We just share some simple greetings with the female side of the Grosshils, then we move on. Apparently, Stefan had them on standby, just waiting for the green light to join us.
I give in to temptation and stop by a stall to buy a bag of chocolate candy tablets, which I promptly share with the Lordsguard.
"How did you like your little taste of the capital?" I softly ask Hukarere as she takes off her snout-shaped helmet to eat some chocolate.
"[The Throne is stunning, but I'm surprised it isn't as ostentatious as what the noble Chimeras like to build]," she casually replies in Reo and throws a tablet into her long mouth, then hums in delight and grins brightly. "Thanks for this gift, your Highness."
"Just a whim," I reflexively mumble, a little embarrassed. I like giving spontaneous gifts, but now I realize that this one might make me look a bit eccentric since it's so expensive.
Well, I am eccentric by Rupegian standards, so I guess I should just own it.
I'd like to spend more time here in Mac Gantus, but then it'd be hard to explain to the emperor why we didn't go meet with him to pay our respects, so we just enter the [Eternal Gate] Network and go back home.
Confiel's group breaks off from ours en route, and when we enter our castle, we meet with Azador and Iliada, my favorite maid, who are obediently waiting for us in the entrance hall.
--
Intermission – Stefan
--
I intently observe His Highness Wolf as he greets a mere maid like one would greet a lover. It seems that some of the rumors are true, while others are just exaggerations or false predictions, but considering his eccentric personality, it's expected that people would find it hard to read him.
His most visible weakness, his tail, seems to have been kept well under control as it only starts to move when he finally drops [Acting]. It wags like a dog's as he kisses the young, pretty elf, which is fitting as he's known to be like a dog perpetually in rut. Or is that just the normal state for a part dragon man? Her Highness Hanafuria is equally as well known for her "appetite," after all.
My beloved sends me a worried look, concerned about our involvement with this lustful Lord, but a man with two Blessings in his harem is not the kind that would abuse his rank to get women. Though, it wouldn't hurt to teach our daughter to be on her guard around him.
After he finishes boasting and removes his tongue from the smitten little elf, the stern knight announces, as if nothing had happened, "Noble Grosshils, please come with me, and I'll show you to your new quarters."
How expedient.
"Signeur Stefan Grosshil, please come with me. Her Highness Yulania wishes to speak with you," the young maid follows up, and I feel a chill run down my spine.
The young Yulania is a legitimate noble, and I feel more afraid of facing her than I think I would from facing Wolf in combat, even with his draconic glare. At least the boy would show mercy and make it quick.
I follow the young elf maid through an [Eternal Gate] and struggle to keep my eyes off her extremely small uniform. She has the famous alluring grace of elves that all races envy, and I realize that the High Forest must be a sort of Paradise for a womanizer like Wolf.
The maid walks fast, though, which leaves me with little time to observe the splendor of the colorful wooden castle, and I almost stumble when I notice what I believe to be a penis carved on a wall as if it were some sort of heraldry.
The rumors really don't paint the correct picture about you, your Highness.
I ignore the engraved penises for now, and we quickly reach our destination.
--
After a knock, I'm allowed in, and I feel a small amount of envy at the luxury of the roomy office, but then my eyes meet with Her Highness Yulania's, and I'm not strong enough to look away anymore.
She's such a beauty that I feel guilty from just looking at her. Her face is that of a delicate porcelain doll, an artistic sculpture rather than something naturally made, yet she's just as humanoid as I am.
I feel like my darling will have trouble befriending her due to how much more majestic Her Highness' drills are. Her appeal is far too potent to ignore, and even I'm getting jealous of how appealing elven hair really is.
"Take a seat," she coolly offers with a graceful hand gesture.
Like a dog before their master, I obediently sit down on the comfortable chair and remain silent.
Which is exactly what she wanted as she immediately continues with a casual tone, "Signeur Stefan Grosshil, it seems that you have a small fondness for schemes."
How does she know about our meeting already? I didn't detect any signs that there was someone listening in.
"I merely maneuver in the way that I believe is the most beneficial to my family and goals, as you yourself have also done," I respond in kind, my [Acting] struggling to keep my emotions hidden in the face of her gaze.
It's like staring at the mask of a Truth Seeker. Emotionless, judging, and dominant. An unbreakable fortress blocking the way of a young warrior. So imposing that it disarms simply through an impenetrable defense that demoralizes challengers. But to have such a strong presence means that they truly have passed level fifty, which, considering their youth, is comparable to imperial Princes.
After an unnervingly long pause, she continues, her tone now as cold as [Absolute Zero], "But, as the possessors of three Blessings, and the target of two Interventions, we will not accept such behavior from now on. We require unwavering loyalty from our subjects."
I immediately lower my head in submission, "I understand, your Highness, and I apologize for my behavior."
This much is fine… Wait… three Blessings and two Interventions?
I raise my head and ask, "Are the two numbers you cited correct?"
She nods sternly. "Yes, that happened yesterday."
A legend being written right before my eyes!
I swallow heavily, and I feel it as my eyes are once again locked with her two blue gems as her harsh tone makes me alert again.
"Continuing on… Since you've stolen Hermann from being our knight by marrying him so hastily to your son, we'll accept an alliance and allow the Grosshils to join the clan we're building. We'll sponsor the couple and have them enter Goloria's Knight Academy, so the Grosshils will be a hybrid family that raises military officers or court mages for us."
A clan? That's excellent, even if I'm, as expected, not deemed worthy to join it.
"That sounds like a wonderful plan," I calmly reply and nod respectfully.
But the harshness continues unabated, "As for you, you'll work with the knights and High Officers on clearing the dungeons in our territory, as well as perform the usual duties of nobility related to town defense and registering for the Expeditionary Division."
That's just what I used to do anyway, except this time, I'm not bound by a vow.
"It'd be an honor," I obediently reply.
Finally, her tone softens, just a little, "In exchange, you'll be given one of the mansions in the outer ring. Do you accept?" Then she offers a handshake.
I can't say no anymore.
I take her incredibly soft hand and seal the deal.
"Yes."
After that, she dismisses me, and once I break eye contact, I feel like I'm just getting out of a sauna since I was sweating a fair bit without even knowing.
Things went as well as they could, and now that I'm here, I have my whole life to mend our relationship.
My darling said that I'd just be trading one chain for another, but anyone would prefer to live in a golden cage instead of an iron one, and most important of all, each generation of our family will be freer than the one before it, as long as Ahren isn't scared of vaginas…
--
Intermission end.
--
The grilling was kind of fun to watch. Stefan was completely calm, clear evidence of a high [Acting] skill, but he started sweating midway through, so that gave him away.
"Why did he give up his imperial rank, though?" I ask through [Bind].
"The Elder Council monopolizes those ranks. They use them to have the Buscuadores trained and equipped, and they even have a law forbidding nobles in the elven lands from holding one," Yunia calmly explains as she stretches, making a cute, girly sound, then leans back in her chair to relax.
I nudge Gify, and she pops out of existence, then she reappears a minute later on Yunia's shoulder and starts her spirit massage to soothe my hard-working wife.
Meanwhile, Hana gives Klein a brain massage and I use my tentacles to play with her long furry tail as we watch from a balcony as the Grosshils slowly cross the castle grounds.
I kind of wanted to make Stefan into a court mage, but I don't think he'd agree to becoming a Blood Slave right after doing so much to escape a vow.
Osaria suddenly comes out onto the balcony and hugs her favorite toy from behind. "Do you want to talk about what's bothering you? We're here for you," she kindly whispers into Klein's round monkey ear, then gives her neck a kiss.
"I'm just… confused about what I should do…" She mumbles dispiritedly.
"We can't give you that much advice about that, but we can always hear you out if you want a second opinion," I warmly offer and pat her tail.
"Thank you," she weakly mumbles as her heart aches from the critical hit.
I turn to my other two women and announce, "I have a meeting to go to, so you two make sure that she's all giddy and giggly by the time I get back, alright?"
"Your wish is my command, your Highness," Osaria softly replies with a suggestive grin.
It's Rupegian custom to soothe a broken heart with mind-numbing pleasure. Though it's unfortunate that I won't be able to participate, I'll still be hearing, seeing, and feeling everything through Hana.
--
In an empty "leaf room" of the castle, the High Officers, Alissa, Ciel, Roxanne, the golems, Teresina, a bunch of priests, and a few Chimeric mages are all gathered around a large table as they chat lightly.
When I enter the room, everyone stands up and bows, except for my wives. Teresina also remains seated, but she's old, so just a respectful nod from her is enough.
"At ease," I softly order, and they take their seats again.
Wordlessly, Sandoro opens a large metal box, revealing the chilled, corrupted, and crushed remains of a Clone Soldier's head while I pull the two headless corpses out of my "Items" at the same time.
The priests immediately stand up again and pull out magnifying glasses to inspect the Soldiers.
The acetone smell of corruption reaches our noses, and I summon an air and a light elemental-wife to spare Alissa the discomfort.
"Once could be a coincidence, but twice is a certainty," Teresina's voice echoes above the curious chatter as she stares at me.
I sit down and gracefully lay my claws upon my lap as I smile. "I told you so," I smugly reply.
Her left eye twitches in annoyance, but she keeps it well hidden. "I advise you to never leave the caste without a Templar escort."
I casually shrug. "If they can pay for their own [Eternal Gate] and living expenses, then I'd be happy to have more bodyguards."
Teresina sighs and turns her eyes towards the corpses. "That won't be a problem," she begrudgingly concedes.
Then everyone focuses on the corpses at hand, and the dissection begins.
The first thing we notice is how hard their skin is. It's as resistant as monster hide, yet soft and elastic like humanoid skin, requiring us to buff the scalpels with [Sharp Blades] and [Reinforce] so that they can last long enough for our use.
The corpses are still warm and bleeding, except for the squashed head, which had to be preserved in an icebox since it's a bad idea to store corrupted material inside one's [Item Box].
While the first corpse is opened up and the squashed one is "reorganized," Roxanne and Ciel closely inspect the blood pooling under the remains. The former identifies magical signatures while the latter uses a stupidly expensive magical microscope to study its composition.
"Is this… metal?" One of the priests questions out loud, drawing our attention.
He pulls out a broken bone from the squashed corpse and cleans off the blood, revealing the metallic shine of steel, but it has an odd blue sheen to it.
Another priest with a Signature Interpreter looks closely at the bone and gasps, "It's a Kanal and steel alloy!"
"Look for shards of gems," I advise, and the priests continue their inspection with scholarly enthusiasm.
A Chimera Alteration mage picks out another broken bone and inspects the shear edge. "It's not just a metal reinforcement; the alloy has smoothly fused with the bone," the naked dog-headed man reports.
I pick up a bone and realize that it's much heavier than a normal one, which must be one of the reasons why it felt like hitting a wall when I crashed into a Clone.
As the pristine corpse is skinned, we realize that every single muscle has small tears all throughout them. This is the one that I killed by using [Spirit Light]s to stun it, but the damage from that spell should be nonexistent, except for in the corrupted brain, so we don't understand what could have caused these tears.
Ciel is having some trouble understanding what's going on with the blood cells. Her microscope allows her to see the red blood cells as if they were the size of grains of rice, slightly bigger than what she could see through the best microscope she had used previously, so she can reliably make out their shape, but they're all bloated and round, pretty different from the biconcave disk they're known for.
She knows this happens due to problems in the watery part of the blood, so she tries out adding a salt solution, but they just burst and lose all color.
This greatly confuses her, so she starts an arcane discussion with the other healers and Chimeras about solutions. Apparently, the Clone's red blood cells have some differences when compared with a humanoid's. Then they notice that the blood cells coagulate at a much faster rate, too.
Just as we start to find pieces of gems inside the squashed body, the dissection team recovers an intact gem from the abdomen of the pristine corpse.
Lina's attention is drawn away from her discussion with Aoi back in their personal forge, but we also have enchanters here with us, so she leaves it to them and returns her focus to her work.
"It seems to be something similar to [Blood of Gaia] from [Earth Magic] or the racial spell [Spirit of Gaia] from the dwarves, but this gem is quite decayed, ravaged by the internal mana of the Clone Soldier," one of our enchanters reports.
Then the Chimeras report finding silver within the bone marrow, which is evidence of a body-wide enchantment.
"How long do you think these gems would last before needing to be replaced?" I question the enchanter.
The elven woman shakes her head negatively. "Hard to say. It depends on how much mana they naturally had within their blood."
"A lot. A bit lower than a one-thousand MP mage, I'd guess," Roxanne reports.
"Then perhaps it could last for a whole day if used constantly," the enchanter theorizes.
"That's not very long for a body modification this expensive," Teresina comments pensively.
And a priest theorizes, "Their muscles are harder than normal; perhaps they had enough strength to move without the enchantment and only used it for battle."
"Perhaps…" Teresina quietly mumbles.
The dissection reaches the organs, then we discover that the heart is a massive lump of muscle, and the lungs are much longer than usual because the digestive system is half as big. We could theoretically pierce the lungs by stabbing the stomach, but that's generally a well-protected area in the typical armor design, so not much of a vulnerability.
Curiously, the Soldier is a male eunuch. There's no trace of his soul left to analyze, so we don't know if they're born sterile or just castrated.
I zone out for a bit when Hana orgasms, and I have to hold it in to not cream my pants. The dissection is a bit gruesome, so the pleasure of the orgasm goes a long way to making me feel more at ease.
I dig my padded claws into Alissa's skin as I squeeze her hand, and she pats my scales soothingly, then I stretch and get myself comfortable again in my massive chair.
Teresina sends me a curious look, likely noticing the sudden release of tension in my body, but doesn't mention it.
As we find more and more suspicious damage within the pristine body, the enchanters conclude that the gem also pushes the body beyond its limits, slowly damaging it, and then Roxanne and Ciel come to the conclusion that the blood is both magically and physically poisoned due to a variety of factors. Additionally, the alloy they used is toxic to the body, and the silver damages the bone marrow, leading to long-term vulnerability to disease, but the Soldier doesn't seem to have had the metal within its body for long.
They're lesser undead, so the corruption is limited to the brain and kept at bay by the blood-brain barrier, which allows them to infiltrate humanoid society unless they're revealed by [Detect Evil]. This also means that they don't have the same inherent regeneration of a full undead, but Roxanne quickly finds out that they compensate for that with a variety of spells similar to [Regeneration] and HP potions, but such a combination is toxic in the long term for the average humanoid.
Then one of the Chimera Alteration mages shares something important, "I know that there are ways to reinforce bones with metals, but the way it's done here is crude when compared to the alterations I've seen before, though I believe it would be relatively cheap."
Another Chimera agrees with him, "The more difficult part of bone reinforcement is to do it in a way which doesn't kill or poison the patient, which was completely ignored here."
The final conclusion is obvious: these Clone Soldiers are experimental, disposable weapons with a short shelf-life.
That the heretics would reveal such an outlandish weapon means that they didn't mind feeding us information about it. Technically, there's no new technology that was used here, just a novel application of them that we won't be able to easily reproduce, so there were few drawbacks to using them against us.
Even though they're so physically powerful and magically enhanced, it seems their weakness is still [Light Magic]. There's no way to avoid it since becoming a lesser undead is a requirement to escape the kill-switch of the God of Existence, so unless the heretics find an alternative to using the lesser undead, these soldiers won't be too much of a threat.
I turn my eyes to the golems, and a worrying thought crosses my mind. Are they immune to the influence of the God of Existence? If they are, then the heretics could use [Golemancy] to create a golem that's capable of controlling a brain, perfecting the Clone Soldiers. Worse of all, due to my cheats, only I seem able to create a golem with the same amount of mental capacity as an earth elemental, which was the base for Ted, Suzy, and Jarn.
I believe I must shift my goal with [Golemancy] towards the creation of a Gods-compliant race instead of the sapient robot servants that I had in mind, just to make sure that nobody can inadvertently give the heretics the solution they need.
Then Almaria finds extremely subtle signs of corruption within the neck and the heart, so perhaps there is a way to detect lesser undead without needing to use [Detect Evil], it's just impractical most of the time.
--
After a few hours of meticulous analysis and many pages of notes being written, we end the meeting, realizing that only the scholars will be able to learn anything further from these corpses.
Before everyone leaves, I ask Teresina to stay so that I can have a word with her.
"It seems that the empire has a bit of a heretic problem," I comment casually, and the gilf takes mild offense at that.
She quickly explains with an angry tone, "The Wicked are everywhere. No matter the place, there's always someone being pushed towards the darker paths. It's something that's natural for humanoids since the God of Change wishes for us to be allowed to make mistakes, though we're not to be shielded from the consequences."
And I coolly reply with a smirk, "Still, I'm obviously being targeted, as you yourself have said."
She just snorts snobbishly and doesn't offer a retort, so it's time to get to the point.
I activate my [Acting] and stoically announce, "I formally request to learn everything you know about the undead."
She hesitates for a moment, thinking it over quite thoroughly before answering, "Only the Blessed ones will receive the knowledge."
A futile demand, but okay.
"I accept."
But she has more demands, "The books cannot be removed from the temple, and I'll insist on regular [Detect Evil] checks after you start reading them."
A bit of an annoyance, but okay.
"Acceptable," I answer with a nod.
Then she asks for something that actually gives me pause, "And I'll also require that you pass questioning by a Truth Seeker to confirm that you won't use the knowledge for evil."
I ask the girls about it, but it'll be fine as long as we agree beforehand about what's going to be asked and make sure that the questions don't have any hidden implications. "Since we'll be meeting with the Seekers, we'll also ask them to validate Arreira's will."
She hums and nods in agreement, then slowly sighs and rubs her eyes. "You're a massive headache, your Highness," she softly remarks with a tired tone.
I smile cheekily and confess, "It's honestly not my intention; I'm sorry for bringing you so much trouble."
She sinks down in her seat and slowly explains, "Not trouble, but work. It's hard to say no to a Blessed, especially with one who's implied to be wise, and even in the case of the Chimeras, we've found nothing that could be used to stop you. But still, you bring change that makes us uncomfortable."
I smile warmly and try to soothe her, "I find that [Massage] followed by some Eia is a wonderful way to help me relax." Then I pull out my precious bottle of Cinco Flores.
She lifts her head and looks at the bottle, then raises an eyebrow, but she doesn't take the bait.
"I feel like I'll need something a bit stronger than that," she casually confesses.
And I shamelessly set another trap for her, "I know how to give someone such an intense experience that they'll never forget about it, but it's something rather intimate."
She snorts and shakes her head, making her long ears bounce cutely, her mean glare nowhere to be found, but again, she doesn't fall for it.
"I'll take a shot of Eia if you're offering, but then I must take my leave," she replies and subtly smiles.
--
--
Hall of Fame of Patrons
The patrons who support Rupegia shall have their names sung by the bards for they deserve the glory and honor. Their names are:
Prince PreownedFIN.
Prince Creamy Spinach.
Lord Andrew Meyers.
Lord Novgarod.
Lord Michale Erwin.
Lord Bakerdea.
Lord Maurice.
Lord Empyrean.
Lord Mattirro Draca.
Lord Fullmoon.
Lord Sean Drake.
Lord EESDESESESRDT.
Lord FrostyCube.
Lord Mike Bartter.
Lord Cardinal Steiner.
Lord Warwulfv.
Lord Jorge Franco.
Lord Khristopher Welsh.
Lord DJ.
Lord Philip.
Lord Tenebris Lupus.
Lord The Tallest Joshua.
Lord Copey Dunt.
Lord Dracopuppy23.
Lord Chris Carter.
Lord Paul Daval.
Lord Bradly.
Lord Aubrey Powell.
Lord AnderyUC.
Lord Cidant.
Noble Salty Panda.
Noble Mild Fracas.
Noble Aclys.
Noble CarlBaxter.
Noble Yeuromain.
Noble Brandon Lai.
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