Chương 20: Demon's Heart

An Ostravian, a Thalassenian, and a Chongren walk into a tavern after sealing a rift. The tavernkeep asks what they'll have, and all three order demon hearts. The Ostravian boils his heart with heavy salt and eats it with black bread, because he is a decent man, while the Thalassenian slices his heart thin and eats it with river-wine, because he is a pompous man, but the Chongren takes one bit of his demon heart, spits it out, and says, "Disgusting". The tavernkeep says, "Too bitter?"

The Chongren says, "Where's all the gunk and crunch?" —Unfunny joke attributed to Sergeant Dobrin Ilyich of the Rift Sealing Corps, later reprimanded for his rudeness and forced to write a letter of apology to his Thalassenian and Chongren allies Orland blinked stupidly as his brain finally caught up with what she'd just said. Before he could go back on his deal to let her into his party, though, Kazimir's chainblade snapped through the air with a crack of lightning.

Then the segmented blade locked mid-air, hovering between Miriyela and the bedding on stage. Miriyela halted at once, and Orland had never been so happy to see the old wolf nearly cut through him.

"I really, really have no idea who you are, grey wolf," she growled, turning to face Kazimir sternly.

"You are no prophesied companion. Drag your wounded leg elsewhere and stop interfering—""I'm not one of the prophesied companions, but the Hero did ask me to travel with him, so I'll make sure the Hero does what the Hero should do," Kazimir drawled, matching her stern gaze head-on.

"And the Hero shouldn't be sleeping with anyone on their first meeting. Besides, look at the mess you made. At least have the decency to fix it before you take someone to bed." Kazimir gestured towards the side of the hall. Both Orland and Miriyela looked. They'd forgotten all about it, but cold wind and metal flakes were blowing into the hall where Miriyela's hammer shockwave had decimated the wall.

Honestly, Orland expected Miriyela to scoff at the damage and say something princess-like, like 'it's not my job to fix it', or 'someone else will deal with it', but—to his surprise—she didn't. For the first time since she'd arrived swinging her hammer, she was quiet as she stared at the hole in the wall. Orland felt her arms loosen just a little. Opportunity! While she wasn't paying attention, he flung himself out of her arms and skipped towards the hole in the wall.

"Don't worry!" he shouted quickly.

"I got this!" It was just an excuse to get away from her, but he did intend on fixing his mess as he knelt by the wall. He'd be no better than the salt shop owner who broke his wooden box if he left the town hall in a worse state than Nikolai and the other soldiers left it in. But when he pressed his gauntlet to the ground, trying to pull up a ten-mana earth wall to block off the hole, he came up empty. … Oh. I'm out of mana. He'd spent a lot of mana today.

He'd spent some against the evercoat deers, some against the elkkin demons, and some against Miriyela… and his mana regeneration per hour wasn't that high, if he remembered correctly, it was only around three mana per hour. Shit. Now I look dumb. Maybe he could say the earth under the hall was too unstable. But no, that didn't make sense, because otherwise the hall wouldn't be built on top of it. Maybe he could say the wood was interfering with his gauntlet.

But that didn't make sense either since he could use his gauntlet just fine while he was fighting the demons. So maybe—just maybe —he could just say he'd run out of mana. But surely Nikolai and the other soldiers expected him to have more mana than this, so— Miriyela suddenly stepped up beside him, making him freeze.

"... Allow me, Great hero," she said quietly.

"I am a Princess of Kamengrad. Collateral damage during battles is to be expected, but I will not leave broken halls behind me like a drunken raider." He looked up at her, befuddled. Then Kazimir's chainblade wrapped around his waist, yanking him out of the way. First she set her hammer down, ordered Sharsana to stand aside, and began to scavenge the debris pile. She sorted the broken planks that were beyond repair into one pile and gathered the usable boards into another pile.

Bent nails were pinched out of the ground, straightened between her fingers, and set aside. Even the cracked pieces of plaster were gathered into neat piles so she could get a good, clear view of the area. Then she began rebuilding the wall. Her hands were built to crush skulls and hold hammers, but she fitted broken beams together with extremely delicate precision.

She used wedges, braces, and short strips of metal she had tucked inside her waist pouches, driving them into place with controlled taps of her fingers, never wasting force, but never using too much force either. The once-bent nails weren't wasted as she hammered them back in. The broken boards were snapped into smaller pieces and used to fill in the gaps.

The old wall may have been made with several dozen planks layered over each other, but she made do with half that, layering the usable planks in a crisscross pattern instead of a horizontal pattern while filling in the gaps with packed soil she ordered Sharsana to dig up from the outside. By the time she stepped back around ten minutes later, the new wall didn't exactly look pretty, but it looked sturdy. More importantly, the wind no longer rushed in.

The last few lead flakes scraped across the floor before settling near Orland's shoes.

"... There." Miriyela dusted her gauntlets off and took a step back as well, studying her work while she scratched Sharsana's chin.

"I am not proud of it, but at the very least, it will hold until I receive proper new planks from the local woodsman. I will deal with the other holes in the floor Sharsana made when she burst out from the ground later." Orland stared at the patchwork wall.

"You really… did it?" he mumbled. Miriyela tilted her head towards him proudly.

"Naturally."

"No, but…" He gestured vaguely at the repaired wall.

"I thought you'd think this kinda stuff was beneath you."

"Beneath me?" She scoffed, placing a hand over her chestplate.

"In Kamengrad, every dwarf learns the art of the craft. Stonework and ironwork, building and deconstructing, carving and embossing… to shape the world with our hands is our sacred duty. It is an honor to preserve the world! A dwarf who cannot make, mend, or respect the work of mortal hands is no true dwarf, no matter how many crowns sit above their brow!" This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Orland kept staring at the patched wall, genuinely astonished. … Nothing wasted that didn't need wasting. So she's someone who won't throw 'trash' away, huh? And she'd finished her repairs right on time, too, because Nikolai and a dozen soldiers chose this exact moment to walk back in, carrying trays of food and drinks. They stopped almost immediately—their eyes jumping from the shattered furniture to the cracked stage to the freshly repaired wall—but none of them questioned what'd happened. Maybe they didn't dare.

However, the moment Orland saw the food, he stopped caring about basically everything else.

"Dinner!" he said aloud. He immediately ran over to Kazimir's table and threw himself onto a chair, his stomach cramping so violently he almost folded over in the process. He was hungry. So, so hungry.

Maybe he wasn't acting like the 'Hero' right this moment, but only those who'd never starved would care about what they looked like while they were hungry, so he grinned as the soldiers brought their dinner over: black bread, bowls of thick root stew, salted pork, pickled mushrooms, boiled potatoes, baked fish, and a pot of something hot that smelled almost too good to be real. He didn't wait for anyone's permission to start eating.

He grabbed his fork and started tearing into his pork—not feeling an ounce of embarrassment—while Kazimir looked at Miriyela pointedly, jerking his head at the empty chair across the table.

"Sit down and eat already," Kazimir grumbled.

"We'll enter the mine tomorrow, not now. You might as well fill your stomach before then." Miriyela still looked like she wanted to argue against waiting, but after glancing at Orland happily inhaling stew like a starving street mutt, she finally huffed and sat down beside them.

"Very well," she muttered.

"But at dawn, we will descend immediately. We shall crush the demons before midday."

"Sure thing, princess," Kazimir said, grabbing a piece of bread for himself. And for several, glorious minutes, Orland was allowed to focus entirely on eating. He didn't have to worry about being heroic with Nikolai and the other soldiers saluting and leaving them to their dinner—he just had to eat. They could all just eat. Miriyela ate her mushrooms heartily across the table while giving all of her pork to Sharsana, who gobbled the chunks of meat the size of her hands without even having to chew.

Kazimir went to war against the bread, eating more plain grains than anything else, while Orland himself shoveled spoonful after spoonful of stew into his mouth, grabbing roasted mushrooms with his fingers every now and then before they could grow cold. The food was hot enough to sting his tongue, but he genuinely didn't care. Right now, this was just as good as the feast he'd had in the Belograd Manor.

But between all of it, Kazimir also started reaching towards the strange, shimmering lumps of meat the soldiers had brought to the edge of the table. Orland had noticed them earlier because they looked like any meat he'd ever seen, but on closer look… They looked like hearts. Creepy, oily, metallic hearts. Kazimir still picked up one of them with his bare hand and munched on it, grimacing the entire time he did.

"Curious?" Kazimir grumbled, swallowing heavily as he noticed Orland looking.

"It's an elkkin demon heart. I had the soldiers carve up the elkkin demon corpses for them earlier, if you recall." Orland did remember Kazimir telling Nikolai to do that, but that wasn't his question.

"But…whye, thogh?" he said between mouthfuls of thick stew.

"Ar dey deelisious?"

"Don't talk with your mouth open, 'Hero'. But no. They taste like shit," Kazimir said, scowling as he picked up a second heart.

"I'm only eating them because they increase my mana capacity and mana regeneration."

"... Hargh?"

"There are many ways to develop one's mana core. You can wait for your mana core to naturally develop with age, eat mana-dense foods, meditate to improve your mana circulation, expose yourself to mana-rich environments, or drink manabrew potions or…" Kazimir said, lifting a few fingers before giving up on trying to list them all out.

"You get my point. For most people, the quickest way to develop their mana cores is by drinking manabrew potions, since meditation is annoying, mana-rich environments are hard to find, and you typically have to eat a lot of mana-dense foods for them be worth as much as a single manabrew potion crafted by the gods—but demon hearts corrupted with astral lead are outerworld organic materials.

They're lumps of unnaturally condensed mana, so eating a single one, even if they're only Common-7 grade like these ones, is giving me… about two mana or point-one mana regeneration per hour each. Some higher, some lower." Orland froze halfway through chewing.

"Really?" he mumbled.

"Uh-huh. The reason why most people don't eat demon hearts is because it's not easy to kill a demon, but if someone were able to kill lots of demons and harvest their hearts consistently, they'd be able to develop their mana cores at an even greater pace than someone who drinks manabrew potions, meditates, and regularly exposes themselves to mana-rich environments." Kazimir bit into his second heart, shrugging.

"And for the 'Hero', who alone is set on the prophesied path of demon-killing?" Orland turned his gaze from the dishes before him to the shimmering fist-sized hearts on the platter to the side. Six… twelve… eighteen… There were at least twenty hearts on the platter, and potentially however more the soldiers hadn't brought in from outside. He didn't even hesitate. The moment Kazimir finished talking, he immediately leaned over the table, grabbed on the elkkin hearts, and bit straight into it. Instant pain.

The thing tasted awful. It was metallic, bitter, and the outer layer of tendons resisted his teeth strangely before tearing apart with a snap. The thick shimmering juices that flooded into his mouth tasted like pure iron as well, while the flesh was gluey and dense, the texture more like rubber than anything else. But he forced himself to swallow, because he'd eaten worse in Rusalka. Compared to the raw stew, weeks-old mushrooms, and the summer-stale breads he'd had to stomach, a demon's heart was only disgusting.

And more mana meant bigger earth firsts. More earth spikes. More walls. More things he could do with earth, more ways to not die—he'd chew through a thousand demon hearts if he had to.

"Gimme," he mumbled between mouthfuls of the heart, already reaching for another.

"Ah need dis shduff—""Mouth closed." He swallowed.

"I need this stuff. My gauntlet fucking devours mana." Kazimir sighed in response, waving him off.

"Most of these were already meant for you anyways," he muttered.

"My chainblade doesn't require nearly as much mana upkeep as your Star-Element Gauntlet, so go ahead as long as you can stomach them." Orland ignored Miriyela staring at him—completely bewildered at his manner of eating—as he chewed even harder and even faster. Honestly, his chest already felt lighter just thinking about eating more demon hearts. Now that he was no longer constrained by the one-potion-a-week limitation, killing the Tyrant of Vyrmgaard within his lifespan finally felt like an achievable task.

In fact, he suddenly felt like changing his mind.

"Actually, I agree with Miriyela," he said, wiping blood-grease off his mouth with his sleeve.

"Let's just go into the rift and kill more demons now." Miriyela straightened in her chair.

"At last! The Hero's warrior spirit awakens! Before sunrise, we shall—""No," Kazimir said flatly, shutting Orland down.

"You're out of mana, you overexcited brat. Sit your ass down, eat your food, and let your mana regenerate overnight. We'll go in tomorrow once your mana's full."

"But Miriyela here can probably—""Besides, something feels off about this rift," Kazimir said, glancing out the window facing the mine entrance.

"It feels…" He trailed off. Then he glanced at Miriyela, his brows tightening.

"When you came searching for the Hero, where were you told to meet him?" he asked.

"Huh?"

"Your directions. All prophesied companions who sought out or were sought out by the Curator Church received instructions on when and where they would find the Hero, right? Where were you supposed to meet him?"

"I…" Miriyela scratched the back of her neck, thinking.

"When I first heard I was a prophesied companion three months ago and reached Relikov City two months ago, I was told by Naghari the Sage that I would find the Great Hero in Rusalka after he had felled the great beast there. Rusalka was where I was supposed to join the party a week ago, but—""We weren't there because the brat wanted to leave early," Kazimir finished, exhaling heavily.

"So you weren't supposed to meet us here. We're all probably not supposed to be here, but… it seems fate has already changed for quite a turn, hasn't it?" With that, Kazimir looked at Orland pointedly.

"Care to tell us what you think is happening here?" Orland could only swallow the next chunk of his demon heart.