Chapter 136: Alucard: My Father Had Two Wives
Dracula did genuinely hate humanity and God, no question about that. He had died and come back so many times, accumulating layers upon layers of history and mythology, that he had become something almost conceptual in nature, something like the embodiment of human evil itself.
In theory, as long as evil and darkness remained in the human world, Dracula could be destroyed any number of times and still claw his way back.
And yet, for all of that, the man was an absolute and completely hopeless devoted husband.
His devotion to his wives was the kind that made even bystanders feel the weight of it. His own son included.
The problem, and it was not a small one, was that Dracula had been married twice.
His first wife was Elisabeth Cronqvist. When he married her, the old count was still human. But when she died suddenly, Dracula broke entirely. He began to hate God. He began pursuing eternal life by any means available. That was the true origin of how Dracula became Dracula.
His second wife was Lisa. This was a Dracula who had already fully become a vampire, falling in love for the second time, and from their union came the product of a cross-species love: his famously filial son, Alucard.
Worth noting: the filial piety was genuine. Alucard's opposition to his father ran deep enough that his very name was Dracula spelled backwards, and Castlevania III had him joining forces with the Belmont family to personally take his own father down.
In the brutality of fourteenth-century Europe, the Church's grip on everything went without saying. Dracula's second wife Lisa was a woman of rare and extraordinary character: a believer in science in an age that had no place for it. The Church branded her a witch and came for her. They burned her alive.
Even as she died, Lisa urged Dracula not to hate humanity for what had been done to her.
But honestly, who was going to listen to that?
Even setting aside the fact that this was Dracula they were talking about: if Ross himself had been put through the same thing, he would have become the most extreme anti-Church, anti-humanity force imaginable without a second's hesitation. The Church specifically: not one person would get out alive.
And so it was. Two wives, both deeply loved, both lost. It was what made Dracula the icon he was: hating God, hating humanity in equal measure.
Castlevania itself was, in a certain sense, both Dracula's base of operations for his war against God and humanity, and a gravestone erected in memory of the women he had lost.
Which meant that for Dracula personally, his wives mattered far more than the castle ever did.
And the wish-granting ability housed within Nanika, inside Alluka's body, was the single most promising avenue in this entire world for resurrecting both of them, or at least finding which bodies they had been reborn into.
Ross remembered, though: Nanika's wish-granting didn't work by creating something from nothing. The example that came to mind was a butler who had once wished to become a billionaire. Money had rained down from the sky. What had actually happened was that an airship transporting banknotes had suffered a sudden malfunction, and the money that fell was some poor depositors' savings.
In other words, in a world where the Spirit World was a verifiable reality, Nanika almost certainly could not bring the dead back to life in any direct sense. Ross's best guess was that Dracula would use a wish to locate where his wives had been reborn, then use his soul-domination abilities to awaken the memories of their previous lives.
As for the three rounds of tribute required before making a wish to Nanika, that was probably nothing to Dracula. Human lives were the one thing he had never been short of.
...Although, Ross couldn't help wondering: what if one of the wives had been reborn as a man? Would Dracula, the kind of person who looked only at the soul, accept that without complaint?
Or maybe the old count would just go the other route entirely: the "I'll take both" approach, and resurrect both wives' reincarnations at once?
Now that would be a situation worth watching.
And beyond all of that: Dracula was cold and merciless toward humans and his incompetent subordinates, but toward those who were actually reliable, and toward anyone who helped him, he showed a considerable degree of courtesy and respect.
The closest comparison Ross could think of was Frieza, who used honorifics with every subordinate except the Saiyans. Perfectly polite and refined, but genuinely did not blink while killing you.
From that angle, Ross didn't think Alluka was in any real danger. If anything, the Dracula who had kidnapped her would be going out of his way to keep both Alluka and Nanika safe.
And something this important, finding his wives, was the kind of thing Dracula would handle personally. The odds of him taking Alluka back to Castlevania were probably low, unless his two wives happened to have been reborn somewhere within the borders of the Ochima Federation.
The whole chain of reasoning was clear enough in Ross's head. The problem was that every single piece of it was built on a source he could never explain to anyone. How exactly was he supposed to tell Killua any of this?
Killua, watching Ross go completely silent, didn't push. He hadn't been counting on Ross to have answers anyway, and with characteristic composure he kept the information tightly controlled, having only given out what concerned Dracula, nothing more.
He had no intention of turning around to find Ross being hunted down by his entire family.
"Sorry. I didn't mean to put you in an awkward position."
Killua said it and turned to leave.
"Where are you going?"
Ross, genuinely uncertain how to explain any of this, called after him.
"Back home first. This is serious. Zaban will send someone to pick me up soon."
A pause.
"And Ross. Just pretend I never said anything. It's safer for you that way."
The considerate little brat, even now, remembered to warn Ross to keep quiet and stay safe, despite not having actually let anything slip.
...Damn it. That was exactly the kind of thing that got to Ross every time.
Push back against him and he'd dig in harder. But if someone was genuinely looking out for him, Ross could never just stand back and do nothing, even if it meant putting himself at risk.
"I know who that noble is. And I know why he took the person important to you."
One sentence. Killua's movement stopped dead.
He turned back around. The surprise on his face was impossible to suppress.
"What I'm about to tell you: it leaves my mouth and goes into your ears, and nowhere else. Don't ask where I heard it. Not a single other person can know, and that includes Gon. Otherwise my life is genuinely going to be in danger."
Ross, with complete and utter childishness, extended one pinky finger.
Killua blinked. Then his expression steadied into something clear and expectant, and he hooked his own pinky around Ross's. The most childish, most primitive, and most purely sincere contract possible: the pinky promise.
And so it went. As Ross fed him the key information piece by piece, Killua's eyes went wider and wider. More than once the thought clearly crossed his face, how do you know all of this?! but he held it in every time, never let it out.
Ross watched Killua take off at a sprint, and had the faint impression of two childhood friends who should have stayed close to each other, showing the first signs of going their separate ways ahead of schedule.
...Well. Things were already chaotic. A little more chaos wouldn't hurt.
With that thought, Ross reset the Castlevania III cartridge and this time selected Secret Realm Mode. A single flicker of light, and he transferred directly into the Secret Realm stage, the one currently accessible only to himself and his master.
His purpose was straightforward.
He was heading to the B route's fifth major area, Alucard's Cave, to find the Alucard currently serving as the area BOSS, and deliver one piece of news.
Your mother might be coming back.
30+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces