Chapter 323

The fragile balance that had been holding tilted decisively to our side the moment Minerva showed up.

Venus was the first to flee, badly wounded.

She'd probably retreated into the depths of the ocean, which meant tracking her down would be tough — but it was just as clear she'd be in no shape to move for some time.

A substantial number of Juno's clones had been destroyed, and unlike Milited, Juno's clones — when broken — passed the damage back to its main body, so that counted as a sizeable gain. Sbeungali and Minerva later estimated that we'd burned out at least forty percent of its main body's combat strength.

And finally, Milited.

Having taken nearly full hits from Minerva's and my own breath attacks, the thing had to be in even worse shape than the other two.

I half-wondered if it had died outright, though if that were on the table it would already have been dead at Minerva's hands long ago… and it was hard to imagine that sly, scheming creature had charged in without preparing some kind of contingency. Still, alive was the most you could say for it — the fact remained that it had taken grievous wounds.

"Haahh… this is, seriously — kff!"

Back in human form, I leaned against a tree and kept dry-heaving.

Once the situation had been more or less wrapped up, Minerva had withdrawn straight back into my shadow.

The thorn growth filling the spot where my heart was kept writhing violently — even to me it looked beyond unsightly, downright grotesque. Anyone seeing it for the first time could be forgiven for jumping to any number of conclusions.

There was a reason the normally-quiet, slow writhing of the thorns had turned this violent.

It was because Minerva — appearing in dragon form, more precisely manifesting through the shadow as a doppelgänger — had drained an enormous amount of power out of me.

Some of it had gone into healing the fatal wound, sure, but even with that allowance she'd taken far too much. To give a sense of it, almost everything I'd put away through Storage Battery was gone without a trace.

[You, are — are you all right…?]

"Uh… I'm fine, I'm fine."

[I — I acted far too lightly… I never imagined you'd be brought this low by it. I swear it to you, I never imagined….]

Apparently she hadn't expected me to be hit this hard, because her voice came out distinctly subdued.

I waved a hand at her — I'm fine — and almost toppled, grabbing the tree again on reflex.

Classic mana depletion.

The dizziness washed over me in a spike, and I rode it out with slow breaths, nodding mechanically.

"It's just, you know… pushed myself too hard, that's all. There's the wound on top of it… give me a little rest and I'll be back to normal in no time."

[Well, then. Good.]

Minerva's voice.

But it wasn't the worried, contrite voice from a moment before — there was a thick edge of wariness in it now.

I slowly raised my head.

In front of me stood Minerva, the past one, having pulverized Juno's clone and returned, looking down at me with the same arrogant bearing as ever.

[You… no.]

She paused, shook her head, and started over.

[There's a great deal you and I need to talk about, by the look of things.]

"……"

I could roughly guess what she meant.

The fact that I'd turned into a dragon, the King of Thorns reeking of a Seven Calamity's power, and most of all the Minerva who had just appeared on the field….

There was more than enough evidence to plant doubts in her.

[First, one question.]

I'd tensed at the word question, but what came next made the tension drop right out of me.

[That wound on your heart — will it cause you trouble later?]

"What?"

She didn't seem put out by my question; she repeated it, perfectly patient.

[Your heart. I asked whether it would give you trouble down the road.]

"Uh…."

I'd expected her to start interrogating me on the spot, and instead she'd opened by asking after my condition.

A little flustered, I gave her an honest answer.

"Well… I'm not sure myself. It's the first time I've ever taken a wound like this, and the first time I've been in a situation like this. We'll have to give it some time and see. For now… I should ask Su-yeong about it too. And Rauné's here."

Apparently the answer didn't sit well with her, because she let out a soft snort.

[Your answer slides around like a loach's tail. If there's a problem, you say there's a problem; if there isn't, you say there isn't. Why drag out so many qualifiers?]

I gave her a sheepish smile under her scolding.

Minerva stared at me for a long moment, then abruptly threw out a new line.

[There's a scent on you.]

She slowly leaned her head in, as if to get a more careful read on my scent.

Her face came up right in front of me — crimson eyes glittering like gemstones, reflecting me back like a mirror.

Come to think of it, this might be the first time I've seen her this close up.

I was thinking that idly, holding her gaze, when she finished and pulled her head back to its original position. She drew several long breaths as if savoring them and muttered:

[Dull as I may be on matters like this, when it's laid out this blatantly even I can't help noticing.]

She gave a nod and slowly began to name them off.

[Margo.]

[Sbeungali.]

[Milited.]

[And… this Minerva.]

The thing they had in common — every name was a Seven Calamity.

And every one was a Seven Calamity I carried inside my own body.

[Astonishing, truly. To catch four — four — Seven Calamities' scents on the body of a single human… so many that they cling to your very skin until my head goes light from it. I find myself wondering how I failed to notice sooner….]

She kept muttering, eyes still fixed straight on me.

[Naturally, you will provide an explanation this Minerva can accept.]

She finished the line and abruptly let her jaws split wide open, gathering breath.

If she actually unleashed it on me now, the consequences didn't bear thinking about — but I simply watched her without much reaction.

I was certain she wouldn't actually do it.

[Hmph!!!]

True enough, Minerva went through the motion of unleashing her breath on me and at the last instant twisted her head off to the side. The breath tore out faster than the eye could track, and a thunderous crash rolled across the area.

[…You didn't so much as flinch.]

Minerva muttered it as she shot me a glance, still clearly displeased.

Then she stared at where the breath had landed and tilted her head, surprised.

[Hmm? What's this — could it really have come through my breath unscathed? No… right. My condition still hasn't fully recovered.]

Ah — right, the surveillance Milited had set up.

From the sound of it, Landschi — the one who'd been watching us — hadn't died after all and had somehow managed to escape.

[Well, I'd been meaning to limber up anyway, so it makes no difference. You — you go to your, ah….]

Minerva paused for a moment.

[…Go and rejoin your companions and tend to your wounds. I shall gladly extend that much courtesy to you for the moment. I'll come to you again soon.]

"I can roughly guess, but mind if I ask what you're about to do?"

[Venus has fled and Juno has likewise withdrawn. Their underlings I've already wiped out almost to a one, just now.]

I'd thought she'd been tangling with Juno's clone for longer than expected, but apparently she'd also cleared out every single underling Venus and Juno had brought along.

She slowly spread her wings.

[But Milited's force is still intact. Detestably so.]

The words came out close to a snarl as she lifted slowly into the sky.

I didn't even need to think to know where she was headed.

[…I almost forgot to say this.]

Minerva tossed the line out at me, almost casually.

That was the last thing she said before launching herself into flight and vanishing.

[This Minerva will not forget the favor you've done.]

That day, thirty percent of the force Milited had gathered evaporated at Minerva's hands, and of the ten chief subordinates Milited had hand-picked, four lost their lives.

"Does it hurt at all?"

Han Su-yeong asked as she poked, again and again, at the thorn growth in my chest with a metal rod.

Stripped to the waist, showing her the wound, I nodded.

"Yeah. It just feels like something's being touched in a normal way. All my senses come through fine, too."

"Mm. Then how about…."

In the next instant she made a sharp, sudden jab at the spot over my heart with the rod.

The slow-writhing thorn growth bunched together as if it had a will of its own, hardening visibly in the process.

"Has its own will, huh? Honestly never seen anything like this."

She muttered, sounding puzzled, and started scraping at the surface of the growth with the rod.

But she ended up just clicking her tongue as she watched the rod itself shaving away instead.

"And it's incredibly hard, too… Ji-hyeok, you really don't have any idea? Nothing?"

I gave her a small nod at the question.

Aside from the fact that the World Tree's Branch and Sbeungali's authority — King of Thorns — were both involved somehow, I had no more idea than she did.

And Sbeungali was in the same boat.

When King of Thorns was actively being used he could pick up things by instinct to a degree, but where the thorns in my heart were concerned, all I got back from him was that he had no idea either.

"If I'd known, I would've studied up on the World Tree too… mm, I don't really have any knowledge on this side of things so I can't say much."

She muttered the words, then poked at Rauné, who was watching me intently with its arms folded.

"How about you, Rauné? Any thoughts?"

"……"

Rauné pulled an even more serious face at being called on.

After a beat, still wearing that grave expression, it slowly shook its head.

The sight of it made Han Su-yeong burst out laughing, and she patted Rauné's head a few more times.

"Guess we just keep an eye on it for now, huh."

I said it as I picked up the shirt I'd left to the side.

"It's slow, but the wound's definitely healing, and like you asked, there's nothing else weird about it either."

…I couldn't tell if it was just in my head, but Sbeungali's presence felt a touch stronger than before.

It was such a faint change, though, that I half-suspected I was imagining it.

Just to be safe I went through the status window in detail, but nothing there had changed either.

Stats, skills, techniques, characteristics — nothing showed the slightest visible difference….

"Huh?"

Something caught my eye, and I looked more carefully.

Name: Yu Ji-hyeok

Sex: M

Health: C (+)

Strength: B

Agility: B (++)

Magic Power: D (++)

Technique: C (++)

Luck: C (――)

Karma: 20

• Strengthened beyond the values displayed on your status window due to an authority.

There was no mistake.

The Karma value had gone up.

Last time I'd checked, the leading digit had definitely been 1 — and now it had become 20, somewhere along the way.

"What…?"

I went straight to the notification logs and records, but I couldn't find a single thing to pin it on.

Why now, of all times, this suddenly — a Karma value that hadn't even risen when I'd absorbed Milited's corpse?

"Ji-hyeok?"

"Yeah?"

"What's wrong? Something bad happen?"

At the worried look she gave me, I waved a hand to wave it off — nothing.

…There was no point making her worry over something I wasn't even sure about myself.

"Uh, no. I was just thinking how impressive you are, Su-yeong."

"Hm?"

"I mean, come on. When did you have time to learn this kind of magic?"

I said it while taking a casual look around.

What I'd said about her being impressive wasn't an empty compliment.

The cabin we'd been staying in had been wrecked beyond saving by Venus and Juno, along with the surrounding area.

I'd been bracing myself for a stint at a village inn or, worst case, roughing it outdoors — and right then she'd whipped up a temporary shelter with magic.

She called it a temporary shelter, but it didn't fall short of the cabin we'd been living in at all.

"It's nothing, really. I just thought it might come in handy sometime, so I picked it up…."

She said it and started absent-mindedly patting Rauné's head over and over.

Rauné, who had been putting up with it, finally smacked her finger sharply with a root branch as if telling her to knock it off.

"Ow! W-we — weren't we friends?"

"……!"

At Han Su-yeong's wounded reply, Rauné tossed its head with a hmph.

Then it stood up and casually climbed straight into my pocket.

"Hmph…."

Han Su-yeong rubbed her finger, looking sulky about it.

She was about to say something to Rauné — that hurt my feelings or the like — and then she trailed off and stared steadily at me.

A moment passed before she, hesitating, finally got out a single word.

"…She's here."

"Yeah."

I'd known even without her saying it.

I stood up and carefully fished Rauné out of my pocket, settling it into her arms. Normally Rauné would have thrashed and resisted, but this time it let itself be held quietly.

The two of them looked up at me, tense.

"I'll step out for a moment."

With that, I got up and walked outside.

Outside, Minerva had already arrived and was waiting for me.

[There you are.]

She muttered the words, and traces of blood were smeared thick across her body in more places than I could count.

I knew the blood wasn't hers, so I didn't ask.

To begin with, I wasn't the one in a position to be asking questions right now.

"All right."

I lifted my head to look at her.

"What do you want to know?"

[Simple.]

Minerva spoke quietly.

[How is it that I sense four Seven Calamities' worth of power on you… and beyond that, how is it that I sense my own power on you as well?]

She was watching me with a look that made it clear she would not tolerate any lie or evasion.

[What, exactly, is the reason?]

I let out a small sigh at her question — here we go.

Well — the original Minerva already knew, so there was no harm in telling this one now.

"It's simple."

I looked the Minerva I would meet again three hundred years in the future straight in the eye and answered.

"I came from the future."