Chapter 11

It was the very eve of the wedding.

“Checkmate.”

The moment the king’s black rook struck down the grand duke’s white bishop, driving rain fiercely pounded against the windows of the royal study. The sound was like thousands of birds hurling themselves to a screeching death. Just then, crimson lightning flickered, and a majestic spear of lightning pierced the earth not far away.

“Did I win?”

The king’s face, cast in the successive shadows of the lightning strikes, looked lonely at first glance. Or rather, it appeared as the countenance of an absolute ruler, detached and resolved to face ruin in the face of an unprecedented disaster looming right before him.

“Well, this makes it a stalemate.”

Fortunately, however, the king was not alone.

Sitting across the chessboard was Vizak Clark, his longtime life companion and the biological father of the five children the king himself had borne, including the twenty-year-old Crown Prince.

Do they say couples grow to resemble each other?

Retaining the same appearance from his green youth when they had first shared their bodies so passionately, Vizak Clark, who also served as the Commander of the Royal Guards, was likewise focused on winning the immediate game of chess, rather than the creeping threat of annihilation in the outside world.

Even when choosing the color of their first child’s ceremonial veil, he had been as serious as a knight of a ruined nation facing a hopeless battle. I fell for that inflexible face, didn’t I? Philip Bright-Ash, the current king of Tuska, chuckled as he rested his chin askew and admired the handsome man’s face.

He had only slept with that boring bastard five times before unexpectedly getting pregnant with their first child. When Philip had joked that his potent seed was indeed fitting for the continent’s greatest swordsman, Vizak had abruptly offered up his sword right then and there. How shocked Philip had been, thinking the man was asking to be killed, begging for decapitation! That was how solemn the knight’s proposal had been. And Philip’s own face, turning as red as a carrot at that clumsy, unrefined proposal, was even more of a spectacle.

“Unbelievable. This might be our final game, and you still won’t go easy on me.”

The passage of time felt truly fleeting.

Over the years of conceiving and birthing five of Vizak’s children, Philip had defused three wars, poured his efforts into diplomacy reaching the southernmost tip of the continent to successfully conclude peace treaties with twenty-five nations, and placed commerce and industry signs in his soldiers’ hands instead of swords and shields, fattening their bellies as merchants of a tourist nation.

As the price for reforming a Tuska once stained with corruption and propelling the country’s market economy to an unrivaled position, today Philip Bright-Ash was on the verge of earning the miserable dishonor of becoming the king of a ruined nation. The sin of blindly obstructing the love of his half-brother was just that great.

“Hey. Don’t be like that, take back a move. Humor me a little.”

Of course, it felt unfair to Philip. In his defense, he had merely used his wits back then to save two ten-year-old boys from a terrible fate. It had been the worst mistake, but he was confident that he had done his utmost since then to clean up the spilled water without breaking the taboos.

But what good was that? In the end, he hadn’t solved the biggest dilemma.

To fully save the dragon, the Nest’s confession of love had to be absolutely flawless. Therefore, hinting at it or forcing it, thus muddling the emotion with impurities, was strictly forbidden. Because of this, Philip could neither press Rochshan Owin—Kyle Blackburn’s Nest—nor appeal to his pity to urge a national-salvation act disguised as a confession.

Even when Philip subtly tested the waters, Rochshan Owin remained unyielding. For some reason, he would carelessly throw around expressions of affection everywhere in high society, but he absolutely never directed them at his own servant. This, despite leaking his aching heart through those brilliant green eyes.

Philip assumed it was out of pride. So, he tried to corner the Count by creating a situation where he had no choice but to discard that pride—just as Philip himself had mobilized all sorts of social schemes to claim Vizak Clark, the most eligible bachelor in court society.

However, now, on the eve of Kyle Blackburn’s twenty-sixth birthday, the king finally admitted that his plan had spectacularly failed.

“Ah, Grand Duke. I said, just take back one move!”

What should he do now? No matter how hard he glared at the chessboard, he couldn’t see a brilliant move to break the deadlock. Philip grumbled.

“No. If I lose on purpose, you will get angry and ask if I’m looking down on you,” Vizak replied.

“I won’t.”

“I won’t be fooled, Your Majesty.”

Defeating the black bishop that had jumped into enemy lines with his white knight, and deploying his hidden queen to put Philip’s king on the defensive in one fell swoop, the long-haired knight chuckled softly from his throat. That benevolent smile only twisted the king’s mood further.

“You’re overly confident that you have me all figured out.” The right ankle resting on Philip’s left thigh bobbed presumptuously. “Then you must have already predicted what I’m going to do.”

It took only an instant for him to extend the tip of his shoe and knock over the wooden chessboard. In a flash, the black and white pieces cascaded down, mixing together in a chaotic mess. The king, having annulled the outcome of the match with such an absurdly underhanded trick, laughed triumphantly.

“See? You never know what will happen until the very end.”

In other words, the only move left was mutual destruction. A method where no one wins, and no one gets to be happy.

“What are you doing? Hurry up and pick them up.”

The king familiarly ordered the Grand Duke and Knight Commander around with an arrogant jerk of his chin. Vizak let out a brief sigh at the brazen behavior.

“This really is the last game.”

“Fine. I go first.”

Exchanging the colors of the pieces, Philip’s white pieces took the first move, and a breathless battle ensued. Amusingly, the flow of the game soon mirrored the previous one. Before long, the king’s white queen knocked over the knight’s black pawn and self-destructed. As if cheering at the momentum, the sound of the rain outside grew even fiercer.

“…It doesn’t seem like a rain that will stop easily,” Vizak noted, bringing up Tuska’s extreme weather for the first time. “There will likely be disruptions to the wedding scheduled for tomorrow.”

“Ah. The Nest Wedding.” King Philip responded apathetically.

It was an event prepared to crown the finale of a festival that had lasted a full fortnight with painstaking effort, but the anticipation and excitement for it had completely vanished in just half a day. In that short time, the laughter that overflowed throughout the capital twisted into wailing due to countless consecutive casualties. Ha. Kyle had ground his teeth, promising a festival of blood, so Philip thought the brat might personally storm in and tear the citizens apart. Instead, it seemed he intended to drown every last human or reduce them to lightning-struck ashes.

The dragon’s curse had begun again.

Swept by rapidly spreading rumors, the small nation of Tuska was being consumed by extreme anxiety. People, overwhelmed and screaming at the uncontrollable natural disasters, overflowed all the way to the palace walls. The black dragon statue erected in the central square of the city had suddenly become an idol for fanatics begging for forgiveness for their arrogance. Anger toward King Philip, who had dared to accumulate immoral wealth by selling out the dragon, was spreading frighteningly fast, like fire across a dry field in the arid season.

“I actually thought it would end up like this.” For a moment, the movement of both sides’ chess pieces halted. “Originally, a Nest Wedding was rarely a joyous occasion,” Philip lamented with a furrowed brow.

Vizak, puzzled, asked, “Then, do you mean to say Your Majesty has deceived the people?”

“Well, my excuse is that I had no choice. Do you know why the custom of the Nest Wedding was established in the first place?”

“Isn’t it to promote harmony among unmarried men and women, encourage childbirth, and furthermore, boost national power?”

“Double check. That’s nothing but bullshit cooked up by the State Department to mislead the public.”

The paused white pieces resumed their advance. Passing the fallen queen, Philip’s white knight and rook surrounded the black king.

“Vizak, shall I tell you a top secret? In truth, mass killings occur periodically in this country. The scale of the damage varies. A small settlement or village, sometimes a small city is almost annihilated.”

“…Your Majesty, that’s.”

“Yes, it matches perfectly with the literature records of the endemic disease, doesn’t it? But strangely enough, a generational shift of the dragons always occurred at those exact times.”

In other words, the atrocious tyranny of the rampaging dragons of the past had been covered up and disguised as the tragedies of an endemic disease.

“Because of that, a massive number of refugees were generated every time, and the gender ratio was constantly thrown into chaos. Naturally, public sentiment would turn violent. It had to be managed. We couldn’t just stand by and let civilian uprisings break out.”

Even though Bright-Ash and Blackburn were distinctly different clans, they shared the seed of the same father and thus naturally had similarities. It was the same for Philip and Kyle; their expressions were particularly alike when they pulled at the corners of their mouths and crinkled their sharply slanted eyes in a cynical sneer. Likewise, the king with black hair and black eyes scoffed self-deprecatingly.

“The best way to forget the heartbreak of suddenly losing a blood relative is to make a new family, isn’t it? Thus, the desperate measure our royal family came up with was sponsoring the Nest Weddings. The response was better than expected, so it became a regular event. But, well, all that talk about soothing the grudge of the black dragon killed by the first king or whatever was just a plausible justification we made up.”

“Then the reason you expanded the scale of the ceremony so massively this time is…”

“It’s because I expected that brat Kyle’s foolish rampage to be just that immense. You could say it was setting up the post-disaster recovery procedures in advance, just in case things miraculously worked out.”

Of course, he also intended to use it to provoke that guy Rochshan. But he never expected Kyle Blackburn to lose his mind to the point of causing an anomaly on this scale before the wedding day even dawned. The starting signal for the grand scheme he had plotted with Kyle hadn’t come yet. Perhaps an unavoidable, unexpected variable had occurred.

“Whatever it was, he should have kept his wits about him. Right? Despite having every kind of ability, how is it that his mental state never rises above the level of a sunfish?”

The moment Philip lamented, an intense flash of light swallowed the royal study once again. A deafening roar of thunder chased after it belatedly, splitting the palace courtyard. As a result, a massive cedar tree in the yard was struck by a thunderbolt and clumsily toppled over. Startled by the vibration, the glass windows everywhere rattled loudly.

Dragon Speech. Devouring Secrets. Unfurling Darkness. Dissolving Corpses. And even causing natural disasters according to his emotional fluctuations.

Kyle Blackburn’s abilities truly evoked the omnipotence of the black dragon of old. If Philip hadn’t known the full truth of the forbidden book stained with browned blood, perhaps even he might have worshipped him as a god. Had he done so, he wouldn’t have had to feel this extreme inferiority complex toward a god.

The weary king, now at the age of forty, could not give a definitive answer even to this day. When he had incited a mere ten-year-old Rochshan Owin to place a gag on the powers of Kyle, his peer, with three taboos—had he truly felt not a single shred of perverse joy?

Well. Only one thing was certain. That he still clearly remembered the fate of the previous dragon and its Nest. Even the foul stench that wafted as their two miserably dead corpses were burned.

Another moniker for the King of Tuska was the Mad Dragon Slayer. But Philip was resolved to end this role absolutely in his own generation. I will absolutely not pass down such a sickeningly bloody task to my children. His resolve from back then hadn’t diluted in the slightest.

That wasn’t all. He had to sever this chain of curses this time, no matter what; only then could he save at least some face before his close friend, Edwin Owin, and his wife Isabelle, who had unfortunately departed from the world at a young age. He had made a promise, hadn’t he? That he would save their one and only son.

“Anyway, if it’s not pride, what the hell is the problem?” Just what had locked Rochshan Owin’s tongue so tightly? Philip, having washed his face dryly, groaned deeply. “Class difference? The taboo against homosexuality?”

Count and slave.

It was true that the class barrier between them was a stark reality, transcending even the differences of species. With a deeply rooted custom that valued labor, it was also true that getting caught engaging in sodomy would bring severe condemnation. How could Philip not know that all this was an unbearable disgrace for a high-ranking noble to endure? He himself was practically a senior who had gone through all these hardships first.

“Still, I don’t understand it. I can say this with confidence as someone with experience: the agony of failing to clearly define a relationship with the one you love is far more terrible than all those societal shackles.”

That was why he had been somewhat confident that the Nest Wedding strategy would work. Philip, too, had a history of burning his insides to ash because he lacked a justification to chase away the flashy court butterflies flocking to Vizak Clark in the past.

Furthermore, he was the one destined to be king. Who would have known that he, who needed to be a paragon for his people more than anyone else, would come to be grateful for the existence of a womb he had dismissed as a cumbersome vestigial organ? Then, one night, borrowing the courage of alcohol, he had endlessly whispered that he loved him while sucking and caressing Vizak’s massive cock until his jaw nearly dislocated—an event that still ranked among his darkest histories. He had even clung to Vizak’s waist all night, threatening never to let him go until he unleashed enough seed to overflow his womb.

Vizak still flushed deeply whenever the story of that night was brought up. He had been very surprised by Philip’s confession, and would quietly add that even if Philip hadn’t done so, he wouldn’t have been able to lock away his overflowing feelings and would have asked to court him first anyway.

The king’s knight was a loyal man. But Philip most loved the irreverent emotion that occasionally flickered in his red-gold irises. Those eyes stared directly at Philip. The man, a paragon of an earnest warrior, spoke straightforwardly in a low voice.

“Because there are fears that surpass such agony.”

“For example?”

“The terror of potentially losing the person you love forever.”

“…”

Thud. Vizak’s black king, pushed to the edge of the cliff, finally began its counterattack. Single-handedly and fearsomely penetrating enemy lines, it aimed its blade at the white king’s neck. It was a lightning-fast reverse checkmate.

What. He was going easy on me after all. The Knight Commander Vizak looked straight at Philip, who made a groaning sound.

“There was a time when Your Majesty wandered the borders of life and death due to a difficult birth. Do you remember?”

“Ah. Was it when I gave birth to our second, Ethan…?”

“Yes. I confess this only now, but I have never wanted to kill myself more than I did then. I wanted to hack apart the cock that violated you, and tear out the tongue that proposed to you. During the thirty-seven hours you were in labor, I must have died and died again ten thousand times.”

“…”

He really had barely survived. The blind midwife had repeatedly marveled, saying it was a miracle he woke up after suffering such hemorrhaging. Come to think of it, that was also the moment he first realized that a man like Vizak was capable of shedding such tears.

“So you can cry too,” Philip joked weakly. I thought you’d have been born bellowing heartily without batting an eye even when coming out of your mother’s womb.

“I am an ordinary man too, Your Majesty,” Vizak replied, deeply dumbfounded. However, the knight, who hadn’t shed a tear since, finished his confession. “Sometimes I imagine it. What would happen if I forced my past self to choose between the honor of lying side by side in Your Majesty’s bed, and Your Majesty’s eternal well-being.”

His tone implied he would unhesitatingly choose the latter, which would spare Philip the pain of a difficult birth.

“So you’re saying Rochshan is keeping his mouth shut right now because he’s terrified of what might happen to Kyle?”

“Well. How could I know all of his inner circumstances? However, considering his mother’s background…”

“Ah, Isabelle.”

Isabelle, or Izamra Owin. The woman who passed down her brilliant jewel-like eyes to her son was originally a descendant of a wandering desert tribe from the East. They were an unknown clan with almost nothing known about them here in Tuska; it was said she had fled to a distant city of arts and, while working as a café clerk, met Edwin by chance and fell in love.

Isabelle in Philip’s memories was a highly impressive woman with naturally curly hair and a vibrant stubbornness. Her personality was like oil to water compared to Margaret Owin, Edwin’s older sister. The fact that the overly kind Edwin frequently vented his distress after his marriage, worried that the two didn’t get along, said enough about the sparking tension between those two strong-willed women at the time.

“In the East, her clan is notorious for being overly beautiful, regardless of gender,” Vizak noted.

“I’ve heard. They say once you spend a night with them, you inevitably become addicted.”

“Furthermore, nine times out of ten, they are famous for dying young.”

Chess is a game that does not end until one side surrenders. Philip, feigning ignorance for a while out of a refusal to raise the white flag to Vizak’s checkmate, abruptly stopped the tips of his fingers. Vizak gently slipped the pawn from his grasp.

“They say there’s even a myth over there. That whoever wins their heart will also surely meet an untimely, violent death.”

The fact that the knight’s voice sounded as if it pierced the king’s core was surely due to the sound of the rain ominously surrounding the heavens and the earth.

“Your Majesty. Do you really believe Count Owin’s parents died in an accidental mishap?”

There was a reason Vizak asked this; a crucial contradiction existed in his suspicions. Namely, the existence of Kyle Blackburn. He possessed the ability to uncover the dirty secrets of everyone except his Nest. If someone harbored a sinister plot to harm the former Count and his wife, there was no way the dragon, who was already at that estate before they were murdered, would not have known.

“I only know that this dragon is a very meticulous and cunning bastard,” Philip said.

If he was incredibly lucky and still alive tomorrow without dying, he would have to assign the design of a new prison to that punk Kyle, who would have abandoned his slave disguise. Because it would surely become an internationally infamous internment camp from which no one could escape.

Thus, Philip’s answer subtly sidestepped Vizak’s suspicions. The king did not look like he would easily hand over the threads of the secret he held. Instead, he merely tickled the back of his lover’s hand—the one that had taken the pawn—and smiled peculiarly.

“I, too, am nothing more than a decoy caught in his trap.”

“What do you mean? It’s hard to fathom your intentions. I simply cannot grasp what goes on inside the minds of you brothers…”

“Well, it’s no fun if it’s obvious, right?”

“Then how do you plan to overturn this board? I will not let you take back a move twice.”

“How, you ask. Like this?” Smirking meaningfully, Philip this time nimbly climbed onto the chessboard on his knees.

Leaning in to practically grab his wide-eyed opponent by the collar, he forcefully pushed a kiss onto him in one swift motion. Mmph, ngh, ah. Moaning lightly as if having casual sex while entwining their tongues, frightening strength entered Vizak’s grip as he instinctively grabbed Philip’s waist.

Instantly dyed with passion, the image of the vibrantly young king refracted and formed in his crimson glass-like irises. I like that only I am reflected in them. A moment later, at the end of the intense kiss, the king painfully tugged Vizak’s upper lip with his teeth and whispered softly.

“I was thinking of using a honey trap; what do you say? Will you fall for it?”

“King Philip, hnn.”

“Look here, Mr. High and Mighty Knight Commander. You truly are a brazen man. Even just last night you ruthlessly rummaged through my hole with this throbbing cock, and now, what?”

“Your Majesty, please, let go… ugh.”

“Hah, you get wet just from a touch. And you haughtily run your mouth about giving up sleeping with me if you went back to the past, being like this?”

That must have been what twisted his mood. Resolving to scold his displeasing knight, Philip began to move his hands terribly obscenely. Straddling Vizak’s crotch altogether, the king roughly massaged the manhood inside his pants. Twisting the red-peeled, damp glans mercilessly, squelching, lewd sounds slipped between the caresses of sucking each other’s tongues. With him dead set on inducing arousal like this, what way was there to endure it?

The hesitation somewhere on the boundary between loyalty and insolence soon met its end. Vizak ultimately pulled Philip into a crushing embrace with tremendous strength. Suddenly bearing the weight of two men, the wave-legged chair creaked heavily. The king laughed out loud, pleased by the knight’s breathtaking hug.

“Vizak. Did you say you wanted to follow me into death while I wandered the borders of life and death?” Smack. Planting an audible kiss on the bridge of his sharp nose, Philip grumbled. Of course, while draining the knight’s soul, he didn’t forget to knock over every piece on the disadvantageous chessboard. “A very splendid chivalry. But it falls far short for me.”

“Philip.”

“Show at least the resolve to chase me to the underworld and drag me back. Obsess over me a little more. Hmm?”

“What utter nonsense. How on earth could I possibly… any more than this!” …love you?

At Philip’s absurd demand, the knight of loyalty raised his voice for the first time. The red-gold irises flickered rebelliously. Baring his teeth fiercely, he immediately and roughly pulled his lover by the neck. Just as he was about to bestow a bite mark of his obsession…

“Your Majesty!”

Bang, bang! The firmly locked door of the study began to shake violently. Patrol soldiers and courtiers flocked before the king’s study as if it were their final sanctuary, wailing. Through their mouths, all sorts of ominous breaking news poured out like a flood.

“The river embankments burst, and the casualties…”

“Nonsensical gale-force winds are blowing, Your Majesty! The villages on the outskirts of the capital have completely collapsed, and…!”

“The lightning strikes won’t stop. Burned corpses are everywhere…!”

“How on earth did it come to this, Your Majesty!”

Haa. A long, reluctant sigh flowed out.

Having no choice, Philip lifted his heavy rear and climbed down from Vizak. Still clad in his unbuttoned shirt, the king dragged his indoor slippers as he approached the door. Finally, the massive double doors, bordered with steel decorative wood, swung open. As they did, the humid air pooled inside the room slid out into the corridor. The King, standing in the center, looked so much like the gatekeeper of hell that a chill ran down the spines of the gathered crowd. Had they perhaps knocked on the gates of the abyss, rather than the study?

“You ask how it came to this?”

In Tuska, it is said that only royals and the sinners who scorned them are born with black hair and black eyes. If so, then who on earth was the king, and who was the sinner? Was there anyone left who could clearly tell the difference now?

Philip Bright-Ash sighed heavily. Sweeping back his disheveled black hair, the king jerked his chin toward one of the people who had rushed to the door. “If you’re really that curious, why don’t you ask that man instead of me.”

Naturally, the eyes of everyone gathered in the study converged on that single person. The one pointed out by the king, the man drenched in the torrential rain, was Count Rochshan Owin. He, too, had ridden his horse like a madman to have an audience with the king this night. Soon, the Count’s bloodless lips parted.

“Your Majesty.” He called the king. It was a terribly trembling call, almost as if he were crying outright. “Please save Kyle… my Kyle.”

Please.

Ah. So Grand Duke Vizak’s guess had been correct. King Philip gauged the emotions overflowing from Count Owin’s green eyes one by one. Dread. Terror. A reason hanging by the absolute thinnest thread just before driving him mad because a tragedy had befallen the one he loved.

With this, the king realized. At long last, the curtain had risen on the grand scheme concocted by the black dragon. Rochshan Owin, standing right here, was the very flare signaling its start.

***

“Your Kyle, you say.”

“…”

“So the Count storms into the royal palace in the dead of night, begging me to save a single slave.”

“…To treat him as a mere slave only now. You must think me a complete fool, Your Majesty. Just how much longer do you intend to brazenly deceive me?”

Count Rochshan Owin, who had knelt before the throne and earnestly pleaded with King Philip to send the royal physician, was currently aboard the fastest six-horse carriage in the palace. The coachman was Grand Duke Vizak. The carriage jolted violently as if trapped in the eye of a typhoon. But no one worried about the natural disasters outside. Rochshan, the whites of his eyes bloodshot where his tears had dried, glared fiercely back at Philip instead. It was an unexpected reaction. Philip, resting his chin on his hand with an elbow propped against the carriage window, arched a brow as if surprised.

“You seem to have regained your memories, haven’t you?”

“Your words just confirmed it. You are hiding something from me, Your Majesty. Or you did something to me.”

When he really thought about it, everything was full of nonsense. How could he not have known? How. Rochshan was on the verge of going mad with anger at himself, having been more foolish than anyone up until today.

“What kind of king interferes in the coming-of-age, marriage, funeral, and ancestral rites of a mere slave? What kind of king shakes off his ministers appealing that the nation’s fate is in peril, just to come check on a slave’s health? Please explain it yourself, Your Majesty.”

It wasn’t as if he had a wound from being gored by the bull’s horns, but Kyle Blackburn, having collapsed, lost consciousness and simply would not wake up. To make matters worse, he was bleeding excessively for an unknown reason and was in a critical, urgent state. Seeing red, Rochshan himself had rushed out and scoured the city—which had instantly descended into chaos—to drag back several physicians, but no one could provide a clear diagnosis for Kyle’s symptoms. The only answer he got was that Kyle wouldn’t survive the night and would die at this rate.

Further rational judgment was impossible. Thus, Rochshan had recklessly ridden his horse to find the king. Sure enough, his intuition had been right. Upon hearing the series of events from Count Owin, King Philip was neither surprised nor did he fly into a rage calling it trivial. He had merely sprung to his feet, stating that this was a problem the royal physician couldn’t solve, so he would personally look into it.

All these circumstances indicated that Kyle Blackburn was not just a lowly slave.

“No, you don’t need to explain anything. You said you would see Kyle instead of the royal physician, so you just need to cure him. That is enough for me.”

Surely even this isn’t some lie, right? His glaring eyes were incomparably fierce. Ha, unbelievable. Letting out a scoff, Philip flipped over a piece of the truth he had kept buried.

“My promise to do my absolute best to help save him is sincere, so you can drop your suspicions about that, Your Grace. After all, on the family register, I am Kyle Blackburn’s eldest brother. Though we are half-brothers, of course.”

“…What?”

“Do I need to say it again? It means that Kyle Blackburn, whom you cherish so much, is the twelfth biological child of the former King and my father. On the family register, that is.”

It was that moment. From Rochshan Owin’s unblinking eyes, a tear rolled down and dropped heavily. Frozen with a look rife with shock, he parted his lips.

“His Majesty made me recite a poem. It was a nursery rhyme mainly about not doing three things.”

“…”

“Now, now I remember. It was a spacious room. In front of me was a box covered with a thick cloth. The box was shaking violently, and it was loud. Just as I finished reciting the poem, that cloth slipped down…”

That box was a steel cage. And the boy trapped in the cage was Kyle Blackburn, leashed by a collar and gagged. He had gnawed on the iron cage so desperately that his pristine white front teeth and canines were entirely dyed in blood. Falling flat on his backside on the spot, Rochshan had ended up screaming and crying at the top of his lungs at Kyle’s ghastly state.

“His Majesty told me…”

“Right, he told you that a wicked beast had latched onto you.”

“…He said it was a beast named ‘Monster’.”

“And he also said that a few rules were necessary to control that monster.”

“…”

The name of that monster, no, that beast, had been Kyle Blackburn. How many beings were truly pointed at and called monsters in Tuska? It was when the two men in the rocking carriage simultaneously recalled the statue in the capital’s square.

“Rochshan.”

With this, the majority of the Dragon Speech Kyle had placed upon his Nest had shattered. The fact that the bastard was wandering the borders of death seemed undeniable. Picturing a candle with its wick almost entirely burnt out suddenly flaring up fiercely to melt away in an instant, the king asked the Count.

“If I told you that the monster must die for me to live, and for all of us to live, what would you do?”

Clatter.

At that moment, the carriage wheels roared and bounced up. From the vibration, Rochshan’s tears plummeted once more, leaving dark stains on his lap. All expression vanished from his frighteningly beautiful face, but his green irises, glinting and reflecting diffusely through his tears, burned intensely. Rochshan answered without a sliver of hesitation.

“I will kill Your Majesty, kill everyone, and save my monster.”

“…So you’re saying you’ll stop at nothing to save the monster?”

“That is correct.”

“Good. I understand your resolve well.”

Philip smiled faintly at Rochshan’s answer, which bordered on treason. He, too, grew curious about the finale of this play. Just how far would Rochshan Owin give up everything for the sake of the black dragon?

At that time.

At the Count Owin estate, where everyone was praying for this chaotic and incredibly ominous night to quickly pass, a silhouette slipped in under the cover of the swaying darkness. The shadow avoided the mansion’s front and rear gates and headed for the stable keeper’s cabin. Soon, with the sound of twisting hinges, the cabin door swung open.

As darkness and the rainstorm rushed in, the piled-up fodder flipped over and tumbled down. One-Eyed Giggs, Laura Smith’s father, who had been trimming a horse board at the table, stood up and yelled toward the door with slurred pronunciation.

“Who’s there?!”

Instead of answering, the shadow seeped into the cabin.

“It’s me, Giggs. Your old lover.”

The true identity of the shadow was Margaret Owin. An aged woman wearing the exact same consistent smile she had long ago was visiting the quarters of a man she had once secretly slept with. She did so with an incredibly friendly attitude, utterly unlike her past behavior where she never pretended to know him even if they happened to cross paths, ever since she coldly bid him farewell after her younger brother and his wife met their violent ends.

***

“You have arrived, Your Grace!”

Rochshan, King Philip, and Grand Duke Vizak returned to the Owin mansion not long after Margaret Owin’s clandestine visit. Night had deepened, and midnight was not far off.

“What is Kyle’s condition?”

“Uh, Your Grace… That is…”

It was then. Substituting for the old butler who hesitated to answer the Count immediately demanding his servant’s condition upon his return, a doctor who happened to be coming down from finishing Kyle Blackburn’s examination upstairs answered instead. He was the fifth visiting physician who had arrived while Rochshan was out. Looking much older than the previous doctors, the elderly physician surprisingly offered a clear diagnosis of Kyle’s illness for the first time.

“It seems the gentleman lying down has contracted a climate-related endemic disease.”

“An endemic disease?”

“It is a bizarre occurrence. It is a disease that has long since vanished from this land because the strain of the poisonous herb that causes it dried up and went extinct, so I don’t know why these symptoms are appearing in this person now, but…”

Regardless, he shared the opinion of the previous doctors that this endemic disease had such a high mortality rate—to the point it couldn’t even become an epidemic—that if they didn’t act quickly, the patient’s condition would be irreversible.

“Then hurry and devise a countermeasure! Since you know the name of the disease, there must be a cure!”

Uncovering the cause of the disease was a matter for later. As an urgent Rochshan rushed at the plump-bodied doctor, pressing him for a treatment, the old man broke into a cold sweat and made excuses as to why immediate treatment was difficult.

“Well, you see, to cure this disease, a medicinal herb that does not grow in the current climate is required.”

“What exactly does this weed look like? Try describing it!”

Pressed by the Count’s intimidating prodding, the doctor was stammering through a verbal description of an herb for which even most of the visual records had been lost, when…

“…I know a place where that herb grows wild.”

Throwing the doctor off by his collar as if swatting away a fly, Rochshan roared. “Call Giggs right now. Tell him to prepare the fastest horse. Hurry!”

Philip, who had been watching the man looking ready to sprint out of the mansion that very instant, tried to calm him down. “Count. This is not a good idea.”

“Let go of me, Your Majesty.”

“I said calm down! Do you really think that monster collapsed from something as trivial as an endemic disease?!”

“Even so, how can I just stay still? I must do everything I can!”

The very idea of vanquishing the black dragon with a human disease made no sense. But neither the king’s nor the grand duke’s persuasion got through to Rochshan Owin in the slightest.

“Then where is this natural habitat, Your Grace? Riding alone in this torrential rain is extremely dangerous. I’ll go with you.”

“No. Even the time it takes to look back and explain the way, checking if Count is following well, is a waste. Let me go. Right now!”

A flower with ten-pronged black petals on leaves bearing blue stains. The medicinal herb described by the doctor who diagnosed Kyle’s endemic disease was none other than a plant growing wild on the grounds of the Owin family’s private villa. Because the road to the remote mountain villa could only be traversed by crossing the cliff where Rochshan had lost his parents, it was also a ruin abandoned since fifteen years ago.

Even if all sorts of specters, including his mother, were gathered there, he had to go.

The only other person aside from himself who might know about the raw ingredient of this absurd cure flashed through his mind. But even an interrogation was a secondary procedure to be handled later. Rochshan clashed sharply with Grand Duke Vizak, who blocked his path. His momentum was vicious, looking entirely ready to draw his sword and cut down anyone in his way if push came to shove.

If he delayed here and something truly happened to Kyle, he wouldn’t let even you off the hook. It was the moment Rochshan, grinding his teeth, was about to lunge at the Grand Duke.

A massive, deafening crash, loud enough to burst eardrums, shook the mansion.

It sounded as if every window in the mansion had shattered outward. Through those gaps, the wailing sounds of the world rushed in instantaneously. But what overpowered all the noise was none other than the slow footsteps treading from the entrance toward the drawing room.

Was a devil returning from hell walking toward them?

When everyone gathered in the drawing room held their breath and stared in one direction at the unexpected abnormal situation. Behind the blinding flash of lightning striking the mansion’s front yard, a man finally appeared.

The one who should have been lying upstairs…

Rochshan’s servant, Kyle Blackburn.

“Rochshan.”

The maddened dragon was smiling.