#238
Zepia Republic (1)
Shurihartgen, the Elder Dragon of the Gold Clan, had paid an unexpected visit.
He took Horus and left Tarak, moving elsewhere.
To the nest where he had hidden himself all this time—a small island located in the northwest of the Ion Continent.
“It is a place I put considerable effort into preparing. Even the Immortal King would never find it without precise information.”
“Ooh—!”
Though he did not have long left to live, it was because he intended to do his utmost to educate Horus for what time remained.
He was dying in real time from the aftereffects of waking from hibernation, which had forcibly extended his lifespan, but he had decided it was better to become nourishment for the next generation than to prolong his life meaninglessly day after day.
‘He said he suffered a fatal wound in the war three hundred years ago and barely managed to hold on until now.’
All for the sake of his responsibility to ensure the Gold Clan’s lineage did not end.
And before him, who had endured so painfully, a successor named Horus had suddenly appeared.
Horus glanced at him as he guided him through the lair, then turned his gaze away with a subtle feeling.
As someone who was merely a lucky outsider, he could not even begin to guess what sort of feelings the other man had toward him.
“I do not have much time left, so I will teach you with all my strength for as long as I can. This is not the usual method of educating a hatchling, but there is no help for it now.”
He spoke as if apologetic, but in truth, that was exactly what Horus wanted.
If he had been forced to waste time idling away the years simply because he was a dragon, that would have been far more frustrating.
“The Golden Treasury will be transferred to you upon my death. In truth, even if I call it an inheritance, most of the useful things were mobilized for the war, so there is not much left. Even so, what remains should still be on the level of the lair of a fairly ancient dragon.”
Of course, that harsh assessment only applied to mystical items such as relics and magical tools. As for ordinary valuables with high liquidity, it was fair to say they were piled up like mountains.
“…Wait, you can use Dragon Speech? Even though you’re a hatchling?”
“Yes. Shall I show you?”
And right after they had discussed matters related to the formal start of his education.
For the first time, Horus saw Shurihartgen, who had remained calm from beginning to end, become genuinely flustered.
“…It’s true. Good grief. Even those who have reached the juvenile stage often fail to handle Dragon Speech properly, yet a mere hatchling… Ah, Drakarion.”
If a hatchling was in infancy, then a juvenile was in adolescence.
The stage just before becoming an adult dragon.
Simply put, what Horus had just done was no different from a preschool child smoothly solving questions from the college entrance exam.
“I had thought I would have no choice but to give you a rough foundation in Dragon Speech and hope you would complete it on your own later, but if this is the case, we can save a great deal of time.”
Soon, having accepted the situation, Shurihartgen slowly nodded with a faint smile.
Dragon Speech itself was practically a dragon’s authority, so with age, one would somehow learn it naturally. However, there was a high possibility that the methods of handling it more efficiently had not been passed down properly.
He had intended to leave arrangements behind through grimoires and magical tools, but the rank of Dragon Speech magic was far too high to be fully transmitted through such means.
‘That was why I wondered if I should ask a survivor of another clan before I died, but this works out well.’
Of course, he knew full well that in the current situation, where their entire race was in crisis, the party he asked would not refuse. Still, there was such a thing as the pride of one’s clan.
If there were no other way, that would be one thing, but if he could resolve it on his own, he did not want to make an appeal to another clan.
In truth, before the Immortal King appeared a thousand years ago, and even before the situation worsened further due to the war three hundred years ago, relations between the clans had been quite poor.
Thus, from the perspective of someone who had lived for thousands of years without forgetting, the current situation could not help but be rather satisfying.
“Good. Very excellent. Then let us begin at once.”
“Yes, sir!”
And so, on a nameless little island hidden in the northwest of the Ion Continent.
The live-in training of the little hatchling Horus and the old dragon Shurihartgen, burning through the last of his life, began.
***
Somewhere in Suwon, South Korea, Earth.
In a sealed space where not a single ray of light entered, a woman with long black hair sat alone with her eyes closed, quietly tilting a teacup.
It was teatime in the dark, filled only with a silence that seemed impossible for anything to disturb.
But that stillness was shattered when her body suddenly stiffened—
Crash—
Along with the teacup that slipped from her hand and broke into pieces.
Yet even as red tea spread with a loud shattering sound and soaked the floor, she did not move in the slightest, remaining frozen in her original posture.
Knock, knock, knock—
“Lady Aria? Are you all right? Please excuse me for a moment.”
At that moment, with an urgent knock, a woman carefully opened the door and stepped inside.
She hurriedly looked around, and only after discovering the one still sitting silently before the tea table did she let out a sigh of relief and slowly approach.
“Lady Aria? Are you all right?”
“…Ah! Oh dear, I was lost in thought and my hand slipped for a moment.”
“I will clean up the teacup right away. Just a moment…”
“No, I’ll clean this up later. Would you leave for now?”
“…Understood. If anything happens, please call me at any time. I will come running at once.”
At that firm order to leave, the woman who had entered the room did not protest any further. She bowed politely and quietly went back outside.
The woman with her eyes closed was left alone in the room once more.
Aria, a vampire and the leader of the moderate faction of the Blood Alliance—one of the foremost forces ruling the night streets of South Korea—wiped the tears of blood flowing from the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief she took from her bosom and sank into thought.
‘I thought things had finally quieted down. So this still isn’t enough after all.’
She had thought that perhaps things might be fine now that the hardliners had been expelled and Heinz’s Heterosis had taken their place.
Yet just now, her unique skill, “Glimpse of Fate,” had once again detected a crisis.
The prophetic skill “Glimpse of Fate” only showed fragments of certain currents occurring around her and to her, but it was a lifeline of an ability that had always helped her make the right choice even in difficult situations.
It was thanks to that ability that she had chosen to accept becoming a vampire, safely returned from another world to become one of the Blood Alliance’s top executives, become the leader of the moderate faction and opposed the hardliners, and cooperated so Heinz could absorb the Blood Alliance’s forces.
‘Heinz…’
The man to whom she had entrusted every burden, because no matter what she tried, there had been no way to resolve things with her own power alone.
Now that Heterosis, the bloodline he had newly established on Earth, had effectively succeeded in swallowing the Blood Alliance, even the title of “leader of the moderate faction” had become meaningless.
Even so, thanks to the consideration of Jin Soran, Heterosis’s second-in-command, she had formed a crew with those who followed her and had been spending her days leisurely as usual…
‘I should warn Soran first.’
Rustle—
The moment she rose from her seat with a sigh, the fragments of the teacup and the tea that had littered the floor crumbled away and vanished.
It was an incident that occurred on the fourth day after the Hahoe Mask, which had been stirring up Japan, suddenly disappeared without a trace.
***
The Zepia Republic, which ruled the eastern part of the Ion Continent.
At the hour when the day began to darken.
Heinz II, master of both Earth’s Heterosis and Auterica’s Hybrid, stepped inside an old, shabby house on the outskirts of the capital.
However, even though he had walked openly down the street and entered through the front door in plain sight, neither the residents passing nearby nor even those inside the building noticed his presence.
Not until he closed the door he had opened and revealed himself again.
“…You’re late.”
When he dispelled “Denial of Existence” and showed himself, a cold female voice quietly rang out from deeper inside the building, as if it had been waiting for that moment.
“I arrived at the exact appointed time. As you know, I am quite a busy man.”
“Ha! I’m sure you are. As if swallowing one nation weren’t enough, you’re diligently reaching your hands into other places like this as well, so how could you not be?”
A middle-aged woman approached with sharp words, her heels clicking.
Kayla McClair, the vice president of the highly sensitive Zepia Republic, frowned as she looked up at his tall figure.
“That is also a misunderstanding. I have no interest in the Zepia Republic. What I want is solely to subjugate Obaifo.”
Heinz, wearing a cold smile, looked down at her with a haughty gaze and murmured in a low voice.
Kayla met that gaze boldly for a moment, but before long, the corners of her eyes trembled, and she bit her lip as she lowered her eyes.
‘To be honest, if I could eat it, I’d like to swallow it whole.’
However, this place was different from the Kingdom of Thalia, which ranked at the bottom of the continent in both scale and national power and only required him to put the ruling class in his grasp.
The Zepia Republic was a great power that could contend to some extent with the Azerion Empire bordering it to the west, and since it was nominally based on a republican system, the lukewarm method he had used before would not even come close to working.
‘Of course, it seems to be having some effect on Obaifo right now, but that won’t last long either.’
That was nothing more than a temporary issue that had occurred by taking advantage of the current chaotic situation on the continent and good timing.
As expected of people who had prepared for decades, they were proceeding with considerable thoroughness, but by now, those who had realized something was wrong at the top should be starting to move one by one.
‘Once things start going off, it’ll probably spread uncontrollably from there.’
In the process of resolving the problem, it would be inevitable for the nation to temporarily fall into a vacuum of governance, but in ordinary times, they would somehow have been able to patch it up.
However, the entire continent had now entered a wartime system—a national emergency.
On top of that, the mastermind seeking to overturn the world was still brazenly at large.
At this rate, the revolutionary would take advantage of the Republic groaning under internal strife to concentrate the giant invasion and the monster uprisings in the east, and the entire nation would be shaken as a result.
And if, in that state, Obaifo began making trouble again…
‘That’s practically the situation those bastards ultimately want.’
Not to rule the “Zepia Republic” in its intact state, but to rule the refugees of a nation that had fallen into anarchy and whose system had collapsed.
It was no different from finely mincing a lump too large to swallow whole, then devouring it.
‘…I can’t let them do that.’
He had no desire to seize a country reduced to such rags either.
It was already bothersome enough to manage the Kingdom of Thalia. There was no need to make his head ache further.
And if he was not going to eat it anyway, he had no intention of letting someone else eat it so easily.
Especially if that was what that revolutionary bastard wanted.
“Still, seeing as you’re alive until now, I suppose there haven’t been any major problems.”
“…Phew. There have been plenty of problems. In fact, it’s a wonder I’m alive right now. I never imagined even Commander-in-Chief O’Connell had been taken.”
A transcendent martial artist who guarded the border with the Empire, and a great man called Zepia’s guardian deity.
After receiving that tragic news while trying to contact him by any means possible, it had not been long before hidden attacks began to reach her in earnest as well.
“If I had been alone, I certainly would have died. I survived purely thanks to the guards you… Hybrid assigned to me. I suppose I should thank you again.”
Shhh—
No sooner had she finished speaking than a small shadow slipped from outside the building to inside in an instant and prostrated itself before Heinz.
A boy with white hair and red eyes.
It was Obor Brokoslak, a true-blood vampire who had been assigned as Vice President Kayla’s guard.
“You have arrived, High Lord! I was late because I was cleaning up the tails around us!”
“Good. How is progress?”
“All preparations have been completed smoothly. The Blood Gates have been deployed at each key point, and all mobilized combatants have finished readying themselves.”
A report on the matter followed.
The current situation, the enemy’s movements, and their plans from here on.
‘…What is this?’
But amid all that, Kayla, who was present, frowned at a sudden sense of incongruity.
…There was no particular problem with the conversation between lord and retainer itself.
It seemed something else was the cause, but it only grated subtly on her nerves, and she could not tell exactly what it was.
‘Is it just my imagination…?’
Troubled by that uneasy feeling, she instinctively turned her head to look around—
And when her eyes met something faint hiding in the darkness, she froze stiff where she stood.
Inside the shabby house she had entered to avoid pursuit.
In the darkness that had spread even inside the building with night’s approach, black silhouettes had at some point filled the place, standing silently.
‘Since when?!’
There were not just one or two of them, either.
So many that she could not understand how she had failed to notice them until now.
Not only that, but even at that very moment, while the lord and retainer were conversing, whenever her gaze shifted for an instant, the figures in the darkness continued to increase one by one.
Walls, windows, stairs, railings… even the ceiling.
And when the number of shadows that had multiplied in that way had already exceeded several dozen and approached a hundred—
“Good.”
At the voice imbued with a strange power that forcibly drew the attention of those around him, her gaze turned back to Heinz.
“Then, now that the preparations are finally complete…”
On his cold face, the same as ever, was a razor-sharp smile.
“To unite every vampire in this world under one rule—”
Shhh—
Sasaak—!
The sound of countless pieces of cloth fluttering all at once rang out.
And as nearly a hundred shadows prostrated themselves in unison, offering worship to their great monarch—
“—we begin the war.”
The war between vampires began.