✦ ✦ ✦
I should try some too.
“Oh, father! Try this black curry I made! I simmered the ingredients for days and also added a secret spice!”
“No, you should have my golden curry! It’s made with a mix of golden spices I concocted myself!”
“Um...”
I’d just gone to grab some chicken curry, but Arcia and Lu slid in and held out a plate each toward me.
So, um... Do I have to eat these? Well, just one or two bites shouldn’t kill me...
What? I had to eat it all?
“Which was more delicious?!”
Here we go again...
Somehow, I’d finished both plates and now the two were hounding me for an opinion. They were both delicious! So delicious that I couldn’t decide which was better!
To be honest, I wasn’t so culinary-minded that I could determine the small differences. If I had to pick, Arcia’s was easier to eat, but that could also have been because I had Lu’s curry second, so I might have just been full. If I’d eaten Lu’s first, I’d probably have felt the opposite. Though, the idea of it being easy to eat had nothing to do with whether it tasted nice or not.
“Umm, I’d say this is a draw...”
“Then I’ll decide it with this pineapple curry!”
“I’ll decide it with this dry-curry-stuffed squid!”
They each whipped out another plate of curry.
Hang on, I don’t have to eat more, do I?
Perhaps I made a mistake asking them to prepare this curry party when all I wanted to do was cheer up Yakumo.
I should’ve asked Crea...
If there was no real conclusion to this, then I’d be stuck eating curry forever, but if I chose one or the other, things would definitely get messy.
In the end, I ate so much curry that I felt ill and fell right asleep. The result of the match? I was unconscious, so I have no clue.
✦ ✦ ✦
Since the day of the great calamity that befell Isengard—no, the world—their country had ceased contact with Lassei to the north and Gardio to the east, both in a political and geographical sense. The cursed thorns that rained down from the heavens and wedged themselves into the earth destroyed the rocks, rotted the soil, and drastically changed Isengard’s surrounding topography.
The land leading to Lassei and Gardio sank to the bottom of the sea, turning Isengard into a small isolated continent. To the north, close to the Lassei borders, there was a lake connected in the shape of a large and small circle, like a little snowman. The two cursed thorns that had fallen there gouged out the earth and water from a nearby river flowed into the lake, creating a much bigger one.
The huge lake, which was about half the size of Eashen, had been nicknamed Lake Calamity. Though the lake was formed by river water flowing into it, it had now become an eerie bright red. However, unlike the red tides caused by abnormal plankton growth, this water was the sharp color of blood.
Perhaps because the curse had seeped into it, no live fish were anywhere to be found. The surrounding areas had become a wasteland, a lake of death where not a single person or plant could be seen.
In the middle of that lake, hovering about ten meters above the water’s surface, was Gould with his gold wings. He was holding some small seeds that he sprinkled down into the lake.
“Wachstum,” Gould muttered as he held his hand over the lake’s surface. Several branches sprung out of the water, growing in the blink of an eye. The branches and roots of the trees grew at an abnormal rate, forming a complex web of shapes.
When the trees finally halted their growth, what was left standing there was a stronghold made of a forest standing in the middle of the red lake.
“So this is the green crown’s crown skill, Vegetative Dominion...”
The man who had spoken those words with a sigh was the plague-mask man, hovering behind Gould with a jetpack. When Gould descended into the plant fortress, the Maestro—no, Scarlet—did the same.
“Put up a barrier immediately. We need to buy time until Porta is ready.”
“All right, leave that to me,” Scarlet said as he pulled out his metallic red rapier and stabbed it into one of the roots. “Summon them, Crimson.”
Several red magic circles appeared in front of him, from which Four-Armed Gollems and Fishmen came crawling out. Following them came a bunch of machinery and magic tools that the summoned beings carried and began assembling.
In no time at all, tall lightning rods were set up on all sides of the tree fortress. Once they were activated, a barrier formed around them.
“Losing the Ark was less than ideal, but thankfully, many of our materials were salvageable from the seafloor. Let us build another factory right away so we can return to our production of the Kyklops.”
Scarlet designated a part of the fortress and began building a mountain of materials. The Four-Armed Gollems once more began to build.
“Schnell.”
Gould sent down one of his gold feathers, and when it lodged into the construction site, the Gollems and Fishmen in a large range around it began moving at a much faster pace. This was the power of the black crown; the penalty was big, so he couldn’t use it too often, but he had no intention of holding back if it would help him move closer to his goal.
“Just wait...I’ll definitely fix this twisted world...”
Deep within Gould’s—Chrom Ranchesse’s—camera eyes were the flames of a terrifying obsession.