Chapter 13: 12.

A lot had been said about the Hanging Tower when he’d gotten the assignment. Like anything people knew little about, it was a source of intense discussion and speculation. 

They say of the Tower that it was visible from anywhere in the kingdom.

Sago didn’t know how big the kingdom was, but he sincerely doubted it. What he did know was it was definitely visible from a mile and a half—the exact distance between it and the city.

They say of the Tower that any who walk in never walk out again.

Which Sago found impossible because people were going in and out all the time in order to deliver food and dry goods, not to mention the glut of resources that researchers there burnt through.

They say of the Tower that it drove people mad.

…Well, he had no evidence for or against that. People had gone mad over less, so maybe.

The roads surrounding the city were well patrolled, so such a thing as monsters or brigands waylaying travellers was near impossible between the two landmarks. The closer he travelled to the Tower, the more Sago could smell a pungent odour of overcharged magic that was probably far more responsible for tamping down monster activity—the weaklings, at least. It’d be catnip to something stronger.

It didn’t concern him, of course. First, humans were short-lived and so were their monuments, so as far as he was concerned: if it fell, it fell. Second, according to the  history books the Tower was built roughly 180 years ago—that it still stood indicated it probably had its own means of deterring anything overly dangerous. 

The closer he drew to the Hanging Tower, the worse the smell got. By the time he’d arrived, he’d had to borrow some of his hair to create a mask to block out the permeation in order to keep from throwing up.

According to the information he’d gathered, the Hanging Tower was made up of two parts: the tower that gave it its name, and the circle courtyard surrounding it that was almost larger than the square meterage of Rosecrest. The circle was divided into eighths, forming the core courtyards all converging on the tower at the centre—seven departments of study (which he’d not bothered to memorise since he’d never seen the point of trying to compartmentalise magic that way), and the administration department. The Tower itself drifted off into the sky further than it felt possible to crane your head back to see. It felt like it had been a man-made attempt to create a Sky Pillar. The typical kind of human effort at architectural immortality.

The wall was two metres tall and a foot thick—a gesture of a thing rather than a real obstruction. Knocking at the shuttered double doors, a slit opened and a pair of sharp eyes glared out. There was a long pause and soft mumbling, then the shutter was closed again with a low curse.

Sago waited for a beat, but heard only silence on the other side. He realised what happened and knocked again. This time when the shutter was opened with a loud and irate “what!”, he cleared his throat loudly and stuck a hand up.

“I’m from the Union. You made an open request through us for resource collection?” He recited the words he’d been told to forward on, pulling the weatherproofed courier tube with the rolled up request forms inside from the holster at his belt. “We’ve finished grading the turned in collections and I’m here to deliver the first batch.”

“We’ve made a lot of open requests.” The porter grunted, slamming the shutter close. There was a follow up of locks and gears grinding, and the small service door within the expansive double doors was opened, revealing the man on the other side. He wore a simple grey kaftan over an ornate umber shirt with fine gold-threaded embroidery and russet dyed serouel, all of it cinched by a brilliant red waist wrap from which hung a heavily weighted keyring. A scraggly beard that had made a desperate attempt to grow despite itself hung loosely from his chin, adding years to a face that probably belonged to a man who was really only in his early thirties.

“Which one is this, then?” He asked, snatching the courier tube off Sago impatiently and slapping the rolled up forms inside out into his palm. He shook the paper out, skimming the text until he hit the signatures at the bottom before giving Sago a sympathetic look, passing back the messed up forms. “Ol’ Ophius, huh? If you’d arrived an hour earlier, you coulda avoided him and had his assistant sign instead. There’s a god of luck out there that must hate you.”

There are quite a few deities that hate me, Sago thought dully, trailing behind the man as he led the way through the entrance hall.

Rather than heading out onto the green, he was led to the left, to the outer ring walkway that encircled the whole structure. On one side was the solid stone of the boundary wall, on the other were ornate stone latticework screens that allowed a view of the inner triangular courtyards and surrounding building structures. The buildings were designed with extra stories the further inward they went, with slanted roofs that converged on the central tower that naturally formed a buttress around the tower.

The courtyards were not solemn and quiet, as Sago expected from such a secretive and solemn institute of learning, but instead peppered with people in all manner of colourful and foreign clothing. Some were reading or notetaking on the grass, some were congregated together into furiously arguing groups—a few were even in the process of writing spells out into the ground, though judging by the berth given to them by other mages, there wasn’t much optimism about the results.

“Here we are. Alteration department.” The porter opened his mouth to speak, gesturing to a set of stairs leading downward, just as there was a tremble and the sound of a muffled explosion. Sago sneezed in quick succession as the odour of rotting decay was momentarily disrupted with instead the smell of grass clippings and scorched earth. The porter was entirely unphased, already heading down the stairs.

Sago had no choice but to follow. Still, he quickly glanced through the stone lattice, spying a few figures pulling themselves up off the ground in excitement as a small tornado gradually lost momentum and dropped a straw dummy fatally down.

The underground wasn’t dank or dim as one might imagine. It was breezy and open, with wide passageways lit by glass blown lanterns and open doorways into rooms of unknown purpose. Some appeared to be focused on cultivating plantlife, others had large samples of monster parts in semi-dissected states.

The room Sago was brought to was stuffed with metal ores and raw mwyn still in an unprocessed crystalline state. A massive furnace was set up against one wall with multiple ventilation pipes leading upwards. The floor was inscribed with magic circles that seemed to mostly be a combination of protective barrier magic and heat dispersal. A pair of stocky figures almost the same height as Sago were deeply embroiled in a lively argument that seemed on the edges of getting physical, but it didn’t make them falter an iota in manning the furnace, which was blasting out a scorching heat.

A third figure was darting through the room, grabbing and discarding papers in a frenzied state, seemingly more to vent frustration than with any purpose.

The porter gave a ceremonial rap at the door and cleared his throat, voice barely managing to carry over the roar of the bellows: “Signed delivery for Ophius.”

Then he gave Sago a look of “your problem now,” before scurrying away. The demon felt speechless—there was absolutely no sense of wariness that he might wander off and get off to mischief? Or even a worry he’d simply and stupidly get lost? In the scales of the man’s heart, clearly whatever trouble Sago might cause weighed less than having to be around this Ophius.

When the scurrying figure froze and whipped around, Sago realised why. Normally he wasn’t good at differentiating humans, but it hadn’t been long at all since he’d seen this fellow yelling at the goldsmith in the craftsmens district.

“Delivery of A grade copper, zinc, tin, and bismuth, and S grade zinc and bismuth.” Sago pulled the crate out of his courier sling and balanced the delivery forms on top, holding it out to the long-haired man.

“Why’s your face covered? Are you a thief?” The man—Ophius—snapped suspiciously, his temper clearly not cooled after all this time. It didn’t stop him from snatching up the lid of the crate, inspecting the ores packed in straw inside. “Passable.”

“Allergies.” Sago explained briefly, preferring to open his mouth as little as possible. “If these are fine, can you just sign already?”

“Ha. I said they’re passable—oh fine, I’ve better things to do than argue with children.” He scurried back to his desk with the delivery forms, grabbing and dipping a pen at random to hastily note down his signature, splattering droplets of ink in the process. He flapped the papers to let them dry faster, betraying his impatience for the goods despite his dismissal of them. “Put them down over there—carefully. Erlend, Tove, we’ll start with copper and zinc. That’s water and air, which becomes fire from brass—then we’ll use the amber mwyn for balance. I refuse to believe we won’t find a way to succeed.”

The two at the furnace spoke low and lyrically, an old mountain dialect Sago recognised even if he hadn’t heard it in a long, long time: “‘Elements in harmony’. That’s what he said last time with the silver and lead. I still haven’t grown back my ear hair.”

“What else d’you think happens when you throw fire-aspect mwyn into a furnace? You’re lucky you didn’t lose your ears. I told you to talk to him.”

“There’s no such thing as talking to mages.”

Sago placed the crate down randomly in the direction he'd indicated, glancing at the furnace with disinterest. The smell in here was especially pungent, not helped by the sweltering hot air. His eyes swept over the chaotic mess of papers, took in the different ore and crystal samples, and helplessly shook his head.

You are reading story The Demon King is a Shota! at novel35.com

“What. What was that.” Ophius’ voice came sharply.

“It’s warm here. Just shaking sweat from my eyes.” Sago held a hand out to collect the forms, but the man held them up petulantly, eyes narrowed.

“No you weren’t. You were looking at my research and shaking your head.” His chin lifted with a kind of pride that Sago didn’t realise reflected his own, stimulating the smaller figure to glare back in challenge.

It was clear this was a man who was wholly and unreasonably unwilling to have anything less than his own way. Sago tapped repeatedly against his front teeth with his thumbnail, feeling impatient. Fine, let it be tit for tat then. Placing his hands on his hips, Sago raised his gaze—though unfortunately with the height difference, the impact of the sense of arrogance was greatly lessened.

“Then let’s trade information,” he curled his lip, pointing openly at the two gossips manning the furnace, “I’ll tell you why I was shaking my head if you tell me how you have two dwarves working with you.”

“I just hired them. Dwarves work for money the same as anyone else.” Ophius dismissed hastily, then pestered back, “Now tell me what makes you so clever, that you think my research is wrong?”

“No.” Sago insisted. “Dwarves don’t work with mwyn, so how are they here?”

Although he didn’t know the specifics, he knew that dwarves considered smithing with magic crystal taboo. They refused to even set it into jewellery or weaponry. The reason Sago knew this was that very early into his reign as king, he’d attempted to negotiate trade with the lowland dwarves along the western flank of Daimonos. Dwarves were insular and neutral, with no historical animosity toward demons. Daimonos had no national exports, but one thing they weren’t short of was the useless contagion of magic crystals infecting the land. 

King Vassago had imagined an opportunity to trade the magic crystals for food and resources, been desperate for it, but the dwarves had flatly refused under the simple excuse that they considered mwyn a taboo and had no interest in it. Demons were rich in enemies but sorely lacking in terms of amicable neighbours, so rather than pressing the point, King Vassago had to helplessly accept that another avenue of rescue had been cut off from the demons.

Yet here now were two dwarves not just working with mwyn, but embroiled deep in focused research on the matter. He wanted answers.

Ophius looked annoyed, turning his head to the dwarves. His momentum was momentarily deflated, clearly deferring to them on whether or not they were willing to talk. It displayed the importance of their involvement in his research.

The stockier dwarf with bared arms scratched the back of their head, shrugging in assent. As if by way of explanation, they explained in a slow, stuttering voice with a sense of hesitancy, “I’m Erlend… Freename. This is my sister… Tove Freename.” 

It was not, by point of fact, an explanation.

Sago stared at Ophius with a sense of accusation, as if to say, What the hell am I meant to make of that, exactly? The mage bristled, The other dwarf—Tove—coughed delicately (or as delicately as a four foot slab of muscle, sweat, and beard could reasonably manage) to ease the sense of tension in the air.

“First of all, it’s not exactly ‘gainst the rules to work with mwyn, per se. It’s just some old superstitions about it—and some other materials to be fair, like. Not like we have a particular grudge sort of thing. The older generation really frowns on it, reckon it’s real poor luck, but you have to move with the times, like? Just considering you knew dwarves don’t traditionally dance with mwyn, we’d thought you knew a bit of this and that about dwarfish culture. As for the rest… forget it. Just think of us as Erlend and Tove, magician’s assistants with an interest in a new age of smithing.”

“Satisfied?” Ophius demanded, hastily interrupting any follow up questions.

Sago exhaled. “Satisfied.”

Satisfied to realise that time plods on. A thing held standard hundreds of years ago cannot always be so. All because he overlooked such a simple thing, how much had he lost? But a fair trade was a fair trade. He picked up one of the research papers, studying the notes. Actually, it was less of a research paper and more the diary of a madman: a pure stream of consciousness scribble, with sentences bolded and underlined, pockmarked with exclamation points. Some things were better to nip in the bud early.

“The current shortcoming of magic weapons is that the effect is achieved by embedding magic stones as foci, but that creates stress points and an imbalance of aetheric flow. You can offset this by using a high-conductivity metal, like silver, but it’s just not practical. A sword made of silver sounds dandy, but in practice, the metal is too soft and the amount needed to make a whole blade is too costly.”

He gazed lazily at the text beneath his fingers, his voice that had become soft and juvenile giving a somewhat comical edge to the slow, serious, lofty words:

“That’s why, in theory, the—new age of smithing? Is trying to create a magic alloy. If you imbue the metal itself with the aspect of magic ore, you create something with an even stronger aetheric resonance and conductivity than silver, with no transference loss or and better yet, no magic corrosion; the kind of metal that can be made into a real magic weapon. Your first attempt was probably by using ground up dust in the bladesmithing process. But it made the metal brittle and it would crumble with the slightest handling.”

Ophius’ expression changed, becoming accusatory. “It’s been leaked?”

“No. I’m just not an idiot.” Sago rolled his eyes, shaking the paper in his hand. So many papers and specimens and he couldn’t figure it out? “Good luck. But it can’t be done.” He paused. “Not to my knowledge, in any case.”

Ophius wore a harsh sneer on his face, snatching the paper and rolling it up. He looked like he was close to either laughing or crying, but his voice was pure rage when he spoke, “Yes, well, thank the gods an ignorant child working as a clerk is here to let me know my life’s work is futile. I really could have misstepped!”

“I’m just saving you time.” And money. Sago had seen the receipts.

He turned to leave, but was stopped with a cry of, “Wait!”

There was anger, but also a kind of frenzied desperation there that made Sago turn back around. Ophius was squatting on the ground, chewing his lower lip while glaring red-eyed at the paper in his hands. He glanced up at Sago, a mixture of emotions in his eyes, but the strongest of all was: pleading?

Maybe. It was familiar, yet not. The sort of pleading Sago had seen most of his life was the pleading of eyes that were about to extinguish. People struggling on the edges of mortality, with the unstoppable force of their indomitable will to live hitting the immovable object of—well, Vassago. People plead for their lives. For mercy. For grace and clemency. All things antonymous with “demon”.

There was that same kind of edge-of-life desperation there. As though, in this moment, Sago held his beating heart and it was up to him whether or not to crush it. What befuddled him was he clearly didn’t. Instead he held something akin to life. This kind of spark is called human ambition. This thing demons lacked, called soul.

It felt like he was on the edge of grasping something, yet it was just out of reach.

“How do you know?” Ophius asked, his voice lowered along with his attitude.

Sago searched for that ephemeral thing, speaking as if in a trance.

“Demons already tried the same. Countless of the best weaponsmiths, for decades, tried to figure it out. If there is no other thing demons can offer the world, it’s ways to commit war. And yet all of them, without exception, failed.”