One More

One more.

The eastern edge of the continent.

The sounds of a bountiful harvest rang out across the farmland, and birds drunk on mana whistled a bright piiii~ as they swept low over the fields.

A great river cut through the heart of that farmland. The water was so utterly transparent that even the most fragile of creatures could have lived in it, and above its surface, the laughter of the people ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠never once seemed to stop.

And at the very center of it all, the warp gate of Thali, capital of the Kingdom of Thalical, opened with a soft hum.

"You've had a long journey, Lady Lily. Thank you for coming."

"Hardly. It was a perfectly pleasant trip."

It was Vir, Foreign Affairs Director of Thalical, there to welcome me. Glancing around, I saw the streets packed with residents poking their heads out as if they'd come just to gawk. Near the gate, knights and what looked like diplomatic staff were exchanging bows and greetings. Unlike the knights in their medieval garb, the diplomats wore modern suits, which created a strange little dissonance — though not so jarring that it felt out of place.

They are the Foreign Affairs Department, after all. The users' outfits wouldn't seem ridiculous to them, presumably.

I had turned on the stream one day after the banquet ended. Normally I would have been holding a lecture on mana, but thanks to the Mock Siege Battle, I had far more contact with rankers lately — no, with students — than usual. After the siege event and the banquet, I'd already done plenty of joint streams, and both my manager and Yena had suggested that jumping straight into another lecture collab might be a bit much, so I decided to put it off for a little while.

Truthfully, I'd been thinking the same thing.

"Right this way, please."

"Thank you."

I crossed through the warp gate and stepped into Thalical. The one thought that struck me on the way was how extraordinarily peaceful and prosperous this place was.

It was a markedly different feeling from the anxious kingdoms of the past, forever swept up in the wars between the Celestials and the Demonkin.

Walking the streets under the guidance of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Vir and the knights, I found the crowd surging toward me like I was some kind of Pied Piper. The knights did their best to keep order, but people still crowded in, desperate to catch even a distant glimpse.

A familiar sight, that.

"Word spread that you were coming, Lady Lily. The residents have been dying of curiosity, it seems."

"Is there not a single user affiliated with Thalical?"

"Oh, there are. Thalical has always traded freely with the Otherworlders — quite a few of them have carried our Masterpieces out into the world, in fact."

Vir paused for just a beat.

"But you, Lady Lily, are special — different from all the others. Setting aside your beauty and your strength, you are the very first Otherworlder His Majesty has personally summoned by decree."

Until now, other users had come of their own accord — the diplomatic corps observing them, or users hunting world quests coming to lend Thalical a hand. But this time, the King had ordered that I be brought here personally.

Hearing that, I gave a careless little nod. To Lily, a king's request was only the most natural thing in the world.

Just how long did we walk? At last we arrived before a palace that looked reasonably grand — on a scale comparable to the so-called Empire of old, the one that had been an empire in name only.

If Thalical's palace was this size, I didn't even need to imagine the imperial palace of the real Empire that held half the continent. It would be tens of times larger than this, surely.

"Here we are."

The knights bowed their heads, and the great doors slowly swung open. Ornate decorations lined the hall, and flanking the crimson carpet that stretched out in an unbroken line ahead stood ranks of nobles.

Countless gazes poured down onto me — curiosity, interest, jealousy, desire, fear, delight, expectation.

Bitterly familiar, those eyes. I nodded along with total equanimity.

Watching me do so, a man rose from the throne.

"Well, well. What an honored guest we have."

Ash-gray hair, and eyes the red of molten lava. For a middle-aged man, his clothing was nothing short of dazzling, and the two eyes fixed on me brimmed with a peculiar kind of anticipation.

Some of the nobles shot me uncomfortable glares at the sight of the King rising from his throne for me, but his expression remained utterly unbothered as he spoke.

"A pleasure. I am Dria von Talikal, King of the Kingdom of Thalical."

"I am Lily Elbrit."

"As I thought... Elbrit, you say..."

"?"

Elbrit, he says...

Dria murmured the words to himself with a slow nod.

"Tell me — do you happen to know a man by the name of Talias?"

"...Talias?"

Talias, hm...

So many people shared that name that I honestly couldn't tell which one he meant. It wasn't quite like shouting "Hey, James!" down a random village street and having five people turn around asking who, me? — but Talias was common enough.

Still, whatever the King was asking about, it clearly wasn't a simple matter of a shared name.

Talias... ah. That guy.

Talias Elbnia.

One of the forty-seven kingdoms wiped out by the Celestials and the Demonkin — an ill-fated king whose royal bloodline had been slaughtered to the last. With the royal family gone and half the kingdom's population dead, the country needed someone new to lead it.

And here, needed was not a choice.

Nearly every facility in the kingdom had been reduced to rubble, and the homeless refugees were starving, ground down by poverty. Left as they were, even the ragged few who had scraped through would surely follow the ones who had gone before. Those people needed a leader — absolutely, unconditionally had to have one.

Please, guide us. Savior of humanity.

And I had taken charge of them, if only for the briefest of moments.

They were lives that would simply gutter out if I turned my eyes away. Lives that would all die the moment I looked elsewhere.

Humanity is such a fragile thing.

It's been a while, hasn't it — even his name.

Among that man's ancestors there had been one who carried his blood, faintly — so faintly that it was laughable to even call it a royal bloodline. I named that man — a man in much the same position as I had once been — as substitute king, and then I left.

That man was Talias Elbnia.

A man who had never even been granted a surname. He had lived his whole life without so much as a passing acquaintance with royalty — and only after the horrifying calamity that wiped out the royal line did he become king.

Of course, I hadn't appointed him on bloodline alone. He genuinely possessed the ability to lead people.

The surname Elbnia wasn't taken from the old royal house. It was modeled after my own name.

And if the Talias the King of Thalical sought really was that man...

"...I don't know him."

"Is that so?"

"Yes."

Right now, I was an Otherworlder — an immortal user — here to strike a deal with the kingdom. I was not the former saintess who happened to know someone from the past, nor the self-appointed savior, Lily Elbrit.

There was no need to play pretend, and no reason to go out of my way to tell the truth, either.

There were simply too many eyes watching me.

And besides, if what Pharaoh told me was right, thousands upon thousands of years had passed since that day. There was no good reason to go digging up the past.

"Ahem."

King Dria cleared his throat, wearing a vaguely disappointed expression.

"In any case, welcome to Thalical. To have an immortal of your caliber stand with our kingdom — no powerful nation in the world could make us envious now."

"Thank you."

"......."

My stiff, clipped reply drew a scattering of glares. Did they think me discourteous?

But I had no obligation to lower myself and babble about how honored I was, how flattered, how it was all too much praise. I had come here in exchange for compensation — not to curry favor with anyone.

"First, accept this."

At Dria's words, a blue message window unfurled before my eyes.

The chat's reaction wasn't bad. The Red Guide — a reward worthy of being called the grand prize — had already been delivered, and on top of that came a marquis title, territory, and cold, hard cash.

But my eyes drifted somewhere other than the rewards.

"There's no deadline set on this."

"Ah... we cannot know when the Empire will reach out its monstrous claws, so we set the terms that way as a precaution. Of course, should the Empire never move, your compensation will be paid regardless. The purpose of this request is the protection of the kingdom itself."

Which meant, in other words — stay for however many months it took, quietly solving every troublesome, difficult problem they threw at me for pocket change.

I let out a sigh.

So that was it. They'd handed over the Red Guide up front precisely to dangle a proposal like this...

"Let's revise the terms a little, shall we?"

"Revise...? Name what you want. If it's my gold or a dukedom ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠you desire, I shall grant it."

At the mention of a dukedom, the nobles' glares sharpened into knives — not that I wanted one in the least. I cast my gaze elsewhere instead.

Vir was sweating buckets, as though some dreadful premonition had seized him.

Regrettably for him, his instincts were spot on.

"When the work is done, I'll be taking the great Masterpiece, the Green Hermit."

One more.