Chapter 127

The fact that they had disappeared ten years ago—and that the eldest Young Lord of House Kreutz was still nowhere to be found—continued to bother me.

Hmm.

My eyes narrowed as I watched the flames roaring in the fireplace.

And then there was Avin, who, unlike in the original story, had returned to the Kingdom of Doctia.

Since we had failed to bring the protagonist over to our side, there was no guarantee our peaceful lives would continue.

Even if Duke Pose, who had originally been destined to die, had simply died a little earlier than intended, Doctia surely had not abandoned its goal of founding an empire.

Which meant one thing.

We still had enemies.

The playful look on my face gradually hardened into something cold.

Come to think of it, this isn’t the time to be reminiscing about childhood.

Kyle and I both had roles we needed to fulfill.

Otherwise, everything could collapse in an instant.

“Father!”

My hands, folded together in my lap, clenched into fists on their own.

I looked at Father with solemn determination.

“I’ll help you burn the marriage proposals!”

“Good. I was wondering when you were going to say that.”

As though he had been waiting for those exact words, Calypse pushed the mountain of proposals closer so they would be easier for me to throw away.

Together with Father, I tossed marriage proposals into the fire and made myself a promise.

I would protect them somehow.

My family.

And Kyle.

***

At that same moment, beneath the dark night sky, a boy was secretly watching the closed office window.

“Those marriage proposals... Kyle’s going to lose his mind if he sees them.”

He muttered with a bitter smile.

A northern wind swept past just then, scattering the cherry-blossom-colored hair that fell across his forehead like flower petals.

The girl Kyle’s been in love with for ten years.

His pale pink eyes narrowed as he remembered a conversation he had once had with Kyle in the snowfield.

Through the window, he could see a girl around his own age.

She was beautiful enough to make anyone stop and stare.

But even so, she did not seem beautiful enough to make Kyle fall for her.

Kyle treated women like rocks.

Girls prettier than her confessed to him back in our village, and he ignored every single one.

And it was not just romance.

Unless something involved the snowfield, Kyle was indifferent to almost everything.

As though he had been born for the sole purpose of ruling it.

His power was one reason the boy had chosen to follow Kyle, but after spending ten years together, he had also come to think of him as a friend.

And sometimes, he worried about him.

There were moments, however, when the eyes of that boy who usually seemed like an emotionless doll would visibly waver.

Whenever the name “Aisha” came up.

Could she really be his first love?

And he still likes her now?

“Whew.”

The boy gave a quiet whistle.

“But she was getting ready to marry someone else. I thought it might be fun when the two of them finally met, but I guess that’s not happening.”

There was no need to keep watching.

If she was going to marry another man anyway, then all he had to do was tell Kyle that much.

He rose from where he had been crouching and silently leaped onto the castle roof.

Landing with astonishing lightness, he immediately sprang toward the next rooftop, heading for the end of the world.

***

The snowfield was the kind of place where anyone who entered would lose all sense of direction, as though they had been dropped into the middle of a desert.

Beneath faint, gently sloping ridgelines, sunlight reflected off the snow in a painfully vivid blue-white glare.

And then there was the vicious wind, blowing so hard it was nearly impossible to keep one’s eyes open.

“GRAAAH!”

An ogre opened its enormous jaws amid the snow whipping across the entire field of vision.

Then suddenly, as though time itself had stopped, its body went rigid.

Blood streamed down from beneath its jaw.

A sword had pierced its heart in a single instant.

Thud—

Its massive body toppled with surprising weakness, revealing the silhouette of a tall man behind it.

The moment the huge corpse struck the ground, a white haze rose like a cloud of sand before dispersing.

Through it emerged the figure of the man who had killed the ogre.

His face was cold and expressionless as he pulled out his sword.

White hair like snow.

Features so unrealistically beautiful they looked as though they had been carved from white plaster.

His full lips and pale skin naturally invited the word pretty, but the eyes and jawline that had grown sharper and more defined since childhood made him look like a young man rather than a boy.

The soft body he had possessed ten years ago had grown far taller than Knox’s and incomparably harder.

Up close, there was still a trace of youth in his face.

But from a distance, Kyle had grown so much that even someone who knew him might fail to recognize him.

“Sometimes you get mutations like this that don’t obey my commands.”

“Then shouldn’t we keep it alive and study it?”

“Study what?”

Thnk.

Without even wiping the blade, Kyle shoved it roughly back into its sheath, then pulled a flagpole from his belt and drove it into the snow.

“One mutation is enough. Me. Better to get rid of the rest.”

A red flag bearing a skull emblem fluttered from the long pole.

It meant that from this point onward, monsters were to be treated with particular caution.

The irony was that the one planting the warning flag was, in truth, the most dangerous monster of them all.

Kyle’s violet eyes darkened ominously as he stared at the flag.

Knox watched him in silence.

Even as a child, Kyle would often fall into thought about his own existence after killing monsters.

But now that he had grown older, the sight of him doing so...

Looks a little dangerous.

Knox forced himself to ignore the hairs standing on end along his arms and asked,

“What were its characteristics?”

“Bigger than the ordinary ones. Pale green circular markings on its skin. Its tusks are larger than a boar’s too.”

“A newly discovered species, then.”

Knox calmly surveyed the gruesome sight of blood spreading across the ground like a spiderweb and pushed up his monocle.

“Then we’ll need to give it a scientific name. How about—”

“Yellow Spots.”

The answer came without a second of hesitation.

“......”

The absurdly cute name would have horrified anyone who heard it.

Knox finally came back to his senses.

I let my guard down. Right. This idiot is an idiot.

“What do you mean, ‘Spots’? It’s a scientific name. It might end up in a paper someday. We’re calling it the Pale-Green Spotted Ogre.”

“Yellow Spots. We agreed I get to name the ones I catch.”

“What did you call that monkey-like monster you discovered last time?”

“Its butt was red, so Tomato Butt.”

“And the eagle-like monster before that?”

“Shiny Baldy.”

“Yes, that sounds terrifying. Do you think naming monsters is a joke?”

Knox shouted, but Kyle only answered indifferently.

“What does it matter? I’m going to make sure no one ever even sees dangerous ones like these anyway.”

“...You—”

Knox’s lips parted as though he were about to argue.

In the end, he closed his mouth.

Because Kyle was right.

They had roamed the snowfield together for ten years.

A great many things had happened in that time, but if there was one achievement that stood above the rest, it was that the number of monster subjugations in the Kreutz territory had fallen dramatically.

That was because Kyle eliminated dangerous monsters before they could ever reach inhabited land.

And with his help, they had pushed deep into the snowfield and discovered many new species.

“Fine. Compared to Tomato Butt, that’s enormous progress. Let’s head back.”

“Already? I think there are about three hours left before sunset.”

“We’ve been out here since morning. It’s about time we went in.”

In other words, Knox and Kyle had been outside since morning, spending the entire day trudging through blizzards while eliminating and researching monsters.

Lunch had consisted of bread and jerky eaten on top of a large rock.

Frankly, Knox was desperate for a hot bath.

But—

“What would we do if we went back?”

The innocent question came with such genuine confusion that Knox blinked.

“...Rest?”

“So there’s nothing in particular to do. Then let’s clear out the colony before we leave. They look like threat level two.”

Knox was briefly rendered speechless by the casual suggestion.

Clear out the colony too...? That means camping out here overnight.

“...Kyle. I know you have stamina to spare, but humans don’t. Sometimes we need to sit down, drink coffee, and rest.”

Kyle looked at him as though he could not possibly understand what Knox meant.

This was one of the things Knox sometimes worried about.

Kyle, with half his blood belonging to monsters, was strong.

But Knox’s goal was for him to integrate into human society.

That was what he had promised Calypse before coming out to the snowfield.

Yet watching this boy grow stronger at a frightening pace gave him the uneasy sense that, instead of socializing an illiterate child into a human being, he was turning him into a weapon.

It would be good if he picked up a hobby, at least. Or made more human connections.

Just then—

“Kyle! Knox!”

The familiar voice calling from the distance cut off their conversation.

Someone was running toward them quickly from the opposite direction.

Pink hair.

Pink eyes.

It was the snow-dweller they had discovered in the snowfield.

Asbon.

“You came all the way into somewhere this dangerous again?”

The boy, wrapped in a white robe that helped him blend into the snow, weaved his way between the enormous ogre corpses as he approached.

“Oh. Assistant Knox! Hello. You look really tired.”

“Thank you for noticing, unlike someone else.”

“......”

Kyle ignored Knox’s pointed look.

Even after seeing his friend, his face remained expressionless as he gathered the corpses into one place.

Used to Kyle’s attitude, Asbon spoke to him cheerfully.

“When are you heading back? The sun’s going down soon, so it’ll get colder.”

“Go back with Knox. I ran into a mutation here, so I should check whether there are any more—”

“I’ve got news for you.”

As Kyle started walking as though he intended to stay out all night, Asbon hurried after him and whispered into his ear.

At the same instant, Kyle’s eyes widened.

And then—

“...I’m tired. Let’s go back to the village.”

Kyle turned around.

For once, a faint spark of life had entered the violet eyes that were usually shadowed.