Chapter 174: Considerate
Sunlight poured straight down through the gaps between the hills, flooding the whole valley with harsh brightness. The camp smelled of blood and dust mixed together. A few torn tents were still trailing wisps of smoke against the clear blue sky.
Lucian moved toward Sebas and Touch Me, favoring his injured side.
Every step pulled at the wound where Gazok's club had connected. A dull, spreading ache moved from his left ribs into his chest, and he could feel the faint grind of bone on bone when he breathed.
He didn't slow down.
His mind was still replaying what had just happened.
The instant Touch Me's blade fell, space had cracked open.
The fracture had existed for less than a second before sealing itself, but the quality of it, the texture of something actually cutting through space, was almost identical to what Lucian knew from the World Champion class's exclusive abilities in YGGDRASIL. Only smaller in scale. Far smaller.
'Finally.'
After the elation, an enormous breath went out of him.
It had been worth it. Touch Me had shown the ability in front of Sebas. Everything Lucian had put into this moment had been worth it.
He had spent nearly all of his accumulated experience on granting Touch Me the [Dimensional Slash] Innate Ability, back when Touch Me was still very young. It had been an enormous cost.
The saving grace was that experience recovered much faster for someone from another world, once they resumed training. The rate of recovery far exceeded the rate of initial growth; it wasn't like YGGDRASIL, where losing levels meant grinding all the way back up the hard way.
That difference had saved Lucian considerable time. Even so, the cost he had paid was enormous. But the result was worth celebrating.
Sebas's reaction had been even stronger than Lucian had anticipated.
That old butler, who was as steady as a mountain in every circumstance Lucian had ever seen, was kneeling in the mud beside Touch Me with tears running down his face.
Even from a distance, Lucian could see all the different things moving through Sebas's expression at once, like someone had knocked over a painter's palette.
So it worked.
Lucian confirmed it in his own mind.
The approach had been correct from the beginning.
Sebas's attachment to his creator ran deep enough to make him set aside the composure and dignity of Nazarick's head butler entirely.
But Lucian still needed to confirm certain things.
He knew that for Nazarick's NPCs, the highest priority was the creator, above the guild and above the guild master. After transmigrating to this world, he had gone through the Theocracy's records on the Eight Kings' betrayal specifically to verify whether that setting held true in a real-world context.
When the Eight Kings broke apart, NPCs from various factions had followed their own creators.
The fact that NPCs had chosen their creators over the broader guild's interests in those accounts went a long way toward confirming the pattern.
But did that pattern hold universally?
Would Nazarick's members respond differently?
And how completely did Sebas actually believe that this was Touch Me reincarnated?
Even if he believed it entirely — how far would Sebas go, for the sake of Touch Me's reincarnation?
To answer these questions, Lucian needed to run a compliance test on Sebas.
Everything that came next in his decision tree depended on it.
He took a few more steps forward. The wound pulled, and he couldn't quite suppress the wince.
But then —
A massive shape launched past him from the side, moving at a speed that left Lucian well behind.
Gazok.
The wild boar chief had circled out of Lucian's field of vision at some point, and was now charging toward Touch Me at a speed completely at odds with his heavy frame. The look in those boar eyes was raw killing intent.
Gazok's reasoning was simple.
The guard captain's death had been caused by the attack from that collapsed human boy.
That impossible strike had shaken Gazok down to the bone.
The boy looked completely spent: weak, barely there. But the same boy had just been fighting with what looked like serious injuries and then erupted and killed someone at roughly Gazok's own level without warning.
Gazok had no intention of making the same mistake twice. He was going to eliminate this threat while it was down.
There was also the matter of practicalities. As the unit assigned to guard the rear against the Dragon Kingdom, Gazok had never actually seen the so-called "dragon." He had heard the accounts: powerful, disguised as a human old man. When Sebas appeared he had been genuinely startled for a moment.
But the beastman king had promised him the dragon would be handled through negotiation, kept occupied.
And besides —
What kind of dragon kneeled in the mud and wept like that?
Gazok blew a hard breath through his snout. His hooves hit the mud and kicked up a small spray of dirt.
A dragon with this sort of behavior, Gazok figured, was a dragon he could handle.
He charged forward with the intention of killing both Touch Me and Sebas together, then turning his full attention to the already-injured Lucian. Even with the guard captain gone, the beastman king's mission could still be completed.
The tusked club swung up and came down toward Touch Me.
The next instant —
Gazok's upper body became a cloud of blood.
He didn't even have time to scream.
That ugly boar head, the thick neck, and both shoulders were reduced to nothing in the same moment by a force that permitted no discussion.
The blood mist detonated outward in the air, like a dark red flower opening all at once.
The lower half of the club fell from the air and hit the ground.
Gazok's lower body was still standing where it had been.
Two thick wild boar legs supported the remaining half of a torso. The surface of the wound where his body had been separated was immaculate.
Then that half-body swayed twice and crashed to the ground.
Sebas was still kneeling. He had only extended one hand.
The punch he had just thrown was done in passing.
The blood mist from Gazok's destruction had been precisely deflected by the air displaced from Sebas's fist and blown in a direction away from Touch Me. Not a drop had landed on the boy.
Touch Me was half-conscious, his eyes barely open. He hadn't even registered what had happened.
Sebas had already withdrawn his fist and returned both hands to supporting Touch Me's body.
The tears were still on that lined face. Those eyes, so steady in every moment Lucian had seen them, had not moved from the boy in his arms.
Gazok, chief of the Fang Tribe, had not possessed the standing to make Sebas look away.
As though the entire world contained only one person.
Lucian had stopped walking.
He had been heading in that direction himself.
But his feet had come to a halt on their own.
He had seen the battlefield Sebas left behind before. Seeing it happen in real time was something different. The scale of it was startling even for someone who already knew.
Particularly given that, judging from what was left of the bodies, the force Sebas had used this time appeared to be greater than what he'd used when he broke the bear-beastman column.
Incredible.
Lucian let the thought pass through his mind without ceremony.
He looked at Sebas's face, still wet with tears.
And decided —
He would not disturb Sebas just yet.
Let the old butler have this reunion properly.
Lucian was not, after all, so purely transactional a person.
The compliance test was important, yes. But Sebas had finally gotten the moment he had been waiting for, and walking up and interrupting it immediately would be a bit much.
Lucian glanced at the remains of Gazok on the ground.
Then, in a gesture of genuine consideration, he quietly stepped back two paces and gave the two of them more space.
The Aindra cavalry soldiers around them had all been drawn to look in the same direction.
Several of the veterans who had seen the force of Sebas's punch were standing with their jaws open, staring, and not closing them.
"That's Sebas-sama's power?"
"One punch... he just... that entire wild boar chieftain..."
"That wild boar was going blow for blow with Lord Aindra not ten minutes ago..."
"Keep your voices down."
The murmuring was low, but Lucian caught it.
He didn't give it much thought. Being stunned by Sebas's power was a perfectly reasonable reaction. He himself was genuinely nowhere near Sebas's level and had no illusions about it.
Since he wasn't planning to disturb Sebas and Touch Me for now, Lucian found himself with a moment of unexpected peace, and his mind drifted to dinner.
He committed to memory the faces of the few veterans who had spoken. They had worked hard today. They were getting extra rations tonight.
Settled. Roast goose legs. Marinated in green vegetable brine, all natural.
He shelved the thought.
Lucian's gaze moved past Sebas and Touch Me to the beastmen still fleeing in the distance.
The remaining wild boar beastmen and lion-beastmen were scattering like ants from a disturbed nest, streaming toward the grey hills beyond the camp. The smarter lion-beastmen had started running the moment Sebas appeared. Their weapons were scattered across the ground behind them. A few who hadn't moved fast enough tripped over the bodies underfoot, looked back to confirm no one was chasing, and stumbled on.
Their chiefs were dead. The enemy's strength was beyond anything they could answer. They knew it.
Lucian didn't order a pursuit.
Not officially.
He turned his head and caught Germann's eye.
Germann's eyes lit up. A grin spread across his face, silent and immediate. He gave Lucian a small nod, then slipped out of the formation without a sound.
He walked slowly, the way someone might go behind the camp to relieve himself.
But a careful observer would have noticed that the direction Germann was drifting matched, roughly, the direction of the retreating beastmen.
His shape disappeared behind the half-collapsed fence at the camp's edge. A handful of old veterans followed, equally quiet.
Lucian turned back.
He wasn't worried about Germann. Chasing routing soldiers wasn't a high-risk operation. And he wasn't especially concerned with the results either.
Plenty of their comrades had died under those beastmen's weapons. Giving the domain's cavalry a chance to answer that was the real purpose.
The primary objective for coming to the Dragon Kingdom had already been achieved. The beastman nation's fate, at this point, was secondary.
Lucian's gaze returned to Sebas and Touch Me.
The old butler was still kneeling. Both hands were on Touch Me's shoulders, and a glow of ki moved through his palms and spread across the boy's wounds.
Touch Me's face was pale, fine beads of sweat across his forehead.
But under Sebas's treatment he had come back to consciousness.
"Touch Me-sama, how are you feeling?" Sebas's voice was slightly urgent, though he was working to slow it for Touch Me's sake.
"I..." Touch Me's voice came out rough. "I'm fine, Sebas-sama. I'm alright."
He pushed himself up onto one arm, trying to sit up. Sebas immediately supported his back, handling him with the care of someone steadying something that could break.
Once he had settled upright, Touch Me didn't look at his own injuries.
His head came up immediately, and those deep blue eyes swept quickly across the camp.
"Leno..." The urgency in Touch Me's voice was impossible to hide. "What happened to Leno?"
Sebas's hands paused.
Leno.
The name was unfamiliar to him.
The elation and joy that had been filling that lined face only moments before gave way to a faint, quiet confusion and something that looked almost like a small, private hurt.
Sebas looked toward Lucian, hoping for an answer.
Lucian felt the gaze.
He was silent for a moment. Then he shook his head slowly.
Touch Me saw it too.
The color that had just begun to come back into the boy's face drained away again in that instant.
Sebas looked at Touch Me's expression and felt something close around his own chest.
Is the wound still not healed? he thought with sudden urgency. Or is there an internal injury I haven't found?
The old butler didn't pause to think further. His free hand was already moving into his coat.
He produced a glass bottle.
The body of it was crystal-clear, the liquid inside swaying gently, giving off a soft luminescence in the light.
Lucian recognized what Sebas had taken out.
A healing potion.
Not the ordinary variety that circulated on the open market.
From the quality of the glass and the color of the liquid, this was a mid-grade YGGDRASIL healing potion.
Perhaps nothing remarkable by Nazarick's treasury standards, but this was almost certainly among the highest-grade supplies Sebas would have been carrying on his person.
Sebas tilted the bottle carefully.
"Touch Me-sama. A little more."
His voice dropped low, with something in it that was close to a plea.
Touch Me didn't refuse.
He didn't even seem to register what Sebas was doing.
The boy's gaze had fixed on the place where Leno had fallen, and the light in those deep blue eyes was going out, degree by degree.
Sebas watched Touch Me's eyes, and that inexplicable private hurt in his own chest grew heavier.
But Sebas didn't stop.
One bottle wasn't enough. He produced a second.
Then a third.
He was pouring healing potions onto Touch Me without keeping count.
Lucian stood at a slight distance and watched the crystal bottles catch the sunlight over and over, and quietly estimated their value. He landed on a figure that was approximately enough to buy half a townhouse in the royal capital's central district.
He watched Sebas's bearing, that complete and utter "I would empty Nazarick's entire medical stores without a second thought if it meant Touch Me-sama made a full recovery" bearing, and felt the corner of his mouth twitch involuntarily.
Lucian almost felt a moment of sympathy for the frugal and long-suffering Ainz.
Sebas appeared to be working through his entire personal supply.