Chapter 36
To explain how Owen and Sylvia had found a human house in a forest where monsters lived — and, of all things, how they had ended up trapped inside that burning house — one had to go back several hours.
Several hours earlier, then, when Owen and Sylvia were wandering through the forest in search of the road back to Sylvia’s estate.
Owen had been cutting down monsters with a skill that was frankly astonishing for a man who had spent the night underground, and worse, had served as a human bed with another person on top of him.
“Don’t support me. Scout the path instead. Even if it’s still daylight, it’s dangerous for the two of us to make it back that far.”
“Won’t a rescue team come?”
“Maybe. How am I supposed to know what’s going on over there?”
Until then, Sylvia hadn’t realized he always prepared for the worst on missions. She had assumed he would be endlessly flexible, someone who moved with whatever happened in the moment.
So that’s why he’s still performing so well even after being left behind.
Sylvia did as he said and scouted the route, pointing him toward where he should go while also casting healing magic on him from time to time.
Then, all at once, a signal from a Holy Relic flared across the magic circle hovering above her palm. No matter how she rubbed her eyes, there was no mistaking it.
“Wait, Owen. I think the Holy Relic is... nearby.”
Owen came closer as if to confirm it, and Sylvia drew a magic circle on the back of his hand with her own blood so he could see it too. But on the back of his hand, the circle showed nothing at all, as though it had never been there.
Owen looked at her like she was spouting nonsense, and Sylvia, flustered, hurriedly wiped it away and drew it again.
“Just a moment.”
But even after two or three tries, nothing appeared, and in the end Owen took her hand away first.
“You’ll wear a hole through your finger. Where was it, exactly?”
“If we go a little closer, I might be able to pick it up. You trust me, right?”
“Not at all.”
Ignoring his blunt, almost chilling dismissal, Sylvia smiled brightly.
“Shall we try about three hundred feet?”
It wasn’t because of that foolish grin. He was a knight, after all; he knew how important a Holy Relic was. Owen let out a sigh and checked the condition of his body. After weighing whether he could make it back after this, he finally agreed and started moving where she led.
But even after three hundred feet, no signal had appeared, and Sylvia kept stretching the distance — two hundred feet more this time, no, just one hundred. The number kept growing.
In the end, Owen could no longer hold back.
“Are you going to keep doing this? What if we end up unable to go back? The Holy Relic isn’t the important thing right now. We can report it and come again later, with an escort team.”
“I know. But the Holy Relic keeps moving. If we go now and come back only after another night has passed, we might lose it for good, or it could be taken to another kingdom.”
“It’s moving?”
“Yes. You said there are more than three people living in this mountain. I think they stole the Holy Relic.”
“Haah.”
He let out a long sigh and ran a rough hand through his hair, clearly displeased with the way things were turning. Sylvia realized this was her only chance to convince him and quickly offered the solution she had in mind.
“If we really can’t go back, then we can just sleep one more night, like yesterday.”
“Like yesterday?”
His voice dropped dangerously low, and Sylvia hastily waved her hands and corrected herself.
“No, separately. Separately.”
Before Owen could point out how absurd that was, he decided to bet on victory. He had told Sylvia otherwise, but people would definitely come looking for them. Heston would not leave Sylvia alone with the barrier between them.
“Are there mages too?”
The question came out of nowhere, but Sylvia quickly understood he was asking so he’d be prepared if they ended up fighting the thieves who had stolen the Holy Relic.
“I don’t know. Unless they use magic, I can’t detect any residual mana.”
“You don’t even know how many there are?”
“How would I know that?”
“Then let’s go back. There’s no need to gamble.”
“Or we can just sneak a look at their faces and come back. You can do that much, can’t you?”
And so they had ended up going there.
The fortunate thing was that as they went farther in, no monsters appeared at all, so there was no need to waste their strength pointlessly. Or rather, perhaps that wasn’t fortunate after all. The fact that not a single monster came near them meant what the thieves had taken wasn’t a Holy Relic darkened by corruption, but one that had truly recovered the power of the gods.
“That’s a pretty big problem.”
Unhappy to have been dragged into such a troublesome mess, Owen muttered it under his breath. He himself didn’t care whether the world ended or not, but Sylvia was the daughter of a duke’s house and had joined that dangerous First Knight Order. She would surely be the sort to gladly sacrifice herself for the sake of the world.
“I think the Holy Relic is over there.”
As she whispered it, Sylvia’s eyes were already shining with that dangerous, faraway look. Owen wondered how he could stop her from charging straight into the fire on her own. Of course, if he simply hauled her onto his shoulder and ran like hell, she’d kick and flail the whole way, and even if it saved her life, she would almost certainly hate him forever.
Damn it, I don’t know.
And so it had happened because of Owen’s resigned refusal to be hated and Sylvia’s relentless fixation.
There was a single-story cottage that looked as though people actually lived there, and in the wide clearing before it was a magic circle. In the very center of that circle stood something like an ornate cage, bristling with mana stones that looked wrong at a glance, as if they had been glued there in a hurry.
“Fortunately, it doesn’t look like there’s anyone here.”
Sylvia said this while scanning the silent surroundings. Even sweeping the area with mana, she couldn’t detect any human presence nearby. There were plenty of magic circles hidden about to create obstacles here and there, but not ones that could hide from Sylvia’s eyes as a Posmata.
The presence of the circle made it certain that there was a mage among the group, but the Holy Relic inside the sealed cage was pouring out a blinding white light, and Sylvia had no choice but to go closer.
“Stay there for a moment.”
With a face that seemed to say, this looks royally screwed, and there’s no way to avoid it, Owen crouched in the bushes as Sylvia instructed. Sylvia darted here and there like a pink squirrel, disabling traps as she went. Magic circles she hadn’t even known existed were bursting apart only minutes after her hands reached them.
When it seemed the situation had been dealt with enough, Owen hauled his heavy body up out of the grass. By then Sylvia was cautiously approaching the huge magic circle drawn in the clearing.
“How long is it going to take?”
Walking slowly along the pattern and deciphering the ancient script carved into it, Sylvia brushed off Owen’s question with a nonanswer.
“It looks like this is the magic circle keeping the Holy Relic from darkening. I’ve never seen anything like it. It seems to be a simple purification spell twisted into something much more complicated... Fortunately, it doesn’t look like there’s a priest here. To keep a Holy Relic from darkening in the first place, you need a priest, don’t you? I thought this unknown group might have bribed one too. At any rate, there’s no priest, which is the good news. The bad news is that there’s a very, very brilliant mage instead.”
“Hurry up and do something. Before people come. It looks like about fifteen people are living here, and I’m not strong enough for that.”
“That many? Ah, yes. Sorry. I think I’ll only understand it properly from above...”
The circle was so large that she couldn’t take it in at a glance, and she had no real sense of how to neutralize it. The bigger the spell, the more complex and the more durable it became.
Then hands gripped her waist, and suddenly her body was lifted skyward. When she came to her senses, Sylvia was perched on Owen’s shoulder. Even when she grabbed a fistful of his tousled hair so she wouldn’t fall, he didn’t make a sound.
“Can you see it better now?”
He held her legs firmly so she wouldn’t slip, and Sylvia flushed red, but soon recovered herself and focused on the magic circle.
How much time passed after that, she didn’t know, but eventually Sylvia shook the hair she’d been clinging to, as if to say she understood now, and asked to be put down. Once she was off his shoulder, Owen’s hair was a complete mess, like a bird’s nest that had been robbed clean.
Rather than fixing it, Owen folded his arms and watched as Sylvia, lacking any solution fluid, dripped blood instead, altering and dismantling the circle with it. Each drop that fell and touched the magic circle turned into a soft pink light, like Sylvia herself, and the letters written there wriggled as if they were alive, shifting out of place.
Thinking that magic had an unnecessarily beautiful side to it, Owen waited for Sylvia’s signal. Soon, the magic circle that some unknown person had spent days creating disappeared like grains of sand blown away by the wind.
As if sensing that the protective spell had vanished, the Holy Relic began to hum and tremble inside the sealed cage.
Owen jerked his chin toward it and said, “What are you going to do about that? It’ll darken soon. If you carry it without proper sanctification, monsters will swarm in.”
Sylvia had already seen the mana stones and the magic circles attached all over the cage. Whoever had been transporting the Holy Relic had already set things up here to prevent it from darkening. But the problem was that if they carried something shining like this around, they’d be exposed before long.
The party that had hidden the Holy Relic here, if Owen’s estimate was right, consisted of around fifteen people who knew how to use swords and one very smart mage. Sylvia thought she needed to hide the Holy Relic so that they couldn’t kill anyone easily.
Soon she returned from somewhere with a large bowl, dumped out the water inside it, and drew a deep vertical line across the inner side of her forearm. It happened so quickly, with not the slightest hesitation, that the deep wound appeared before anyone could stop it.
“Have you lost your mind?”
Only belatedly did Owen come at her with a twisted face, but Sylvia, focused on squeezing her blood into the bowl without letting a single drop fall, shoved him away with one arm as he tried to stop her.
“This is the only way both of us survive.”
“We could’ve survived already if you weren’t being so stubborn for no reason.”
“Someone is privately exploiting the Holy Relic. The world already fell apart once because of the Holy Relic’s power and was overrun by those bizarre monsters. We can’t let that happen again.”
“The world’s already ruined. How much worse can it get?”
“It can get worse. There’s no bottom to ruin.”
Sylvia said it with a grave expression, as though she were looking at the matter from some higher plane. Owen put a hand to his head and thought, We’re both going to die here.