Weland sat on a block of his territory. The dimension around them was a place of darkness and shadow, lit only by his shine dragon slayer magic. The woman before him had an ageless look about her. Physically she could have been in her late teens or early twenties, her pale skin, black hair, and black wardrobe giving her an almost goth appearance, but there was a timeless look to her face, and something elfin about her beauty. She carried herself with a stately elegance that spoke of otherworldly nobility.
She was the Horned King’s cauldron. Weland’s territory armor, and as many status ailment negating spells as he could stack on himself, were wrapped tightly about him. He’d done all he could to seal its power before placing the Personality Enchantment on it, and done all he could to program the resultant personality for loyalty, but he still did not trust the cauldron. Its magic was not his magic, and he could feel it twisting and rejecting his enchantment even as he had placed it upon the cauldron.
“What can you tell me about yourself?” Weland asked.
“Isn’t what I will tell, more important than what I could?” the girl smiled, her lips the same black as her hair, her eyes red as she looked at him with a vulpine grin.
“What is your purpose?” Weland ventured.
“I believe you could tell me that better than I could tell you. After all, your enchantment created me.” Weland’s eyes rolled at the deflection.
“What do you desire?”
That one got her to pause. “I… don’t think I’m sure of that.”
“What is the king of distortion?”
“... I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What did the Horned King want?”
“To bring death to all of Britannia.”
“Why?”
Again the elfin woman paused. A pointed ear twitched beneath her long black hair, and long, slender fingers reached to brush her hair behind it. “I cannot say. The cauldron exists to help him bring death to all of Britannia.”
“So you can tell me its purpose?”
“Can? Yes. Will?”
“What do you want to answer my questions clearly?”
“Freedom.”
Weland’s eye twitched. He’d made her. He’d made her specifically to get information about the cauldron. Her purpose was to tell him everything she could. And now she was trying to barter freedom.
“I can’t give you freedom without releasing the cauldron onto the world, and I can’t even begin to consider that until you give me the answers I need,” He said.
“You won’t. So I see no reason to.”
“Why won’t I?”
“That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?”
“Well I definitely won’t if you don’t give me information.”
“And I have no reason to give you information if you won’t.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to figure out things about the cauldron experimentally. Maybe I’ll start by making stew.”
Her cheek and eye twitched. Weland recognized it from his own expression of frustration a moment ago, but it was more exaggerated.
“I mean got to see if the cauldron is any good as a cauldron.”
“I am the brewer of death and destruction, of life eternal clawed from the grave. I am not a common cookpot.” She had risen to her feet, towering over Weland in his fairy form. She was lithe, airy, and elfin, with a sense of ethereal beauty. She was not small. She stood over 6 ft tall, albeit somewhat willow thin.
“You seem to take pride in your destructive aspect,” Weland said. He tried not to show the smug, superior smirk forming on his face, but he needed to play more poker.
“Don’t you? I mean you made me.”
“I didn’t make you as the brewer of death and destruction. I made you as the answerer of questions.”
She laughed then, a laugh that spoke of pleasure taken at others’ expense. “You did poor work then. For I bring death and destruction, I don’t answer questions.”
Weland’s territory armor down air permeability at a thought as his Archive warned of a shift in magical energy within the eidolon he had created. Poison issued forth from her being, filling the area, and washing over his armoring forcefield. He was in a space all his own, but still there was the feeling of the poison all around his armor.
And then the dimension shifted subtly, and the energies within began to be desired. He reinforced his territory armor, and he drew in energies from that which the dimension had absorbed to reinforce his territory armor. It lost something efficiency-wise but consuming her poisons the energy was a net gain for him. Not that he really needed it unless she stubbornly tried to kill him longer.
It was with a look of petulance across her face that she flopped down to sit on the ground - the bench of territory he had provided her with consumed by the dimension - and stopped her assault.
She crossed her arms before her, and Weland sighed. “Ready to talk to me now without trying to kill me?”
“No,” She huffed. “Not really. I mean… can’t I try and kill you a little while we talk?”
“Why do you want to kill me?”
“You’re the King of Distortion.”
“Why do you want to kill the King of Distortion?”
“Because you can stop the Horned King.”
“Little late to kill me now,” Weland said. And then he looked at her. Her eyes turned away from him, as she suddenly seemed afraid to make eye contact with him.
“The Horned King is dead, right?” He pressed.
“Of course,” She said.
“And not coming back?”
He’d made the personality enchanted onto the cauldron. It shouldn’t be able to lie to him. Of course it shouldn’t have been able to try and kill him either.
“And not coming back, right?” He repeated.
“How would I know?”
“Do you have reason to believe he is?”
“Well… He’s the Lord of Death.”
“What gives him that title?”
“He commands the Black Cauldron.”
“So if I get you to listen to me I’ll be the Lord of Death?”
“You’re the King of Distortion.”
“Why couldn’t I be both?”
“I don’t like you.”
“That’s not how you get ice cream.”
“What’s ice cream?”
“A sweet treat.”
“I don’t like sweets.”
“How do you know that?”
She gave a noncommittal wave of her hand. “I just do.”
“What do you like?”
“Bringing death to the living.”
That was it. If she was going to answer like that he wasn’t going to play nice. His features and figure shifted, as he allowed his takeover magic to change his body, Seilah’s curse of macro beginning to fill him. “In that case I think I had best make you talk.”
Weland stepped back into the dimension that included Britannia with an exhausted sigh. Arthur sat watching over Merlin’s unconscious, wounded form. Weland had healed her some. But he had been careful not to heal her completely. He didn’t want her waking up until he had decided what to do with the black cauldron.
And after that interrogation he had decided that sealing it away as tightly as he could was the only option.
“Did you learn what you set out to learn?” Arthur asked, looking at him.
Weland’s hand reached to his head, fingers running through his hair. “Your majesty, I learned that the cauldron is an artifact of death with but one purpose to bring death to this entire world. I learned that it can and will resurrect the Horned King, that as long as it exists he can be reborn through it. I learned that it can resist my magic, and that it will not be simple to destroy if we decide to go that route.” He didn’t know enough about this world’s magic to be certain whether he could contain it and put it to his purposes or not. He wasn’t certain what his purposes with it would even be.
“And what of Vortigern?”
“I haven’t interrogated him yet,” Weland admitted. “I was busy with the Cauldron.”
“I have,” Selene said walking forward, magical energy crackling between her finger tips. Her magic power from this world was Invasion, the power to invade minds. Given Merlin might have already guessed it, it was a better card to reveal than his Macro curse. “The Horned King resurrected him. Offered to make him the vassal king over his old lands once the Horned King had conquered Britannia. He never trusted the Horned King, but the King could kill him with a whim, and he’d die if the Horned King was ever truly vanquished.”
“So the Horned King is coming back,” Arthur noted.
Weland resisted the urge to point out to the king he’d already reported that.
“It seems like it,” Selene said. “Or he lied to Vortigern and Vortigern swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Really, though, Vortigern just wanted to see you dead. He knew that there would be no rule under the Horned King, but he wanted to destroy Uther for overthrowing him and everything that Uther had loved and built. You were first on the list.”
“And what were they seeking with the King of Distortion?” Arthur asked the question that Weland knew had been coming. And hated that it inevitably would. He didn’t want to have to answer it, because… well he wanted to bury the fact that he had been the main target.
“Vortigern believed that the King of Distortion was a threat to the Horned King, and under the Horned King’s belief the only thing in Britannia which could and would stop him from complete conquest, and that the Horned King was convinced that he needed to kill them now before they could grow stronger and reach new heights of power.” That got Weland a look from Arthur. He had destroyed a castle with an explosion which had killed a man who dissolved magic as it touched him. And then he had killed a dragon which men would call a living mountain - though closer to a castle - with a single spell. What greater heights of power was the Horned King fearing that Weland would reach. “Vortigern didn’t care because he got to pursue his vengeance. And once it was done he’d see about gaining dominion over the King of Distortion.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Arthur nodded and looked at Weland. “Did you learn anything from the Cauldron about the King of Distortion?”
“Much the same,” Weland said. It was partially true. He just wasn’t including certain aspects the Cauldron had told him when forced.
“What does it mean to be the King of Distortion?” Arthur pressed.
“Vortigern couldn’t tell beyond that he was seen by the Horned King as a threat,” Selene said.
“I was talking to a cookpot of death and destruction. It wasn’t exactly the chattiest source, or freely giving out details on such things,” Weland spun the truth. It was technically true. He just wasn’t including how it had told him that the King of Distortion would warp the world, that their very presence and existence warped the world, and that the Cauldron like the Horned King had been born to destroy them; and thus control how the world would be warped and distorted in Chaos’s favor.
Hendrickson was on edge. The king’s new movements threatened to upturn his plans. Since killing the former Great Holy Knight and removing the King’s personal loyalists the Seven Deadly Sins, he and Dreyfus had vied against each other for power. He had nearly been ready to usurp the king’s power and proceed in his plan to open the Coffin of Eternal Darkness with or without Dreyfus. The king’s growing talk of peace, and the lack of need for Holy Knights had been a tool Hendrickson could use to secure the loyalty of enough knights to make it a possibility. And with his research into demon blood showing promise he could create a new generation of knights to bolster his numbers and ranks.
But now the king had begun rallying the knights of Liones to him with talk of a Holy War. The King of Distortion must be stopped before he brought great destruction to Britannia. And for that King Bartra had called the strongest knights of the kingdom together.
It had taken Hendrickson a year of work and scheming to remove Denzel Liones to a distant post. And now he had been recalled immediately, before Hendrickson was ready to move against Bartra. He could try, but his loyalist cadre, even including those he could push into service under him, was too small unless Dreyfus threw his support behind Hendrickson. Even with Gilthunder’s forced loyalty. Even with his undead fairy. Even if he could get the Sin who had returned to mope by the City of the Dead and who now served as a personal executor to aid directly against the king which was unlikely given his oaths of personal loyalty.
Well…
There was the vampire. Hendrickson might be able to use her. She had power. She had enough power she might be able to tip things in his favor, even if King of the Seven Deadly Sins sided with King Bartra. But he couldn’t be certain of her loyalty, even if she seemed to have no desire for this crusade against the so-called King of Distortion.
And then there was Bartra’s prophecy about this King of Distortion. He would open the Coffin of Eternal Darkness. He would bring the new Great Holy War and its destruction. He would bring forth darkness greater than the world had ever seen.
Hendrickson had spent the last decade seeking nothing else but opening the Coffin of Eternal Darkness. It was an obsession with him. A monomaniacal desire to which all else was subservient.
If the King of Distortion was destined to cause it to open, he did not want to stop him. It would seem that they were on the same side. But the how was the question. For now, though, he had to talk with the king of Liones about the force being assembled to move south.
The Horned King had been defeated. The force that had threatened Camelot had been vanquished. Weland had slain the dragon and captured the resurrected Crimson King who had commanded the great serpent’s loyalty. Alongside the king he had returned a hero of Camelot.
But not all was well with Weland in Camelot. He knew Merlin had even more suspicions about him than she had before. Oh, he’d saved hers and Arthur’s life, she was evidently thankful about that. But he had been named the King of Distortion whose presence brought Chaos and destruction.
There was also the Horned King’s black cauldron. Weland had locked it away, sealed behind a treacherous personality enchantment, bound by his Macro Curse, kept in eternal slumber, and all while trapped within a prison dimension. He still didn’t trust it to remain contained. There were energies which even now moved within it.
Keeping the exact extent of his abilities secret from Merlin was difficult. He had in the end been forced to reveal his Dark Dominion magic, the power to create pocket dimensions of darkness to use as all consuming traps. He’d dismissed the personality enchantment before showing up, letting her only see a cauldron. She had - quite rightfully - then chewed him out for the lack of proper containment for the cauldron.
Not that her spells had held it better than his. Even her Perfect Cube wouldn’t survive its energies that could eat away at the underlying magic. At least he’d gotten a magic lesson out of his Archives observing her. He’d even learned how to craft a Perfect Cube of his own.
Merlin had actually warmed to him after the castle. There was the question hanging in the air about his status as King of Distortion, but she accepted that twice he’d saved Arthur’s life, and had acted to keep her from dying in two battles against surprisingly dangerous foes. That debt had earned him some consideration at least. And the consideration had come in the form of grimoires from her personal library, and the golden key he had taken an interest in when he had been allowed in her personal lab.
The golden key of Taurus the bull. He wondered how far his collection might extend while he was in this world. As much as Weland couldn’t slip the feeling that Merlin was still suspicious of him, things had actually gotten easier there.
That didn’t mean he’d been allowed to rest, though. Besides dealing with the cauldron, containing the resurrected former tyrant-king, and attempting to read the grimoires from Merlin there was still the looming task of preparing Camelot’s knights for the Holy War. And then there was the threat of an attack from Liones which Minerva had warned him about.
He had thought that Liones’s king was a pacifist. Was this more of Chaos’s OCs? Had Bartra been replaced by some shapeshifting doppelganger? Or was it that his acceptance of the 7 Virtues and true Estarossa had been that bad?
Whatever it was, he could use the prediction that he would open the Coffin. It might be enough to get Hendrickson to let him near the red demon to fix the flaw of the New Generation. That would help uplift the Holy Knights of Liones to be relevant in the Holy War. But helping Hendrickson without burning bridges with Camelot might require him to find some means of squaring the circle.
For now his focus had been on uplifting the knights of Camelot. With Galerides dead they had lost not their best warrior, but the one with the greatest raw physical prowess and mastery of the sword.
That was where Ddraig Goch came in. Forged from a fang of Vortigern’s dragon - the red worm which over time became the Welsh Dragon - the sword had been more receptive to enchantment than any weapon he had made as Weland the Smith. Three pieces of the lacrima made from the dragon’s heart had been implanted into the hilt. It had taken more than a month to craft. And Weland was not going to offer the sword not to Arthur directly, but to whoever could tame the blade.
His enchantments had been laid. Painstaking and difficult work, but the sword should be the equal of any S-Ranked Mage of Earthland. And now Ddraig Goch stood beside him, the personality enchantment taught to him by Irene having given her shape and form. She looked a fair bit like Erza Scarlet, not that that was his intention. Her figure though was similar. Her hair too was a scarlet hue, distinct and eye catching as it ran down from her head, too red for the world he had been born into, more like one of the inhuman hues found in anime or manga… or the worlds he found himself in. Her eyes were also red, not quite the same shade, but still a crimson color. She was about 5’6”, and she carried herself with the stride of a natural born warrior.
He’d used his Archive in her enchantment, uploading all he could about the various fighting styles it had observed. Her mastery of the sword wasn’t truly complete, he had fed her data, but without direct comparisons in battle the full why and how wasn’t there. But she was optimized for figuring it out. She was a warrior-trainer. It was her purpose.
And she walked beside him to the throne room, carrying her true body in its sheath. It was there that he drew forth Ddraig Goch from its scabbard and presented it before the knights of Camelot.
“Hark O knights! I present to you Ddraig Goch, the Dragon Slayer! The most powerful blade I have ever enchanted. I present it to whosoever she shall accept as the wielder,” He gestured the sword at the human avatar of the blade, not explaining her true connection. “If you think you can master the blade, face her in battle as many times as it takes for her to recognize that you possess the heart, spirit, skill, and power necessary to be worthy of the Red Dragon!”
There were glances passing from knight to knight as they looked at the sword. His blades of light were well known. They made even the least Holy Knight a match for greats, capable of toppling entire strongholds in a single blow; or so they said. He could tell that they were wondering how powerful this sword must be if it was his greatest enchantment.
And then Ddraig smiled beside him, reaching for the hand-and-a-half sword’s hilt and taking the blade from him. “You heard him. Win me and I am yours.”
Some part of Weland cringed at the fact that she had put it that way. But she was the sword, and the sword was the prize. Still there was a murmuring then, as the question rose if the blade came with a bride.
“She is the sword,” Weland finally said to silence the questioning cacophony. “The sword and the maiden are one. If you wish to have either you must be worthy of both.”
Ddraig tilted her head and winked. “Do you think you can beat me?”
It had taken time, but Liones’s holy knights were ready to move south. There was only one thing left before they did so.
Minerva faced the Great Holy Knight Dreyfus. She had petitioned to join the king’s entourage. All the biggest names among holy knights were there except Denzel and Hendrickson who would guard Liones in Dreyfus’s absence. But the king’s personal squadron or as it was called Dawn Roar, Dreyfus himself, his nephew Gilthunder and his son Griamor, their fellow Howzer, Vivian the court mage, and many more had been selected for his retinue as they went to see what could be done about the King of Distortion. Even one of the outlawed Seven Deadly Sins - the fairy king known as King - was included in the party.
Minerva sat astride a very special line. She was both a powerful knight. She had fought and defeated one of the Seven Deadly Sins - at least she claimed to have - and she had encountered and fought the dragon that had heralded Bartra’s vision. Hendrickson claimed she was the strongest knight in his faction.
But she had no long past in Liones. She was just a knight seeking to fight one of its criminals for personal vengeance. And this was an unrelated quest of kingdom shaking import.
If she was to join, she would have to prove her strength, and the proof that King Bartra had requested was simple enough: fight the Great Holy Knight Dreyfus and win.
The long haired Great Holy Knight had a small beard, really more of a mustache that connected to his goatee. He was a tall, powerfully built man with an air of confidence and pride. He looked like he knew what he wanted, he knew how he was going to get it, and he was going to do it.
Minerva knew to be on guard as she took her position opposite him. The Rabbit Killer whip was in her hand, its head trailing on the ground. There was no restriction against using one’s magic power in the fight, and she had every reason to expect he’d lead with his.
The sun was high overhead, enough to bother her as a vampire. But it didn’t matter. She was the vampire princess. She held the power to stand above her race as its strongest member day or night.
“Pierce.” The word erupted from Dreyfus’s mouth and a beam shot from his sword. It struck through Minerva’s stomach leaving a clean, almost perfectly round hole in its wake. Dreyfus’s face said it all, a look of abject disappointment. Not in her. She wasn’t even worth his contempt. But that he’d hit off center, and the hole’s edge was in her navel with a fair portion of its radius outside of her body.
Minerva was the princess of the vampire clan. Their regeneration was not perhaps the equal to the demon clan’s but it was immense. A wound like that might slow her down, but it’d not finish her off.
The Rabbit Killer shot forth, the chain whip stretching out to wrap around his neck. And then she twisted her body and spun, slamming him down behind her, digging up the ground with his body as she completed a 360 degree turn, lifting him back up into the air before her whip released him, with some added velocity from her white tiger dragon slayer magic. He shot out, landing well past the hills in the distance.
To her surprise he’d resisted her attempt to drain his strength in the process. She wasn’t certain why he had proven immune, but it was worth noting. The battle might not be over. So she began to run. She dove as she crested the hill, dodging a blast of the same energy this time aimed for her head and she snapped her whip, letting it stretch out to many times its length, the magic multiplying the chain links even as if animated them to her will. The spiked ball that served as the head of her whip smashed into Dreyfus’s elbow before the length spasmed and wrapped around his arm. The battle was over. This time she didn’t throw him, but let the whip stay wrapped around his arm as she slammed him again and again into the ground and demanded he yield.
Even if she was a stranger her ability in battle had been proven.
Ddraig Goch smiled at her suitors. She wasn’t sure why father told her not to call them that. Then again he told her not to call him father. But he was her father. He had made her. Her mind was his enchantment. Her human form was his enchantment. Even the powers and form of her true body were his making. He was as far as she could discern his father. And these men before her wanted to wield her. If that was not a suitor what was?
Five of them had banded together to fight her today. She wasn’t sure if they honestly expected it to make her recognize them as worthy of her. But she was willing to give them a lesson and bruises as a group just as she was if they were alone.
They were getting better. But that didn’t mean she needed to so much as use her blade. She parried one with her sheath and turned him into the way of the next’s attack, her leg rising up to strike a third in the groin. “I am a sword. You’ll never beat me without resorting to your magic powers,” She commented. “So use them, weave them into battle with me. Let me see the strength of your souls not just your muscles.”
She saw new determination forming on the faces of the knights, but whatever plans they were formulating was not to be. The exercise grounds that she had been given to take on challenges went hushed as the watching peasantry began to kneel and bow. The king had come, Arthur striding towards the exercise field with the look of awkwardness he often had when obsequience was shown in his presence.
“I would like to test the validity of those words, lady Ddraig,” Arthur said, his hand going to Chrysaor at his hip.
“I am not some stepping stone to some other sword,” Ddraig answered with an unfeminine bluntness which would be questionably appropriate to anyone and the lack of respect and politeness was especially inappropriate when talking to a king.
Arthur was stunned for a moment. “What do you mean by that?”
“You have sword you took from the stone, the sword that must not be wielded. I am not some stepping stone towards another sword.”
Arthur paused. “I did not say I sought to claim you. I only want to test your assertion and see if you can push me to my limits so that I finally have cause to discover my magical power. I had hoped it would rise against the Horned King and Vortigern but it did not and now I beseech you to please allow me to test my skill against yours.”
Ddraig looked at him. “Well, I’d not mind seeing how I compare to my big sister. If she’ll fight with you, I’ll fight you.”
Arthur looked at her for a moment, and then put his hand on Chrysaor. “I don’t have any reason to think she won’t.”
Ddraig began to object. If her sister was remaining as a blade she wasn’t really fighting with Arthur. But she did want to see what the king could do with her sister in his hand. “Let’s do this.”
Weland winced as he saw Arthur’s wound, his arm cut to the bone in several places, ligaments barely attached. “What happened?”
“I fought your sword, and ordered her to stop holding back.” The king was wan from the loss of blood, even with his arm tied off.
“Someone, amputate the arm. It’s gonna be easier to just regrow a whole new one.” Weland barked out, only to then sigh at the looks he received. The stunned, dumbstruck silence all around him was absolutely no help. So he took his knife from his belt and he cut the last few scraps of flesh holding Arthur’s arm to his shoulder. He was going to have to talk to Ddraig about not putting the king’s life in danger. Regardless of his orders. Still she’d evidently disobeyed somewhat as the king was not burnt.