The Disciple's Suspicious Companion Arrives
If asked what kind of woman Madam Rain was, Sera would answer that she was a poisonous flower. Drawn by its sweet fragrance, one would approach, and the moment one touched and plucked it, the poison would take hold and kill. And the flower itself would die as well.
A woman who would gladly throw even her own life away to achieve her goals—literally a woman hurtling toward ruin.
There had been times Sera wanted to stop her. Times she wanted to change her.
But the Hero only ever managed to provoke her. As a Hero, she could never change her.
It was an absurd story, really. A Hero was meant to save the world, and that meant a Hero should be able to accomplish anything, shouldn't it? That was what made one a Hero. Yet she could not. She could neither change the woman nor save her.
After endless repetitions of failure, Sera had no choice but to accept that fact. And so she kept her distance. Because the woman was precious to her, she had no choice but to keep her distance. From afar, she searched for a way to save her.
Even then, she could only fail.
She knew the reason. There could be no way in this world to save someone who did not wish to be saved.
Yes. To that woman, this world was hell.
Even if the Demon King vanished and the demon army disappeared, the fact that this world was hell for her would not change. And so she did not care if she was ruined in pursuit of her goal, nor did she care if she was ruined after achieving it. Whether she failed or succeeded, she would ultimately arrive at the same ending of ruin.
Just as it was a flower's natural fate to wither in winter, just as it seemed her natural fate to meet an end of ruin, her ending never changed.
"Are you truly set on going?"
"It's something well worth verifying, isn't it?"
Madam Rain was not wearing her usual extravagant dress and veil, but form-fitting clothes that hugged her figure and allowed for easy movement. As the top expert of Dark Moon, she would sometimes take matters into her own hands when necessary.
Her closest confidant and elderly butler, Alfredo, looked at his mistress with concern.
"That is the Hero's master. He will be no ordinary man."
"My, are you worried about me? You know my skills."
"Even so, I am uneasy."
"Hmm. Alfredo's instincts are always accurate. But that only makes me want to go all the more."
He said he was uneasy. He said it might be dangerous. But to Rain, that was not a problem to avoid. It only stoked her desire further.
Alfredo knew this as well—that his mistress's desire for ruin was as great as her drive to achieve her goals. That was how she had lived, burning her soul to ashes, and how she had risen to her current position. Yet no matter how much power she gained or how much she obtained, she still hurtled toward ruin.
The old butler Alfredo wanted to change that. He hoped his mistress would find a passionate love befitting her age, marry, have children, and live out an ordinary, happy life. He had long since realized, while staying by her side, that this was a futile hope. And yet Alfredo still wished for it to appear.
A miraculous bond that could change his mistress's life. He prayed for it, again and again.
Rain was not unaware that the Hero was an extremely dangerous person. The moment the Hero learned she had been gathering information on her master, she would come storming in—that much was obvious. Even so, Rain chose to take the risk. In this business, the more valuable the information, the more natural it was to accept danger.
Above all, she was refusing to sell the information. That was no light matter. When an information guild refused to sell a particular piece of intelligence, it was no different from turning its own clients into enemies. If she had simply named an exorbitant price and left them unable to afford it, that would have been one thing. But declaring outright that she would not sell it at all, without even that process, was a sure way to sour her clients' moods. And every client of Dark Moon was a figure of considerable power within the empire. Turning such people from clients into enemies was a heavy burden indeed.
Of course, it was not as if she had no options. Rain possessed any number of means to smooth the situation over and resolve it. The problem was solvable—but solving it would mean playing cards she had been carefully holding in reserve. Having to spend even a portion of what she had prepared for a truly critical moment was not something that sat comfortably with her, either.
In other words, she needed to confirm for herself whether this was worth using what she had been saving. And so she set out for Jade's hermitage.
She already knew the rough location, if not the precise one, so finding the mountain where Jade lived was no great difficulty.
The problem was…
…I've spent far more time on this than I expected.
She had been forced to struggle through every kind of obstruction. Had she not been in the realm of a Transcendent, she would have had to give up and turn back midway. No—even as a Transcendent, if she had lacked experience with this sort of thing, she would have had to abandon the attempt.
This is no mere A-class mercenary's craft…
Even an S-class mercenary would be incapable of techniques like these. Only a veteran who had studied them professionally and accumulated the experience could employ them.
In this world, fewer than five people could display skill of this caliber. And Rain herself was one of them.
If I'd had a disciple of genius talent, perhaps they could have managed something like this…
But such musings were pointless. She had no disciple of any kind.
It was while she was thinking that that she heard it.
Whiiing!
The sound of something cutting through the wind. Rain had no difficulty recognizing it as an arrow.
She responded with calm. The arrow carried no aura; neither its speed nor its destructive force felt particularly threatening. Judging it better not to reveal her full ability, she decided to handle it with an artifact instead. She activated the shield magic of her artifact bracelet to defend.
But—
Chiiiiizik!!
"……!"
She was forced to witness an unbelievable phenomenon. An arrow that clearly carried no aura had not only pierced the shield magic—something even an aura-imbued arrow should have been incapable of—but was still trying to punch through.
An arrow with no aura at all pierces shield magic and still tries to break through?!
Even for someone who had lived a life that forced every kind of experience upon her, this was a first.
Tiiing!
In the end she had no choice but to draw a dagger, coat it in aura, and knock the arrow aside.
That arrow was deliberately aimed to just miss me.
It had flown toward her, so she had treated it as an attack and responded—but experiencing it firsthand, she could tell it had not been meant to hit her directly. It had been a warning shot.
And the fact that a mere warning shot had pierced shield magic made it all the more shocking.
An unknown enemy loosing arrows charged with some unknown power. Even a Transcendent could not help but tense. She settled into a ready stance and held her ground. Move carelessly, and the next arrow carrying that unknown force might come straight for her.
In that very moment—
Whiiiing!
Another arrow came flying from an entirely different direction.
Tiiing!
Rain reacted in an instant.
This one wasn't meant to hit me either.
She had thought this time it was truly intended to strike her dead-on.
An elf? The ones I've only ever heard about?
Even as the master of the empire's foremost information guild, Dark Moon, with all her varied experience and connections, Rain had never met an elf in person. Information on elves was valuable enough that she would have liked nothing better than to breach the World Tree's barrier and confirm them for herself—but that was simply impossible. Everything she knew of elves had come secondhand, through word of mouth. And those scraps of information matched the present situation perfectly.
The arrows elves loosed were said to carry an unidentified power that nullified human mana and aura. Of course, it had never been confirmed. Elves never left the World Tree's barrier, and the reckless fools who approached the elven forest hoping to enslave them and make a fortune simply vanished from the world forever. No one had ever been able to treat such reports as established fact.
But in this moment, Rain could not help thinking she needed to take those reports seriously.
Then—
"Don't move."
"……."
They said an elf's movements were so swift the naked eye could not follow them. Rain now had no choice but to believe it. In the brief span while she was focused on the arrow, the elf had slipped into the opening with such precision.
Even living it in reality, it felt unreal.
"Who are you?"
For this, Rain produced the line she had prepared.
"I am a companion of Hero Candidate Lady Sera."
It was a lie. There was a chance her opponent, being a Transcendent, possessed some special ability to distinguish truth from falsehood—but even if a crisis erupted, Rain was confident she could resolve anything. She had been caught from behind, yes, but she herself stood firmly in the realm of a Transcendent. She had simply chosen not to respond because the other party appeared to be Sera's master. To her, the present situation was no crisis at all.
"Sera's com—"
Thud!
"……?"
Rain turned with a face full of pure bewilderment.
A white-haired human man had collapsed.
Even for Rain, who had seen and endured every manner of grotesque spectacle, it was a moment that briefly paralyzed her reason.