The Void Cult
A temporary partnership, formed with Sigrun.
I told her that my goal was to find the entrance to a cave somewhere among the dark mountains ringing Bramante Volcano, and with the support of my magic she surveyed the peaks even faster than I could have managed alone.
Thanks to her, we covered three of the mountains ahead of schedule — though we found nothing. We had expected as much, so Sigrun and I simply set off toward the next one without delay.
"Hmm."
Along the path to the next mountain, I lit a water-aspected Mana Herb. The moment I took out my pipe and started smoking, Sigrun — walking behind me — looked over with a faint start of surprise.
"Smoking already, at your age? That can't be good for you…"
"Pardon? No, this isn't tobacco — it's a Mana Herb. Something that increases a mage's mana capacity and elemental understanding."
"Hmm? Those two things are different?"
"Of course they are. Tobacco doesn't do the body any real favors, but Mana Herbs are packed with nothing but good effects. Though I'll grant you both fall under the category of smoking."
I corrected Sigrun at once for calling a Mana Herb a cigarette. Tobacco and Mana Herbs both involved inhaling smoke, yes, but their effects could not have been more different. I had never intended to take up smoking in my previous life, and I still had no intention of doing so in this one. The only reason I smoked Mana Herbs was that the mere act of inhaling them raised my mana capacity and elemental understanding.
Once I finished explaining, Sigrun nodded as if she understood.
"There were no mages in my village, so I wouldn't have known. And even after leaving, I never had much occasion to cross paths with one."
"That's surprising. I would have thought a beginner Sword Expert would have taken on the odd adventurer's request now and then."
"I never much cared for belonging to anything. I prefer simply wandering from place to place."
"That makes two of us. I like that kind of freedom myself."
To travel with my own feet across a continent I had only ever known through a game. How beautiful a thought was that? I smiled, finding myself in easy agreement with Sigrun's fondness for the road.
How long we walked after that, I couldn't say.
"…Hold on."
Without warning, Sigrun's expression hardened and she caught my arm, bringing me to a stop.
"What is it?"
"Someone up ahead. Quite a number of them."
"What?"
Sigrun had stopped me with the claim that people lay ahead. I frowned at the empty stretch of ground in front of us, seeing nothing — until I grasped what she meant.
"…! ……."
"……! ……!"
Faint voices drifted over the slope from beyond a ridge that still hid everything from sight. There were clearly more than one or two of them; many voices rose at once.
Bramante Volcano was a place people almost never visited. The volcano itself was nothing but searing heat and barren rock, devoid of so much as a single animal, and the mines that produced its specialty ore lay some distance away. There was no reason for anyone to come here. So for a crowd that large to be present in a place this deserted was deeply suspicious.
"Let's approach quietly."
"Mm. Best that we do."
Our eyes met for a moment, and then we crept carefully toward the source of the sound. Climbing the slope while keeping low behind the scattered rocks, we finally caught sight of the speakers — and of the scene that had produced those voices.
What stretched before us looked for all the world like a forced-labor camp.
"Move it, you bastards!!"
"If you don't finish by the deadline, you don't get paid! You hear me?!"
"Unless you want to be barred from the free city for good, get moving!!"
Dozens of men and women climbed the uphill path with sacks of ore slung over their shoulders. Flanking them on either side stood more than a dozen others in robes, driving them on. The moment Sigrun and I saw the emblem stitched into those robes, we spoke as one, without so much as a glance at each other.
"The Void Cult…!"
A star-like white pattern embroidered on black robes. There was no one on the continent who did not know that mark. And how could there be? The Void Cult was the largest organization currently operating in the underworld. I rubbed my eyes and looked again, but the symbol on their robes was, without a doubt, the mark of the Void Cult.
Why were they here?
I narrowed my eyes at the obvious question — and then an ore chunk tumbled free from a sack one of the men was carrying, and the whole picture snapped into place.
Thud. Clatter…
A single lump of ore spilled from a loosened sack. It was unmistakably Volcanium Ore — the same kind I had seen only that morning.
"Hey, you bastard! Carry it properly!"
"I-I'm sorry!!"
Men and women hauling sacks of Volcanium Ore, and members of the Void Cult barking orders over them. That alone was enough to make sense of everything unfolding in front of us. Still not certain, but nearly so, I whispered my conclusion to Sigrun, who crouched hidden beside me.
"Those people carrying the sacks — I'm fairly sure they're all the criminals who were hiding out in Himrave. And what they're hauling is Volcanium Ore."
"Criminals who were hiding in Himrave? Why would those lot be moving Volcanium Ore? And so obediently, at that."
"There was an incident this morning in Himrave — a mass theft of Volcanium Ore by criminals. From what people were saying, it was obvious someone was behind it, and it looks like that someone is the Void Cult. As for why those criminals are so obedient… it's probably because of the subjugation magic on their necks."
Everything I whispered to Sigrun rested on solid grounds.
First, why I took them for criminals: brands for marking convicts were visible on their faces or limbs. Not on one or two of them — on every last person carrying a sack. That they were criminals was beyond dispute.
Second, what those criminals were transporting was, as we had just seen, Volcanium Ore. Which meant they were the same criminals who had robbed the ore storehouse that very morning.
And last, the marks on those criminals' necks were almost certainly subjugation magic cast by a Void Cult mage. Put together, the situation was simple: the Void Cult had bound the criminals with subjugation magic, forced them to steal the Volcanium Ore, and was now making them haul the entire massive stockpile away.
And not just anywhere.
"So the entrance was there."
They were moving it through the very cave entrance we had been searching for. Realizing that, I muttered under my breath, a foreboding I could not suppress drawing my brow tight.
"This… already feels wrong."
"What does?"
"That cave I've been looking for leads into the heart of Bramante Volcano. Its deepest point is probably the closest you can get to the volcano's main conduit. And they're stuffing an enormous quantity of highly explosive Volcanium Ore into a place like that."
I didn't know what the Void Cult's ultimate purpose was, but I could guess well enough what they meant to do right now. Anyone with a reasonable grasp of magic would have drawn the same conclusion from this scene alone. I gave voice to that near-certain prediction in a low tone.
"It looks like the Void Cult is trying to force the volcano to erupt."
"…What did you just say?"
Sigrun blinked, as if she must have misheard.
"Is that… even possible?"
"Obviously, simply detonating a large amount of Volcanium Ore wouldn't be enough. It wouldn't fully shake the volcano's underground either. However…"
I let the sentence stretch as I looked toward the cave mouth the criminals were filing into — and at a woman sitting there with a look of pure boredom.
"If there's a mage with an exceptional understanding of the fire element, then yes. It's possible."
Detonating Volcanium Ore alone could not force a volcano to erupt. But if one made use of the Fire Elemental Stone buried deeper still within that cave, the impossible became possible.
Among all the phenomena humans could produce, the one that generated the greatest quantity of fire elemental energy was none other than an explosion. The blast of something going off like a bomb could create a volume of fire elemental energy so overwhelming that simply lighting a vast fire could not begin to compare.
If that much Volcanium Ore went up in a chain reaction, the fire elemental energy produced would be beyond imagining.
An amount of fire elemental energy so vast that ordinary imagination could not even grasp it would pour out of those Volcanium Ore explosions. And if a mage with a deep understanding of the fire element could spread that torrent of energy deeper into the cave?
There would be no need to control that enormous quantity of fire elemental energy. All that was required was to give it a current — a direction.
And if that current were guided properly, what then?
A catastrophic explosion.
The immense fire elemental energy flooding deeper into the cave would meet the Fire Elemental Stone embedded in the bedrock below, and the resulting blast would make the Volcanium Ore detonations look like nothing. That explosion would trigger another — the natural disaster of Bramante Volcano erupting by force.
Thankfully the Fire Elemental Stone itself is indestructible, so it would survive…
But with the volcano about to erupt at any moment, the Elemental Stone was the last thing that mattered. And that woman in my line of sight — so steeped in fire elemental energy that it was visible even to the naked eye, as if she had already prepared her magic — would have no trouble guiding the fire elemental energy born from the ore blasts.
"If Bramante Volcano erupts, how much damage are we looking at?"
"At the very least, every single person in Himrave — several kilometers from here — would die. Without a single exception."
I stated it as fact. The outcome was obvious. If Bramante Volcano erupted, everyone in Himrave would die.
At that answer, Sigrun rose from her crouch as if there was nothing left to consider.
"Then it seems we have only one thing to do from this point on."
"Yes. Only one, really."
We stood up from behind the rock that had hidden us. A few of the criminals spotted us and turned; the Void Cult members who had been shouting beside them turned as well. For a brief moment, silence hung between us. Sigrun and I each raised our weapons.
"I don't know why they're doing this…"
I had no idea why the Void Cult wanted to make a volcano erupt. What mattered was that they were already putting the plan into motion — and that we had found them in time. Which left us with only one task.
"Let's go, Miss Sigrun."
"Right, Elia."
To stop the Void Cult before they could bring about a disaster.
That was all we had to do.