Chapter 129: Dracula, You Wouldn't Want Me Doing This to Your Castlevania, Would You...
Castlevania. Top floor. Dracula's throne room.
"Tch. One step too late."
Ging watched something that had every appearance of being the final boss crumble to dust under a whip strike from the chain-whip user, and a rare expression of genuine regret crossed his face.
Castlevania's internal rules and construction were simply too interesting. He had gotten completely absorbed.
It wasn't just that the monster population came with their own rule system, the bare-hand damage and the touch-and-hurt-yourself mechanics. Every adventurer who stepped inside Castlevania was also passively brought under the corresponding rules.
The forced-backward-jump-and-phase state was particularly fascinating. Ging had even exploited it directly: deliberately jumping backward to make contact with an airborne monster, effectively creating a double jump that let him reach places no normal leap could have taken him. He arrived at the top floor having spent too long in the earlier areas experimenting, and by the time he got there at full speed, it was already over.
His working theory: Castlevania almost certainly had a structural core. Following game logic, that core was most likely the final BOSS, and as a direct consequence, once the core was destroyed, the entire Castlevania domain would cease to exist.
The principle wasn't so different from his conclusions about Greed Island.
Greed Island was built by eleven people: Ging Freecss, Razor, List, Elena, Eta, Done, and the others. But each person's area of responsibility was distinct. If Razor, who handled the Emission-type structural components including the intelligent NPC Nen beasts, were to die for some reason, everything inside Greed Island that depended on Emission-type ability maintenance would be severely degraded or stop functioning entirely.
And sure enough: the moment the chain-whip user drove one crack into the thing that looked like nothing so much as an enormous gargoyle, which every visual cue screamed was the final boss, the entire castle started to shake.
Two thoughts surfaced in Ging's mind simultaneously.
The first: being able to construct a Nen ability domain this vast, on par with a naturally occurring ruins site, from a single structural core. Genuinely enviable.
The second: Castlevania collapsed so fast. He had barely started enjoying it and now it was gone. Genuinely frustrating.
He had been here for less than half a day. And yet the targeted inspiration he had collected in that time was comparable in depth to everything he had accumulated over the past several years combined. He had a very strong urge to go back and sit down with Greed Island's development team to revise some of the rules.
Ging's visible frustration was noticeable enough that Kurapika, who had been stationed outside the BOSS room at Trevor's request and had not stepped inside throughout the entire fight, found himself taking a few extra glances.
And the longer he looked, the more familiar the face became.
That hair, stiff enough that it could practically scratch someone. And those features, which carried the shadow of someone Kurapika recognized. The image of a certain stubborn kid began forming in the back of his mind.
That can't possibly be a coincidence.
Kurapika hadn't heard much from Gon about his father's specific whereabouts, and talked himself out of it. There couldn't be that many things happening by coincidence at once.
Trevor came out of the BOSS room at a quick walk, looking thoroughly puzzled, and gestured for Kurapika to follow.
"Move! This place is coming down!"
His body was already doing what it needed to do, but Trevor's confusion had not cleared. It had gotten deeper.
The three-phase transformation, the soul-imprisoning evil power that came off it. There was no question it was Count Dracula. But somehow, having defeated it, Trevor didn't have that feeling of weight lifted, the sense of finally having put down a genuine evil.
If he had to pick one word to describe the Dracula he had just fought, it would be: lifeless.
But the castle shaking and collapsing around him was an undeniable fact, and Trevor set the confusion aside for now. Get out first. Think about it later.
The death of "Dracula" carried effects beyond just the structural earthquake. All the monster spawns that had been running continuously stopped. With the evil power sustaining them cut off, no more units generated. Others still in the castle picked up on the shift and began evacuating on instinct.
The reaction outside, though, was different from Trevor's confusion and Ging's frustration.
The adventurers and traveling merchants gathered outside the Grand Cemetery looked on with something closer to complete despair.
The kind of despair that comes from watching your money fly away right in front of you.
Especially the ones who had already made a profit over the past two days, decided to take out short-term loans, bought new goods and supplies, and committed to continuing to work the Castlevania perimeter market. Those people were now grey-faced to a person.
Without Castlevania, everything they had bought was dead inventory. That was worse than just being killed outright.
But what could they do? It had collapsed. It was collapsing. This process was not something any amount of personal conviction was going to stop.
So a large number of people, some perhaps unable to accept what was happening, some wanting to search through the rubble for something worth taking, some with other intentions entirely, gathered outside the Grand Cemetery and watched in silence or in noise as Castlevania was destroyed completely.
"If we'd known it would be this easy to clear, wouldn't it have been better to claim it exclusively for ourselves?"
Nobunaga, having escaped from the underground areas, shook out his loose, disheveled hair with undisguised dissatisfaction.
"Why go to all that trouble? Isn't it better to have someone else clear it for us? If whoever went inside actually came out with something valuable, we just kill them and take it."
Phinks, who had visibly fully processed Feitan's death and seemed to have returned to baseline, gave this answer with complete casualness.
"...Fair enough. Watch whoever comes out of Castlevania last, then."
Nobunaga shook his head with the air of someone who had just been reminded of an obvious truth.
"Is something wrong?"
Shizuku poked Machi in the shoulder with open curiosity.
Machi pressed her temples twice. Then gave her answer.
"Everything."
"Everything?"
The people around her had all heard it. They repeated the word almost in unison.
Same as always. Machi had no articulable reason to offer. Purely a feeling.
The last three to leave the Castlevania domain were Trevor, Kurapika, and Ging.
And so Castlevania was destroyed.
Yeah, no.
"Reset!"
Ross activated the once-per-natural-day Secret Realm stage reset permission without hesitation.
The next instant, a shadow spread across the entire Castlevania area. From a bird's-eye view it looked like a massive dark mirror laid flat against the ground. The surface showed only rubble where buildings had stood moments before. But the mirror held the complete image of Castlevania, intact.
Then, as everyone present watched in stunned silence, Castlevania grew back from beneath the shadow, solid and complete, replacing the collapsed ruins that had just finished falling.
And at the same moment, a notification appeared on Ross's screen.
[You have used Castlevania: Dracula's Curse Secret Realm Creator Authority to reset the Castlevania in the real world.]
[Dracula Vlad Tepes's control authority over Castlevania has permanently decreased by 5%.]
[Your control authority over Castlevania has permanently increased by 5%.]
[You may now make certain modifications to monster types, drop rules, and spawn frequency in the Castlevania Grand Cemetery area within the established parameters. The modification range can be extended to other Secret Realm stages where you hold Intermediate Access.]
[Whenever a monster unit in the Castlevania Grand Cemetery area kills or defeats an invader, there is a small chance of triggering the Navigation Arrow effect. This activation does not affect your main body's usage.]