Drmersh shook his head as if thoroughly fed up with Erger’s shameless reply. Erger stretched his arms wide and hauled himself to his feet. The scrawny boy who had first come to the Mage Tower had grown, without anyone quite noticing, into a solidly built giant of a man.
Every inch of him was packed with muscle. His bone structure had always been large to begin with. And the thing hanging between his legs — which few within the Mage Tower, man or woman, had apparently gone without sampling — was large as well.
Drmersh had no particular interest in making eye contact with the nether regions of a man young enough to be his grandchild, so he spun around and swept his staff through the air, using magic to drag over a length of fabric from the floor. It fluttered through the air like a bird’s wings before wrapping itself around Erger’s lower half.
“Put some clothes on when you walk around!”
Erger dug a finger in his ear in response to Drmersh’s nagging.
“It’s suffocating.”
And indeed, the fabric wound around his lower body was already stretched taut. Drmersh clicked his tongue.
“Uselessly enormous, that’s what you are…”
People tended to assume that mages from the Mage Tower would be frail and slight — but that was a prejudice. Erger in particular, having trained primarily in combat magic, had conditioned his body to a degree that put most knights to shame.
When a rift appeared, it was always the people of the Mage Tower who fought on the very front line. Those without magical energy had their limits when it came to dealing with demon beasts.
When the Emperor received a prophecy and issued the alert, the Mage Tower would send those it had trained from youth ahead of time to the rift’s location. Hunting down every last demon beast that forced its way through the dimensional tear was the Mage Tower’s charge.
Without the Mage Tower, the Empire would crumble. No matter the Emperor, the Mage Tower was not to be dealt with carelessly. It held a kind of extraterritorial status. Those who belonged to it lived in a state of semi-isolation from the outside world.
Erger thought it was fortunate he had ended up belonging to the Mage Tower. Thanks to that, he had been able to live all this time without having to give a single thought to tiresome matters like engagements — things decided entirely without any say from him.
And as of today, that freedom ends too. A shadow of gloom settled in Erger’s violet eyes.
“Move it, move it! You’re already late as it is. Sleeping in on the day you’re to go before His Majesty.”
Drmersh brought his staff down mercilessly on Erger’s backside.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. I get it.”
Erger muttered as he ducked his head and stepped through the arched doorway. The room connected to the bedroom was covered in plants imbued with magical energy — a space he used as both laboratory and living area.
Just thinking about leaving this place made a sigh rise up in him. Erger chewed his breakfast miserably — set out for him by Drmersh — and lamented his fate.
The mere thought of living in the imperial palace from here on made his chest feel tight. It was sure to be a space steeped in pointless formality and ceremony he had no use for. Etiquette and obligation were exactly the sort of things he despised.
And as the Emperor’s husband, how much will everyone expect of me? The idea of walking around with nothing but a length of fabric around his waist would be nothing but a distant dream.
On top of that, he was supposed to bed an Omega who was so much older than him and get him pregnant. He wasn’t even sure his body would respond properly. The one silver lining was that Erger didn’t particularly discriminate by gender.
He had taken anyone to bed, as long as there was pleasure in it. It was also his way of managing the magical energy that had begun surging violently once he came of age. By radiating magical energy into a partner through direct skin contact, he could prevent it from running out of control.
His magical energy stabilized, and he felt good on top of it. Every few days, Erger would gather those who were struggling with low magical energy and enjoy himself with them all at once. It was a dissolute lifestyle — but beneficial in more ways than one.
Leila, the Tower Master, had seemed flustered at first by the wave of impropriety Erger had ushered in, but she had eventually permitted it. After Erger had scattered his magical energy all over the place, everyone’s research had progressed considerably.
Even so, Erger had never been with anyone one-on-one. There was a limit to how much magical energy one person could absorb at a time, so doing it with multiple people simultaneously was far more efficient.
And besides, somehow… a private act between just two people felt like the sort of thing lovers or a married couple did.
Despite living the life Drmersh called “bound to wear it down to a nub,” Erger had never taken a lover. He did have a fiancé, after all. Taking someone else as a partner felt no different from having an affair.
Infidelity just doesn’t sit right with me. Even if the marriage had been decided entirely without his input.
Straddling the line between the sensible and the senseless in this peculiar way, Erger had spent ten years at the Mage Tower. And now the moment had truly come — the moment he would be handed over to the Emperor.
Sold to the Emperor by his own power-crazed father. He was the sacrificial pawn his father had offered up in order to plant someone from the Crowell house inside the imperial palace.
“Ah. I’m so miserable…”
He was mumbling and gnawing at a bread crust when Drmersh, tidying the cluttered workbench, launched into another lecture.
“Would you stop saying that already! Think of how much His Majesty has accommodated our situation.”
“Honestly, it was probably because our proposal stood to benefit him too.”
In the Empire, the age of adulthood was nineteen. In truth, Erger should have gone to the imperial palace a full year ago.
The reason he had been able to linger at the Mage Tower for so long even after coming of age was that the Tower Master Leila had negotiated with the Emperor directly. At the time, the magical formation Erger had been researching showed the potential to dramatically amplify the physical capabilities of combat mages.
If that research could be completed without incident, it would prove invaluable in any future rifts — and casualties would decrease significantly as a result. That was why the Emperor had readily agreed to grant him an extension.
“I should have worked on it more slowly. Ah, why do I have to be a genius…”
As dismissively as he said it, Erger had never actually entertained the idea of deliberately slowing his research down. No one knew when the next rift might come. The formation had to be completed before that happened — so that fewer people from the Mage Tower would get hurt.
So he’d pushed himself hard and finished the formation in just one year. There was no longer any pretext he could hold up to the imperial side.
Erger was the kind of genius the Mage Tower produced once a century. By all rights, he should have been the next Tower Master.
“Ten years — His Majesty waited a very long time for you, you ungrateful wretch. You ought to be grateful! Have you no loyalty whatsoever?”
Erger pursed his red lips. Every citizen of the Empire revered the Igvaltwyn bloodline. Drmersh’s reaction was the normal one.
“If it weren’t for His Majesty, the number of people dying with every rift would be several times greater!”
“I know that. I even know that His Majesty absolutely must produce an heir — because there needs to be someone to inherit the power of prophecy. But why, of all people, does it have to be me?”
If only he weren’t directly involved, he was quite sure he could sing His Majesty’s praises every single day with genuine enthusiasm.
“Blame yourself for being born an extreme-rare.”
“Even the gods are indifferent.”
Erger’s fate had been all but sealed at the age of ten. Every child in the Empire underwent two examinations upon turning ten — one for magical energy, and one for designation.
Anyone who carried even a trace of magical energy was placed under the Mage Tower’s jurisdiction without exception, regardless of social standing. It was a system no different from conscription. Mages capable of holding back rifts were that precious — it simply couldn’t be helped.
And so from a young age, they belonged to the Mage Tower and underwent training in semi-isolation from the outside world. Once they came of age, they were expected to deploy and fight every time a rift appeared.
On top of all of that, Erger had received the designation of extreme-rare Alpha — and with it, an entirely different layer of fate had been laid over him. He was to impregnate the Emperor, an extreme-rare Omega.
Erger had undergone a magical energy examination immediately after becoming the Emperor’s fiancé. Even as a child, his magical energy levels had been high. The Emperor had readily permitted him to enter the Mage Tower — almost as if relieved to have an excuse to keep the boy at a distance until adulthood.
Drmersh watched his young disciple’s expression grow darker and darker before speaking up.
“There are rumors that His Majesty is quite a handsome man.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting? Even if he were genuinely ugly, people would still say that, wouldn’t they.”
Erger scoffed. Very few people were ever permitted an audience with the Emperor. Commoners couldn’t even presume to look directly at his face.
Erger had met the Emperor exactly once, at the informal betrothal ceremony when he was young — and he had no memory whatsoever of what the man looked like. He had been trembling so badly with nerves back then.
Truth be told, his memories from childhood had large gaps in them generally. Some kind of partial amnesia brought on by the shock of losing his birth mother, or so he’d been told.
Well — if the Emperor had truly been remarkably handsome, surely even a faint impression would have lingered. The fact that there was none at all meant he probably wasn’t anything special.
The Emperor did come out whenever a rift appeared, but he always wore a helmet, so even within the Mage Tower, no one had actually seen his face. All Erger had heard were secondhand accounts — that he had an imposing build, and that the low, resonant voice he used when issuing imperial commands was remarkably compelling.
Whatever the Emperor actually looks like — he’s of the Igvaltwyn bloodline, so of course everyone would call him handsome regardless. Who would dare criticize the Emperor’s appearance?
Erger grumbled.
“Either way, he’s an old man twelve years older than me.”
Drmersh startled and gave Erger a sharp smack on the shoulder.
“You insolent little — ! Are you going to talk like that in the imperial palace too? You could lose your head.”
“He wouldn’t be able to take it even if he wanted to. He’s going to need my seed.”
Now that the moment of departure had actually arrived, Erger had gone thoroughly sour and couldn’t hold back his sulking. The thought of leaving this laboratory full of green, living things and being shut away in some stuffy imperial palace made everything in the world look grim and made him want to resent it all.
Bracing himself for the absolute worst, Erger made his preparations to leave for the imperial palace. Before long, he would finally be meeting the aged Omega fiancé whose existence he had known only through letters for the past ten years.
