Chapter 137: Murder – Part 3

Chapter 137: Murder – Part 3

Aoi and I remain knotted for a couple of minutes, allowing me to feel her insides gradually absorbing my cum. She rests her large, blue body against mine, and though she's heavy, it's far from being uncomfortable.

I can feel how the strength of this draconic form of mine is at a completely different level when compared to what I can do as a humanoid. Even though my arms are short and lack the "Dexterity" of human hands, they hold a lot of power in them, which is why Aoi can swing halberds or sledgehammers, but not anything more delicate.

My neck has so many muscles that it's obviously been made specifically to allow me to rip off chunks of meat I've bitten onto, while my claws are clearly for digging into flesh and holding my prey still while I tear them apart, piece by piece.

But if I were to act like that in a real fight, I'd be asking to get killed as humanoids have many tools to break through my scales and pierce through my hide. It's why I've made Aoi use a halberd, because attacking from range is better than grappling and biting in basically every conceivable situation.

She starts to feel sleepy since she's too comfortable on top of me, so I wake her up and undo the knot.

"Awn... it felt really good inside me," she moans as she shrinks back down to her usual size before jumping off and stretching her limbs with the elegance of a cat.

"We can't laze around too much, you know," I gently point out.

"I know..." She hums back and begins conjuring her ball of water for practice.

I return to my humanoid form and give Alissa a kiss and a hug. She can't train her bow with her hands the way they are right now, so now that she's finished her daily [Illusion Magic] practice, she's going to call for Kahura and finish her treatment.

She's dreading going back because she's tired of sleeping all day, and even with [Purify Body], drinking the sleeping potions still makes her feel a bit sick, so our hug is extra tight to comfort her a bit.

"Thanks, husband," she whispers sweetly in my ear, and we separate, then she waves as she leaves.

I watch her walk away, her fluffy tail swaying alluringly with each step, but then I remember something. "Right, Aisco wanted to talk."

After a quick [Clean], I use [Telekinesis] to float up towards our mini High Tree, which I enter on the floor the Officers have been given. Then I walk down the corridor towards the most isolated room, and it quickly becomes obvious why he chose to sleep so far from everyone else as the muffled sounds of explosions reach my ears. He's a bit of a mad scientist like Roxanne, so I think I need to come up with safety guidelines before he kills himself or hurts someone...

I stop before his door and sigh. Then I knock, and the explosions stop.

After a short wait, the door opens, revealing the creepy elf with his lifeless eyes and thousand-metri stare, his pale skin dirtied by patches of soot and some sort of cream that I believe is for treating burn wounds.

"Your Highness," he slowly greets with a nod, then immediately gets down to business, "I want to study the designs of your cannon."

I blink once, caught by surprise at his straightforwardness. "What for?"

He promptly launches into an explanation, his tone so flat and boring that I almost zone out, "I helped develop the Supersonic Penetrator, the heavily enchanted weapon that wounded you and Lords Ciel and Aoi when you attacked my previous place of employment. Your design is a lot more elegant, so I desire to study it and review the Penetrator."

I hold back a childish giggle. "Your 'Penetrator' has more power than my sabot cannon."

He nods slowly. "Yes, but it's extremely expensive, as you should know, whereas you made that cannon in a single day, showing the potential for it to become a far more standardized weapon than the vanity project my former peers treated the Penetrator as."

I rub my chin in thought with my padded claws. "Hm... do you know [Manipulate Metal]? That cannon needs extremely precise proportions or else a lot of power is lost to attrition."

He suddenly becomes so still that it's almost like he's stopped breathing, likely because he understands the implications of what's to come, and we stare at each other for an awkwardly long moment. Then he quietly admits, "No, I don't..."

I hold back a sigh and lay down the rules, "If you're going to ask for help from the court mages, you'll need to assure me that you won't cause any accidents that could hurt someone. I know you and Roxanne are quite reckless with experimentation, and this is too dangerous to let you play with it unsupervised."

His lifeless eyes gain a bit of fire to them, but it's because of annoyance rather than excitement. "I understand..." He begrudgingly accepts.

And then I give him a little encouragement, to the dismay of the two girls, "Lina and Aoi are working on smaller cannons that can be carried by hand, so you can think of ways that your work could aid them, too."

Then he finally stops looking like a corpse as some excitement appears in his expression. "Ooh, I see, I see... big plans."

I flash a smile and continue, "I don't have design papers for the cannon since we built it directly from my imagination, but I'll draw them for you."

He freezes, his mind seemingly stalling out in confusion. "Why didn't you draw up any design papers?"

Cause I'm a fucking nerd who spent too much time on Wikipedia, that's why.

I just smile and walk inside.

Aisco's lab is an organized mess. It's filled with tools, alchemical supplies, burned junk, junk that's burning, and junk to burn. Everything clearly has its own area, it's just that the things in those areas aren't organized. I can relate to him quite a bit since I'm not much better, but at least the things I study require very little in the material department.

I sit down at the one clean table, which is clearly the area he uses to write down his experiments as it's full of papers. Then I pick a blank sheet and start drawing the schematics for the cannon, the casing of the sabot, and the dart that it fires. The APFSDS works better with a smoothbore cannon, but I also include a drawing for the miniaturized and rifled cannon, and for the bullet that goes in it.

Lina and Aoi will perfect the rifle and the APFSDS cannon and make them ready for mass production, but Aisco can help by improving the Draconic Climax that Roxanne developed.

I find it funny that the Climax was based on Dawn of Fire's explosives, and now it's returning to Dawn of Fire through Aisco's further development of it.

Once I've finished the drawings, I give the sheet to him, which he just silently stares at for a long, awkward moment.

"Any questions...?" I hesitantly ask.

He slowly begins, "The 'cartridge' and the... 'APFSDS' round-..."

"You can just call it a sabot."

He clears his throat. "Yes, the 'cartridge' and the 'sabot'... they're just casings for the explosive, which propels the bullet and dart."

I hum, "Exactly."

He lifts his eyes from the papers and stares at me. "Those casings require extremely precise construction."

I chuckle softly in excitement. "Exactly, and that's what Lina and Aoi are developing: the methods to construct these things in massive numbers at a reasonable speed."

He hesitates for a couple of seconds as he thinks. Then he concernedly continues, "With a casing this thin, the metal is very delicate and vulnerable to blowing up inside the cannon, potentially damaging it."

I nod once again. "Exactly! Which is why the propellant needs to have a precise amount of power so that we aren't forced to drive up the cost by reinforcing the cannon magically."

His pupils widen in excitement as he understands his role. "I'll develop many prototypes."

"Talk to Roxanne when you're done." Then I tap his arm, which he visibly doesn't enjoy a single bit, and leave.

When I return to the yard that the girls are training in, Roxanne receives me with a very gloomy look, strikingly similar to Lina's. They kind of don't want to work with Aisco.

"Stop being such a baby," Hana grunts as Romy pummels her with a hammer.

"You wanted to study my [Chaos Breath]?" I gently ask, trying to get my mad scientist succubus to think of something more pleasant.

"Yes, of course!" She happily exclaims, instantly cheered up.

But to actually use [Chaos Breath] again takes a lot of effort from me. I unlocked it while I was the angriest I've ever felt, so it's no small task to recreate that condition. I even have to recruit Gify's help to flash painful and enraging memories at me to build up the anger.

Suddenly, it "clicks," and I feel the power building up within my throat, so I open my mouth and let it out at the hay target. The beam hits its chest, and the energy balloons into a turbulent ball of light, ripping apart any matter it touches just like an Arrow of Annihilation, except a lot more chaotic.

The explosion causes a shockwave that lifts dust and scatters the bits of hay that have managed to escape the destruction. Once all of the chaotic energy has been spent, we can see that over 90% of the target has simply disappeared.

Then I collapse on the ground and groan in exhaustion. Roxanne kneels before me, and I shrink down so that she can scoop me up and pet me while I recover.

She happily remarks while her long fingers run along my mirror-like scales, "Through [Sense Presence] and [Sense Mana], I saw something interesting happen within you, so I think you should give me [Sense Soul] for the next one. I also realized that since my [Explosion] draws upon my emotions, it's almost certain that I can learn something from you."

"Glad to help..." I weakly groan and close my eyes.

It takes me a whole hour before I can fire another beam, and afterwards, I'm even more exhausted, so I decide to have some not-earl-gray to help me relax, and Alissa returns just in time to keep me company.

But while I eagerly await her hug, the first thing she does is run her fingers through my hair. Then she grabs my horns and starts massaging them.

"Oh, yeah, that's the good stuff..." I moan as her now dexterous fingers pressure them in a wave-like motion.

But she's too excited to concentrate on the massage, so her hands go down my face and under my shirt. Then she starts massaging my muscular chest, her tail wagging uncontrollably with how happy she is.

So I pull her hands up and give them a few kisses, then I push her fingers into my mouth and suck on each of them individually just like how I suck on toes. Her hands are so sensitive that she feels repeated pleasant chills, and the sensuous way I'm sucking on them starts to make her aroused.

Her fingers are young and pretty again, and they don't resemble her mom's anymore, but they're... different. I'm not complaining since she's back to full "Dexterity" again, and her hands are as beautiful as the rest of her body, but I know every centimetri of her body, and they look slightly different.

I just need a bit of time to get used to them.

After I finish sucking on and memorizing each of her new fingers, I [Clean] them all. Then I pull her onto my lap so that I can fill her face with kisses, and she rewards me with the angelic sounds of her giggles.

When I finally let her rest, she looks at her new hands and wonders out loud, "Maybe I could ask Kahura to 'improve' them a bit more later, but I'm really tired of being forced to sleep, so I think they're fine as they are, at least for now."

"I'm glad you're happy with your hands," I whisper lovingly.

And she smiles back, though it's a bit bitter. "I hated being left behind for the battle, so I'm excited to use my bow once again."

I nod in understanding and kiss her lips, and then we enjoy tea time together.

I manage to release a third and final [Chaos Breath], and by the time I've recovered, the sun is already going down, so we take a quick bath, eat a snack, grab Cleinias' rotting head, and take an [Eternal Gate] to the upper level of the Throne, all without saying a single word to the Enforcers.

Then everything blurs as my eyes are drawn to the Emperor against my will. I simply can't look anywhere but his face, and it's really annoying, but his eyes feel like spears through my limbs, pinning me in place, and that makes me anxious.

"Your existence has triggered quite the uproar," he speaks directly into my head without moving his mouth.

All of the wives jerk their heads towards him and glare. The only one who can force us to do anything is Wolfy.

"How is that my fault?!" I growl back, my anger supported by everyone's presence in my mind.

I didn't want things to go in this direction, and I didn't want to cause problems for anyone, but I can't stop Wolfy. I won't stop him.

The Emperor glances at my sisters, noticing their supportive glares. Then I see his chest twitch in a silent chuckle.

"It isn't." He whispers into my head. Then he stands and turns his eyes to Wolfy, who feels his anger freeze over as the Emperor gives him a disapproving stare. "You've taken it upon yourself to expand the reach of the Sins?" He asks out loud, the commanding tone of his magical voice sounding quite grating for both Wolfy and I.

But my husband shows how admirable he is by grinning in the face of the ruler of all while taunting him at the same time, "I have. Is everyone here too craven to admit that this is the right thing?"

The nobles scoff. They all scoff.

I walk forward until I'm standing beside Wolfy. Then I sit on my hind legs and glare at every single one of these... craven. "Say it to my face that I don't deserve to be protected by the Sins!" I challenge, and I almost smile when I see the lower-level nobles reel back at the power of my voice.

"You're different," Apeiltik once again interferes, infuriating me.

So I turn to him and glower. "I had a family, parents, siblings! If I wasn't a hatchling when I was taken away, do you think it'd have been easy for me to love and respect humanoids?"

"We only train tamable dragons if we get them when they're young. The older, wild ones are simply too unruly," a different noble remarks out loud.

Wolfy immediately uses the change in topic to continue his speech, "And those aren't much smarter than animals. What about the monsters who can speak with us, who can understand our language like Crown Lord Aoi Ryder can? How can we try to build peaceful relationships with them when we treat them like that!" He points at the sleeping monsters.

"You're trying to 'befriend' monsters...?" A familiar voice echoes from behind the Katasko nobles, and when we turn to find the source, we see "Little" Alki walking forward.

We all hold back our anger to not launch ourselves at the spawn of the evil old man, Wolfy's anger turning cold as he slowly explains, "It's not our purpose to exterminate them. Creation gave birth to us so that we could grow and rise ever higher despite the interference from the God of Destruction, so getting the monsters on our side is invaluable for our future."

Alki, the Little, snorts dismissively. "More mouths to feed."

Wolf, the Great, confidently retorts, "More potential to be realized."

"More problems to solve."

"More allies to help."

The intensity with which the two are staring at each other increases, and we all unconsciously notice the subtle signs of two men preparing to kill each other.

"Did you know what your father was doing...?" The Emperor suddenly interjects, his words and magical voice breaking the tension completely.

"I didn't..." Alki hesitantly answers.

"I'll take you to the Seekers," Caterina immediately asserts, and Alki takes a step back in surprise.

He turns to the Emperor, his eyes begging for help, but the ruler of all simply stares down at him without showing any reaction as the Punisher takes him away.

The nobles start to murmur in disbelief, but the ruler sits down on his seat with a smug smile and remarks, "It disappoints me that any of you thought I'd ever side with the Alkibiades."

And with that, there's nobody left who has the courage to stand against Wolfy.

Intermission end.

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