“Hup, there we go.”
“Haaah... Mountain roads aren’t meant for walking on.”
Surena, Lucy, Allucia, and I were now ascending the Aflatta Mountain Range. We were using mountain trails, so there was no way they’d been maintained in any way. Once in a while, we had to go up sudden slopes and sections with bad footholds. After experiencing this several times, Lucy began complaining.
“Don’t grumble after volunteering to come along...” I told her.
“Ha ha ha. Whining makes the walk better,” she refuted.
A part of me understood what she meant. Allucia and Surena weren’t the type to chatter pointlessly, and the pair didn’t get along on a personal level. That combination naturally led to our march being utterly silent. That would be perfectly normal for the Liberion Order, but not to Lucy.
I wondered if the magic corps ever went marching en masse. I frankly knew nothing about them as an organization. I only knew Lucy and Ficelle as individuals. Kinera was a teacher at the institute, so I doubted she ever joined the front lines as part of the magic corps.
However, as one of the kingdom’s armed forces, I was pretty sure they had to do these things, at least occasionally. I wasn’t part of their organization, though, so I had no idea what the reality of the matter was.
Either way, I was never going to get involved with their internal workings. Even if I wanted to, I had no talent for magic, and no amount of effort would solve that. So, I could only give up on such aspirations.
“We’re almost there,” I warned the others. “Keep your eyes open.”
“Understood.”
We’d been ascending for a while and were now a ways up the slope of the mountain. We’d encountered several monsters along the way. This only made sense—the wildlife in the mountains was diverse and plentiful.
However, regular monsters couldn’t possibly stop the four of us. We’d killed every last one in an instant. No large packs had attacked us, so Surena, Allucia, and I had handled almost all of them. Lucy didn’t even have anything to do. It was best to preserve her mana anyway, so I was glad that the rest of us were able to clear the way without her.
Our march up the mountains went on smoothly. Finally, Surena, Allucia, and I all noticed something simultaneously.
“Oh...”
“We’re here...”
“I see... So this is its territory? What a strange sensation...”
All signs of life had vanished. We were now in Id Invicius’s territory. It hadn’t changed much in the last few days.
Despite it being a scaredy-cat, it hadn’t run away. Doesn’t make any sense. Looking at it another way, constantly moving its nest might’ve just been inconvenient for a wild beast.
Lucy sighed. “Haaah... You’re all amazing. I can’t tell at all.”
There was both admiration and exasperation in her voice. She was a combatant, but it wasn’t her primary duty. That was why she couldn’t really sense bloodlust or presences around her. She probably wouldn’t even notice if someone attacked her from behind. That still wouldn’t be enough to kill her, though. I’d mentioned the dangers of the mountain range before all this, but it turned out she basically always had defensive magic deployed all around her body.
I’d gotten a taste for what defensive magic was capable of during my trendy lunch with Kinera that one time. If Kinera was able to produce such a defensive shell, it wasn’t hard to imagine that Lucy’s had to be far stronger.
To add to that, if Lucy could escape from any attack without dying on the spot, she had a cheat in her healing magic. It was impossible to defeat her unless you decapitated her in one blow or gouged out her heart or something.
So, her complete dismissal of needing to sense any presences was a crazy power play to all those who lived by the blade. But she had the strength to back it up, so there was no point complaining about it. As always, the world is an unjust and irrational place.
“Being able to sense those things is pretty much essential to a swordsman...” I told her. “Well, I guess that’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Indeed. I don’t use a sword,” Lucy said. “On that note, can Fice sense this stuff too?”
“She sure can. I’d say her senses are relatively sharp.”
“Haaah... A world beyond comprehension...” From my point of view, Lucy’s world of magic was far more inscrutable. Not that I was even trying to understand it.
Anyway, sensing life and bloodlust wasn’t exactly something you could document in a reference book or quantify as a formula. It was all intuition. Still, we depended on this sense to achieve victory, so it couldn’t be ignored. We lived in a world where having dull senses for these things led to death. Maybe from an outside perspective, the worlds of swordsmen and wizards were equally incomprehensible.
“We’ll keep the same formation and focus on protecting Lucy,” I said.
“Understood.”
We were now within Id Invicius’s striking range. Considering the magical elements at play, Lucy was the most pivotal member of our party. However, forcing her to take the full brunt of the mission would hurt our pride as swordsmen.
So, I took the vanguard, Lucy the rear, and Surena and Allucia watched the flanks. This formation held as we entered its territory. Protecting our wizard was important, but we had no way of taking the initiative against Id Invicius—if we just lined up to strike all at once, it would leave us wide open for a horrible attack.
The plan was to somehow dodge its first attack, then have Lucy analyze its invisibility trick. We couldn’t proceed until that was done. I wanted Lucy to be able to focus entirely on observing our target.
Her insight would be our lifeline. We couldn’t allow her eyes to be damaged in any way. And in the worst case, if any of us got hurt, Lucy could heal us. It could take several minutes to get back into the fight, but Lucy and the uninjured could buy that amount of time.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this atmosphere,” Allucia remarked.
“Yeah, I don’t want to either,” I said.
“True,” Surena agreed.
Being in an ecosystem that was supposed to be bustling with life yet sensing none of it was extremely abnormal. Surena and I were experiencing it for the second time, so we had some familiarity with the feeling, but it was a first for Allucia, so it affected her more.
I understood how she felt. It was really uncomfortable. Such a sensation would be normal inside a building on your own, but feeling this way out in the wilderness was, quite frankly, creepy. I really didn’t want to get used to it.
Though we saw no signs of life, that didn’t mean we could let our guards down. Keeping an eye open was pretty meaningless against this opponent, but we still had to stay alert. As we proceeded carefully, Lucy called me to a halt from the rear.
“Beryl, stop.”
“Hm?”
“Heh... Ha ha ha! I see, I see... It seems Id Invicius is a real rookie.”
“Wh-What?”
I was perfectly okay with stopping when the world’s greatest wizard told me to, but I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. How was Id Invicius a rookie? I glanced around me, but I couldn’t spot it, let alone sense the characteristic signs of there being a large monster around. It seemed Lucy could, though. I was extremely curious—what was this about?