Chapter 140: The Nostrad Family Just Got a Very Powerful Backer
The Nostrad crime family was, by any measure within organized crime, an insignificant operation.
In terms of standing, they were arguably outranked even by the Tarukane family, the one whose entire business model was imprisoning Yukina and selling Ice Tear Stones.
And yet the Nostrads had managed to wedge themselves into the circle of major crime bosses through one very specific service that only they could provide.
A divination service with a one hundred percent accuracy rate.
At a price that made most people flinch, the Nostrad family offered monthly divination readings to select criminal clients, each reading covering whatever events that client would encounter in the coming month.
Because the events were guaranteed to happen, any client who simply acted against the predictions could avoid the risks entirely. That was why people kept paying, despite the cost.
Of course, for every crime boss buying into the Nostrad family's service, there was another who wanted nothing to do with them, who saw a family that had started as a small rural outfit's errand runners as completely beneath them and refused to share a table.
Compared to the established powers in organized crime, the Nostrads had almost no real foundations. They had forced their way into the top tier through sheer wealth, pure upstart style, and even with the enormous sums flowing in from their clients, all that money spent arming and scaling up their operation couldn't buy them the depth that the genuine powers had accumulated over generations.
That gap was visible in the Nostrad family's head of security, Dalzollene.
He was a Nen ability user, but in terms of raw combat capability, the ceiling was roughly comparable to the pack occupying the Sky Arena's two hundredth floor. The rest of his hired staff were functional types, not worth counting on in a fight.
The family clearly couldn't afford to pay for anything stronger.
For most serious Nen ability users, money is just a number. What they actually want is the kind of thing money can't buy.
That fact fed directly into the anxiety of Nostrad family head Light Nostrad, because he understood better than anyone what his family actually was. He knew, with total clarity, that everything he currently had came from one source: his daughter.
Neon Nostrad. A natural-born Nen ability user. One hundred percent accurate divination.
Because of that, Light gave Neon more or less everything she wanted, while simultaneously keeping her under close watch. Within whatever constraints he could manage, her security was always maximized. And every month, he used himself as the divination subject, navigating his criminal enterprises carefully along whatever the reading indicated.
What his reading for this month had clearly failed to predict was the arrival of a being that could, in theory, qualify as the sixth great calamity, now standing outside his compound.
Neon had never trained her Nen ability in any formal sense. She thought of her divination as simply a superpower, nothing more. The ability also couldn't be used on herself, only on others.
When Neon was a child, she had seen a divination program on television. The host, who went by the stage name "Grandmother of the Galaxy," had said one thing that stayed with her: "Divination exists so that people who are working hard to live in the present can live a little more happily."
That line had shaped how Neon used her ability ever since. When she activated it, she instinctively focused on drawing out as much of the negative as possible, so the other person could use the reading to avoid bad outcomes. Positive information barely showed up in her readings, because good things didn't need to be known in advance.
From that angle, the fact that Light's reading for this month hadn't mentioned anything about a figure like Dracula showing up was, to put it carefully, something worth thinking about.
As a side note: the "Grandmother of the Galaxy" who had indirectly shaped the development of Neon's divination ability was arrested for fraud a few years later.
"This is so boring! So incredibly boring!!!"
In a bedroom of at least a hundred square meters, Neon Nostrad, slender and fragile-looking with the kind of beauty that carried a faint unhealthy edge, was rolling back and forth across her princess-pink bed in her pajamas, hair in complete disarray.
"Young miss, would you like to go shopping?"
One of the kimono-wearing maids was attempting to calm things down.
"No! I've already been to every mall in the city a hundred times! There's nothing interesting anymore!"
Half complaint, half tantrum, Neon flailed her limbs against the mattress for five or six seconds before stopping, tilting her head sideways to look at the maid.
"How long until the Yorknew City auction?"
"About four months, miss."
"AAAUGH! I hate this!!!"
After a brief windup, Neon went into full motion again, closer now to pure helpless rage.
The Yorknew City auction was the most significant event of its kind held annually, and it had already been generating buzz across various circles well ahead of time. As a collector of human oddities, Neon had already seen everything she wanted in the auction catalog.
The full-body mummy of Princess Corco. A tissue used by the famous actor Son Limach. And a Kurta clan scarlet eye.
All three had landed squarely in Neon's strike zone. She wanted them regardless of what it took.
Unfortunately, the auction was still four months away. For someone who usually got whatever she wanted the moment she wanted it, four months was a genuine kind of suffering.
Reason told her that getting anxious wouldn't change anything. But desire wasn't the sort of thing that went away just because you told it to, and Neon had been raised by her father to expect that everything she wanted was available immediately.
The maids were equally helpless, and equally unable to do anything about it.
But at that moment, without any warning, a darkness that was not a shadow and not a trick of the light seeped into the center of the room. Neon's face was buried in the mattress and she didn't notice a thing. The maids around her did. Every one of them went wide-eyed. Their bodies pulled toward screaming.
But just before the full force of the scream could break free, an invisible pressure closed around each of their throats. Their eyes went blank. One after another, they dropped.
The sound of bodies hitting the floor was what finally made Neon feel that something was wrong. She pushed herself upright and turned around to look.
And saw, stepping out of that indescribable darkness, a remarkably handsome older gentleman.
A remarkably handsome older gentleman with a small child, no older than ten or so, sitting contentedly in the crook of his arm.
The aristocratic bearing. The elaborate cape. The sheer presence of the man. Neon's mind stopped completely.
She had genuinely never seen a man this striking in her entire life.
The handsome gentleman stepped forward until he stood in front of Neon. He set the child gently to one side. Then he lowered himself to one knee before Neon, who was still sitting on the bed in a duck-sit, extended one hand, and spoke in a voice full of feeling.
"Lisa. I've come for you."
"...Who are you? What did you do to my maids?"
Back to herself now, Neon straightened up, hands on her hips, glaring at the uninvited lord of Castlevania with undisguised indignation.
30+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces