"You fed a fish a mushroom and poisoned it? Your guardian must've transmigrated here from some province of that eastern great power. Is that actually a modern stockpot—I knew it!"
The fish meat in the pot held its warmth and clean fragrance from right after it had finished cooking. The White Whale—a legendary witchbeast created by the Witch of Gluttony, Daphne, with the explicit purpose of being eaten—was, in practice, inedible to most people.
Witchbeast meat carries toxic Mana. People of sufficient power can ignore the effect, but Yimi had used The World to strip that property entirely, reducing what should have been a terrifying White Whale carcass to something that looked remarkably ordinary.
Something made explicitly to be food yet inedible to almost everyone—and on top of that, actively inclined to eat people—wasn't strange to Daphne at all. In her view, anything that wanted to eat meat and wasn't prepared to be eaten in return was simply bizarre.
"I removed—the toxicity. But most of the flavor is still there." Yimi strained to hold the pot as high overhead as possible, hoping to convince them that witchbeasts could, in fact, yield something worth eating.
To reassure them, Yimi also pulled from her storage space some raw, uncooked meat that The World hadn't touched. She held it up. "This one—is the poisoned kind. How it looks originally."
Even through the crack you could see traces of something dark and miasmic—residual properties that lingered in the White Whale's wounds even after death. Almost no one but Witch Cult members had ever seen this, but anyone could tell this chunk of meat was something different.
Four hundred years of carnage. The one creature merchants dreaded most—the kingdom itself had mounted repeated subjugations, all of them failures, including one that had cost the previous Sword Saint, Theresia van Astrea—the wife of the Sword Demon, Wilhelm van Astrea, standing before them now—her life.
From that moment, he had made the White Whale the single purpose of whatever time remained to him. To one day kill it with his own hands.
Wilhelm looked down at the cooked meat in the pot. He lacked Crusch-sama's Divine Protection of Wind Reading—which let her read the air to detect lies—but experience told him this little girl showed no signs of deception. Children, though, had their own particular strangeness: the kind that believed their own fabrications.
"Old man?" Subaru waved a hand in front of Wilhelm, pulling him back. "How's the tea?"
"One can tell it's an expensive variety."
He didn't press on the obvious self-interest behind the young man's gesture. Instead, Wilhelm looked down at the little girl putting the pot away:
"Little girl—I would ask you something, and I hope that at your age you'll do me the courtesy of not lying. This matters greatly to me. The wilderness south of the Royal Capital—the hole in the clouds overhead—was that your doing?"
The area beneath it still hadn't cleared because the clouds refused to fill back in. You couldn't ignore it even if you tried.
"The mushroom made it," Yimi said, deflecting credit entirely onto the Doom-shroom.
A few seconds of silence. Because of everything she'd said leading up to it, everyone present understood perfectly well that the mushroom had also been her doing.
"I see… as powerful as the rumor claimed, little girl. Quite like Reinhard van Astrea." Wilhelm closed his eyes. In that moment, he almost hoped what he was hearing was nothing more than childish fantasy.
Looking at her, she didn't even seem to know the smoky fish was one of the Three Great Witchbeasts feared across the world. That actually made Wilhelm more irritated, not less—because it cut off the one rebuttal he could have used: if you'd killed the White Whale, why didn't you announce it and give Emilia-sama the political credit? A child who hadn't known what she was killing couldn't have thought of that.
Somehow managing it or not, the world occasionally threw up geniuses who were prodigiously powerful at remarkably young ages. If you had the power to punch a hole in the sky and peel back several feet of earth, killing a legendary witchbeast wasn't out of the question.
What settled it, ultimately, was this: a large-scale attack that caused no disappearances, no casualties—that had never made any sense. But if it was the White Whale, everything lined up. And right from that day forward, there had been no new White Whale attacks—though it wasn't as though it ate people at every moment.
Catching the shift in his expression, Subaru jumped in to cover for Yimi: "Please don't take it the wrong way, sir. She does strange things all the time, but at heart she's a very good kid. She definitely didn't mean to cause trouble…"
"No—I simply slipped into my own head for a moment. Don't mind me."
A lifelong enemy, killed by someone else's hand. For a man of his capabilities, the first feeling was never joy. There had been a single instant, just now, where he'd felt as though his remaining years had lost their reason for being.
But the creature had been a plague upon the world. Flying into a rage because someone had beaten him to the kill—that would be unbecoming of a man his age.
His wife's killer had received judgment. That was all. Even if the bitterness never fully left.
He gripped his fist tighter. Feeling the weight inside him, Wilhelm was almost back at that night from long ago—cursing at a five-year-old child, broken open by grief after his wife's sacrifice more than a decade past.
Theresia's death in the subjugation of the White Whale more than ten years ago had been attributed, in part, to a child stealing the Divine Protection of the Sword Saint. And now, ten-odd years later, another young child had killed the White Whale that had plagued the world for centuries—and once again, it had nothing to do with him.
"Welcome back, Old Man Wilhelm—sorry to have kept you waiting outside so long." Felix came trotting back from his talk with Emilia with a light step.
He shook the ears on his head and circled around Yimi, looking her over from left and right. "Ah, I see, I see—so this is my daughter, is it? Hello there."
"The misunderstanding earlier—truly, I apologize for that." Subaru winced.
"Mm." Yimi retreated behind Subaru, on guard.
No good cat-people in this world except her.
"Oh, she's shy? How adorable—there, there~" He reached around Subaru and scratched lightly under Yimi's chin.
"Thank you for the tea." Wilhelm returned the cup to Subaru and looked down at Yimi for a moment, expression complicated—he opened his mouth, couldn't find the words, and closed it.
"Thank you as well, little girl. If you haven't lied to me, I will find a proper way to repay you when the time comes." Bitter or not, that debt had to be acknowledged.
"Repay? Did something happen while I was gone?" Felix blinked those pretty eyes and looked between the two of them.
Wilhelm shook his head. He had no intention of explaining, here and now, something that neither party could verify.
Felix shook an ear, didn't push further. "Looking forward to seeing you again in the Royal Capital—I believe the Hoshin Company has three little cats as well; you might actually become good friends… hmm, did I just say something that could be used against Crusch-sama? Anyway, farewell."
Wilhelm gave Yimi a small nod, turned, and stepped back up into the Dragon Carriage.
They were gone.
"Strange folks," Subaru said, looking down at Yimi. "Did you do something?"
Yimi shook her head.
"Ah—I forgot to ask what they even came here for!" Subaru looked down at the tea leaves settled in his cup. "Ram is going to kill me. Maybe I'll just say there was a witchbeast that had a taste for expensive tea…"
"What are you saying?"
Ram appeared from inside, expressionless, and looked down at the cup in Subaru's hand.
Subaru heard it distinctly—a sound that was probably teeth grinding.
Ram bent down, patted Yimi on the head, and pointed toward the distance: "Rem just made sweet roasted yams. They're in the kitchen."
Subaru took a step back. "Onee-sama—is this one of those situations where you're sending the child away because it's not ideal to use violence in front of her?"
"That's correct," Ram confirmed.
"She admitted it!"