Chapter 142: I Said Char Was Right. Anyone Know What I Mean?
The Spirit Wave Style dojo. Island nation.
Ross, using a bathroom trip as cover, materialized the Little Tyrant console without wasting a second, pulled out the portable TV, and ran Castlevania III to check the configurable BOSS list.
Alongside the original Castlevania BOSS units, the Four Saint Beasts, and the three imprisoned spider legs, there was now a new entry: Lisa Tepes / Neon Nostrad.
He tapped it open. The main screen displayed a face that was both familiar and completely new.
The companion BOSS had two forms. The Lisa Tepes form was a full European-style dress, same color palette as Dracula, black with blood-red detailing, a kind of dark nobility. An unmistakably aristocratic look.
The Neon Nostrad form was Neon's standard appearance: blue-pink tones, the kind of fortune-teller accessories people expected from a diviner, dangling ornaments and hair decorations, with platform shoes underneath and a look of pure lively energy.
...So the old count's wife came back as a natural-born fortune teller.
And that meant Alucard was going to have to call this very much alive teenage girl "Mom."
The mental image of Alucard wearing a deeply conflicted expression and forcing out the word "Mom" at Neon was enough to make the corner of Ross's mouth rise entirely on its own.
Char was right.
I'm telling you, Char was right all along. Young mothers are exactly the kind of thing the world should allow.
Ross had lost his mind.
Should he tell Alucard in advance?
After recovering a fraction of his sanity, Ross found himself genuinely torn. Telling him early had its advantages. But waiting for him to discover it on his own was a flavor of entertainment that didn't come around often.
He'd let Alucard find out himself. Ross was looking forward to that moment very much.
Setting that aside: now that Neon was confirmed as one of Dracula's wives reborn, it meant Dracula was almost certainly at the Nostrad family compound. And that also meant Alluka was almost certainly there too.
Ross checked his phone. The distance from Kukuroo Mountain to the Nostrad family compound was staggering, ocean and continent between them. Which meant Dracula had a long-range teleportation ability. One that could carry others with him, too. Nothing else explained how he had gotten Alluka out from behind five consecutive ten-digit-passcode vault doors.
Not that knowing any of this changed much.
Setting aside how long the journey from Kukuroo Mountain to the Nostrad compound would take, anyone who actually got there would mostly just find the crime family's people on the receiving end of something unpleasant. Alluka was the Zoldyck family's most tightly kept secret. The entire family had almost certainly mobilized. If Ross started feeding more information on top of what he had already told Killua, the only result would be heat coming back at him.
Let them handle their own headache.
Though now that the second wife had turned up, surely the first couldn't be far behind. Would the BOSS configuration eventually feature all three of them at once?
Ross was genuinely curious.
"What?! Neon is missing?! What are you useless people even for!"
Light Nostrad, out at a crime boss dinner, received the call about his daughter's disappearance and his face contorted like the ground had split open beneath him.
He knew better than anyone that Neon was the foundation of everything he had. Without her, he was nothing.
"Sir. Miss Neon left a note."
A maid who had woken up to find the young miss gone picked up the note with trembling hands and read it out word by word.
"Daddy! It's Neon here! I'm going out with my husband for a bit, I'll be back by noon tomorrow probably, don't worry!"
"P.S. No need to make a fuss looking for Neon. With my husband around, nobody can touch your daughter. And please don't take it out on the staff. If Neon comes back and anyone is missing, I'll never speak to you again."
The maid did a genuinely faithful impression of Neon's usual tone. On the other end of the call, the head of the Nostrad family went into a long and profound silence.
"...Husband?"
It came out one syllable at a time, like he was grinding his teeth down to the gum. Light's reaction to those two words was more extreme than when he had heard Neon was missing in the first place.
A very powerful feeling of losing his daughter began circling in Light's mind.
He had given Neon everything she wanted while keeping her under strict control, especially regarding anything romantic. Dating was completely out of the question. He had made sure she had almost no contact with young men whatsoever.
Even when selecting a head of security, he had deliberated at length before specifically choosing someone who looked like a shark in a suit, someone Neon could never possibly find attractive.
And now some stranger from nowhere had walked in and walked off with his precious daughter and the entire foundation of his family. And had the complete shamelessness to be referred to as a husband.
This from a man who had smiled through the worst contempt and insults any crime boss had thrown at him, who bent when he needed to bend and endured everything. Light Nostrad's blood pressure went straight through the ceiling.
Light's fear of losing his daughter was excessive, of course. The current Neon was a fusion of herself and Lisa, and her interests hadn't fundamentally shifted, human body collecting possibly evolving into human anatomy study somewhere down the line, and her feelings for her family weren't going to change dramatically either.
Light was still her father. The Nostrad family was still her home.
Whether Light himself could survive having the lord of Castlevania as a son-in-law was a different question entirely.
Neon had said not to come looking. Light couldn't hold himself to that for a moment.
So while a thoroughly bewildered Dalzollene, who had no idea what had actually happened, was getting the verbal equivalent of being torn apart, the entire Nostrad family mobilized, throwing every resource they had into finding Neon, and putting out a bounty.
Light didn't believe a single punctuation mark of his daughter's claimed safety.
They moved like headless flies, without the first idea where to begin.
And the impulse to punish the staff who had failed to keep watch was swallowed down because of Neon's note.
Just in case. Just in case what Neon had written was actually true.
Left with no options, Light could only pray, full of resentment, that Neon hadn't been abducted but had genuinely gone off with some white-haired nobody of her own free will, and that she would come back.
It was exactly at that moment that a figure appeared outside the Nostrad compound.
Facing the suited crime soldiers standing guard at the gate with machine guns trained on the newcomer, this figure's hands moved, and a row of round-headed nails appeared in the tops of each guard's skull.
The arrival was the Zoldyck family's eldest son and heir, who had been on the same continent for work purposes, and who, upon receiving word that Alluka had gone missing, had been ready to go completely off the rails. But a location trace run by his younger brother Milluki on a tracker previously hidden in Alluka's headband had confirmed a brief stay at the Nostrad compound, and so he had come directly at the fastest speed available.
Illumi Zoldyck.
His face right now was the kind of thing that triggered the uncanny valley on sight. Every part of him radiated a very specific kind of bad omen.
He wanted to start killing. He also needed answers from the people in front of him.
But just as he attacked the gate guards, guards who should by any reasonable expectation have died on the spot, a distinctly different aura rose across their bodies, one with a higher priority in terms of control than Illumi's own Nen needles. And at that same moment, a new notification arrived for Ross.
[Detected: a special enclave of the real-world Castlevania domain has been established: the Nostrad family main compound.]
[Detected: the Nostrad family main compound is currently under attack by an external hostile. Autonomous defense mode has been activated.]
[You may now use spectator view to observe this area remotely.]
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