Chapter 141 - Younger Sibling

Meanwhile, the 1st Regiment moved to hunt the last demonic creature on schedule.

The silhouette of a colossal demonic creature towered over the dead land.

Thanks to the demonic creatures that had spread like a plague, there were few left guarding the mother.

'This one should go smoothly too.'

There were no variables on the battlefield, and their condition and morale were at their peak.

Olivia intended to march on as they were and smash the colossal demonic creature to pieces.

"Chief of staff! Please halt!"

Just then, the commander of the magic company shouted urgently.

"What is it?"

"A powerful energy is gathering around the colossal demonic creature!"

"Energy... What kind of..."

She was about to ask what kind, but Olivia could soon feel it.

It was a viciousness anyone sensing the currents of that battlefield could clearly feel.

Just as he had said, that energy was moving around the colossal demonic creature.

It drew in white clouds, clumping them together and darkening.

The sky over the area turned gloomy in an instant.

"W-What in the..."

The army that had been advancing with unstoppable momentum faltered.

Even those who used weather magic could not create a phenomenon where clouds gathered that quickly.

"Is a D-Demon using magic?"

"Everyone, defensive formation! Prepare for an attack!"

Everyone thought it was some kind of magic being used by the demonic creature, but Olivia was different.

She had already seen clouds of that form before.

The clouds gathered and gathered until they rose high like a mountain that had made the sky its land.

"No way..."

RUMBLE...!

The roar of the sky shook the earth.

BOOOOM!!!

A single bolt of lightning struck down toward the colossal demonic creature.

A pillar of light split the demonic creature's torso and burst it apart.

Everyone lost their minds at the astonishing sight.

Some called it judgment upon evil, and some called it divine punishment.

Olivia called it a calamity.

In the place where the colossal demonic creature had stood, a creature of similar size stood on four legs.

There were filthy chunks of flesh and rising white steam, but even humans seeing that silhouette for the first time could recognize it.

A pair of wings and a long tail.

A long snout and two pairs of horns stretching toward the sky.

Deep blue scales that, at a glance, could easily be mistaken for Iorga's.

But unlike the Aspect of Water, this being had lightning wrapped around its entire body.

That alone made it clear who this was.

-Ha ha ha ha ha!!!

The Thunder Dragon, Storeus.

The most belligerent dragon among dragons had descended upon this place.

-That damned Godfrey! I heard there was something making the Empire suffer, so I thought it would amuse me, but it is nothing but small fry!

He pressed down on the eggs the colossal demonic creature had been carrying with his claws and laughed as though entertained.

The advancing soldiers looked bewildered by the situation.

"Is h-he someone protecting us?"

"It seems that way..."

For a moment, the red scales standing tall atop Lonely Mountain came to their minds.

With that thought, someone led the chant.

"Long live the dragon!"

"A great power protects us!"

Those who knew nothing about Storeus began praising him.

"You stupid bastards! Shut your damn mouths, all of you!"

The knight company commander shouted, trying to stop the wave.

Those who were well aware of his infamous reputation tried to stop their actions, but it was already too late.

-Hmm?

They had drawn the dragon's gaze with that praise.

When those eyes turned toward the temporary alliance, they felt a chill run through them.

-No, there are still some left who might make for entertainment.

He grinned, raised his upper body, and lifted his hands toward the sky.

CRACKLE!!

Two bolts of lightning grew larger and larger until they were grasped in his hands.

"What is that?"

"All the demonic creatures are dead, so why...?"

Instead of those who could not grasp the situation, Olivia shouted at the top of her lungs.

"All forces, defensive formation! All mages, activate protective magic at the front!"

Only then did they realize.

Storeus was an Evil Dragon who threatened humans.

The beings called Evil Dragons showed no mercy even to small fry.

Everyone formed ranks and entered battle readiness.

The lightning in Storeus's hands became two spears.

They were called Storeus's Judgment.

Each one of those bolts possessed the terrifying power to turn an entire kingdom to ash.

And he was trying to throw two of them at a single army.

His intent was clearly to annihilate them.

-Let us see whether you can withstand this attack, hm?

Storeus discovered something among the crowd.

Blond hair and blue eyes that stood out among the armored masses.

That beauty, famed for its excellence, was famous even among dragons.

-Hah hah! Olivia! You cute little puppy! So that is where you were!

With a hearty laugh, the terrifying lightning spears scattered into the air.

At the dispersed electricity, everyone's hair floated up toward the sky.

-I cannot lay a hand on an army with Olivia in it, can I? Yes! A shame, but I shall be going now!

Storeus spread his wings as he was and entered the thundercloud.

Once his figure disappeared, the clouds scattered and the sky regained its original color.

A dragon that had arrived like a storm and vanished like a storm.

He was truly one suited to the name Aspect of Storm.

Only one minute had passed, but the soldiers' faces looked as if they had aged ten years.

Cold sweat was streaming down Olivia's face as well.

However, it was not because of Storeus.

It was because of the being who could move the Thunder Dragon, Storeus.

'The Emperor...'

Godfrey Arken, called an incompetent Emperor by the world.

Only he could move the Thunder Dragon, and only he could handle him.

Olivia clenched her teeth hard.

The subjugation battle she had thought would be a smooth stepping stone would no longer go according to her intentions.

Immediately after the Start of Spring Festival, the sudden demonic creature disturbance ended like that.

The encirclement the demonic creatures had been forming completely collapsed, and news of victory came from everywhere.

Isabella compiled the battle results and reported them to Ferda.

-Among the full force of 6,253, the dead have been counted at 220.

"That is an incredible result."

-It is. Even when considering every factor, this achievement cannot be ignored.

Pride seeped through Isabella's voice.

It made him truly feel that she was a member of Valdrova Castle and the administrator of Hestia village.

Among the dead, 170 came from the far eastern alliance led by Concillus, which counted as an average figure.

Most of them had occurred in the first battle, in other words when the demonic creatures were gathered near their mothers.

'This will raise the value of tactical infantry even further.'

Tactical infantry certainly had good cost performance.

They might cost a little more than spearmen, but they were far superior in difficulty of training and operation, so they would be more than sufficient as reserves later.

This news was good not only for Ferda's territory, but for the surrounding areas as well.

-And contact has come from the Pascal trading company and from Halim.

"Why from Halim?"

-They said everyone has worked hard for a month, and that they will send festival supplies as consolation. They said they will provide two days' worth of festival supplies and two months' worth of food.

What a reliable ally.

He had expected it from the Pascal trading company since they were in the same boat, but he had not thought Halim would pay attention to that as well.

"Tell them thank you. You must be tired, but you are working hard, administrator."

-Meaningless hardship is the hardest kind. I am enjoying myself right now, so it is all right. Please take care and return safely until the very end.

Enjoyment.

Yes, even outside the tent, most people were in a festive mood.

The reason it was only most was because the subordinates of Count Nazarov's young lord were not.

They must have felt like dying, thinking about how to explain the fact that he had thrown himself in like a moth to the flame.

As long as it was not related to him, the battle result left only joy behind.

'That should be the case...'

But there was someone who had no connection to Dmitri and yet felt no joy.

Ferda turned his gaze and looked at that one person.

Luri was standing in the corner of the spacious tent.

Her expression was so businesslike that those around her likely had not noticed, but Ferda was different.

He felt worry in her heart.

"Luri."

"..."

"Luri?"

Luri flinched in surprise and lifted her head.

"Yes, did you call for me?"

"You are spacing out."

"... I apologize. I had something on my mind. Is there something you would have me do?"

"Bring me a cup of tea. I will be sleeping soon, so make it chamomile."

"Yes."

As told, Luri brewed chamomile.

The sight of her looking down at the tea seemed even more sorrowful.

'She was like that when we met again too.'

Luri had gone ahead of them to the point.

Without many words, she answered that she had failed.

Just as a Demon had crawled into Hellus's mansion, there had also been a Demon where she was.

And that Demon had been Gokma.

It had been a situation where failure was inevitable, and he was not greatly disappointed by that failure.

But for it to be simply the stigma of failure gripping her, there was something more.

There was definitely another story Ferda did not know.

"Lord Ferda."

As he waited while the tea was steeping,

She opened her mouth with difficulty.

"What is it?"

"... It is nothing."

And then she closed her mouth again.

Ferda did not leave it at that.

"You may speak."

"..."

Ferda waited patiently for her to speak again.

But Luri only poured the tea quietly and did not readily open her mouth.

"Enough."

Ferda said as he lifted the cup.

"If you do not want to speak now, say nothing."

"I... apologize."

"There is no need to apologize. As long as you are safe, that is enough for me."

"..."

"If the time comes when you want to talk, you can tell me then, so take your time thinking today."

When she heard those words, a faint sense of resentment rose in Luri.

He should not have added the last part.

It made her mistakenly think he was saying not that he did not care, but that he would wait whenever she was ready.

Even though she knew it was a misunderstanding, Luri opened her mouth.

"Lord Ferda..."

Because if the moment came when she broke down, she wanted to lean on this man.

"Have you ever had a younger sibling?"

"A younger sibling?"

Among three sons and no daughters, he was the third son.

"I had no younger siblings."

"I... had a younger brother."

She said with difficulty.

"Back when I was a mortal, like other dragon spawns."

Her past, which she had never told anyone.

Dragon spawns are commonly called children of dragons.

That is because they regard dragons as fathers and obey them absolutely.

In truth, they are more tightly bound than family, and their solidarity is stronger than that of elves.

However, they are not truly beings born from dragons.

Some are humans, some are elves, and some are orcs.

As long as they possessed intelligence, anyone could become a dragon spawn through an ascension rite, so their appearances varied by race.

Luri was an ordinary child who had lived the miserable life of the lower class.

Back then, she did not have the name Luri, and her hair was not silver.

When Luri was born, her baptism was held with curses rather than joy at the birth of life.

For the lower class, unless a child was a son, a daughter was baggage that would one day leave them.

Luri's father was especially sensitive to that.

He always said things like, why raise something that would become baggage instead of a pair of working hands?

Whenever she put a spoonful of rice into her mouth, she was met with her father's tongue clicking and his contemptuous gaze.

Even so, she had been able to live because she had a mother.

She was a daughter her mother had borne after a difficult pregnancy, so she devoted herself to young Luri.

Luri followed that mother and proved her worth by begging in a way that stirred sympathy.

But change came all at once.

Luri's mother gave birth to a son.

With the birth of a boy to carry on the family line, her father smiled for the first time, and her mother's attitude instantly grew cold.

Neither her father nor her mother gave her affection anymore.

In the end, she was treated like a useless mouth to feed, and before her younger brother even passed his first birthday, she was sold to an orphanage.

She had been abandoned by her family.

She was depressed for months from the sorrow of losing her family, but still, the situation was not bad.

No, it was actually good.

The director treated Luri very well.

The shock of having been abandoned by her parents was healed by his devotion.

Luri followed that director like a father.

But that, too, lasted only a short while, and as she grew older, Luri faced an uncomfortable truth.

That orphanage was in fact a child auction house.

They graded children by potential, and the treatment they received differed according to that grade.

Luri ranked at the very top even among A-ranks.

It meant that she was moderately intelligent and outstanding in appearance, with enough potential to be sold off to a noble household in the future.

The director had poured money into her not to raise a child, but to make her into a product worthy of that grade.

A sense of betrayal surged up.

The words that he saw her as a daughter, as a human being, had all been lies.

What father in the world would look at his child as money and judge when to sell her off?

She made up her mind.

Rather than live as someone's doll, she would live as a human being in the gutter.

Luri escaped the orphanage.

The orphanage director flew into a rage and organized a pursuit party, but she managed to shake them off by a hair and successfully slipped into a kingdom.

With not a single coin to her name, she made a home in a corner of the kingdom's sewers.

Though it smelled and the floor was hard, it was more comfortable than any other place.

Having lived on that harsh floor, her personality naturally grew rough and hardened.

Around the time Luri turned twelve,

An uninvited guest came to her comfortable home.

Thinking it might be a mad beggar, she tightly gripped the blade she kept for intimidation.

But what appeared was different from what she expected.

Standing there was a boy much younger than her twelve-year-old self.

His nose was running, and his whole body was covered in bruises.

Even Luri, who considered herself miserable, felt that in front of that child, her own misery was a spoiled complaint.

The boy sniffled and asked.

-Noona, do you have anything to eat?

If another beggar had said that, she would have screamed at him to get lost immediately.

But the moment she saw his eyes, Luri was overwhelmed.

They held a pure light that could not be found in the gutter.

At that alien color, unfitting for such a miserable situation, Luri thought this.

She had to protect this child.

What a child who was only twelve felt toward a boy she had seen for the first time was responsibility.

Luri drew that boy into her home.

She shared food with him, changed his clothes, and covered him with a blanket.

Her comfortable home became even narrower, but it grew warmer than before.

In that way, Luri became the noona of a boy she had seen for the first time.

For the first time, she could truly feel the meaning of the word family.

Luri did everything together with her younger brother.

They went out together to beg and rummage through trash cans.

There was now another mouth to feed, so the days they spent hungry increased, but on the rare days when they ate their fill, she used the happiness of those moments as fuel.

Once, when they came out of the gutter and wandered around looking for food, Luri and the boy saw someone around their own age.

Unlike them, who could not escape the back alleys, that child was walking down the main road.

And one hand held his mother's hand, while the other held something delicious.

Seeing that, inferiority and misery pointlessly filled Luri's chest.

-It would be nice if we could eat something like that too.

The innocent boy said that while tightly holding Luri's hand.

With that one sentence, Luri gained a dream.

She swore that someday, she would let this young brother live like that.

Luri wanted to become an adult quickly.

Once she became an adult, there would at least be more things she could do, and she could save money too.

If she saved money, they could live not in this gutter, but in a house with a roof.

Strangely, once she had a dream, tomorrow no longer felt painful.

Because if they kept living, someday there would come a day when they could see this time as just one memory from the past.

But even that dream shattered to pieces.

War broke out.

No, it was closer to a one-sided annihilation ritual than a war.

That day, Luri and most of the people did not know.

The king of the castle where they were staying had insulted a dragon and truly touched its reverse scale.

Hundreds of dragon spawns flew in without warning, becoming a meteor shower that covered the kingdom.

The sturdy castle walls collapsed, and houses burst into flames.

It took only one hour for everything to become ruins.

After running frantically from the roars, when she opened her eyes again, she saw a land turned to ruins.

The smell of ash stung her nose, and an emptiness filled her chest.

Luri looked down into her arms.

That was where her younger brother should have been.

But there was nothing.

It was strange.

In her memories, she had been holding her younger brother at the end.

Luri called his name.

She cried out desperately for that name she could no longer remember.

After a long time with no answer, she got up and searched through the debris.

They had been together, so he had to be somewhere nearby.

But what her hands caught were only fragments of collapsed walls and gray ash.

There was no sign of her younger brother anywhere.

Luri kept moving until her breath caught in her throat, and her mind swirled with questions.

Her younger brother had disappeared, so how had she survived this unscathed?

If she had been holding his hand, they would have lived together and died together.

That meant Luri had let go of her younger brother's hand.

Then when had it happened?

When that meteor shower and lightning poured down?

When her mind went hazy from the screams and scorching heat?

When the rain of rocks fell right afterward and everything was chaos?

Then she erased all of it from her mind.

It did not matter when.

Luri had survived alone, and her younger brother had disappeared without a trace.

She had thought she had given him affection and cherished him, but when she stood before death, she had coldly become a stranger.

They were all the same.

Her parents.

The orphanage director.

And me.

All of us are equally selfish humans.

-I'm... sorry.

She said to her younger brother, who no longer even had a form.

-I'm sorry I survived alone...

Having failed to fulfill her responsibility, she became literally empty.

Having lost a part of her life, she simply waited for death.

But death did not come.

Ironically, the one who took in such a Luri was a dragon.

A middle-aged man with silver hair.

With a bright smile, he shared his blood with her.

The silver-haired middle-aged man had performed an ascension rite on the spot, on a whim.

-I shall call you Luri from now on. Forget your painful past now. Think only of how you will live from here on.

Her empty emotions were once again filled by the middle-aged man's smile.

The ascension rite was a ritual to forget the past and move forward.

It made one forget their original hair color and eye color alike, and made all memories of the past lose meaning as if they had been nothing but a dream.

But even in that ritual where she abandoned all of that, Luri held one thing in her heart.

Responsibility.

Only the responsibility she had felt when taking in a boy from the gutter became her pillar.

That responsibility now turned toward Silverwind.

Luri thought this.

She would use her mistake as a stepping stone and live for this great one.

Luri resolved to become a warrior.

And another hardship began from then on.