In House Parsha's council chamber, Jemel laid out a fairly convincing case to Turan and the vassals assembled around him, then withdrew for a time. Only then did the vassals, who had listened quietly, begin discussing it.

"What do you think?"

"It doesn't sound bad to me. It is a disaster we need to deal with, after all."

"I also like how deferential they're being."

Turan's reputation for repelling Arabion's House Head and his negotiations with Zahar had allowed House Parsha to establish itself quickly for a newly founded great house. Still, the reality was that its standing fell short of great houses with long histories and traditions.

Yet Karmine, a fairly powerful great house even if not a particularly ancient one, was treating them as its superior. How could that fail to swell their pride?

Seated at the head of the table, Turan gauged their mood before speaking quietly.

"You all seem inclined to accept."

"Yes, well... The compensation Karmine is offering is considerable, too."

For this joint operation, Karmine had offered the extraordinary payment of two Holy Relics, an enchanted warship, and two hundred tons of gold. Those were exceptionally generous terms even for requesting aid from a great house.

"Does everyone else agree?"

"My thoughts differ somewhat."

The speaker was Haram, a guest of House Berg, Turan's teacher, and one of Parsha's most powerful fighters. His expression remained solemn as he spoke.

"We expect war with Ruban soon, and the threat from Arabion has yet to subside. This would effectively open a third front. We cannot afford that."

"But don't we have to eliminate the great sea serpents anyway?"

"With the maritime-access ban in place, there is no great urgency on our side. Better to steer Karmine toward handling it themselves, since the North Sea was their base."

Having coolly answered the noble's question, Haram closed his eyes and nodded as if he had said his piece. Turan watched him quietly, then addressed the gathering.

"As he says, we are not in a position to rest easy. We will decline Karmine's proposal."

"If we refuse, the neighboring houses might think less of us..."

The man who had begun to object quickly trailed off upon sensing the mood around him. Turan decided not to diminish his own authority by bothering to rebuke him.

'Master's timely objection made that much easier to bring up.'

Turan, too, had decided to refuse as soon as he heard the proposal, but not simply out of concern over fighting on three fronts, as he had just said. Considering that the great sea serpents were unlikely to be a temporary threat, it would be better to finish them off while they had the chance to cooperate.

The problem was that he could not trust Karmine.

'They abandoned their capital because they were outmatched? What a joke.'

Based on his recent battle with them, the individual members of that great sea serpent clan were roughly as strong as an ordinary House Head, or slightly weaker. There were around a dozen of them, with their king and queen probably somewhat stronger.

That was a force Karmine's leader, the Lawyer, could readily repel or kill if he and the other vessels unleashed their divine powers.

'Unless Karmine's vessels are half-elves like Baraha's and Ruban's, of course.'

The mingling of divine and White Elf souls had left the half-elves at a considerable disadvantage when it came to drawing on divine power.

Those with properly coexisting souls and bodies, such as Turan, Maysa, and Solif, could freely combine symbols through the power of their souls, with no particular side effects beyond depleting their spiritual power. The half-elves could not. Hadn't they said it was because White Elf souls and the gods' symbols were fundamentally incompatible powers?

If Karmine's gods were similar beings, it would make sense. Otherwise, there was a strong chance they had something up their sleeves. They might, for instance, go into battle together only to stab him in the back as the fighting drew to a close...

In truth, there was an even greater reason behind his refusal.

Scent.

Throughout his visit and his long explanation, Jemel had not given off any bodily scent at all.

'He's probably concealing it with some magic tool or Holy Relic. He knows I have the Zahar bloodline. But...'

Common sense dictated that someone with no ulterior motives would have no reason to conceal his scent while asking for help. He must be hiding something unsavory, some emotion he could not afford to let Turan detect.

That alone had stripped Turan of any inclination to accept whatever the man proposed. And if refusing made them enemies? That would only mean they had decided to turn against him long ago.

A short while later, Jemel returned to the council chamber and looked flustered when Turan told him of the refusal.

"W-why... Head of Parsha, please reconsider. This concerns not merely our house, but all humanity."

"My decision stands. I might cooperate once Arabion has fallen or a rightful House Head has taken power, but not now. You may leave."

By a rightful House Head, he naturally meant Maysa. Jemel continued trying to change his mind with every kind of sweet talk, but had to fall silent when Turan said, "I have no wish to hear more."

A mere confidant of a House Head could hardly bare his teeth before the head of another great house.

In the end, having gained nothing, he looked up at Turan with fury in his eyes and muttered through gritted teeth. Even without smelling him, Turan could sense the astonishingly blatant emotion.

"... I shall take my leave. May you live a long life."

Did the emotion revealed in that instant belong to Jemel, or to the god dwelling within him? Either way, it made little difference.

* * *

Before long, word of what had happened between Houses Parsha and Karmine spread throughout the surrounding lands: having lost their capital, Karmine had sought aid and been refused.

Some said it was regrettable that Parsha had refused to help fellow humans. Others called it only natural, given the formidable enemy at its doorstep.

Many of Parsha's upper-tier wizards who had recently accompanied Maysa to Open's rescue tentatively concluded that Turan had made the right decision.

A few had been dazzled by Jemel's obsequious manner and all the promised rewards, but upon sober reflection, the great sea serpents were far too powerful an enemy to let such things sway them.

Not long after the envoy's departure, another event vindicated Turan's decision. News arrived that far to the east, the great house of Ruban had begun marching on Baraha's lands.

"War?"

"That's right. It's giving me one hell of a headache. I've only just begun getting the territory back on its feet..."

Repeated wars had left Baraha's territory, the land of lakes, chronically short of wizards. Even Solif himself, the House Head, sometimes went out hunting monsters. Wizards from Parsha and Ravista remained both to help and to keep watch, but there were too few of them to make that avoidable.

"How many troops?"

"You haven't seen them yourself, so we don't have precise details, but their numbers are around twelve hundred."

"Twelve hundred... And Baraha?"

"Eight hundred if we scrape together absolutely everyone. Most of those won't be much use in battle, of course."

Even if they somehow mustered two-thirds of the enemy's numbers, their actual fighting strength was probably less than half. They did not even have vessels capable of wielding power like Ruban's half-elves.

"Ravista's forces are still on their way home through the South Sea, so we're the only ones who can help."

"How much help can you give?"

At Solif's question, Turan tapped his fingers on the desk, considering for a moment.

"Not much, I'm afraid. We've been receiving reports of suspicious movements here lately, too."

"Suspicious movements?"

"There are reports of numerous wizards from the western forest being seen along the Gray Zone's border."

The Dark Elf upheaval several years earlier had dealt devastating damage to every wizard house ruling the western forest region. By now, however, they had recovered a fair measure of their former prosperity. Some who had fled had returned, while nobles who had struck out on their own from neighboring regions had organized settlement expeditions, hoping to rule new cities.

Together, they would make a sizable force. Their appearance in the borderlands was hardly a positive sign for House Parsha.

"I sent people to investigate, and the explanation is that several powerful monsters have been spotted nearby... But it would be difficult to learn the full story without going there myself and kidnapping someone."

"Let's not do that. It's dangerous. Hmm. So you can't readily pull troops away from here either."

Another concern was what lay behind Ruban's decision not merely to provoke them, but to actually attack. Unless they were fools, they would hardly invade blindly after seeing how swiftly Baraha had fallen.

Whether or not they had accounted for Ravista, it was reasonable to assume they had something that would let them stand against two great houses: Solif's Baraha and Turan's Parsha.

"I could leave the main house to Maysa and come help on my own... Oh, that reminds me. There's something else I wanted to discuss."

"What?"

"Berit."

Solif's face stiffened a little at Turan's words.

"What about her?"

"I'm thinking of sending her to Baraha while we're at it. What do you think? Even without me, an upper-tier Zahar noble would be a great help with scouting and tracking."

"Why so suddenly?"

"She wants to go."

Several days earlier, Berit had come to Turan and abruptly asked him to send her back to her main house. Her explanation was that his bond with Maysa was far too strong for her to come between them, and she did not want to waste any more time here. Besides, she had grown quite fond of Maysa during her stay.

Naturally, Turan had refused. Berit's posting involved all manner of complicated political calculations, making it difficult to decide lightly. Sending her back could itself be interpreted as a hostile signal.

Over several conversations on the subject, however, Turan had realized why Berit truly wanted to leave Parsha. Since becoming House Head, Solif rarely stayed in Kalamap. She wanted to leave because it was now difficult to see him often.

"... So instead of sending her back to Zahar, you want to send her to me?"

"Stealth is practically useless inside the Temple of the Sun anyway. And we have plenty of justification to give Zahar. We originally brought her over on the pretext of letting her find love freely, so we can simply say the object of her affections has changed. It's still the head of a great house, isn't it?"

Solif gave a pained grunt, as though that had struck a nerve. Turan shook his head with a hearty laugh.

"I have a fair idea how far things have gone between you and Berit. Pairing you two up wouldn't be bad for our side either. All that matters is whether you're happy with it."

From their conversations, Turan knew Berit was an ambitious woman. As the talented daughter of an heir, she had once aspired to become the heir after her father. But after the disappointment of her mana reaching its limit in the upper tier, she had hoped to gain power even if it meant becoming a House Head's consort.

Given an opportunity, she had come to Parsha to pursue Turan, only to find herself frustrated by his impenetrable defenses. In the meantime, she had been drawn to Solif. His looks were quite to her taste, he was powerful, and he was even the head of Baraha, a venerable great house despite its recent decline.

Unless she was a fool, rather than continuing her hopeless pursuit of Turan, she would return to her main house and try to find some way to be posted to Baraha. Turan had simply offered her a more attractive option.

"In exchange for sending her to Baraha, I asked her to pass us intelligence on Zahar. We're the ones who'll have to ask Zahar for a favor, so we deserve something in return."

"Using even your friend's love life for politics? You've really turned into a corrupt bigwig."

"I wouldn't have done this if you weren't particularly fond of Berit. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case."

Solif cleared his throat in embarrassment and deliberately looked away. Just as Turan said, at some point Solif—whose preference had previously been judged to be older married women—had become strongly attracted to Berit.

Perhaps it was impossible to fit a person's sexual preferences into neat categories in the first place. Could it even be called love if one could state categorically, "I like this sort of person and dislike anyone who isn't"? Such feelings simply arrived one day without warning and branded themselves upon the heart.

"Are Berit's feelings for me genuine?"

"From what I can tell."

Zahar nobles like Turan could consciously suppress the emotions carried in their scents to some extent, as he had once done before Talis while disguised as Onil.

But Berit lacked the ability to control herself to that degree. Indeed, at some point she had stopped even trying to hide her feelings for Solif in Turan's presence. The difference between simple lust and love was subtle enough to be difficult to discern, but Turan judged her feelings closer to the latter than the former.

"Damn it, fine. Let's do it. Though I don't know how we went from discussing war to talking about women..."

"I told you just now. Use Berit for reconnaissance as a Zahar noble."

"You want me to throw the woman I care about into danger?"

"Unless there's someone with abilities like mine, scouting won't put her in danger. Besides, I think it would be better if you gave me the intelligence she gathers and let me handle things myself."

Turan pointed to the world map beside the lounge where they were talking, his finger resting on Ruban's territory. At an ordinary wizard army's marching speed, it would take roughly half a month to travel south from the border to Baraha's capital, Helio.

If a Zahar noble scouted ahead and ascertained the army's composition, deployment, and the like, that would give a House Head-level assassin more than enough time to run rampant, throw the army into disarray, and force it to turn back.