Chapter 81
Though to Kim Yul, Esthea was the cute neighborhood mutt,
she was being treated like a yellow dog.
exactly as she had boldly declared when she first met Kim Yul.
Surprisingly enough, her true identity was the gold dragon Esthea Golden Lintberius.
She was neither a Golden Retriever nor a yellow dog,
but an unmistakable mythical creature: a dragon!
Of course, the biggest reason Kim Yul saw her as a yellow dog
was also her peculiar obsession with novels.
'No matter how you look at it, doesn't she seem kind of stupid?'
'Tch. Esthea is a little stupid, yes, but still, show some respect. Why are you treating a person like a dog?'
In any case, for someone who looked like a great being beyond humans, goblins, elves, and even something close to omnipotence, her intelligence was somewhat lacking.
But there was a shocking twist.
In fact, Esthea was
not stupid at all;
she simply didn't use her brain because she was lazy!
As with any overwhelming powerhouse, if your physical abilities are superior, there is no need to bother using your brain.
Persuasion? Persuasion is the exclusive property of the weak.
What good would any persuasion do in the face of a 'Then die!'?
Even so,
because she could feel the strange fondness she felt toward Kim Yul, and, more than that, the feeling of being cared for for the very first time from Historie herself,
she had never once bothered to use her brain in front of those two.
But now,
in Duke Schnaisen's office, where he had been peacefully working.
Even though she was away from the World Tree, she still retained the blessing of a high elf.
And, true to an elf who loved to keep well out of harm's way, that iron fortress bristling with all kinds of magical barriers
"Elf. You're a high noble, huh?"
"Y-yes, yes, that's right......!"
Esthea, who had breezed through the defenses as if it were nothing, let out a delighted mwahaha.
Schnaisen, confronting the madness writhing in those vertically slit pupils unlike those of ordinary humans and elves, trembled.
There was no doubt that this dragon—who until recently had been roaming all over the imperial capital like a jobless bum and, whenever she got bored, pestering Ulysses—
why on earth had she suddenly shown up here without any notice?
Had something happened to Ulysses?
Or had her lovable but stupid daughter finally made a huge mistake?
Into Duke Schnaisen's ears, which were already spinning with confusion,
"I want to hold a concert, no, a piano competition!"
Esthea's clear voice pierced through.
"......What exactly do you mean by that?"
Unable to clearly understand the words he had heard, Duke Schnaisen nevertheless surrendered to the fear carved deep into his bones and cautiously asked the question while maintaining an extremely deferential posture.
Esthea, finally making use of the ten percent of intelligence she possessed,
instead of answering, flung the Novelpia she had flown all the way here clutching into Schnaisen's hands.
At the sight of Duke Schnaisen reading it with the reverence of someone studying a sacred scripture, Esthea happily swished her tail.
Of course, Schnaisen himself was having a miserable time.
Because of that, he began desperately chewing over the subtext hidden between the lines of the novel.
'Chloe...! Ulysses...!'
Of course, he also didn't forget to mentally gnaw on the two people he had already pegged as the culprits.
And then, at last.
"Ah, so, competing with each other on the piano......"
"Mm! But this is a novel, right? Even if you imagine it, it doesn't really come across, so, um, a duke should be able to manage that, right?"
As if praising him for having perfectly understood her intent, Esthea's tail flapped even more wildly, crushing one of Schnaisen's cherished potted plants.
The complaint, 'Why the hell am I the only one getting screwed over?' rose to Duke Schnaisen's throat,
but if he had been the kind of Kim Yul-type person who could say something like that without a second thought, he probably never would have reached the lofty position of duke in the first place.
Instead,
"O great being."
"Mm?"
"It seems you mean for me to select two pianists and have them go head-to-head. Is that correct?"
"Mm!"
"I have a better plan, so may I, a miserable wretch, be permitted to speak?"
"Mm?"
Schnaisen, struck by a three-hit combo of "mm"s,
he nevertheless kindly spelled out the elven brainwave that had flashed through his mind.
Even to Esthea, who had already shut off her ten-percent-brain mode and returned to her usual yellow-dog mode, the explanation was so reasonable and appealing that
"That sounds great! But I want you to handle the preparations."
"I will prepare the finest stage, and on my end I will also secure the finest performer."
"Mmhihihi!"
Satisfied, Esthea purred, then, just as abruptly as when she had torn open space to arrive, disappeared.
"I have a more interesting proposal; would you like to hear it?"
"Since you're here, how about trying a few gold ingots?"
"O great being, have you perhaps returned?"
Only after he had fired off three straight lines of monologue into empty air did
"Phew, fucking hell."
relief slowly seeped into Schnaisen's body, which had been rigid with tension.
It was a disaster he never wanted to experience twice,
but......the ominous feeling that, once his face had been stamped into memory, similar incidents would keep happening in the future prickled at the tips of his ears.
Still, the good thing was
that he wouldn't be the only one forced to endure this rampage.
.
.
.
After Esthea disappeared from Duke Schnaisen's office, she made three more space jumps.
"Hey! That's a face I've seen before, where was it again?"
"H-h-h-huuhh......!"
Duke Bertus, upon facing the real, flesh-and-blood mad dragon who had torn open space and suddenly appeared, and who had given him a massive trauma in his youth,
was unable to endure the extreme stress from the recent collapse of all his plans and simply clutched his heart and fell over.
But.
"Sit vita cycle iterum!"
Though he had pleaded for the "I'd rather die" option, the great Esthea Golden Lintberius did not grant it.
The heart that had launched into a sudden rampage became perfectly fine in an instant.
"Haaah, haaah, haaah."
Looking down at Duke Bertus, who was frantically gasping for breath after a momentary cardiac arrest,
"I want one pianist to compete in the piano concours!"
Esthea declared proudly.
After going through a persuasion process not much different from Schnaisen's,
Esthea, using only ten percent of her intelligence, cleanly subdued the two dukes who held sway in the empire.
Of course, one of the two was also swept up in the blast radius of the elven "I can't be the only one suffering" instinct, but anyway, double kill!
* * *
The starting point of the mad dragon's antics that shook the entire empire.
At first, it was just simple curiosity.
A piano competition? That sounds fun.
But to see that as a novel too, mm, the piano sounded good last time, mm, I want someone to play it!
So she went to Kim Yul's house with her horns twitching, only to realize too late that he'd moved, nearly smashing the building to pieces.
Fortunately,
"Those two strange men and women with no moving boxes at all and not even a trace of ever having lived there, you mean......"
thanks to a landlord who happened to be passing by and babbling, she quickly found the new home where Kim Yul and Historie had moved,
and listened to the piano performance while hanging onto Historie.
- Mmm, this is disappointing......
Yep, it's god-tier.
The music was certainly good, but if this was going to be a piano battle, shouldn't it have a more blazing atmosphere?
And Esthea had always lived by extorting others instead of getting what she wanted with her own hands,
so the first strike of that grand extortion plan had landed on Duke Schnaisen.
And as the saying goes, what goes around comes around, and all things return to their source.
"......You want me to give you a song? All of a sudden?"
"Mm! A song to use for the piano competition! Make it hard! A super awesome song!"
Its final destination, of course, was Ulysses, the writer fated to keep producing even crazier music;
"Mm......"
the one who would actually suffer was Historie, the practical dispenser of maternal affection still doting on Esthea.
Raising even one yellow dog was such a grueling task.
* * *
If a dragon personally descended and growled, 'Hold a concert or I'll slaughter your entire bloodline!'
anyone would be trembling like mad and willingly bring out superhuman booking skills and a vast pile of money.
Of course, Esthea had never actually put such gruesome wording into her mouth,
but Duke Schnaisen and Duke Bertus moved very quickly after the mad dragon's visit, exchanged a few curses at each other, and immediately got started on the concert preparations.
The stage was an outdoor stage in front of the peach World Tree.
The booking was for the best pianist they could secure as quickly as possible.
The production cost was split fifty-fifty.
The publicity was Duke Schnaisen's newspaper, Truth Daily.
After agreeing on all the various practical details in a flash, like roasting beans over lightning,
the "First Bertus-Schnaisen Piano Concours" made its debut.
Of course, unlike a modern, solemn concours, it would be a stage for a true showdown over a pianist's pride, just like the one Beethoven gleefully wrecks in the novel.
For ordinary citizens, it was destined to be nothing more than a lively festival stage.
.
.
.
And now.
"Phew, that's about it."
Schnaisen's pianist.
Giselle sat before the keyboard, taking deep breaths as she waited for things to begin.
A festival that had been opened on the spur of the moment under the guise of a concert.
It was a stage with that bizarre name of a concours, and a place crowded with people who might not even understand music at all,
but Giselle was an elf who had lived for many long years.
And, as an elf, she had loved music for just as long.
She intended to use this opportunity to prove that elves were the best even in the music world.
She would make that arrogant human pianist, Boris, understand it clearly.
"We will now unveil the piece!"
At the host's declaration,
to test her sight-reading ability,
she pulled away the cloth covering the sheet music that had been hidden beneath it to display her playing prowess to the fullest, and faced the contents.
What was written on the cover was
Franz Liszt.
Transcendental Étude, S.139, No. 5.
Will-o'-the-Wisp.
A composer she had never heard of.
A title of a piece she had never heard of.
Listening to the cheers rising from a crowd that was more like a group of passersby than an audience, Giselle drew a breath and did her best to stay calm.
Then she turned over the cover of the piece and met the notes.