Unavoidable Fate (2)
Serina's gaze upon me when she returned was starkly different from before. It carried the terror-tinged awe of someone who had witnessed something vast and incomprehensible.
The moment she dismounted, her eyes scanned in order: the wound on my cheek, the shotgun in my hand, and far off in the distance, the shattered target five hundred meters away. As a mage, her keen senses must have swept the air once. Yet there were no remnants of fire magic, no ripples of mana—just an eerie stillness. Serina felt a profound relief that this man was not her enemy.
Finally, her gaze settled on my notebook atop the table.
"You've left behind yet another world-shaking record in the meantime, haven't you, my lord?"
Serina's fingers carefully turned the first page of the parchment. The opening pages held my designs for the steam engine and the musket's structure. Intricately meshing gears and complex mechanisms for controlling pressure. Having handled precise magic circles as a mage, she seemed to take pure intellectual delight in the flawless, logical perfection of these mechanical devices.
"Truly astonishing. To achieve such efficiency with nothing but interlocking metal... Your engineering insight is already centuries ahead of this continent's level."
She flipped the pages with a pleased smile. Up to this point, Serina had viewed the notebook as an innovative inventor's log from a genius craftsman, turning the pages with light curiosity. But as her fingers opened to the section on foundational science, the leisurely smile on her lips slowly faded. In its place bloomed an insatiable curiosity that no scholar could suppress.
Serina drew in a breath without realizing it. The true face of the world she had sought her entire life amid tomes and meditation lay bare and defenseless on this rough parchment. It felt like holding the key to a forbidden library long sealed shut. These were shocking theories, yet her scholarly instincts screamed their truth—meticulously inscribed, not mere scribbled delusions. Her heart raced with a thrilling terror and a burning thirst for new knowledge.
The heliocentric theory, positing that the universe revolved not around the ground beneath our feet, but around a massive flaming sphere. The atomic theory, claiming all things were not condensations of mana, but composites of infinitesimal particles invisible to the naked eye.
Serina's lips trembled faintly. Her expression turned dazed, like a child peeking behind the world's curtain to glimpse the machinery hidden within. But what shook her most profoundly—the mage from the department overseeing environment and ecology—was the content on the following page.
The evolutionary theory, asserting that all life forms were not fixed creations of the gods, but had transformed themselves over tens of thousands of years to adapt to their environments and survive.
"Life... evolved on its own? For adaptation?"
In Serina's eyes burned a rapture bordering on ecstasy, the thrill of lifelong mysteries unveiled in a few crisp sentences.
"Lord Kyle... what in the world are you...?"
She was witnessing in real time how countless ecological puzzles dismissed by mages as divine providence or mana whims slotted perfectly under words like 'natural selection' and 'evolution' on this humble paper.
"What mages have failed to see for millennia behind the veil of mana—you lay bare in a single notebook."
Serina looked up at me, her blue eyes brimming with a scholar's pure respect and profound awe toward the one who had revealed this immense truth.
"Especially this record on evolution... the brutal choices for survival, the wondrous chain of adaptations shaped by environment... Your mind is breathtakingly beautiful. I'm green with envy."
Serina clutched the notebook for a long while, unable to let go—like Eve taking a bite of the fruit of knowledge, she had crossed an irreversible line.
After poring over it intently, she glanced at the scar on my cheek, then alternated between it and the shotgun in my hand, murmuring in a voice laced with worry and admiration.
"What happened to that wound?"
I rubbed the scar lightly and chuckled softly. It was the engineer's badge of shame—punishment for arrogance, thinking 'this should hold' in the face of physics.
Telling the truth was embarrassing, but denying it felt wrong with her eyes sparkling so brightly.
"Oh, this? Yeah... circumstances. Haha."
I scratched the back of my head with an awkward grin. No way could I say, 'Messed up the design, gun blew up, nearly died.'
The notebook she held was fundamentally my legacy for my absence, but also a harsh self-reflection sworn never to repeat such pathetic mistakes.
I hadn't shared this dangerous knowledge just to sate her curiosity. Recording it was a massive gamble on my part. In an era where knowledge was power, committing source knowledge to writing invited tech leaks. Yet I hadn't stopped my pen for clear reasons.
If I perished in some accident and could no longer write, I had to prevent Eisengrad's miracles from evaporating overnight. I needed to lay a civilizational foundation so Grody and future scholars could stand on my shoulders and keep it turning even without me.
Above all, I didn't want those who cared for me paying the brutal price for my sloppy errors. One person's scars were enough. It was the deepest consideration and responsibility I owed this domain's future.
Even if fragments fell to enemies, I trusted my people's absorption and progress would outpace them.
Guessing deeper circumstances from my vague reply, Serina fell silent, gazing at me intently. But her expression soon reverted to the investigator's cool demeanor. Ugly reality demanded immediate action.
The shooting range's fierce wind whipped her blue cloak mercilessly.
"Anyway, we came tracing the count's terrorist tracks. Have you found anything?"
Reading the tension in her voice, I nodded.
"Perfect timing—I have evidence to show. Something you'll see once in a lifetime. Follow me."
I led the puzzled Serina and Rozelin to the lord's castle basement. Entering what had once been our temporary lab with Serina, the acrid gunpowder scent gave way to alcohol and stinging acid fumes.
I pointed to a corner of the workbench: a parchment scrap sealed in a glass jar to block outside air.
"What's this? A page from a grimoire?"
Serina leaned close to the jar. Inside the transparent vessel, a long strip of parchment lay with bizarre bands of color layered and streaked across it.
"This is the trace of an analysis called chromatography. We separated that orc's blood by components to expose the berserk drug's identity."
I lightly lifted the paper with tweezers.
"It exploits differences in how mixed components climb the solvent. No matter how tangled to hide, each substance travels at its own speed."
My finger pointed to the distinctive purple band at the top.
"This purple line is the main ingredient of the berserk drug that numbs reason and forces metabolic frenzy. An artificial toxin that could never occur naturally in orcs."
Serina stared in admiration at the purple band. This young lord had pierced a domain mages monopolized for millennia with mere scraps of paper. Before this cold logic devoid of mana traces, she felt awe tinged with defeat once more.
Gazing at the purple band, she gave a wry smile. As her intellectual fervor cooled, the odd feeling from first seeing her at the range sharpened: her saddle soaked in sweat and mud from a long forced march, her knights at the entrance poised to draw swords at any moment, and above all, the deep fatigue etching her usually unflappable eyes, betraying how cornered she was.
I slowly set down the tweezers and met her gaze squarely.
"So, Investigator. What's the real reason you raced here from afar? Not just to see this, I imagine."
My question wiped the smile from her lips.
"...We went to the count's territory first. Per imperial orders, to secure evidence."
She tore her eyes from the jar and faced me directly.
"They'd cleaned most traces beforehand... but couldn't fool mages' eyes. We got the tail."
Serina clenched her fist, knuckles whitening beneath her glove in fury.
"But they noticed we'd dug too deep. Maybe planned to smash it all if exposed from the start."
She roughly gripped her sword hilt, glaring sharply at the map on the basement wall. Her eyes fixed on the vast forest between Eisengrad and the count's lands.
"Faced with exposure, they dosed a nearby monster horde with massive amounts of the berserk drug."
"...Monster horde?"
Rozelin's face paled instantly beside me. The count's mad bid to drown the region in blood, turning it into a vast graveyard to bury their crimes.
Grodi, following behind, dropped his hammer with a clatter. Ella, watching from the entrance, stifled a silent scream, hand over her mouth.
The basement's chill air thickened with suffocating dread.
As despairing gazes trembled, I quietly eyed the glowing purple band in the jar. This slender line had already claimed countless lives as sacrifice—and now heralded uncontrollable slaughter.
"...Fucking lunatic."
A chill curse slipped through my lips. The count had long crossed the line—not to win, but in self-destructive madness, hurling variables to doom everyone.
I gripped the bolt-action rifle leaning against the wall. The cold metal in my palm cleared my tangled thoughts.
"Grody."
At my call, he lifted his head, neck veins bulging. Gone was the fear in his eyes; instead burned the fierce resolve of a craftsman defending his world.
"You know without me saying, right?"
"Hah, what do you take a dwarf for?"
Grodi snatched his hammer from the floor, baring his teeth in a grin.
"I'll kick the factory bastards out of bed and shove 'em to the forges. That reference manual you left? Devilish thing that hooks ya."
His eyes already flickered with the equations and theories he'd devoured for a week.
"From tomorrow, every wide-eyed sod in the factory chambers bores and bolts. Long as the steam engines don't stop, those sticks'll rain down like hell."