“King of the Dead! Are you all right?!”

Tie looked at Berugon with bewildered eyes.

Berugon, having come to, awkwardly tried to get up.

Tie stepped back warily — she was afraid he might become strange again.

But it seemed Berugon had partly regained his senses.

“Krazar? You destroyed the red fog? You really found and broke its core? Wait—then why are we still in the subspace?”

To the barrage of questions Tie only blinked and looked around.

“Um... that’s because...”

Where to begin explaining?

She turned to Lucarion for help.

“Huh?”

But Lucarion was suddenly nowhere to be seen.

Instead he was in an unexpected place — in Tie’s bag.

“Kkamani, why are you there...”

Curled up in the bag, Lucarion looked like an annoyed cat: he squinted his eyes into slits, then abruptly turned his face away.

Tie opened her mouth.

“...he’s sulking!”

Apparently Lucarion didn’t like that Tie had decided to raise Pupu.

What to do now.

Tie lowered her brows and fixed her gaze on Pupu in her hand.

‘Pupu is a very good baby elephant.’

From /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ the moment it had hatched, Tie had shared the same feelings with Pupu: anxiety, guilt that it had frightened her, and surprise that it had not meant to do so.

‘Of course...’

Tie glanced at Berugon. Since Pupu had hatched, it had been staring at Berugon, licking its lips.

‘Looks like he still wants to eat the factory master.’

Berugon had been the food Pupu had been saving for a long time. So even though Pupu had already fed on Tie’s magic, it could still desire Berugon.

Tie thought: if her favorite food were in front of her, she too would probably keep eating even if she were full.

But since she had promised to be Pupu’s mother, Tie decided from that moment to raise him properly — first teaching him not to think of people as food.

She pressed her palm over Pupu’s mouth, which was making a smacking sound, and answered calmly:

“Krazar is gone.”

Berugon jumped where he sat.

“Really?!”

Tie glanced at Lucarion, who quietly snorted, and nodded.

“Yes, yes.”

Lucarion kept insisting that Pupu was the very Krazar and that it smelled of foul magic. But Tie did not agree. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

‘Pupu is small; he doesn’t know who Krazar is.’

Besides, she had just seen Pupu writhing with hurt and confusion — Tie could feel it with her whole body. Pupu’s behavior, its reactions — they weren’t pretending.

Tie had her own logic.

‘If Krazar is the mother-box, and Krazar’s core is the egg, then what hatched from it is only the baby. You can’t treat the child and the mother as the same.’

Besides, in their world cruel laws that punished the whole family of the guilty had long been abolished.

While Tie enjoyed her reasoning, Berugon muttered, wiping sweat from his brow.

“Killing that monster isn’t something to boast about. There’s a reason for the fame.”

Tie didn’t know what to answer and remained silent.

“Maybe the crack in Krazar’s core appeared because two huge forces collided?” he continued.

That word — “collided” — made Tie blink in fear. Looking back now, the sensation felt less like a collision and more like a transfer: at the moment Tie had taken the core in the weapons exhibition hall, Pupu had felt a huge force pour into him. Pupu was very hungry and wholly absorbed Tie’s magic.

‘Then he said he was full.’

Prepared to hatch, he opened the subspace and, in gratitude, began bringing food to Tie. But the restored power was unstable, so the created subspace began to threaten Tie herself.

As soon as Tie reached this point, Berugon’s voice sounded again.

“King of the Dead. It seems you saved me.”

Tie’s eyes widened.

But Berugon was serious.

“Because, I think this core had been intoxicating me for a long time.”

Tie instinctively covered Pupu with her hand. Fortunately, Berugon did not look at it; he only exhaled softly.

“Yes... that’s right. Looks like it started about five years ago.”

He could not name the exact time, but he was sure something had changed since then.

He shifted his breath and looked directly at Tie.

“You know, about three years ago I briefly kept Krazar equipment in my room.”

Back then the church was already pushing to hand over the arms to them. Berugon, under the pretext of inspection, brought the equipment to his room. And from that day on he began having nightmares — the worst memories replayed again and again.

“I don’t know your exact age. But if you were over forty, you’d probably have heard about the Hederdel incident.”

Tie thought and was frightened: forty? She was four.

Berugon noticed her confusion and looked at her with interest, as if trying to guess her real age. Tie hastily added:

“I think I vaguely heard about it...!”

Berugon, as if expecting this, nodded.

“Yes. You most likely have heard. It was a fairly well-known case.”

Berugon’s face darkened.

“The son of Lord Hederdel began by attacking a hospital and killed ninety innocent people.”

Hospital, attack, ninety people — Tie felt a faint horror.

If someone entered a hospital and attacked the sick — that was monstrous.

“And do you know who gave him the weapon?”

Tie fell silent, her eyes wide.

“What?”

“I did.”

Berugon lowered his head.

“I don’t usually accept private requests. I mostly refused to make special equipment for individuals. Of course, orders from the court I was forced to accept, but private matters — no.”

He sighed heavily.

“That man was not only the lord’s son; he was a knight who suppressed rebellions in the Hederdel area. I was enchanted by that.”

Berugon himself had come from a similar region: where magic stones rose, people began fighting and it turned into a brutal civil war. War had taken his adoptive parents and seven brothers; he could not refuse the knight’s request. Until that moment he had not suspected that the knight would use his weapons for such things.