Chapter 32
The story continues off the page
The Last Dance Before Midnight
A masked dragon asks the lanternwright for one slow dance
An unnamed rural village.
Inside a lavish mansion utterly out of place there, a man was smiling contentedly.
“By now, the Purge Unit must have arrived.”
Helus was in high spirits.
He knew what sort the Purge Unit were.
The kind of vile bastards it was better to pay off with a little money and send away than try to shake off.
Having connections like that was a blessing.
“Once I get that bitch back… it would be better to throw my lot in with the Empire.”
He had maintained neutrality only because there had been a risk of his identity being exposed.
It would be disastrous if the girl were kidnapped yet again.
‘By the way, does that man called Ferda Valdrowa know what that child is?’
There was no way to uncover the girl’s identity.
For that girl, rules were absolute.
He had made her obey no one except Helus Povidas, so she was little more than an idiot who could not understand anyone else’s words.
If she were returned safely, it would mean he did not know what use she had.
‘Phew, it’ll work out.’
He poured whiskey into a crystal glass.
At that moment, a carriage stopped.
He discreetly lifted the curtain and looked outside.
It was a very welcome person.
‘Sir Karl!’
Helus rushed out barefoot to greet him.
“Welcome, Sir Karl!”
“……”
“Well, I certainly did not expect you to visit this late at night. How did the mission go?”
“……”
“Why are you being so quiet? Hm? Since you have come all this way, why don’t we have a drink? What happened to the girl?”
“Get in.”
“Get in? Oh, yes, of course.”
Helus climbed into the carriage.
There was no one inside the soft, luxurious carriage.
Karl climbed in and shut the door.
“……Set off.”
The carriage began to move.
Helus’s eyes widened.
“Sir Karl, where are we going?”
“……”
“Answer me! Th-this is kidnapping, isn’t it?”
Helus thrashed about.
But Karl merely sat there without saying a word.
“So that’s how you’re going to play it!? Do as you please! I’ll never go to the Empire, so you should know that!”
“……Haah.”
Karl, who had been sitting silently, let out a deep sigh.
Karl raised his head and, at the same time, raised his hand.
Smack!
His flabby palm was no different from a club.
“Ow!”
“Shut up, you pig.”
“W-what is the meaning of this, Sir Karl?”
“What do you think?”
Smack!
“Can’t you understand what’s happening? We’re in this mess because of that girl you told me to bring!”
“The kid? You said you could use that kid as a good pretext—”
“Who cares!”
Smack!
“I!”
Smack!
“I came here because of that, fuck!”
It was nothing more than violence born of frustration, but it was enough to make Helus behave.
Helus’s mouth was torn, and blood streamed from his nose.
“Anyway, thanks to you giving them that sketch of the kid, you’re in a situation you can’t back out of either, so follow quietly.”
Karl sighed toward the heavens.
Fuck, why am I doing this?
Karl swallowed his lament and threw himself against the backrest.
Helus sat as docilely as possible and was dragged away.
Questions piled up inside him, but Helus decided not to concern himself with them.
There was no way for him to escape this situation anyway.
Because he was not a sage.
After wandering aimlessly for some time, the carriage came to a stop.
His body was lifted like a piece of luggage and carried somewhere.
The place he was dragged to was the audience chamber of an old castle.
A red carpet stretched across the floor, while banners bearing the seal of a red dragon hung on the walls.
Beneath the banners stood an astonishingly young man.
“Do you know who I am?”
Helus was seeing him for the first time that day.
Yet the situation and the aura he exuded made Helus’s lips move of their own accord.
“F-Ferda Valdrowa……”
“That’s informal.”
“I-I greet the Regent of Valdrowa.”
Hadn’t they said the regent was an eighteen-year-old brat?
But he was completely different from what Helus had heard.
Looking up at him now felt like standing before a giant.
Helus had been an immature fool who even dared to defy Karl, but he could not even dream of defying Ferda.
Beside him stood a girl Helus had seen once before.
His cherished young maidservant.
The source of the knowledge he had sought so desperately.
‘Had she always been this beautiful?’
He had not realized it when he entrusted her to that fat woman.
With her hair neatly combed and fine clothes adorning her, she was no different from a young lady of noble birth.
“You are the Sage of Water, are you not?”
“The Sage of Water? I am nothing more than a magic walker, no different from an old man who lives in a back room.”
“I thought you were merely stupid, but you’re smarter than I expected.”
Ferda let out a sincere exclamation of admiration at that answer.
“Did your servant die?”
“……Yes.”
“I see. When someone takes away something precious, no one can forgive them. Wouldn’t even someone like me be hard to forgive?”
“What is there to forgive? This foolish man committed the crime.”
“What crime?”
“……”
“You say you committed a crime, yet you do not know what that crime was? That is a lie, is it not? I dislike empty words.”
He forced out words he had never wanted to utter with his own mouth.
“My crime was using a child and boasting as though I were the sage.”
Helus bowed his head.
“So…… please spare my life.”
He submitted while behaving with due courtesy.
But what Ferda’s eyes reflected was indifference.
His face showed no sign that he would find any value in Helus living or dying.
“You have lived by pretending to be a sage, but you are still intelligent. So I believe you will understand this as well.”
Ferda leaned close to his ear and asked,
“Do you think you can live here?”
“……”
“Those who have tasted power can never forget it. That is why struggles for power are the cruelest and dirtiest of all. How much power did you taste?”
“……”
“You are respected in your village, and even the Empire wants you. Can you really give that up and go back?”
“I-I can’t forget—”
“No. If I send you away like this, you will move to reclaim your power. That is not because you are stupid, but because you are human.”
His entire body trembled.
Even in the chilly weather, sweat poured off him like rain.
Ah, I am going to die here.
“So I will make you an offer you cannot refuse.”
All his fear vanished, and a ray of light descended.
Helus raised his head.
“Would you not like to live as a sage?”
“What…… do you mean?”
Ferda placed the object he had kept inside his coat on the floor.
It was a crystal orb.
“It is a communication crystal orb. A high-grade crystal orb containing the essence of eternal ice from the deepest part of the northern snow mountains. Its material is superior to the Empire’s. Neither some amateur nor even the Imperial magicians would dare try to eavesdrop on or track it.”
He tapped the crystal orb and continued,
“The mind of Mori is linked to it.”
“Mori……?”
“That is the name of the girl you had with you.”
Ferda lightly patted Mori’s shoulder.
The girl reacted to his voice.
It had truly become her name.
“You want this child’s knowledge. So live as a sage, just as you wished. Indulge in pleasure at night, and during the day, you may share whatever nonsensical wisdom you like.”
He was offering him a life no different from the one he had always lived.
It was what he had wanted so desperately, but he could not seize it without hesitation.
Sweet rewards always came with a fatal price.
“What do I have to give you?”
“Your soul.”
Everything.
“Become my dog.”
Helus hated becoming entangled with people.
His true worth would be exposed in no time.
But there was something he hated even more.
Losing his money.
Losing his reputation.
Power was what had supported all of it.
To lose power was to lose everything.
Ferda was right.
Helus was already yearning for the power he had once enjoyed.
He was already a dog of power, and he would do anything for it.
Even if it meant serving a demon or anything else.
That was why Helus bowed his head once more.
“I will become your loyal dog.”
* * *
Ferda went down to the castle’s basement.
Echidna’s laboratory was located at the very bottom of the castle.
When he opened the door, the witch’s gloom flowed out like an eerie fog.
The only difference was that there was none of the herbal apothecary smell or bubbling cauldrons peculiar to witches; the room was filled only with the smells of ink and stone dust.
“Welcome, Regeeent!”
Echidna welcomed him with a foolish grin.
She came running like a large dog greeting its master.
The difference was that she exuded an ominous aura that made even Ferda flinch.
“How did the contract go?”
“Ah, of course it went well! I fastened the dog collar you asked for, Regent! Hehehe. At first, when you said it was a big dog wearing silver armor, I wondered what you meant, but I never imagined it would be a knight!”
Echidna grinned foolishly.
When Ferda had actually said that he needed a collar to restrain a dog in armor, she had brought him a real dog collar.
After that, Ferda stopped using metaphors when speaking with Echidna.
“Where is the contract?”
“H-here it is!”
Echidna took out the contract she had stored away and showed it to Ferda.
Ferda skimmed through it and asked Echidna,
“Do you understand what these clauses mean?”
“Hehe, there’s a whole lot written here, but I don’t understand a~nything about what it says.”
Echidna scratched her head sheepishly.
If one were to name those adept at vicious contract magic, demons and witches would be the obvious choices.
But there was an exception to everything.
The reason Echidna had never managed to get a boyfriend in the first place was that she could not create the subtle wording or inescapable procedures required for such contracts.
‘So because that was difficult, she created an unprecedented learning-type golem……’
She had chosen a difficult path because the simple one was hard, and that path had turned out to be the correct answer.
Even now, it was an absurd thing to think about.
In any case, Echidna had carried out the contract itself, but Mori had written its contents.
The Library of All Things inside her mind.
It contained copies of contracts written by demons as well.
Ferda had ordered her to create the clauses based on them, and Mori had succeeded after working on them for three hours.
‘The true dog collar is complete.’
And so he had acquired two dogs.
A dog that had infiltrated the Empire, and a dog that was smarter and stupider than expected.
Ferda placed the contract on Echidna’s desk with a satisfied expression.
“How is the golem coming along?”
“Well, should I say it’s still a little way off……?”
The golem assisting her was still only capable of looking at Echidna’s face and making her tea.
If there was any visible progress, it was that the shape of its face was gradually changing from a crude drawing into something else.
It was not yet possible to tell for certain, but it was undoubtedly in the process of coming to resemble Jed Swallow.
Ferda watched it silently and asked casually,
“You haven’t become so fixated on carving its face that you’ve neglected everything else, have you?”
“Whaaaat! Th-that’s n-not true at all! Whenever I think, ‘I can’t come up with the appearance,’ I work on it, okay?!”
Her flustered reaction was highly suspicious, but Ferda did not press her for the time being.
‘Compressing sentences into runes is difficult in itself, and this is a witch capable of doing it.’
It was difficult to produce immediate results, so Ferda had no intention of accusing her of slacking off.
“I’ll be counting on you from now on as well.”
“Yes, understood. But, Regent?”
As he finished his business and was about to turn around, she stopped him.
“What is it?”
“Um, you’ve reached the Third Circle, haven’t you? Judging by the energy I can roughly sense, you’re stronger than when I saw you before.”
“That’s right.”
“Then would you like to try finding your aptitude?”
Echidna made the suggestion as she held up the mana crystal on her desk.
Finding his aptitude, huh.
It had been a long time since he had heard those words.
“By finding my aptitude, do you mean discovering which attribute I possess?”
“Now that you’ve reached the Third Circle, it would be good to find a magical path for yourself, too. All magicians do it at least once, don’t they?”
The Third Circle, the Magic Walker stage.
As proper magic began pouring forth in earnest, the process of using magic to command and transform the elements began.
That was when people started seeking out their own aptitudes, and Ferda had measured his once around that time as well.
Finding one’s aptitude was regarded as little more than a pastime.
For those who possessed the Blue Circle, it was merely a lighthearted way of learning that their aptitude might be somewhat higher.
That was because the nature of mana itself was uniform.
But those who possessed the Red Circle were different.
For mana based on emotion, aptitude was nearly everything.
“Let’s do it.”
“Oh, then I’ll prepare it for you!”
Echidna waved her fingers through the air and chanted a spell.
Mana flowing along her fingers drew a magic circle in midair.
Then the magic circle gradually shrank and shone brightly before transforming into a fixed shape.
A rune had been created.
Even something this simple would take a month of work, yet this woman had created it on the spot.
As expected of a Rune Maker.
Echidna embedded the rune into the mana crystal.
“Here it is!”
“Thank you.”
Ferda picked up the crystal.
He knew how to use it.
When Ferda’s mana reacted to the rune, colors and shapes would appear inside the crystal through it.
‘Back then, was I darkness and electricity?’
Two attributes born from hatred.
Darkness possessed great destructive power.
Electricity was magic with great speed and penetrating power.
Ferda’s magic, which combined the strengths of the two, had been impossible for anyone to stop.
‘It will be different now.’
His feelings then were different from what he felt now.
For example, wasn’t Ferda’s magic now capable of suppressing Valdrowa?
His attributes would undoubtedly have changed as well, and so would the path before him.
Ferda watched his mana react.
The mana responded to the rune, causing a chemical reaction inside the crystal.
When one handled fire, surging flames appeared.
When one handled water, blue, rippling droplets formed.
What appeared before Ferda’s eyes was neither of those things.
The inside of the crystal was dyed pitch-black.
It was a color that seemed to devour everything in its path.
It was all too familiar to Ferda.
‘Darkness……’
And within it, faint blue sparks leaped.
“Oh my, you have electricity as well?”
Nothing had changed.
No—if one were to say something had changed,
‘Was it…… this dark?’
The inside of the crystal was even darker than what he had seen back then.