Warlock Apprentice

Angor glanced at the boy on his leg and wondered.

I thought this guy hated me not too long ago?

They almost fought before boarding the airship because Angor did not take Ananda along. Here, “fought” meant Hobbiton was going to kick him, while Angor did not pay any attention to the kid at all.

A kid might he be, Hobbiton had been spending his years receiving “education” from Ananda, the leader of a thief gang. He knew all the dirty words used by adults. After Ananda prevented him from kicking Angor for real, he did not hesitate to use those words on Angor.

Maybe the kid was too scared of height as well as the strange world around him?

Angor did not believe those were enough reasons for the little devil to suddenly give up those gangster attitudes.

Maybe Hobbiton was suddenly enlightened by something overnight?

“In the story, Peter Pan can fly too.”

With that, Angor stepped into the woods first.

They walked all the way to Sunders’ mansion where Butler Goode welcomed them at the door.

“Mister Padt.” He bowed, then looked at Hobbiton with a gentle expression.

Hobbiton already saw Goode’s portrait in his family. The robe, as well as the mask with strange patterns, quickly helped him recognize his grandfather. Now the kid felt both happy to see someone who shared the same bloodline and nervous for being somewhere unknown.

More importantly, Hobbiton was quite shocked to see his grandfather addressing Angor as “Mister”. Did that mean Angor was actually someone important?

“He’s Hobbiton, your family, according to his own words,” Angor spoke. He added, “Now I took him here, you can handle the rest, Butler Goode.”

Goode replied in an emotional tone, which was rare for the butler. “Master already told me. Thank you, Mister Padt. Let me take it from here.”

Angor left Hobbiton and prepared to head to Sunders’ study. However, he was stopped by Hobbiton’s timid voice.

“Sir-sir!”

Angor stopped and turned around to see Hobbiton blushing badly.

“Thank-thank you very much, for bringing me to my grandpa. I-I-can I ask something?”

Behind the mask, Goode frowned a little and wanted to stop Hobbiton’s rude act.

“Go ahead.”

Angor thought the kid was going to ask about Ananda again. He did not show it, but he was getting impatient deep inside.

“Sir, can you tell me that story about… Peter Pan?”

That surprised Angor a little. He wondered if the kid was getting lonely, or simply wanted to find the cause of life from the story.

Probably both.

It was not a difficult task anyway, so he nodded to agree.

“I will… when we have time for it.”

…

Upon going through the door of the study, Angor found Sunders writing something in front of a desk, as always.

“I know you have a lot to ask, such as the Nightmare Domain. I’ll tell you about them in due time. Now, you must tell me everything first, about what happened during that day when you shut the nightmare passage, so we leave no loose ends.”

The gentleman’s serious expression made Angor worried.

Angor put away his relaxed attitude in front of his professor and carefully went over his memory.

“You asked me to close the passage, professor, and I had no idea how, so I thought about breaking the illusion nodes in my body…

“… I went for the node on my heart and fainted. Then that green toy owl saved me. It told me not to kill myself. When I realized I can communicate with Auri, I thought about swindling him into telling me how to close the door.

“… There were monsters, and they were going through the passage one by one. Auri said something about arranging a ceremony for the queen’s arrival, so I followed that lead and pretended that I wanted to enlarge the passage so the monsters could come faster. If I can learn about how to control the passage, I’ll have something to close it off.”

Enlarging the passage and closing it should be different, but Angor believed they had something in common.

Using the excuse of losing his memory, Angor managed to trick Auri into telling him info.

Whether the nightmare passage was open, as well as its size, depended on his own will. Auri told him how to control his will. It was then that Angor realized it was something similar to how he could sense the emotions of monsters.

He used to “communicate” with the monsters using his subconsciousness. Now that Auri taught him how to control the communications for real, there was a lot more he could do now. He could even directly communicate with a person through emotions, on condition that the target lowered his or her spirit defense.

After learning the trick, instead of closing the passage right away, Angor attempted something else first.