17

Dinarts suggested to Rubelmel that if she wanted to drink it that badly, he could have someone bring her a new lemonade, but Rubelmel stopped him with her hand.

Then Rubelmel tried to take the glass from Darius, but her hand slipped, and she spilled the lemonade on the floor.

The glass broke, and the lemonade spread beneath the table.

“Oh my, I’ve done it now. I seem to have shown you a careless side of myself.”

“H-hey. What are you doing, Rubelmel-san? Damn it, I’ll have them bring a new one, so don’t touch the glass. You’ll hurt yourself.”

Dinarts showed an unexpectedly kind side, but Rubelmel shook her head.

“It is quite all right, Dinarts-san. This alone is enough.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

When Darius stood up, Rubelmel stood up at the same time.

Dinarts looked up at the two of them with a blank expression.

“Water energy gives rise to wood energy.”

Rubelmel quietly wove those words.

At the same time, the floor began to rumble, centered on the place where she had spilled the lemonade.

“Wh-what is this? An earthquake?”

Dinarts and his companions lowered their bodies and looked around as if enduring the tremors.

Even so, there was no sign of the shaking stopping, and it gradually grew more intense.

Then the floor cracked, and a thick trunk emerged from the ground.

“Magic!? …Rubelmel, you used magic!!”

Only then did Dinarts finally realize that Rubelmel had chanted something.

“Yes, this is my magic, Dinarts-san.”

Even as Rubelmel answered with a smile, the wooden serpent raced through the warehouse and surrounded Dinarts and the others.

They tried to cut the trunk with weapons in hand, but their blows were repelled, and there was no sign of it being cut at all.

“What the hell is this!? Weren’t you supposed to lend us your strength!!”

Except for Rubelmel and Darius, every man was wrapped up by the serpent and could no longer escape.

“Yes, I will lend it to you. However, the goal is the success of the plan. The people who devised the plan, Dinarts-san and the rest of you, do not really matter. …After all, you failed.”

Rubelmel looked at them with eyes filled with contempt, completely different from before.

“That’s why I said we’ll do it properly this time!”

“How much credibility do those words of yours have?”

“What!?”

Darius poured wine into a glass, took one sip into his mouth, then spat it onto the ground.

Then he twisted his face.

“…As I thought, this is foul. I’m amazed you could drink such inferior wine. It seems you cannot tell the difference between aging and rotting. Well, perhaps filthy water like this suits someone whose very nature has rotted.”

“Lord Darius, I cannot let that one pass so easily. I was drinking it too, after all.”

“Your sense of taste has simply gone stupid. Don’t worry about it.”

“Umm… That was not a defense, you know?”

Rubelmel picked up the glass Darius had poured and drank down the remaining wine.

She tilted her head and murmured, “Is it really that bad?” but Darius was no longer looking at Rubelmel.

“I have judged that your words have no value. And when someone like you, whose words are worthless, speaks of success, it reeks too badly for me to bear hearing it.”

“And so, we thought there would be a far higher chance of success if we took action ourselves.”

“What the hell are you talking about!”

Dinarts struggled inside the serpent, but there was no sign that he could escape.

“Only recently, I have come to value the weight and worth of words. I learned firsthand just how much compensation is needed to make others obey. That is why, for a time, I was impressed by you for making others obey.”

Darius took in everyone restrained and immobilized by the serpent, including Dinarts, with his eyes.

“But when the lid was opened, you turned out to be hopeless scum.”

“You people are the same as us, aren’t you! That’s why you’re here too!”

“I have no intention of pretending to be a good man. What I am about to do is not so different from what you did. If there is one difference, it is only that the words I give to others carry a clear price.”

Darius took a breath and wove his words.

The power born from his wish and desire. Sorcery.

“Limit Release: Golden Word.”

Thin, transparent threads hung down from the air.

They coiled around the bodies of Dinarts and his companions, tangling around them.

Some swung swords, and others struggled to bite through the threads, but they could not interfere with them at all.

With no weight, no sensation, and no resistance at all, the eerie threads wrapped around their limbs.

“You will take responsibility for blowing up the warehouses. This time, to make sure there is no failure, you will watch the gunpowder explode with your own eyes from close by.”

“H-hey… What are you saying, Darius?”

Darius’s words and the eerie threads hanging from the air. Dinarts understood that this was not simple magic like the kind Rubelmel had used.

Something that was not magic. A tremendous chill that he had never felt from magic. A great amount of sweat burst out across Dinarts’s back.

“Is that all it costs? You are surprisingly cheap. Or perhaps it is precisely because you people make light of words that you come so cheaply?”

Darius told Rubelmel, “You can release the magic now.”

Rubelmel smiled and replied, “Is that so?” Then the thick trunks that had restrained Dinarts and the others quietly decayed and vanished.

Even though Dinarts should have been able to move now, his body would not obey him at all.

“Wh-what is this! Hey! What the hell is going on!”

They slowly walked toward the warehouse entrance.

Without avoiding the tables or objects in front of them, they advanced while crashing into them and knocking them over.

Even when tables toppled and glasses and ornaments broke, they stepped on them and kept walking without concern.

“This is a joke, right, Darius!? This, no way, there’s no way this is happening!”

The men each shouted loudly and tried to resist, but it meant nothing.

“This will be an addition, but it cannot be helped. If they walk outside like this, they will be discovered immediately.”

Darius decided to silence Dinarts and the others with Golden Word.

More threads hung down from the air, wrapping around the men’s mouths and jaws, forcibly closing them shut.