Super Regeneration (2)
The mountain range of the wild stretched vast and boundless. Once we had crossed the foothills and stepped in earnest into the densely wooded interior, I realized that bringing a guide had been the best decision I could have made. Finding a path through a tangle like this? If I had set out on memory alone, I would never have found the place where the Mystery lay hidden—I would have lost even the way back before long.
Finding the hidden pieces is going to be harder than I thought.
Nothing in this world comes easy, after all. I shook off the brief aside, pulled my gaze from the stream running through the valley, and got to my feet.
"Let's keep moving."
"Yes, my Lord."
Kan, who had been scanning the ground around us, took the lead again. Ashel and I followed. Ashel went without saying, and Kan was no low-level himself, so a hike like this would never tire them—but I was another story. Whenever my stamina ran out, I had no choice but to rest like this, pretending to leisurely admire the scenery. If I let them catch me gasping and panting like a wreck, a Lord's authority would hit rock bottom. It was a rather pathetic scramble, if I was being honest.
If this damn body were even a little above average, that would've been plenty...
Still, I wasn't the only one having a hard time, so I decided to keep the complaining in check. Kan, diligently playing guide, had been visibly stiff since earlier. My presence was clearly a considerable burden on him, though even that was much better than when we had set out. I understood. Who would ever imagine that, in the course of an adventurer's life, they would suddenly be asked to guide a Lord?
"How deep into the range have you gone?"
I asked Kan, curiosity getting the better of me. I remembered that fairly powerful monsters inhabited the depths of the Luthers Mountain Range.
"I've only gone truly deep a handful of times. There are more vicious monsters than you'd expect. It's a dangerous place for someone like me."
"What kind of monsters have you run into?"
"The one that sticks with me most was a massive bear. Not an ordinary bear, though—it had these sharp, quill-like things jutting out all over its body..."
A Spike Bear, then. As I asked him this and that, his tension seemed to ease, and he started talking freely. He was apparently the talkative type by nature.
"And lately there's been this ridiculous rumor going around. An adventurer claimed he saw an impossibly huge snake in the northern range."
A giant snake? More to the point, the northern range was right here.
"He went white as a sheet and raised a huge fuss, saying if a monster like that came down to the city no one could stop it, that the place would be razed in an instant, that we had to request aid from Grand Lord Castle."
"And?"
"The mayor did listen, and they're supposedly putting together an investigation team with the Adventurers' Guild, but of course most people don't believe it. The way he told it, the snake was even bigger than the city walls. The Luthers Mountain Range isn't a Demonic Realm. How could a monster like that even be here?"
A snake bigger than the fortress-like walls of Xenix City. A list of snake-type monsters flickered through my mind. Only one of them was as massive as Kan described.
...Bellebagora?
That thing was a named boss that lived in an actual Demonic Realm, not a lush mountain range like this. Figuring he had exaggerated, I considered other possibilities. Just an ordinary Giant Snake, then?
Had Giant Snakes even appeared in the Luthers Mountain Range?
Well, reality wouldn't confine set monsters to set regions the way a game did. Giant Snakes inhabited forested areas, so it wouldn't be strange if one had wandered in from somewhere. A fully grown adult easily exceeded level thirty, which by ordinary standards made it a catastrophic monster. Even if we actually ran into one, I didn't think it would be a problem. We had Ashel on our side, a far more terrifying monster than that. And in a range this vast, the odds of running into one were—
A rustle.
Just then the nearby undergrowth shook, and something stepped into view.
A wolf. Twice the size of an ordinary one, with something thick and spiked hanging from the end of its long tail like a mace. A Flail Wolf.
Kan's face tightened as he put a hand on his sword hilt. Keeping its eyes locked on us, the creature whirled its tail and let out a low growl—then launched itself in a sudden charge.
A flash of blue light split it in two at the same instant.
Blood sprayed. The neatly bisected hunks of meat tumbled across the ground with a messy clatter. I blinked at the corpse, then shifted my gaze to the side. There was Ashel, her face expressionless, already sliding the sword she had drawn back into its sheath. Kan, half-stunned, looked back and forth between the halved carcass and Ashel. I spoke as if nothing had happened.
"Let's go."
"Ah—yes..."
No need to worry about monsters after all. I had a rather bloodthirsty, but thoroughly reliable, escort with me.
The deeper we went into the range, the more frequently we encountered monsters. We met various beast-type monsters, including the Spike Bear Kan had mentioned, and even a troll—a considerably powerful one. There were no attacks in the night, but while we were eating breakfast after dawn, monstrous birds the size of a grown man suddenly came diving at us from somewhere.
A low growl rolled through the trees.
We had barely started moving again when we found ourselves surrounded by a herd of wild boars. These were no ordinary animals either, but Armor Boars, monsters encased in plating as hard as armor—but...
Ashel swung her sword, and a massive blade of Sword Aura fanned out horizontally, carving every last one of them apart in a single stroke. The forest ran red with blood. She was performing her duty as escort with absolute perfection. Of all the monsters we had encountered so far, not a single one had made it within five meters of me.
I asked Kan,
"Do you run into monsters this often every time you climb the range?"
"Not this frequently. Normally we keep our guard up so thoroughly we don't run into them at all..."
He explained that if they found even a slightly ominous trace, they would retreat on the spot or take another direction. In other words, right now we were pushing straight ahead whether we found traces or not. There was no reason to be careful, and caution would only waste time.
We kept going, and around the time the sun hung high overhead, we arrived at the base of a cliff. It was a dizzying height, easily several dozen meters, and Kan said something absurd.
"If we climb up this and go a little farther, we'll be there."
What?
I stared at him, wondering what kind of nonsense that was, and he gave an awkward laugh.
"Ah, I'll be fine. There are plenty of footholds, and I've climbed heights like this more than once or twice. I'm used to it."
"..."
No—I'm the one who's not fine, not you. I looked up at the distant heights. He had said it so casually I had almost forgotten. To the superhumans of this world, free-climbing a cliff was nothing special. They treated a cliff not as a blocked path, but as a stretch of road you simply climbed.
"...Is this the only way?"
"Pardon? If we looked we might find another route, but they'd all be long detours. I'll go up first, then."
With that, Kan started moving. He didn't even seem to imagine I might not be able to climb something like this.
Maybe I should've brought a mage along too...
Kan stuck to the rock face like a lizard and began scaling the cliff at speed. I stared after him in dismay, then shifted my gaze to Ashel. No helping it now.
"Ashel."
"Yes."
"Carry me up on your back."
"...Pardon?"
Ashel turned with a look that said she wasn't sure she had heard correctly. I said it as shamelessly as I could.
"I said carry me up on your back."
"..."
A brief silence fell. Her expression was complicated, as if she couldn't understand the intent behind the order, but she soon offered her back without protest.
And the ascent was over in an instant. A single stamp of her foot sent us exploding upward, and without even touching the rock face we arrived at the top of the cliff. The speed and the sensation of hanging in the air put any amusement-park ride to shame, but I somehow managed not to scream.
...Ugh.
I don't want to do that twice. I climbed down from Ashel's back, waiting for the tingling aftershock to settle. Looking down, Kan was about a third of the way up and would be here soon enough. If Ashel went down again, he could come up easily, but he was climbing just fine, and it felt odd to order her to help, so I decided to wait.
Then Ashel stared fixedly at something. I reflexively looked where her gaze was pointed, but there was nothing there. A metallic scent stabbed at my nose.
The smell of blood...?
It was a thick blood-scent, strong enough that even I could pick it up without difficulty. Kan, who had just reached the top, seemed to catch it as well; he brushed the dirt from his clothes and looked around. Then he said, unconcerned,
"There's probably a monster carcass nearby."
We kept moving. The deeper we went into the forest, the thicker the blood-scent grew. We were getting closer to the source. And when we reached a certain point, the scene that unfolded before us left everyone speechless.
The carcass was a giant snake. A gray-scaled serpent so huge that its head alone was as long as a human body. Without a doubt, a Giant Snake. What stood out was that it was already dead. Its midsection was severed... no, not severed—the entire middle of its body was simply gone. It looked as if something far larger than itself had bitten the middle out in a single gulp.
"I-is this the one from the rumor...?"
Kan opened his mouth and muttered. The giant snake that had been sighted in the northern range. But whether this was the subject of that rumor or not didn't matter at all. It was dead.
...Killed by what?
I looked around. Following the barren, swept traces on the ground nearby, I saw a strange landscape of trees all toppled over. Kan seemed to grasp the situation as well; his face grew paler by the second. Ashel was already on guard.
A faint hiss reached my ears. Along with that unpleasant sound, which seemed to stir a living thing's instinctive terror, the ground began to tremble. The dense undergrowth on one side collapsed in a rush as something enormous approached. And still, none of us could move.
Then an overwhelming bulk reared up, casting a shadow across the earth. Ashel and Kan both stared at it, their faces emptied of thought.
...It was a colossal black serpent. A snake so endlessly vast that calling it a dragon wouldn't have been strange at all—so vast the dead one before us looked like a newborn hatchling. I knew exactly what it was.
Bellebagora...
One of the named bosses of the Demonic Realm. The very thing I had thought of first when I heard about a giant snake—and the thing I had been sure couldn't possibly be here.
Why in the world is it here?
The answer came at once. This was a point in the past. If it hadn't yet established itself in a Demonic Realm at this time, there was nothing strange about it being somewhere else. Right... it wasn't impossible. Even so, I had never imagined the "giant snake" would actually be this thing.
Its enormous, slit pupils swept over me and the other two. It looked as if it were considering which prey to taste first. Kan looked as if he might stop breathing any second, and Ashel wasn't much better. Far from preparing for battle, she had gone deathly pale, her hand trembling on the sword hilt. No different from a frog before a snake.
Is this... Fear?
This unpleasant sensation was subtly different from the killing intent I had felt before. Some monsters possessed a kind of Fear ability that induced extreme terror and panic in those weaker than themselves. Bellebagora was one of them. Even Ashel couldn't help being heavily affected by the Fear of an opponent whose level far exceeded hers. Even at full strength there was no chance of winning a fight—and now she couldn't even flee properly.
I was unaffected by Fear thanks to Emperor's Soul. That didn't change the fact that the situation was the worst it could be. How could anyone have luck this bad? I had resolved to accept a certain amount of risk, but a crisis like this already? It was so absurd I almost laughed.
...If I can just make contact somehow.
I knew that if we were going to survive this, I was the only one who could do anything. A single touch was all it would take. If I got crushed under that enormous body before I could even activate the skill, it would be over—but I had no choice but to bet my life here.
I took a slow step toward it.
A size so overwhelming it stole the words from her mouth. It was almost absurd that she hadn't sensed even a hint of its presence, despite it having been so close. In that moment, Ashel learned for the first time that a living thing this vast even existed in the world. She also knew it instinctively: even if she fought with everything she had, she could never stand against this monster. No—as things stood, she couldn't even fight.
I... can't move my body...
The mere act of facing it choked the breath from her, made it hard to twitch a single finger. She ground her teeth until they might shatter, resisting the Fear. She threw everything she had into holding up a will that was trying to break. And still she couldn't even draw her sword. The terror creeping from the depths of her heart, devouring her whole body, would not be shaken off no matter what she did. All she could do was feel the despair and helplessness, and desperately draw up her mana in an effort to break free of the binding.
That was when it happened.
Footsteps broke the silence. Her eyes went wide. The Seventh Lord was walking slowly toward the monster. As if this crushing pressure didn't affect him in the slightest, his steps were as light as if he were out for a stroll.
The monster twisted its head as if tilting it in curiosity, and slowly lowered it. Even that small motion sent a gust of wind and made the ground rumble. It looked as if it were wondering why there was prey that could move as if nothing were wrong. Close enough that a stretched hand would reach. Standing right before the monster, the Seventh Lord looked so precarious that a single inhale with its jaws open might have sucked him in.
The Seventh Lord slowly reached out his hand. To Ashel's eyes, it was a calm gesture, holding neither killing intent nor any particular energy. And the moment his fingertips touched the monster, he smiled, as if the thing before him were utterly insignificant, and said quietly,
A colossal tremor rolled through the earth, and the monster's vast body came crashing down.