Chapter 43
After dispelling the barrier made of smoke, I stretched refreshingly and loosened my slightly stiff body.
"Aaaah..."
Perhaps it was because I had finally relieved the pent-up frustration in my chest.
My body felt lighter than I had imagined.
In truth, there had been no reason to use a barrier that pushed mana away and created a space devoid of it.
Karon had already expended quite a bit of his mana.
Moreover, as an assassin rather than a mage, fighting in a space without mana was not particularly difficult for him.
In fact, Karon had been momentarily startled when he entered the barrier, but he had not been as helpless as Heros.
Then why had I used the barrier?
My mind had already been dominated by irritation and unpleasant emotions, and I felt like my head would go haywire if I did not calm my mind and body in a space filled with the smell of cigars, so that was why.
I needed cigar therapy, like aromatherapy.
Thinking that, I looked at Karon, hanging in the air with his shoulders pierced by smoke that had stretched out like tentacles.
"Kehuk!"
Though blood was flowing from his mouth, he actually was not that badly injured.
Perhaps because he was an assassin, but he was holding out quite well inside the barrier.
Just a few cracked ribs, injured internal organs, and fractures in his arms and legs?
"I guess it's because you're an assassin. You were holding out pretty well, weren't you?"
"Kuh... That's right? Haha."
Despite having his shoulders pierced, Karon lightly coughed up blood and laughed at my words.
Swish.
I lowered Karon back to the ground.
By then, most of my unpleasant emotions had long since been relieved by treating him like a punching bag and attacking him.
Of course, if Karon had not desperately held out inside the barrier, one or two of his limbs might have been blown off.
After being lowered to the ground, Karon sank down where he stood and coughed up blood once more before speaking in a surprisingly light voice.
"Urgh... Wow. Nearly dying while trying to satisfy my curiosity was certainly a novel experience."
"..."
Curiosity, huh...
I stared silently at Karon, who was speaking so calmly.
I thought there had to be something more to it, but based on the personality I had seen from Karon, he would probably slip away like an eel.
"So what will you do?"
I decided not to question why Karon had refused to acknowledge me and resorted to such a roundabout method.
It was not as though I was particularly interested in it, either.
"Pardon?"
"Are you going to keep going? Or will you tuck your tail between your legs and swear loyalty to me?"
No sooner had I finished speaking than the smoke spreading from my back like wings instantly transformed into swords and began pointing at Karon.
"Well."
"..."
"It's time to choose."
At my words, Karon coughed up blood once more and slowly began to straighten his posture.
"Karon, member of [Dark Shadow]."
He knelt and prostrated himself, bowing deeply in an act of atonement.
"I swear my loyalty to you, Lord Abel."
"..."
"This loyalty... Kuh!... will remain with me forever unless you, Lord Abel, take me in."
"..."
As he said this, Karon drew a dagger from inside his coat.
"The price for my insolence is..."
Slice.
It happened in an instant. Truly, in an instant.
The moment he drew the dagger, he cut off the ring finger and pinky of his left hand simultaneously.
The ring finger and pinky play quite important roles in the human hand.
That is because these two fingers contribute the most to maintaining the grip strength and stability needed to hold something.
Especially for an assassin who primarily used daggers, the strength with which he held a dagger was most important—and he had cut that away.
"I humbly ask that you forgive me for this."
Saying that, Karon placed the fingers he had cut off himself in front of his head.
"If this is not enough to satisfy you, I will humbly accept it if you take my arm as well."
"..."
What the hell? Who is that guy?
I was momentarily flustered by Karon's words and actions, which were far more deferential than I had imagined.
"Sigh... Fine. I understand."
Cutting off one's own finger with one's own hand was a far more difficult thing than I had imagined.
But in front of someone who had actually carried it out to express his remorse and loyalty, there was only one thing I could say.
I could not even begin to grasp how sorry he must have been.
"Ah, but get it treated."
Pointing toward Karon's fingers lying near his head, I continued.
"These too."
If I did not say this, Karon clearly had no intention of having the fingers he had cut off restored.
"...Understood."
Karon answered in a subdued voice, then slowly straightened his bent back and looked at me.
"Are you finished?"
"Hm? Ah, Mist."
I turned my head toward the voice and saw her standing quietly, looking at Karon and me in her maid uniform.
"Excuse me for a moment. Here you are."
Mist looked at me for a moment longer, then checked Karon's severed fingers, sighed, and took bandages from inside her clothes before handing them over.
"Ah, thank you. Wow, it's my first time cutting off my own fingers, and it hurts more than I imagined."
Karon grinned slyly as he used the bandages Mist had given him to apply pressure to the wounds, then wrapped the severed fingers in the bandages and put them inside his coat.
Even if regeneration through divine power was possible, it seemed he had kept them because preserving the severed parts would reduce the aftereffects.
"...Lord Abel, there is something I would like to tell you."
After watching Karon joke around like that for a moment, Mist opened her mouth toward me.
"Hm? What is it?"
"...Our boss—in other words, the boss of [Dark Shadow]—is here. She requested a meeting with you, Lord Abel."
Stiff.
When Mist finished speaking, Karon's hand, which had been deftly arranging the bandage with one hand, suddenly froze.
'Hmm...?'
At that sight, my newly clear mind began to spin rapidly.
The boss of [Dark Shadow].
According to the information the Duke had given me before, she was supposedly his granddaughter, right?
But that boss had appeared in this abandoned city where there was nothing, at precisely the moment Karon and I were fighting?
Suspicious. Far too suspicious.
And then there was Karon's reaction.
It had only lasted a fleeting moment, but a reaction shown in a fleeting moment would have come from his unconscious, making it closer to the truth.
The pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place in my mind.
'The boss of [Dark Shadow]... Karon's reaction... If I put all of this together...'
Had the boss of [Dark Shadow] set Karon in motion?
"Really?"
Once I had organized my thoughts, I could roughly see the picture.
Grin.
"You said she requested a meeting? I don't mind. Let's see her face at least."
.
.
.
When I finished speaking, Mist nodded and led me to the car we had left near the outskirts of the city when we came here.
This was my first impression of the boss of [Dark Shadow], whom I had been looking forward to meeting so much.
Isn't she hot dressed up that tightly?
Her outfit revealed not even an inch of skin at a glance.
Even her face was hidden inside a robe whose interior was filled with nothing but darkness, as though it had been specially treated somehow.
[This is our first meeting.]
A clear voice rang inside my head.
"Telepathy?"
I had never experienced this phenomenon directly, but I had read about it in books.
They said it was a difficult form of magic that required extremely high proficiency, which was why few people used it.
[Yes. I apologize that, due to my circumstances, I have no choice but to converse with you this way.]
But she was skilled enough to hold an everyday conversation like this?
'Good grief...'
People who had awakened their mana generally defended their bodies with mana by default.
No, rather than saying they defended themselves, it was more accurate to say that awakening one's mana caused one to instinctively repel other mana.
Because of this, while there were ways to strengthen one's power with divine energy, magic that strengthened one's power through magic itself was classified as an extremely high-level field.
'But she broke through that?'
I had once experimented with forcing my smoke into people's bodies to attack them from within.
To give only the conclusion, I had found that it was possible against those who had not awakened their mana, but far more difficult than I had imagined against those who had.
My smoke itself possessed the properties of mana, so when it entered an enemy's body, its movement stopped, like a cell whose cell wall had been destroyed.
In that case, I would have to send mana into the body with more mana than the enemy's basic reserves.
Why bother?
Rather than filling it with such an enormous amount of mana to attack the inside of the body, simply blasting the opponent away with smoke offered a far better exchange rate.
That was why I had put techniques that used smoke to block the airway or attack from within on hold.
"..."
The fact that she had broken through it so easily made my interest surge rapidly.
If I learned that boss's techniques or know-how, I could complete a technique for attacking an opponent from within with smoke.
But I suppressed that interest for the moment.
I did not want to be remembered as some weirdo who interrogated her about mana at our first meeting, and there was something more pressing to deal with right now.
[Good day. My name is]
[Velias.]
[[Dark Shadow]'s boss.]
Velias spoke to me in a polite tone and bowed her head.
I was not even the official heir yet, nor had I inherited the Dukedom, but she was being far more deferential than I had imagined.
"All right. First, may I ask why you requested a meeting with me?"
As I said this, I glanced at Karon, who had moved a considerable distance away the moment Velias and I met.
"I have a rough idea, though."
[...]
"Shall we have an honest conversation?"
[...If I may dare to guess at the matter Lord Abel mentioned, is it... about Karon?]
'Hm? Yo?'
[No, is that correct?]
The telepathy that had arrived in an instant was quickly corrected.
Listening to the telepathy, I realized that Velias was far more deferential than I had imagined and was deliberately using honorific speech.
Her? It had to be a woman, right? The voice conveyed through telepathy was feminine, after all.
In any case, her attitude made the hypothesis in my mind seem even more plausible.
"Yes."
When I readily answered in the affirmative, Velias paused for a moment before bowing her head once more.
[First, I apologize on my behalf for Karon's insolence.]
"..."
[I will explain the whole story... Um... yes, the whole story.]
"Go ahead."
Once I gave her permission, Velias began to explain.
Hearing her story, I became so drained by the motive's absurd triviality that all the vigilance I had been raising simply vanished.
"So..."
[...]
"You asked Karon to find out my strength, and the condition of that request was that it only applied to an illegitimate child recognized by the Duke."
[...Yes.]
"From your perspective, you had forgotten about it because there was no way someone recognized by the Duke would appear, but Karon remembered and went on a rampage, leading to all this?"
[Yes... I am truly sorry again.]
What kind of...
I looked at Velias, who was standing restlessly in front of me, with my eyes half narrowed without realizing it.
"Whoo..."
I needed a cigar.
The problem was that I had burned through every cigar I had because I was irritated, so I had none left.
"All right. I understand."
Karon apologized to me, and I accepted his apology.
That was where the conversation ended.
If this entire incident had happened because of Velias herself, I would have had a lot more to say, but that was not the case either.
'It doesn't seem like a lie.'
If I had been her, I would have given a more plausible reason, or cut off the tail by sacrificing Karon.
But this absurdly trivial reason was instead making her more trustworthy.
"I do have one request, though."
I won't call it a price.
If I raised her guard that way, how should I put it? Velias seemed like the type to instinctively run away.
"This isn't an order, either. It's all right if you refuse."
I shrugged as though I truly did not care.
[What is it...?]
Perhaps her guard had relaxed a little at my attitude, because her voice rang inside my head.
"At least once a week, let's have tea or something."
First, I needed to close the distance between us.
So I could ask how she had broken through my mana and sent me telepathy.
"What do you think?"
Saying that, I smiled lightly at Velias, who had frozen after hearing my proposal.
"..."
Ignoring Mist, who was looking at me with an indescribable expression, I continued speaking.
***
At last, I returned to my room in the Nebula ducal residence.
I immediately placed the clothes I had worn outside on the desk, changed into a light shirt, and threw myself straight onto the bed.
"..."
The soft sensation of the blanket wrapped around my entire body.
Though I had relieved my stress, perhaps because I had recalled memories of my past life for the first time in a long while, I felt extremely tired.
Swish.
As I lay blankly on the bed, Mist, who had been quietly watching me, began organizing the clothes I had taken off.
With my eyes closed, I listened to the sound and began to feel drowsiness slowly overtaking me.
"..."
But something was missing.
"Mist..."
"Yes. Did you call?"
When I called her in a slightly drowsy voice, her voice came from beside my head before I knew it.
Swoosh.
Keeping my eyes closed and roughly locating her by sound, I took her hand and raised it above my forehead.
"Ah."
"I'm a little tired, so... lend me your hand for a moment."
The warmth of a person against my forehead and around my eyes.
Maybe because the memories of my past life had resurfaced after so long. My stress had been relieved, but the unpleasant memories still remained.
Of course, I no longer felt like blowing everything up as I had before.
"Are you all right?"
I needed a little human warmth.
When I asked in a subdued voice without realizing it, her slightly bewildered voice reached my ears.
"...Yes... I under... stand."
Hearing her voice, I smiled faintly and surrendered myself to the drowsiness overtaking me.