The Way to Prove It (6)
'Is this really all right?'
Late at night, the Baron of Waut had slipped out of the castle in secret with only a handful of his closest retainers, and even now, he was still wavering. He was still hesitating when he reached his destination.
He had no choice. What he was about to do was anything but honorable. If anyone else found out, they might call him a fool.
And if everything that was about to happen turned out to be true, they would call him wicked. What he was about to do was, in plain terms, a complete betrayal of common sense and all he held true.
"My lord. What brings you here at this hour?"
"...This place is important. It’s the water source in the southern part of our domain, isn’t it? The small streams that begin here become great rivers and waterways. All the water that flows from here ends up there."
"That is true, but..."
The butler spoke in a low voice, though he seemed not to fully understand and only blinked back at him. In truth, the Baron of Waut had no intention of making him understand. In heaven and earth, two people would be enough to know exactly what he was doing.
So he simply walked in silence and stopped by the water’s edge. Then he took out the sack from his robes and opened it. It looked no different from ordinary powder, but after hearing the full explanation, he looked down at it with trembling eyes.
'This is unforgivable. And yet...'
His eyes twitched once. The skull’s words were still vivid in his mind.
People who drank water mixed with this powder would become rampaging madmen, but also an army that obeyed his commands without question.
At the thought that he could use that power to solve the crisis before him now, and perhaps gain the strength to speak against whatever troubles were yet to come, his heart pounded violently in his chest.
"I-I can’t refuse that."
In the end, with trembling hands, the baron emptied the powder from the sack into the river. The falling grains scattered into the current and dissolved without leaving the slightest trace.
He had chosen the desire he had longed for so fiercely between reason and ambition. To realize it, he decided that killing countless lives would be a cost he could bear without hesitation.
At the same time, a defensive, almost instinctive thought rose up to protect him: he had not done anything wrong.
According to the skull he had secretly made a bargain with, there were already seventy-two demon lords hiding in this world, preying on people and corrupting them.
So he had the duty to fight such beings by any means necessary and save the world. He decided to think of it that way. It made his conscience hurt less.
In the end, even a seasoned and greedy man of power was just a dog with a leash when faced with desire.
Simple fool.
From the shadow of a nearby tree, a pair of red eyes hidden beneath a black hood watched him and let out a snort of contempt.
"The quiet little push into the Baron of Waut’s territory is going well, too. Seems the neighboring domains still have no intention of helping their rival this time either."
"Looks like they hate each other more than I expected."
"At this rate, the nutrient problem can be solved immediately."
Agares, checking the quest rewards and the like during the settlement process, smiled as if he found it delightful. Then again, if you thought about it, he was basically my secretary in this game, so there was nothing strange about him being pleased.
"But I trust you already know this. The new skill you acquired this time means that if you want to make proper use of Incubation and train a real legion, you’ll need a new nutrient supply system."
"I know. Simply killing them and eating them like this isn’t enough."
I let out a sigh at his words. We were strict carnivores. All our nourishment came from devouring living organisms. If you wanted to count another kind of nutrient, mana was about it.
But even then, once you accounted for digestion and absorption efficiency, it was only being supplied to a tiny portion of the force. Clearly, we needed another method.
And for that, what had to come first was growth. Just as it had been until now, continual growth and evolution were the means by which we could make up for our shortcomings.
"If you do find that method, then I suppose we’ll see a little less of scenes like this?"
With a bitter smile, I set my phone down on the desk. What was before my eyes now was a mountain of corpses.
The corpses had been stripped of all nutrients and lay dried out, rolling across the floor like husks. All of it had happened because of my choice. I might no longer care as much as before, but I couldn’t pretend it didn’t bother me at all.
"That much is still unclear. Though I do agree that this kind of indiscriminate hunting is inefficient."
"It’s about time."
Checking the time, I moved to turn off the phone. These days the Great Lord hardly ever acted, so I hadn’t burned through all my action points, but I couldn’t keep holding on to it forever.
"Busy already, are we? Does it please you? To see the results in the game and feel yourself slowly getting closer to what you wanted?"
At that moment, Agares turned the question back on me. That was a rarity. And the question itself was not an easy one to answer on the spot.
What I wanted was obviously to win the biggest international tournament held once a year with my head held high.
But was that truly the essence of it? Was it just winning?
I no longer thought so. Winning the international tournament was only one form taken by the true desire sleeping inside me.
Like Lena, who was obsessed with affection, or Karin, who hated helplessness and dreamed of revolution against the world, or Robinson, who fought for his own growth, what I really wanted was something else.
"I want to win."
Now I knew it clearly. I had watched and managed so many cases, and through them I had come to feel it. What I wanted in exchange for dedicating everything I had was victory in competition. It didn’t matter whether that competition was in the game or in reality.
I didn’t want to lose anymore. I wanted to trample everything and stand on top of it. I wanted to win, and by winning, never be left behind.
I wanted to stand at the highest place of all.
"That’s enough."
Agares slowly clapped, then fell silent.
"...You didn’t drink alcohol, did you?"
"It’s just juice."
The moment I finished getting dressed, Im Chan-gyu and the other team members appeared at the door. Im Chan-gyu glanced at the glass bottles neatly arranged on my desk and asked with an uncertain expression, but I just let out a dry laugh and brushed it off.
The glass bottles he was asking about were potions I had bought in Pandemonium, but if I insisted they were juice, there was really no room for suspicion. In fact, Im Chan-gyu didn’t show much interest in the bottles after that.
"Who’s our scrim opponent today?"
"Wasn’t it the VT team? I heard they’ve changed a lot of their roster, too. They’re preparing pretty fast. We were the team that got our roster together fastest out of the ten teams."
It seemed Im Chan-gyu no longer found me so intimidating. That stood in contrast to the others, who were still watching my mood carefully.
"They’ve changed a lot, but they’re all veterans from strong teams, right? Do you know how much more they make than us? At least ten times as much..."
"So you’re going to lose?"
I turned with a bitter smile, and he flinched, then clamped his mouth shut.
The time for complaints was over. Once we had signed the contract, we had to keep our eyes forward and run. No matter who the opponent was, we had to beat them.
"They probably won’t be coordinated with each other either, so the result’s something we’ll have to see for ourselves. It’s just a closed scrim, so even if we lose, it won’t matter—but I still want to win."
"...We do too."
Im Chan-gyu avoided my eyes. The others did the same. I realized belatedly that I might have made things sound harder than I intended.
I’d meant it as encouragement, but I wasn’t sure whether it had worked.
"Let’s keep it easy and play without pressure. It’s our first time syncing up properly, and the season hasn’t even started yet."
The team practice room in the company building carried a strangely solemn yet hectic atmosphere as Coach Park Yong-bin directed everyone and kept the players going.
And I, too, was fully prepared. It had been a while since I’d felt this on-site atmosphere, and the headset on my head somehow felt more comfortable than anything else.
"Don’t get too tense. The other side is clearly strong, and this is nothing more than a scouting match."
He seemed determined to ease our burden as much as possible.
In fact, VT was a team sitting in the playoff bracket, a mid-to-upper-tier squad among the ten teams, and they had reportedly built a roster even stronger than last year’s. So his words were not wrong.
"Can you hear me?"
"Yeah."
Through the microphone inside the headset, I could hear the voices of my teammates. Most of them had spent time as trainees, yet they still sounded stiff with nerves. Oddly enough, Im Chan-gyu was the loudest of them all.
"Hyung, just go even for now. You can hold, right?"
On top of that, it seemed Im Chan-gyu expected me to start the match already at a disadvantage against the enemy. Even if you were ranked number one, team play at the pro level was a completely different world. His plan seemed to be for me to hold defensively and then either come help me himself or win the game elsewhere with support from the others.
I don’t want to do that, though.
Of course, I was confident I could hold. But I had no intention of doing nothing but holding. This time, I planned to beat an opponent who was rated far above me.