The Elf Chief's Daughter and the Unreachable Dream
Lahan sat alone at the window-side table of the Inn of Abundance. When Estella stepped through the door and approached him, he looked up and asked.
“So? What information did you hear?”
Estella answered with bright enthusiasm.
“The adventurer guild! Receptionist Rona told me!”
“Rona the receptionist…?”
“Yeah! I mean… if it’s the elixir of the elves—the one passed down only through legends—wouldn’t that be possible?!”
“…That’s nothing more than a guess.”
“Still! Thinking about it, the elf elixir—it could be possible!”
“Well, it’s not completely impossible.”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t it!?”
Lahan rested his chin on his hand and thought carefully for a moment before nodding.
“Alright. Looking at it, it might even align with our goal. Shall we seriously look for it?”
“Aah! I’m so excited!”
Seeing Estella, who was already beaming with joy and seemed on the verge of skipping, Lahan’s lips curved into a satisfied smile on their own.
‘Well, I have no guarantee I’ll find it 100%, but… still, it makes Estella happy.’
And yet, it was strangely ironic.
Just a short time after they left on their journey, they had obtained information about the location.
One merchant traveling with a double-horse carriage told them.
“If you keep going that way, I heard someone spotted a small fairy the size of a firefly in the forest decades ago.”
“…….”
“Wow! You heard it!? Lahan!? The forest over there must be the passage leading to the legendary elf forest!”
As the merchant, the coachman, passed by, Lahan stood there, stunned.
No way?
This was actually found?
…It seemed there were no impossibilities in reality.
* * *
“Charlotte! Marry me!”
“Get lost.”
“Hic! Still… I like it…”
“Charlotte! Let’s date for real, assuming I’m going to marry you officially!”
“Drop that overly noble tone. It makes me feel so disgusted I almost gag. How does everyone around me speak in such a stiff, flowery way?”
“Huu…! Even your cold demeanor is still very attractive.”
“Ah, really. These people…”
The blonde-haired elf, Charlotte Elias, was at her wits’ end.
As the only daughter of the elf chief, the majority of elven men who proposed to her all spoke in the same grand, poetic manner when confessing their love and asking for her hand.
‘I didn’t see him like that in the dream.’
Charlotte Elias had gone out hunting alone, stopped in front of a tree in a clearing, gazed at the sky, and fell into deep thought.
The man she had dreamed about was not an elf with black hair and golden eyes. He was a human man.
The human man always appeared suddenly in her dreams.
And always inside her own bedroom.
Every time she dreamed of him, he would violently explore and take her like a beast.
“…Hng!”
Rustling.
With a hand covering her mouth to keep from making noise, Charlotte Elias leaned against the tree, trembling.
Among the usually gentle elves, Charlotte was exceptionally strong-willed and a complete anomaly.
Especially when it came to secretly watching, with fingers in her ear, the rough mating of animals during hunts.
Unconsciously, she had embraced a rough, barbaric man as her ideal.
“Humans… Hic…”
Charlotte arched her back like a drawn bow.
Her head, thrown back, shook violently.
A string of drool dripped from her mouth.
It seemed she had come.
“Haa…”
With her eyes half-lidded, Charlotte released a ragged breath.
Before her unfocused pupils, the figure of a man wavered.
“Huu…”
Charlotte covered her face and slowly hugged her knees, burying her face in them.
It was because of him.
Ever since she was young, since she was an elf child, because of her clairvoyance—the ability to see the future of herself and others—she had begun to dream of him, and soon after, a strange habit had formed, along with the same situation she was in now.
“Really… What exactly…?”
This was something she couldn’t tell anyone else.
She couldn’t consult anyone about it.
She clutched her knees tighter, feeling tears well in her eyes, and buried her face deeper.
The next day,
In the dream, she finally saw his face for the first time.
The man was looking at her, who had tied up her hair.
A few days later,
She saw a changed dream.
It was no longer the rough embrace in front of the bed like usual.
Instead, she saw herself, pregnant and full, smiling happily as she gently embraced her swollen belly.
Beside her sat the man who always appeared in her dreams. In the dream, she was naturally embraced by the approaching man and closed her eyes, extending her lips for a kiss.
‘Ah.’
Charlotte Elias, waking from the dream, finally understood one truth.
The man in the dream was human.
He was the man who would impregnate her in the future.
That meant he was the destined partner in her future—the man she would marry.
Realizing this belatedly, Charlotte Elias’s face and long ears turned bright red at the same time, and she buried her face in the white blanket.
Chirp chirp chirp.
In the log house where such Charlotte lived, only the pleasant morning sunlight quietly seeped through the window, along with the cheerful morning chirps of sparrows.
* * *
“Estella. Is this the right place?”
“I wonder? The detected aura definitely came from this direction…”
Lahan, who had been pushing through the forest instead of the road, turned his head and said to Estella behind him.
“Perhaps there’s some kind of confusion-inducing ward.”
It was felt through his heightened senses.
“Indeed. That’s why we could settle here without being noticed by people. It’s deeper than I thought when we started.”
“If we go in this direction, we’ll basically be entering uncharted territory on the map.”
“Have we already left the kingdom’s territory?”
At Lahan’s words, Estella expressed her agreement.
Lahan nodded in front of her.
“Now we should be able to find the elves’ living area. There’s no one here because of the ward, but faint traces of various monsters have started to appear in the surrounding areas farther away.”
“Wow! Lahan, your senses are really amazing. How can you sense so far? Do all knights have that?”
“Well, I’m not a formal knight yet, but most should be possible, right?”
At least the masters Lahan had seen—Carlson and Logan—were like that as knights.
Even when reading a book in a room inside the house, they could sense visitors with their senses.
Because of this, Lahan’s average knightly senses were quite high.
Normally, a general knight could not feel a being tens of meters away…
“Estella. I’ll break the ward. Stand back.”
“Huh? You can break the ward?”
“Yeah. Probably. Somehow it feels possible. No, I think it’s possible.”
It was instinct and superhuman intuition.
“Alright. I’ll leave it to you. Please, Lahan.”
At Estella’s permission—which wasn’t really permission—Lahan finally drew a sword from the two swords at his waist.
It was Carlson’s beloved Tapa Sword.
It was also called the Tapa Sword.
In keeping with its simple and straightforward name, it was a very special sword with the ability to cut and break things like wards.
Its durability and hardness were beyond words.
“Go.”
“Yeah…!”
Lahan released a portion of his full power.
Then, two whirlpools began to churn inside his lower abdomen and heart.
He possessed two cores—one at the lower abdomen below the navel and another at the heart.
Normally, all warriors, swordsmen, and those training in martial arts accumulated mana only in the lower abdomen and transformed its nature into aura.
But Lahan was different.
‘Of the insights my masters, Carlson, mentioned, I reached one fact.’
[Lahan. Listen carefully. Transforming mana into aura and accumulating it in the dantian. All processes and results are ultimately just one method.]
[Break the framework of thought. The fact that only the dantian can hold mana and aura.]
When he was young, he had difficulty understanding the full meaning of those words because the way of thinking was too broad.
But Carlson had told him.
He had spoken with conviction to his younger self.
‘Accumulating mana and aura not only in the dantian but in part of the body.’
It was a natural truth that anyone could understand and try once.
But people did not readily attempt it.
Because they knew all too well that if done wrong, the body might not withstand it and organs could burst.
It was not just accumulating mana in the small lower abdomen and transforming it into aura or magic power to change its nature.
‘At first, I thought it was senile rambling when death came. But over time, I could understand.’
Like myself now, not only the lower dantian but the middle dantian.
‘Accumulating aura in the heart.’
Lahan named the completed second core the Aura Heart. The lower dantian below the navel was called the Core in this world.
‘If I slip up, the heart might burst and I could die. But I thought it was worth trying. I thought it had value.’
Memories and knowledge as a hunter from his previous life had made it possible.
The passive skill, the powerful body, had allowed aura to gather in the heart.
He had successfully created another heart and second core, the Aura Heart.
Finally, Lahan swung the sword wrapped in blue light between the elf-placed wards in a curve.
The swung sword aura, carrying immense blue energy, shattered the wards that had protected the elves for hundreds of years.
Crack!
The elf ward, transparent like glass, cracked in parts.
And at that moment,
A bird flew from the tree with a flutter and noticed from afar that the forest end had a being whose ward had been broken.
A woman with long ears and green eyes, golden ponytail.
The daughter of the elf chief, Charlotte Elias.