“Yeah?”
“The reason I, the first daughter of the Saegusa line, ended up in the absolute bottom class of this magic academy is actually pretty simple.”
“Simple, huh?”
“In truth, I’m barely even a contender right now,” she said quietly, her tone steady but stripped of any pride. “I really am as weak as I seem. So, being placed in the bottom class? It’s not a mistake. It’s exactly where I belong.”
I frowned, not quite grasping her meaning. But before I could ask, she continued, her gaze distant.
“At present, as far as I know… only a few members of the Saegusa clan are still alive.”
That stopped me short. I tilted my head. “Wait, didn’t your entire clan live in that village? The one built around the shrine? Wasn’t everyone there part of your family or tied to it?”
She nodded. “Yes. And that village… is gone. Destroyed.”
The weight of her words hit hard. “Destroyed how?”
She paused, as if choosing her words carefully, then spoke with the quiet gravity of someone who had lived too long with truth no one else saw. “Do you know why the Saegusa clan lived in seclusion, deep in the mountains?”
“The eastern disaster entity,” I said slowly. “The Serpent of Eightfold Calamities.”
She blinked, visibly startled, then let out a small, breathless laugh. “You really do know everything, don’t you?”
But there was no real humor behind it. Her smile was touched by sorrow, her usual bright demeanor dulled by grief. In that moment, she seemed older; graceful, yes, but weighed down. Not the clumsy girl I knew, but a woman shaped by loss.
I looked away, quietly exhaling. “No… I don’t know everything.”
I almost added “just the parts that matter,” but I figured the reference wouldn’t land. Now wasn’t the time.
The fact that her village had been annihilated? That was nothing to joke about.
“So?” I asked, prompting her gently.
She looked up, her voice steady. “The Serpent of Eightfold Calamities, an ancient, eight-headed serpent, once devoured entire villages across the east. Eventually, it was sealed near our home. That’s why we were there. The gods themselves appointed our ancestors to guard it. In return, the imperial family protected our clan. For generations, we upheld the seal. We watched. We waited.”
Her voice fell to a near whisper.
“But then the seal failed. The serpent rose. We fought… and we fell. The village was destroyed. Only a few of us survived.”
Koharu shook her head slowly, side to side, her expression unreadable.
“The seal on the Serpent of Eightfold Calamities had indeed weakened,” she said. “And yes, its resurrection was believed to be imminent. But in the end, it never came back.”
That made me blink. “What?”
“In fact,” she continued, her voice hushed, “the final scheduled inspection reported something strange. Instead of accelerating, the timeline for its revival had been pushed back. By several centuries. Something that should’ve been impossible.”
I stared at her, frowning. “Then what destroyed your village?”
Her shoulders sank as she answered. “A horde of demons. Here, I think you’d call them ogres. They overran us.”
“Ogres?” I echoed. “Your village was filled with people assigned to guard a sealed calamity. How the hell did it fall to ogres?”
To be fair, ogres weren’t exactly weak. They traveled in packs, and a rookie adventurer who spotted even one would be smart to turn and run. Still, they weren’t so dangerous that they could overwhelm national defense. Veteran adventurers in well-equipped parties could usually manage them without issue.
In fact, out on the frontier, local knights often made a side business of exterminating ogre nests. They were more nuisance than nightmare, an excuse for land taxes and recruitment drives. If anything, ogre outbreaks were a bonus for rural lords looking to score political points.
Apparently following my train of thought, she nodded solemnly.
“They weren’t normal ogres,” she said. “They had a commander. an evolved type we call an Ogre General.”
I nodded slowly. That tracked. Ogre Generals were on par with C-rank monsters, formidable enough to require veteran adventurers, ideally working in groups. Even then, taking one down cleanly wasn’t guaranteed. Around here, maybe someone like our instructor could handle one alone, but even that wasn’t guaranteed.
Still, I gave her a skeptical look. “Even so… You’re an A-rank level fighter. That shouldn’t have been enough to wipe out your entire clan. Something doesn’t add up.”
She was silent for a long moment. Then she drew a slow, deep breath, as if bracing herself.
“The horde that attacked us,” she said softly, “numbered over fifty, but none of them were ogres.”
I stared at her, genuinely unable to process what I’d just heard. It didn’t make sense. Frustration prickled under my skin as I turned to her again.
“A horde of ogres attacked you, but there weren’t any ogres? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Koharu pressed a hand to her temple, her fingers trembling slightly. The color drained from her face, her body stiffening as if a memory had just clawed its way to the surface.
“It wasn’t ogres,” she said quietly. “Not exactly. It was a horde of Ogre Generals. Or rather, I think there may have even been an Ogre King among them.”
I went still. “An Ogre King leading an army of Ogre Generals?”
That was beyond bad. It was catastrophic.
By adventurer standards, an Ogre King rated somewhere between B+ and low A-rank. A single one could decimate an entire provincial garrison. If a frontier lord tried to mount a counterattack, he’d likely end up slaughtered with his entire force. Normal military operations couldn’t handle that kind of threat. They weren’t designed for it. A monster of that class demanded national response, emergency reinforcement from the main kingdom, or a contract issued through the Adventurer’s Guild to mobilize elite parties.
And suddenly, a chill ran down my spine.
It reminded me of something. A dark, whispered memory from the edge of recorded history, the time when Goblin Emperors emerged, commanding armies of Goblin Kings. One evolutionary leap had turned an entire species into a global threat. A lone Goblin King mutated into an Emperor… then gave rise to the Ultimate Goblin. The phenomenon had shattered the balance of power across nations.
That same word echoed in my mind now. The Great Calamity.
“No way…” I muttered. “Could this be another Great Calamity? But if something like that happened in the east, we’d have heard about it…”
“I don’t know,” she replied, her voice barely audible. “All I know is that the men who were supposed to protect us, the warriors of the village, trained to hold the line against disasters, were wiped out in moments. Swallowed whole by the tide of Ogre Generals.”
It made a brutal kind of sense. Outside of divine possession, a Divine Vessel Priestess was vulnerable, completely dependent on her guardians. And descending a god into the body wasn’t instantaneous. It took time. Ritual. Preparation. That meant someone had to stall the enemy. Someone had to buy the seconds, or minutes, necessary for the god to awaken.
Those men were supposed to be that shield. The line. The ones capable of holding back calamity-level threats long enough for the real power to arrive.
And they’d been erased without leaving a scratch.
The men who had defended Saegusa’s village weren’t ordinary fighters. They would’ve been seasoned veterans, battle-hardened from a lifetime of guarding the seal. There was no way just any monster attack would’ve wiped them out.
“If it was only a pack of Ogre Generals, you could’ve handled it yourself, couldn’t you?” I said, watching her carefully. “Hell, even with an Ogre King thrown in… I don’t see how that would’ve been enough to destroy everything. You would’ve found a way.”
She didn’t respond at first, just stared at the ground in silence.
“And why did you say there might have been an Ogre King?” I pressed. “You were there. On the front lines, weren’t you?”
At that, she gave me a small, sad smile—quiet and tired, with something distant behind it. Then she shrugged gently.
“I understand,” she said softly. “No use in arguing theory when you can just see it with your own eyes, right?”
Before I could respond, she reached for her robe and began loosening it at the collar.
“Wait… What are you—”
But the words caught in my throat.
She opened the front of her uniform just enough to bare her chest, not in some teasing way, but matter-of-factly, as if it were nothing more than rolling up a sleeve. Her pale skin shimmered faintly in the morning light, and her breasts, impossibly full and soft, shifted with the motion in a way that made me instinctively avert my gaze, blood rushing to my ears.
And all I could manage, voice cracking in sheer awkwardness, was—
“Hey! Koharu!” I stammered, nearly choking on my words as she loosened her sash and pulled open her collar. “What the hell are you doing!? Why are you… Wait, hold on a second!”
But she didn’t stop. With a calmness that only made the situation more surreal, she let her white outer robe slip completely off her shoulders, baring her upper body. For a moment, I thought I was witnessing something I absolutely should not be seeing, until I realized she was still wearing a tightly wrapped cloth beneath. There was no actual exposure, but it still had me flailing to avert my eyes, heart hammering in my chest.