Chapter 86
※ This episode is a side story.
When the world goes mad, anyone who refuses to go mad along with it cannot live a normal life.
This was true everywhere, whether in the Empire, the Holy Kingdom, or even the Demon Realm.
Even when a good citizen was stabbed by a bandit and left dying in the street, no one cared anymore.
Bribing one's boss or a noble to get promoted had become customary.
When an entire family had nothing to eat and was starving, they considered it only natural to sell the youngest child to a slave trader.
Everyone understood that none of this was remotely normal, but no individual could possibly have the strength to condemn the state of society.
They simply conformed and accepted it.
One among those countless varieties of humanity was a man who introduced himself as Raven and eked out a living day by day hunting rabbits in the Siela Mountains.
Yet even in an age so rife with chaos, though lunatics were everywhere, he was certain there was no one more insane than the woman fiddling with a pebble right before his eyes.
“You’re going to hunt a dragon? Are you serious?”
“We absolutely need Dragonheart to suppress this latest Erosion.”
“Hah, anyone can say that. There are all sorts of ways to commit suicide, you know.”
The man snorted.
Saying you would hunt a dragon was tantamount to challenging the divine feat of god-slaying.
And she intended to do it alone.
After watching the woman tear into rabbit meat without hesitation, Raven decided to lose interest.
‘She’s out of her mind.’
Had she been born mad, or had some circumstance forced her to go mad simply to survive?
As far as Raven knew, there were plenty of people in the former category, and the latter were too numerous to count.
Most of the survivors of the horrific war and the disaster known as the ‘Erosion’ acted as though they each had a screw loose.
On top of that, the woman was more beautiful than any woman Raven had ever seen in his life, so even when he tried to look away, his gaze inevitably kept drifting back to her.
“Did you have any trouble getting here? Did anyone bother you or anything...”
Raven’s concern was sincere.
Excessive beauty was practically a deadly poison in such troubled times.
The eastern region of Kaizen lay beyond even the emperor’s reach—a lawless land.
How many women had been assaulted and buried alive by the eastern barbarians, who were strong but ignorant?
No matter how aggrieved they felt, the reality was that women without the strength to defend themselves would suffer terrible fates.
“Do I look weak?”
“Are you confident in your fighting ability?”
“I haven’t gone around getting beaten up. I ate well. This rabbit meat is delicious.”
The woman spat a piece of bone into the campfire.
Raven poked more firewood into the dying flames, bringing the fire back to life.
Belatedly, the man also picked up a rabbit hind leg and tried to take a bite, but his face soon twisted violently.
“She really is crazy.”
Meat contaminated by demonic energy.
It was safe to eat in moderate amounts, but meat saturated with demonic energy to this extent would not lose its bitter taste simply by being heated.
As Raven wondered whether he would have to go hungry that evening after all, his gaze shifted to the woman’s hand, which was clacking the pebbles together.
“What are those stones you’ve been fiddling with?”
“These? They’re called gonggi stones.”
“Gong-geek-tore? I don’t know what you mean, even after hearing it.”
“It’s a fun game from my hometown. Want to see?”
Clatter-
The woman sat down on the rough dirt and tossed five pebbles into the air.
A slender, white arm emerged from beneath the woman’s robe.
Soon afterward, the woman performed a dazzling feat, tossing and catching the pebbles with fluid movements of her hands.
“Doesn’t it look fun?”
“You seem to find all sorts of things entertaining. It certainly looks like a game beggar children would enjoy.”
“It does have the advantage of being playable with stones you find lying around.”
The woman took Raven’s sarcastic assessment in stride.
As the woman amused herself by tossing the stones as high as the trees, Raven asked her,
“What are those lumps of stone made of?”
“Lumps of stone? That’s rude. They’re fairly expensive, you know?”
“To my eyes, they look like simple fragments of stone, or perhaps glass.”
“They’re artifacts. Storage artifacts, at that. Each stone contains some fairly rare treasure. Aren’t you curious what might be inside?”
“Ho... I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t. Will you show me?”
He had been unable to recognize them in the darkness until now, but after examining them more closely, Raven found that they really did appear to be artifacts, just as she claimed.
“I’ll show you one whenever you answer one of my questions. How does that sound?”
“I’ll answer as best I can, based on what I know.”
The hunter, lured by those sweet words that stirred his instinctive curiosity, agreed without a moment’s hesitation.
As if she had expected that, the woman came up with her first question.
“How long has the Erosion been progressing in the Siela Mountains?”
“The Erosion? Which one do you mean? The Erosion that turns all animals to stone, or the one that turns all animals into monsters?”
“If possible, I’d like to hear about both.”
“I don’t know the exact timing of the former, but I think it’s been over three years. The latter began exactly twenty months ago.”
“Twenty months... I see. That was useful information.”
“I’m glad it helped.”
The woman infused a pale reddish gonggi stone with mana and then tapped it lightly.
Before long, the gonggi stone clicked and split in half, and twelve simple magic circles activated in the shape of a regular dodecahedron.
The woman reached her hand inside, pulled out an unidentified object, and held it up to the campfire.
“What’s this?”
“A pink diamond ring.”
“Something this large is all diamond?”
Raven marveled.
Surely, no one could see such an object without feeling greed.
After all, the jewel set in the ring was not merely the size of a fingernail; it looked larger than a big toe.
The ring’s shoulders and setting were crafted with a delicacy far beyond his imagination, making it impossible to dismiss the woman’s words as a lie.
“Its name is Agnes’s Tear. It’s also the current empress of the Prahain Empire’s most treasured possession.”
“Em... em... the empress?”
“At first, I wore it because it was pretty, too, but once I actually put it on, it turned out to be nothing but incredibly heavy and uncomfortable.”
“Don’t joke around. Why would you have something like that?”
The woman gazed steadily at Raven.
“I can ask you the next question too, right?”
“...Let’s hear it first.”
Raven swallowed nervously, sensing the atmosphere under the inexplicable pressure she gave off.
“Setting the animals aside, how are you able to deal with the Erosion?”
“That’s because all the residents of our land underwent magical organ-removal surgery.”
“You mean the Aura Heart?”
“They say it’s a small organ attached below the Aura Heart, but I don’t know its exact name either. A doctor did it to us on his own initiative. Thanks to that, we could travel through areas with low concentrations of demonic energy without any problems.”
“He must have been an excellent doctor.”
“He was the finest man imaginable.”
The woman now took out a second artifact.
This time, it was a seal that gleamed with gold. The precisely carved phoenix atop it stood out in particular.
“A seal, I see. Even at a glance, the gold finish makes it look expensive.”
“I don’t know if it’s expensive. It doesn’t seem likely to sell.”
“What do you mean? If it won’t sell, couldn’t you just sell it to the Golden Merchant?”
“Do you think that man would buy it? It’s the imperial seal.”
“The imperial seal? The one I know?”
The woman took out a piece of charcoal that had burned down to ash and rubbed it against the bottom of the seal. Soot covered its bumpy surface.
Raven belatedly tried to stop her, asking what she thought she was doing to such a precious object, but the woman did not budge.
Instead, she pulled a sheet of paper from her clothing, spread it on the ground, and slammed the seal down onto it.
The full name of the one and only sovereign of the Kaizen Empire was engraved in runes.
The imperial seal began to glow and initiated the process of verifying the paper’s validity.
However, the woman put the imperial seal back into the artifact midway through, so Raven lost his chance to see how the process ended.
“Third question. May I ask it?”
“...”
“May I?”
“Go ahead... No, please, go ahead...”
Cold sweat streamed down Raven’s back.
There was no doubt this woman was a lunatic. The problem was that she was a lunatic in the fullest sense of the word.
Only when the ring of the neighboring country’s empress was followed by Emperor Irogen’s imperial seal did he finally understand the situation he was in.
She was no ordinary person. No—if he made one wrong move, he might be the one who ended up dead.
“How long has it been since the Blue Dragon returned to its lair?”
“How would I... No, how would I know, sir!”
“You’re a hunter, and you don’t even know that?”
“Roughly... a year and a half? No, it can’t have been as long as two years... I’m only guessing.”
“What’s your basis?”
“It was when the habitats of the orcs and other monsters changed drastically.”
“Excellent deduction. That was helpful.”
Even though Raven no longer wanted to know what was contained in the artifacts, the woman stubbornly showed him the third object.
“You probably wouldn’t know what this is even if you looked at it, so I’ll explain. It’s called the ‘Key to Heaven,’ and it’s the only means of entering the treasury of the Alphenheim Papal See.”
“Why do you have that... No, just who in the world are you?”
“That’s the fourth question. So where should I go to see the Blue Dragon’s lair? We’re starting to run out of time, so you’d better answer quickly.”
“I don’t know either! In the first place, a dragon’s lair doesn’t have a fixed location, does it?”
“I know. That’s why I’m asking you. Haven’t you even seen an empty lair?”
“Ahem... Well... There was an incident ten years ago when a viscount’s son gathered troops and entered these mountains in search of a dragon’s lair, only for them to be wiped out. I believe it was somewhere to the northeast of here.”
“That answer was a little disappointing, but it can’t be helped. Here, this must be a very interesting object, too. Unlike the others, it was quite difficult to steal.”
So were the objects she had shown him up to now things she had simply picked up off the road?
Fortunately, Raven’s sharp question caught in his throat and never reached the woman.
A pendant emitting an ominous, dark-red glow appeared.
“It belongs to the Demon King Alzahab. I don’t know what it’s for yet, but it must be something precious if he’s chasing after me and screaming his head off like this, right?”
“May I leave now?”
“No. You’ve come this far, so you should at least see the last item, don’t you think?”
“I’m not curious about anything beyond that, so I...”
“Sit.”
The woman ordered him in a low, threatening voice.
However, when Raven ignored her and tried to run away, the woman kicked him squarely in the small of the back without the slightest hesitation.
Raven rolled once through the mud and protested his unfair treatment.
“I’m a busy man too...! I only prepared this meat and shelter because I heard a lady was crossing the Siela Mountains alone, without even camping gear! And this is how you repay my kindness?”
Estasha’s black hair turned gold, regaining its original color.
Her irises shone brightly with a golden light.
“This is the last question. I came after hearing that a notorious wanted criminal, responsible for more than twenty murders, robberies, and rapes, had hidden here in the Siela Mountains. Where can I find the blue-blooded half-dragon Craven Gordon?”
If you want to hunt the parents, start by finding their offspring.
It was one of the Empire’s vicious methods of dealing with the princess.
“It looks like you’re unwilling to tell me.”
“……”
There was no way an ordinary person could be living in the Siela Mountains.
The gazes of the princess and the hunter crossed and tangled.
It did not take long for Craven Gordon’s entire body to become covered in scales.
Two wanted criminals clashed with each other.