Hastur did not even need to explain the rest of the story himself.
Seeing the look on Hastur's face, as though he desperately wanted to complain but had no idea where to start,
the Mysterious Lord simply voiced the complaint for him:
"Then you discovered that little Ithaqua had dragged off the chunk of corpse you didn't want and eaten it while nobody else was picking it up. And since its power was also ice-aspected, it just happened to give him enough energy to advance into a Lower Great Old One, right?"
But to the Mysterious Lord's surprise,
Hastur slowly shook his head.
"No...?"
The Mysterious Lord grew doubtful. Why wasn't this little weakling Ithaqua following the usual wish-fulfillment protagonist's path of scooping up overlooked treasures?
"No. There were still some differences."
Hastur stated firmly:
"Big fellow Ithaqua did indeed gather enough energy from the half-corpse I threw away, but he didn't initially choose to transform into a Great Old One."
"He thought there was a very high chance he wouldn't survive the transformation into a Great Old One, so he wanted to become one of the Old Ones instead!"
The Mysterious Lord watched Hastur once again adopt that helpless expression of wanting to complain.
He decisively chose to voice the complaint for him again:
"So something else went wrong? What caused it this time? Did the corpse's father come back?"
But Hastur shook his head.
"No, nothing to do with him. That fellow's still hiding in some remote little world. He hasn't dared show his face all these years."
After casually mentioning the opponent he had once wanted so desperately to kill, Hastur continued explaining how Ithaqua had come into being.
"Ithaqua was charging toward the rank of a lower Old One at the time, but his luck was