Taking a deep breath, Tie deftly slid her hand into Berugon’s inner pocket.

Finding the core there was not that difficult.

At last the core was in her hand — and the moment she pulled it from Berugon, he screamed.

“You can’t! That—!”

Tie looked at Berugon as he shouted and writhed, and drew a long breath.

Soon, after a few more cries, Berugon slowly closed his eyes.

Tie only looked down when he went limp.

In her palm lay Krazar’s reddish, gleaming core.

The little stone in her hand, with a small crack in it, shimmered quietly as if nothing had happened.

“You stole it?!”

Lucarion rushed up at that moment.

When Tie turned, the red fog had already gone somewhere.

Tie nodded, still shaken.

“Yeah. I’m hauling it...”

“Let me see.”

Lucarion frowned as he looked at the core in her palm.

He pawed the stone, turned it over, and muttered.

“You can feel condensed magic. It seems stronger than before.”

“Con-densed...?”

Tie tilted her head in puzzlement.

— crack.

New fissures spread across her palm.

Dozens of new cracks appeared around the existing one — Tie froze.

Lucarion stopped moving.

After a few seconds the trembling core made a strange noise, then split cleanly in two.

What hatched from inside made Tie part her lips.

“Kvyuut! kvyu!”

Two round, coal-black eyes.

Beneath them — a long trunk.

On the sides — ears fluttering slightly like flags.

“Ko-koal...?” Tie murmured.

Lucarion frowned.

“What kind of ‘-al’ is that?”

Tie, nervously squeaking, looked at Lucarion.

“Lu... Lucarion. With ko-koal. With ko-koal...”

The child’s eyes danced with excitement.

“A baby elephant hatched!”

The herbivores Tie had seen in documentaries about the savanna — her favorites were wolves, giraffes, and pandas.

An elephant had been born from Krazar’s core.

And even more incredible was that she understood its babble:

“Kvyu!”

“He says you’re his mother!”

Not just “mom,” but “mother” — and Tie seemed to understand every squeak of the baby.

“Kvyu, kvyurun, kvyupit!”

“Pupu says he’s an obedient son. So he wanted to give Tie the food he had been saving for a long time.”

“Kvyuun... kvyuu.”

“He had kept it so long that he’d been holding onto it for years.”

“Kuuuu...”

“He had been saving food so that one day he could hatch them all at once.”

Lucarion drew a breath.

Before him sat Tie and a fist-sized stone monster.

For some reason the monster politely sank to its knees before Tie.

“Kvyurun! kvyuun! kvyukkrut.”

“But when he met Tie, he had enough strength to hatch without eating the food. So he chased me to give the food to me instead of eating it himself,” Lucarion explained, narrowing his eyes.

“No way, is that the food?” he asked.

Tie hesitated, then nodded, following his gesture.

Lucarion glanced over — there Berugon lay sprawled and unconscious.

“Ha.”

Lucarion let out a long breath and slowly opened his eyes.

Staring seriously at Astie, he pointed a paw at the strange monster.

“Do you understand what this is?”

“Kvyupit!”

The monster, which had been kneeling, sprang up and swatted at Lucarion with a paw as if scolding him.

But Lucarion, as if unfazed by the blow, continued calmly:

“This is a magical beast. What you’re calling a hatching happened because the residual magic in Krazar’s core absorbed your power and formed a body from it.”

Tie ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) swallowed and averted her eyes from Lucarion.

He kept talking, his voice growing grave.

“In other words, that creature — the one that locked us here and recently frightened you with illusions — is it. Do you think you can relax just because it looks new? From the feel of it, this beast has killed at least two hundred people.”

“No!”

“Kvyuruk!”

The monster and Tie both spoke at once.

The wobbling monster clutched the back of its head with one paw and fell with a dull thud.

Tie jumped up, pressed the monster to her, and declared:

“Its name isn’t that, it’s Pupu!”

She immediately put on a look of utmost seriousness.

“And Pupu remembers almost nothing.”

“What?”

“He doesn’t remember what he did before he was in the ko-koal.”

Lucarion blinked in astonishment.

“And he says he didn’t kill anyone. Pupu isn’t such a bad baby elephant!”

Lucarion exhaled in restraint.

“Didn’t touch anyone?”

But what about the smell of blood that had come from the magic of that creature?

The scent of the will to live and of blood — the sort that comes only from those who committed merciless slaughter.

“Absurd,” he muttered, looking at Pupu, who perched importantly on Tie’s palm and glared nastily at Lucarion.

Tie, a little embarrassed, tried to defend the monster.

“Pupu didn’t mean to lock Tie in the subspace... he said he didn’t want to do it out of malice.”

“Then?”

“He wanted Tie to be able to calmly eat the factory master...”

Tie fell silent, then continued awkwardly.

“He’s still little and can’t control his powers, so by mistake he did what scared Tie. At first he wanted to let Tie out, but the hatching wasn’t finished, and he tried to help with the fog. But Tie kept running away, and he couldn’t catch her.”

Lucarion leaned back and let out a soft laugh, then fixed a threatening stare on the monster again.

“Saying he didn’t touch anyone but planning to eat a person — what is that? Isn’t that a contradiction?”

“Kvyu! kvyukkrut! kvyu! kvyurun! kvyukkrut!”

“Pupu doesn’t eat people; he eats feelings! He eats the feeling of fear!”

Out of breath, Tie stepped in to defend the monster.

“He eats the scary feeling; he’s a baby elephant that feeds on fear! At first he thought Tie would give it to him, but Tie told him otherwise!”

“...”

“Tie eats only porridge, cookies, and bread, so there’s no need to feed scary feelings to her.”

Lucarion stared into the air in silence.

Astie, as if to demonstrate, quietly presented the monster to everyone to show its innocence.

“So, little dark one, maybe this is just a misunderstanding? Look, Pupu is very small.”

“Kvyurun.”

“Very cute and calls me mother all the time.”

“Kvyukkrut!”

“Pupu wants to be with Tie forever. If Tie doesn’t want him — he won’t even go get food!”

Lucarion involuntarily pressed a paw to his forehead.

“...But this little one is still absorbing your magic and swelling from it! He has no need to gather food if he’s feeding like that right now!”

Tie’s eyes filled with tears in an instant.

“But Tie wants to raise Pupu...”

Lucarion held his breath at the absurdity of the thought.

“King of the Dead?”

A hoarse voice came from behind.

Berugon, who had suddenly come to, looked at Tie and Lucarion with disbelief.