Garfiel scowled, flinching at the stinging, skin-scorching sensation, and kicked violently at the fallen leaves scattered across the ground.
"Heh — so that's how you wanna play it."
The words came out irritated, but there was genuine admiration buried in them.
He'd underestimated the man — that was the cause of his defeat. Garfiel couldn't deny that. He had looked down on Otto completely, assuming the guy had zero combat ability.
"The fire-infused mineral ore… So you didn't bother making the blast lethal. What was that supposed to accomplish?"
A curtain of flame that had engulfed his entire field of vision in an instant — scorching his rigid body for the briefest of moments before vanishing. Garfiel recalled it with irritation.
It was nothing more than a bluff. A faint stinging lingered on his skin, but no different from a sunburn — nowhere close to being actual damage.
Still, one thing was clear.
"If that had been a killing blow, even I wouldn't have walked away unscathed…!"
A moment that should have been fatal, dodged entirely by his opponent's judgment.
If this wasn't being shown mercy, then what else could it be? He'd held back, tried to knock the guy unconscious, and had instead been completely outplayed.
How pathetic. How foolish.
"You think this is a damn joke…!?"
What irritated Garfiel even further was that his opponent — while Garfiel was momentarily blinded by the flames — had simply chosen to flee in the blink of an eye. Not a shred of consideration for a follow-up attack. The sheer decisiveness of it left Garfiel, whose response had been too slow, having completely lost sight of Otto.
Soft earth. Fallen leaves piling up. The terrain should have been unfamiliar, yet Otto had sprinted through it with surprising agility. His claim about wandering the forest at night suddenly made sense.
Even so, in a pure chase, there was no way Otto could escape Garfiel. For every ten of Otto's steps, Garfiel could close the gap in two. The difference in physical ability — the gap between their races — was that vast.
But Otto had covered even that shortcoming with his cunning.
"—ghh! Ngh, what the—!? This… damn it, my nose!"
The moment Garfiel flared his nostrils to pursue the fleeing Otto, a pungent, painful odor had pierced straight through his nasal passages. He'd inhaled too deeply, his head snapping back as a searing pain flashed through his vision.
Looking down, he saw a transparent bottle discarded at the spot where Otto had been standing moments ago. The lid had been removed, and a colorless liquid was spilling out — the acrid stench wafting from it was unmistakable. But that was as far as his sense of smell could serve him.
"You bastard… blocking off my nose and thinking you've won, are you?"
Baring his fangs, Garfiel snarled in frustration as one option after another was stripped away.
Just how long had Otto spent devising strategies specifically to counter Garfiel? Every single plan, without exception, had been perfectly tailored to shut him down.
"————"
Garfiel touched the wound on his forehead and let out a ragged breath, performing his own ritual to calm himself.
Deep breaths to steady his heart and lungs, pulling back thoughts that were threatening to be swept away by rage. What he needed to think about was not the question of how Otto continued to trap him so flawlessly.
It was why Otto would throw himself into such a reckless fight in the first place.
The fundamental premise was wrong: Otto challenging Garfiel at all made no sense.
His goal was to buy time — to draw Garfiel's attention to himself while the refugees left behind in the
That was exactly as Otto himself had revealed when he'd laid out his cards. And if his words were true, then even now, even if Garfiel gave chase, it would be impossible to stop every single dragon carriage.
For a fleeting moment, he considered using his authority to send Ryuzu's clones after them — but until the departure points of each carriage were known, it would be nothing but wasted effort. The clones lacked knowledge and experience; they could only carry out rough instructions at best. Besides, he had to instruct them to eat at regular intervals, and once they hit their limits in the forest, they would curl up small and give up on living altogether. Having to dash around finding them and keeping them from shutting down — Garfiel was sick of it.
"So in the end, it all falls on me. Ha! Same as always."
Too few hands. Nose sealed shut.
And yet, Garfiel wouldn't despair. He had this body he'd honed. It still held more than enough power to tear through the forest and achieve his objective.
Whatever Otto's purpose might be, he had resisted Garfiel to this degree. He had provoked Garfiel's wrath and was prepared to face his claws and fangs.
Garfiel had stopped underestimating Otto as mere prey to be devoured. He judged him to be an opponent he needed to hunt with everything he had, and he would corner him and finish him without fail.
—But in thinking that way, Garfiel had already failed to notice that he had forgotten his original objective entirely, playing right into Otto's hands.
"You lot have gotten awfully well-behaved, haven't you. Following that bastard's orders, are y— …You'd actually say something like that to me!"
As Garfiel pursued Otto into the depths of the forest, his gaze swept to the dragon carriages standing nearby.
Two decoy carriages, made to look as though they were carrying refugees to safety. That said, both earth dragons pulling them were genuine. And ever since the exchange between Otto and Garfiel had begun, they had simply sat on their haunches, maintaining an air of complete indifference.
"As long as you don't move, I won't bother hurting you. Smart move. I'm not the kind to kill without reason."
Shaking his head, Garfiel passed by the earth dragons and reached for the passenger compartment of the nearest carriage.
Clothing had been scattered inside to throw off his scent identification of the villagers. He'd only given it a cursory check before, but if he looked a little longer, he might find something.
Kicking aside the randomly strewn garments, Garfiel surveyed the seats and the walls. Finding nothing of interest and about to step back out— "Huh?"
At the far end of his peripheral vision, something was affixed to the back of the carriage door, hidden from outside view.
A white sheet of paper, fluttering slightly in the breeze — something that could only be seen from the inside.
A bad feeling washed over him. Garfiel stomped over to the door, tore the fluttering paper free with a rough hand, and unfolded it.
And there, written in neat script, was: *—To think you'd actually fall for it. That almost makes this worth the effort.* Reading those words, Garfiel's vision flooded crimson with fury.
The next instant — the carriage seat blew open, a black mass erupting inside the cramped compartment. Amid the storm-like flutter of wings as a swarm of insects surged forth, Garfiel's roar was swallowed whole.
※※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ —To the young
"————"
"×××××××××"
"※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※"
"***************!*!*"
From the moment he drew breath until the moment he lost it, words that Otto could not comprehend poured ceaselessly into his ears.
Sitting blankly on the ground, he was assailed — sometimes by whispers close to his ear, sometimes by shouts from far away, sometimes by singing, and sometimes by what sounded like death screams. The world never stopped insisting on its connection to him, relentlessly, without pause.
No matter where he went in the world, the voices followed the young Otto wherever he fled.
Days that never rested. A ceaselessly echoing chorus rife with dissonance. Everything — every last sound — was a concerto of hell, with no intention of cooperating in the slightest, and it clung to Otto's side without end.
—How does everyone just live in such a noisy world as if it's the most natural thing?
Trapped in a hell where he couldn't even properly hear the person next to him, Otto carried that question with him.
His parents would lift him up, smiling, and speak words to him. But no matter how loving those words were, they were swallowed by the cacophony and never reached Otto's ears.
His parents noticed their son's condition and promptly took him to a doctor.
He didn't laugh, didn't get angry, didn't cry. Emotional expression of any kind simply never developed, because every stimulus from the outside world felt exactly the same to Otto.
And so, Otto spent his early childhood as an emotionless child, worrying his parents.
One might call it fortunate: the Suwen household was a merchant family that maintained a comfortable middle-class living, with more than enough savings to send their son to the doctor.
But no matter which physician examined Otto, they found nothing wrong. Naturally. His condition, put simply, was nothing less than a disability born of hearing too much.
An older brother two years his senior, and a younger brother two years his junior. Unlike Otto, the two siblings grew up healthy, basking in their parents' affection and flourishing. Their parents' attention gradually shifted away from Otto; love that had been split three ways was divided between two, and Otto drifted further from his parents' warmth.
Yet Otto held neither resentment nor envy toward his siblings or his parents. At that age, he had not yet developed the capacity to hate or envy anyone — neither positive nor negative emotions had taken root. His siblings had been patient with the half-incomprehensible Otto, and he understood that his parents' hearts had simply grown tired.
If he had been in either sibling's position, he wasn't sure he could have been so kind to a family member who made so little sense. So if anything, he was grateful.
He couldn't deliver his thoughts through sound — but through the written word, communication was possible.
The one who helped him discover this was his older brother, who had tried to read books aloud to him.
Learning to read, naturally, was excruciatingly difficult.
The sounds he needed to recognize the words simply wouldn't come through. To understand the meaning behind strings of words, Otto spent ten times longer than a normal child would on the same task.
Even so, it wasn't suffering. Sadly, Otto lacked the sensitivity to find it painful — and a toddler who couldn't live a normal life had nothing to do with his days.
*—Thank you, always.* The first time he showed that written message to his parents and they burst into tears and embraced him — Otto still remembers that moment with crystal clarity.
Even if he couldn't fully grasp the emotion of gratitude, he recognized that he was receiving treatment he should be grateful for. Even as a young child, he understood this, and when his dutifully written words were praised, a ripple formed in his heart.
—The time he raised his voice and cried until his throat was raw may well have been the first time since the day he was born. If so, that was Otto's second cry of life.
"I fank you, Fafa, Mafa."
"A G A T E G A T A G F A T T T E T A A D A E R T E R A"
"Mi mi mu mu me mi mi."
He began to perceive a faint pattern within the meaningless chorus of hell — and this came not long after his second cry.
The noise that had been pounding his eardrums nonstop was gradually — very gradually, but unmistakably — being filtered and removed by his own will.
And the day he could fully block out the sounds around him at will came when Otto celebrated his eighth birthday.
Essentially restored to near-normal, Otto — like water dropped into a parched desert — began to absorb everything around him with insatiable hunger.
After all, Otto had been forced to forfeit the majority of experiences that a normal child would have by the age of eight. Even though he had learned to read and devoted time to studying, his comprehension still lagged somewhat behind his peers. He closed that gap in one decisive sweep with a weapon he possessed: concentration.
The dormant talent of the boy called Otto Suwen had blossomed.
Thinking ability and comprehension that surpassed even his brothers — no, that exceeded them both. Otto demonstrated extraordinary learning ability and quickly distinguished himself among the boys and girls of his generation— —And then, he spectacularly failed at human relationships and found himself completely isolated.
"How does everyone just live in this complicated world like it's the most normal thing?"
Otto sat with his arms around his knees, his cheek still stinging from the slap. The girl he'd been trying to befriend had struck him across the face, leaving it red and swollen, and he murmured those words.
Otto, now ten, was studying diligently as befitting the son of a merchant family. In this era, an environment where a young child could receive proper education was rare and precious. It was undeniably a privileged upbringing, and an ideal time to spend with peers his own age.
The problem was that Otto's emotional development and mental age were roughly seven years behind those of other children his age.
The failures that most children made as a matter of course, Otto had never experienced — and so when he finally was able to make them, he made them all the same. But since most of these were mistakes excusable only when made by young children, and Otto had long since passed that stage, the results were nothing short of disastrous.
To make matters worse, Otto Suwen was a boy blessed — or cursed — with truly extraordinary misfortune.
According to his parents, his run of bad luck began almost immediately after birth, when he nearly drowned in his own bathwater. From there, seemingly without any intent on his part, he was knocked down the stairs, defecated on by birds, nearly drowned in a flower vase — plagued by misfortune with alarming frequency.
The only reason he hadn't fully registered it was that he had not yet developed the capacity to feel what misfortune truly was.
Once that capacity did develop and he looked back on his past, Otto was stunned by his own track record.
What could possibly lead a human being to endure days so thoroughly forsaken by luck?
"Big, gone, now, gone, already, went."
"Light, was bright, the light, is far, light, light, shining."
"Hey, the monster is coming. Hey, the monster is coming."
Around this same time, the noise he had learned to consciously block began to change.
The meaningless chorus, which he had never been able to assign any meaning to, now began to seem as though it carried intent.
Most of what he could now make out was still incomprehensible — but in the process of turning incomprehension into understanding, Otto finally discovered the true nature of the hell from his early years.
Apparently, he possessed the ability to communicate with non-human creatures.
The ability that would later be identified as the Blessing of the嘴灵 — it took Otto Suwen eleven years after its emergence to finally become aware of it.
From that point on, Otto traveled to various locations around town, testing the limits of his Blessing through trial and error. He discovered that, generally speaking, the more intelligent a creature was, the more clearly its intentions came through.
Then, after having a conversation with the earth dragon kept at the family home in front of his siblings, he revealed that he had possessed this Blessing since early childhood.
"Yeah, I see. Yeah… So, look, Otto. That power — yeah, it's amazing. I think it's amazing, so… just, you know. Don't use it where anyone can see."
Being a Blessing holder was a blessing from the world — but that didn't mean everyone welcomed those who possessed such abilities. A Blessing that benefited the public was one thing, but Otto's power worked only for himself, and even a child could imagine various ways to misuse it.
His older brother's concern for Otto's wellbeing was perfectly reasonable.
Promising his brother — who averted his eyes, face pale — Otto resolved firmly that no one would ever learn of his Blessing of words.
This power could endanger not only himself, but everyone around him.
In the heart of the young Otto Suwen, a sense of duty had been kindled: he had to protect his family.
The full-scale rejection by his peers — triggered when his Blessing was publicly exposed — came three days after his promise to his brother.
He had been caught talking to an earth dragon in secret by his younger brother. Reluctantly, Otto confided in him about his Blessing. He also shared his older brother's concerns, letting his younger sibling understand just how dangerous the ability was.
The next day, his younger brother — eager to show off Otto's power — led him to a crowd of children. And Otto, caught mid-conversation with insects, saw hell once again for the first time in years.
The weakness of the Blessing was that, for communication to occur, it necessarily required using the other party's own sounds. Put simply, when Otto spoke with an earth dragon, he whinnied like an earth dragon; when he spoke with insects, he produced insect-like chirps.
His reputation as "the creepy bug freak" spread instantly.
From that day on, Otto sealed his Blessing of words and swore never to use it again. Over the course of several years, he managed to erase the notoriety he'd stained himself with, scrubbing the wretched memory from the minds of most people.
He accomplished this at the age of fourteen — a sensitive time of life.
Once he turned fourteen, excuses about "emotional maturity" no longer held water. His body, too, was steadily climbing the stairs toward adulthood, and by the time his limbs had fully lengthened, Otto had become a young man with features that could be called reasonably handsome.
Gray hair, a soft face with a touch of melancholy. Gentle eyes, and a diligent nature that threw itself earnestly into everything he undertook. These unexpectedly maternal-appealing qualities, combined with the natural curiosity of a young man, led Otto to develop an interest in romantic affairs— —And then, through the power of his Blessing, he made an enemy of the daughter of the town's most powerful man and was banished.
This happened during a cold season, just before Otto turned fifteen.
The details of what happened need not be recounted in full, but to put it simply: he was caught up in a love drama.
On the night of a birthday party for the daughter of the town's most powerful man, her lover — furious and shouting — burst in, having heard she was with another man. The target of his rage was Otto, who had been spotted talking to the daughter just moments before.
Otto honestly answered that he'd simply been asked for the time, but the man — his face crimson, screaming "creepy bug freak!" — was in no state to listen.
Having his long-buried past dug up after four years of obscurity, even Otto lost his composure in that moment.
So he unsealed his Blessing and, acting with full force to clear his name, listened to every voice of every living creature in the town — and discovered that on that fateful night, the daughter in question had in fact been making the rounds with no fewer than seven men. He then cheerfully informed the wretched lover: "It appears you were number eight!"
After being punched by the man and then targeted by an assassin hired by the daughter whose affairs had been exposed, Otto fled his hometown in a panic. Using his father's connections, he found work at an acquaintance's trading company.
He trained there, and at sixteen, set out as a traveling merchant — this was Otto Suwen's first step as an independent man.
Otto's life as a traveling merchant was, without exaggeration, an unbroken string of hardships.
His misfortune did not let go of him as the years passed. Transport breakables and a storm would hit; take shortcuts through the mountains and bandits would attack; camp with fellow merchants and Otto alone would wake covered in blood-drained bites from insects.
The only reason Otto survived all these calamities without being destroyed was, sadly, that he possessed a talent for commerce commensurate with his misfortune. He never made large profits, nor did he suffer catastrophic losses. Guided by a miraculous sense of balance that was almost degenerate in its mediocrity — a perfect break-even — the four years until he turned twenty passed in a flash.
The reason his spirit wasn't broken and he never returned home was that he had with him Furufu, an earth dragon he'd known since childhood, whom he'd brought along from the family home on the day of his banishment.
Honestly, Otto had mixed feelings about Furufu being the catalyst that exposed his Blessing to his siblings — but to the Otto of today, Furufu was a sure and irreplaceable bond, like family.
Often, when other merchants refused to partner with him, Otto would pass the sleepless nights alone by exchanging words with Furufu.
He would beg Furufu to keep talking whenever the dragon tried to shy away, saying "Come on, let me sleep."
The image of him sitting around the fire in the dead of night, mimicking earth dragon calls and carrying on a one-sided conversation, became such a common sight that fellow merchants would simply walk around him.
Through these days of relative calm — lukewarm from an outsider's perspective, but actually quite desperate for him personally — a turning point came for Otto.
—He missed a business opportunity, and it ended in total disaster.
At the time, he was dealing in oil. A red-faced, bearded man with an eyepatch had told him that oil fetched extremely high prices in
What dealt an even greater blow to his heart was hearing that the iron goods he'd been forced to dump at steep discounts were actually trading at enormous prices in the royal capital.
He realized he'd been completely duped, and his life as a traveling merchant was in jeopardy.
He had to find some way to turn things around in a single stroke, or he might be forced to part with Furufu. Worse, he might have to grovel before his family.
For Otto, that was the one line that must never be crossed.
It had been over five years since he'd last seen his family, but his love for them had not faded by even a fraction. The reason he could still carry on, however imperfectly, was thanks to the family that hadn't abandoned him in those early years.
In those first ten years of life, Otto had already imposed a lifetime's worth of burden on his family. From here on, he needed to spend the rest of his life repaying what he owed them for those ten years.
Debts must be repaid, properly and precisely. Otto Suwen was, after all, the son of a merchant.
—He was approached by a familiar merchant with what sounded like a profitable deal, and Otto took it.
The job, it turned out, didn't require goods — it required the legs of an earth dragon. They wanted to transport a large number of people by loading them into a dragon carriage's cargo bed.
Otto jumped at it without a second thought. He and Furufu, Blessing working at full capacity, raced as fast as possible toward the destination.
He charged over rough terrain, cut through pathless wilderness, and ignored Furufu's worried protests of "Come on, boss, let's stop this," arriving faster than anyone else.
And then— "Oh my, oh my, oh my… Where are you rushing off to, in such a hurry… to die!"
Things had gone terribly wrong.
Captured by people whose eyes were completely unhinged, bound up like a morsel, Otto realized that his misfortune had reached its absolute peak.
Separated from Furufu, stripped of everything he had, thrown into a cold cave — he was reduced to nothing more than an existence waiting for the whim of death.
The depth of despair that flooded Otto's heart at that moment — who could possibly understand it? No one could.
Because at that moment, Otto had been throwing everything he had into escape. He had unleashed the Blessing of words to its fullest, desperately searching for a way out of the clutches of this collective evil. What finally broke his defiant spirit was not the enemy, but an overwhelming silence — the same silence that had once engulfed the young Otto when he had fully opened his Blessing to the world.
The familiar yet wretched noise was nowhere to be heard.
Every living creature — insects, small animals, the creatures of the forest and the cave — had vanished without a trace. Faced with an existence so demonic that it drove all life to hide, Otto braced himself for hell. And the hell that exceeded his expectation shattered his heart completely.
The light left his eyes, and strength drained rapidly from his entire body. He understood now: everything was hopeless. Nothing would work. It would all end in this cold cave.
A despair so deep that even tears would not come. In the hollow emptiness where time itself seemed to have ceased, it arrived without warning — and rescued Otto Suwen from the course of his fate.
"What's all this?! You
A voice echoed through the cave, and Otto — who had been lost in a trance — was shaken back to reality.
He raised his head and called out in a hoarse voice. The one who appeared at his call was a large beastman with the face of a dog, speaking in the
"Yer in luck, mister! If we'd come any later, those guys woulda killed ya for sure! Even a few minutes more and it'd have been all over! By the skin of yer teeth! The skin of yer teeth, I tell ya! And of course, we oughta be grateful to the Boss's boy too!"
"The… Boss's… boy…?"
Otto, loosening the ropes around his wrists and ankles, cocked his head at the grinning beastman's words.
The beastman's eyes went wide at Otto's confusion, then he clapped Otto on the back with his massive palm so hard it drew a cry of pain— "The Boss is the Boss! The boy is the boy! Together, they're the Boss's boy! The brains behind all this — the one who sent us here! Didn't look like he had much going on upstairs, but people really can't be judged by their looks, can they? Gahahaha!"
"Uh… right. I see. Well, thank you regardless. Oh, I should also thank him…"
As Otto raised his head to express his gratitude, he paused.
The beastman was staring at Otto's face with an expression of surprise. Not understanding the reaction, Otto watched as the beastman pulled out — surprisingly — a clean white hand towel from his coat and tossed it to him.
"What's wrong? If yer gonna cry, at least go somewhere private. A man weepin' in front of others — that's just sad."
"Huh… C-cry?"
"Yer face is covered in tears, ain't it! If that ain't cryin', then what is it?! Sweat?! Sweat from yer soul?! C'mon, mister, not even the Kararagi boys are that bad at lying!"
The beastman turned his back and walked away, as if out of consideration for Otto's pride. Otto, half-doubting, pressed the cloth to his face — and was genuinely shocked to find it soaked through with tears.
The instant he recognized that he was crying, they came in an uncontrollable flood.
"Ah, damn… What is this… why am I…?"
He bit down and pressed the cloth harder against his face, unable to stop the torrent of tears.
He didn't know why he was crying. His mind was a jumble of incoherent curses and fragmented thoughts.
—Was this because he had been released from a despair so deep that even tears had dried up?
"I'm… not dead… Thank goodness… thank goodness…"
He hadn't accomplished anything yet.
He hadn't repaid a single kindness shown to him.
Had he died there, Otto would have ended his life without ever having given it meaning.
Now, having survived, he understood that with perfect clarity.
—Every time Otto Suwen shed tears, he was reborn.
His first cry upon entering this world.
His second cry, when he learned the love of family and found the shape of his own heart.
And now, his third — having cheated a death he'd already accepted, understanding at last the purpose and meaning of his life.
—On this day, Otto Suwen had let out yet another cry.
※※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ "Honestly, I wasn't even asked to buy time like this…"
Kicking off the ground, laboring at the unseemly physical work, Otto managed a wry smile.
The memory of that undignified, bawling breakdown was something he wished he could forget — but unfortunately, tearful memories were always precious ones, and he could not forget them even if he wanted to.
The beastman named Ricard who had saved Otto that day had kept his secret — never telling anyone that Otto had sobbed uncontrollably. A debt like that would have to be repaid someday, without fail.
And— "Debts must always be repaid. —After all, I am a merchant."
—The Boss's boy, who had saved his life.
A life saved. A kindness that demanded everything he had in return.
That was only natural for a merchant.
But more than that— "—Because that's what friends are for!"
The Otto who was a merchant, and the Otto who was simply a human being, were both gritting their teeth and holding their ground right here, right now.
That was why Otto Suwen was throwing himself into a battle with almost no chance of winning.
He would stake everything on this desperate gamble, layering every last ounce of his existence onto Natsuki Subaru's victory.
That was Otto's merchant spirit — and the proof of his friendship.
—From far away, in the direction of the dragon carriages he'd left behind, the roar of beasts rose into the air.
Sensing that the true battle was about to begin, Otto released his Blessing — surrendering himself to the familiar embrace of hell, squeezing out every last shred of his power, and continuing to run.