Chapter 73: Demigods, Dragons, Succession... and the Holy Grail

"Right! Now that the first matter’s settled, Aria, tell us about your adventure~~!" Freya said, gesturing to the chair beside her.

Aria bowed first, one hand over her heart, then walked around the table without hurrying, pulled out the chair, adjusted its position with millimetric precision and sat down, smoothing her skirt with a single motion, her back perfectly straight and her hands resting on her knees, before beginning to tell them everything.

She started with Artalia, with that fight she had enjoyed far more than her words let on, though Freya read it perfectly well in the way she spoke and in what she left unsaid, and with what had led to her death, to the release of that poor woman and of the burden she had been carrying for far too long.

Freya felt a fat tear well up at the corner of her eye and had to stop herself from sniffling loudly in front of everyone, before remembering that this woman had also been a mass murderer who had tried to kill her too.

Yes, Freya! Let’s not forget she didn’t see humans as actual people! People like that absolutely do not deserve to live!

She was of course carefully setting aside the fact that she wasn’t so different herself, never feeling the slightest thing for anyone outside her own dungeon, human or otherwise, hypocrite that she was.

"By the end of the fight, I was wounded," Aria continued in a perfectly even tone.

"You? You, wounded?!"

"A little, yes. Nothing serious, a few minutes would have been enough to regenerate completely."

"But...?"

"But two more of the children showed up."

Those two didn’t specialize in brute force but in something far more inconvenient, namely sealing magic, and they had sealed her on the spot, which explained everything else at once, starting with the contact lost so abruptly, her familiars severed at the same moment, and the butterflies dying inside the magic because she was no longer able to hold the barriers.

"Ah!" Freya sat bolt upright in her chair. "I instinctively knew it was something like that!"

"Hihi..."

The small laugh escaped Laïa before she could stop it, and Freya immediately shot her a perfectly hard look that meant very precisely not to add another word, which was enough for the little one to go back to eating in silence with her head down.

Then they had taken her to their divine palace, a place resting atop a titanic cloud suspended above everything else, a dense white mass drifting slowly whose edges could never be made out, with the palace built directly onto it, all pale columns and tiered terraces, ringed by basins whose water spilled over the sides before falling away as fine rain and dissolving into the void.

That must have been magnificent to see... she thought with entirely undisguised excitement, completely absorbed in the image her imagination was building of it.

After what she estimated to be a day, Aria had managed to decipher the sealing magic and free herself from it, then she had fought the two gods and killed them in cold blood.

"That said, they were far weaker than Artalia, even together. Mostly they had big mouths."

Naïa choked slightly on her juice while Aria was already moving on to the matter of finding a way out, explaining that she’d sent familiars out in every direction but that without knowing where she stood in relation to the entrance she could transmit absolutely nothing to Freya, and so she had decided to walk.

She had crossed the place, fighting divine beasts and ancient dragons along the way, and she passed over that very quickly, explaining it all in a rush as though the subject held no particular interest.

"Ancient dragons?"

"Three, yes."

"But what’s the difference between a dragon, an ancient dragon and a dragon king?"

Aria rested her hands on her knees, and her gaze shifted slightly, as though detaching itself from the room to settle somewhere else, somewhere inside a body of knowledge whose scope nobody here could measure.

Then she spoke.

"A dragon is an entity that reigns over mana, at the very top of its food chain. It is born with a domain, meaning a magic of its own that it never had to learn, whether fire, lightning, frost, stone or anything else. It commands it from the moment it hatches with a mastery most mages never reach in an entire lifetime. An adult dragon measures between fifteen and thirty meters in length, possesses a natural resistance to mana that renders very nearly every spell cast at it useless, and its lifespan exceeds a thousand years without any sign of decline ever appearing."

She carried on without the slightest hesitation.

"An ancient dragon is a dragon that has passed the ten-thousand-year threshold. Its size continues to increase throughout its life, and the oldest ones I’ve encountered reached two hundred meters, with scales thick enough to stop an A-rank attack without the creature even noticing. Their domain, however, is what truly sets them apart. Through the sheer accumulation of time, it has reached the absolute peak of what it could ever become. An ancient dragon of fire no longer produces a flame, it produces the most perfect flame the law of fire permits, with no waste, no loss, and no limit to its scale other than its own reserves."

"And the dragon king, then?"

"A dragon king is a dragon that has transcended its domain."

She let a longer pause settle this time.

"There aren’t even ten of them across all the worlds, counting those of Nymeria, at least as far as I’m aware. Where an ancient dragon has reached the limit of its law, a dragon king has surpassed it, which led it to write its own inside its domain. It no longer follows the rules of fire, it decides what fire is wherever it happens to be standing."

She tilted her head slightly.

"Their body reforms entirely at the moment of transcendence, matter reorganizing itself to support what they’ve become, and their mind undergoes the same process. Most of them lose the use of their original draconic form afterward and take on an appearance of their choosing, often humanoid, because a two-hundred-meter body becomes superfluous once you no longer need to force anything."

Aaaaah~~ How am I supposed to interrupt her information dump this time, when I’ve missed her so much?

And Freya didn’t mind in the slightest how long and how confidently the demon could talk.

Besides, that little nerdy side of hers is honestly rather sexy~~

Then Aria went on to describe how three gods had arrived to stop her.

"And they picked the moment when I was out on open water, exposed, while one of them controlled water magic specifically."

"...Rather clever!"

"I quite agree with you, madam."

She had very nearly lost that day, and she said it without putting any weight on the words at all, though Freya still felt her own fingers tighten against the edge of the table as she went on.

Then, at the moment she killed the water one, something unexpected had happened, since one of the other two, a dragon rather than a demigoddess, had switched sides mid-fight and helped her cut down the last one.

"Whoa! She switched sides?! Just like that?! In the middle of the fight?!" Laïa exclaimed, sitting up in her chair with both hands flat on the table and her eyes enormous.

"In the middle of it, yes. And that’s when she explained the situation to me."

Because there was a war, a full-blown war of succession that had been raging since the parents’ disappearance and their presumed deaths, tearing the thirteen children apart and dividing them into two distinct factions.

The first gathered the demigods, under the leadership of a child named Aten.

Aten, which means the sun disc back on Earth. Another one of the father’s doings, I assume.

The second faction gathered the children who had inherited draconic attributes, and the dragon in question had been pretending to side with the demigods while waiting for exactly the opportunity Aria had just handed her.

And at their head was Kaguya.

"AN ENTIRE FACTION UNDER KAGUYA???"

Freya had half risen out of her chair without even noticing, while at the other end of the table the woman in question waved cheerfully in her direction, mouth full.

"I was surprised by it myself, madam," Aria replied with perfect composure. "But of all the children, Kaguya is the strongest. Stronger even than this Aten."

So that’s why she brought her here after all? The rightful heir, now regent of Nymeria, and incidentally the strongest thing in the entire underworld.

Freya was beginning to understand Aria’s intentions in bringing her here more and more clearly, along with everything that could come of it, while the demon went on explaining that the problem, on the other hand, had initially been one of numbers, with eight demigods on one side and five dragons on the other.

"Which I found perfectly ridiculous, incidentally," she added. "They all carry the genes of a demigod and a dragon king, and dividing themselves according to which physical attributes they inherited, horns, scales or tails, is nothing short of stupidity."

But she had also understood something else, namely that helping the dragons would earn her a considerable advantage, so she had made her way to the territory where they were pinned down, a territory where Kaguya had been sealed since the beginning of the conflict, which explained their inferiority all the more, but since Aria had killed the twins responsible for the sealing, it had broken of its own accord and Kaguya had returned, which made the war that followed entirely one-sided.

"Counting myself, and subtracting the ones I’d already killed, we were six against three. We took down two more."

"And the third one, then?"

"Aten." She paused before continuing. "Impossible to kill. Not for lack of power, but because he’s immortal, and above all because he is Nymeria’s sun, the source of light for that entire world."

"Whoa! So if you’d killed him everything would’ve gone all dark?! Like night but forever?!" Laïa asked, completely absorbed in the story once again.

"Exactly, kid!" Kaguya called from the other end of the table, delighted to finally be contributing.

Aria turned slightly to address the whole table.

"Nymeria is an underground world, with no sky and no celestial body, and there is nothing down there capable of replacing that boy. Without him there would be no light and no warmth, and everything growing there would die within weeks, so killing him would have meant condemning the entire world along with him. So I left him alive, simply sealing away any possibility of him rebelling, and left the rest to the dragons."

"Wait, hold on a second."

Freya leaned forward, one finger raised.

"The demigod who controlled water. Did water disappear from Nymeria when he died?"

"No." Aria shook her head gently. "Some of the children shared their laws between them, and this one shared his specifically with one of the dragons. That said, it’s true that every god who died reduced the world’s diversity, by nearly half in certain domains. But none of those deaths was fatal to Nymeria itself."

"And would it be possible to give it back the beauty it had before? By recreating the lost laws and handing them to people?"

Aria seemed to consider it for a moment, her gaze drifting slightly to the side, before returning her attention to her mistress.

"You will almost certainly be able to do so later, madam. Once you’ve grown as a goddess."

"I see..."

Well, no, I don’t really see. But let’s trust Aria’s knowledge on this one!

"And then you came home."

"No." Aria sighed, for the first time since the story began. "Before I left, Kaguya insisted on a fight. She felt she hadn’t had enough of them."

"It was a really good fight~" the woman in question confirmed without even looking up from her plate.

"But... you’d just fought a war involving demigods and dragons?" Freya asked, turning toward her.

"Yeah, but that wasn’t the same~"

So they had fought for an entire week, destroying absolutely everything in their path, and having never managed to determine a winner, and having laid waste to a good portion of Nymeria in the process, they’d eventually settled on calling it a draw.

"And that’s the moment she threw herself at me and asked for my hand, which I declined by explaining that I already belonged to you."

"My offer still stands, by the way~"

"I would sooner die," Aria replied in a cold tone, entirely indifferent toward her.

Freya looked down into her glass.

More proof that I don’t deserve her in the slightest. She turns down a marriage proposal without a second’s hesitation, and I throw myself into a fox’s arms at the first opportunity...

But Freya said nothing of it, simply resolving to do better in future to make up for it, then raised a hand as if to be entirely certain she’d followed everything.

"Hold on. You’re telling me that you were sealed, abducted, that you freed yourself alone, that you killed two gods, crossed all of Nymeria fighting divine beasts and ancient dragons, killed two more gods, then waged a fratricidal war between demigods and dragon kings..." She caught her breath. "...all of that in one week. And that you spent the second week fighting her?!"

She pointed at Kaguya, who gave two enthusiastic thumbs up with an enormous smile.

"Yes, that’s correct."

"...I see."

Aaaaah... if I’d known... I wouldn’t have worried nearly so much about those piles of muscle.

She let a moment pass before continuing in a noticeably more serious tone.

"And do you have any idea how Myrphès and Ōgami disappeared? How they died?"

"Yes." Aria folded her hands in front of her. "I believe they transferred a portion of their authority to each of their children, granting them life through it, and I believe their procreation was in itself a romantic way of orchestrating their own suicide."

Silence fell over the table as she went on.

"Incidentally, Nymeria is no longer the paradise you visited, madam. Every child who died stripped a force from the world itself, and this fratricidal war cost Nymeria far more than it ever should have." She tilted her head slightly. "Which makes their squabbles over succession all the more ridiculous, especially when you consider that their own parents literally gave their lives so that they could be born—only for their children to repay that sacrifice by tearing everything apart and killing one another."

"Ah... I see."

Freya set down her glass, her gaze lost somewhere on the table.

"Even after all that, it’s rather beautiful, really. Dying together after spending several thousand years side by side."

And leaving their own lives to their children in the process.

"It’s a shame, though..."

"IT’S SO SAD!"

Laïa had burst into tears at the end of the table.

"It’s so sad... really, really sad... poor Kaguya..."

And she threw herself at the dragon to hug her with everything she had, smearing snot and tears across her maid uniform, without the recipient understanding in the slightest what any of this was supposed to be sad about, so much so that she ended up patting the girl’s head, looking thoroughly perplexed, while scanning the table for some kind of explanation.

She reminds me more and more of a wild animal. A simple mind, a very simple mind, an extremely simple mind even, that just follows its instincts.

Freya was about to say something compassionate.

Except she searched for her words for a while without finding a single one that fit, because she had no idea how one goes about consoling someone who didn’t understand there was anything to be consoled about.

She opened her mouth anyway, at random, and it was at precisely that moment that the door of the lavish bedroom opened and she laid eyes on the holy grail, the thing she had been waiting on for far, far too long.

A Researcher Mycofox, with a sheet of paper in one hand.

She shot to her feet, scooped the Mycofox under one arm and took the paper with the other, and found it was the one for the forge.

[ Congratulations! Your workers have analyzed and improved your forge technology! ]

[ Forge buildings can now be raised to Level 2! ]

[ Your Worker Mycofoxes have received the instructions needed to upgrade the building! ]

Perfect! Well done!

Except she didn’t much care, in truth, because she was waiting on something else entirely, while the other girls all stared at her, thoroughly startled by their mistress’s sudden speed and enthusiasm.

Please! Please! Please! Let it be that, please, please, please!

Then it appeared.

[ Congratulations! You have reached the threshold required for the dungeon system to evolve to Level 4! ]

[ Dungeon System — Level 3 -> Level 4! ]

[ Upgrade of the Upgrades category to Level 4 available: 1,500 mana points. ]

[ Mana capacity increased to 50,000! ]

"Yaaaay~~!"

She couldn’t stop herself from holding the Mycofox out at arm’s length and spinning on the spot, singing something at the top of her voice that nobody understood, her feet half leaving the floor, while the Mycofox spun along with her, legs dangling, wearing the resigned look of someone who had been through this before and knew it would eventually stop.

Five pairs of eyes followed her in silence, while Kaguya applauded to the rhythm of Freya’s song.

Then Freya spun around toward Aria, the Mycofox still held aloft.

"Aria! I’m leaving everything to you! Give the new girl a tour and teach her the rules! We’ll talk about what comes next for Nymeria later~~!"

And she was already disappearing down the corridor, running toward her throne, impatient to explore one by one every new option she had finally unlocked.