Chapter 44
After the roundtable segment had also thoroughly ignited the Three Kingdoms hype in my chest.
I stayed away from reader reactions for a while.
There was no helping it.
Cao Cao had trusted the big-eared bastard, only to end up a complete idiot who got backstabbed.
As for Liu Bei, what was the problem with an elf acting like an elf? Still, he got cursed out for acting like an elf anyway.
And what commentary could I possibly add to that?
I immediately whispered to Chloe, 'The truth is, Liu Bei was an opportunist,' and her response was.
- What would the canon know, desuwa! Cao Cao is an utterly monstrous villain anyway! The evil axis persecuting the noble high elf bloodline, desuwa!
......
That was how it was.
It was an expression I had often used myself before I transmigrated, so I couldn't really argue.
And that wasn't even the end of it.
Once Cao Cao's rage gauge hit MAX, he activated Rage Art and joined in with a healthy round of applause, and from that moment the dazzling prelude to the legend of Liu Bei's great escape began.
From that point on, Liu Bei's story could only be a subplot, not the main story.
Because......
Because Guan Yu, so long as he still had his head, was invincible.
Still, wasn't that better than Zhang Fei, who had gone missing entirely and then later quietly rejoined as a bandit?
But if there is one taboo in serialized fiction,
no matter how well-crafted a supporting character may be, the moment that supporting character pushes the protagonist aside, the novel's popularity is bound to drop.
I was worried that if I went so far as to throw in the Du clan as well, it might even hurt card sales, so I removed that part while weeping blood.
So.
Let's keep our heads down and write until the Battle of Guandu.
That would probably be better for my mental health.
And there were plenty of other things worth focusing on besides that.
“A little more flamboyantly.”
“Ugh...! Illusion magic doesn't just come out because you squeeze it like that, you know!”
For example, squeezing Chloe dry.
After much discussion, we completed a draft of the provisional title 'Hero Assembly.'
As for the rules, of course the one to draft them was Historia, the goddess of plagiarism incarnate. The base, apparently, was Hearthstone, but I hadn't really played it properly, so I wouldn't know.
The rarities were R, SR, and SSR.
All of the basic sets sold by default were R rarity.
And when you opened a gacha pack, there were five cards inside. Along with the R-rarity cards obtainable only from gacha packs, the wicked probability game began from here.
“So why is this Zhao Yun character SSR when he barely has any presence?”
“It's a spoiler.”
“Who is Zhuge Liang? Why is he so coolly fluttering that fan around?”
“It's a spoiler.”
“Hmph!”
Ah.
The elf pouted.
Anyway.
Since there was a probability game involved, we needed to provide a rush of pleasure when you actually pulled a card.
First, the wrapper pack containing the card.
Rip it open and it glows!
Sparkle sparkle! Thump thump!
Gold! SR!
Wow! Rainbow! SSR!
......Magic truly was amazing.
And now the character cards of SR and above would, just like Chloe was grinding away on them now, have holograms floating over the card.
SR would be standing pose only. SSR would even get its own special animation.
It was a perfect differentiation strategy to stimulate the urge to collect.
People who had initially questioned whether this would sell ended up tearing into a few finished card packs with bloodshot eyes once we handed them some.
Ah.
I wish time would go faster.
I want to unleash this supposedly demonic invention of mine into the other world as soon as possible and throw a dopamine party......!
“Ah, I have something to pass along.”
“What is it?”
“After I submitted the investment proposal, my dad said he'd like to meet Kim Yul once. Keep your schedule open.”
“Hmm, that's fine enough...... wait, your dad?”
If it was the father of this useless elf heiress, then surely.
......
I wish time would stop.
Why do I keep attracting nothing but old men?
Should I drag Roseline along as a human shield again this time?
Lady Saintess has been a little scary to look at lately.......
* * *
Schneisen von Wisperaud.
Commonly known as Duke Schneisen.
He was a typical high elf.
The wisdom he had accumulated over a lifetime far longer than any human's filled his spirit.
His body, which did not age easily, had always gifted him with robust vitality.
Naturally filling his heart was gratitude toward nature.
And pride—that high elves were the race destined to lead the world!
Though the slightest tilt could make it a mustache-wearing ideology prone to turning black or red.
Fortunately, he was a master of both politics and governance.
In other words, he had a good nose for power and strength.
Just like his daughter had a nose for money.
And to his nose,
the scent of one man slowly began to drift in.
Got Duke Bertus good with words.
Subdued Duke Bertus's third son by force.
Kept teasing his daughter by yanking on her ears like crazy.
Had a close relationship with that monster Saintess.
His background was unclear, and he even had black hair and black eyes.
He also maintained ties with the Dragonians.
“He was the kind of being who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, as if he had dropped from the sky. He had even only finished registering his identity a little over a year ago.”
Of course, the Empire's administration wasn't perfect, so there were plenty of people whose identities hadn't been registered.
But cases of someone appearing at twenty as if dropped from the sky were, naturally, almost nonexistent. If they had lived their whole lives unregistered, that would be one thing.
The fact that his identity was registered even though no one had issued it meant there had to be some kind of trick.
There was only one conclusion.
A hero of the Holy Kingdom who retired long ago.
Otherwise, there was no way to explain his existence.
After all, a hero is not only tasked with breaking through the demon realm, but also serves as a nation's strategic weapon.
Although the culture of putting heroes at the front lines has almost disappeared now, until only a few decades ago heroes were not the ones who blocked the demon realm—they were the ones who crushed enemies.
For that reason, it was customary to keep a hero's identity classified as top secret.
Wasn't the reason that monster Saintess never set foot in the demon realm because she had been chosen as the hero's partner?
Heroes, in fact, do not retire.
Because they end their lives in the demon realm before they can retire.
But that man seemed to have successfully retired and to be spending his remaining years in the Empire, not the Holy Kingdom.
“Which means he's an overwhelmingly powerful figure that even a demon-subjugation force couldn't easily mobilize.”
What's more, he had even been able to obtain, in strict secrecy, intelligence that the man returned from the demon realm without suffering a single injury.
As expected, humans are stupid.
Why did Duke Bertus, when he could clearly infer it with just 1% of a sharp mind, fail to see it and go out of his way to make trouble?
What's more, he even went through the trouble of plotting a rebellion that was doomed to fail, only to fail for real. Utterly foolish.
Of course, he didn't bother telling his daughter about the enormous truth he'd realized.
Surely, if it was his daughter,
- A-ah, i-it, ugh, eh, yo, Hero-sama desuwa?
“She'd short-circuit.”
Better to stay close like this, at least.
......The chance of that idiot charming a hero with brute force is slim, but if she naturally got close, wouldn't some affection develop?
No matter how saintly she was, she was still one of the short-lived races.
If she had beauty that never withered, just like him, she could melt that strategic weapon's heart whenever she wanted.
If not, well.
It's Chloe, so it can't be helped.
He was a cold-blooded schemer before he was a father.
.
.
.
Though Duke Schneisen had been diligently shadowboxing by himself.
“Good day. My name is Kim Yul.”
“Hi! I'm Es-jjang!”
“How rude to an elder.”
“Huh? Elder? Who?”
Just as a novel could never catch up to Earth's history in terms of plausibility,
Schneisen's imagination too had no choice but to crumble before overwhelming reality.
“E, e, Esthea...?”
“Huh? You know me?”
Duke Schneisen quickly erased Kim Yul's name from the list in his head of 'people who'd be useful to rope in and make allies out of.'
And then.
He made a list of 'a walking disaster that, if touched wrong, could smash not only the family but the entire nation.'
And wrote Kim Yul and Esthea's names at the very top.
And then.
'How stupid do you have to be...... not to recognize a dragon......?'
He sighed inwardly.
As Chloe had clearly said,
- You seem to play with that cute Dragonian sometimes, so your nature doesn't seem bad, desuwa!
A Dragonian, she says.
A Dragonian, she says......!
No matter the outward appearance──
they share the common traits of horns and a tail, and of being able to hide them if enough human blood is mixed in,
dragons and Dragonians are, in fact, completely different.
Their frequency of appearance is different by that much too. Dragons are beings you might see once in a century, if at all.
Of course, if you compare them to humans, expecting that level of common sense from Chloe, who had only just turned about twenty, is asking a bit much.
Even Guilford, who had passed the sighting on to Chloe in the first place, had considered Esthea just a troublesome Dragonian.
“I'm asking you. Do you know her or not?”
“Shh. Tsk.”
“Grrr!”
“......”
Of course, given that dog-like attitude, it might have been natural to think there was no way that could be a dragon......
But just now, when she had just said, 'I'm asking you. Do you know her or not.'
Duke Schneisen could only feel the thick fear that had long ago been etched into his racial base stats and individual values.
* * *
“So was it really someone you knew, or, no, an elf?”
“No? Still, I don't think she's that much of a degenerate! Mmm, pure gold!”
Watching Esthea crunch down on gold ingots with a blank look made my heart feel like it was being torn apart.
Still, well.
I think I got a pretty good effect out of bringing along that bored yellow mutt.
Even if Chloe was a stupid, useless elf and basically a vending machine that would spit out exactly what you wanted the moment you scratched her a little,
she could still get dragged into some weird misunderstanding like the Duke Bertus incident. There's that saying that old ginger is scarier, isn't there?
- Hmm... I, no, I also have a bit of interest in that business. I'll be investing more seriously.
......It went so smoothly that I couldn't help thinking that this was probably how Do-jo felt when he met the wheelchair man who put Little Boy on the negotiation table.
Anyway.
It seemed the mass-production problem, the biggest obstacle to my 'Hero Assembly' TCG, had now been neatly solved as well.
“As promised, the new work! You're going to churn it out like crazy and show me, right?”
“That's about it, I guess.”
Unknowingly, I found myself imagining Esthea wearing a Zhuge hat and fluttering a white feather fan.
I barely managed to hold back my laughter.
* * *
By the time elf magic, and even the essence of magitech, had joined forces and preparations to siphon off kids' pocket money were gradually being put in place.
“Kyaa...! Bartender! One glass of Guan Yunchang here, please!”
The cocktail 'Guan Yunchang,' with deep black settling at the bottom of the glass and flesh-toned red mixed into the top, was by now racking up the Empire's highest sales.
“To think they'd betray the Chancellor's goodwill like that!”
“Tsk, tsk. This is why you can't take in black-haired bastards.”
The Guan Yu haters, in the face of that unprecedented massacre event known as the Five Passes, Six Generals slaughter, jeered that whether it was the big-eared bastard or the long-bearded bastard, they were all the same bastards.
Some crafty sycophant must have intercepted that report, but in Cao Cao's own part, there was no particular commentary on Guan Yu's rude behavior.
He simply raised the banner of 'march north and annihilate Yuan' in silence.
Thus Cao Cao tore Yuan Shao apart at Guandu after passing through Wuchao and Baima, and while he was at it, gave the big-eared bastard in Runan a vicious forehead flick.
Liu Bei, after once again trying to sneak a look for a backstab angle on Cao Cao, had his skull properly cracked and fled again stripped down to his underwear.
Toward Jingzhou.
Toward the place where the coiled dragon slept quietly.