Chapter 218 — 용아병단(龍牙兵團)

Chapter 218

Dragonfang Legion

Fwaaah—

The firmly sealed door was shedding a glow like a magic mirror.

『So this must be the key?』

At Mephisto’s words, Elric nodded, stepped to the door, and laid his hand upon it.

Where his palm touched, a brief ripple of mana shivered.

Clack!

Creeeeak!

With the sound of latches releasing, the door swung wide to either side.

As if bewitched, Elric stepped inside.

A room tucked in the deepest recess of the family’s arcane treasury. A place like that would surely be hiding something precious.

But contrary to Elric’s expectations, the interior was starkly modest.

Even the shelves along the walls stood empty.

What caught Elric’s eye, however, was not that.

The very back of the room.

As if simply abandoned, a single desk sat there.

Beneath a silver candlestick whose red flame wavered, a thick volume lay.

The instant he saw it, Elric’s heart began to hammer for no reason he could name.

Thump!

Thump!

As if it were calling to him, Elric slowly approached.

The darker his shadow fell over the book, the more the candle flame beneath the silver seemed to flare.

『Hm. This…?』

“Do you recognize it?”

『Not exactly.』

Mephisto let out a short, wry laugh, pointing at the emblem worked into the cover.

A smile tinged with a tangle of feeling—something like fondness, and something like discomfort.

『Just very familiar.』

It was unmistakably the Merbinger family crest.

But it was also a crest no longer in use.

Elric knew what it was well enough.

‘The robe the Progenitor wore. The crest embroidered there.’

The afterimage of the Progenitor he had seen each time he went through an arrangement—the emblem on the garment had been exactly this.

Similar to the current one, but with a far more archaic air.

Which only made Elric more impatient.

Even so, he didn’t move at once, afraid that if he mishandled something so old the book might crumble to dust in his hands.

Judging by the layers of preservation spells, it should have vanished long ago; it felt as if someone had forced it to remain, just barely.

With trembling fingers, Elric opened to the first page.

A slip of parchment, tucked there like a bookmark, fell silently to the floor.

‘This…?’

It was a letter.

Written in a hand all too familiar to Elric.

‘A letter left by Grandfather!’

Among the few keepsakes of Usdon Merbinger that remained in the family, hadn’t there been writing like this?

Elric’s gaze dropped to it of its own accord.

-To my grandson who will one day come here.

Though we have never met in the flesh, I think still that I know you, and you know me—we know each other very well.

The path I walk now is the path you will walk, and the path you will tread henceforth is the path I once trod.

And one of the small waystations along that road is this very place.

Here, I think it’s all right to tell you a portion of things—for by now, you will feel confusion at too many matters. So I leave this letter here.

From the Black Snowfields to this place.

Would he finally hear why Grandfather’s handprints had been left so many times along the way?

Elric swallowed dry.

-First, let me say only this: in truth, I do not know exactly what path you are walking.

‘What is that supposed to mean…?’

-I was fortunate—long ago, I came to touch hands with the God of the Azure Heavens. And with her aid, through the augury of the stars, I gained the ability to “glimpse” the future, if only for a fleeting moment.

Yet that future remained naught but a realm of possibilities, and I could not point to any single one and say, this is real.

In the end, the road I saw and walked is but one among countless lines of future. I merely chose to walk the hardest, roughest, most painful of them all.

Because I thought you could do all those things.

Though you are a grandson I shall never meet, I firmly believe you are the one who will carry on me and our family’s legacy better than anyone.

Elric stuck out his lower lip.

‘If you believed that firmly, you might’ve tuned the difficulty down a notch, sir.’

He felt peevish for no reason.

And yet a nagging question found an answer.

‘The God of the Azure Heavens… so the god Sarnai serves was tied to Grandfather as well.’

Once he got out of here, he would need to find Sarnai first.

-The fates written upon the ecliptic and the celestial sphere speak thus: the star that means me will soon go out. Now it shines more brilliantly than any other, but that is only what happens to a candle right before it’s snuffed—the greatest flare before the dark.

Elric’s eyes slid to the silver candlestick burning with bright light.

‘So he wrote this under that candle.’

Somehow he could almost see Usdon Merbinger seated here, quietly scratching away with a fountain pen.

-I do not know exactly how I will go out. I only know that the task the stars have given me ends there. I have no lingering regret for life. I have already received praise few ever know, and I have a beautiful wife and a dear child, and a kind-hearted daughter-in-law.

Even so, one worry remains: the black clouds that still blanket the ecliptic show no sign of clearing.

No matter how brilliantly I shine, can I pierce a pall that covers the whole constellation?

‘Black clouds.’

The word snagged in Elric’s mind.

Did it mean Azazel and the Grigori?

He felt it could not be only that.

‘Perhaps.’

Elric stole a sidelong glance.

『What? Why?』

“It’s nothing.”

Catching his eye, Mephisto narrowed his brow slightly, but Elric calmly shook his head.

Outwardly calm, his thoughts were tangled.

‘Mephisto…’

A thought kept rearing up unbidden now and then.

That of all times, it was now that Mephisto woke from a millennium-long seal. Could the Grigori moving to resurrect Azazel be chalked up to mere coincidence?

Even though two Demon Kings had opened their eyes—a thing not seen even in that harrowing Great Demon War?

And if, as he feared, Mephisto too was included in the “black clouds” Usdon spoke of—

Then…

What should he do?

-So, to find a way to scatter the black clouds, I began walking wherever the stars’ augury led me.

And soon I learned:

That road was, in truth, a road someone had already walked.

The Four Retainers.

The Four Seasons.

It was them.

‘…!’

Elric had thought Usdon stood on the road he himself was taking—but it seemed there had been another before Usdon as well.

In a way, it felt obvious.

All those roads bore the family’s touch.

-It was truly wondrous. Everywhere I went, there were traces of those called the Four Seasons.

Thanks to that, I saw much.

Things even I did not know, that many former heads did not know—or had forgotten.

In the Black Snowfields, a past remembered only by the beastkin.

At the Temple of Flowers, the Progenitor’s traces.

Dragons that had long, long waited.

And—

Many sites of arrangements you have yet to reach.

-As I beheld them, I laughed and enjoyed myself, and I came to understand much.

Also, I understood

What charge had been given to me.

I could not know what it was they truly wished to say—but to make it so that their message would be passed to the descendants. That was my charge.

Thus to scatter the black clouds, and to kindle once more in the heavens the Progenitor’s starlight, now forgotten in this land.

That, too, was my charge.

Elric recalled what Otto Han had told him as he vanished.

The magics of the Four Seasons—spring, summer, autumn, winter—were indeed developed by the Four Retainers, but their roots all sprang from the Progenitor.

And if one could gather all those threads, one could draw near to the Progenitor as well.

Perhaps—

This was what Usdon meant.

‘The Progenitor’s magic…’

-So while I had only to set those things in order, a nagging worry arose.

That what I began to drive back the black clouds might, for my grandson, become too heavy a burden.

-But I believe.

As I did, as my father did, as my grandfather did—and as many forebears did.

And as the Progenitor did.

You, too.

Will walk the road well.

Elric’s nose prickled for no good reason; he rubbed it with his fingertips and grumbled.

“…Our grandfather, in the end he still won’t tell me the secrets.”

-So even if that road is still hard and lonely and desolate—walk, and walk in silence, and wait. It will soon unravel and unspool.

-But I cannot simply send you off when you’ve chased me all the way here like a dear old grandchild. I shall give you a gift.

Even through the words, Usdon seemed to soothe a sulking Elric. It felt as if Grandfather himself had appeared, patting him by his side.

But something else seized Elric’s attention.

A gift.

What could it be?

-As recompense, I leave this volume.

What follows are the things I came to glimpse faintly by tracing the stars’ augury and treading in the Four Seasons’ steps—the Progenitor’s magics I managed to imitate, if only by a paltry knack.

“…!”

At that line, Elric couldn’t help but sit up ramrod-straight.

‘The Progenitor’s magic?’

Usdon had lowered himself, calling it a paltry knack, but a man of his caliber would not have “restored” a spell to only that degree.

Chances were, he had brought it back almost to its original form.

What could it be?

A magic to command dragons?

Or one to marshal giants?

No—dragons and giants had long since perished, so perhaps not.

A sorcery that hurled down tremendous bolts and raised tempests would be fine, too…

Elric’s eyes shone as he recalled the Progenitor’s many magics glimpsed within the arrangements.

Each had been something that could only be called a “miracle” or a “calamity.” Surely they would show him a grand road forward.

-P.S. Oh, and by now you’re probably fretting because you can’t, for the life of you, recall the “spring” arrangement that should come after “winter.”

In truth, that was me.

Why, you ask?

Reaching the last line of the letter, Elric narrowed his eyes.

The reason spring’s arrangement had slipped his mind—

The guess he’d had, the “perhaps?”—it had been right.

Given how deep Grandfather’s mind ran, he’d hoped there was ample reason.

-Just. Because it sounded fun?

“…”

At an answer that somehow called Otto Han to mind, Elric fell into a deep, wordless silence.

Then he clutched his hair and let out a howl.

“Aaaagh! Damn you, Merbinger! What a damn family! I really can’t stand youuu!”

One thing, at least, was crystal clear.

That the grandfather vaunted as the continent’s Hero and Savior was, in the end, a Merbinger through and through.

The Mage Who Devoured Talent