The Shiland Hills
A few days had passed since Artia and Elgaia kept the night watch alone.
In that time, Artia and the elves had followed the countless valleys and gentle ridges of the Shiland Hills, climbing and descending as they pressed north. Their destination was the Twilight Fortress Osten, Orteia's southern border city and the stronghold that guarded it. Elgaia had said the journey would take somewhere between ten days and a fortnight.
Of course, that estimate assumed absolutely nothing happened, and that they devoted themselves to nothing but travel. Artia, Elgaia, and the others were going out of their way to manufacture trouble, so the day they would actually reach Osten kept sliding further and further off.
What could they possibly be doing, lingering in dangerous enemy country?
The Shiland Hills were a thoroughfare crawled by countless elf hunters. Artia and Elgaia's company were bound to run into the bastards coming south after a finished hunt, and when elves met elf hunters there was only one thing to do: free their kin, and break the hunters.
They were headed that way regardless. Striking down villains along the road and saving innocent elves was only natural—all the more so when they judged they had strength to spare.
The elves racing over the hills were light on their feet and quick. The scouts had found yet another band of elf hunters, and the company ran like the wind to seize the better ground.
The elves Artia had first rescued—Elgaia and her companions—moved with something exceptional about them. Call it the hard, blade-like air of people accustomed to fighting, people who knew how battle was done. Then again, this miserable war was in its fifteenth year. That was time enough for an ordinary person to become a seasoned veteran. Think of Elgaia and her companions as a militia that had survived those fifteen years, and their practiced movements made perfect sense.
A nameless bird's cry rang high through the air.
So natural it could never be mistaken for an imitation, the call was the signal that they were ready to hunt the elf hunters in turn. Using the blind spots the hill country itself created, they had closed a three-sided encirclement. Hunter and hunted changed places completely.
It began with Elgaia's heat-ray magic.
The same spell that had shattered Ander's last desperate struggle. Her body had returned to normal since then, and perhaps because of it the light burned far stronger than when Artia had first seen it. The fierce beam raked in a single stroke through the middle of a column of elf hunters who had been passing, oblivious, through the gorge between the hills—a streak of light that burned and severed everything in its path, then broke apart and scattered with a clean, satisfying snap.
Caught in the sudden ambush, the hunters who had been strolling along in high spirits broke into panicked confusion. Then the second wave came for them.
"D-damn it! What—what's happening?! Where did they come fr—gack!"
"S-save m—ghrk!"
Countless arrows made of nothing but flame split the air. Instead of an ordinary arrow's arc, the magical shafts flew dead straight, picking off the hunters whose wits Elgaia's heat ray had already stolen. Judged by power and difficulty alone, a fire arrow was nothing more than a low-grade spell—but magic was still magic. Rabble who could not handle mana had no way to resist, and with the advantage of surprise piled on, the spell struck harder than its rank suggested.
There was no hesitation in the magic they poured into the screaming gorge, and no mercy.
From a rise overlooking the battlefield, Artia watched the elf hunters flounder beneath the sudden rain of spells. It was not a pleasant sight, but she was hardly soft enough in the head to plant herself in the elves' way, crying that every human life was precious.
The hunters fell helplessly under the storm of fire arrows. A few who seemed to have a scrap of sense began to flee in a hurry, but—
"Shame."
Artia pitied the ones who ran. They would have been better off dying, or being caught, where they stood. The place they were fleeing toward—the gap deliberately left in the encirclement—was a gate to hell, the spot where the most painful death would find them.
The hole in the net. Picturing the faces of the elves already waiting there, the ones whose eyes had gone white-hot with vengeance, Artia shuddered. Quite apart from how much power a person held, the sight of someone blazing with rage and hatred stirred an instinctive fear.
Ugh. Terrifying.
She turned her attention away from the people sprinting toward a future already decided. That side of things would take care of itself. Looking down over the battlefield, she coiled her muscles, ready to launch at any moment.
Why?
Because of this.
"A magic scroll! Lady Artia!"
Yes. Exactly that.
Far off, the man who looked to be the elf hunters' captain flung a magic scroll wide open. The circle inscribed upon it lit, and the mana in the air shivered in answer. And so a miracle took shape—
"Haa. Again?"
Pale lightning. Thunder gathering to a single point. Light changing into a spear that stood for the wrath of the sky. It was the Great Thunder Spear, and she was getting thoroughly sick of it.
Over the past few days, as she and Elgaia moved north, they had fought several battles. Not every time—but roughly once in every two—that damned scroll carrying a Great Thunder Spear had popped out. A scroll holding magic of that grade was cutting-edge work, something that had only begun to appear recently. For a thing like that to be floating around this commonly—did it even make sense? A corner of Artia's chest felt distinctly uneasy.
If more of them were made and spread, she could not imagine the story ending well for the elves. Their advantage over humans was that every one of them was a mage. Now imagine elf-hunter trash each walking around with a Great Thunder Spear scroll, reckoned the finest even among intermediate magic. Yeesh. Absolutely horrifying. Artia might walk away from one, but an ordinary elf hit by a single spear would be at death's door as a matter of course.
Ah! This isn't the time!
She shook the stray thoughts off with a toss of her head. She had to move. A moment's delay, and someone would be hurt by that vicious lightning.
Before the spear in the hunter's hand could fully take shape, Artia moved. She drove strength into legs she had already drawn tight and kicked off the ground.
It was barely a starting step, not even a proper run-up, and yet a faint tremor ran through the great hill. Her body shot forward like a shell. Black hair like the night sky streamed smoothly behind her, and starlike eyes caught the point where the pale lightning began.
In the instant the elf hunter who had opened the scroll blinked against the blinding flash, Artia was standing in front of the man who held the spear of lightning. His eyes bulged as if they might pop free. Before he could register the elf before him, before his brain could give his hand an order, before the hand that received that order could so much as twitch a muscle—
Artia's fist shot out.
A slender forearm, smooth and long fingers, a fist without a single scar, hurled in an instant and bearing monstrous force. The aftermath tore the air, and a storm rose a beat behind it.
The spear of lightning, only just taking form, could not endure pure force swung in from outside. It warped, failed, and vanished.
Falling apart from that much? A spell with no grit! Artia clicked her tongue at the feeling in her hand—she hadn't felt a thing.
"Wh-what are you—cough!"
Having taken the full brunt of the force, the elf hunter lay on the ground, blood spilling from the corner of his mouth. Artia looked at his face for a moment—
—and kicked it.
She shoved the hunter, out cold with a strangled croak, off into a corner and scanned her surroundings. The battle was racing toward its end. She had finished the greatest variable, the one using the scroll, so the rest of the fight would be entirely one-sided. They could manage without her help.
Artia decided to do something more important instead.
What? What else? They had cleaned out the elf hunters, so of course she had to free the elves those hunters had captured. The sight of life returning to the faces of those beautiful men and women who had been steeped in despair! Beautiful things ought to be taken in with the eyes whenever the chance arose. Punching every elf hunter she happened to meet along the way was merely a bonus.
When the fighting ended, the acrid stink of burning and the iron tang of blood rode the wind, but no one paid either any mind. The corpses of the dead elf hunters were swallowed by flame and returned to ash and dust. The survivors lay bound in one place, each with some limb or other broken.
They were not exactly prisoners. The elves meant to leave them and go. Whether they lived after that, or became a single meal for wild beasts and monsters, was entirely their own fate.
Someone out there might say that leaving them like that was as good as telling them to die—how was it any different from killing them yourself, you hypocrite? So what? And what are you going to do about it? She felt no obligation to worry that far on behalf of vicious slave hunters.
"Ah..."
The freed elves stared down at their own wrists as if they could not believe it. Nothing bound them anymore. Some quietly wiped away tears at the freedom they had regained. Some broke into sobs at the sight of family they had been torn from. Some watched the weeping and sank into silent thought; in the chest of the one who said nothing, some feeling was surely rising like a flame.
It was a sight both glad and bitter.
As they let the moment pass, Elgaia approached from the other side.
"Lady Artia! You've worked hard."
"Ah—you too, Elgaia."
"If we keep on like this, I think we can save a great many elves before we reach Osten."
Elgaia smiled, bright and bubbling. Rescuing so many elves of late seemed to have pleased her a great deal; in place of her earlier gloom she was giving off a distinctly buoyant air. Positive energy simply poured off her, and thanks to it the slight darkness hanging over the camp went up in a rush of flame and vanished.
It was a truly good sight.
Traces burned black. Enough time had passed that the smell of charring on the air was faint.
"Hm."
The man lowered himself, swept a hand across ground that crumbled and drifted as fine ash, then lifted his head almost at once and looked toward somewhere in the north.
"Hm."
Lips that had been firmly shut parted, and a laugh slipped out. Another man, apparently a subordinate, put a question to him.
"Captain, we've finished up on this side. What will you do?"
"Why ask what's obvious?"
"Well. Figured that's what you'd say."
"Then move."
"Yes, sir~"
A short while later, a troop of cavalry began to run north along the hills.