CHAPTER XV — One Request You Cannot Refuse
Lionel had slept like a dead man.
Not the restless, half-conscious sprawl of someone perpetually braced for the next catastrophe — but deeply, profoundly, embarrassingly well. The kind of sleep that rewired something fundamental in a person. The kind that made you briefly forget what century you were in, what dimension, what species you were technically classified as on any given Tuesday.
He surfaced from it slowly, like a body rising through dark water toward light.
The first thing he registered was the ceiling. Then the warmth. Then — improbably, almost offensively — the silence.
No chittering insects reporting perimeter breaches. No mold colonies whispering coordinates through mycelial networks like nature's most unsettling telephone system. No distant creak of castle architecture settling into another thousand-year slouch.
Just... quiet. The rare, precious, medically significant kind.
Lionel stretched — a full-body, vertebra-by-vertebra unfurling that concluded with both arms extended above his head and a sound that was equal parts groan and aria.
"That," he announced to the empty room, with the solemn certainty of a man delivering a verdict, "was the most comfortable sleep I have ever had in my entire life."
He sat up. Made the bed himself — corners folded, pillow centered — with the methodical precision of someone who had learned that small acts of order were the only honest counter to a world that fundamentally refused to make sense.
Then he opened the door.
Three faces.
Arranged in ascending order of barely-suppressed glee, like a theatrical poster for a production titled We Have Been Waiting.
Bela stood at the front, her crimson eyes holding that particular brand of patience that was really impatience wearing a trench coat. Cassandra bracketed her on one side, vibrating faintly at a frequency just outside human perception. Daniela completed the formation, her expression the pure, uncut sugar of someone who had absolutely no concept of the word subtlety.
Lionel stared at them.
They stared back.
Somewhere in the castle, a distant wall dripped.
"...Why," Lionel said slowly, with the measured cadence of a man choosing his words the way a bomb technician chooses which wire, "are all three of you standing outside my door."
The girls exchanged a glance with the efficiency of people who had already rehearsed this moment.
"You told us yesterday," Daniela said, both syllables of you doing considerable structural work, "that you had a surprise."
The words landed in Lionel's chest like a stone dropped into still water.
Ripples. Expanding outward.
Oh.
Oh no.
He turned — just slightly, just enough that his expression was no longer their problem — and stared at the middle distance with the hollow look of a man watching his own plans walk briskly off a cliff.
I completely forgot.
The thought arrived with a sort of resigned affection, the way one greets an old enemy at a reunion. He had known he would forget. Some part of him, some ancient, tired, deeply experienced part, had clocked the promise the moment it left his mouth and quietly updated the ledger under Things Lionel Said That Will Haunt Him.
He breathed in through his nose.
He breathed out through his mouth.
He turned back around.
"My surprise," he said, in the tone of a man improvising a soufflé from ingredients he found behind the radiator, "is that each of you... gets one request from me." He paused, letting the architecture of it settle. "A single request. That I cannot decline."
Bela's eyes narrowed — sharp, calculating, the expression of someone already pressure-testing the load-bearing walls.
Cassandra's mouth fell open. Closed. Opened again. She looked like a woman who had just been handed a loaded weapon and was deciding which direction to point it.
Daniela simply gasped, a pure, crystalline sound, and immediately turned to her sisters with the energy of someone who had already spent it seventeen times over in her head.
"Any request?" Bela said, still auditing.
"Any request," Lionel confirmed. "No expiration date. Redeemable anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances I will almost certainly regret."
He had planned to gather the business-minded residents of the village today. Coordinate the economic scaffolding of a civilization, or whatever one called the administrative infrastructure of a mycological feudal state. Terribly important work.
It could wait.
Again.
"Okay!" Bela declared, snapping off the word like a verdict.
The three immediately retreated into a tight cluster in the corner of the hallway — a conspiratorial huddle, shoulders curved inward, voices dropping to the pointed whispers of people plotting something technically within the rules.
Lionel watched them for a moment.
Then he went back inside his room, brushed his teeth, showered, and dressed with the calm efficiency of a man who had learned not to look directly at fate.
He emerged twenty minutes later, presentable, functional, and — in the grand tradition of men who have already surrendered — vaguely at peace.
The girls were still there.
Of course they were.
"Why," he said, slowly, for the second time that morning and almost certainly not the last, "are you still here."
"We voted," Cassandra announced, stepping forward with the gravity of a woman about to read out election results. "Our first request—"
"Your request?" Lionel interrupted, the arithmetic already prickling at the base of his skull.
"—is that you take all three of us to the place Daniela went yesterday!"
A beat.
Two.
"So," Lionel said carefully, "that uses up all three of your wishes?"
"No!" Bela's voice carried the exquisite frustration of someone who has caught their prey wandering directly into the trap and still somehow managing to miss it. "That was Cassandra's request — she wished that you take all three of us. Together. Which means Daniela and I still have ours."
The silence that followed had texture.
Lionel looked at Cassandra. Cassandra looked at Lionel with the serene satisfaction of a chess player who had just announced check six moves ago and was only now showing him the board.
"I," Lionel said.
He stopped.
"I," he said again.
He pinched the bridge of his nose.
"...You win this round."
The girls erupted — not loudly, not dramatically, but in that particular wavelength of contained triumph that is somehow more devastating than any shout. Three pairs of red eyes curved upward. Three mouths pressed together over smiles.
"Get ready," Lionel said, already walking. "All of you. Now."
They scattered, giggling, trailing the sound of barely-leashed excitement down the corridor like silk unraveling in a draft.
Outside, the farm had grown teeth.
Tall stone walls now ringed the perimeter — solid, grey, patient, the kind of architecture that said something learned to protect what was inside. Lionel noted them with a brief nod of approval. The mold had been busy. The mold was always busy.
He crossed the yard and let himself into the Baker house.
The smell reached him first.
Scrambled eggs. Coffee. Something fruity and warm. The honest, uncomplicated alchemy of a working kitchen — a smell that belonged to no particular world or century but simply to the concept of morning itself, stripped to its most essential truth.
"Creator!" Marguerite appeared, wiping her hands on her apron, gesturing to the table spread with more food than one person had any right to consume before noon. "Please, help yourself—"
Truly, Lionel thought, picking up an apple from the bowl with an air of quiet reverence, there is something remarkable about a farm that provides for your necessities without requiring you to do anything so undignified as shopping.
"Just this, Marguerite — thank you." He held up the apple like a small toast. "I also wanted to say it in person. Your work has been extraordinary. All of yours." He let his gaze move around the room, unhurried, genuine. "Especially whoever is responsible for that bed. I slept like a man who had made his peace with the universe."
Jack smiled — that particular fatherly smile, warm and worn smooth with use, the kind that belonged to people who gave without accounting. It caught Lionel somewhere behind the sternum, not painfully, just with the precise, unexpected tenderness of something true.
"It is our duty, Creator," Jack said.
"It's more than duty," Lionel said, simply.
Then the door exploded open.
Not opened. Not swung. Exploded — a full theatrical entrance, two wood panels separating at velocity with the energy of people who had absolutely not been raised to knock and had, in fact, been raised in a castle where doors were ornamental suggestions at best.
All three Dimitrescu sisters stood in the frame.
Still riding the momentum of victory.
The Baker family turned.
The silence lasted approximately one second.
"Out," Lionel said.
Not loud. Not sharp. The way a scalpel is not loud or sharp — it is simply precise.
Bela opened her mouth.
"Out," he said again, same register, same weight, the repetition doing exactly the work that volume would not.
He held the door and guided them outside with the deliberate patience of a man who had, in his life, moved larger and more dangerous things than three excitable young women. He closed it behind him. He turned to face them.
He said nothing for a moment.
Let the quiet do the work.
"I am," Lionel began, with the measured diction of someone choosing every word like footing on an icy surface, "deeply disappointed."
The girls had the grace to look it.
"Those people are your family. And you entered their home like you were storming a contested position." His jaw was set. "Every person on this property — every single one — is to be treated with the same respect you give me. Not less. Not less." He paused, held Bela's gaze, then Cassandra's, then Daniela's. "Think of them as aunts. Uncles. Blood."
More related than you know, he added, silently, to no one. The mold that made you and the cadou that shaped them — both children of the same great mother. The Megamycete doesn't draw the family lines you think it does.
"We're sorry, Creator." Bela stepped forward, her voice steady even as something quieter moved behind her eyes. "We were excited. We haven't been out in so long — even now that the cold can't touch us anymore—"
"Don't," Lionel said. "Don't let excitement be the reason you forget yourselves." He looked at her for a moment — really looked, the way you look at people you've chosen to be responsible for — then exhaled. "Don't let it happen again."
He extended his wings. The dark membrane caught the grey morning air as he pushed upward, rising above the walls, above the treeline, into the cold.
The girls followed — three bright, terrible shapes ascending like embers from a fire — and together they carved east, toward the Tomb.
"Ainz. Are you at Nazarick?"
The voice channel crackled open as Lionel banked through a dense shelf of cloud, the cold pressing pleasantly against his face, the kind of cold that reminded him he could feel it without it meaning anything.
He made a mental note — for the third time this week, and the note was beginning to develop real estate value in his internal monologue — that navigating between open speech, the hive mind, and the voice channel simultaneously was the conversational equivalent of juggling three different languages while riding a unicycle over a philosophical abyss.
One wrong word in the wrong channel and he'd be broadcasting castle coordinates to Ainz or, worse, sharing his opinions on Igvarge with his own subjects. Neither outcome appealed.
"Are we there yet?!" Cassandra shouted from somewhere to his left, looping lazily through a thermal draft with the uninhibited joy of someone who had recently discovered that the sky had no ceiling.
"Don't," Lionel said.
"But—"
"Cassandra. I will descend. I will sit on the ground. I will not move. And we will see who outlasts whom."
Silence. Then the sound of Daniela suppressing a laugh.
"I'm here, Lionel — though I'm departing shortly. I need to speak with the guildmaster about Shalltear."
Below, the Tomb of Nazarick resolved from the horizon — vast, dark, patient. The kind of structure that made the surrounding landscape feel like it was leaning away. Standing at its entrance, a figure in layered black armor stood with the quiet stillness of something that did not get cold because it had long since moved past the concept of temperature.
Ainz looked up. Lionel raised a hand in acknowledgment.
He descended in a slow, deliberate spiral — the theatrical kind, because if you have wings, you might as well use them — and reminded the girls with a single weighted look as he touched down to keep themselves in check.
"What stands before us," he said quietly, so only they could hear, "is not a man in costume."
A beat.
Three pairs of red eyes fixed on the skeleton with a seriousness that had not existed thirty seconds ago.
Good enough.
"Using Shalltear as a ladder to Mythril," Lionel said as he landed, giving Ainz the casual two-fingered salute of a man who found ceremony endearing in others and tolerable in himself. "That's clean thinking."
Ainz paused. He seemed genuinely unsure what to do with a salute. The gesture appeared to exist in a social category he had not yet fully indexed.
Curious.
"Yes," Ainz said, recovering. "Is there something you want?"
There it was — the directness Lionel appreciated about him. No decorative preamble. The skeleton read subtext the way competent people read maps: efficiently.
"I'm already solving your Shalltear problem for you," Lionel said. "I'd like to not do that for free. We join the meeting. We propose to assist in the field."
"The guildmaster won't sanction it. You've never left Bronze." There was no cruelty in the observation. Only the flat factual texture of someone relaying gravity's policy on jumping from tall buildings. "He won't allow an unproven participant."
"He won't allow you to ask, or he won't allow me to come?" Lionel tilted his head. "Because those are different questions, Ainz."
A long pause, the kind that had furniture in it.
"I'll try," Ainz said. "Though I genuinely don't know what role you'd play in dealing with Shalltear."
Lionel smiled — not the performance, but the small private one. The one that meant I know exactly what's coming and I'm going to enjoy watching you realize it.
"You will," he said.
The circumstances were already conspiring. They were always conspiring, in Lionel's experience — the universe had a well-documented preference for ironically elegant solutions. Ainz would simply have to arrive at that conclusion in his own time.
"Very well." Ainz equipped his armor piece by piece with the practiced ease of long habit, then paused, studying Lionel. No disguise. No equipment. Nothing to obscure what he was. "You're not... concerned? About being recognized?"
"We're back in business, girls," Lionel announced, and shifted.
It was not a dramatic transformation. It was more like a change in emphasis — the same materials rearranged toward a different conclusion. His adventurer's form settled around him the way a well-fitted coat settles around someone who knows how to wear them.
The sisters cheered.
"The only remaining problem," Lionel said, eyeing them critically, "is that you're all roughly the color of a fresh invoice. We'll need to work on that before we enter town."
⬛ — A brief interval during which Lionel's companions learned what human pigmentation was supposed to look like —
The meeting room in E-Rantel had the specific atmospheric quality of a space where important men gathered to discuss problems in ways that made the problems feel important.
Guildmaster Ainsach presided from the head of the table with the natural authority of someone who had spent decades being the largest personality in every room he entered. Three Mythril-ranked adventurers flanked him: Moknach, who had the look of a man who chose his words carefully and made them count; Bellote, quieter, watchful, the kind of person who formed conclusions before he spoke them; and Igvarge, who had apparently decided that being the loudest instrument in the orchestra was equivalent to being the best one.
Ainz and Lionel took their seats.
Ainsach looked at Lionel the way one might look at a pebble that had somehow made it inside a fine watch.
"I appreciate you all coming on such short notice," he said, extending the courtesy to the people he considered it owed to. His gaze returned to Lionel. Settled. "Though I didn't expect Momon to bring a Bronze-rank."
Lionel smiled back, pleasantly.
Underneath the table, where no one could see, his right hand had quietly acquired an extra finger.
He folded it back. Clasped his hands. Looked down.
Not here. Not now. We are professionals.
"Let's dispense with pleasantries." Ainsach's attention moved to the capable people. "Last night, seven Iron-class adventurers encountered what they believe to be a vampire in the forest outside E-Rantel. Five of them didn't come back."
The room absorbed this in silence.
"Survivors described the creature as having striking blonde hair," Ainsach continued, "and an unusually large mouth."
Lionel heard it before he could stop himself — a short, compressed exhale through his nose, the sound of a laugh that had barely cleared customs.
Every head turned.
He examined the table's grain pattern with great interest.
I am a grown adult, he reminded himself firmly. I am a leader of considerable authority. I have cultivated an air of dignified command. I did not just nearly laugh at a briefing about five dead people because of a vampire's hair.
I am absolutely better than this.
...She really does have a very large mouth, though.
"Is something," Ainsach said, in the quiet tone of a man watching a fuse burn, "amusing to you?"
"No," Lionel said. "I apologize. It won't happen again."
Below the table, Ainz's hand found his shoulder.
The unspoken message was perfectly clear: Do not.
"My colleague isn't entirely well," Ainz said, with the smooth, unruffled delivery of a man who had prepared this contingency. "He conceals it admirably. He's capable — more than he appears."
"Colleague." Igvarge let the word turn over in his mouth, apparently found it wanting. "I assumed he was picked up from the street. Live bait, maybe."
Nobody laughed.
Even Moknach looked at him with the particular expression reserved for behavior one will be referencing later as a cautionary tale.
"I'd prefer you didn't speak about him that way," Ainz said. Pleasantly. With a quality of pleasantness that had very sharp edges. "He's strong. Possibly as strong as I am."
The world's most elegant backhanded compliment. Delivered by a skeleton, somehow without irony, while simultaneously serving as a mild threat.
Lionel would have appreciated it more if he hadn't been the subject of it.
"Strong." Igvarge's smile was the kind that invited the room to share a joke at someone else's expense. "He looks like a trained dog who—"
Later, Lionel would reflect that the most embarrassing part was not what he did, but how little time it took.
One moment he was seated. The next, his hand was around Igvarge's throat. The gap between those two moments was brief enough that at least two people in the room didn't see it happen — only registered the result: the Mythril-ranked adventurer suspended slightly, heels brushing the floor, expression cycling rapidly through several emotional stages that began with shock and were currently passing through oh.
The other adventurers moved. They pulled. They pushed. They pried, collectively, with the combined effort of people who were accustomed to the concept of leverage.
Lionel didn't move.
Wonderful, he thought, with the serene fury of someone being forced to improvise a character they did not audition for. Now I'm the unstable one. This is the role I'm playing. I came here to be a composed, precise, quietly lethal professional, and instead I am a dog on a shortened chain, and this is entirely Ainz's fault for not warning me that "colleague" would apparently read as "liability."
"Release him, Lionel. You're unraveling the entire premise."
He let go.
Igvarge found the floor. Found air. Found his composure, approximately, in that order.
Lionel returned to his chair with the controlled grace of a man who had not almost just redecorated the ceiling. He sat. He folded his hands. He looked at Igvarge with the level, patient stare of a predator that has decided, temporarily, not to.
"Next time," he said softly, "scope your target before you engage."
The room exhaled.
Ainsach, demonstrating why he was a guildmaster and not the other way around, straightened in his chair and resumed as though the interruption had been a minor administrative footnote.
"As I was saying. Vampires convert their prey through blood. If this one reaches E-Rantel, we are no longer discussing an incident — we are discussing a cascade." He paused. "Could this connect to the cemetery case?"
"The one Momon resolved last night," Moknach noted, with quiet admiration.
"Must be nice," Igvarge muttered, from the position of a man who had recently been reminded of several things, "getting Mythril with so little visible effort."
"Don't," Bellote said.
"From the cemetery investigation, we've identified Zuranon as the culprits," Ainsach continued. "They specialize in undead. Which raises the question of whether the vampire is connected."
Lionel looked at Ainz.
Ainz looked at Lionel.
The look lasted exactly as long as it needed to.
A secret society that weaponizes the undead, Lionel thought. Sounds familiar. Sounds essentially like us. Should I be offended that someone else is doing this without the courtesy of asking permission? Yes. Slightly. Yes.
He shook his head, fractionally, toward Ainz. Not mine. I didn't build them. Don't look at me like that.
Ainz looked away.
"Possibly a diversion," Moknach said, "though we lack the information to—"
"We know there's a cave near the sighting," Ainsach said. "Scouting party first."
Ainz inhaled.
If Zuranon took the blame for Shalltear, the guild would send someone competent to deal with her. Someone who might not stop at defeating her.
"The vampire has no connection to Zuranon," he said.
Ainsach leaned forward. "You know something."
A pause — brief, pregnant with preparation.
"Her name," Ainz said, with the gravity of a man revealing classified intelligence, "is Honyopnyot."
The room went very still.
Lionel felt every muscle in his face engage simultaneously in the effort of not. The mold under his skin shivered with suppressed amusement. He pressed his mouth flat. He looked at a point on the far wall and focused on it with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb using only his jaw muscles.
"Her name," Ainz said again, clearing his throat, "is Honyopnyoko."
The three Mythril adventurers inhaled sharply, like the name was a thing with weight and teeth.
"How," Ainsach said, his mouth attempting the pronunciation twice and gracefully declining, "do you know this vampire's name?"
"I've been hunting her for a long time," Ainz said, with the composed certainty of someone who absolutely had not invented that name thirty seconds ago. "In fact, she is the reason my colleague is the way he is. The instability. The — " He gestured faintly toward Lionel. "All of it. History."
"If you finish that sentence," Lionel said through the voice channel, in the tone of a man who had absolutely reached a personal limit, "I will tell Albedo you said she was average."
Ainz paused.
Continued, somewhat more carefully.
"My team will handle scouting. If she's there, I'll deal with her."
The adventurers stared.
"You're confident?" Ainsach said.
"I have a trump card." Ainz produced it — a magic-sealing crystal, humming faintly with eighth-tier potential. By his own standards, a fairly modest item. By everyone else in the room's standards, apparently a small contained deity.
"Eighth tier," Ainsach breathed.
"That's," Igvarge started, searching, "mythology-class—"
"He's bluffing," he finished, because Igvarge had apparently decided that today was the day he would collect every possible consequence available.
"I don't mind an appraisal," Ainz said. "Though the vampire won't wait."
"And if you succeed?" Ainsach said, reading the architecture of the situation. "What do you want?"
"Orichalcum rank. At minimum."
The word landed like a dropped sword.
"Orichalcum—"
"It wastes everyone's time if I have to prove myself again after this," Ainz said simply.
Igvarge's gaze moved to Lionel, making calculations. "And him? Does he advance too?"
Lionel turned to look at him with the unhurried patience of a crocodile considering a riverbank.
"Have I not," he said, pleasantly, "already made my case?"
The smile he wore was the particular kind that makes sensible people suddenly remember prior engagements. Igvarge found the grain of the table genuinely fascinating.
Ainsach nodded once.
That was apparently sufficient oxygen for Igvarge's ambition to reignite.
"My team joins," he declared, surging upright. "Easy Orichalcum — I'm not sitting that out."
"I don't bring people who slow me down," Ainz said.
"What?! You don't even know if she's actually dangerous—"
"Newbie or not," Lionel said, settling back in his chair with the lazy ease of a man who has won an argument by simply being correct, "we are stronger than you. You've seen the evidence. Draw your own conclusions."
"Igvarge—" Moknach's voice had the hard edge of genuine embarrassment.
"Your conduct throughout this entire meeting," Bellote said quietly, "has been a disgrace."
"I don't mind if you come," Ainz said. His left eye pulsed — a deep, slow crimson, like an ember drawing breath. His voice did not rise. It didn't need to. "But I want to be precise: if you do... you will die."
Igvarge laughed.
He was still laughing when they left.
He was not laughing now.
The forest outside E-Rantel had the particular darkness of places that had held something terrible recently and not yet forgotten it. Trees pressed close, bark black with moisture, branches interleaved overhead like the fingers of something vast and patient lacing itself together above the trespassers below.
Igvarge's party was dead.
All of them. Quick, in the way that things organized by Shalltear tended to be quick — not merciful, exactly, but efficient, in the blunt mechanical sense of a system that did not believe in waste.
He himself was alive in the technical and increasingly provisional sense, suspended against a tree trunk by vines that had opinions about where he should be and were enforcing them with considerable conviction.
"You knew," he screamed, or tried to — the vines had a perspective on volume too. "You knew this would happen and you didn't—"
Mare stood at a respectful distance, looking down at the earth with the expression of a child who has seen something they cannot unsee and has decided that the ground is a safer visual option. He looked, objectively, like someone's lost little sister. He was dressed like someone's lost little sister. He was holding a staff that had recently introduced itself, at some force, to several structural problems.
The contradiction was unresolved and apparently intended to remain so.
"I warned you," Ainz said, in the tone of a man closing a book he has finished. No heat. No satisfaction. The simple, clean finality of someone who made a statement, proved a statement, and is ready to move on. "You chose not to listen. The result is the result."
He turned to Mare.
Mare stepped forward, raised his staff, and resolved the situation with a single, unhesitating arc.
The forest went quiet again.
Lionel watched, hands in his pockets, head tilted at a small contemplative angle.
Then he looked at Mare. Really looked — at the slight frame, the elaborate braids, the enormous eyes that held something deep and unquantifiable behind the surface compliance.
"Your guardian," he said to Ainz, with genuine admiration, "is remarkable. Wouldn't have guessed it by looking."
He crouched. Took Mare's face gently in both hands — the small, startled face — and studied him with the focused attention of a mycologist confronting an unclassified specimen.
"You wouldn't be willing to loan him out, would you? Just briefly. I've been developing a new viral strain, and elf blood—"
"How dare you—" Albedo's voice cracked like a whip. She was moving before the sentence finished, a dark momentum aimed squarely at Lionel's continuity as a biological entity.
Ainz's hand rose.
She stopped.
"He's joking," Ainz said.
Lionel released Mare — who had, throughout this entire encounter, maintained a composure that frankly put everyone else present to shame — and straightened, dusting his hands.
"You're too fast," he said, with a small sigh of genuine disappointment. "I've barely got the thread started and you've already pulled it. Where's the drama? Where's the slow build?"
He looked at the forest around them. At the aftermath. At Ainz, standing in the middle of it all with the unhurried stillness of someone for whom aftermath was simply one more type of setting.
Something loosened in Lionel's chest, slightly. The particular loosening that came from moments of honest alignment — when the mask you wore for your subjects, and the mask you wore for the world, could both be set briefly down, and you were simply yourself, standing in the dark, making questionable jokes about elf blood to a skeleton overlord.
"You catch on too fast," he said again, quieter this time. A touch of something genuine in it.
Ainz said nothing.
But there was something — just briefly — in the set of those skeletal shoulders that suggested he understood exactly what Lionel meant.
▲▼▲▼▲
Chapter XV — and we have reached 1,000 readers. I won't be theatrical about it. Thank you. Genuinely. Season 1 is nearly closed — fewer than twenty chapters to cover what Danmachi needed forty-four for. Draw your own conclusions about narrative efficiency. See you at the finale.