Mass Feather Walking
Having become the official mage of the Wolf Mercenary Band, Kaisent no longer had any reason to hide his abilities from watching eyes. He made his presence known at once.
⟨ Mass Feather Walking ⟩
"Whoa. Our steps really did get lighter."
"At this rate, we could keep moving a lot longer."
It was the same Feather Walking spell that had once eased the agony of torn soles when Kaisent first fell into this world and walked mountain paths far too long. Cast now over the entire Wolf Mercenary Band, it delivered a narcotic kind of relief to men burdened with armor and full kit.
"Holy shit! My feet don't hurt!"
"My knees aren't creaking half as bad!"
The dull ruin of aging knees and the throb of battered soles were a happiness no one who had never felt it could explain.
"Kaisent. How long before this spell wears off?"
Frederick, who had received the enchantment along with the rest, asked about its duration.
"It depends on how much mana I pour into it… but roughly six hours."
"Six hours? If you burn that much magic, won't you be empty when we actually need a spell?"
"Pardon? This much barely matters. If my total mana is a hundred, this is about a two. And it fills back up with a little rest."
A spell lasting six hours, laid over a hundred people—and it had cost only two out of a hundred? And recovered with a short rest?
Is magic in this world simply more efficient than ours? Or is Kaisent the exceptional one?
Ask him straight and the shy, modest boy would insist it was the spell's efficiency. Frederick decided to verify it himself. He nodded, asked Kaisent to keep looking after them, and the band moved on.
After several hours of marching, Lillian prepared to call the usual rest and checked the mercenaries' faces. Thanks to Feather Walking, they were sweating less than before, and strength still rode in every step. Greedy to put even one more stride between them and danger, she pushed on another two hours—and the men followed without real complaint. Only when the full six hours had run out and the spell finally faded did they stop to rest.
"Damn. So mages were hoarding shit this good for themselves the whole time?"
"Hey, you transferred from a band that used to have a mage, right? Did theirs ever do anything like this?"
"Hell no. That bastard claimed his legs hurt the second anything got hard and parked himself in a wagon all day. When we said walking was killing us and begged for any spell at all, he brushed us off—said he had to save it for combat. Just thinking about it pisses me off again."
Otherworld mages had arrived in greater numbers and the count of casters had risen, yet magic still felt like a story from another world. Low-tier spells never looked impressive, and even the flashy ones fizzled after a few casts. To see a true mage who could turn a battle with a handful of people, you had to join a large-scale war—and if luck ran sour, you became one more soldier swept up in a high mage's spell. Adventurous mages were rare to begin with; those who existed made their names with large mercenary companies or famous adventuring parties.
The mercenaries filled their stomachs on dried bread and jerky while they rested.
Ugh. Salty.
Kaisent would have preferred something boiled, but greenskins—if not beasts—still had noses sharper than a human's, and they could not risk the smell. Salt was necessary, so he washed the jerky down with water and lightly circulated his energy to restore what he had spent. All that remained was to wait for the others' stamina to recover.
"Hey, Kaisent."
"Yes?"
A mercenary scratched his head as he approached.
"This is a Mana Road book I bought in Munratel… I can't make sense of a damn word it's spouting. Think you could interpret it for me?"
"Let me see it."
Kaisent took the book and speed-read through it.
So this is a Mana Road. But why is the order of circulation and the method of gathering energy so inefficient?
He already knew his father's martial arts belonged to a Transcendent. Even allowing for that, the Mana Road the mercenary had shown him was wasteful in several places.
Don't route from Tianzhu to Dazhui—move through Tiantu and Zhongfu instead…
"Kaisent?"
"Ah—sorry. It's my first time seeing a Mana Road, so I was interpreting for a moment."
"Come to think of it, this is your first Mana Road too, isn't it?"
Kaisent stopped himself from rewriting it for peak efficiency and instead taught the mercenary how to use what was written.
"Broadly, this is about circulating mana through the whole body to enlarge it, and stimulating the blood—well, the organs and the body—to strengthen them. The metaphors are pretty thick, so I'll clean it up for you."
"You'd do that?"
"For starters, this passage should be read as…"
With the pencil he always carried, he began amending the text and adding notes. Midway through making the book easier to understand, his ceaseless pencil stopped over one particular section.
Do I leave the book's content as it is? Or…
The mercenary had not understood the metaphors and had come to him for help. That meant Kaisent could rewrite the figurative language however he liked, and the man would never know.
If I change the content, he might distrust my knowledge and ask why I rewrote it on my own. But if he follows this as written, even twenty years won't make him a true expert.
Dang Seol-yeong had warned him again and again: never reveal his talent carelessly to others.
Flip it around—if I make sure no one realizes what my talent is, there's no problem.
But if he altered the content without the mercenary knowing, would the man even thank him properly? He would simply assume it was the book's original teaching and be grateful only for the translation.
…I don't need the thanks. Everyone in the Wolf Mercenary Band is a benefactor who made me who I am now.
In the end, Kaisent could not betray his own conscience. He rewrote the passage in the improved direction. He was not hard enough to abandon comrades with whom he had eaten, laughed, talked, and shared life and death. Anyone who learned the Mana Road as he had refined it would, in twenty or thirty years, be a fighter of some renown. Distant as that was, it still meant escape from a lifelong cage of zero possibility—and for a mercenary, that alone was no different from a fateful encounter.
"I'm finished. Move your mana according to this."
"Thanks. I'm testing it right now."
The mercenary patted Kaisent's head in gratitude, returned to his place, read the revised text, and drew something out. A small, transparent pill holding a faint blue energy. He swallowed it without hesitation.
It was a magic pill developed as otherworld knights' and mages' techniques mixed into this world—a capsule trapping a tiny amount of refined mana. The hardest part of learning a Mana Road or inner cultivation method was sensing mana at all. Even the finest technique was a painted cake if you could not feel it; swallowing refined mana let a person sense it simply and easily, and helped form a mana hole—what the murim called a dantian.
After about ten minutes of circulating mana while reading, the mercenary let out a shout of triumph.
"I did it! I formed a mana hole!"
"What? Already?"
"It only just formed, and my whole body is overflowing with power! Those knight bastards! Sitting on strength like this and dumping the grunt work on us! They could've finished it faster themselves!"
He had taken only a single step from a trained human body toward the realm of the superhuman—yet the elevated senses and physical ability ushered the mercenary into another world.
"Thank you, Kaisent! Seriously, thank you!"
Until now he had thought, Mana Road? Learn that and you get a little stronger than you are now, right? The power born of senses and flesh rising a full dimension casually shattered that ignorance. His gratitude toward the boy who had made the Mana Road easy to learn ran just as deep.
"You have to keep gathering and using mana whenever you have a free moment. Especially—if you only gather and never spend it, you'll develop unevenly, so be careful."
"Got it!"
The mercenary who had discovered mana grinned from ear to ear, venting his surplus strength this way and that. Other mercenaries who had watched a comrade form a mana hole in moments swarmed Kaisent.
"Uh, hey. I can't really understand this book either…"
"Shut it, all of you! Yours are ordinary Mana Roads! Mine's a hybrid of Mana Road and inner cultivation!"
"Idiot. You don't touch the murim ones."
As explained before, murim inner cultivation methods were utterly incomprehensible, while a Mana Road could be learned if you "worked your head a bit." The problem was that "a bit" was a towering mountain to commoners in a world without even compulsory education.
"Just a moment—please, one at a time…"
"Everyone freeze! Line up in order!"
Unable to watch Kaisent's small protests any longer, Lillian restored order among the mercenaries, and the chaos settled at once.
"Damn. Maybe I should've bought a Mana Road too."
"If I save a little more, I can…"
Envious of those who could now learn Mana Roads so easily thanks to Kaisent, the rest of the band resolved to buy one as soon as they earned the coin. And so Kaisent, free at last to pour out even a fragment of his talent, rose almost overnight to the center of the mercenary band.
Only yesterday the Wolf Mercenary Band had moved like a routed remnant, fretting over when the greenskins might strike. Today that atmosphere had all but vanished.
"Heh heh heh. So the knights weren't just spouting nonsense about Prana and Mana Roads."
"Just having mana makes it a completely different world, you know?"
The mercenaries who had grown stronger by learning Mana Roads smiled at a world transformed. Watching them, Lillian and Frederick wore expressions of people steeling themselves for something.
"The plan just got pulled forward."
"But it was always something we'd have to face eventually."
"True, but earlier than scheduled…"
"We've already spent years with these people. I think that's enough."
"…If you say so…"
Frederick cast an uneasy glance at the mercenaries who had learned Mana Roads through Kaisent. Whatever private plan the two of them held, they let the conversation end there.
"Wolf! Frederick!"
At that moment, the very boy who had unwittingly accelerated their plan came running in urgency.
"A unit of cavalry is approaching our position!"
"Cavalry? Greenskins?"
"No! Humans in armor!"
Word from Kaisent—who had been scouting with a tamed crow—that other humans, and armed ones at that, were coming lit up not only Wolf and Frederick but every mercenary face.
Just as he said, a short while later a troop of cavalry met the Wolf Mercenary Band.
"Are you survivors out of Munratel?"
A uniformly armed cavalry company. Their captain at the head put the question, and Wolf answered for the band.
"We are. We were fortunate enough to leave Munratel and slip free of the greenskins' assault."
"Do you also know how Munratel fell?"
"We do."
"Good. The survivors who arrived earlier were so incoherent we couldn't make sense of them. Follow us."
With that, the captain turned his mount and rode on.
"Whose cavalry is that?"
"They look pretty strong. First Prince faction?"
"No way. With the Second Prince faction around, would they send elites like that?"
While the mercenaries lightly bet on which prince had sent the riders, Lillian and Frederick wore the faces of people whose lives had just grown more troublesome.
"Lillian. Their crest…"
"You're right. Akina Karayden. That woman is moving in person."
Back when the Luciarkenel Kingdom still stood whole, she had been the one who forced Halrot Kingdom to fear invasion. The kingdom was gone now, so there was little point in holding a grudge—but the problem was Akina's ability. She would realize that Wolf was a woman. If she grew curious and dug deeper, the odds of Lillian's true identity coming to light were high. As a former margrave, Akina knew Lillian's face.
"Still, ordinary mercenaries like us aren't likely to meet a noble like Akina."
"…We'll have to pray for that."
Following the cavalry, the Wolf Mercenary Band reached a vast encampment where supplies were being gathered.
"Huh? Isn't that a First Prince unit?"
"That one's flying the Second Prince crest, though?"
To their surprise, both First and Second Prince factions were there transporting materiel. Two princely forces that ought to have been at each other's throats simply ignored one another and focused on hauling supplies.
Lillian and Frederick, who knew Akina Karayden's temperament well, understood the situation at a glance.
"She threatened both princes. I'll do the fighting. Give me supplies. Give me a little less and I'll back the other side."
"I think so too."
Lillian agreed with Frederick. As they expected, Akina—a warrior who valued the survival of Halrot Kingdom over politics—had been watching for a new warlord's movements as a contingency. Munratel was one of the rear cities of the Karayden County; if the rear collapsed completely, the county would be isolated. The moment she received word that greenskins had taken Munratel, she moved at once, raised a punitive force, and demanded supplies from both the First and Second Princes—exactly the kind of coercion Frederick had described.
Akina Karayden, who had kept her blade honed for a counterattack should the Saryeong Kingdom strike next after Luciarkenel, now drew that edge and turned it on the greenskins.