Catastrophe (2)
Thinking something had to be off, I went to check the egg. And sure enough, there really was a hairline crack running across the shell.
“Don’t tell me it’s about to hatch right now.”
“I can’t say for certain, but the crack is definitely widening.”
Right before my eyes, the fissure spread until the shell split apart with a ragged crunch. From inside emerged a small, damp kitten.
Its fur was black as the night sky. On its back sat a pair of wings covered in leathery membrane — wings far too tiny to carry anything through the air.
“Kyiiii….”
The kitten stretched out its legs and yawned with shameless abandon. I stood there flustered. For one thing, I had never even heard of a cat being born from an egg.
“Imprinting!” Lucian suddenly raised his voice. “Look the Hellcat in the eyes.”
“Its eyes?”
“There is a legend that a creature born from an egg recognizes the first being it encounters as its parent.”
“That’s just a legend.”
That was what I said — but I was already locking eyes with the Hellcat. The little thing stared straight back at me with its bright yellow eyes.
…It’s actually pretty cute.
Sorry, Ruby, but when it comes to cuteness, cats just…
“Shrack!”
“Ow!”
The Hellcat suddenly raked its claws across my face. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time to react.
“Pweep!”
At the same moment, Ruby burst out from my shoulder. The two beasts tumbled into a snarling, thrashing brawl, and the office descended into absolute chaos.
For what it was worth, Ruby held the upper hand. After all, her true form was a magisterial Magma Dragon.
The Hellcat, by contrast, no matter how fearsome its species, was nothing more than a newborn hatchling. Pinned beneath Ruby, it squirmed and writhed furiously.
“Here.” Lucian handed me a handkerchief. When I pressed it to my cheek, streaks of blood came away — exactly as many as the Hellcat had claws.
“I thought meeting its eyes made me its parent?”
“As a monster, it seems eye contact alone isn’t enough to imprint. I’m afraid you’ll have to subdue it with force.”
“How? Beat up that tiny little thing?”
“That would be the simplest way, yes — but surely a man of your talents can bring a single beast to heel without laying a hand on it.”
He had a point.
I stepped toward the Hellcat. It glared up at me and hissed viciously.
Ssssssss….
Surging Daoist energy rose over my body in the shape of blue flame.
Having absorbed the Fire Giant’s inner core and weathered battle after battle, I had all but reclaimed the power of my past life.
My current realm was the threshold of the Divine Manifestation stage.
In demon terms, that would be more than enough to rank as a Marquis. A hatchling fresh from its shell, if not a fully grown beast — surely this would be more than sufficient.
The Hellcat’s pupils trembled as though an earthquake had struck beneath them. Its needle-sharp fangs slid back down between its gums.
The moment it showed no sign of resistance, Ruby lifted her foot and retreated.
“Up we go.”
I scooped the Hellcat up in both hands. It went stiff and let itself be held. Apparently the little creature’s final stance was one of pure indifference.
“The Hellcat will grow and grow stronger at a frightening pace. If you feel you cannot control it, it would be wiser to dispose of it now.”
“I’ll make that call when the time comes. Not today.”
“…I will trust your judgment, Lord Iden.”
I gently stroked the Hellcat’s black fur.
I couldn’t have known before it hatched — but now that it had, it was my responsibility. Culling something because it was inconvenient to manage simply wasn’t in my nature.
That’s right. Monsters are for monsters to handle.
And so Ruby took up residence on my right shoulder and the Hellcat on my left. The two housemates did not seem to be getting along particularly well.
Every now and then the Hellcat would hiss, and every time it did, Ruby would billow out the aura of the true-form Magma Dragon. For the moment, Ruby seemed to be succeeding in keeping her junior in line.
And that balance was unlikely to shift in the future. A fully grown Magma Dragon, they say, becomes powerful enough to tear apart other first-rank monsters.
Which raises the question — who exactly was it that split a full-grown Magma Dragon in two with a single sword strike?
“Young Master. It is Simon. There is something I must report — may I come in?”
The genealogist Simon rapped on the study door. The man could never be made to wait. No sooner had the news piqued his curiosity than he came running.
“Come in.”
Simon was in a state of feverish excitement. His face was flushed red from brow to nape.
“What is it?”
“Young Master, we’ve found it at last!” he cried, his voice pitched high with elation. “We’ve unearthed the Pioneers’ records in the underground camp! A historic achievement!”
“Is that so?”
Now that I looked, he was clutching a worn old notebook.
“May I read it?”
“It’s three hundred years old — please handle it with care.”
He handed the notebook over gingerly. I opened it and examined the contents.
August 23rd, Year 141
The world will not remember us. It will never know what we are about to accomplish. Upon our sacrifice, they will enjoy prosperity for generations without end.
I am not afraid of being forgotten. What I fear is the possibility that our mission may fail. For now, all we can do is trust in Lord Ivan and press forward.
To secure the next stronghold, we must first pass through the mushroom colony. Lord Hans says he heard the cry of a dragon coming from that direction — pray that it was only his imagination.
— R
That was all the notebook contained — just a few short passages.
“Lord Ivan — that would be Sir Ivan Esterzy, I take it?”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“And who is R?”
“That has not yet been determined. We are currently investigating the records of knights who vanished around the same time as Lord Ivan.”
“What was their mission, exactly?”
“That, too, remains unknown.”
“Hmm.”
Upon our sacrifice, they will enjoy prosperity for generations without end.
The greatest knights of their age had turned their backs on wealth and glory and descended into the earth. And the reason was to secure the safety of their descendants?
“That is why I must request your support, Young Master. There should be another camp beyond the mushroom colony — if we can reach it, even more significant records may come to light.”
“…Not right now.”
I answered carefully.
“The entrance is crawling with gulloks, and who knows what else is waiting deeper in?”
Worse still, the lair of an Earth Wyrm — a first-rank monster — sat in the middle of the mushroom colony. If things were this bad already, the depths were beyond reckoning.
“But—”
“I acknowledge the gravity of the matter. For now, the camp situation is stable, so have Srudal lead a force and expand our territory bit by bit. Once we have more room to spare, I’ll go down myself and carve out a path.”
“Thank you, Young Master!”
Simon’s face brightened.
I dropped by the alchemy workshop around lunchtime. It struck me as a good moment to check on Kaspar’s research progress.
The senior officers were growing stronger by the day, but the rank-and-file knights still had a long road ahead of them.
Which made the results of the pill refinement all the more important. Elixir pills could raise the knights’ realms directly — or serve as rewards to spur them on.
“Kaspar!”
The brown-haired boy appeared from the back of the workshop.
“Lord Iden!”
He came sprinting toward me, hair flying.
“So? How’s the new still?”
“Master Ruka Rain must be the god of blacksmiths himself!”
He thrust the still Ruka had built at me, eyes shining, and shouted:
“This gorgeous design! The sleek, flowing lines! The temperature control and the water valve! He has truly made us something extraordinary!”
“Glad it suits you.”
No need to mention that we’d decapitated a Demon Count just to get the thing made.
“So did the yield rate improve?”
“Yes — ninety-two percent!”
A ninety-two percent yield meant that refining an elixir pill lost only eight percent of the invested mana. It was a result that blew my expectations clear out of the water.
“However, I have not yet managed to produce an actual pill. An unexpected problem has arisen.”
Kaspar’s expression collapsed into a sudden sulk.
“Once I removed every impurity, all that remained was pure mana — it wouldn’t hold a physical form.”
Strip away the impurities, and nothing was left but mana.
“Sounds like the mana source was too pure.”
“Precisely. So I’m considering mixing in a material that would help the mana take physical form… a low-grade ingredient, blended in midway.”
“Right — no pill was ever made from a single ingredient alone.”
Come to think of it, my master had never worked with just one herb either. Angelica decoction tempered with licorice root, and so on.
“Well, in the meantime… this is all I have to show for it.”
Kaspar handed over a handful of shriveled little lumps. Failed attempts — pills that had almost been pills. Shabby as they looked, the mana packed inside each one must have been immense.
“These will do fine as feed for the Hellcat.”
“What is a Hellcat, my lord?”
“A nasty-tempered cat I’ve got.”
I swept the failures into Sanpedla’s Travel Bag.
Kaspar was handling everything splendidly on his own. It wouldn’t be long before he produced something truly remarkable.
I left the alchemy workshop. My next appointment was the High Court.
Judging Ravenshade hadn’t ended my tenure as stand-in lord. Lawsuits were always in abundance, and the ones too thorny for the chief judge to handle fell to me, the lord’s proxy.
Truthfully, I found the courtroom harder than Daoist arts.
Call me a transcendent genius of the immortal path all you like — that meant mastery of spells, not of the ways of the world.
Someone’s inheritance rights, whose bastard child this was… how was I, a boy who’d never even been on a date, supposed to untangle any of it?
“Look at him! Can’t you feel it, in your bones, that he is mine?”
“What nonsense! The shape of his ears is completely different!”
Today, too, the courtroom was hosting a human drama that could wring tears from stone.
“Come here, child! Come to your true father — hurry now!”
“Lord Iden, silence that swindler’s mouth, I beg you!”
Watching the two hurl slanders back and forth, a great question rose in my mind.
How had this fiefdom ever actually functioned?
…No — had it ever functioned at all? Had it simply been rotting away all along?
With Father absent, there had been no lady of the house to make the weighty decisions in his stead — and was that not exactly why Marbel and Kris had been able to run rampant?
Just as the lovers’ quarrel over a single child was reaching its crescendo, the door at the back of the courtroom burst open with a crash.
“Sir Vitten, you mustn’t!”
It was Vitten who stormed into the trial — with a soldier hanging off each of his arms.
“What is it, in the middle of official duties?” I asked, disapproval heavy in my voice.
“I have grave news to deliver.”
“It couldn’t wait?”
“No, my lord.”
Vitten’s face was dark. His tone was subtly different from his usual banter.
“Court is recessed.”
I struck the gavel once. Vitten strode forward with a grim, deliberate step.
My foreboding was bad. That grave expression didn’t suit the man at all. Whatever it was, this was no ordinary trouble.
“Speak, Vitten.”
Vitten leaned in close to me.
“The Steel Guard has been defeated.”
“…What?”
At first, his words simply wouldn’t register.
“Stormrock has fallen. Stragglers are pouring in through the north gate.”
Vitten’s voice was heavy with grief.
His words still wouldn’t reach me. And no wonder — it was impossible. The Steel Guard, with Father at their head, was supposed to be invincible.
“Father…?”
Vitten avoided my eyes.
“Answer me, Vitten.”
I pressed him.
“I asked what happened to my father.”