Kyrie and Andromeda returned to the encampment.

Vicher and Vichera walked them out as far as the street to see them off.

On the way back to their lodging.

"Brother."

"I'm listening."

"It seems like we did not say a single word about Helios today."

There was still a heat like dying embers in Vichera’s eyes.

"That is so."

"I have been thinking about why that might be."

"And why is that?"

"Maybe she thought he was not even a subject for negotiation to begin with. I felt it today. It is House Astreos."

Vicher nearly asked whether that was not an excessive charitable interpretation, but stopped.

An excessive charitable interpretation.

They sent the Sub-patriarch and the Senior Adopted Heir together, and in not even ten days, they crippled eighty thousand out of a three-hundred-fifty-thousand corpse army.

They put the Elixir of Starlight in front of them and even drew out natural cooperation.

In any case, the Corpse Wasteland would require a steady campaign of great subjugations.

If you could make a beneficial elixir from that byproduct, it was no different from the triumph of making bread out of air.

And it was even more so because they revealed that fact first.

He could have kept his mouth shut and only exported the Elixir of Starlight. We would have had no choice but to cling to it anyway. Our competitors all share similar bloodlines, similar oaths. What we are born with is the same, and there are limits to what we can afford to give up. It has come to this, down to our clothing and even the way we speak.

She pictured Kyrie.

A single eye left behind, as if it reflected a will to live for one thing alone.

But he did not make us cling. By showing everything, he wanted us to cooperate of our own accord. Just as he does his utmost for his own goal, he wanted us to do our utmost for ours.

In the one-eyed Blue Knight, there was the spirit of someone who could discard everything else like chaff for the sake of his own objective.

"King With a Hundred Legs."

"Yeah."

"There was a reason he charged that hard at the thing."

"Right? I think so too. He could have retreated the moment it grew wings. It could come back later. We have to stay for months anyway. But he did not."

"He showed it. How sincere they are."

Vicher thought he might be interpreting it even more charitably than his younger sister.

"I thought it would take ten more years."

"Even with only the Elixir of Starlight, it will take three. If we also have the Elixir of Nebula, it will take one."

The Blue Knights of House Astreos lived lives with little to do with the good the world talked about, but there was a power in their lives that made onlookers think they wanted to live like that too.

Certainty settled into the twins’ eyes.

This great subjugation had meaning as an intangible asset of connections with high-ranking officials of other great houses, but in itself it was nothing more than an expedition to protect trade routes.

And because they had to come all the way out to a distant land, it was also a burden for the direct line.

Kyrie had turned that burdensome work into elixir hunting.

A relationship that helps both sides never breaks.

"May I interpret it as you also want to keep meeting us going forward?"

"Of course. You can even see it as a groom’s dowry."

"If the other side has brought a spark, then it is only proper that we make the firewood. How about we begin subjugation immediately starting tomorrow?"

Lightning struck and a fire caught.

Once it caught, it spread in an instant.

Inside the wagon on the way back, I let out a sigh of relief.

I really did manage it, somehow.

Even up until we departed the Main Fortress, it had felt hopeless beyond words.

To begin with, this mission itself had a vague side to it.

First was the usual suppression of corpse overflow.

Second was strengthening the alliance with Flammerios in preparation for an armed clash with Rikenta.

Third was my debut in inter–great house politics as House Astreos’s new Senior Adopted Heir.

Then strengthening Andromeda’s standing within the house.

And after that, gaining enough renown to attend the Council of Elector Princes, and finally proving the connection between mutated manbeasts and the Corpse Wasteland.

If I were to organize what I had to do in the style of missions the Thunder’s Roar displays on the brand, it would be about that much.

The difference from the brand’s strings would be that even if I accomplished them one by one, my Celestial Lightning Body value would not go up.

And I did it all.

All of it, bundled into one and organized.

The core was mutated manbeasts and the Elixir of Starlight.

Mutated manbeasts and corpse armies are essentially the same, and you can make the Elixir of Starlight from mutated manbeasts.

Traysan tried to steal that knowledge, joined hands with the royal family and the Myriad Star Church, and branded me and Andromeda as heretics.

I think I succeeded in putting it together like this.

I did not know why Andromeda, Vicher, and Vichera liked it that much.

It seemed like there was something only direct-line purebloods understood, something a red-light district bastard like me could not.

Back then, I thought that once I became an adopted heir, I would know everything, but now it feels like I know less than I did then.

Even if I do not know, I have only gotten better at doing it anyway.

Maybe that is how you truly do something.

The fact that such unrealistic idle thoughts were creeping in meant I was tired.

Today, I will sleep right away without lightning arts training.

"Thank you, sirs."

"Please send our regards to Prince Kyrie!"

"Thank you for avenging my son."

When I returned to the encampment, merchants were just coming out.

I passed them without much thought.

"Older sister. Go in."

"Yeah. Sleep well. You did really well today. Stretch out and sleep comfortably. All right?"

I also parted ways with Andromeda and headed for my tent.

I stopped dead.

A pile of boxes, large and small, was stacked in front of the tent.

"My lord, my lord. Look at this!"

Joi made a huge fuss.

"What is this?"

"Gifts that came in for you, my lord."

An exorbitantly expensive carpet packed with dense embroidery, a delicate pure-gold camel sculpture, a chess set made of sterling silver and black onyx, a scabbard adorned with splendid jewels, a box filled with freshwater pearls, a heating-and-cooling magic tool shaped like a turtle, a magic tool that produces warm water so you can wash anywhere, perfume made from ambergris...

"Gifts? Did someone pressure them to show sincerity...?"

"Not at all, my lord! I checked several times myself, my lord!"

If it were simply a bribe, it would have been filled with gold ingots and silver ingots.

But these gifts carried traces of someone thinking about what I might need.

Thump, thump.

It felt strange.

I knew why they were doing this much.

After coming here and seeing it firsthand, I got it.

Without superhuman soldiers, mutated manbeasts were impossible to handle.

I remembered the first day.

My soldiers were elites who had been on years of expeditions together, but they could do nothing in front of a 30-meter-class abomination.

In the end, powerful superhuman warriors like me or Andromeda had to step in.

Even that was not enough with only our house.

This time, Joi found the King With a Hundred Legs in this barren wasteland in a single week.

The reason she could do it was because Flammerios conducted reconnaissance alongside us, shrinking the area we had to comb.

If Flammerios had been joined by Septentrios and the Stellite royal family, it would have been easier still.

For the sake of the Empire’s subjects, all great houses had to join forces.

"Ah."

In that moment, I realized with a shiver.

In the Empire of the Stars, they called the someone who made the great houses join forces the Emperor.

Hunt mutated manbeasts, protect the house from Rikenta and the royal family, and build and lead a coalition among great houses through shared interests.

It was a hero’s journey.

"Let’s subjugate the other Whitebone Lords too. We cannot keep only driving them back forever. We wipe them all out and turn them into potions."

I proposed it at the meeting the next day.

"...In this overflow, the number of confirmed Whitebone Lords is seven in total. Since the King With a Hundred Legs is dead, six remain."

"That is a lot."

"Among the six, three are minor lords with fewer than thirty thousand corpses under their command. The King With a Hundred Legs and the Fly King were each said to possess forces around one hundred thousand. The King With a Hundred Legs was around eighty thousand, and the Fly King is probably around one hundred twenty thousand to one hundred fifty thousand."

"They are not all gathered in one place, right?"

"Of course not. We can use the same operation one more time."

Kyrie actively offered his opinion toward Andromeda.

"I will cooperate to the best of my ability."

Vichera’s eyes curved like crescent moons above her leather mask.

I thought she would be reluctant. As expected, the Elixir of Starlight is doing its work.

Kyrie thought his realistic calculations were paying off.

Perhaps the true power Prince Kyrie received from the Thunder’s Roar was not mana, but that drive to improve.

That is my little brother for you. Bold, so bold!

Vicher, Vichera, and Andromeda admired Kyrie’s daring, which did not bother weighing pros and cons.

Once again, a large-scale search operation unfolded.

"Do not fight those pointlessly clever bastards, my lord! If we just kill the lord first, they all become idiots! Then you smash their heads and they will love it, my lord!"

Dozens of units split into several hundred to a thousand wandered the wasteland, searching for the Whitebone Lord, the Fly King.

"We found it!"

This search took two weeks.

"Sixty-five kilometers to the southwest. Near the border with the royal family."

Kyrie and Andromeda exchanged looks.

The roster was not much different from last time.

To do again what succeeded last time, you used the same method as last time.

"If you get hit by Mental Shockwave, ordinary people turn into the same kind of monster. Even we would need purification once or twice."

"Limit attendants to Navigator-rank or higher."

Since the Whitebone Lord wielded Mental Shockwave, they had to bring only the elite.

If Magnus had been there then, I would not have had to go crazy firing Magnetic Railshot alone.

Are they trying to purge me this time? Fine. I will not go down that easily. I will show the strength befitting the eldest son of House Magnes.

Kyrie even reached out to Magnus.

"Shall we go?"

In the dead of night.

A three-hundred-man assassination detachment from the two houses, all Knight-rank or higher, set out.

Corpse armies did not particularly distinguish day from night, but it was to prepare for the heat and for the battle dragging on.

Around dawn, they found the Whitebone Lord, the Fly King.

"There it is."

"It seems mutation has already progressed."

"Ugh, it flies?"

"Did not see that coming."

Kyrie looked at the Fly King’s forces spread out below a low hill.

It is far more elite than the King With a Hundred Legs.

Thankfully, there was no hundreds-of-meters-long centipede-like monster in sight.

But there were many monsters in the tens-of-meters range.

Bone-only abominations, Whitebone Giants ranging from twelve to sixty meters, and even Whitebone Knights wielding four-pronged swords made of clustered heads and spinal bones like bunches of grapes.

More than anything, the most horrific part was the flying units.

"This time, they are not feathered wings."

"A membrane? Crystalline? What should we even call that?"

The massive skeleton soldiers, formed by two or three skeletons fused together, had wings like dragonflies or flies.

A translucent, net-like exoskeletal frame had an equally translucent membrane stretched across it.

Buuuuuuung!

Weeeeeeeee!

Wiiiiiiing!

With those wings, they repeatedly flew around, carrying something from place to place.

"Corpses, no. Captives."

Vicher frowned.

"Captives? What do dead things want with captives?"

"I do not know. That is what is frightening."

Kyrie nodded at Vicher’s words.

"Yeah."

An abnormal situation that had not occurred for hundreds of years was unfolding.

A corpse army could take captives.

Whether it was bad luck or good luck, Kyrie soon learned what those captives were used for.

"Fly King?"

A Whitebone Giant came forward, with unusually large wings and eight arms, its red glare shining.

A massive compound eye sat on its head, and its skeleton was a grotesque blend of human and insect.

More than anything, the most horrific part was that between the bones, pale pink flesh was swollen thick.

That pale pink flesh was packed with dark red veins and blisters large and small.

The hallmark of mutated manbeasts.

["More, bring me more! More!"]

A half-formed vocal cord trembled.

A voice between spoken sound and Mental Shockwave spread out in black.

That thing.

Kyrie shuddered, exchanging looks with Andromeda, Vicher, and Vichera.

"We fry everything. Now."

Andromeda crackled with sparks between her fingers.

"If we proceed as planned, we need more time. They have wings, so flame waves will not work well."

Vichera voiced her concern.

"I will handle that."

Magnus raised a hand.

"Do we not just need to knock them down?"

Chapter 146

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