently, something close to disbelief. An abrupt declaration like that gave them no reason to think a simple hand gesture could produce that kind of destructive force.
While they kept their weapons lowered and eyed Anton with open suspicion, he let out a chuckle behind his mask and gave a lazy flick of his fingers.
His gaze drifted briefly toward Aslan, and Aslan read the intent immediately.
Anton had noticed the party didn't believe him and was prodding Aslan, the one who knew better, to back him up.
He'd marked Aslan as the one they trusted, the one they'd obey without question. That was why he looked his way.
The man was a lunatic by any measure, but he hadn't lost his reason. In fact, he was chillingly rational. Nothing more.
Aslan clicked his tongue and exhaled.
"Everyone, stow your weapons. And do whatever Anton tells you."
"...You certain about this?"
Tiyamal asked. He'd already stripped off his outer tunic, shivering in the cold, yet his bow was still trained on Anton.
He hadn't nocked an arrow, but an archer of Tiyamal's caliber only needed a single breath to loose one.
Maybe he could shoot before Anton triggered his explosives. But Aslan's goal wasn't mutual annihilation.
"Yes, I'm certain. I'll guarantee everyone's safety."
Truth be told, he couldn't guarantee much. Anton's mental instability was real, which made his sudden swings impossible to predict.
The promise was hollow. At Aslan's words, Tiyamal clicked his tongue, flipped his bow, and slung it over his back.
The rest of the party lowered their weapons, sheathing them or tucking them back into belts. In the pause, Tiyamal shook out the tunic he'd tossed on the ground and pulled it back on.
"Then His Excellency here goes first. I'm freezing my scales off. Let's get this over with so I can sit by a fire or something."
"By all means, lizard."
"...This bastard. Him or the other one—same difference."
Tiyamal growled. His tail scraped the dirt in irritation. He fixed his eyes on Anton as the old man approached, watching his every move.
The first thing Anton did was seize Tiyamal's jaw.
He gripped it hard, forcing his mouth open. Peering inside, Anton let out a low, fascinated chuckle.
"What the..."
"Judging by the oral mucosa... age around seventy? Just past adolescence. But your somatic volume significantly exceeds typical Dragon-kin parameters. A hybrid, are we?"
"No, His Excellency is pure-blood—"
Tiyamal answered, but Anton paid no mind. He simply rotated Tiyamal's jaw this way and that, inspecting it with elaborate care.
At the end of his examination, he smiled a distinctly odd smile.
"A peculiar first-person pronoun. 'His Excellency.' A deliberate bid for authority? Or an expression of some deeper arrogance? Possibly a defense mechanism. One might call it a dull-witted attempt typical of those who endlessly invoke a faith they've lost..."
"Let go, you godforsaken bastard."
An unprovoked grip on his jaw, followed by the most offensive string of observations imaginable. Anton was dissecting another person's manner in granular detail, reciting his findings aloud.
When Tiyamal snarled and shoved his arm away, Anton let out a cackle and released him.
"Good. An insult to one's species elicits a textbook display of displeasure. Extrapolating from that, you are no priest. You pass."
He'd provoked him on purpose. As Tiyamal's face twisted, Anton cackled again and stepped back, pivoting away.
That was Anton's idea of a test. A test without scientific basis or verification, conducted entirely according to his whims.
As the party watched the scene with deepening frowns, already anticipating some ugly conclusion, Anton turned to survey the group.
One by one. He shifted his gaze slowly, as if deciding how best to interrogate each of them.
His eyes settled on each person in turn, drawing out different flavors of discomfort.
Then Anton's head jerked to a halt.
He flinched. Violently.
The party reacted instantly, all heads swiveling to follow his stare.
At the end of that collective gaze stood a single woman.
A woman whose tunic had been torn wide open across the chest, leaving her deep cleavage fully exposed.
Under the sudden weight of all their stares, she gave a puzzled look tinged with a thread of shame and covered her chest with one hand.
Covering it only made it more obscene.
"...What? Did the geezer suddenly get horny?"
Tiyamal's remark. Aslan didn't agree, but his expression was even more baffled than the others'.
He couldn't understand why Anton was reacting this way either.
Anton was past seventy. His physical prime was a distant memory, and he had long since discarded his humanity in the pursuit of a body optimized for explosion and survival.
There was no possibility the old man was lusting after Rumel's body at this point.
So what was this? Aslan had no answer.
He only watched Anton approach Rumel slowly, debating whether to intervene.
Was he actually considering harming her? The mask hid his face, making it impossible to tell.
At the very least, he needed to get his attention. Make him stop walking.
With that thought, Aslan moved his hand to the Wings of Stymphalos, deliberately producing a clear metallic sound as he drew the dagger.
A warning sharp enough that normal Anton would have spun and fired on reflex.
But Anton didn't react. He simply strode up to Rumel and removed his mask.
The face revealed beneath belonged to an old man adrift in some deep mixture of grief and joy.
A complex emotion so raw that Rumel, who had been warily reaching for Verdict, froze in place.
An expression tipped toward happiness and sorrow. At the sight of a tearful old man without a trace of hostility, Rumel withdrew her hand from the spear.
Anton reached out, and her face was caught between his palms.
"Wha...?"
Anton's hands: large, gaunt, skeletal.
Between them, Rumel's small face.
Rumel's pupils shook wildly. Aslan and the rest of the party watched with deep confusion written across their features.
"H-hey, wait... just..."
Rumel's voice, flustered, her cheeks pressed inward. The sight of Anton weeping, cradling her face in his hands and squeezing, was bewilderment given physical form.
As everyone exchanged uncertain glances and shifted awkwardly, unable to fathom the reason behind any of it—
Anton spoke.
"Child, where have you been all this time...?"
And pulled Rumel into an embrace.
There was nothing lecherous or ulterior in it. The gesture belonged to family.
An affection so sincere it made Aslan's expression harden as he reassessed the situation—and so sincere that it opened Rumel's floodgates for wild speculation.
She grasped for clues and stretched her conjectures toward an answer.
Toward what Aslan had already begun to perceive.
Rumel's flights of imagination, which sometimes stumbled upon the truth, now recognized that Anton's attitude and tone were identical to a father addressing his daughter.
In Anton's eyes, right now, she looked like his daughter.
Rumel realized it. And she felt it.
She, too, had lost her family. Her overflowing sensitivity turned her eyes wet.
Tears spilled unbidden, and she sank into a melancholy imagining of whatever Anton must have endured.
So much pain that he had forgotten the simple fact: his daughter could not possibly be here.
It was sad. And it was understandable.
She, whose entire life had been torn away from her, could understand.
So Rumel wept at a reunion that wasn't one.
While she did, Aslan watched the whole tableau from a step removed, and remembered.
The hidden story behind Anton's creation.
Just as he'd suspected, Anton—like Itar—was a character made by a high-spending backer.
That explained the coat that didn't belong in this world. The plague doctor mask. Things that shouldn't exist here.
The repeating crossbow, the peculiar magic: all of it was essentially gifted to him.
If that were all there was to it, the community would have derided it as a backer's self-insert fantasy. But Anton's reputation among the players was, surprisingly, positive.
Because of the backstory layered underneath.
The backer had loved comics. Specifically, a dark fantasy epic considered a towering monument of the genre.
Drawing motifs from that work, he'd given Anton a bleak history.
Anton had lost his entire family to the Warrior Monks.
Right before his eyes.
A past superficially similar to Anna Heleminus's, but Anton had made a different choice.
Instead of yearning for regret and peace, he'd chosen vengeance.
So rather than obsess over bringing his family back, he obsessed over retribution and punishment.
He hunted Warrior Monks. He fought tooth and nail to make the war god choke on his own doctrine.
The trial and error he must have endured in that battle were countless. Maybe even more than Aslan had gone through.
His use of Equalization arose from the same context. Thinking along those lines, the episode unfolding right now was nothing less than the eruption of a hope he'd long suppressed.
He had clearly cast Rumel as his daughter and was operating under the delusion that she had returned alive.
He was blithely ignoring the fact that such a thing could never happen.
That was Aslan's assessment. And he weighed how to handle it.
As he put the matter to rest with a sigh, Angie, who had been watching the entire scene, slipped closer and whispered.
"...Is she really his daughter?"
Of course not. The ages didn't match, the origins didn't match, the appearances didn't even remotely match. Aslan started to shake his head, then stopped abruptly and grabbed Angie's hand.
He'd just remembered that the entire tower at their backs was, for all intents and purposes, an extension of Anton's senses. Speaking aloud risked exposure and triggering immediate self-destruction.
"Mmph."
Angie's startled grunt. Without pausing, Aslan pulled her closer and covered his mouth with her palm.
'No.'
The word ghosted across her skin. The meaning landed. Angie's eyes flew wide.
"Ack."
She snatched her hand back, clamped her mouth shut, and put distance between them. Aslan blinked after her, puzzled, but there was no time to ask what was wrong. The reunion was winding down.
"I didn't realize you were friends of my little girl. Forgive me."
The old man, tear tracks still clear on his face, looked as if he'd aged another ten years. He smiled, affixing his mask to his belt.
The eccentricity had softened noticeably. As if Rumel truly were his daughter now.
"I spoke too harshly, didn't I? My little girl's friends could never be priests... Won't you accept my apology?"
A different man from the one Aslan had visited every time before. As Aslan stared with an awkward expression, the old man formed a hand seal and flicked his fingers.
It was a magic-release technique.
A seal keyed to specific wards he himself had placed.
The instant Aslan recognized it, he felt the dense mana that had been roiling behind him begin to thin.
The tower's traps were disarming one after another.
The old man rendered every spell he had painstakingly laid completely inert, then took the lead, guiding Rumel forward. Approaching the tower's entrance, he smiled with gentle warmth.
"Come inside. Any friend of my little girl is a son or daughter to me. Please, come in, rest comfortably, and then be on your way."
A smile brimming with goodwill. A far cry from the expression Anton usually wore.
Aslan turned his head, dumbfounded, and saw the rest of the party wearing similar looks, all trying to process the abrupt shift in circumstances.
At least he wasn't the only one. Deeply relieved, Aslan stepped into the tower.