Chương 72: The Season of the Minotaur (21)

Five airships had begun to rain fire down on the Darkwood's western edge. Simon could see the smoke in the sky all the way from the Halls of the Minotaur's rooftop. The war machines had burned down the outer edge of the Darkwood and created a vast no man's land of ashes and cinders to prevent its growth from reaching the Goetia Research Center. They then began to advance towards the corrupt manatree.

They incinerated everything in their path without care or concern for any civilians trapped below with fire spell bombardments. Telepathic backlashes from dead cultists had continued to buzz in Simon's mind since their arrival, and his gargoyle messengers sent to discuss terms had been killed on sight. Even light messages using imperial communication methods had been ignored. They had come to destroy him and his realm, and they would not relent in their quest.

"They will reach us in less than an hour at this rate, Your Majesty," Duchar pointed out. And there's still no sign of that dragon creature, Simon thought. Shabram had no information on the creature, much to her unease, though she confirmed that Lauriane had been working on creating special warbeasts at the Goetia Research Center to help turn the civil war's tide. Even the spymistress had been kept away from that project and never managed to infiltrate it. This was a rather big issue.

Simon's plan had been to establish communications with the War Party and share the intel he had obtained from Asterion with Lauriane so they could focus on the greater threat of the Zodiac Parade. He had hoped to turn the Muse's power into an asset for House Magnos, perhaps optimally using her to secure a settlement with the Church Party. Alas, this possibility was steadily growing more and more remote.

Simon's best bet for now would be to repel the War Party's initial foray and capture the crews to use as intermediaries or hostages to open secure communications with Lauriane. Failing that… failing that, he would take Asterion's crystal and the Muse's fruit, then bolt out of the region with Duchar, Cassandra, Hector, and any others he could bring along with him to another location. He didn't really need to defend this area in particular now that the ritual was complete.

As suboptimal as it would be, he could always rebuild his organization elsewhere. Simon turned to his coven of witches. Cassandra and her fellows had been incantating for ten minutes around a crystal ball to cast a weather-altering spell that should hopefully delay the airships, but it had a long preparation time and required all their focus.

"Muse, it is time for you to show your might," Simon informed the dryad. Asterion the Minotaur had returned back to the depths of her subconscious after informing them he couldn't unleash his true power within his current host, but the Muse should remain a powerful being nonetheless. He had taken care to brand her as well to tighten his hold on her soul, which neatly confirmed even dryads weren't immune to his abilities.

"Stop their advance." The Muse grunted at the order, but followed through. She waved her hand in the airships' direction, and the entire Darkwood acted in response. The earth shook across the entire region as the manatree's roots squirmed beneath the earth under the will of a singular, malevolent intelligence. The land split open beneath the ashen wasteland and a great tower of wood surged out of it.

Roots thicker than castle walls rose as high as mountains and reached out to the sky, catching one of the airships by surprise. They caught it in midair, seizing its engines and shattering its wings, before pulling it down to its doom. The machine crashed into the earth in a cataclysmic explosion that likely slew everyone onboard. What power, Simon noted. The airships immediately spread out or ascended upwards as more roots surged out of the earth to try and catch them.

Flaming bombardments only burned out the roots' outer layers without truly halting them, and they soon caught a second airship. Such displays of strength reminded him why the imperial army was trained to flee dryads on sight. Their control over their manatrees granted them the power of entire armies so long as they were within their forest's borders; and since the Darkwood's growth threatened to engulf all of Magvolia, the Muse could turn the entire country into an extension of herself.

Nonetheless, her roots could only extend so far and the rest of the airships had begun to gain altitude beyond her grasp. Flying closer to the Darkwood would have likely enhanced the strength and precision of their fire spells, but less power beat being violently dragged down to earth. Their ascent soon met darkening skies and blowing winds. Pulses of magic erupted from Cassandra and her coven, reverberating through the Darkwood before spreading out for miles." Hailstorm," the witches sang out as one.

The weather itself answered their command, with mighty winds blowing above the Darkwood all of a sudden. Dark clouds began to pelt the airships with heavy hail that battered their steel hull and wings. The higher their ascent, the harsher the experience. That should slow them down for a bit, Simon thought. The War Party's airships were now trapped between the roots below and terrible weather above.

Simon telepathically deployed gargoyles, wraiths, and other flying monsters under Grimm and Gregory's leadership to harass them on top of it. Still no sign of the dragon though. Is it flying too high for us to see, or moving undetected through the clouds? I don't like this. Not to mention that there was another source of concern they had to deal with on top of the attack.

"Hector, protect your sister and ensure her coven isn't disturbed," Simon ordered. Cassandra's weather spell would apparently remain in effect so long as she and the others could focus on it.

"Duchar, Muse, come with me." The group walked up to the point where the Halls of the Minotaur's roof met the manatree's thick black bark. The lowest-hanging branch was within arm's reach, alongside its prize. Simon had never seen a manatree's fruit before, and this one was quite the horrible sight. It reminded him of a beating heart of red flesh and blackened purple veins the size of a cart.

It sucked life from its parent tree with each pulse, and its outer layer was so thick Simon could hardly see the strange, unborn shadow dwelling in its core.

"My beloved child…" the Muse said with longing, her hand caressing the fruit with what could pass for maternal love.

"How long I have waited for your honored birth…"

"It would appear that Mardok's guess was correct," Duchar noted upon observing the fruit more closely.

"This may be the first miasma tree's seed in all of creation. A truly unique creature."

"And one whose birth does not factor into my plans," Simon decided. Besides the danger the fruit posed, the newborn dryad inside wasn't bound by the Seasonal Key ritual. Having a second Muse potentially loyal to her bound mother was too much to deal with right now. Simon opened his Inventory and summoned the Paladin Crestone.

The wily item immediately slipped out of his hand and began to roll along on the ground, its radiance startling the Muse, but Simon quickly brought out an empty glass and trapped the runaway Noble Crestone underneath it.

"I know you hate me, Paladin spirit. That's fine, I don't like where my power comes from either." The fact that he had to go through this ritual and vile acts to even level-up properly or get answers had only solidified Simon's distaste for his own Class.

"But I ask you to put that aside for now and help me do some good for once." He could have sworn the Paladin Crestone's glow dimmed for a second. It was listening.

"There is an innocent soul in that fruit that the First Overlord wanted to twist into a monster," Simon said, pointing at the fruit.

"She's not born yet, but she soon will be… unless you save her. If you have the power to purify her, then do so."

"What?!" The Muse choked in impotent outrage.

"You would deprive my daughter of the Dark's embrace?!"

"I must say I believe this would be a waste of a unique creature," Duchar said, though unlike the Muse he quickly rolled with the program.

"However, confirming whether or not a Noble Crestone can counter the influence of a miasma crystal ought to prove interesting. The newborn dryad is unlikely to be a threat in her infant state either."

"Quiet," Simon said as he removed the glass and picked up the now cooperative Paladin Crestone. Its light had dimmed, and it didn't burn Simon's hand like it usually did. The Class indeed had a will of its own; one advanced enough to hear and consider even a non-wielder's words. Simon proceeded to press the Paladin Crestone against the corrupted manatree's fruit. The Muse let out a wail of outrage and horror, only for the contract to silence her.

She could only watch on as the Paladin Crestone slowly melded into the fruit. Its mere contacts caused the veins feeding it with miasma to ripple like oil pushed away by water. The Crestone entered the fruit and began to glow within it, purple smoke rising from the fruit in response.

"Is it working?" Simon asked Duchar.

"I think so," Duchar replied after casting a handful of analysis spells.

"The Crestone has started to purify the miasma back into mana, though whether or not that will be sufficient to eventually purify the unborn dryad remains to be seen." So far so good, Simon thought. He was cautiously optimistic about this whole venture. The fruit and Crestone should have shown a more violent reaction to the fusion if purification was truly hopeless. I wonder what Frea and Alphonse would have done had I not interfered in this reign… would they have tried to save this child too?

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Why free me only to deny my daughter the Dark's blessing?" the Muse rasped in incomprehension.

"Which side are you on, Simon Magnos?"

"My own." Simon met her gaze.

"Speaking of sides, why did my ancestor betray you to Mardok?"

"My treacherous sisters said he had grown jealous of the elves' immortality," the Muse replied.

"That he had foreseen his own death through his third eye, and that the Oracle could not change his fate. I think otherwise. He had finally seen the beauty of the Dark and how the Light blinded us."

"So he went to Mardok and became a lich instead," Simon guessed. The Muse looked at him with contempt.

"Who do you think taught your ancestor how to become an undead, beloved?"

"And the Oracle failed to foresee this?" Duchar asked with curiosity.

"Quite strange."

"The Light lightens the way to the future, but the almighty Dark blinds her," the Muse replied with reverence.

"It shrouds all in darkness everlasting."

"She couldn't see Mardok coming, even before he became the Overlord," Simon said. Which raised many more questions. Could Anathemic Secrecy have been one of the demon's abilities before it became an Overlord one? Death drew him out of his thoughts. The sudden murder of a dozen of his bound creatures all at once startled Simon, their pain echoing through their Brands; a demise so brutal they didn't even send him a warning. It only took him seconds to pinpoint which minions had been wiped out.

"Gargoyle squad seven?" Simon called out to the survivors.

"Gargoyle squad seven, what's going on?"

"Something is approaching us from above the clouds!" his minion replied with a voice laced with fear.

"A drago–" Simon felt the echo of the speaker's sudden death in a final scream, then clenched his teeth and contacted his next line of defense.

"Gregory, Grimm, the dragon wiped out gargoyle squad seven! Abandon the airships and intercept!"

"On it, Lord Overlord," Gregory replied, only for his confidence to swiftly crumble into unease within a minute of catching up to the target.

"What… what is that thing?!"

"It's not a dragon at all!" Simon heard Grimm all but screech in the back of his mind.

"It's a circus frea–" Light pierced through the hailstorm clouds, a droning noise melding with the demons' final screams. This time, Simon could see exactly what had slain his minions: a mighty, fractal yellow beam of searing radiance that reduced everything in its wake to ashes. It set the sky alight and then the Darkwood below on fire.

"What the…" Simon nearly stumbled as a second beam hit one of the manatree's outer branches, pulverizing its bark and exposing its purple, slimy, toxic sap. He briefly caught a glimpse of a colossal form flying past the clouds far above them.

"Stop this!" The Muse oozed with miasma and pointed her palm to the sky." Terabolt!" A massive lightning storm worthy of a Tier VII spell erupted from her fingers in seven massive bolts. They surged to the heavens, crossing the clouds… and failed to hit their target due to a lack of visibility.

"It is too high for my branches to reach, and I cannot see it," the Muse complained, right as another beam hit her tree's trunk. The attack only inflicted light burns when taking into account its size, but the fact that it managed to wound a manatree at all was a cause for concern. Simon grunted in annoyance and summoned his phantom steed.

"Then I'll force the creature down," he said upon climbing on his horse.

"Muse, Duchar, stay and defend the manatree. Strike at this creature as soon as I bring it into range." Simon didn't wait for his allies to respond and immediately had his steed take flight. The winds Cassandra summoned offered an excellent path for his mount to ride upon, the spectral beast racing through the heavens. Simon continued to cast buffing spells on himself during his ascent.

"Energumen. Shadowshield. Dark Saber." Simon found himself in a vast and tranquil expanse past the storm, in a sea of clouds only the highest of the manatree's branches could reach. The monster was flying less than three hundred feet from him in all of its horrible, mismatched glory. The reports were wrong. It wasn't a dragon; only half of one. Simon immediately realized why the Goetia Research Center purchased so many monster parts from Whispermire during the past few months.

The Alchemist Noble Class was known to be able to create obedient creatures and homunculi, but Lauriane had taken a novel approach when it came to flesh golems. The monster flying towards them had four wings, two of them belonging to a red dragon and two others draped in feathers. Most of the torso was dragon-like too, as was the jaw, but the upper part of the skull was some kind of mechanical, horned helmet bolted into the monster's bones.

Its two arms ended in the living faces of two other creatures, some kind of giant white wolf and an elongated undead's skull. The two legs and a scorpion-stinger tail belonged to a leonine manticore. Simon recognized those parts since Odette had shipped them on his behalf. The War Party's symbol was tattooed on its neck alongside a series number, '066', identifying it as the artificial warbeast it was. It was huge too, roughly the size of Vouivre.

Perhaps this abomination had been created for the express purpose of killing her.

"Destroy… tree…" it rattled from its enormous mouth, light building up in its belly and gullet.

"Wipe out… enemy… destroy…" That voice… Simon's eyes widened in disbelief.

"Casval?"

"Cas… val…" The name drew a brief reaction out of the creature, its head snapping in Simon's direction.

"Cas… val…" Their gazes met for a brief instant, with Simon noticing two reptilian eyes staring at him through slits in the mechanical helmet. He sensed no intelligence within them; only a vague echo of something long gone, but he had died often enough at that reptile's hands to recognize him. Dassein must have found Vouivre's post-meal leftovers and shipped them to Lauriane, who had then filled in the holes with monster parts to create a new weapon.

"Casval…" The creature's eyes lit up with pain and berserk rage.

"Casval!" The creature fired at him with a mighty roar. Light poured out of the beast's gullet in the form of a mighty beam which Simon's steed barely managed to dodge at the last second. The beam surged across the horizon without hitting anything, but Simon could feel the sheer heat radiating from it dozens of meters away.

"Destroy…" the thing which had been Casval roared as it gave up its assault on the manatree and began to chase after Simon with all of its inhuman fury. Being reminded of what it had once been must have infuriated it to the point it completely shrugged off Dreadful Aura." Destroy!"

"Fine," Simon replied as he prepared to cast a spell.

"Killing you again will be a pleasure." And for once, it would be by his own hands. Casval began to pursue him across the sky, his phantom steed running as fast as a warhorse pursued by an elephant. Realizing that fighting a chimera-dragon in melee was suicide even with his buffs on, Simon opened hostilities by casting Mire to debuff his enemy's vitality. Vile slimes materialized on Casval's chest and eroded his scales, with Simon quickly following them up with a Megatox aiming at that exact spot.

Poison seeped into the monster's flesh and began to eat away at it." Elemental Shift," Casval rasped with a monotone, emotionless voice, like a parrot repeating words he didn't understand anymore. A purple aura briefly surrounded him without doing much otherwise, after which it lunged at Simon with all three of its heads. Simon had his phantom steed dive down towards the clouds below to both dodge and lure the monster closer to the ground.

They deftly avoided the creature's multiple jaws and then descended through hail-battered clouds. Simon switched his Ring of Cursed Flame for a Ring of Cursed Winter to shield himself from the weather, whereas Casval appeared to completely shrug it off. Apparently sensing the change, Casval's two-faced arms glowed and then each fired a crimson stream of focused fire.

Simon's horse dodged one, but the other struck at him in the shoulder with such intensity that it would have melted through his armor without Shadowshield. Supereffective damage! Simon hastily drained both lifeforce and mana from his thrall monsters across the Darkwood through the Brands, healing his wounds and replenishing his magic reserves. He retaliated with a Megatox spell, except this time the poison failed to wound Casval. Did it become immune to Corrosion?

That Elemental Shift ability had to be some sort of self-inflicted Elemental Imbalance, gaining immunity to an element at the cost of suffering a weakness in another.

"In that case, Elemental Imbalance: Fire." The curse successfully struck Casval, granting him immunity to fire at the cost of suddenly becoming vulnerable to ice. The surrounding hail began to hit him harder, and Simon visited more pain upon him with a Hellfrost spell. His ice struck Casval's skull with enough force to dent his helmet, only for the projectiles to bounce off the creature with its next Elemental Shift.

It seemed Casval automatically switched his defenses to protect himself from the last element that hurt him. Efficient, but predictable.

"Duchar, Muse, I am bringing the creature down low," Simon informed his followers.

"The two of you should follow with a lightning spell."

"As Your Majesty wishes," Duchar replied.

"But I must also warn you that a sixth airship is coming at us from the southeast." War Party reinforcements? Well, that could wait until after they dealt with the monster Casval had become. Simon quickly cast Elemental Imbalance: Water on Casval right as he and his pursuer emerged from the hailstorm clouds, then followed through with a Night Raid spell. A swarm of abyssal bats materialized from his fingertips and flew into Casval's face.

They did little more than bite and harass the much bigger creature, but they at least diminished his visibility. His enemy, now newly weak to lightning, opened his maw to charge and fire a beam at Simon, only for a mighty thunderstorm to strike Casval before he could finish his attack. The Muse and Duchar both hit the monster head-on, with the former's bolts dwarfing the latter's. They tore off one of his wings, destroyed half his chest's scales, exposed a few ribs, and melted off his flesh.

The blowback caused Casval's beam-breath to miss and instead hit overgrown farmland across the horizon." Hellthunder!" Simon cast from his fingertips in an attempt to finish off Casval. His lightning incinerated whatever bats his enemy hadn't already swept away and stuck him in the chest. He had hoped so many supereffective spells in quick succession would slay him, but Casval's transformation hadn't stripped him of his draconic resilience."

Elemental Shift, Defensive Protocol," Casval rasped immediately after being struck, his words sounding as if he were reading from a script." Barrier, Rampart, Regen." Simon's optimism turned to horror as a green glow washed over Casval, buffing him with two defensive buffs and causing his wounds to slowly close on their own. Worse, he began to fly away from Simon rather than continue assaulting him, likely to keep his distance until he fully recovered.

Cursebound could negate his regeneration with the right wording, but the spell required physical contact.

Simon's best bet was to leap onto the creature's back, curse and debuff him, then resummon his steed and switch back to long-distance spells.

"Duchar, switch to deb–" A light in the east caught Simon's gaze.

"What the?" Simon instinctively turned his head to glance across the horizon. The Muse had crashed two airships out of the initial fleet and was pulling a third down to its doom, but another vessel was coming straight at them from the east. One the sight of which filled Simon with dread. Duchar lacked the context and knowledge to identify the imperial fleet's ships, but he immediately recognized this one as the Conqueror. Louis' newest flagship. Louis had come to Magvolia.

The light surging from the east came from the airship's bow and spread to its right like a long grey beam… or at least Simon thought so, until he recognized that radiance for moonlight reflecting on stainless steel stretching out for miles. That's not a beam. Simon's eyes widened in horror. It's a sword. Louis swung his giant blade across the horizon in one swift stroke that whipped up the winds and chopped the manatree in half.