Episode 148: It’s 13cm, Y’know (Third-Person Perspective of Other Characters)
Around the time Hugh and Rouge were enjoying a chat with their friends, in a mansion about two kilometers from the town of Valleed, a certain man had sunk into a sofa, restlessly shaking his knee in irritation.
The man’s name was Victim Drefon. He was the current head of House Drephone and, to Lucas and Lucretia, an uncle by marriage.
He was born the second son of a provincial Baronial House. He was blessed with enough Skill to enter the Royal Academy and also possessed the intellect to graduate with reasonably good grades. Recognizing this potential, he was invited into House Drephone—which held the most brilliant honor in the kingdom, that of dragon slayers—as an adopted son-in-law.
House Drephone, despite being a new noble family with a short history, had been steadily expanding its influence.
The most prominent example of this was likely the second daughter, famed as a silver-haired beauty, becoming a royal concubine. Even from Victim’s perspective, as the husband of the eldest daughter, she was exceptionally beautiful and, above all, an outstanding woman with a sharp mind. It was understandable why the King would want to keep her by his side.
With the second daughter becoming a concubine and giving birth to a son, House Drephone gained overwhelming momentum. The boy was born with a visual handicap, but he was undoubtedly a candidate for succession.
The domain bustled with Adventurers gathered to conquer the Drefon Great Labyrinth, and the economy was on an upward trend. The expansion of towns within the domain, starting with Barleen, was progressing smoothly, and everything was going well. Soon, the Drefon domain would surely develop to an extent incomparable to the lands of other nobles.
Victim, who had worked tirelessly, sweating profusely, as the next head of House Drephone, had firmly believed so.
It was around that time that deaths from unknown causes began to occur within the Drefon domain.
The first report he saw was from a village a short distance from Valleed. In that village, where poultry farming was prosperous, in addition to mass chicken deaths, villagers were successively collapsing with high fevers.
Victim reported this to his father-in-law, the head of the house, and doctors and guards were immediately dispatched. Mass chicken deaths were not that unusual. While it was an industrial blow, it was something that happened in some village within the domain once every few years.
And even if the villagers’ high fevers were due to some contagious disease, quarantining the village would solve the problem. After all, doctors and guards to monitor the movement of people had been dispatched.
At first, neither the head of the house nor Victim had considered it that serious. However, it was two weeks later that the tide began to turn.
This time, mass chicken deaths and high fevers among villagers were confirmed in another village. Moreover, news arrived that in three villages almost simultaneously, and also in Valleed, the largest town in the domain, residents were successively visiting clinics with fevers of unknown origin.
Something was wrong. By the time Victim began to feel that way, it was already too late. The doctor dispatched to the village where the abnormality first occurred had died of a high fever. The domain’s people were collapsing one after another with high fevers, and Adventurers were scrambling to escape the domain.
As such reports flooded in one after another, even the lord and Victim’s wife collapsed with high fevers.
Victim desperately tried to manage the situation while nursing them both. However, despite his care, the head of the house and his wife died, and the disease had spread to the point of being confirmed in the neighboring domain of House Drefon and even in the Royal Capital.
The Adventurers who had fled the Drefon domain had likely spread it.
Victim had ordered the roads to be blockaded to contain the disease, but the guards also fell ill, leading to a shortage of manpower. Above all, Adventurers forcefully tried to break through the blockades, resulting in skirmishes and even deaths.
Bringing the situation under control was no longer possible. Victim requested aid from the King via a letter. However, no matter how much time passed, the requested aid never arrived. The disease had already begun to rage throughout the kingdom, and the King no longer had the capacity to send help.
The disease subsided about a year later. Victim himself had also hovered between life and death with symptoms of high fever and coughing but miraculously recovered and continued to fulfill his duties as the sole remaining representative of House Drefon.
The result was a demotion in rank, held responsible for allowing the disease to spread throughout the country. Their former honor was replaced by a Curse, and the once glorious Drefon domain, aside from Valleed whose population had halved and the Drefon Great Labyrinth, was entirely confiscated.
Victim recalled those times and believed he had done what needed to be done. He had lost his wife, lost the head of the house whom he had adored like a father, and despite being an outsider by birth, he had shouldered House Drefon and done his utmost.
If the reward for that was demotion to a viscountcy and confiscation of his lands, there was no way he could accept it.
Harboring gloomy feelings, Victim toiled and sweated for the revival of House Drefon and the restoration of their domain. He bowed his head when he didn’t want to and endured heartless insults and slander.
All to one day restore honor to House Drefon.
“――Well then, why don’t ya just become a hero yerself?”
He heard that voice when his spirit was about to break. A tall man clad in a dark green robe, calling himself a traveling merchant, visited the mansion. He possessed a mysterious charm that drew people in, and Victim found himself completely engrossed in telling his life story.
And after finishing listening to Victim’s life story, the robed man said that.
“The honor o’ House Drephone came from the first head killin’ a dragon, right? In that case, ya just gotta kill the Black Dragon Drefon again yerself. Ya kill the Black Dragon, break the Curse, and revive House Drephone as a new hero. It’s the birth of a new heroic tale, ya see.”
Victim thought the man’s proposal was absurd.
He knew the limits of his own talent. His Skills were not nearly powerful enough to defeat a Black Dragon, and his swordsmanship wasn’t skilled enough to receive an offer from the Royal Knights Order.
And above all, the Black Dragon Drefon had been subjugated long ago.
“Nah, nah. It ain’t been subjugated, not at all. It just got beat up a bit and is sleepin’. That thing’ll revive no matter how many times, ‘less its heart is crushed to bits. It’s made that way, ya know.”
The man, speaking as if he had seen it all himself, took out a dusky black sphere from the breast of his robe. The sphere, which emitted a dull glow like a crystal ball, had a flabby mass of flesh pulsing within it, as if marking a heartbeat.
“And this here is the heart o’ the Black Dragon Drefon. If ya keep feedin’ it human Living Blood, the Black Dragon Drefon will revive. Then, while yer pretendin’ to fight the Black Dragon Drefon, if I go and destroy this thing, the Black Dragon will die, and you’ll become a hero. That’s the plan. How ’bout it? Don’tcha think it’s a great idea?”
Questioned by the man, Victim nodded immediately. He couldn’t help but think it was a brilliant, life-reviving plan. He would kill the Black Dragon Drefon and become a hero himself. By doing so, the lost honor of House Drefon would be restored, and he could break the baseless Curse.
From that day on, Victim formed a cooperative relationship with the hooded man. The hooded man gathered the Living Blood necessary for the Black Dragon Drefon’s revival in the Royal Capital. Victim, while paying meticulous attention to prevent the plan from leaking externally, continued to feed Living Blood to the heart.
The plan should have been progressing perfectly.
So why, at this timing, would Lucas appear? The image of his intelligent and sharp-witted sister-in-law flashed through his mind. If it were her and the King’s son, perhaps they might have detected the plan through some means. He couldn’t help but think so.
Did they come barging in without prior notice because they feared the destruction of evidence? Or was it for some other purpose?
“Gatherin’ Living Blood in the Royal Capital got interfered with too, what a troublesome prince he is, really.”
The robed man sitting opposite him on the sofa shrugged.
“It’s a bit earlier than planned, but ain’t it just right?”
The man narrowed his bright red eyes and grinned.
“Heroic tales need tragedy and a storyteller. Right?”
Victim, too, as if drawn in, smiled and agreed with the hooded man.
The germination of malice was imminent.
Due to being busy with my main job and the writing of 6 bonus short stories piling up, my mental state is about to die, so I’ll be taking a break for a little over a week! The next update is scheduled to skip two releases and be on 5/27 (Tuesday)!
And finally, the cover illustration for Volume 1 has been revealed!
Please check the latest activity notes for details!