152. Intersections (1)
The decisive battle is near.
It won’t be long before I kill all four Heavenly Kings, destroy the dungeon, and face Draken in a one-on-one battle.
Of course, the gap between Draken and me is still vast.
Just by entering the other world, I become almost incapable of fighting.
I can barely hold on because of my enhanced mental strength, but if other guys were to enter, they would become useless without fail or, like Transylvania, they would tremble at the mere mention of Draken’s name.
In order to increase my chances of winning, I have no choice but to lure him out of his home ground.
Dimensional Converter, Spear of Longinus.
I will use these to drag Draken into the dimensional gap and fight him there.
I don’t know when that decisive battle will suddenly come.
I have to hurry and complete the Spear of Longinus as soon as possible.
There is only one part left.
It’s the navigator that will adjust the dimensional coordinates.
Before I go to get it.
“Oh my······.”
“It’s completely broken.”
First, I stopped by the Clockwork City.
When I opened the door of the mansion with Kern, we were greeted by none other than Linda with a hole in her chest.
It seemed that she had pierced her outer shell with her own hand and crushed the engine.
“Do you have any idea why Linda is like this?”
“What do you expect? You don’t think I can read her mind just because I’m the one who made her, do you? She’s no different from a human now. You shouldn’t ask the one who made her, but the scene of the incident.”
That’s right.
There’s no way Linda would have a self-destruct function.
Linda made the decision to stop functioning on her own.
Kern is not Linda’s father who gave birth to her and raised her, so there’s no point in asking him.
“Was there an attempted hack?”
“That’s nonsense. How could a clockwork doll be hacked? It’s made of a perfect closed circuit. To hack Linda, you would have to tamper with the circuit directly······.”
While opening Linda’s lid and examining the inside, Kern froze.
With his mouth open.
Kern’s eyes widened and he spoke in a trembling voice.
“The circuit is deformed······.”
“Someone must have broken in. I’ll collect footprints and fingerprints.”
“No. No. It wasn’t someone else who deformed it. This is······ Linda deformed it herself.”
“What do you mean?”
“She used the fuel that was supposed to be injected into the engine, in other words, magic power, to deform the circuit herself.”
“······.”
My head hurts.
Linda became like this on the night when ‘some kind of change’ happened all over the world.
I came to my own conclusion that the phenomenon was to return the monsters to ‘normal’.
The monsters were weakened.
The Unidentified regained the Blessing of Oblivion.
But why did Linda suddenly experience a circuit deformation?
‘She’s the one that Draken had his eyes on enough to offer her to be one of the Four Heavenly Kings. It’s not strange for Linda to be treated specially.’
Did Draken try to take control of Linda, but failed because she chose to stop functioning?
That possibility seems the most likely.
If the function stop had failed and Linda had fallen into Draken’s hands······.
“Ha······.”
It’s creepy just to imagine.
Right now, Linda is acting as a relay station that connects me with information and contacts from all over the place.If I had allowed Draken to distort all of that, I would have fallen into the Four Heavenly Kings’ trap without a second thought.
Just like Belphegor fell into the trap with me.
It’s creepy.
“Can you fix it?”
“What do you think I am? I’ll try to fix it within a month.”
“Why does it take so long?”
“Because I have to redesign it so that the magic flowing into the engine doesn’t leak into the circuit. If an expert says so, I have to do it.”
“······.”
It seems like Linda’s repairs will take a long time.
It means that it won’t be able to act as a relay station for at least a month······.
I need someone to replace it.
“Kern. While you’re repairing it, can you collect the letters that come here and send me the contents through the communicator?”
“You want me to play the role of a go-between? I don’t have any interest in watching you and the girls flirt, so stop it.”
“It’s not like that. It’s important, so please do me a favor.”
“Okay, I understand. But, um······. The communicator is broken too. Tsk.”
Kern clicks his tongue as he rummages through Linda’s insides.
The communicator is broken too.
That’s why the relay station is out of service.
“How long will it take to fix that?”
“It will probably take about a month too. What do you want to fix first? The communicator? Or Linda?”
“Hmm······. Please fix Linda first.”
“Okay.”
Linda takes priority.
If I fix Linda first, I’ll be able to hear what happened.
It’s a bit scary that I won’t be able to receive any contact for the next month because the communicator is broken, but it’s something I have to endure.
I can’t just stay in the Clockwork City for over a month, afraid of what will happen if I can’t be contacted.
Now is the time to move quickly.
“I’ll be back in a month.”
“I’ll do that. But······. Your sister. She seems more lively than before.”
“······Not my sister. My older sister.”
From Noble mtl dot com
Mijung, who is holding my arm and making a V sign.
However, her smiling expression is still unfamiliar, so it’s still awkward.
“Yes, well. I guess you could say it’s a relationship improvement. There were all sorts of things that happened.”
“That’s good to see. There may be some who don’t like it, but don’t worry too much about it. She may look like that, but she’s actually older than you, so there’s no problem. I’m rooting for you.”
“Yes. Well, thank you.”
“······Huh?”
Kern pats me on the shoulder and smiles with a slightly trembling expression.
I don’t know what he’s talking about.
For now, I just gave him a vague answer since it sounded like a compliment.
Who would dislike us?
I thought about it again, but I couldn’t understand it at all.
“But what is this thing?”
“This? What should I say? It’s like a pet spider.”
“A pet······ spider······?”
Kern frowns as he looks down at Myeong.
The term “pet spider” seems a bit strange.
However, the intelligence of spiders is surprisingly high, comparable to that of cats or dogs.
Of course, apart from that, Myeong seems to have the intelligence of a human······.
“Look.”
“Wow······.”
“It even makes a sound! It’s a strange spider.”
When I stroke its head with my little finger, Myeong melts away, making a purring sound.
I found it creepy at first, but now I find it quite cute.As I petted it so often, it now clings to my finger and makes a fuss to be petted first.
“Hoo. hehehe.”
“Ugh, that little thing. It’s not even a dog······.”
Moony, who rolls around my finger and makes cute noises.
Now it’s completely flipped over on its back and tickling my finger with its four pairs of legs, begging to be petted.
I lightly pressed Moony’s belly, which made a gurgling sound.
“Ooh······ Ugh······.”
“······?”
A white liquid-like substance gurgled and spurted out a little from its anus.
I realized what it was after touching the sticky stuff.
This is spider silk.
“You can finally spin spider silk! That’s great!”
“hehehe!”
Moony proudly raised its head and showed off.
I put Moony on my hand and rinsed it.
It had been whining as if it was constipated for a while now, but it was practicing to shoot spider silk.
Moony is quite big now.
It’s growing from a baby spider to an adult spider.
It hasn’t been long since I started raising it, but I’m still proud of it.
Moony licked my finger with spider silk on it and ate the spider silk.
It takes a lot of energy to spin spider silk, so it is said that spiders ingest it when they retract the spider silk and convert it into nutrients.
It seems to be a healthy individual, judging by the fact that its instincts are working properly.
“Well······ It’s cute······. But do you often hear that your tastes are peculiar in many ways?”
“No. Not really.”
“······.”
Kern looked at Moony and Miso alternately and looked at me with a sympathetic look.
My tastes are perfectly normal.
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Anyway, since the communicator with Linda is broken and we lost contact, it wouldn’t be bad to visit a remote area while we’re at it.
The destination is the San Francesco Sea Fortress.
It is a fortress located on a small rocky island in the vast ocean.
Since it is a rocky island, it is impossible to be self-sufficient because farming is not possible.
It is also small, so only three or four ships can be anchored at a time.
No matter how you look at it, the useless-looking sea fortress is used for research.
In order to continuously monitor and study the underwater, it is better to have a fixed land than a swaying ship.
Above all, it is said that most of the researchers suffer from severe seasickness.
Of course, if it was a peaceful underwater creature research, there would be no need to build a sea fortress······.
The problem is that the research subjects are dangerous creatures such as sea dragons and sky whales.
The entire island could be wiped out by a sea dragon if they were to slack off on their guard, so they had no choice but to build a sturdy fortress.
The last part that will serve as the navigator for Longinus’ Spear is in this San Francesco Sea Fortress.
No, strictly speaking, it’s not there yet······.
It will be there by the time I go, so it’s not a wrong statement.
“I’ll have to wait here until the supply ship arrives.”
Finally arrived at the port city of Lyon on the west coast of the Kingdom of Gallia.
It is a bustling trading city where large and small ships come and go endlessly.
San Francesco is an island that cannot be self-sufficient, so it needs regular supplies, and the supply ship is set to come and go once every two weeks.The supply ship loaded with supplies stopped at Liang for a day’s rest before heading to San Francisco.
Two days later, the supply ship will arrive at Liang.
Two days is more than enough time.
It’s enough time to clear about ten dungeons near here.
‘I haven’t had much to do in the Kingdom of Gallia. Why don’t I take this opportunity to defeat the black dungeons in a row?’
The black dungeons on the side of the Holy Kingdom are now virtually extinct.
However, there are still several black dungeons remaining on the side of the Gallia Empire.
Since I have to leave in two days, I can’t go around the country.
I’m thinking of just defeating the dungeons near Liang.
“Let’s start with this one.”
I chose the closest dungeon.
Until then, I didn’t think much of it.
However, the moment I stepped inside the dungeon.
I felt a cold chill wash over me, and I realized that something was wrong.
[The monsters in the dungeon are strengthened by the blessing of the Saintess Jill.]
[The monsters in the dungeon have a weak poison due to the curse of the witch Julia.]
[The dungeon is cold due to the grudge of the Frost Lord Yerina.]
It was wrong, very wrong.
finally the prologue…