Chapter 214: The Tin Knight and the Singing Bones (2)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 214: The Tin Knight and the Singing Bones (2)
The Magic State began to burn.
Slowly at first, but the flames grew ever larger.
Undead birds soared through the sky, scattering the singing bones everywhere. The bones that fell into people’s hands tirelessly repeated the same song.
While some feared this strange phenomenon of bone flutes singing on their own, many others were simply fascinated.
“A fake war? The Magic Towers and the Lions staged it?”
“What’s this all about?”
“I don’t know. Was there some kind of fight somewhere?”
When the bone flutes first began to spread, people didn’t understand the meaning of the song.
The Towers of Protection and Foresight, not wanting to stir up war sentiment, had demanded silence from the Tower of Control. And Control, though outwardly fuming, was satisfied with having achieved its original goal and accepted their demand.
“Maybe it’s about that thing? You know, they said there was some fight near the border.”
“Ah, now that you mention it, the merchants who travel that area were complaining. They had to take a huge detour because all the nearby forests were closed off.”
“But when they say ‘Lions,’ do they mean the Lennarts?”
However, a love for gossip and back-talk was only human nature.
This was especially true when the target was the Tower of Control, which had long been the object of the lower class’s resentment.
Anyone with even a shred of related information began to speak up. Rumors were embellished, growing more specific, and all sorts of speculation and false tales intertwined to form a colossal mass of hearsay.
Of course, its accuracy was abysmal, but the very fact that such stories were constantly circulating and capturing public interest was enough to make the Tower of Control’s stomach turn.
“What in the world are you all doing?!”
Valdeus, a 4th-rank mage of the Tower of Control and captain of the public order maintenance unit, shouted at his subordinates, his face grim.
“Slanderous rumors about our Tower are spreading by the second! Go collect every last one of those damn bone flutes and throw anyone spouting nonsense into prison!”
“My apologies, Lord Valdeus. The collection is already underway. The same goes for quelling the disturbances through the city guard.”
“Then why is the situation still like this?!”
“…There are just too many of them, sir.”
The subordinate replied, his face mournful.
“A massive number of flutes were already scattered in the dead of night while people were sleeping, and they’re still being dropped as we speak. Birds revived through necromancy are flying through the sky and dropping them, so we can’t stop the distribution just by blocking the roads. To snipe each bird from that high up, we’d need at least a 2nd-rank mage, and several of them at that. We just don’t have the manpower.”
“How can you even say that…!”
Valdeus clutched the back of his neck.
He was the captain of the public order maintenance unit.
His role was to expose and eliminate all subversive elements within the territory ruled by the Tower of Control.
The fact that this incident had occurred at all was a severe blow to his prestige. He didn’t even want to imagine the consequences if he couldn’t clean up the mess himself and had to ask for help.
Just as he was about to berate his subordinates again, the crystal orb on his desk flashed.
《—Valdeus, come to my room. Now.》
The message was sudden and one-sided.
Despite the command being far too rude to be directed at a 4th-rank mage of the Tower, Valdeus dared not show any discontent.
On the contrary, unable to even think of hiding his deathly pale face from his subordinates, he hurried away.
The Tower Head’s office, located on the highest floor of the Tower of Control.
Valdeus spoke to the servant guarding the door, his voice trembling.
“Valdeus Rognir. I have come at the Tower Head’s summons.”
The servant bowed respectfully and opened the office door.
The interior of the office was magnificent and classical.
Though called an office, its structure, designed to unconsciously instill a sense of pressure and awe in any visitor, would have been more aptly described as a royal audience chamber.
About twenty people were already inside, all of them bearing the blood of Rognir or their spouses.
A cold sweat broke out on Valdeus’s back as he spotted a large pile of bone flutes on the floor in the center of their circle.
Though they must have known he had entered, none of the guests turned to look at him or offer a greeting.
Even those who would normally have made snide remarks about his failure remained silent.
Valdeus was not foolish enough to think this was a good thing.
It meant the situation was so grave that they couldn’t even afford to offer him their usual scorn and derision.
“According to detection magic, there are over 2,000 undead currently transporting the bone flutes. The majority are bird-type undead, but there are also some using rats and wild dogs.”
“Based on the times the bone flutes were discovered in each region, it appears they were first spread from Utgard Forest, where Jeras was conducting his operation.”
“We are currently unable to contact Jeras and his unit. It is likely that—”
“—They’ve already been annihilated.”
At the calm words of an old man with a gray beard, the others fell silent.
The old man’s gaze turned to Valdeus.
“What are you and your men doing now?”
“We are collecting all the bone flutes! We are also cooperating with the city guard to arrest all the ignorant fools spreading these rumors!”
“On what grounds?”
“Pardon?”
A look of disappointment crossed the old man’s face at Valdeus’s question.
He nudged a bone flute at his feet with his toe.
“You must have heard what these flutes are prattling on about. I told you to hide it if you could. Now that everyone knows, what do you think people will think if we act all flustered and try to cover it up? If you’re going to collect them, it’s only natural to prepare a plausible pretext or a cover story.”
“My-my apologies! My thinking was shortsighted!”
“Enough. It was my mistake to entrust such a heavy responsibility to you simply because you are my eldest son.”
The dismissal was cold, as if he expected nothing more.
Valdeus bit his lip, the frigid rejection feeling worse than any scolding.
“Teur. What is the status of the pursuit team?”
“We’ve found traces of several dozen individuals moving south. It seems they intend to cross ‘The Garden’ and head toward the Empire to shake off pursuit.”
“It’s a diversion. Leave a minimal pursuit team and redirect the rest elsewhere.”
The old man declared it as if it were obvious.
“If a group of necromancers of that size had been roaming our territory, there would have been some sign beforehand. The enemy is small in number.”
“But, Tower Head, this involves operating over a thousand undead simultaneously. We have several skilled necromancers in our Tower, but even among them, only a handful can handle over a hundred undead at once.”
“The Queen of the Dead can single-handedly recreate the army of a nation. What are a mere few thousand to her?”
A momentary silence fell.
The silence had two meanings.
‘The Queen of the Dead… so the Witch of the East has turned against us?’
‘Even if she is the culprit, can a single mage really do such a thing?’
The latter was more common, especially among the younger, less experienced mages.
They couldn’t easily grasp the concept of an individual being equal to a nation.
But the old man was different.
He knew well the divine power the Witch of the North had displayed during her active years, when she was not in her current state of near-seclusion. He also knew what kind of monsters the other witches, said to be her equals, were.
“Of course, it’s unlikely to be the Queen of the Dead herself. She wouldn’t have resorted to such a trick.”
“A trick, you say?”
“The farther an undead is from its necromancer, the more rapidly it loses its power. This is even more true when the range covers not just our territory, but the entire Magic State. To overcome that, the enemy must have used a special material. The corpses of a 4th-rank mage and his elites… well, they would be a more than perfect catalyst.”
He was saying that the raw material for the bone flutes causing such a stir in the Magic State was Jeras and his men.
The people were once again horrified.
The old man’s eyes glinted coldly.
“Send envoys to the other Magic Towers. Convince them that this is nothing more than a slanderous rumor and a frame-up. Also, place a ban on all ships departing from the east. No one is to cross over to the island where the Tower of Protection is located. The pursuit team will focus their search on the port cities. Hurry. This is a grave matter upon which the glory and prosperity of our Tower hangs. I will not tolerate failure.”
The Tower Head of Control.
At the words of the king who inherited the direct lineage of the old kingdom, his kin acknowledged his command in unison.
One of the four heads of the Magic State, shedding all carelessness and arrogance, began to bare its fangs at the enemy.