Chapter 211: All Sorts of Branches (3)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 211: All Sorts of Branches (3)
In a manga I saw in my past life, there was a saying that only a sorcerer can deal with another sorcerer.
Of course, that was likely said because knights and mages didn't exist in that world.
However, the famous fighting game proverb—if you don't know the matchup, you're gonna get hit—applied to other worlds as well.
Unlike mainstream magic, even fellow sorcerers in this world didn't know much about each other's techniques. Thus, using a sorcerer to handle a sorcerer was indeed the best approach.
But.
"Can't do it."
"Why not?"
"Three-day sorcery cooldown. Boradori can't do a thing."
"..."
"Due to the nature of my sorcery, for these three days, I'm weaker than a common street magician."
Our Boradori was, as always, useless.
"Why would you even have such a useless restriction..."
"In exchange, I bet my entire life to catch Silence, didn't I?"
I felt like there had been a lot more luck involved in that than he was letting on.
If Silence had escaped then, he would have had to live the rest of his life as a Useless Boradori.
"Anyway, I caught him, right?"
Since evaluations are best made based on results, one could say Boradori's life-risking sorcery was effective.
It was just that, because of it, he was currently dead weight.
"If you'd learned at the Leon Magic Tower, you'd at least be useful right now."
"And here I thought you spent all your time badmouthing the Leon Magic Tower..."
It couldn't be helped.
As the saying goes, you can't find dog poop when you need it for medicine. In the face of enemies who turned ordinary mages into mere civilians, the mages of Leon were actually helpful.
However, this was the Empire, not Leon.
And there was no way another abnormal place like the Leon Magic Tower existed elsewhere in this world.
The mages who had come to pursue were all rendered useless, and the knights weren't being much help either.
"What do we do about this?"
"What do you mean, 'what do we do'?"
"Do you have a plan?"
"I do."
For a moment, I thought Boradori was finally going to say something useful.
"You can just do it all, can't you?"
"..."
"Agh!"
There was no way Boradori was going to be helpful.
The pursuit of the enemy went quickly at first, but...
"We're screwed."
"Why?"
"Looks like they've split up."
Even if they had abandoned magic and undergone body modification, it seemed their brains hadn't turned to mush.
"Can't you find them?"
"I can't. They all learned the same sorcery. Can you look at footprints and pick out one specific guy from dozens of others carrying the exact same sword?"
"I don't think I could find him even if he was carrying something else."
"Then stop talking and listen to the expert."
Following Boradori's advice, our forces were split.
But.
"We're really screwed now."
"What is it this time?"
"They split up again."
"Then..."
"They're probably trying to evade pursuit. Or maybe they're looking to pick us off one by one."
They were certainly going through a lot of trouble to be annoying.
"But there's no need to worry."
Despite the situation, Boradori looked unbothered.
"Why?"
"They say if your head is stupid, your body suffers, right?"
"Right."
"Which means, if your body is damn good, it's okay to be a little stupid, right?"
"I don't think that's what that means at all."
Even I knew that wasn't the point of the saying.
No, more importantly...
"You're just telling me to do everything again."
"Oh..."
He knew exactly what those words implied.
"Exactly. If the enemy wants to pick us off one by one, we just have to crush them as we go."
"What if things collapse elsewhere?"
"Wouldn't that be the fault of the weak Empire?"
"Anyone would think you weren't an Imperial citizen."
"I jumped ship to Leon a long time ago, remember? You said the Empire knows all about it."
"That's true, but..."
He felt like a changed man.
Before, he used to joke about Leon taking responsibility, but now he spoke as if it were an absolute obligation.
This Boradori fellow... is she already thinking about her pension?
I'll have to have a word with the Commander later.
Of course, before that.
"I guess they were the violent type."
"That's why they kidnapped a prince."
"Maybe the guy who got kidnapped is the stupid one..."
"He's a RoFan Male Lead, after all..."
"What do you expect from guys who are only candidates because they can't even confess..."
First, I had to deal with the Hulk-like bastards charging toward us.
Arwen - I mean, what the hell is that even supposed to mean?!
"Bricks and Sullivan have fallen."
"..."
Not far away, the lives of the comrades who had split off were extinguished.
Bound together by sorcery, they could sense each other's deaths and were forced to make a choice.
Would they fight and die?
Or would they flee and survive?
The choice didn't take long.
"Inform the others."
They would fight and die.
And simultaneously, they would flee and survive.
"Sacrifice yourselves to change our fate."
They called together the members who had split off in the other direction.
At the same time, they confirmed the main unit's escape route.
"To complete the contract, we need royal blood."
Originally, the contract was to be carried out with Silence's blood.
But after Silence's death, everything began to waver.
"Everything is for our Original Sin."
The Demon Tribe was known as the evil of the world, but the Original Sin of Dale—no, of mages—was not inferior to them.
In fact, some might consider it even more wicked.
That was why they had followed Silence.
They had thrown themselves in with the dark mages.
And finally, they sought to strike a contract with the demons to erase their Original Sin.
'...So, what the hell is that Original Sin?'
Of course, that was something only the villains, who knew and understood all the facts, could know.
Arwen had risked his life to meet the villains just to find out what it was.
But due to Silence's unexpected sorcery—Magic Nullification—his mana had been neutralized, and he had been helplessly suppressed.
He had anticipated that such a thing might happen, but...
'Those damn bastards. Talking only about things they know!'
He had braved such danger, yet the bastards in front of him were only sharing secrets among themselves.
If someone came prepared to risk their life, they should at least offer an explanation!
"In that case, we shall..."
"First, it seems we will need the Spring of Life."
"We can proceed with an abbreviated version. Rather than the Spring of Life..."
Arwen's entire body was sealed by restraints made of sorcery.
It was difficult to move even slightly. His eyes and mouth were covered.
The only sense he could use was his hearing.
If anything, being able to hear felt like a curse.
'What's the Spring of Life...'
"Block the pursuers with the rest. The Nirvana Ritual..."
'What the hell is Nirvana now...'
"An abbreviated Nirvana? That's too dangerous!"
"We have already staked our lives. If we get out of here and proceed with the contract with the demons! We shall handle our Original Sin with our own hands!"
'I'm asking what that Original Sin is!'
Mages were prone to using jargon.
If mages set their minds to writing a magic book, they could write it in the most common Imperial tongue and still make it so that a citizen fluent in the language couldn't understand a single page. That was the kind of people mages were.
Furthermore, these were former mages and current sorcerers.
They mixed in sorcery slang that would make even mages scream, "What the fuck does this mean?"
No matter how much Arwen was a member of the Dale royalty, a prime candidate for Archmage, and a practitioner of Eternity Magic—one of Dale's secret magics—he couldn't understand a single proper sentence.
The only thing he could grasp was...
"Three allies have died in the Realm of Ashes."
"Those who contracted with the sea have been annihilated."
"Two ships of the sky have met their eternal rest."
Someone was coming, and they were coming fast.
However.
'I don't know who you are, but please, don't kill them all...'
Who was it that said mages were people trapped in the curse of knowledge?
Even while being kidnapped, Arwen thought that he absolutely had to keep at least one of them alive to find out what the hell they had been talking about.
Clang!
A human arm collided with a sword, and the sword snapped.
"Ugh."
No matter if it was a dwarf-made weapon, a sword was ultimately a consumable.
Of course, it would be a different story if it were made of legendary metal.
But a sword made of simple iron clearly had its limits.
"How annoying."
My hand naturally moved toward my subspace pouch, but I immediately used the broken sword like an axe to pin the enemy down.
The subspace pouch was also an object that utilized mana, so it didn't work properly against enemies who nullified magic.
Actually, it would be better if it didn't work at all.
Sometimes it would go haywire and vomit out all sorts of things, so it was safest to just kill these bastards and use the subspace pouch once I was far away.
"Graaaagh!"
I struck at the relatively weak eyes, widened the distance, and caught the sword Uncle Aeryun threw to me before charging back in.
"They're really tough."
I said the eyes were relatively weak, but even a direct strike only left a scratch.
What kind of things do you have to do to a person to turn their eyeballs into steel?
Thinking that golem manufacturers would all go out of business at this rate, I hammered away at him.
"Agh!"
"Gah!"
"Wait, what?!"
With a heavy thud, a massive weight came flying and crashed into the guy I was fighting, sending them both tumbling.
"The dark mage who performed the procedure should have seen this."
Enemy reinforcements had arrived.
This was exactly why I had tried to settle things as quickly as possible. It was as if these bastards had GPS trackers attached to their bodies; if one was attacked, the others came to help.
To be honest, even for me, dealing with three of them at once was difficult, so I had tried to finish before reinforcements arrived.
However, even with reinforcements, things were surprisingly manageable.
"Ugh... you fool."
The tackle from the guy who came to help seemed to have dealt more damage than all the strikes I'd landed with my dwarf-made sword.
"No, that's...!"
The comrade who came to help looked flustered as he saw his ally literally crumpled.
"Behind you!"
True to their nature as Magic Spammers who usually sat comfortably in the back under protection, they were too busy worrying about their fallen ally to notice the enemy right in front of them. I made sure he couldn't get back up from the ground.
As I stood there huffing after taking down two of them, Uncle Aeryun, who had been watching from afar, approached.
"Finished?"
"One of them."
"You left one alive? For interrogation? Their bodies don't seem like they'd take well to torture..."
"No, I just don't have the strength to hit him anymore. Call some people over. They should at least finish this much."
It felt unfair that I was the only one working, but this time, the work felt worth it.
For no other reason than...
"You're sure Dale is going to pay us handsomely for this, right?"
"If they don't, we can just team up and raid Dale."
Was it because a prince who had learned Dale's secret magic had been kidnapped, even if he was far down the line of succession?
It was because he had promised a reward from Dale that wouldn't just be satisfactory, but would leave our pockets overflowing.
"Man, if only our Magic Tower were still intact."
"So, what are you going to ask for?"
"An airship."
"......Can you even operate one?"
"I'll have to try."
Humans are creatures that can't forget something once they've experienced it.
In my past life, I played a certain game without spending a cent, but after experiencing a mount during an event, I eventually couldn't resist spending money.
Honestly, I wanted to ask them to install a few teleport gates, but if Leon tried to manage those, the death toll from spatial displacement would probably skyrocket. So, I decided to settle for an airship.
"Please, just don't fly it toward the Empire."
Well, Uncle Aeryun spoke as if even an airship would get shot down.
I'll have to find people to manage it somehow.
"Then let's leave this be."
According to Boradori, there were thirty sorcerers in total.
Including the ones just now, I had taken down twelve. With eighteen left, there was still plenty of work to do.
"..."
Or so I thought.
"...?"
Until I saw five things that used to be human burning brightly like human torches.