61 — Chapter 61

“…F-Father. …What I mean to say is, that… I understand now that the reason you were heading to the marsh night after night was to study the Demon Moths. And your order not to burn them was because using ultrasonic waves was more rational. Knowing that—just knowing that—has truly made me so happy…!”

“Y-yes, that’s right…! Setting aside whether your research had fully come to fruition or not, your true intent—to drive away the moths as safely as possible—was one entirely befitting a Lord. Just knowing that has saved our hearts more than you can imagine…! Father, I’d like to award you a ‘Golden Trophy of the Heart’!”

“Please stop… receiving words that sound like something a principal says to a student who came in dead last on sports day is…”

Jonas muttered under his breath in response to his children’s desperate attempts to console him.

Deborah and Kevin wore “I’ve messed up” expressions.

Lucas and the others couldn’t think of anything to say either, so they simply offered Jonas supportive glances for the time being—but then,

“Setting aside any ‘Golden Trophies,’ is it not true that the neutralization of these Demon Moths is entirely due to Lord Jonas’s achievements?”

The very person who had just elegantly crushed Jonas’s spirit spoke up with a perfectly straight face.

“Normally, I hear that Demon Moth wings carry a brownish hue. However, the Demon Moths of Frenzel are green. This is surely because Lord Jonas utilized the Demon Insects living in that marsh to alter the moths’ body color and constitution, is it not?”

“…!”

At that remark, Jonas’s eyes snapped wide.

He stared at Elma intently, then asked in a low voice, “You noticed…?”

Elma gave a small nod.

“Yes. When I discovered the miasma-tinged euglena in the estate’s garden, their properties caught my attention.”

She answered flatly.

“What do you mean…?”

To the visibly confused Deborah, Elma explained without a change in expression.

“The euglena I had you drink the other day, Lady Deborah. I mentioned that they carried a faint trace of miasma. Their growth was terrifyingly robust, and they possessed a detoxifying effect so strong it would be unthinkable under normal circumstances. Since you, Lady Deborah, were able to flush out every toxin in your body in an instant after just one sip, I considered that by ingesting those Demon Insects, even the Demon Moth poison might be neutralized.”

The presence of miasma-tinged Demon Insects in a pond where a Miasma-Weak daughter was supposed to be.

The suspiciously high growth rate of the euglena for a natural occurrence.

The fact that they inhabited a backyard that was hidden from public view and close to Jonas’s private room.

Elma, who had felt a nagging curiosity about these points, had woken up early this morning to give the euglena from the pond to the Demon Moth she had captured yesterday.

The Demon Moth had eaten them as if they were familiar food.

And from nowhere within that moth—including the scales it had released yesterday—could any poison or miasma be detected.

“…”

Deborah and the others gasped at the unexpected revelation.

But now that it was pointed out, even though such a massive swarm had invaded, and they were breathing air that surely contained scales, they felt no respiratory distress at all.

Confused, Deborah pressed a hand to her forehead.

“But… ten years ago, I certainly collapsed after inhaling the scales…”

“Yes. And likely using that as a catalyst, Lord Jonas began his research. The toxicity of the scales drifting through the territory should have decreased year by year.”

“Now that you mention it…”

For the past several years, Deborah had not collapsed once.

She had simply shut herself inside the estate and neglected her own health so thoroughly that she hadn’t noticed.

On behalf of the stunned Deborah, Elma turned back to Jonas.

As if simply confirming the facts, she asked:

“The marsh that people rumor to be swarming with Demon Insects and filled with miasma. Were you not raising euglena there, feeding them to the Demon Moths, and proceeding with the detoxification of the moths within the territory? The euglena in the backyard pond were the test subjects for that experiment. Am I correct?”

The commoners held their breath.

They never imagined that Jonas, whom they had cursed as a gloomy Lord and a heretic who had fallen to evil, had been doing such a thing.

However, if it were true, he had been continuing his research for years for their sake, even while enduring unjust slander.

Erich and the others watched Jonas intently, their breathing shallow.

Eventually,

“…That is correct.”

Jonas nodded with a low murmur.

His voice was raspy, for some reason sounding like a defendant having their crimes laid bare.

“The research to detoxify the moths using Demon Insects, and the research to drive them away using ultrasonic waves. I was pursuing those two as the two wheels of the same carriage.”

That task should normally be a duty a Lord takes pride in.

However, as Lucas watched Jonas speak with such cautious concealment, he suddenly felt a sense of dissonance.

Jonas had pushed forward with research to protect his territory even while being shunned by his people and his own family. Given that he possessed such a strong sense of responsibility and such a brilliant mind, why had it never occurred to him to simply inform the people of his research? Had he done so, he could have immersed himself in his experiments quite openly.

Furthermore, why had he focused his efforts on “detoxification” and “driving them away” through constitutional changes and sound waves, rather than developing a quicker way to simply “kill” the Demon Moths?

Elma had prattled on about being “clean” or “cost-effective,” but such things could only be said by a girl with her otherworldly capabilities. Normally, when faced with a pest, a person would think of extermination long before constitutional improvement.

Was he trying that hard to avoid harming the Demon Moths…?

There had to be something more this Lord was hiding.

But the moment Lucas narrowed his eyes in suspicion—

“By the way…”

Elma, who had been absent-mindedly staring at the ground while following Jonas’s downcast gaze, suddenly spoke up.

“How should we handle these eggs?”

“Ah.”

The surrounding crowd snapped back to reality at her remark.

In the fields before them, a massive amount of branches infested by eggs and their mycelium still lay scattered about. While the adults had been detoxified, it seemed the ecology of these eggs remained unchanged. The branches were rotting and melting away miserably; that entire section of the vineyard—which should have been at its most bountiful time of year—had lost all its color.

Erich and the others, who had been busy oscillating between the excitement of the successful extermination and being moved by the Lord’s true intent, fell into a somber silence as they were confronted with the cruel reality.

They were lucky the damage was limited to this much given the scale of the swarm. However—at the very least, Erich and his men were facing a harsh winter.

The Frenzel family members each spoke to Erich and the workers.

“This is the responsibility of my family for failing to prevent the egg-laying. I promise that we will compensate you for the lost branches.”

“We will take responsibility for incinerating the egg-laden branches before the Demon Moths regain their senses. Leave it to us.”

“Please, all of you should go and rest well today.”

Each spoke with a level of compassion and responsibility that would have been unthinkable from them before today.

The commoners looked at one another, prepared to accept the offer with expressions that were a mix of tears and smiles—but—

“Please wait a moment.”

Elma called a halt to the proceedings.

Perhaps because the danger of them breaking had passed, she slid her glasses back on with a click, making the lenses glint. Then, radiating an aura of absolute seriousness, she asked:

“What do you mean by ‘compensation’? And why has the conversation turned to incinerating the eggs?”

“Huh?”

The siblings and their father knit their brows in confusion at Elma’s question.

However, Elma spoke with utter earnestness.

“The field trip isn’t over until you’re back home. Disaster recovery isn’t over until you’re happy. Simply making up for the branches the eggs rotted… can such a half-baked extermination even be called ‘pest control’?”

“Uh, well…”

Before the bewildered group, Elma pushed up the bridge of her glasses.

“Gaining back more than you lost—beating the odds to actually turn a profit greater than the damage to the fields—now that is what constitutes a ‘normal’ pest control job, isn’t it?”

Just what world’s ‘normal’ are you talking about?!

Miraculously, the silent scream in everyone’s hearts became one.