CHAPTER 238: THE TRAGEDY AT THE TOWER OF THE LION

CHAPTER 238: THE TRAGEDY AT THE TOWER OF THE LION

— Let us rewind the time all the way back to right before the coup in the royal capital took place.

After accompanying both Mare and Cherry on some laps of the Silent Ruins in order to level up some more, Cinque was troubled by the issue of how to improve her own abilities and Skills.

Given the difficulty of the Hunting Grounds that he knew about, the “leveling up” process was rather inefficient, and was quickly ruled out as an option for Cinque to train, who wanted to make some big changes. So instead, she reconsidered her Skills composition from the ground up.

「As expected, “Guard Impact”, “Shield Technique”, and “Axe Technique” are all good…… Oh? This Skill is……」

「Cinque-nee-san, what are you doing?」

「Pyaaaahh?! D-Drake……? How long have you been here?」

「I have been here for a while now. I even heard you muttering something to yourself, so I got curious and called out to you!」

「Well, that is just perfect. Just what I have been looking for. Drake, I will have you come with me for the time being, okay?」

「Huh……? Come with you? Why? And where exactly?」

「There is something that I really want to try out right now. So let’s have ourselves a little monster hunting date together! It’s been a while since we last did just that!」

It was here that Cinque set her sights on the skill 「Cooking」.

Moreover, she tried an idea that was the “complete opposite” of the Skill Arts that were activated by combining multiple skills or magic together, such as Aun’s 「Neirichiou」 and Kinu’s 「Aotekahanabi」…… You could even call it the decomposition of Skills of sorts.

Normally, the cooking process is a series of different steps and actions such as “measuring, dividing, heating, cooling, seasoning, and plating,” done together in close succession, but Cinque, who was in charge of all the cooking for Aun, was very particular about her choice of ingredients, saying, “I want people to eat something that is as delicious as possible,” and even considered some additional steps before the normal cooking process, such as “slaughtering, bleeding, and dissection,” when she was getting to cooking.

And as much as time would allow it, she would often go on monster hunting dates with Drake as many times as possible, which made it possible for her to “disassemble Skills” that activated this cooking Skill for each step. This was truly the result of Cinque’s unique thought process and natural sense for using Skills, as well as the gift of an abnormal number of “trials” that can’t be described as even pure effort alone.

Furthermore, to disassemble this cooking Skill even further, naturally, a proper cooking tool was needed. Cooking with a giant axe was an extremely difficult thing to do, so she tinkered around with her Dosukoi a little bit, and even mastered its third form, which was a giant kitchen knife.

However, these “Slaughter” and “Dissection” Skills, which at first glance seemed like basically cheats no matter how you would like to look at it, only applied to lower Rank Adventurers whom the user of the Skill judged to be nothing more but “small fries” when using the giant knife, or monsters with a rank of B or lower, and had the disadvantage that they could not perform a “certain kill” on the target and that they could not hold back.

If this was to be done to a human being…… The scene that would result from this would become a bizarre and disastrous situation that would be well beyond words and anyone’s ability to describe. And this is what actually happened right now and was going to be referred to within the Calvados camp at a later date as the “Tragedy at the Tower of the Lion.”

Even though Cinque understood this well enough, after receiving Aun’s seal of approval that they should all “hold nothing back” and that they could “go all out”, she ended up taking those words at face value. She also understood them as “So yo are all well prepared to scatter your guts around here if you attack us…… right?”. When you would combine this with the meeting with the Adventurers in front of the tower, this made her even more excited to spring into action and give her new Skill a try in actual combat situation, which resulted in this ruthless cooking-like execution that we all just happened to witness.

……When questioned by the Guild on that dome time later Cinque, who did all of this on her own, apparently stated that: “This was the only suitable punishment those guys deserved for talking down to Aun-sama, even though they themselves were just some shitty little weaklings,”, followed by: “I have no regrets or remorse about my actions,” and then finally: “Next time around I will cook them even better.”

So in the end, based on the ratio of the victims on Calvados camp’ side to “Seiha’s” side and the would-be victims’ testimony, “Seiha” was found to be the victim of the surprise attack, but because of some mysterious force that was at work here and behind the scenes, the Guild staff who conducted the questioning were not to tell anyone else about it.

— Let us change perspective a bit here.

The number one Clan in the entirety of the Ibuldia Empire was Calvados. It was an ultra-large Clan with well over one thousand Adventurers on board and various branches not only in Wislo, but in every city in the Ibuldia Empire.

Furthermore, if you were to combine all of the smaller clans and the sub-organizations, they would have one of the top five personnel in the entire Sphin continent. This allowed them to monopolize the Wislo Dungeon efficiently through overwhelming force alone, which has been their usual tactic thus far, and in fact has allowed them to build a solid position and huge funds in this way across the years.

However, the Adventurers who fled after the “Tragedy at the Tower of the Lion” suffered some serious mental damage, and some were even forced to retire from Adventuring altogether, never being able to enter the Dungeon again. Furthermore, when the full details of the brutal executions told by these people were spread throughout the Calvados camp, Cinque, who caused it all on her own, was then universally feared and would subsequently be given an entirely new nickname, this time around that of the “Evil Star,” a universal symbol of bad luck and misfortune.

In addition to that, these events triggered a continuous stream of defections from Calvados camp and the various smaller clans associated with it in the Wislo region over the course of the next two months, leading to an abnormal situation in which approximately twenty percent of the Calvados members were reduced in number until replacements were found and sent over from the other towns.

This would be a factor that would greatly influence the outcome of the upcoming “Wislo Dungeon Large-Scale Liberation Battle”…… but Aun and the others who had managed to accomplish this feat completely by accident were completely unaware of this fact.