In that light, it wasn’t an exaggeration to call Rosalia—a magician capable of commanding wyverns—a dark magic prodigy. Yet even she was afraid. The wyvern she’d controlled had been defeated, and she didn’t know why, how, or by whom. Although wyvern hunts occurred several times a year, there was still no established method of consistently defeating them, and every successful hunt came at a terrible cost. Rosalia’s wyvern, on the other hand, had been killed with startling ease.
And that terrified Rosalia.
No longer able to hide behind the smoke screen, Rosalia was paralyzed by the thought of charging in head-on... But there was no turning back now. The only choice left was to defeat them!
While Abel, an A-rank adventurer, was a particularly dangerous threat, the other adventurers were just C-ranks. Furthermore, the twenty Royal Knights escorting the delegation would prove easy pickings, considering their organization’s reputation had been declining in recent years. Thirty assassins were more than enough to defeat them, Rosalia thought, trying to convince herself—trying to avoid thinking about the slain wyvern. The only path to victory lay in a head-on attack. They had no other choice... She repeated this in her mind over and over again.
As the white smoke cleared and revealed the attackers, the delegation’s fighters began their offensive by pelting them with the squires’ arrows and the magician adventurers’ spells.
The assassins simply deflected the arrows in midair. The volley might’ve inflicted damage or even killed the assassins outright had it come from professional archers or elves skilled with the bow, but the squires weren’t powerful enough.
The magicians, on the other hand, attacked at a rate several orders of magnitude faster than the squires. Many assassins failed to avoid the high-speed magical attacks, especially since they already had the slower arrows to deflect. In the end, the spells put five assassins out of commission and inflicted such serious leg injuries on another five that they were essentially immobilized.
The delegation had reduced the enemy’s numbers by a third with their long-range attacks. A greater success than they had expected.
“This is amazing...” Abel said as he watched the battle unfold closely. He was well aware of his lack of experience in the effective use of bows and magic on the battlefield, so he took this opportunity to shore up his knowledge.
“I mean, the smoke did dissipate in an instant thanks to a certain water magician, so that’s a huge part of it... Come to think of it, Lyn did something similar back at the inn. Jeez, magicians are too damn smart.” He was honestly impressed by how skillfully his two friends had cleared the smoke despite using different methods.
In contrast to Ryo’s relaxed assessment, the battle before him was beginning to ramp up. The assassins might have lost a third of their strength while approaching, but that hadn’t changed the fact that they were first-rate, trained killers. Some tried to flank the shield wall and target the rear. Some tried to slip through the knights to attack the magicians and priests hiding among them. Others tried to leap over the vanguard and target the carriages directly.
Then, all at once, the four air magicians cast a short incantation: “Wind, rage with all your might. Wind Pressure.”
Though the spell’s only effect was to create a gust, C-rank air magicians could generate considerable force—especially when four of them combined their efforts to create a single, powerful front of wind. Now staggering against hurricane-force gusts, the assassins struggled just to stay on their feet.
After a minute or so, the fight devolved into full-on melee. Shoken led his adventurer infantry while Company Commander Dontan rallied his knights, and both units exploited the magicians’ spell to thrust their swords and spears into the off-balance assassins. The delegation’s offensive was terrifyingly effective, but not without cost. However, after briefly falling back for the priests to heal their injuries, the adventurers and knights quickly returned to the front lines. Meanwhile, the assassins had no choice but to rely on potions to heal themselves. Eventually, the combined efforts of Wind Pressure and the infantry took down every last assassin.
One assassin hadn’t joined the attack, choosing instead to observe the delegation from afar. It was Natalia, of course, the enemy commander. She just had to find her target—a female magician with brunette hair, a petite build, and—ah, there! The moment Natalia spotted her, the assassin’s expression twisted with macabre joy.
She created a stone spear so thin that it would’ve been impossible to see if it was moving at high speeds. Confident of success, Natalia fired it, just as she had once fired it at the Sect’s leader. Her aim was true, but just before it pierced the magician’s heart—
Klang!
The stone ricocheted as if it had struck an invisible wall.
“Impossible!”
“Phew, that was close,” a man’s voice said beside her.
When Natalia tried to turn to look at the source of the voice, she realized she couldn’t. Before she knew it, her entire body was encased in ice.
“I recognize that stone spear. You’re the one who killed Hassan, right? Yes, yes... Natalia, I believe your name is?”
The man moved in front of her.
“You...” Natalia said. “From back then... Why are you here...”
She knew him. He was a water magician who’d once been by the merchant Gekko’s side. He’d even attacked their village all by himself and had been there when their leader died—but why was he here now? Natalia had memorized the names of every adventurer, knight, and civil servant in the delegation, their jobs, backgrounds, everything. She knew there were two other adventurers besides the escorts—an A-rank swordsman with extremely high combat ability and a mere C-rank. She even knew the C-rank’s name, but the man standing in front of her couldn’t possibly have been Ryo, could it?
“You’re...Ryo?” she said, but the ice encasing her muffled her words.
“When you’re on a job, try to remember to match faces with names,” Ryo chided as he lightly tapped the wall of her icy prison. “At least I’ve avenged Hassan now.”
“So they failed, after all.”
“Even if they are assassins, they’re still human. Such is life.”
“Yes, but eliminating the Knightley delegation that Count Contreras summoned would have been the simplest solution.”
“Well, now everyone will know they were attacked in Twilightland, so at least we accomplished that much.”
Four men and one woman stood on a hill nearly a kilometer from the delegation, watching the events unfold. They were so far away that even Ryo’s Passive Sonar couldn’t detect them. The men paused, having been speaking among themselves, and then the middle-aged fellow who’d spoken last turned to the woman.
“My lady Duchess,” he said, “we asked you to come all this way to assess that water magician. As the Arbiter, our faction may make one request of you, and our wish is for that water magician to be eliminated.”
“You would use your Votum for this?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm...”
The duchess tapped a finger on her chin and thought for a moment. “Very well. Granted. I shall take him for my own.”
The middle-aged man looked baffled. “I beg your pardon?”
“I trust there are no objections? He intrigues me.”
“I... Of course.”
Then the four men gave the duchess a respectful bow.