Chapter 117

I didn’t realize it until now, but the Archipelago Fog was a paradise.

The skinhead elf made curses spill from my mouth without me even trying.

The skinny orc filled my heart with a grand feeling.

And the dwarf, cloaked in a robe as black as a dark sorcerer, made me grateful to be alive once more.

“Ugh, I don’t wanna work—”

When has there ever been a lazy dwarf in this world?

Look at that tiny dwarf holding a staff instead of a hammer, radiating a pitch-black aura.

This right here is cultural subversion, reverberation, and independence.

“Hahahaha! I’m going mad! Even for a hallucination, this is quite the deranged spectacle.”

Dajin, dormant in my right hand, could only erupt in laughter at the sight of a dwarf wielding a staff and casting dark magic.

I walked towards the dwarf cloaked in midnight robes and clutching a slender staff, as if spellbound.

“Hey! Hey?! You know it’s a trap! Why are you going? There’s no way a dwarf like that exists!”

Shion tugged at my robe, yelling into my ear.

“That’s a foolish question.”

“……What?”

“I’m approaching because there’s no way he could exist.”

“That’s insane! Lirr, don’t you have anything to tie him up with?”

“You cannot stop me. I am a rebel against this world, a voice for all the outcast…”

“Just shut him up! Damn it, what’s wrong with this guy!”

* * *

A cerulean sky unfurls. A faint sunset clings to the distant horizon.

At the heart of the mist sprawls a colossal graveyard.

A scene so bizarre, it forces the word from your lips.

The thickly layered fog embraces its surroundings with effortless grace, and the sunset in the distance remains frozen in time. The tombstones scattered everywhere are devoid of any inscription. Only the vivid crosses, as if freshly carved yesterday, stand guard.

“…In the end, I couldn’t even exchange a single word with the dwarf.”

“Because it was a hallucination.”

“It certainly was hallucinatory.”

“No, I mean it was *just* a hallucination.”

Lir tapped my head with her finger, asking me over and over if I’d lost my mind.

“How could I be in my right mind after letting something like that slip through my fingers?”

“……”

She soon… gave up trying to reason with me.

“From here on out, the Pale Ones start appearing! And most of the monsters are highly aggressive. But General, are you aware we only have nine gold left?”

“I am.”

“The place we’re aiming for is a massive cathedral located in the deepest part of the fog, yes? How many monsters do you think will appear between here and the cathedral? Definitely more than nine…”

“And?”

I nodded at Sion, who was beating around the bush, and said,

“If you have something to say, just spit it out. You want to renegotiate the contract, don’t you?”

“……Well now, you certainly saw right through me.”

Sion didn’t seem to appreciate my attitude all that much.

“Renegotiate…?”

Lir, who was examining the surrounding graves, tilted her head, a question in her eyes.

“Clause two. General Bean Kyung will pay Sion the stipulated sum for every monster, demon, human, elf, and dwarf Sion slays while escorting him.”

Sion recited the second clause of our contract with a bright smile, as if Lir’s confusion was endearing.

“What’s wrong with that clause?”

“There’s no mention of payment being made within a specific timeframe. Which is odd. One is obliged to pay for labor, but there’s no stipulation as to *when* that payment must be made.”

I leaned back against a nearby headstone. The hem of my robe drank up the dew from the grass growing out of the graves.

“……That’s true, isn’t it? It’s strange that there’s no mention of whether payment must be made within days, even. If the person paying can just arbitrarily declare, ‘I’ll pay you in a hundred years,’ then no matter how hard Sion works, it would all be meaningless.”

Lierre gave Sion a look that telegraphed, ‘Are you perhaps an idiot?’

If Sion were truly so dense as to not consider such a simple thing, they wouldn’t have entrusted him with guard duty in the first place.

“Precisely as you say. ‘I will pay the debt in one hundred years’. That isn’t the same as saying I *won’t* pay, but rather that I will pay *later*. Strictly speaking, it shouldn’t be treated as a ‘breach of contract’.”

Leaning against the monument, I lifted my left hand, displaying the jet-black bracelet to Lierre.

“But, Lierre. Do you recall when we first stepped foot into this mist?”

“…The moment thirty heads vanished at once?”

Lierre frowned, as if she didn’t particularly want to revisit that scene.

“At that instant, the bracelet on my left wrist glowed red. An insistence on ‘Paying the debt’. I thought to myself, ‘In one month’, but the bracelet continued to glow red.”

“That means…”

“It means there’s a set time to pay the debt. We can’t arbitrarily decide on a period like ‘in one month’ or ‘in one hundred years’.”

“Even if the contract doesn’t specifically mention it?”

“It’s surprisingly common around us. You could find hundreds of precedents.”

I twirled the black bracelet around my wrist as I continued my explanation.

“The Imperial Law states, ‘Unless otherwise specified in the contract, payment for labor must be made within two months’.”

“…Then logically, shouldn’t the issue be resolved by paying within two months?”

“This thing on my wrist, remember? It’s an artifact made by a demon. Do you think common sense would apply to a madman who seeks to obliterate all life on the continent?”

Sion interjected, his face amused.

I picked up where he left off.

“The important thing here isn’t the ‘two-month’ period, but the fact that ‘the debt must be paid within a specific time’, even if the contract doesn’t specify it.”

“If the debt isn’t paid within that ‘specific time’, the contract will be considered broken by the General.”

Sion draped an arm over Lir’s shoulder, a vast greed shadowing her face.

“Just wondering, are you perhaps willing to reveal exactly how many days ‘a certain time’ encompasses?”

“Of course not. That’s the whole point.”

Sion shrugged, her voice dripping with irritating sweetness. She seemed determined to provoke me… though, it didn’t have much of an effect.

“Bin-nim currently possesses a mere nine gold. If I were to dispose of ten monsters in this state, what might happen?”

A knowing smile stretched across Sion’s face, thick with amusement.

“Tick, tick… The bomb on your wrist would begin counting down, wouldn’t it? Not a particularly pleasant experience, I imagine?”

Sion tapped the black bracelet on her wrist with a fingernail. Lir, looking displeased, shoved Sion’s arm off her shoulder and pushed her away.

“I have no desire to be responsible for the death of a Coalition General. So, try not to glare quite so intensely.”

Pushed back by Lir, Sion smoothly perched on a nearby tomb, continuing to needle me.

“The General’s course of action is clear. First, you must declare that you ‘no longer require our services’ to terminate our current contract.”

I wholeheartedly agreed with Sion’s suggestion.

I had no desire to wander around with an invisible countdown ticking on my wrist.

“I no longer require your services.”

As the words left my lips, the black paper binding Sion’s wrist and mine tore apart, fluttering to the ground.

Immediately, it shriveled like burning parchment, dissolving into ash that vanished amongst the grass.

“And now, you will sign a new contract with me.”

As if she had been waiting for this, Sion produced a new ‘Devil’s Contract’ from within her dark cloak.

“The terms are identical to the previous one, with a few exceptions. This time, however, let’s include the precise ‘date of payment’ within the contract itself.”

“Payment due within one month.”

“Excellent! That much, even I can wait for, however…”

“The price will rise, of course.”

“Monsters will be 10 gold per head, Continentals will be 20. The price will rise ‘a bit’… well, isn’t that just how things are in tourist spots?”

“There’s also an additional condition, isn’t there?”

“You’re playing around right on top of my head~ I was thinking of tweaking the third clause a little.”

“The content?”

“The contract is terminated the moment Zion says, ‘I will no longer provide services from this point onward.'”

Why so serious, putting on such a solemn face?

Even with far worse conditions than that, I would be willing to renew the contract.

“As you wish.”

“Um…”

Lir interjected into the conversation between Zion and myself, which was proceeding with lightning speed toward the renewal. She appeared to not fully understand this suddenly unfolding situation.

“If you knew everything, shouldn’t you have just included the execution date in the contract from the beginning? I don’t understand why you didn’t…”

“The moment I mentioned a ‘precise execution date,’ Zion would have made all sorts of excuses to postpone the contract indefinitely. Then, the day we arrive here would just keep receding further and further.”

The reason I let myself get played by Zion’s scheme, knowing full well what was happening, was simple.

“It doesn’t matter either way.”

Postpone my chance to heal my hand while I squabble with this petty merchant?

Besides, I already have a plan of my own to stab Zion in the back, so I can let this much slide.

“So it’s fine. I don’t care if I have to pay several thousand gold.”

Having heard my answer, Lir hesitated for a moment, then cautiously placed her hand on my shoulder and began to speak.

“Vin, darling. What if we just scrap this contract? We’re already inside the Mist of the Archipelago, so from here on out it can just be us…”

“Why bother?”

I wore a faint, wry smile and regarded Sion, perched atop a headstone across from me.

Even if we called off the contract now, Sion wasn’t simply going to return home obediently.

In the worst-case scenario, I might find myself in a life-or-death struggle with her.

I didn’t want to use ‘Bloom’ in a place like this. Losing consciousness from the magic’s backlash was a concern, but… there was a greater reason.

Bloom’s power increases proportionally to the mana stored within me. And thanks to ‘Blessing of the Spirit,’ I can store an infinite amount of mana within my body.

As long as I live as a general, I can’t avoid battles with the Mazoku. That means one day I’ll have to fight a Great Overlord again.

‘Against Maltiel, I poured out nearly a month’s worth of accumulated mana.’

And even then, the situation was absolutely favorable to me.

‘Maltiel threw gamble after gamble because of the pressure of the Sword Saint chasing him. On top of that, he never figured out the precise effect and range of the artifact Rex possessed before he died.’

To survive against a Great Overlord under equal conditions, I needed to gather at least three months’ worth of mana.

If I squandered Bloom to solve every trivial incident, there would be times when my firepower would be insufficient at crucial moments.

“Why make a person roll around in a muddy field when you have a perfectly good ‘dog’?”

What I needed was choice and focus.

And money wasn’t that important to me.

If money could solve the problems facing me, why wouldn’t I use it?

“…”

Sion, who had been sitting on the headstone drafting the contract, quietly rose upon hearing my words.

A twilight, impossible to hide with a bright smile, settled upon her face.

“…At the very least, I’ll squeeze 4000 gold out of him. You’ll have to liquidate all the land and buildings under your name, you know.”

Sion leaned forward, warning me in a small voice.

I could feel a faint tremor in her voice, she seemed quite agitated.

“If you’re willing to work that hard, that’s fine by me.”