46. Old Story (6)
It had already been over a week since the expedition that Eizel and Flame had joined began wandering through the Karakorn Mountains.
“Expedition” sounded grand, but in truth, it was closer to a battle against oneself.
Cutting through terrain hostile to humans, fighting beasts, enduring uncomfortable nights in the wild, and then steadily pressing onward again.
A journey that one could never withstand without both strong physical endurance and strong mental fortitude.
“Those little brats… they don’t even look tired.”
“No. They’re exhausted. They’re just enduring it.”
In that sense, it was only natural that the eyes with which the expedition members looked at Eizel and Flame gradually began to change.
At first, they thought of them as immature students.
But around the time they concluded that the girls had enough useful little skills to make them worth dragging along, they began to perceive the true weight of their presence.
When things turned serious, they were serious.
When it came time to fight, they were of great help as actual combat strength.
During rest periods, they chatted constantly to keep morale up, or helped the expedition with all kinds of odd useful skills.
In this expedition, their presence had by no means become a small one.
Flame mixed words freely with all sorts of people.
Eizel did not.
By now, much of her wariness had faded…
but after spending nearly ten years branded as the child of a traitor, it was difficult for her to easily approach someone else.
And so, after one day’s expedition would come to an end and she and Flame lay side by side inside their little tent, Eizel would tell only Flame stories of her past.
“…Flame, what do you think of my father?”
What a difficult question, one might think.
A friend asking what one thought of her father—there had never been any such thing before.
But then, was Eizel an ordinary friend?
She was not an ordinary girl, not an ordinary student, and not an ordinary human.
She was…
something very special.
Even so, Flame had no intention of suddenly treating her as special, and so she simply laid bare her honest thoughts.
“I don’t know.”
“…Is that so?”
“Yeah. Honestly, I’ve never even properly heard who your dad is. I was living day by day in some backwater countryside orphanage, digging up potatoes to survive. Why would I care what was happening in some other town?”
Flame and Eizel had shared stories of each other’s childhoods.
“I had more than ten younger siblings, and they told us to make do with five potatoes for a meal. I wanted to grab that crazy headmistress by the neck and shake her, but I was only ten back then, so I couldn’t.”
Flame’s childhood had been one of never enough to wear, never enough to eat.
“My father always told me, ‘Walk the path you believe is right.’ But now… I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what is right.”
Eizel’s childhood had been one spent with a dependable, admirable father.
When the two of them were alone, Eizel tended to unpack far more stories, and Flame listened quietly.
Recollection.
What a beautiful and mysterious word.
Because it allowed even an ordinary human being to travel through time.
Whenever Eizel reminisced, Flame never said anything.
Or rather, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she could not.
“Even if we fail on this trip, that’s alright. I know it won’t be easy. But someday, I will definitely clear my father’s name.”
Within Eizel’s memories, Isaac Morf had been a righteous and upright father.
A great mage who had planted his steadfast convictions upon this land like a towering pillar and protected the world.
“Hey, Eizel.”
Carefully, Flame opened her mouth.
“Yes. Go ahead.”
“What if… just hypothetically. Really hypothetically…”
She hesitated over something, trying to ask her something—
but perhaps the timing was poor.
Teeeeeng!
Wiiiiing! Wiiiing!
The alarm of the barrier they had set outside the tent blared loudly, and the person on watch sent the signal to wake everyone up.
“Wake up! Everyone up! It’s an emergency!”
“W-what?”
Since this was the first time anything like this had happened, the two girls were flustered, but hurriedly crawled out of the tent.
The other expedition members had already woken long before them, gathered with their equipment and staffs in hand.
They were not soldiers, so they were not arranged in neat ranks, but they were prepared cleanly enough that there would be no issue even if battle broke out at once.
They too were mostly 4-Class mages, but compared with Flame and Eizel of the same level, they clearly showed the seasoned experience of veterans.
“What’s the situation?”
When the expedition leader asked with a hardened expression, the one on watch, still unable to wipe the panic from his face, stammered and rambled.
“T-that way, that way… quickly! It’ll be better to see with your own eyes than for me to explain!”
Following his words, the entire expedition headed deep into the mountain without even stopping to break down the temporary camp.
‘What is it?’
A heavy sense of wrongness began at the heart, flowed through the blood vessels, and struck its destination in the mind.
“…Where’s Kayla?”
And one of those wrongnesses was cleared up directly by the expedition leader.
“Huh? Come to think of it…”
Kayla.
The veteran adventurer who had proposed bringing the two clueless Stella cadets into the expedition.
She enjoyed the expedition leader’s trust and was always present for important decisions, so for her to be absent at a time like this—
“Hey, where’s Kayla? What happened?”
When the leader asked, the watchman twisted his expression hard and answered:
“She’s… missing.”
“…What?”
“In the middle of the night, she said she really had to go to the bathroom and went into the forest. There wasn’t really any reason to stop her, was there?”
The night watch was done in teams of two.
Kayla had also been on watch, but after going into the woods saying she needed the bathroom, she never came back.
No matter how rough and manlike Kayla behaved, her biological sex was still female, so it was awkward to interfere while she was relieving herself, and they left her be. But after thirty minutes passed, the watchman sensed that something was wrong and personally entered the woods, he said.
And then—
“…We found this place.”
At the place they finally arrived at—
there sprawled something enormous.
…A vast city.
To be precise, it was a ruin.
The ruin of a city destroyed in an ancient era.
“H-how can this be…!”
Even the veteran expedition leader could only move his lips dumbly in shock, unable to say anything at all.
No, in a situation like this, anyone would have been the same.
Except for one person.
Flame.
‘…So we’ve finally arrived.’
The name of that ruined city spread out before them was Karakornia.
Long ago, it had been a small kingdom that flourished…
but then, one day, it suddenly vanished from the map overnight, leaving behind one of history’s mysteries.
And that was already over nine hundred years ago.
Now it was hardly recorded in history at all, dismissed as little more than legend.
“How… how can something like this happen…?”
Up to now, countless expedition parties had been dispatched here.
Including the expedition leader himself, many of those gathered here had explored the Karakorn Mountains several times over, so that said enough.
And yet, they had never once found ruins like these until now.
“That’s… not the only strange thing.”
As they slowly walked toward the city, one of the expedition members spoke.
“Look there.”
The expedition member pointed into the air.
There stood a building in the middle of collapsing.
That was an exact description.
‘A building in the middle of collapsing.’
The building had been collapsing…
and then stopped in place, motionless.
And that was far from the only thing like it.
It was a wondrous scene, as though someone had captured a single instant and painted it into reality.
“That’s not all. If you look closely… the city hasn’t aged at all.”
Ordinarily, if one were to refer to a city destroyed long ago in modern terms, perhaps the proper word would have been “ruins.”
But that city was far too recent to be called ruins.
Though it was somewhat worn and broken, it was closer to a devastated wreck than an ancient ruin. It simply did not look that old.
“But that flag is definitely Karakornia. I know because I’ve read the legends several times!”
“I’m not saying it isn’t Karakornia! That’s exactly why it’s even stranger!”
“This is insane. It really is.”
In an ordinary situation, perhaps one would feel fear here.
But adventurers were different.
The expedition leader wiped both hands down his face.
The emotion in his eyes was not fear.
It was curiosity.
And excitement.
With his face flushed red, he bared his teeth in a grin.
“I don’t know. I don’t know a damn thing. How something like that can exist. Why something like this happened. Really, there’s not a single thing I can understand…”
The next words were picked up by another expedition member.
“Which only makes it all the more exciting…”
Turning back, the expedition leader addressed the entire expedition.
“We didn’t come all this way just to tuck our tails and run, did we?”
No one raised a hand.
If anything, they were all staring at the expedition leader with faces full of excitement, as if asking when the hell they were leaving.
Seeing that, the expedition leader nodded in satisfaction and said:
“Normally, the proper thing would be to return to headquarters and assemble a full expeditionary force… but we can’t do that, because a missing person has appeared. Kayla vanished—how could we abandon a comrade and turn back? We have to go find that crazy bitch, don’t we?”
“That’s right!”
“Tear this place apart! Don’t miss even a dead ant—search everything!”
The expedition members split into groups and scattered.
As for Eizel and Flame…
no one joined them.
Normally, if something like this happened, they would have moved as a three-person team with Kayla.
But she had disappeared.
“What… should we do?”
Eizel asked with a deeply tense expression.
Kayla’s disappearance—the woman she had relied on and trusted all this time.
At first, it was true she had been wary of her, but it was also true that thanks to Kayla’s help during the expedition, she had adapted here much more easily. There was no way she couldn’t be worried.
“We have to go too.”
Flame said that to Eizel.
“We have knowledge as our weapon. We don’t know anything about this city, but… there’s one thing we do know. Somewhere in there is Silver Age November’s relic.”
“…That’s true.”
“Go where your instincts pull you. It won’t be hard. There isn’t any orthodox path here anyway, so the road you walk will become the road.”
Looking over the ruined city, Eizel nodded.
“Still… I think it’s better not to investigate the most suspicious place.”
The expedition leader and the veteran adventurers would search a place like that.
“You’re not going to go for a place that obvious, right?”
“No. And actually… ever since I got here, there’s been one place that’s giving me a very strong feeling.”
Eizel looked toward the city.
Karakornia’s appearance was completely different from that of a modern city.
It looked as though countless cubes had been tangled together, square forms mixed all throughout.
Naturally, one could not see very far, but even so, one tower that rose especially high stood out.
It looked like an ordinary tower with nothing special about it, but that unusually tall place…
for some reason, your eyes did not want to go to it.
As though someone did not want it to be looked at.
“…Really?”
Flame smiled faintly.
Having come this far, it could no longer be stopped.
No, in truth, ever since “Kayla” had appeared, the arrival of this moment had been inevitable.
“Then, shall we go? We’ll be the first to find it!”
“Yeah… of course.”
Eizel strode ahead with spirited steps, and Flame followed behind her with a face full of worry.
After Baek Yuseol joined them, the Full Moon Tower search unit, Black Team, traced Melian’s whereabouts quite smoothly.
Hae Seongwol had reasoned that Melian had not been annihilated, and that his body and soul were likely bound somewhere even now, and in accordance with that deduction, Baek Yuseol used a method that reverse-traced the location of Ancient Carmenset’s dungeon.
That method worked quite successfully.
“We found it.”
It was far faster than when Zeliel’s expedition had found the Ancient Carmenset Ruins before.
Every keyword Baek Yuseol presented struck directly at the core, and since Black Team—arguably the finest search team in the world—was acting on-site in person, that was only natural.
“This place is…”
The destination was not entirely unfamiliar.
The Silent Labyrinth Forest, located in the center of Hawol Plains.
This place had completely forbidden entry to ordinary races, because the moment one stepped inside, one lost all sense of direction and found it difficult to escape again.
Now, with cutting-edge magical equipment, one could enter and leave as much as one liked, but there had been no need to do so, and thus no one had.
But the tracker Baek Yuseol had developed was pointing toward the Silent Labyrinth Forest.
‘The ruins moved…?’
The moment Zeliel had completely cleared the Ancient Carmenset Ruins and won at Soul Chess, the ruins had vanished without a trace.
They had thought it had been completely destroyed—
but instead, it had moved to another place like this.
“I see. Looking at the wavelength, I understand now. This dungeon isn’t restricted by spatial coordinates.”
The mages of Black Team nodded as if they had grasped the mystery in magical terms.
“That’s right. Space isn’t the issue. For Carmenset, time is the decisive keyword.”
When Baek Yuseol answered, the mages put their heads together and began to ponder among themselves.
“Hmm, then does that mean Philipes’s Spiral Time Particle Theory was correct? I’ll have to go back and write a paper about this.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Really? Why?”
“According to Spiral Time Particle Theory, the Ancient Carmenset Ruins should have moved not to ‘another place,’ but to ‘another time period.’ But the fact that they were found here less than two weeks after Zeliel conquered Ancient Carmenset is proof that they didn’t escape temporal constraints.”
“Ah, right, that would be the case. But couldn’t it just be that, due to the randomness of time, it happened to appear twice in the present in a row?”
“Then let me explain the probability of a dungeon appearing twice in succession in the present, after a thousand years have passed since the birth of magic, across all that time.”
“…That’s a horrifying probability of less than 0.000001%, isn’t it? My theory is garbage. I’ll have to revise it.”
Following behind Baek Yuseol, Zeliel stared blankly at his back.
Not only was he now using Black Team completely at his discretion, he was also discussing magic on equal footing with them.
And in most cases, Baek Yuseol was the one who was right.
‘…Is he really only one year younger than me?’
Zeliel had always thought of herself as a genius in her own right.
But there was no comparison.
‘What if, instead of leading Starcloud, I had studied magic?’
No.
Even then, it would still not have been enough.
Because Baek Yuseol possessed the knowledge of a specialist… or even more than a professor, in every field of magic.
Even if Zeliel herself had devoted herself to magic, at best she might only have become outstanding in a single subject.
The gap felt utterly impossible to overcome.
And the more of a genius one was, the more sharply one felt that gap.
And yet, rather than jealousy…
what she felt was relief.
Because that perfect boy, more complete than anyone else, was at this very moment standing as a dependable ally, doing his utmost to find her father.
“…How about stopping staring at that side and focusing instead?”
“N-ne? Pardon?”
When Hae Seongwol spoke from behind, Zeliel stammered for the first time, looking genuinely flustered.
It was such a rare sight that Hae Seongwol almost wanted to laugh in disbelief.
“You’ve been staring holes into that boy’s back this whole time. At this rate he’s really going to develop one. Focus for now. The Labyrinth Forest is the sort of place where, if you let your guard down even for a moment, you’ll lose your bearings completely.”
“Ah…”
She had not realized at all.
The fact that she had not even been aware of her own actions made her face flush bright red.
Was that because she was embarrassed?
She didn’t know.
Perhaps Zeliel herself…
didn’t know either.
‘Get a hold of yourself. I have no right to be like this.’
After piling up so many sins and wrongdoings, how could she let herself be distracted by anything else?
There was no way she could be any more ugly.
Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath, then opened them again.
When she did, the look in Zeliel’s eyes had changed completely.
‘I… need to become colder.’
If anyone who knew her had heard those words, they might have found them deeply awkward.
From the day she was born until now, there had never once been a time when Zeliel had not been cold.
Right now, in many ways…
Zeliel was in turmoil because of strange emotions that even she herself could not control.
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