Chapter 241 — 화려한 귀환
Chapter 241
A Glorious Return
The city of Biern.
A venerable city that, only a few centuries ago, boasted the largest scale in the East.
But as the Imperial Family deliberately neglected it, its population steadily drained away and the city shrank.
Now, with war raging along the Eastern March, columns of refugees have emptied it even further.
Even so, those citizens who couldn’t bring themselves to leave the hometown they’d lived in all their lives flung their gates wide the moment the Star’s Host arrived.
They saw them as liberators come to save them from the unrelenting pressure of the mountain tribes.
The Star’s Host set up a temporary base here and took a rest.
It was to reorganize the troops before the long march ahead.
And then—
As if they’d been waiting for the Star’s Host, an envoy from the Imperial Army’s Grand Headquarters arrived.
“I am Count Borai. I bring a letter from our great and sagacious supreme commander, Crown Prince Zeraitz.”
In front of Elric, with Herman, Sailor, and Sean present—
Count Borai flinched at Elric’s blazing gaze, then strutted forward as if he himself were Crown Prince Zeraitz.
Elric frowned slightly at the sight. Isabel’s words flashed through his mind.
-He’ll probably be the sort of envoy who gets under your skin, Elric.
-Me? Why bother?
-To shave a few slivers off your credit, however they can.
-…What a convoluted way to live.
-He’s a crown prince, remember. Petty to the bone.
Elric hadn’t dealt with Isabel as much, but he’d tasted enough of Crown Prince Zeraitz to know the type.
He could more or less guess how Zeraitz would play this.
He could also guess what the letter said.
After some bland niceties about how hard he’d worked from afar and how he’d labored for the glory of the Empire, it would tell him to “return” to Grand Headquarters at once.
That would automatically fold the Star’s Host into GHQ, and every last merit Elric had earned would drift over to Crown Prince Zeraitz as a matter of course.
Because they could package it as Elric having carried out his “orders,” successfully, thanks to the prince’s direction.
As if anyone could have achieved such feats—Elric or not.
As if all this had unfolded beneath the grand design sketched by Zeraitz.
That’s how they’d advertise it.
‘Says who? Trying to slap your spoon on my dish, are you?’
Elric had no intention of watching that farce play out.
He was already thinking about how to cook Zeraitz to perfection.
One corner of Elric’s mouth curled.
He could see why Count Borai was acting the way he was.
No doubt Zeraitz had instructed him to do exactly this. If Elric snapped, they could slap him with some convenient charge and strip his command.
And then hand that command to Count Borai, perhaps?
‘Look at those eyes. He’s practically drooling.’
As they toured the camp, Elric didn’t miss the greedy gleam in Borai’s eyes.
He snorted. A laugh with no humor behind it slipped out.
Why do central nobles love eating other people’s work raw?
『So what are you going to do?』
Mephisto skimmed Elric’s thoughts and tilted his head.
He knew Zeraitz was petty, as Isabel said, but he’d still figured the man could use his head. Which meant Elric’s only option should have been to bow his head a little… yet judging from Elric’s current posture, there was no way he intended to.
[What do you mean, what?]
Elric’s smirk widened.
[Push it even harder.]
『Keh. Of course.』
No sooner had Mephisto’s chuckle died—
Thoom!
A crushing pressure slammed down over the room.
“…Kgh!”
Before Count Borai could even get through his admonition about proper decorum when receiving the Crown Prince’s letter, an immense weight pressed onto his shoulders, making him grind his teeth.
‘This… this petty cur!’
He saw the twist at one corner of Elric’s mouth and realized Elric had begun to let his presence leak.
He was trying to seize the initiative.
‘Like hell I’ll let that slide!’
But Count Borai was a man who’d survived for years in the central political arena, where plots and schemes swirled like storms.
He’d seen childish tricks like this too many times to count.
He meant to flatten Elric’s nose for him.
So long mired among these eastern hillbillies, had he lost his edge that badly? He must have forgotten the difference in level between the Empire and the Eastern March—not just forgotten, but erased it from his mind.
In his youth, Count Borai had trained his sword to the rank of a master of Four Chains.
Maybe Herman or Sailor would be different, but Elric—whose level was rumored, at best, to be about Seventh Circle—shouldn’t be hard to suppress.
Even if he were Eighth Circle, in a straight duel a martial artist overwhelms a mage—everyone knows that.
Shouldn’t be a problem at all.
Except—
‘…Hm?’
A crease formed between Borai’s brows.
‘Higher than I thought? So he hasn’t been just playing around on the Eastern Frontier?’
Even after drawing up his mana, he couldn’t wash away Elric’s pressure, and Borai’s smile turned wry.
Did this child not understand the more he forced it, the worse it got for him?
He was about to chalk it up to youth when—
‘Why…?’
Even after he opened eighty percent of his strength, the pressure didn’t fade.
No—if anything, it grew fiercer.
Tremble, tremble.
His shoulders began to shake.
‘Tch!’
Borai clenched his teeth and threw out everything he had.
But even with his full strength unleashed, the pressure didn’t budge.
In his violently shuddering vision,
Elric’s mocking smile only widened.
As if to ask, Is that all?
And then—
“Ghk!”
A groan ripped from Borai as the pressure suddenly doubled.
Thud!
One knee slammed into the ground.
Boom! Boom!
The pressure didn’t stop there.
Three times, four…
He couldn’t see the end of it.
‘H-how is this possible…!’
Shudder, shudder…
Now both knees were buried in the floor.
Cold sweat poured out of his violently trembling body.
Borai couldn’t make sense of it.
The gulf between this and the Elric described in the Inspectorate’s briefing before he left GHQ was too vast.
This was not something he could resist.
It was like—
‘A Lion!’
Yes. A level attainable only by those stepping beyond the bounds of humanity—the superhuman.
Among martial artists, an Eight-Lion; among mages, a Six-Pointed Star—that’s the threshold.
And yet Elric, at his age, had already reached the rank of Lion?
Most superhumans didn’t reach that height until their forties or fifties. It was absurd.
Not that it had never happened.
There had been someone like that in the past.
The Star Mage, Usden Merbinger.
Elric Merbinger’s grandfather, was he not?
But in Usden’s day, House Merbinger rivaled the Mage Tower—a colossal power that could pour support into him. Even so, Elric’s current prowess bordered on the unbelievable.
For a moment Borai wondered if Herman and Sailor were helping Elric, but they only watched with quiet smiles. They hadn’t so much as twitched.
Which meant this suffocating pressure all originated from Elric.
Now Borai wanted to at least shout.
Ask if he really meant to insult him like this.
If he couldn’t seize the initiative, he could at least flash his backing.
But he found he couldn’t force a single word out, and it drove him mad.
What drove him even madder was that Elric still hadn’t said a word.
Elric wasn’t stupid; he had to know that crushing him like this would earn Zeraitz’s hatred.
In that instant—
‘Is… is that it…?’
Borai felt as if a blunt object had cracked him over the back of the head.
At last, he thought he understood Elric.
Command authority?
Elric was telling them to try taking it, if they could.
It won’t go the way you want.
The Star’s Host will disband on its own before that ever happens.
He was saying the East already belonged to him—don’t you dare reach your hand in.
And that warning… wasn’t meant for Borai, but for his backing, Crown Prince Zeraitz.
He might kill me.
If this kept up, Borai might really close his eyes here—that sense of crisis flooded his mind.
Only when his thoughts were going white and he was on the verge of blackout—
Fwoom!
As if it had all been a lie, the pressure lifted.
Shudder, shudder…
But Borai still reeled in the aftershocks and couldn’t gather himself. The spot where he had knelt was soaked through with sweat.
“My. The count must be quite worn out after such a long journey?”
Elric inquired, all impeccable courtesy.
To Borai, it sounded like pure leisure.
“What are you all doing? Give the count a room so he can recover from his travel fatigue in comfort.”
Soldiers bowed and moved in to drag Count Borai away by force.
He was already half-unconscious, in no state to walk on his own two legs.
He probably wouldn’t see Elric again until this war was over.
He wouldn’t get the chance to deliver Crown Prince Zeraitz’s missive, either.
He’d just be hauled around under guard the whole time.
Which meant Elric would have never “received” the secret letter conveying Zeraitz’s orders.
“Anyone else? Or are we done here?”
When Elric looked to Sean and asked, Sean pressed his index finger hard against his temple, as if his head hurt.
For a moment he was seized by the thought: Can we really do this?
‘That’s it, then. Merbinger is now completely at odds with the Crown Prince… and we’re going with them… Ah, hell, I don’t even know anymore. Dad will figure it out.’
He wondered what would happen when House Merbinger, meteoric as they were, and the old powerhouse, House Neresta, both turned their backs on Crown Prince Zeraitz.
Add the Blue Lion and the Ash Lion to that, and it’d be a powder keg moments from blowing.
Sean chose not to think any deeper.
He’d been through this enough at the Academy.
Thinking too hard about anything involving Elric only made your head hurt.
With a half-enlightened look, he waved his hand.
“No one. So please, just get lost.”
“Heh heh. Then I’ll leave the rest of the paperwork to you, my friend.”
Leaving those words behind, Elric wandered off. He’d said there was somewhere he wanted to go, and his retreating back looked for all the world like a child heading to a playground.
Haa…
I’m not dying a natural death at this rate. Feeling another throb at his temples, Sean let out a sigh deep enough to sink the floor.
The Talent-Devouring Mage