Chapter 216 — 용아병단(龍牙兵團)
Chapter 216
Dragonfang Legion
“You think this will let you lot even dare to handle me? 【Sweeping Gale】!”
Count Caliger unfurled the spell he’d memorized, as if he would never forgive the traitors.
His eyes were bloodshot with worry for his son.
“Artifacts! Bring the artifacts!”
“【Magic Canceling】!”
“【Cancel】! 【Cancel】!”
“【Power of Defiance】!”
The retainers, knowing Count Caliger was a formidable mage, frantically pulled out the magic tools they’d prepared in advance to cancel his casting somehow, but—
“【Pelting Bolts】!”
The instant Count Caliger tilted the little staff he’d drawn from his robe and invoked a new spell, they were all sent flying.
Yellow lightning poured from the crystal set at the tip of the mini staff like a lash and struck them all at once.
Among all the elements that exist between heaven and earth, lightning is said to be the most intense and destructive.
And as a kind of “light,” its speed was so great that the naked eye could not hope to follow it.
So the magic tools the retainers were holding were smashed to pieces by lightning before they could even activate, and—
Some were cleaved clean in half along with their mounts.
Rumble, rrrrumble!
Rrrrrumble—
The smell of burning filled the air. Deep pits pocked the ground where the bolts had scoured it.
The glare was so fierce it felt blinding; the horses panicked and reared, but their cries were drowned beneath the thunder.
“Kill Count Caliger—!”
But something else made the retainers panic even more.
Lightning never ends with a single stroke.
Sparks that jump can lace themselves together again into a new lightning web, or fresh forks can split off—weaker than the first, perhaps, but still deadly.
And the problem was that no one knew that nature of lightning better than Count Caliger.
He had always been a suspicious, cautious man.
No matter how much he trusted and cherished his retainers, he wasn’t about to expose the ace up his sleeve.
“You mocked me—pay with your lives!”
Kra-kra-kra!
He jerked the mini staff inward, and the yellow embers lingering on the ground leapt high into the air.
Lightning lattices formed between them.
The few retainers still alive were trapped inside and shredded.
No shield spell or hastily raised barrier could withstand the relentless barrage.
“M-My lord!”
“Why even us…!”
There were some within who hadn’t betrayed him.
“I am sorry,” Count Caliger answered, eyes hard.
The power he’d called up couldn’t be made to spare friend from foe.
Had they known, they would have stood on the other side themselves. They died with faces steeped in grievance.
And then—
Rrrrrr…!
When the last bolt finally guttered out,
The only one left standing was Count Caliger. Alone.
Everything around him was scorched and ruined, black soot smeared everywhere. Dust hung thick in the air.
“Rodeo! Come on, Rodeo, wake up!”
Count Caliger hurried to his son.
No matter how he shook him, the boy who had long since stopped breathing only stared wide-eyed, as if still outraged.
Caliger ground his teeth and closed Rodeo’s eyes.
He had always been thoughtless, a wastrel—but he was his blood.
Even to Count Caliger, whose heart was cold as a snake’s, the death of his child hurt.
“Your vengeance… somehow your father will see it done. I’ll send Elric Mervingger to join you soon. Wait for me.”
Count Caliger decided Elric was the root of all this.
His son’s death. The house’s downfall. It all began when Rodeo met Elric in the north.
If only they had never met.
If Elric had remained nothing but the disgrace of the Mervingger, the House of Count Franz would still be thriving, and Rodeo would be firming his footing as heir.
So all of it was Elric’s fault.
Because he was trying to revive Mervingger, a relic of an older age, Caliger’s son and house had been harmed.
That was why his retainers had made this foolish choice.
He chewed over his rage, promising he would punish him someday.
Fwoooooosh!
Count Caliger poured mana into Rodeo’s corpse.
Whoomph. The body was swallowed by flame.
It pained him that he couldn’t give a proper funeral, but that was a hundred times better than letting Mervingger find the body and disgrace it.
He rose slowly.
The grief in his eyes settled into grim focus again.
“Too loud. Far too loud. Even the Star Host will have seen this. I must hurry.”
His son was dead, but he would have to bury that in his heart. Right now the only thought in his head was that he, who yet lived, had to escape this place somehow.
Only then could he have his revenge and rebuild his house. Three eggs. With just those, he was sure he could rise again.
From olden times, dragons were revered as sacred beasts, symbols of imperial majesty.
Give one to the Emperor, another to the Fourth Prince, and they would be his staunch backers.
Then he could hatch the last egg and use it as the stepping-stone for his comeback.
“No—if the Fourth Prince won’t back me, I can always switch to the Crown Prince now.”
The leverage the Fourth Prince held over him? That no longer mattered. With nothing left to lose, what was there to fear?
And—
Fortunately, Count Caliger still had a way to get out.
“A Teleport Scroll… It can’t be helped. I’ll have to use it here.”
Long-distance spatial transfer magic is avoided without a fixed-coordinate gate.
Coordinates in the material realm shift constantly, and calculating and inputting them into the formula is tedious work.
And often, by the time the calculation is done, the coordinates have drifted again and the work is useless.
Worse, the mana cost is enormous, and you can only move one or two people at most.
Luckily, Count Caliger had a magic tool that eliminated those obstacles.
It was single-use, but it would carry him and Rodeo safely back to the Empire.
Which was to say, he had never planned to stay with his retainers in the first place.
Still, he had meant to first secure a safe zone for casting and then flee with Rodeo.
“Now there’s no helping it.”
All he could do was hope the scroll would prime faster than he’d expected.
“Before that, this goes away.”
To transfer through space, he needed to lighten the load as much as possible.
Count Caliger hefted the box containing the dragon eggs.
It was heavy, but he had a way to store it.
The Magic Treasury, Interresia.
Because Interresia was a vault set in subspace, it imposed no restrictions when casting spatial transfer.
“Haven’t opened you in a while.”
Fshhh!
He poured mana into his ring, and the gem at its end flared brilliantly.
“The magic pendant—if I’d had that, I might have forced open the last chamber somehow. I thought I might finally pull it off this time, and in the end I couldn’t.”
He was just deciding he’d have to try again next time when—
Cr-r-rack!
Space split open in front of Count Caliger.
Subspace was beginning to open.
At that moment—
Caw! Caw!
Somewhere, a crow cried.
“Shrieking far too loudly. An ill omen.”
He thought as much and reached toward the subspace—
“…A crow?”
A flash of unease streaked through his mind.
He remembered something from the background check on Elric.
That Gility Renz, the Beast King and a former executive of the Free Revolutionary Army, had become Elric’s master.
At the time he’d dismissed it with the easy conclusion that the Beast King, once infamous even in the Empire, would never pay attention to Mervingger’s disgrace—and ignored it.
But if it was true?
Whoomph!
No sooner had the thought formed than Count Caliger kindled a fireball at his fingertips to blast the crow.
But the crow was a step faster.
Scree-eeeee—
In a blink the crow became a black arrow and sheared off Count Caliger’s finger as it shot past.
Slice!
“Graah! How dare you—!”
Kra-boom!
Screaming with pain, he detonated his fireball to catch the crow, but it was already winging high with the ringed finger in its beak.
Cawwww! Caw!
Interresia’s door, just opening, slammed shut again. The crow screamed in triumph from above.
“My ring! Return it!”
Count Caliger exploded with fury and hastily drew the mini staff from his robes.
If he lost the ring now, he was finished.
What gave him confidence in his comeback wasn’t only the dragon eggs; Interresia mattered just as much.
It held nearly all the legacy of the Mervingger through the ages.
Losing it would be disastrous.
It would be like giving wings to a lion already in full sprint—the Mervingger would become unstoppable!
Crackle!
Rrrrrrumble—
He unleashed tightly condensed lightning.
Unlike the earlier barrage that had swept the retainers away, he fused the many forks into a single bolt. He had to bring down the crow quickly.
There was a risk the ring would be damaged, but in his agitation he had no room to worry about that.
Yet contrary to his intent, the bolt that came down like it would cleave the world never even touched the crow.
Flutter!
The crow twisted violently in midair. The black aura unspooled like thread and, in an instant, turned to gold.
Elric stepped out of it.
Golden hair tousled, white robe billowing.
Smiling coldly, he spoke word-magic—or rather, a new spell that had become a true mantra.
“【Scatter】.”
Kra-krash!
A white flurry whipped into a vortex, shredding the lightning and scattering it to the winds.
The shattered charge fell over the already-ruined ground, kicking up an even bigger cloud of dust, but the gale from the snow squall swept it down at once.
“Elric Mervingger!”
Count Caliger realized Elric had been toying with him and howled.
Elric had known the key to Interresia was with him—and waited in silence. To learn exactly what that key was, and how to use it.
He had even let Caliger walk off with the dragon eggs as bait for this moment.
Of course Count Caliger could only rage at the fact he’d been dancing on a board Elric had laid out, a fool unaware.
Not that Elric cared.
“So noisy. Hey, old man, for someone caught stealing, you’re awfully brazen, aren’t you?”
Elric sneered, pried the ring off the severed finger, and slid it onto his own.
Click.
As if it had finally found its rightful place, the ring shrank and settled smoothly around Elric’s finger.
And then—
Fwoooom!
Flaaare!
The magic pendant at his neck and the ring blazed with light at the same time.
The Mage Who Devoured Talent