Once everyone had returned to the Warhammer city, Vincent showed all the representatives and guests an area which his subordinates prepared in their absence, with chairs, maids, chefs and tables of food prepared for everyone, clearly although Vincent isn’t too fond of social events like banquets, he still holds the proper etiquette of a noble when receiving visits.
“Please feel free to take a seat and enjoy the food that the Mermen Sea has to offer, prepared by Lady Delieri and her students”, said Vincent, among the chefs there was a woman who seemed to be in her early thirties and shared some resemblance with Aida, the girl that was in the same caravan which Daimon and the girls joined.
“Oh, I have heard about Lady Delieri’s restaurants, thanks in advance for this feast”, said the old Aurora as she walked to the food table.
The royals, representatives, high ranked nobles and the patriarchs of the sects from the Elemental Sea all went to take their respective seats, the most important people had a seat assigned on the first raw, which directly looked to the crystal board where the participants of the beast hunt were registered.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t see their performance directly, but they could still see how the scores increased and discuss about it, all the presents were high ranked mages or knights, so the two-day duration of the event was nothing, besides the Trident Marshal has prepared all the commodities needed.
But of course, there was again another clash among some people, this time due to the distribution of the seats, while the king, the Trident Marshal, the old Aurora, the patriarchs of the sects, Annete and surprisingly the mother of the Valas princess, were assigned a seat at the first row, the other two wives of the king weren’t.
Making them frown and complain to the king, unfortunately this was a matter of authority not status, so the king who normally dotes on his wives had no say this time.
“Now, don’t feel bad Irma and Norma, the ones in the first row are people who has to listen to complains and deal with matters of our respective territories, so I doubt you’ll want to hear to such boring stuff~”, said Annete with an unnoticeable tinge of disdain in her voice.
She wasn’t lying though, while the three wives of the king were descendants of Dukes, they themselves held lower ranked titles, for example since the mother of the crowned prince though she was the niece of the Trident Marshal, her title was that of a Marquis as her father was a Duke, and although she was his only children, her father was still active as a noble, so she had practically zero responsibilities, the same applied to the mother of the twin princes, and the king was prohibited from granting tittles to his consorts, making Annete the only with that authority, that or they could get it through “backdoor” means, gaining merits in the military.
The only exception was the mother of the first princess, as her parents died so she inherited their Dukedom, becoming the Duchess of Valas.
In a sense, the other two spend their days in the royal castle in luxury, while the Duchess of Valas was busy managing the cities of her family, something well known in the noble circles.
“Humph”, Irma and Norma softly snorted and then walked to their respective seats.
Needless to say, but the king wasn’t happy, Annete has been kicking his ass since the beginning of this event, probably as a revenge since she was ignored in the last meeting that the higher echelons of the kingdom held.
Vincent saw the sparks flying and he bitterly laughed, as he tried to take the conversation to a different direction, Annete actually cooperated with him by pointing out something the old man “forgot” to mention.
“Uncle Vincent, although I didn’t mention it, but it didn’t escape from me, that you didn’t mention the fact that each year the four currents that converge in the Wild Tide Reef, tend to drag not only magic beasts from their respective seas but even resources and other natural treasures”.
The Trident Marshal inwardly chuckled, but he still accepted the lead Annete gave him.
“As I stated before, luck is part of one’s strength, I personally believe that when one is destined to something, it doesn’t matter where you are it will come to you, but at the same time personal effort is important in order to fully exploit one’s opportunities, like this, all those kids will have a fair chance of getting their own fortunate encounters, whether they can spot them or not, that is up to them”.
“Well said old Vincent, please accept this toast from me hahaha!”, the general Dominic completely ignored the seats and other “boring” stuff and went straight to the drinks table, grabbed a bottle and directly drank from it.
The other neo nobles were pretty much the same, they ate and drank without thinking of elegancy and things like that, which of course made the most orthodox nobles glare at them, but since they were minding their own business discussing in their private groups, nothing else happened.
And so, the festive atmosphere grew and soon the discussions turned in the direction of the crystal board, as the counters had started to show some changes, meaning the participants were starting to get some achievements.𝑂𝑣𝗅𝒩xt.𝗇𝓔t
The mother of the crowned prince, Irma, smiled from ear to ear seeing that her son was the first one to increase his score, the dazzling yellow star with a number “1” attracted the attention of all the people present, that and the fact that Terry got a small bonus for being the first to increase his score.
Irma turned to see Annete who was enjoying a piece of cake with a free and careless expression, but her modals were top notch, making it a bliss for the eyes jut to see her, with a challenging expression, but then her smile froze on her face when Annete’s voice made everyone turn to see the only one that had zero points up past the first thirty minutes.
“Oh my, these bonuses are a bit unfair, but I guess that making the effort of finding a peak stage middle level Mortal magic beast to be the first kill and doing it such a small lapse of time instead of going for long endurance battle, is truly praise worthy~”, said the queen as she pointed at a certain name with her spoon.
Once the eyes of the nobles found what the queen was pointing at, their mouths widened in disbelief.
…
While Daimon might not be the one with the highest realm among the present people, he has yet to see someone whose perception surpasses his, in the young generation at least, so of course he noticed there were a few people that have been eyeing them in secret.
So, after seeing with his infinity eyes a temporary breach opening on the ground, and making sure it led to not a dead end, he grabbed the girls and jumped into it.
Inside of the tunnel the current was pretty strong, luckily the potion that the queen gave them not only allowed to breath underwater, but also protected their mouth, eyes and ears from the pressure, essentially granting them the common advantages of the mermen of seeing, talking and hearing underwater, besides breathing of course.
The girls were holding onto Daimon, with the exception of Mellie that held Aisha’s shoulder to not be dragged apart by the current.
Aisha looked at the place from where they entered the tunnel, that closed in a hurry and she raised an eyebrow at her son.
‘Why didn’t you let those idiots follow us darling, we could have dealt with them right now?’.
Daimon grinned as she answered to Aisha through the mental connection.
‘It’s better like this, we’ll let the little fish fatten before catching it’.
Aisha softly giggled and then she tightened her grip on Daimon’s right arm, as the current accelerated all of a sudden after taking a detour.
After about ten minutes of being guided by the current, Daimon suddenly felt his body being released from the pressure.
“Don’t let go yet, I’ll take us to the surface”, mumbled Daimon.
“Mm”, the girls nodded and then Daimon moved his feet to propel them out of the water, while dragging others out of the water without using his hands as support, might be hard for others.
Daimon who has trained to swing a thirty-ton sword around, could easily handle helping five girls out of the water.
Once their heads popped out of the water, Daimon first inspected his surroundings, they happened to reach an underwater cave of some kind.
There was no shore and they actually had to jump a couple of meters to reach the ground of the cave, Daimon flexed his legs and then with straightened them propelling himself and the girls out of the water and safely landing on the ground, which was made out of some kind of dark green rock.
As soon as his feet landed on the rock, Daimon waved his hand and Disaster appeared floating in front of him, before he stabbed it on the ground.
“Screeeechhh!!!”, a loud uncomfortably high-pitched sound echoed through the cave, before the ground bellow their feet trembled, revealing there was some kind of large webbed hand which was covered by rocks, below them.
“What the hell is that?”, the first one to react was Ivonne, she and the other girls jumped away from the large webbed hand but Daimon stayed there.
The whole rock trembled before a fifteen-meter-tall strange creature raised from the ground, its hands were about two meters large and Daimon was standing on it, with Disaster piercing the webbed part from one side to the other.
“I wonder what the hell are you”, mumbled Daimon trying to see if the creature was rational or not.
The reason as to why he did it, was because the creature stood on its hind legs in a semi-erect way, and it had large arms as well as a trunk which resembled that of a human, though it had the head of some kind of fish from the depths of the ocean, with big bright red eyes and needle like teeth.
The answer of the creature was to open its jaws and try to devour Daimon, Daimon simply loosened his grip on Disaster’s hilt, and the whole 40 tons of weight of the sword when Narasha didn’t cooperate to lighten it, made the creature fall and get pinned to the ground due to Disaster’s edge betting drilled into the rock all the way to the hilt.
The creature made a ruckus trying to separate itself from the ground, even trying to take out Disaster just to be directly attacked by the black and red bordered energy radiated by Disaster.
‘This thing has such a low vitality but a really high amount of darkness and water mana, a good help to eliminate more of the antinite~’, said Narasha directly to Daimon’s mind.
Daimon chuckled, after a couple of seconds, the creature collapsed exhausted, only then he took Disaster out of the creature’s hand, he was surprised that the thing didn’t cut off its arm to escape, as he would have done that if he was in that situation.
But then he remembered that Narasha mentioned it had a really low vitality, meaning that losing a limb was probably the same as dying due to the loss of blood.
After inspecting the creature Daimon found the mark that the Trident Marshal mentioned, at the left side of the head of the creature, and he smirked noticing the three yellow stars on it.
“What an unfortunate bastard, a glass cannon ambush beast like you would have probably caused all the other teams troubles, and you had to come across the one that can see through disguises, and really heavy sword too”, mumbled Daimon as he snapped his fingers.
The creature then exploded in white flames before it even had the chance to scream, it died, then Daimon saw the three-star mark flying out of the corpse and entering the crystal plate the Trident Marshal handed him.
Daimon placed Disaster’s backside on his shoulder and then walked towards the girls, it was awfully obvious that Mellie was the newest of the group, because her pretty face had the word “impossible” written all over it.
“S-Say Daimon, I could feel the ground tremble when the creature fell earlier, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t that heavy, so how much does that sword weights?”.
Daimon chuckled as he played with Disaster before saying.
“About forty tons, but it will keep increasing in the future”.
Seeing Mellie’s dumbfounded expression, the Risha sisters patted her shoulders.
“It’s easier if you don’t think too much about it, otherwise, you are in for a lot of outrageous things~”, said Leslie.
“Mm”, Liliana and Yvonne nodded agreeing with Leslie, while Aisha giggled.