Chapter 146: The Crime World's Newest Major Player: The Dracula Family
Time turned another hundred-plus pages without making a sound, and suddenly it was late August, the eve of the Yorknew City auction.
By this point Ross had accumulated roughly half a year of training under Master Genkai.
The fast travel network had taken initial shape, and Ross could now move between the Spirit Wave Style dojo and the Sky Arena freely and without side effects whenever he wanted. Neither side had suffered for it.
Two months prior, Ross had pushed up against his floor deadline and fought again. His opponent that time was a fighter named Dorado.
Something about the intensity of the Rabid Hyena fight earlier seemed to have unsettled the remaining two members of the hyena group enough that neither had been eager to challenge Ross.
Dorado was a dual-spear fighter from an ethnic minority, his skin a deep red, covered in black markings that ran like a troll's tattoos. His weapon was a double-ended long spear. His technique was refined, the best spear user Ross had faced by a clear margin.
His ability used the double-ended spear as a medium, applying a Transmutation and Conjuration combination to enhance and extend its attack range, and to fire mid-range Emission-type shockwaves from it. It looked straightforward at first glance, but fighting it made clear that Dorado was somewhat underutilizing what he had been given.
Ross came out to meet him looking unarmed.
Seemingly unarmed. Because his right hand was actually wearing the Power Glove, hidden with In so it was invisible unless you actively looked with Gyo.
And then Ross, without giving the man a single opening, mapped the Tiger Fighter template directly onto himself. Enhancement Affinity immediately pushed to 120%, stacked on top of pure numerical stats that climbed steadily through training with no ceiling in sight, and he rolled over his opponent like a freight truck.
One exchange. Dorado's head went into the ceiling.
Alucard in the Secret Realm had at least been able to dissolve into bats to escape the follow-up damage from the Spiral Pile Driver's descent. This one just got knocked unconscious in a single hit. Which also meant he survived, which was probably the best possible outcome under the circumstances.
In the original HxH anime, this character had fought Killua in the 1999 version and been finished in seconds.
The training period had also done nothing to suppress Ross's natural inclination to evangelize gaming.
In theory, anyone who had achieved an S-rank Entertainment Mode clear in both Castlevania III and Tower of Druaga could travel with Ross into the Secret Realm and use it as a means of cross-map teleportation.
Outside of Ross himself, Genkai was the first to satisfy both prerequisites. The veteran's ability was genuinely frightening, no surprise from someone who devoted more than half her free time to gaming and had been doing so for decades.
Next was Kurama, who was not obsessed with games but had an extraordinary natural instinct for them, able to pick up any genre at once. He had also gone out of his way to earn S-rank clears on the other cartridges Ross had available, apparently having already calculated that Ross would eventually be setting up teleportation nodes across multiple continents and regions and wanting to get his passes in advance.
Then at the end of May, Killua had returned to the Sky Arena. With Alluka.
The two of them just showed up openly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Without a single Zoldyck family member interfering.
Killua's explanation: he and Alluka and Nanika were now formally under the protection of the Castlevania faction.
Ross wasn't particularly surprised when he heard it. He had already formed a rough theory about where things were heading.
Shortly after Killua had sent the family portrait photo, Castlevania had welcomed back its true master.
More precisely: the old count had exercised his actual landlord authority and moved the entire Castlevania directly to the area where the Nostrad family compound was located.
The small-scale economy that had naturally formed around Castlevania and reached a decent size collapsed instantly.
Dracula did not care. His wife needed it nearby, so it was moved.
It had been said before and it remained true: this was not the fourteenth century. It was the modern era, the age where the science Lisa had devoted her previous life to had developed into something remarkable. Even if Neon genuinely wanted to give up her current life and sit around in a gloomy old castle with Dracula, Dracula would not let his wife suffer unnecessarily.
So he simply relocated Castlevania. It kept the wife's current life intact, and reinforced the Nostrad family's overall security from the ground up at the same time.
When he moved it, Dracula also made comprehensive modifications to Castlevania's internal rules within the scope of his authority, reshaping it into something fit for living rather than purely a monster's nest.
As sub-landlord, Ross lost direct operational control but retained observation rights. So he watched.
What he watched was the gradual formation of the world's first openly operating faction in which monsters and humans coexisted in something approaching harmony.
Dracula could modify the rules and even alter Castlevania's internal structure, but some things could not be conjured from nothing. Electricity, the internet, plumbing: the full infrastructure of modern life. For those, the Nostrad family hired human construction crews, who moved into Castlevania's territory in large numbers and began a comprehensive renovation. Simultaneously, skeletons, ghouls, patrol armor units, giant mummies, Frankenstein-type constructs, and other humanoid monster units began handling the material transport for the construction work.
Human engineers and Castlevania monsters ended up in a remarkably cooperative working relationship without anyone planning for it.
Predictably, the Nostrad family's complete alignment with the Castlevania side drew condemnation from peers and from broader human society. Most criminal organizations that worked with demon groups kept those arrangements hidden and off the record. The Nostrad family's current posture had at least the surface appearance of open anti-human tendencies.
But condemnation came with supporters. More than a few capitalists and crime bosses had started eyeing the Castlevania monster units with serious interest.
From their perspective, monsters were strictly superior to demons as labor.
Demons had the same range of desires as humans, easy to offend, prone to making emotional decisions, capable of anything when they were in the mood. Castlevania's monsters, by comparison: no complaints, no biological needs, no wages required, available at all hours. That combination had a lot of people in organized crime and capital circles quietly salivating.
Beyond all of that, Neon still held an irreplaceable monopoly: the one hundred percent accurate divination service. Despite the controversy, the Nostrad family held its ground, and subsequently renamed itself.
The Dracula Family.
30+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces