Chapter 40
Did I go a little overboard?
Still, something around Roselyn’s level of power, rather than Nureongi, would probably have been enough.
In any case, trying it in actual combat made one thing clear.
Hector’s Courage.
Depending on how well I could control myself, this could be called a truly broken skill.
Limited to one-on-one, it raises my potential to the same level as my opponent’s stats.
So I worked myself into a self-hypnotic state, imagining the duke’s son in front of me not as a person, but as an NPC—dust, a tick, something like that.
I asked Nureongi to growl and threaten me.
……Once the joke was stripped away completely, I almost pissed myself.
A dragon’s true aura of earnest intimidation is Conqueror’s Haki. Note to self.
As a result.
In an instant, I acquired a physique on par with Nureongi’s and quite literally blew the duke’s son away.
Of course, there was no such thing as a free lunch in this world.
The exhilaration of victory and the self-esteem boost from collecting awestruck stares were definite perks.
“Aagh, ugh.”
“Anyone would think you’d been beaten to a pulp, Kim Yul.”
The moment I got home.
The backlash hit me in the form of muscle soreness, as if I’d fired off a Gear Second Batta-batta JET Bazooka.
It felt much the same as the pain I’d felt before transmigrating, when pneumonia and the flu hit me at the same time and my fever shot up to forty degrees.
Back then, I was rushed to the ER and suffered for about two weeks.
Was I the one who shouldn’t have talked back…….
.
.
.
“Can I even write a manuscript like this? You fool, Kim Yul.”
Even while complaining nonstop,
History still took very devoted care of me.
History picked me up from the floor, where I was sprawled out unable to move even a finger, laid me on the recliner, and took off my dirty clothes.
Then History even rubbed Mentholatum into both hands and massaged my forearm, where the pain was especially severe.
It even guided me down the path of repentance whenever I had the wicked thought of imagining what it would be like to mold History with the Pygmalion skill as some kind of demon of domination──
“Aah!”
“Making a fuss over pain is bad for you, Kim Yul.”
“It really, really hurts, I’m telling you──!”
There was just one minor problem.
Maybe because I was a tin can, my force control was a little off…….
“So why did you go that far? It can’t be good to make an enemy of the duke.”
That wasn’t wrong.
But my life had already been shaped by struggle from the very beginning.
It wasn’t as if I’d been born the youngest son of a conglomerate family and lived a happy life.
Every now and then, a surprise repossession sticker would get slapped on the house, and the world around me felt more like a male-vs-female slugfest than an academy story.
If there was one thing I learned while growing up in that demon world,
“If someone hates me for no reason, it can be easier just to give them a reason.”
Of course, there had been plenty of people in history who tried that.
The Imperial General Headquarters was the prime example, going in with the mindset of, ‘Hmph! If I hit first and hit hard enough, they’ll sell us oil and listen to me, right?’
And in my view,
Duke Vertus wasn’t some revenge-crazed ghost like the beastly Anglo-Americans, so if anything this display of force would only leave him even more confused.
No matter how I thought about it,
he seemed to think of me as something like the saintess’s kept man.
And,
“It pisses me off.”
Sure, he fed me and gave me money,
but I’d really done nothing except write.
On top of that, he’d suddenly sent an assassin to try to loot my head?
“Then, will this keep going?”
“Probably not.”
I’d even brought the saintess to the dueling arena for a performance, and I’d already sent a letter of polite protest via the elves.
“We’ve secured testimony from both the witness and the party involved in the affair, so please stop screwing around before this gets turned into an article” wouldn’t exactly count as a polite protest, though.
“That was polite enough, wasn’t it?”
Instead of stabbing them in the gut, I planted a bat there.
I simply made sure everyone knew that anyone who messed with little Kim Yul was fucked.
Kim Yul is free.
I want to write the stories I want to write without outside pressure.
* * *
Smack!
“Why are you doing things I didn’t even order you to do!”
Duke Vertus’s immense fury crashed over Regios.
Under that pressure,
Regios could only bite his lip hard, unable even to protest.
If anything, that only stoked Duke Vertus’s anger, and before long clear, sharp slaps rang out a couple more times across his cheek.
Even then he still didn’t seem satisfied, so after kicking the chair once,
“Sometimes you have to endure things. Don’t you know why this father did nothing even when that damn writing was circulating, and why your brothers are keeping quiet?”
Of course he did.
So, rather than formally making a big deal of it, Regios had intended to resolve it by subtly applying pressure and making it look like a personal indiscretion.
Of course, while trying to apply that pressure, he ended up getting flattened himself.
When Duke Vertus seemed to be regaining some of his composure,
“That guy…… what on earth is he?”
Regios asked cautiously.
There was no way an ordinary person could bring him and his sword down with a single blow.
“I don’t know. That’s the problem. Dammit, no wonder that idiot Klapen from Killing Field ended up half-broken.”
“Killing Field…… you mean Klapen?”
“Yeah.”
He was definitely the one leading the family’s hunting dogs.
And that man ended up half-broken?
“It wasn’t the saintess who got him. It was that bastard. He must have ignored my order to treat him properly. How arrogant, for a hunting dog.”
“…….”
“Fine, let’s ask it this way. Was that bastard really that strong?”
At that question,
Regios recalled what had happened that morning.
That arrogant look in his eyes, as though he didn’t even see Regios.
That enormous killing intent that suddenly surged up from behind.
Power that was hard to believe came from such a frail body.
And,
the perfectly flawless arc of nothingness, so clean it made even the sword he had faced look shabby by comparison.
And the fact that he hadn’t felt even a trace of mana also...
If you think about it from another angle......
“……He’s probably someone the Empire would have a hard time finding an equal for.”
Maybe it meant there was no need to raise mana just to deal with the weak.
And, on top of that, his last words were still echoing in his mind.
- From now on.... don’t talk back....
The moment he remembered that very low, heavy whisper, Regios shivered slightly without realizing it.
“Oh dear…….”
Duke Vertus clutched his head.
How was one supposed to interpret the Church State’s attitude when they had thrown not one but two continent-class powerhouses into the Empire?
And with power on that level, why the hell had that bastard crawled all the way to the Empire just to write?
And, infuriatingly enough,
he wrote well!
If you cut out the parts that rubbed people the wrong way, even the content was fun!
The fact that the Night of Daggers had ended in a disastrous failure apparently didn’t matter.
It would have been wonderful if he’d succeeded in assassinating all of his targets, but even so he’d succeeded in stirring up a sense of unrest in the imperial capital.
He wasn’t stupid enough to build a tower that would collapse after one failure, so a second, third, and fourth plan were already being prepared.
So, no matter what,
he had to stop any uncontrolled variable from constantly baring its teeth at him and growling.
“Lay low for a while. Don’t go hanging around outside. And once your wounds heal, take some of the wealth you’ve been secretly stashing away and go apologize properly.”
“…….”
The moment a trace of unmistakable dissatisfaction flickered in Regios’s eyes,
the duke immediately hurled his wine cup at his useless son’s face.
* * *
- No way! This is the kind of piece that has to be run as a special feature!
- His Majesty even sent a message saying he hopes this matter doesn’t grow any bigger? So we’re burying it quietly, desuwa?
- Grrr……! If that is His Majesty’s command……!
As a result of some kind of collusion between the Estrias family and the Wisperaud family,
it was unfortunate for Asteric, but the special feature he had planned, “The Women of Duke B,” could no longer be printed.
Also, the disgrace of the third son of the House of Estrias being sent sailing over a wall by a bat swung by a mere writer
became a fact that existed only for the witnesses.
- Hey, hey! Can’t you give me that?
- No. It’s my treasure.
- Iiiih!
Aside from the tragedy that the greedy dragon had recognized the value of Lee Dae-ho’s autographed bat, it was otherwise a peaceful conclusion.
Despite those external storms,
Kim Yul’s main job.
The novel series “Two Heroes” continued to earn praise for its ruinous yet strangely realistic development, and for its pacing, which felt like force-feeding frustration and catharsis down your throat in alternating doses.
After drawing the married woman, the vanguard, the son, and the nephew from the deck and sending them to the graveyard,
and then using the 0-cost, 3-draw card to pull Rage, Emperor Xian, and the Qingzhou Soldiers into hand,
Cao Cao began to sweep through everything around him indiscriminately.
A ruinous hot streak!
But then, as if cold water had been poured over it.
## ====== ##
“Is the grain supply that short?”
At Cao Cao’s words, the official in charge of grain bowed his head to the ground.
“I’m terribly sorry, but if things continue like this…… we may have to retreat.”
He couldn’t let this once-in-a-lifetime chance to seize Shouchun while the false emperor Yuan Shu was away slip through his fingers.
A sigh slipped from Cao Cao’s mouth.
Seeing that, the official hesitated, then,
“Well…… there is one measure.”
“Speak.”
“If we shrink the measuring vessel used for the grain, we can fool the soldiers’ eyes and reduce the amount distributed.”
“Hmm.”
A clever idea.
…….
…….
- The lord tricked us!
- How are we supposed to fight after eating like this!
Hearing the faint voices drifting up from the camp,
“It was a clever scheme, but in the end it was only a stopgap.”
“S-still, it allowed us to save at least a month’s worth of grain. If we can at least keep the complaints down──”
Cutting off the official mid-sentence, Cao Cao sighed.
“Regrettably, I’ll have to cut off your head to calm the soldiers. Otherwise I won’t be able to untangle this knot.”
“Y-yes?”
The official, stunned, lifted his head.
But before long, the blade Cao Cao had drawn came down on his neck.
.
.
.
“Listen! The official in charge of the grain dared to use a small grain measure to steal from the state granary, so I have judged him guilty and beheaded him! I, Cao Mengde, promise you this: from now on, everything will be normal again!”
## ====== ##
“Wow…….”
“No, seriously, that’s a villain right there…….”
“Is his character for real?”
“He was the one who set it up, and now he’s shifting the blame onto a subordinate!”
The treacherous writer Ulysses had once again committed the atrocity of turning the protagonist into total trash.
Aside from that trivial episode,
he was riding high.
He had even captured Shouchun and landed a punch on the trio of scheming generals and Liu Biao, who kept sneaking in dirty tricks from behind the scenes at every turn.
Although the protagonist’s character issues did come to light, it was still a textbook cathartic development.
What became the real problem, however, was
“No, in the end he lost everything to Lü Bu?”
“I feel so bad for Lady Mi……! Still, even after losing everything, she loves her husband with pure devotion! I love it!”
“There’s such a thing as being too nice! How can she laugh so carefree in that situation!”
That big-eared bastard had been feeding everyone lethal doses of romance all this time.