Swords, Dogs, and Bones—It's All in How You Use Them - 3
"I'm back."
"Welcome home. That took a whi— ugh?!"
Lin had gone out to pick flowers and come back again. Somehow, though, her body was covered in wounds. Scratches, shallow bite marks, dirt and leaves stuck to her skin. No matter how you looked at it, she hadn't been flower-picking — she'd been through a war.
"What happened to you?"
"Nothing much."
"Nothing much, my foot! You're covered in injuries!"
If you're going to lie, at least make it believable. It was painfully obvious she'd been in a fight, yet Lin was trying to play dumb. I was debating whether to keep pressing her until she talked when Rewen stuck his head out of the tent.
He sized up the situation in an instant and spoke in a voice far colder and more dangerous than mine.
"Sis? How did you get hurt like that?"
"Rewen, this is—"
"Tell me the truth. Or I will genuinely get angry."
"Ugh… Fine. What happened was…"
With Rewen joining the interrogation, Lin finally opened her mouth. According to her, she'd run into a black dog on her way to pick flowers. For reasons she couldn't explain, her instincts had screamed that it was an enemy, so she'd fought it — and gotten hurt in the process.
"There's a dog out there that can wound you…?"
"Bern, could that be the monster dog we met in the mine?"
"Impossible. Master dealt with that thing personally, didn't he?"
"R-right."
Sorry, but it's alive and well inside my shadow.
"Besides, it looked completely different from that monster. Much smaller and cuter… which somehow made it even more unsettling."
"So did you take care of it?"
"I lost it in the middle of a fierce fight. For some reason, it just… left on its own."
I had a pretty good idea what had happened. I'd been about to go looking for Lin myself after waiting so long with no sign of her return. Chaos must have sensed that and bolted.
So she really did fight Chaos?
This was serious. I'd explicitly forbidden Chaos from attacking anyone without my permission. In other words, Chaos had broken our contract.
"Sis, now that we know, get over here and get treated!"
"A-all right."
Once Lin headed off toward the cargo wagon, Chaos poked its face out of the shadows. One of its ears was slightly torn, and its usually fluffy fur was a tangled mess. No question — it had fought Lin.
I narrowed my eyes in disapproval, and Chaos looked up at me with a pitiful expression.
"Kyuuung…!"
[He's saying he's being wronged.]
"You broke the contract and you're the one feeling wronged?"
"Wang! Wang!"
[He says it was self-defense. He was about to quietly withdraw, but the human started the fight first.]
"Would you swear on getting neutered that that's true?"
"……. Kyiiing."
[Actually, he admits they both lunged at each other on pure instinct at the same time.]
"Instinct? Does that even make sense?"
Lin was human, and Chaos — monster or not — was one of the Four Evil Beasts, a creature that thought and acted with full awareness. And those two just threw themselves at each other on instinct?
Lin, fine. But Chaos should have known better, given our contract.
[This one thinks it understands why the two of them clashed.]
Go on.
[As you well know, both of them are the loyal-hound type. Their personalities may differ, but their natures are nearly identical. The moment they laid eyes on each other, they felt a sense of kinship.]
Shouldn't that make them get along better, then?
[You understand one thing but not the other. A master has no need for two loyal hounds. Only the one who protects the master first gets to monopolize the affection. So Chaos and Lin were always destined to become rivals.]
And they figured that out on instinct and started fighting?
[That would be the long and short of it.]
They're both insane.
I'd heard of animal instinct and a woman's intuition, but never of two beings sensing they were rivals and immediately going at each other. Rivalry was supposed to be a product of conscious, subjective thought. The idea that they'd recognized each other as competitors on pure instinct had never even crossed my mind.
I feel like I'm walking around with a time bomb that could go off at any moment…
First priority: keep Lin and Chaos as far apart as possible. If the two of them were ever left alone together… I had a bad feeling an unmanageable disaster would erupt.
The City of Steam, Ainharden.
Also known as the City of Progress, it was the most advanced place in the entire kingdom. Together with Hendakpin, the magic city that housed the Magic Tower, it formed one of the twin pillars of civilization — a place that had forged its own unique culture through coal and steam power. As a result, the sounds of hissing steam and turning gears were a constant presence in Ainharden.
"Bern! Bern! Look — that doll is moving on its own!"
"It's a clockwork doll."
"Have you been to this city before?"
"No, but I've seen one that an acquaintance used to carry around."
I'd lived in an era far more advanced than the one that produced clockwork dolls. But I couldn't exactly say that out loud, so I brushed it off with a vague lie.
"What a fascinating city. Everything I see is completely unfamiliar."
"Makes sense. It's known as the most alien city in the Holden Kingdom."
"To know so much about a place you've never visited — as expected of Master!"
I waved her off before Lin could launch into full-blown praise. I'd simply read the novel and the setting materials thoroughly. I hadn't done any actual research or information-gathering. Being complimented for that just made my skin crawl.
[All well and good, but the noise is making my head spin.]
Just bear with it a little longer.
Ainharden's level of civilization was close to the modern era. This was the period when Village Chief Adeson and countless inventors throughout the city were pushing civilization to ever greater heights. Naturally, the clockwork mechanisms and devices throughout the city never stopped running.
It was an effort worthy of every bit of praise — but sadly, this city would one day be wiped from existence without a trace by a deranged Breeze. The kingdom's civilization would regress, and people would come to rely entirely on magic.
That doomed future, however, had been erased thanks to me.
With Breeze's cataclysm averted, I wonder how things will turn out now…
I couldn't begin to predict what kind of influence Ainharden would have on the kingdom's future. Still, as someone thoroughly sick of the Magic Tower types who went around proclaiming that magic alone was humanity's hope, I found myself wishing this city would grow strong enough to shut those Magic Tower brats up for good.
I'd never imagined the butterfly effect would play out like this, but I was glad I'd saved Rene. Just thinking about it made the corners of my mouth keep twitching upward.
"By the way, is this really our destination?"
"Yeah, pretty sure it is."
I'd known we were in the right place from the moment we entered the city.
The people of Ainharden welcome the visit of this era's greatest idol — Hades-chan!
That was the message on the banner hanging at the entrance.
A lich who had voluntarily become undead in pursuit of the ultimate heights of magic. A madwoman who had rejected even the rest of death had somehow won over the people of Ainharden — a city whose very nature stood opposed to magic — and was even planning to hold a fan meet-and-greet here.
I'd carefully asked her if she didn't find that… off-putting. Hades had replied:
"Roughly half the residents of Ainharden are presidents of my fan clubs. I had no choice."
In the short time I hadn't been watching, the Demi-Lich had reinvented herself as a full-blown self-made superstar. She might actually prefer chatting with her viewers and cooing cutely at them more than producing undead or researching magic now.
And the people of this other world were going wild for her without the faintest idea that she was a lich who'd once tried to spread a plague.
This is an isekai?
Honestly, if I'd known the other world was this broken, I might have joined the Demon King's side from the start. What kind of war had she even been fighting…?
"The crowds are incredible — must be because of the event we're attending tomorrow."
"Enough people to drown out even the constant hiss of steam… This Hades person's popularity is nothing to scoff at."
"Mm…"
According to Hades, roughly ten million people were sponsoring her. Assuming the average streamer I used to watch scraped by with about ten thousand concurrent viewers, that was roughly a thousand times more. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say she was more popular than the King of Holden or the Pope — so the fact that Ainharden was bursting at the seams wasn't surprising at all.
"We're not going to get any sightseeing done like this. Let's head to the inn we reserved first."
"Yes!"
The crushing crowds were a convenient excuse. The real reason was that I couldn't stand watching people fawn over clockwork dolls modeled after Hades's appearance. Some of them were even lifting the dolls up to check their underwear.
What do you even say to a human trying to look at a skeleton's panties?
Having taken the red pill myself, it was a sight I simply couldn't bear to watch with my eyes open.
And off in the distance, I spotted Kang Junhyuk loaded down with armfuls of Hades merchandise, looking absolutely delighted.
"……Huh?"
Wait. Why is Kang Junhyuk here?