Ch#66
“Sovereign King! Are you all right?!”
Tie stared at Berugon with baffled eyes.
Berugon was scrambling to get up from his spot the moment he regained his senses.
Tie warily backed away from Berugon.
She was worried he might act strange again.
However, Berugon seemed to have regained some rationality.
“Krazar? Did you dispel the red mist? What in the world......?!”
He was staggering a bit, but his eyes were focused clearly.
Soon he frowned, clutching his aching head, and sat up on his own.
“Sovereign King, you defeated the red mist, right? You found and destroyed its core? Wait, but why are we still in the subspace?”
Tie shut her mouth at the barrage of questions.
Then she rolled her eyes.
“Well, it's wike......”
Where should she even start explaining?
Tie turned around to ask Lucarion for help.
“Huh?”
However, Lucarion had vanished at some point.
Instead, he was somewhere unexpected.
None other than inside Tie's bag.
“Bwackie, why awe you thewe......”
Lucarion was curled up inside the bag like an angry cat.
Not content with that, he glared with axe-shaped eyes before turning his head away with a huff.
Tie gaped.
‘......He's suwwy!’
It seemed Lucarion didn't like Tie's decision to raise Ppuppu.
What to do.
Gloomily, Tie stared at Ppuppu in her hand with drooping eyebrows.
‘Ppuppu is a weawwy good baby ewephant.’
From the moment Ppuppu hatched from the core, Tie had been fully sharing its senses.
Ppupu's anxiety, its guilt for scaring Tie.
And the bewilderment that none of this had been intentional.
‘Of couwse......’
Tie glanced at Berugon while looking down at Ppuppu's head.
Ppuppu had been eyeing Berugon and smacking its lips since earlier.
‘It stiww wants to eat Factowy Chief.’
Berugon was food Ppuppu had painstakingly prepared for a very long time.
So even if it was full from Tie's magic power, it would still crave Berugon.
Tie would feel the same if her favorite food was right in front of her—even if stuffed, she'd want to eat more.
However, having decided to be Ppuppu's mother, Tie needed to properly educate it from now on.
And the most important thing was surely to stop thinking of people as food, right?
Tie first covered Ppuppu's smacking lips.
And calmly replied.
“Kwa-zawu is gone.”
Berugon jumped up from his spot.
“Really?!”
Tie glanced back at Lucarion snorting behind her, then subtly nodded.
“Yeshhh.”
Lucarion kept insisting Ppuppu was Krazar.
That he could sense Krazar's evil magic power from Ppuppu.
But Tie disagreed.
‘Ppuppu doesn't even know what Krazar ish, it's a baby!’
Moreover, she had seen it just moments ago.
Ppuppu writhing in indignation.
Tie could fully sense it.
That Ppuppu's actions and reactions weren't fabricated lies.
And that was all?
Tie even had her own logic for interpreting the situation.
‘If Krazar is Mom Koko, and Krazar core is Koko egg.’
Then Ppuppu born from inside would naturally be the baby.
‘You can't say baby and mom awe the same!’
Especially in Korea, that law thingy...... what was it?
Anyway, the scary law that imprisoned even the families of wrongdoers had vanished long ago.
Tie was feeling proud of her own logic when,
“To think you really defeated that monster.”
Berugon's muttering reached her ears. He wiped the blood trickling from his forehead and continued.
“Your great reputation has its reasons, after all.”
Tie stayed silent, unsure how to respond.
“Then the reason Krazar's core cracked was the clash of massive magic powers?”
But at his following words, she panicked and rolled her eyes.
Clash of magic powers......?
Thinking back now, the sensation felt more like ‘transfer’ than a clash.
The moment Tie picked up the core in the Armory.
Ppuppu had felt an enormous amount of magic power pouring into it.
And since Ppuppu had been starving for so long, it absorbed every bit of Tie's magic power.
‘Then it got fuww.’
Full enough to attempt the long-prepared hatching.
Ppuppu, starting to hatch, opened the subspace and tried to offer its painstakingly prepared food to Tie out of gratitude.
However, the power it regained after so long was unstable.
That was why the created subspace ended up threatening Tie too.
As her thoughts reached that point, Berugon's voice continued.
“Sovereign King. If my guess is right, it seems you saved my life.”
Tie's eyes widened round.
However, Berugon was serious.
“Because Krazar's core—that demon—seems to have been bewitching me all this time.”
Tie subtly covered Ppuppu with one hand.
Fortunately, Berugon sighed without glancing that way.
“Yes...... it's certain. Thinking back, it's been a few years.”
She couldn't pinpoint exactly when it started.
But Berugon was convinced something had changed from that point.
He steadied his breath and stared at Tie.
“Actually, three years ago, I briefly stored Krazar's armament in my lodging.”
Around that time, the Church had started pressuring him to hand over the armament.
Berugon brought it to his lodging under the pretext of inspection.
And from that day, memories of his most horrific day began replaying as nightmares.
“I don't know your exact age. But if you're over forty, you've probably heard of it. The Hederdel tragedy.”
Hederdel twagedy?
Forty?
Tie counted on her fingers and startled.
‘Fowty!’
Forget forty, Tie was four.
Moreover, Hederdel tragedy was completely new to her.
Shaking her head, an intrigued expression spread across Berugon's face.
As if gauging Tie's real age.
Tie hurriedly added.
“I think I've heawd of it......!”
Berugon nodded as if he knew it.
“Yes. You've surely heard of it. It was quite a famous incident.”
For some reason, a shadow fell over Berugon's face.
“The lord's son who killed ninety innocent people, starting with a hospital raid.”
Hospitaw waid, ninety peopwe?
Tie's eyes filled slightly with fear.
If someone entered a hospital and harmed sick people, that was terribly evil.
“I sold the weapon to him.”
But at that moment, Berugon said.
Tie shut her mouth, then widened her eyes.
“Nyeh?”
“I'm saying I was the one who put the weapon in that bastard's hands.”
Berugon had already bowed his head deeply.
“I rarely took personal commissions. I mostly refused requests to make special armaments for someone. Of course, I still can't help but accept the Imperial Family's.”
Berugon sighed.
“But that guy...... he was the lord's son and a knight suppressing civil war in the Hederdel region. I was bewitched by those words.”
Not Hederdel, but Berugon too hailed from such a village.
Where magic stones sprouted, people began fighting because of it.
A warzone where that fighting turned into vicious civil war.
Berugon, who had lost his adoptive parents and seven siblings in the warzone, couldn't refuse the knight's—no, the monster's—request.
Because until then, he didn't know what that man intended to do with the weapon he made.
