Chapter 59
Mmm, this is good! I'm very satisfied again today!
Just as Kim Yul had predicted.
After greedily devouring every last inch of the manuscript she'd been handed, Chloe twitched her ears and expressed her satisfaction with her whole body.
The narrative was reaching its climax.
Liu Bei and Cao Cao, the protagonists of Part 1 of "Two Heroes," were finally going to clash in earnest, each leading their own armies on equal footing.
Chloe was weak to stories that steadily paid off the setups planted from the beginning.
It also didn't skimp on praise for the protagonists.
From Zhou Yu, who died after losing a contest of wits with Zhuge Liang and coughing up blood, to Pang Tong, who had seemed quite impressive at first but was quickly written off because readers were split on him.
The classic progression in which the efforts and sacrifices of the supporting cast only made the protagonist shine brighter was irresistible.
Chloe decided to gift Ulysses a very precious smile.
But.
"......Why are you staring at me like that?"
Kim Yul's expression was especially sullen today.
As if he were pouting, a little miffed, like he had something to complain about.
The fear engraved in her ears was so vivid it felt as if he might charge over and grab them at any moment...!
At last, his mouth opened.
"You don't trust me?"
"Eh...?"
At the line she never could have imagined, Chloe froze up like a broken machine.
"T-trust? What are you suddenly talking about?"
"Sigh... This is why they say never to trust big-eared people..."
Kim Yul let out a sigh and lowered his head, but Chloe's mind was spinning in knots.
For high elves, trust was sometimes a value even more important than life itself.
As a long-lived race that endures through the ages and is born with an inherent superiority over the other races, high elves do not give trust easily.
This was true not only of the short-lived races, but even of their own kind.
There was only one place a high elf's trust could go.
Only to true family—whether bound by blood or by heart.
And yet.
Sudden trust.
Trust, here?
No matter how loosely—and shamelessly—she had been letting him handle her ears so far.
So easily──
"Kyaaah!"
Along with the warm, tingling sensation rising from the tips of her ears.
Chloe's train of thought was cut off.
* * *
One of the three beings who trusted Kim Yul unconditionally.
"Agh, this is exhausting..."
The hero Seraphine lay sprawled on the icy ground of the Demon Realm.
Recently, monster outbreaks had been growing more frequent.
As a result, the number of battlefields with fierce standoffs had also increased, and the hero was being assigned to base defense a little more often than to reconnaissance of the front lines.
Still, little by little—just a little at a time.
The areas within the Demon Realm where humanity could operate had begun to expand.
You could call it a great victory won by humanity, but...
"They're here!"
"Damn it, let us rest already!"
"Please take care of us again today!"
"Thank you, Lord Eagle...!"
Just as much as humanity, the strange beings that had appeared in the Demon Realm not long ago had contributed heavily.
Human-like, but not human.
They looked like infantry armed with armor and long spears.
They would suddenly surge upward, radiating pure white light.
"──!"
"──, ──!"
"───!"
Only after they had wiped out the surrounding monsters with a language no one could understand did they vanish, satisfied.
Above the places where they appeared, a pure-white eagle with a strangely bald crown would be circling overhead.
According to the soldiers, they were the Eagle God's army.
But Seraphine had her own nickname for them.
Caesar's legion.
It was a tribute to writer Ulysses, whose uncanny insight into the ecology and weaknesses of giant beasts was so precise it was almost miraculous.
And seeing that eagle's bald crown naturally brought Caesar's late-life hair loss to mind.
"Hero! Let's head back!"
"All right."
As her companions approached, Seraphine stood up and brushed the traces of monster residue from her clothes.
"Come to think of it, is today the day the porter comes?"
"Yes! We'll be able to rest a bit..."
Since Seraphine hadn't been able to leave the Demon Realm at all lately, boredom had built up to the point of exhaustion.
The last scene of "Two Heroes" Seraphine had seen was Red Cliffs, and more than a month had passed since then.
How much more interesting had the story gotten?
.
.
.
After returning to headquarters, Seraphine immediately grabbed the mail that had arrived and fell into a reading trance.
First things first—"Two Heroes."
All the way to Jingzhou and Yizhou.
Watching Liu Bei win battle after battle through his leadership, Zhuge Liang's strategy, and the valor of the officers under him.
"So even the three visits to the thatched cottage were foreshadowing..."
Seraphine let out an exclamation, having pinpointed exactly the kind of detail only someone binge-reading a novel would notice.
Of course, only now that the story had been serialized this far could readers fully appreciate Zhuge Liang's greatness.
No matter how good his reputation was.
How contrived was the episode where a leader had to visit some nobody in town three times just to recruit him?
But now, it all made perfect sense.
Without Zhuge Liang, could Liu Bei have accomplished his great undertaking?
No.
And what about the current balance of power?
At the time of the three visits, Zhuge Liang had already put forward the ingenious plan of dividing the realm into three.
The first to firmly establish his position was Cao Cao in the north.
And unlike Sun Quan in the east, who had also proven his strength at Red Cliffs...
Liu Bei was always a wanderer.
His forces were meager compared to the other two, too.
- Even if we wish to heed the Emperor's command from afar, the court's authority has been severed. ... Cao Cao is devouring the realm from outside ... We, your humble servants, wish to follow old precedent and appoint Liu Bei as King of Hanzhong and Grand Marshal, so that he may lead the six armies, rally the alliance, and destroy the vile traitor.
At last.
Finally.
With the memorial drafted by Zhuge Liang and approved by Liu Bei finally announced, Liu Bei rose to equal standing with the other two.
If Sun Quan and Liu Bei formed an alliance and kept pressing Cao Cao like this, victory was surely within reach.
"Then it wouldn't be any fun! Haha, the plot is getting interesting."
Watching the latest serialized installment's final scene, Seraphine burst out laughing merrily.
- How could I hand a tiger's cub over to a dog's cub?
It was a line that showed Guan Yu's fiery temperament to perfection.
It had been a truly satisfying read again, but...
Sadly, Seraphine would be stuck in the Demon Realm for another month or more.
When the regular supply run came again next month,
what interesting story would be waiting then?
Today as well, Seraphine firmly trusted Kim Yul.
* * *
Damn it.
Who is it?
After gaining Yi Sun-sin's ability, I had been weirdly bothered by it and had wandered around everywhere.
Honestly, I had thought one of them would be an elf, but it wasn't.
- Sun Shangxiang! I enjoyed the story! An arranged marriage bound by a fate that means you have to be enemies... romantic!
Roseline was, naturally, not one of them.
The Saint had grabbed me by the collar and shaken me around physically more than once or twice, and, hmm, she gives off the feeling that she has some other holy purpose in mind.
Anyway, besides the tin can at my place, the other one was.
"Huh? Trust you? Of course I trust you!"
It was Nureongi.
"Because you give me tasty feed every day, and you don't even go on hiatus!"
"But Sima Yi's story is currently on hiatus."
"I dropped it first, so I guess it doesn't matter?"
"You little brat."
Truly...
It was a strange thing, but.
Simply because he was more diligent than any novelist I'd seen so far, wrote in massive quantities, and had a capable tin can.
[Nearby Applied Target: Estea]
He had ended up becoming a man who had earned the trust of a gold dragon, of all things.
If there was one tiny problem.
"Hmm, maybe I should put Zhuge Liang on hiatus too."
"Whaaaat!"
[Total Targets: 2]
[Nearby Applied Target: None]
"Just kidding."
"Hee-hee!"
[Total Targets: 3]
[Nearby Applied Target: Estea]
Uh...
Isn't that a bit too elastic a standard for firm trust?
Dragons are transcendent beings who can even toy with the power of the status window... right.
Otherwise, who else could shove their head into the lab and try physical hacking?
"So, where are we going?"
"To the workshop."
I had originally planned to take the elf with me, but.
I had been disappointed that an elf, of all things, lacked faith in me.
Hmph.
Did they think I wouldn't have anywhere to get funded if it wasn't an elf?
So the one I temporarily settled on as my new investor was our Nureongi.
If it can crunch gold bars like snacks, it must have a huge hoard of wealth, right?
Besides, there's no better bodyguard than this creature, and in an emergency it could even be used for Hector refills.
Hmm.
Dragons are the best.
"We're here."
The workshop we arrived at with Nureongi.
"Oh! Welcome, Yuli... H-h-huh, no, no way..."
Bolin's face, as he hurried out after hearing that the boss had arrived while he was hard at work, turned pale in an instant.
The place his trembling eyes were fixed on.
"Hmph, a failed creation dares cast such blasphemous eyes at this body──Kyaa!"
"Sss. I'm sorry. Nureongi was rude."
I gave Nureongi a light bonk on the forehead as it suddenly bared its horns and growled.
Reprisal?
"Estea. If you treat my friends so roughly, my delicate heart will be so wounded I don't think I'll be able to write."
"Then that's no good!"
Nureongi's horns tucked right back in.
Mr. Bolin was still trembling as if fear had been engraved into his genes.
......Had dragons and dwarves always been on bad terms?
Maybe I shouldn't have brought it.
Still, fortunately, Mr. Bolin quickly regained his senses.
"Here, the finished Cheonja Chongtong. It can fire too! Haha."
He proudly showed off the full-size prototype of the Cheonja Chongtong I'd commissioned earlier.
"Oh? Not bad..."
Of course, I had no intention of caring about historical accuracy when making a cannon, so it was Cheonja Chongtong in name only.
In reality, it was a rather flashy breech-loading cannon.
"Wooooow! So cool!"
Nureongi's aesthetic sense passed muster, at least.
"And the performance?"
"Need you even ask?"
.
.
.
A little while later.
On the outskirts of the capital.
Toward Mr. Bolin's masterpiece, 'Caesar's Fortress.'
The Cheonja Chongtong spat fire.
With a thunderous roar that shook heaven and earth.
Caesar's Fortress collapsed.
"Owaaah...! That's about as powerful as one of my claws...!"
Setting aside Nureongi's reaction, which was on a completely different scale altogether...
This seemed to have enough practical combat capability.
What remained were two steps.
Securing investors and a place to sell.
Even though it had just been fired and was obviously scorching hot, Nureongi couldn't resist sticking its tail out and fiddling with the cannon while going, "Hot, hot,"
I wondered how to sweet-talk someone into investing.
Hmm.
Maybe ten straight updates would do.