The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 596 – Ruined garden

Machaon stood by the pond in his garden, lost in silent contemplation while staring at his reflection. The waters of the tiny lake were turbid – disturbed by the wind – though he didn’t care enough to calm them down with his willpower today. It wasn’t like he had any interest in preserving his refined appearance anymore.

From what little he could see amidst the roiling waves, the bags under his eyes betrayed the fact that he hadn’t slept in days. It had been even longer since he’d last washed himself, his hair oily and unkempt as his robes were wrinkled and covered in stains.

Had somebody told him a few years ago that he would have allowed himself to devolve to this pathetic state, he would have been appalled. This hadn’t been how Machaon had wanted people to see him. He was a patriarch of a Great House – one of Remior’s leading figures!

The garden was in even worse shape than its owner.

The overgrown grass reached all the way to his knees, the bushes and trees having not been trimmed in years. Most of the flowers had withered or otherwise been replaced by invasive weeds. The fragrant air that had once permeated Machaon’s little paradise now reeked of the bird droppings that littered the marble benches and cobblestone paths.

‘How the fuck did it come to this…?’ he asked himself for what he felt was the millionth time, his lips curling into a bitter smile.

Machaon had known that Percy and Nesha had posed a theoretical threat to his plans – especially if they’d kept digging into the matter of the girl’s destroyed family. However, he’d thought that the possibility of them connecting the dots or stumbling upon something incriminating had been rather remote.

He’d still wanted to eliminate the danger before it blew up in his face, of course. Machaon had never been fond of loose ends. He’d even taken steps to get rid of the low-borns over the years.

Still. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that his operation would have come crumbling down so quickly… and so completely. The Violets in his House had been pressuring him to step down from his position for months, and his fellow Whites had made every attempt to sever ties with him and his family, clearly unwilling to be implicated by association.

Centuries of meticulous planning and excessive caution had been rendered moot by a couple of young upstarts that hadn’t even lived as long as the plants in Machaon’s garden.

‘I should have headed to the Guild personally and squashed the little bastards on day one,’

he thought, grinding his teeth.At the time, it had seemed like an unnecessary risk. People would have questioned his involvement in the destruction of House Veritas and his obsession with the girl. Putting their concerns to rest without arousing suspicion about the Starry Princess would have been difficult.

That said, if he could go back in time, Machaon would choose that path a hundred times over.

‘This… it’s even worse than the worst-case scenario…’

It would have been bad enough if Percy and Nesha had simply speculated about his crimes and tattled to the Divine Order and the other Houses. At least, the low-borns had been fugitives for years, so there was a small chance that nobody would have taken their accusations seriously.

To think that Deimos – that stupid asshole – would lure Percy and his bird back to the Fungal Spire, practically inviting them to one of the only two spots on the entire planet where they could have found concrete evidence of Machaon’s crimes.

‘No. There’s no point regretting the past.’ He sighed. He’d already gone over this a thousand times, but he understood that the choices he had made had been reasonable at the time. ‘Besides, Percy is clearly as ambitious as I am. The little freak would have still tried to turn a Starry Wasp into one of his minions sooner or later.’

Either way, it was better to focus on the future – assuming that Machaon still had one of those. While he’d given up on his appearance, his garden, and even his reputation, Machaon had yet to give up on himself.

Much like everyone else, he’d waited with bated breath to see how the gods intended to deal with him. At the same time, he’d spent his days and nights trying to come up with a way out of this mess.

As far as he could tell, there was precisely one path to salvation, and he didn’t like it one bit. Whether it even had a chance of succeeding practically depended entirely on Phoebe’s whims, and Machaon wasn’t one who enjoyed leaving his fate in another’s hands.

Alas, there was nothing he could do about it.

The good news was that the Order had remained silent so far – an indication that his plan had merit. There were several additional things that Machaon had to take care of if he wanted to live though, the hardest of which he had been postponing for the last few months.

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‘No sense in delaying the inevitable,’ he thought, finally deciding to commit to his gamble. ‘If they kill me, so be it.’

There was a good chance that Machaon wouldn’t see the sun rise again, but dying was starting to sound preferable to agonizing over his fate for years. Besides, if the deities decided to spare him, he would have to start preparing for the next phase of his plan sooner rather than later.

Nodding with grim determination, he flew over his dilapidated garden, reaching the entrance of the underground chamber in mere seconds. The leaders of the other Great Houses had demanded access to his not-so-hidden lair countless times in recent months, insisting that they couldn’t allow anybody to threaten the survival of their world.

Obviously, Machaon had denied both their requests and the Red-born’s explosive accusations. He knew that he hadn’t convinced his colleagues, but they had luckily proven too cowardly to take action against him before the gods broke their silence.

‘I’ll still have to get Theseus and Morpheus on my side for this to work,’ he reminded himself.

The other four boot lickers were more likely to stick with Percy and the smaller families if it came to a conflict, but Machaon felt that the Divine Root and House Ypnos could be convinced to join House Asclepius due to their own history with the Red-born. Regardless, it was too early to worry about his potential allies before knowing whether Phoebe would even hear him out.

Using his willpower, Machaon ripped out a massive chunk of dirt and dead plants out of the dried hedge formation, revealing the entrance of the underground complex. This time, he carelessly tossed the carpet of weeds and bushes aside, not bothering to preserve it for later.

There was no going back. Everyone who mattered already knew of Machaon’s crimes, so he might as well start operating in the open.

Flying into the dungeon, he made his way to the captive as the runes around him activated one after the other to illuminate the narrow corridors. Machaon had deliberately designed the pathways to barely fit humans and beasts up to Green, to make it harder for the wasp to escape once she grew past a certain size.

Of course, the creature would probably be strong enough to break out regardless if her restraints failed after she reached Blue, but a few obstructions might delay her long enough for Machaon to notice. At least, that used to be the plan.

As things stood, the Starry Princess’s possible resistance was the last thing on Machaon’s mind.

Soon, he reached a wider chamber at the heart of the underground prison. This was the only room large enough to fit a fully grown Violet beast. Originally, Machaon had expected both its current occupant and a bunch of her eventual descendants to reach that grade by the time he became a demigod himself.

In the middle of the room, a single Starry Wasp lay motionless atop a large formation that glowed softly in various cycling colours. The bug was larger than an elephant, though she didn’t look great at the moment.

All six of her limbs and both of her wings were missing. Machaon had ripped them out himself, to ensure that she never so much as tried to leave. Her black carapace was cracked and worn, the colourful dots adorning her exoskeleton were dim, and the golden watermark patterns coating her exterior had lost their royal lustre. One of her eyes had been crushed to a pulp, dried insect blood marring her mandibles as her second eye appeared entirely listless.

More importantly, the bug was thinner than she was supposed to be, as procuring enough beasts to feed her had grown even harder following Percy’s revelations. The only reason the other Whites had humoured Machaon’s requests for more food was because nobody on Remior had wanted the Starry Princess to starve to death.

The Red-born had replaced her with a healthier sister – hence the lack of urgency from everyone to retrieve Machaon’s prisoner – but keeping the second royal wasp alive could only be a good thing.

Finally, the creature was bound in countless enchanted chains that suppressed her mana without draining it and prevented her from moving. It was important to weaken the creature enough that she couldn’t attempt to escape, yet without increasing her mana consumption more than necessary. If anything, Machaon’s enchantments had only helped in that regard.

“Let’s drop this farce, shall we, Lady Athena?” Machaon requested, his voice echoing through the vast hall.

Nobody replied, but Machaon wasn’t a fool. He knew that the gods would have never left the creature unattended in this state, and he’d caught signs of the illusion months ago – even though he’d been more than happy to play along as he considered his options.

“Fine. If you insist on pretending, I hope that you can forgive my rudeness.”

Compressing his domain into a cube as big as the Starry Princess, he willed it to slam down on the creature with enough force to pulverize it like a common wasp. On the off chance that he had guessed incorrectly, he genuinely didn’t care if the royal bug ended up dying.

As things stood, Machaon knew that he wasn’t going to survive the next thousand years or so, meaning that the beast had lost its value in his eyes. The only reason he’d even kept feeding it to this point was because he hadn’t felt ready to pull the curtain on the gods’ charade.

Much like he had expected, his willpower never so much as touched the Princess. It struck an invisible wall a few centimetres above the wasp’s exoskeleton, the impact causing the entire room – No. The whole garden – to shake. As for the creature, it remained entirely unharmed.

Just as Machaon was about to strike again, a single ripple disturbed the air between him and the Starry Princess, the scene in front of him shifting rapidly.

The starving creature was instantly replaced by a healthy one that stood on all six of her legs, the chains that had previously bound her now gone without a trace. A pair of membranous wings unfolded and folded lazily on her back, her carapace glossy and adorned with all the right colours.

The original heir of the Fungal spire wasn’t nearly as thin as she had previously appeared either, though her compound eyes still glared at Machaon with undisguised hatred, despite her complete recovery. However, the patriarch of House Asclepius had lost all interest in the oversized bug.

He was too busy looking at the beautiful young woman sitting on the creature’s head with one leg over the other, staring back at him with as much scorn and disdain as her magical mount.

“You have some nerve to attack and make demands of me, you selfish little prick.”