The Fruits of Early Education
How on earth had it come to this? Even calling the situation a mess would be flattery. I stood there dumbly, staring down at the courtyard below.
A gray-haired woman standing in the middle of the battlefield like a regal queen.
...And the many poor men she had swept aside.
And among those men, a face I knew—familiar, and achingly dear.
Grandpa...
I had known for a long time that the grandfather who raised me was Zeus himself.
You've made me so proud.
...
And yet, even so, he had always treated me as his grandson.
To me, my grandfather had never been the god Zeus. He was simply Grandpa. Nothing more, nothing less.
But—but what about now?
Even if I thought of that god as my grandfather, to Zeus I was nothing but a stranger who had appeared out of thin air.
As a god, he might well be capable of understanding all manner of strange things, but I had no desire to stir up needless worry. So I pulled my hood down even deeper over my head.
Hide my face as much as possible. Evade the intuition of the gods.
Between the folds of that hood, I could feel every gaze in the courtyard landing on me.
The warily narrowed eyes of the two faction captains.
The two deputy captains regarding me with open curiosity.
And... that gray-haired woman glaring at me like she wanted me dead.
Her name was... Alfia, was it?
According to Meteria, she was Meteria's older sister—the very one.
Hadn't she said, with real pride, that unlike her, her sister was a magnificent adventurer?
Lv.7...
Her sister being Level 7... no, that was something I hadn't expected at all.
How is anyone that strong...
I had grown somewhat as an adventurer myself as experience piled up. The times I felt that most keenly were when I came face to face with an opponent.
The instinct forged from battles survived and senses honed to a razor's edge—the instinct that issues its warnings.
A measure that told me whether the person before me was stronger or weaker, and just how great a threat they posed.
An adventurer's gut carried evidentiary weight all on its own. It ran on a different wavelength from divine intuition, but to catch hold of that indescribable something was what it meant to be a true adventurer.
Even for me—past my clumsy years, now a finished adventurer—that warning still existed.
And that warning bell was telling me...
You've got to be kidding—a captain-class threat?
An oppressive presence that wouldn't have paled one bit next to the two heroes eyeing me warily from across the field.
The aura radiating off her was so overwhelming that I found myself wondering why a hero like her had never so much as left her name in my era.
Level 8? 9?
Setting my baseline at least that high would be the correct call. Probably a Level 7 tempered to the absolute limit, like Ottar.
No—in terms of sheer presence, she actually felt stronger than Ottar had at Level 8. Not that I'd ever crossed blades with the man.
The warning that hadn't sounded once since that day was now ringing loud and clear, refreshing my vigilance: this was not an opponent to be careless around.
"Move aside. I'm in a foul mood."
"Ahaha... then all the more reason I can't."
Cranel—whose name was the same as mine, which gave the whole thing an oddly uncanny flavor—was already fleeing with a death's-face, blubbering.
Given the power I could feel from him, he was fast. Fast for running away, at least.
To be honest, I wanted to run too...
I'd suggested simply scooping up both of them and bolting, but Meteria had refused.
I'm sorry. But my body can't endure anything faster than Cranel's pace.
An ambiguous answer, but I'd let it slide. Cranel had worn such an odd expression at the time that it clearly wasn't meant as a compliment.
In plain terms: nothing too fast, so we'll use Cranel at a moderate(?) speed—something like that. Which meant I, out of nowhere, had to buy enough time for even a slowpoke to make his escape.
Roughly five minutes, time-wise. If I couldn't manage that, then at least three, they'd asked.
Can I even do that...
She looked to be a mage, and judging from that shockwave earlier, she was the practical combat type—unleashing bombardments on single-chant or even ultra-short chants.
Even Ottar, a frontline fighter, had magic at roughly that level—and this was a pure mage, a Level 7 (effectively Level 8 class), firing rapid barrages. Honestly, I had no confidence I could block it entirely.
Saving my own hide? That much I could manage.
But the ones I had to protect were two fragile souls who could die from the mere shockwave of the exchange!
Truth be told, I lacked confidence.
In losing, that is.
See, for all appearances, I'm something of a mage's natural enemy.
No matter how fast her chant was, it couldn't outrun mine.
I would intercept any incoming spell, and if I disrupted her chant mid-cast, it was over. Unless she had something like homing magic up her sleeve—the way Lefiya did—buying a little time should be entirely doable.
"I owe a debt to her younger sister."
"...A debt?"
"Yes. So I was asked to hold you off until the two of them could get away, and here I am, with little choice in the matter."
There was no particular need to say it, but I explained myself anyway.
Partly because it would be troublesome if this engagement left a grudge behind later, and partly out of hope—she'd clearly doted on her little sister, so maybe those words would make her withdraw peacefully.
Just as I'd expected, the expressions of the surrounding faction members softened a little at my words.
They'd been warily watching an intruder crash their fight (their game), after all. Natural enough.
"I see."
And then—surprisingly—she accepted my explanation just as easily. Huh? Was this going to wrap up faster than I thought—
"So you're another worm clinging to my sister."
Expect betrayal, and it will come. The words flickered unbidden through my mind.
And at the same moment, formless mana came pressing down on everything around us. Under that tremendous pressure, both factions scattered into panic in an instant.
This was dangerous. And in the very moment the two faction captains moved to intervene—
"Gospel."
The witch moved faster.
"What—?"
Simultaneously, my instincts shrieked at their highest register.
Nothing was visible. But something was coming, right now, beyond all doubt.
Trusting that instinct, I reached out my hand and, after so long, cried my magic into the air.
"Firebolt!"
The blazing bolt of flame-lightning collided with something invisible.
The male god watched.
He watched the searing bolt and the merciless Sound clash head-on.
The two magics, devouring and shoving at each other in turn, soon swelled up together with all their remaining strength—as if in one last convulsive struggle.
Heat and shockwave swept across the entire area.
The lingering ripple of the impact washed toward the intruder.
By a hair's breadth, the Sound had held the advantage.
And that single fact struck the onlookers as a shock of the freshest kind.
"It was canceled out? Alfia's magic?!"
"More than that, what WAS that?! Did that even count as a chant?!"
"No chant?! Alfia's magic has a chant!"
What a racket.
Amid the clamoring crowd, Alfia remained calm.
No—perhaps that description wasn't quite accurate.
After that single clash, Alfia had grown somewhat cooler-headed.
My power wins. But she's faster.
Her own spell, fired first, had been canceled out. The only conclusion was that her opponent's speed was superior.
From that brief exchange alone, Alfia had managed to grasp a great deal.
The greatest of those facts: the figure before her was not someone to be taken lightly.
Who are you?
Everyone with any connection to Meteria was committed to her memory. Which was precisely why Alfia was troubled.
Meteria had never once faced a person of that build.
A retainer of the Egyptian pantheon? Or else a powerhouse on a level that simply couldn't exist.
Yet no matter how she combed through her memories, no figure matching that person could be found anywhere in her mind.
Not among Meteria's acquaintances—no, not among anyone in all of Orario.
At minimum, Level 7.
Unquestionably among the very top mages in the city. There was no way she wouldn't know someone of that caliber.
And yet the matching face simply refused to surface.
Which left only one possible explanation.
That rotten god...
One of Alfia's eyes turned toward a certain male god. The only one capable of handling a powerhouse like that without a whisper reaching anyone's ears was that infuriating old man.
Hm...?
But the god in question was watching the intruder with eyes shining like a child's at a festival.
He looked genuinely as though he were seeing them for the first time—an expression that left Alfia with no choice but to doubt her own reasoning.
She never trusted a word that god said. But that look... it was simply impossible to read as a lie.
Could she be mistaken? But then nothing else explained the situation.
And those vain Egyptian lot had no reason to deploy a trump card in such an uncharacteristically discreet fashion...
Alfia's deliberation ended almost as soon as it began. Now was not the time for wondering.
She fixed her gaze on the intruder, revealed once more as the smoke cleared.
A cloak of deepest black. She couldn't tell what material it was woven from, but not a single scorch mark upon it marked it, surely, as something made of only the highest-grade materials.
Judging by build, the figure was considerably small for a man—a slight frame one would rarely find among the burly members of Zeus Familia. It brought that worm to mind, though the worm had never possessed this kind of strength.
The mystery only deepened the longer she looked. But that was no problem. If she was curious, she need only seize the person and find out.
But before that.
"Move. You're in the way."
"Haha... I'd love to, but I really can't."
The man's reply came back in a voice touched with fatigue.
It was a remarkably clean voice, too. A child after all, then?
"I don't follow. Why go this far to block me? What business is it of yours?"
"I told you. I made a promise."
"And for some trifling promise, you'd fight me?"
"No, nothing like that. I'm just buying time, then making my escape."
"...We're not communicating at all. Let me ask again—why on earth would you go this far?"
"What do you mean, why...? A promise made to a woman is meant to be kept, even unto death. Isn't that just obvious?"
That one line swept every lingering question clean away.
Alfia's mind went crystalline.
Certain. Beyond any doubt.
That turn of phrase. That way of thinking. That shameless audacity.
This one was Zeus Familia.
A worm.