The First Snow of the Northern Empire
The First Snow of the Northern Empire
Self-Birthing Mother.
The Evil God who bore that name had a form that was impossible to overlook.
In terms of raw power, she surpassed the War God but stood equal to or slightly weaker than the Predator — a relatively minor Evil God by any measure.
Her appearance — a grotesque fusion of serpent and centipede — made her less a single entity than a bizarre chimera stitched together from countless living creatures.
A monster where each scale was a twisted, nightmarish hybrid of beasts.
Her colossal body, vast enough to span from the universe's dawn to its end, sprouted innumerable legs, each one bearing the traces of a different animal.
At a glance, she might have seemed a cosmic monstrosity born of some primordial harmony, but she was an artificial god — a biological abomination created to forestall the universe's destruction.
A beast-god tasked with devouring all existing life, endlessly dividing herself so that life might survive even beyond the far edge of the universe, then germinating new life in whatever cosmos rose from the ashes.
That was the original purpose behind Self-Birthing Mother.
Of course, that purpose had been forgotten long ago.
Now that Self-Birthing Mother had multiplied herself without limit and crushed the universe under her own mass, the task had become meaningless.
Yet the implications that could be drawn from it remained.
Self-Birthing Mother bestowed bestial forms and extraordinary regenerative powers upon her priests.
The letter Aslan had just received contained a passage that brought those very details to mind.
Naturally, it was still too early to draw firm conclusions from reports of people suddenly transforming into priests without warning, or spontaneously taking animal shapes and tearing one another apart, without any apparent cause.
Nevertheless, Aslan held a reasonable suspicion that an Evil God was entangled in this affair.
After all, weren't Evil Gods exactly the sort to act without rhyme or reason?
Their will and intent rarely aligned with anything coherent.
For now, the fact that a large group of humans had collectively and abruptly transformed into beasts pointed toward a single possible culprit.
To transform that suspicion into certainty, Aslan summoned a greater authority on the subject than himself.
A woman who stood with her weight on one hip, her feline ears twitching and an expression of undisguised displeasure on her face.
Maria Auris Meland's bodyguard, and a hybrid of Self-Birthing Mother — Catherine.
She listened to Aslan's account with bared teeth and a low growl, then uncrossed her arms when Richard shot her an awkward look.
"So?"
"I'd like your assessment. As you well know..."
"You figured since I'm a hybrid, I'd know more. Something like that?"
Hostility simmered beneath her tone.
Aslan's expression tightened briefly at the edge in her voice before he nodded. Catherine tapped her own arm with her fingertips, radiating irritation.
Then she shot back a question.
"What kind of beasts did they turn into?"
Aslan recalled the detailed account from the letter — the observations the Olpasbet guards had transcribed from whatever they could see.
"Cattle, horses, bears, wolves, sheep, crocodiles... every sort of beast, they said. The rest were mixtures of two or more creatures with no identifiable original form, and some were too grotesque to recognize at all...."
"You have the letter?"
"Of course."
"Hand it over."
Aslan drew the letter from inside his coat, and Catherine snatched it and unfolded it to read.
Her eyes swept meticulously across the page. As her feline golden irises traced the text, Aslan watched her and leaned back against a barrel behind him.
The wait was brief.
"That bitch's divine power, definitely. I'm sure of it."
That bitch. She meant Self-Birthing Mother. The words dripped from Catherine's lips. Aslan nodded at them, and she folded the letter and continued.
"They're not hybrids like me, and not priests either. Just people twisted into monsters by the influence of her power. Well... you'd know that better than anyone."
Whether she was mocking him, needling him, or just being caustic, Catherine finished speaking and tossed the letter back. Aslan caught it and nodded again.
Self-Birthing Mother's priests were not particularly numerous.
But Self-Birthing Mother granted her divine power to her priests.
The power to mutate humans or animals under certain conditions — to create chimeras or twist their forms into beasts.
And amid all this, the events in Olpasbet served as concrete evidence.
A divine power that effectively amounted to forced monsterization.
Grotesque creatures bereft of reason unless they were priests or hybrids.
Proof that Self-Birthing Mother's touch had reached across the distance.
At last, his suspicion crystallized into certainty. Aslan exhaled as he tucked the letter back inside his coat.
That wasn't the real problem.
The question was how that touch had reached so far, and why such a thing had been done.
Catherine, catching the shape of his concern, shrugged down at him, her face still shadowed by that faint displeasure.
"How would I know? They're all dead, so there's not much to go on. Either some priest mixed in among them used the power and got himself killed, or — who knows — they found a way to trigger it later, from a distance."
She doled out the plausible theory as though she were withholding information rather than offering it. Aslan suspected the latter.
Priests were tools of their gods. They stood ready to throw their lives away if their god willed it, but gods were not generally the sort to demand mass suicide on a whim.
At most, the Veil of Compassion might. Most priests did not discard their lives like worn-out rags.
So Aslan judged the latter more likely.
What remained was why such an act had been committed.
The power of monsterization unleashed against the people of the Northern Empire could mean one of two things.
Either someone was trying to stop Aslan from heading north, or something was already unfolding in the Northern Empire and they had been caught up in it.
"If you've got nothing else, I'll take my leave. Young master Richard, I'll call on you later."
"Ah, yes. Until later, then."
The hybrid woman who maintained a disrespectful attitude toward Aslan yet remained impeccably courteous to the young master alone.
Watching her retreat — the subtle twitch of her feline tail, the flick of her ears — Aslan turned the thought over.
Self-Birthing Mother's priests were few, but her hybrids were considerably more numerous and scattered across the world.
Historically, the conspicuous presence of such hybrids had been a source of terror among common folk, and rumors naturally followed.
If this incident in the Northern Empire was not an isolated event but something deeply entangled with imperial history...
Then the rumors and prejudices Rumel had mentioned might not be baseless gossip — they might be rooted in truth, in events that had actually happened.
If that were truly the case, the situation would become far more complex and dangerous than Aslan had anticipated.
He had originally intended to make thorough preparations and head for the Northern Empire as safely as possible. He now realized that was no longer an option.
The situation would soon slip beyond his grasp and spiral out of control.
It needed to be suppressed before that happened — or early on, at the very least.
Aslan had to reach the Northern Empire as quickly as possible.
Even as he steeled himself to act on that conclusion, something was already unfolding far across the sea.
*
Off the coast of the Northern Empire, amid a wasteland of jagged reefs and biting sea winds, a massive ship was breaking apart in the storm.
"Aaaaagh!"
A scream — and something came flying.
A colossal harpoon-like projectile smashed into the mast, which crumpled helplessly and crashed to the deck, crushing a man beneath it into pulp.
It was a horrific sight, but no one paid it any mind.
The people aboard the ship were consumed by their own agony, shrieking and scrambling toward death.
Men who spilled their entrails as they fell, men torn apart by beasts, men impaled by charging moose and emptied across the deck, men cloven in half by sweeping forelimbs.
A scene that could only be described as carnage. And at its center, a lone man was moving.
No battle cry. Just the flash of a brass-hued blade slicing the air.
The sword-stroke arced out in an honest line and carved straight through the lunging beast's torso, severing it at the waist.
The creature howled. Entrails sluiced from the severed trunk and sprawled across the deck as the man twisted at the hip, reversing the blade and stabbing behind him in a single motion.
The sword sank in with a sickening crunch of flesh and bone, and the bear-badger hybrid convulsed and died.
Wrenching the blade free, the man glared at the advancing beasts and swept a hand across his body with the other arm.
A thrown dagger buried itself simultaneously in the eye and brow of a charging wolf-like creature, which slid past him as it collapsed.
He pulled the dagger from the corpse and scanned his surroundings. Even in the driving rain, the man looked composed.
He was unmistakably distinct.
His bare body, unarmored and vividly exposed, bore a faint jade-green hue, across which broad, swirling tattoos of blue coiled.
His honed physique steamed in the downpour, radiating heat. The several daggers and tools strapped to that body lay quiet, ready to be drawn at any moment.
The face that such a menacing body supported was, in contrast, serene.
Mana-light bled from his pupils in clear gray radiance. His jade-toned face was adorned with a thick black beard and white tattoos.
From his hair — bound in a single tail — down to his feet, he was drenched in blood both foreign and his own. He flicked the gore from his brass-hued blade with a swing and surveyed the scene.
The man was a Beastman.
A living exemplar of the warrior ideal.
And magic far from typical of such a warrior made him all the more singular.
With a strange whine, a gray glow of sorcery washed across his flesh. New tissue swelled rapidly into place, sealing split wounds shut.
High-level Restoration School magic.
An art impossible to wield without combining medical knowledge, anatomical expertise, and magical ability.
Restoration magic that surpassed mere proficiency and ranked among the finest.
No wonder the beasts growled low and began to edge backward.
No matter how many wounds they inflicted, he healed at once.
His mana seemed limitless, and the treatment was so swift that no opening ever appeared.
He was a dangerous existence. A formidable warrior.
The beasts encircling the Beastman warrior recognized it.
At his feet lay countless others — creatures without reason, who had failed to recognize what they faced.
Every one of them a predator capable of tearing a grown man apart.
And yet they had failed to kill this single Beastman. They were struggling.
They had him surrounded, but the atmosphere felt more like an execution — their execution.
A humiliating sight. Despite their numerical superiority, they were being cowed.
A few beasts with barely any reason left lowered their bodies and snarled at the indignity, preparing to lunge.
But before they could, something stepped forward.
The deck — built to bear heavy cargo — buckled and cratered under that stride.
The thing that emerged carried a singular strangeness that surpassed even the Beastman warrior.
A monster that advanced on hooves like a bull, with long, muscular legs like a horse's and the forelimbs of a bear.
A creature standing four meters tall, with a moose's head and hideously sharp fangs that belonged to a carnivore.
It stepped forward and planted itself among the beasts.
And with eyes burning red, it looked down at the Beastman warrior and spoke, in a strangely beautiful voice that did not match its form at all. 'Greenskin. Let's make a deal.'