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“This is about where contact was lost. It’s known as an eligator habitat. First, see if there are any traces of a fight nearby.”
As if he shared Astin’s thoughts, Hallag dismounted from his horse as well.
Gripping a long trailing vine, he began to climb the tree with practiced ease.
“I don’t see any bugbears nearby.”
“That’s a relief, at least. Don’t go any closer to the river than necessary. One wrong move and you’ll end up as the eligator’s meal.”
There was no need for Wulbaniero to warn them.
The eligator they had seen so far were ambushers of the river.
Unless one had ten lives, approaching the water was madness.
“No. There’s no need for that. If they were trapped near the entrance from the swamp’s depths, we can make a rough guess at where they might have been cut off.”
Neil, rubbing his waist, got to his feet.
He was still wincing in pain as he spoke.
“I’ll guide you. But the route is rough, so we’ll have to leave the horses behind. There are stretches where we have to cross the river, too, so we’ll probably need to cut down a few trees along the way.”
“I heard you were a guide, but you seem pretty familiar with the swamp.”
“If I wasn’t confident, I wouldn’t have agreed to lead that fellow either.”
Both Wulbaniero turned to look at Lawrence.
“Neil doesn’t waste words. As far as I know, he’s the best guide there is.”
“Hmm... Well, when the wizard himself says so, I suppose that settles it.”
“All right. It’ll probably be faster to look where we can reasonably expect them to be than to search every inch one by one.”
But that left them with the horses to deal with.
Since they couldn’t take them along, someone had to stay behind and watch them, and by the end of the discussion that task fell to Hallag.
“I’m more likely to survive if I’m left alone.”
Astin didn’t deny it.
In both experience and skill, Hallag seemed to be the better man.
“Is the path dangerous? Mercenaries or not, if they’re trapped in some isolated place... I can’t say we’d be all that safe ourselves.”
“There’s no such thing as a safe place in the deep swamp. Wherever you go, danger goes with you. Still, I know a few places where we can at least hide for a while. That’s where we’re headed now.”
Neil drew a machete with a broad blade from his pack.
With a few swift swings, he cut through the vines wrapped around the trees.
“This works in your favor, in a way. This is the route we’d have to take anyway to reach the bugbear nest. If we hadn’t joined up with Wulbaniero, it would have taken at least another ten days to get here.”
“What? Were we not just going somewhere else?”
“The place where mercenaries get trapped is the swamp’s depths. The bugbear nest you’re headed for is also in the swamp’s depths. Getting to the depths was the first priority above all else, and we broke through by the shortest route possible.”
“No, I know it was fast, but... ten days? That feels exaggerated.”
Above all, it had only been a few days.
It had been merely three days since they joined Wulbaniero. It was hard to believe they had covered a distance that should have taken ten days in so little time.
“Not at all. A swamp isn’t a place you can simply march straight through. Even if the path is right in front of you, the terrain makes you detour. Dangerous monsters force you to go around. It’s literally a distance you could trip over and touch with your nose, and yet you still have to circle around it. Wulbaniero smashed straight through that absurdity.”
He knew that.
It was thanks to horse riding that bordered on an art form.
Once he’d been on Wulbaniero’s horse, they had thundered forward without detouring for almost anything at all.
The only real obstacle had been the deeper rivers.
Shallows barely deep enough to reach their ankles were crossed at a tearing pace.
Who could possibly catch a horse determined to run at full speed?
The only thing that came to mind was the jaguar that had plagued them so persistently.
But in the swamp during the rainy season, there was no place for those beasts to stand.
“But in the depths, things are different. From here on out, we have no choice but to go the long way.”
“Then it’s your turn to lead, Neil.”
“Isn’t that why I was brought along? I’ve got my job to do.”
Neil began searching first in places that didn’t require crossing the river.
Just as one would expect in a place where mercenaries came to hunt eligator, campsites were scattered throughout the swamp.
“Not here either.”
But the most important trace was nowhere to be found.
The first place turned up nothing.
The second place too.
By the time they reached the third camp, they finally found evidence that people had passed through.
“How many trapped mercenaries did you say there were?”
“Nine? No, I heard there were ten.”
“Then this isn’t it either.”
Gray ash that had never quite become dust trickled through his fingers.
“Judging by the remains of the cooking fire, there weren’t many people who stayed here. If we assume four mercenaries traveled together with one guide, then at most there were five. Maybe even fewer.”
“Are you certain?”
“A person’s mouth may forge lies, but the traces left behind by a person do not.”
Neil’s voice was full of conviction.
He sounded so sure of himself that Astin wore a faintly sour expression.
“Is that so, wizard?”
“Yes. Traces don’t lie. But Neil, aren’t we sure other people were here? Couldn’t they have met up with Balik’s group?”
“I can’t deny that. But chasing two sets of traces at once is too risky. More importantly, if mercenaries came this deep into the swamp, it means they came to hunt eligator. They would have kept their distance to avoid interfering with one another’s hunt.”
The trail led across the river.
In other words, Balik’s group had moved deeper into the swamp to avoid the mercenaries who had stayed in this camp.
“Then they may have crossed the river.”
“Exactly. That’s the worst-case scenario.”
Preparing to cross the river was no simple matter.
They started by looking for a place where the current was relatively mild.
The problem was that every such shallows had eligator lurking in plain sight.
In the end, the place they chose was a steep, cliff-like slope far from the shallows, where they had to descend before they could even reach the water.
“You mean to go through here?”
“Don’t worry. I’m the only one crossing without equipment. I’ll tie a rope to a tree on the far side, and you can cross holding onto that.”
Neil said it as if they were merely taking a stroll.
But the river, with no bottom in sight, only filled Lawrence with a sense of foreboding.
The current wasn’t weak, and there was no sign the pouring rain would let up anytime soon.
It was a blessing that no eligator could be seen.
But that only meant they couldn’t be seen from above.
There was every chance something was swimming below in the filthy water.
“Is this really the only way? It’s too dangerous. Wouldn’t it be better to build a boat?”
“Even if we built a boat, it would still be spotted by eligator. If anything, it’d be more dangerous if it capsized. This isn’t like the river you came looking for, where the water runs out. That place is originally bugbear territory, so eligator don’t go there.”
“......”
“Don’t worry. We came all this way to the swamp’s depths; it’d be a shame not to dig up at least one root of Tairei, wouldn’t it?”
Despite the joke, Lawrence couldn’t laugh.
By now, Neil was taking the rope Astin handed him.
He looped it around a giant tree and around his own body to keep the current from sweeping him away.
Then he seemed to intend to cross to the far side and secure the line so the others could use it to cross.
The only lifeline they had was a rope.
Lawrence took hold of that rope.
“What’s wrong?”
“No matter how I think about it, this isn’t right.”
Balik’s group might be saved, and yet something could happen to Neil instead.
If that happened, even by the smallest chance, Lawrence would never forgive himself.
“I’ll handle it.”
“You? Now that’s madness.”
No. Not quite.
The real problem here was the river itself.
Something unknown lurked in the water, so if he could cross without ever setting foot in it, the danger would vanish.
“Neil, I’m a mage.”
“I know that. What’s your point?”
“Mages have magic.”
Neil looked as though he had no idea what Lawrence was talking about.
But Lawrence’s eyes, fixed on the river, had gone calm and still.
He could do it.
It was a method he had been thinking about ever since the day he split Shadow into two.
He hadn’t been able to finish practicing his magic because he had to stay wary of whatever might happen, but he had still trained Shadow whenever he found the chance.
Shadow Light.
The gathered darkness instantly took on the shape of a sphere of light.
Making Shadow Light was enough.
Its purpose was only to strengthen Shadow.
Shadow.
Shadow rose beneath the Shadow Light.
Lawrence split Shadow into two.
One became a broad, large ring.
The other took on the thorny bramble he had seen in the Shadow Forest.
There was no need to insist on a different shape.
What he needed now was a strong, sturdy Shadow.
So far, nothing was wrong.
Practice didn’t lie.
His skill in controlling Shadow had reached an advanced level.
He tested its strength first.
The Shadow reinforced by Shadow Light was as hard as armor.
He already knew Shadow’s power.
It could open windows, and it could move most things while in its doll-like state.
So changing the thing it carried from an object to a rope shouldn’t be a problem.
What worried him more was control.
This was different from everything he had done before, when all he had to do was move things from one place to another.
This wasn’t land. It was a river.
If the current was even a little strong, Shadow would be swept away.
That was why he had made two shadows.
A wide ring to resist the current.
A thorny bramble to catch the rope and keep it from being washed downstream.
Could he do it?
The moment he lost control, Shadow would fall into the river.
Maintenance and balance.
He had to keep strict control over the Shadow that was meant to serve as the footing for the other.
The river was both near and far.
Manipulating Shadow without being swept away by a current like this was a first.
Practice and reality were different things.
Pressure would soon become shackles tightening around his mind.
If his concentration slipped, he might well fail to control Shadow.
The instant he lost his footing, it was over.
Looking at the current, there would be no way to recover the rope.
He had one chance.
“......”
So what if it was?
There was no second chance. That was what real combat was.
And it was in real combat that magic grew.
“You’re not seriously planning to send the rope across with that, are you?”
“I’m a mage, after all.”
Before beginning, he sent the ring-shaped Shadow out over the river.
As the current swallowed it, the Shadow he had thought he had made sturdy was swept far away downstream.
That was fine.
He adjusted the strength again.
It needed to be stronger.
He needed to pour in more mana.
After repeating the process three or four times, the Shadow finally found its balance above the river.
He could do it.
Lawrence draped the rope over the thorny-bramble Shadow.
“......”
Just one deep breath.
There was no need to be distracted by the swirling current.
This wasn’t the time to worry about anything else.
He needed to focus every ounce of his mind.
It’s fine.
He whispered it as if to reassure himself.
Strictly speaking, Lawrence wasn’t climbing onto Shadow itself.
He only had to move the rope across to the other side.
Then secure it to the tree with Shadow, and that would be that.
The Shadow beneath his feet would stay broad and flat.
Balance came first.
Slowly. Carefully.
The Shadow began to move across the river.
He did not let go of his concentration.
If he could control Shadow perfectly, there was no reason he couldn’t cross.
The shape was so vivid he could see it even with his eyes closed.
The image he had drawn over and over in his mind, he reproduced with magical precision.
Neither the sound of rain falling nor the rushing water could break Lawrence’s focus on controlling Shadow.
Sweat, different from rain, beaded on his forehead.
A small groan slipped through his tightly pressed lips.
It wasn’t the kind of pain that came from overusing magic.
It felt like sharpening a blade that had already been honed to a razor edge.
One grain at a time.
He ground the edge down and refined it until there was nothing left to shave away.
The overworked blade had reached its limit.
It was so precarious it might snap if he sharpened it one more time.
There was no better way to describe it than a lonely tightrope walk.
The moment he lost balance, Shadow would fall into the river.
Don’t look anywhere else.
Just pour every shred of his attention into the blade’s edge.
When that sharpness reached its peak, he became aware that Shadow had made it to the far bank.
“......”
Not yet.
He couldn’t relax.
He changed the shape of the Shadow he had used as a foothold.
He retrieved the rope caught on the thorny bramble and tied it to a tree.
Only after checking the knot again and again did he look back at the others.
Neil and Astin both nodded.
They took hold of the taut rope and crossed the river one after the other.
Once the two of them were safely across, Lawrence drew Shadow back.
He felt a weariness different from what came with Shadow Spear.
He had concentrated so hard that his mouth tasted faintly of sweetness.
Maybe it would be better to rest a little.
Then he felt a gaze on him from the other side, where the others were holding the rope and watching.
Since they’d come this far, he might as well keep moving.
Gathering his breath, Lawrence took the rope again.
Even with the line to hold, pushing through the current wasn’t easy.
The muddy water below was impossible to see through.
The stones on the riverbed were slick beyond belief.
He couldn’t afford to relax.
One wrong step, and rope or no rope, the current would sweep him away.
The surging water kept slipping into his mouth.
How much dirt and water had he swallowed before he finally managed to keep walking?
Just as he felt he might collapse, someone seized him from above.
“Almost there!”
“Just a little more!”
He had no strength left to climb on his own.
The two men hauled Lawrence out of the river.
Exhausted, he lay flat on the ground.
“You alive?”
“......”
Wordlessly, he raised a hand.
“Nice work. We’ve made it this far, so now we’re basically there. Let’s hope the mercenaries are waiting at this camp.”
“I hope so.”
At his hoarse reply, the two men laughed.
* * *
For some reason, the far bank had a different feel from everywhere they had come before.
Was it the air that had changed?
The scent carried on the wind and rain held a faint, fishy reek.
It was the smell of the swamp, one he had never encountered before.
There was no way Neil wouldn’t have noticed what Lawrence had.
Astin, too, was scanning the surroundings with a tense expression.
“This is eligator territory. Just as those things never approach the bugbear nest, bugbear never come this far either.”
“So if Balik’s group came seeking eligator, there’s a good chance they drifted into this area.”
“The problem is that they went too deep. I’d say they had no choice because the hunting grounds overlap... but it was still a very dangerous choice.”
So that was why contact had been lost.
As he compared the map with their current position, Neil led the group onward.
Lawrence and Astin took over the lookout.
Astin, a Wulbaniero, still had a wide field of vision even in the rainy swamp, and Lawrence used Shadow Light, which he had deliberately avoided relying on until now, to scan the area.
How many hours had passed since they crossed the river?
Astin, who had climbed onto a rock to survey the area, called to the two of them.
“Come take a look at this.”
“Did you find something?”
What Astin had found was a sheet of metal.
The palm-sized plate was stained with black marks that had baked onto its surface.
“A piece of armor.”
“So there was a fight.”
Lawrence’s face hardened.
The metal plate had been found on the bank across from the shallows.
As they looked more closely, broken spear shafts and sword fragments began to surface from beneath the water beside it.
“The bloodstains... I think it’s safe to say they’ve all been washed away.”
For mercenaries, gear was a tool almost as precious as their own lives.
Treating equipment carelessly was no different from lowering your own chance of surviving a job.
For such gear to be lying scattered on the ground meant...
it had happened to its owners.
At the very least, it was certain that several days had passed.
Even if the blood had been washed away by the rain, the scars left in the trees would remain.
They couldn’t tell how fierce the battle had been, but the traces continued along the shallows.
“Can you track them?”
“Of course.”
In fact, the more visible the traces were, the easier they were to follow.
As he trailed them, Lawrence came to understand that this had been an unwanted engagement.
Normally, when mercenaries hunted monsters, they tried to draw in only the number they could handle.
The Forest Spider was a good example.
They’d lure them in using monster corpses.
Then they’d set the forest on fire to block any reinforcements from coming.
It was a method of killing only the Forest Spider they had drawn into a prepared hunting ground, controlling any possible danger as much as they could in advance.
But the traces left here told a different story.
The hunters were not the mercenaries, but the monsters that had ambushed them.
Driven into a one-sided retreat, the mercenaries had fought desperately as they fled.
And soon the three trackers came face to face with those who had been pursuing them.
The first to spot them was Lawrence.
That was because the hunters, lured by the glow of Shadow Light, had begun to emerge one by one.
Eligator.
Four eligator had come out of the river and were walking upright on two legs as if to show off.
Seen on land, they looked more pathetic than expected.
That wasn’t a slip of the tongue.
On the ground, they seemed little more than large lizards.
The hides that had left black trails in the river now merely glistened.
The little spikes bristling over them looked like the peel of some insignificant fruit.
And yet their heads were so large that the sight of them waddling along on tiny feet made Lawrence want to laugh despite himself.
The weapons in their hands were crude logs.
Compared with the weapons used by goblins or bugbears, it felt as though they had simply seized something straight from nature and held it in their hands.
Or perhaps it was more accurate to say they had torn a tree out and used that.
The eligator shuffled slowly around the area.
“......”
Hidden behind a rock, the three of them held their breath.
He controlled Shadow Light.
Toward the place farthest from the rock where the three of them were hiding.
Once he sent Shadow Light off into the distance, the creatures vanished in pursuit of its radiance.
“It feels like they’re searching for something, just like we are.”
“There’s only one reason creatures that should be in the river are out on land. It looks like the mercenaries we’re after are being hunted by them.”
“So it’s not the worst-case scenario, at least.”
Astin spoke after hearing that.
“Not the worst-case scenario?”
“If eligator are tracking them, that means some of the mercenaries are still alive. How many, I can’t say.”
Lawrence couldn’t laugh.
This time, the mercenary party that had come out with Balik numbered ten in all.
Among them were Gawud, Garik, and Ronan.
He couldn’t begin to guess how many of them were still alive.
Were they getting closer to the search net?
The farther they followed the traces, the more often they encountered eligator.
Their pace gradually slowed.
Moving carefully, the three of them eventually found a cave.
The cave lay between a tree and a rock and was covered in waterlogged undergrowth. Unless one looked closely, there was no way to know it was there.
“The traces lead into there.”
“It’s far enough from the river, too. The perfect place to hide from eligator.”
“The last time I came here, it was a den for wild animals. If I remember right, there were bears and bats... Even with some injuries, mercenaries should have been able to clear them out.”
The problem was that getting in wasn’t easy.
As they followed the traces, the number of eligator had increased as well.
By now, creatures moving in loose packs were patrolling the area at regular intervals.
They needed to enter the cave without being noticed.
But even after they got inside, there was another problem. According to Neil, it sounded as though the cave had only one entrance and one exit, and both were here.
“If we’re not careful, we could end up trapped too.”
“I’ll use Shadow Light to draw the eligator away.”
If he could divert the eligator’s attention elsewhere as he had until now, an opening should appear.
“That’s not a good idea, wizard. No matter how stupid they are, they’re not idiots.”
Astin shook his head.
“I admit that the sphere of light is convenient. But if you keep showing it to them, the eligator will adapt eventually. If they start sensing something’s off, then we’ll really be in trouble. I think it’s better to keep it back for when we really need it.”
“I agree with Wulbaniero. If there’s one weapon we have that eligator don’t know about, it’s you. I’d rather you used it only when we truly have no other choice.”
For the time being, the three of them took turns checking the eligator’s position.
They watched for the times when the patrols thinned out.
And they decided to move when the pack was at its smallest.
“Eligator are nocturnal. If we move, it’ll be in the morning or during the day.”
They kept watch for a full day, and by afternoon, with the sun high overhead...
it was after lunch when the eligator were fewest in number.
At last, after finishing their meal, the three of them headed for the cave.
As they drew near, a sharp odor tickled Lawrence’s nose.
“This smell is...”
Lawrence looked at Neil.
He nodded.
That sharp, familiar scent was Lamael.