Chapter 239
Chapter 239
"O great one. Here is tea for you."
"O great one, here is a hide from the great tiger, found only in the northern wilderness."
"O great one, I am a man of little means with nothing to offer, but if you have need, I would give even my own child......"
"No, please, really, it's fine. You don't need to go this far."
Cassian waved his hands in a fluster.
But the refusal seemed to shock the old man, whose expression crumbled as though his entire life had been denied.
"I see...... my child is too unworthy...... I am too lacking......"
The old man went so pale he could barely breathe.
In the end, Cassian had no choice but to sigh and reassure him.
"Instead, please consider sending the child to Akarind Academy. If there's talent, we'll nurture it."
"Ohhh, great one, thank you!"
Another round of "great one."
The incessant title was giving Cassian something close to a neurosis.
The burden of the honorific was part of it, but more than that—
"As expected, people who truly appreciate your greatness, Teacher. I believe we have enough followers for a religion."
"I think I'm starting to like Aislard."
"Why didn't we know about this place before the regression? Oh, right—you weren't here then, Teacher. A land abandoned by the great one is merely fodder to be devoured!"
Pan, Rozalin, and Yuria kept orbiting him, saying things that might or might not have been sincere.
No—those three were just conspicuously obvious. The other students were hardly any different.
"Well, if it's the teacher, sure."
"Of course. He's great. Absolutely. Honestly, hasn't Cassian been underappreciated in our Belmein Kingdom?"
"Come to think of it, not just Belmein. Our teacher's accomplishments deserve way more recognition than he gets."
"Does the Academy even pay him properly?"
"What's our teacher's salary, I wonder?"
"He's the world's greatest swordsman...... at least ten million gold, right?"
"Come on. It's gotta be a hundred million at least."
The conversations looped between realistic and oddly off-target.
Cassian pointedly pretended not to hear and turned to Zelta.
"What do you think?"
"I think even a hundred million is cheap."
"......Not about that."
Cassian tapped the map.
Zelta caught himself with an oops and refocused on the meeting.
"From what people say, it's less a village and more of a market. Like an oasis in a desert."
Aislard's roaming people gathered at specific locations to barter necessities and sell goods.
At certain times, continent-linked merchant guilds set up shop there.
That was where children were sold and food was traded.
People exchanged information and goods where many converged.
"We kept looking for a village or town, so we kept missing it. It was never a village or a town—that's why every search came up empty."
"If it's not a permanent settlement, the resident population won't be large."
"Same goes for the merchants. They don't stay year-round—they only come at specific times...... but we're still going, right?"
"There's something to be gained, so yes."
"Then give me a moment."
Zelta conferred with students, mercenaries, and soldiers.
Shortly after, he returned with a fairly young mercenary and a young man who looked about eighteen.
A familiar face.
He was from the family Cassian had personally rescued and brought in.
"This mercenary operated in Aislard. And this fellow says he knows the area well and volunteered to guide us."
"I worked as a mercenary here for about five years. I know the local customs and culture fairly well."
"I—I'm......"
The mercenary finished his introduction, and the young man stammered as if trying to say something.
His eyes were reddening—there was clearly an emotional dimension to this.
Cassian read his heart and asked quietly.
"What's your name?"
"Oh, uh, Dulli—Dulliang."
"Dulli Dulliang?"
"N-no! Dulliang! Just Dulliang."
"All right. Take your time and tell me. Why did you volunteer?"
At Cassian's question, Dulliang bowed his head deeply, squeezed his eyes shut, and spoke.
"I—I was at my father's side when my sibling was s-sold."
Cassian's gaze darkened slightly at the confession.
"I, I......"
The young man fumbled through words that were barely comprehensible.
An Aislard dialect tangled with tears made the precise meaning hard to grasp.
But the heart behind them came through clearly.
"You want to take responsibility."
At Cassian's words, the young man nodded, tears streaming down his face.
He hadn't made the decision to sell his sibling.
But he had been there when it happened.
He wanted to bear the responsibility of having been present.
"All right. You may."
It was the strongest possible motivation.
Cassian placed a hand on his shoulder.
"We'll keep the traveling party to a minimum. Everyone else needs to start preparing for the journey south."
"That's a large group."
"We burned through a lot of our food supply in the fighting. We've got wounded, too. No telling what Triban might do, so we need to be well-prepared."
Cassian called for Duke Crownhardt.
"For a situation like this, it'd be best if you led the descent personally, Duke. You handle variables better."
"Can you attach Pan?"
"Of course."
Having two Master-level fighters was far more reassuring than just Experts.
"I'll attach the Spear God as well."
Three Masters could handle virtually any contingency.
Duke Crownhardt nodded in satisfaction and issued orders to his soldiers.
No matter that the Duchy of Crownhardt's knights and soldiers had been absorbed into Akarind Academy—at their core, they were the Duke's private forces.
His commands were seamless, and their movements were equally crisp.
The response was actually smoother than when Cassian gave orders.
'Nice.'
That was precisely what pleased Cassian.
He was just an instructor, after all.
Outside of teaching swordsmanship, he had no special talent.
Tasks like this were better delegated to capable, suited people.
"Yuria, Rozalin, Hati. Let's go."
He trimmed the accompanying party to a minimum.
The most threatening demon in Aislard seemed to have been dealt with, but if something else happened, he'd need backup.
Even with this demon alone, he couldn't have handled it solo.
After entrusting the rearguard to Duke Crownhardt, they immediately set off toward the market.
***
"We call it the Cave."
"Is it really inside a cave?"
"There's a cave at the base of the mountain—used to be a mine. They renovated it to block the outside wind."
A cave system.
One of the hypotheses they'd formed while searching for a settlement.
"We went fairly deep inside. Two hours? After that the interior warms up. Opens into a wide space."
"Two hours—underground?"
"I don't know for certain. The path was narrow and winding."
Narrow and winding.
A wrong move and they could be trapped inside.
If remnants of the Underground Magic Tower or Avril's machinations remained within—
While he was weighing that concern.
"Teacher!"
"Hm?"
"This."
Rozalin held out a Fantasy.
The Fantasy from the Ice Wall demon they'd felled at Aislard's edge.
"We've been calling it the Ice Wall, as a working name."
"Ice Wall. Straightforward."
"I talked to Ulf about it too—she says a demon like this never existed before."
Never existed—meaning in the life before the regression.
"The Aura-like Demonic Energy amplification, and this barrier-type demon—both new."
"So this one appeared because of something in our current timeline?"
"Yes. Ulf thinks it's an Anti to expansion."
"Expansion......"
The scope was broad.
Not something internal to Aislard—something about humanity as a whole.
"In the previous life, humans kept shrinking. World Eater, Ocean Hall—they lost territory continuously and were compressed into the Empire."
But this life was different.
Humanity was pushing into wider territory.
Knights' Aura awakenings had made survival possible even in the harshest environments.
Aura had also made fighting various monsters far easier.
Arguably, the sphere of human activity had expanded beyond what it had been even before the demons appeared.
This very field trip across the Belmein Kingdom was proof.
Brief as it was, the students had cleared nearly twenty times the monsters that the kingdom's knight order used to manage.
"So the demon erected a boundary to stop outward movement, according to her."
"Then going forward......"
"Yes. Unknown Antis will keep emerging. An Anti-Aura, for instance."
If Aura had become universal for humanity, an Anti-Magic equivalent targeting it could appear.
"We'll need to prepare."
"Yep. On that note—this Fantasy. Its ability seems to be in that direction."
Rozalin drew her sword and affixed the Fantasy to the hilt.
It glowed an icy blue, radiating frosty light.
"Hah!"
Rozalin swung, and the ground surged upward to form a wall.
"Boundary creation. And a pretty sturdy one."
It looked like the earth had been pushed up by tectonic force.
I walked over and tapped it—the soil had absorbed Rozalin's distinct Aura signature and was functioning as a kind of shield.
The very ability that had frustrated us during the Ice Wall fight.
"A defensive Fantasy."
"Nice."
"......!"
A sharp intake of breath.
It was Dulliang.
He stared at Rozalin as though he'd witnessed a miracle, eyes wide as saucers.
His hands were trembling visibly—deeply shaken.
"Oh, this? It's like magic. Don't worry about it. You'll see it a lot from now on."
Rozalin waved it off as nothing.
True—Fantasies were so routine for us that this felt natural, but for someone seeing it for the first time......
'Wait. Something just......'
A spark of an idea flashed through my mind.
Fantasy, familiarity, terrain alteration, Ice Wall, sword, Aura......
Ah.
"Rozalin."
"Yep?"
"That cave we're heading to. I just thought of how to deal with it."
***
It was at the base of a colossal mountain range covering a third of Aislard.
The cave entrance was, indeed, tiny.
Four people walking abreast would fill it.
The mountain range, by contrast, was overwhelmingly vast.
The ridgeline was steep, and at some point sheer rock walls like canyon cliffs jutted up, filling the view.
Monster cries seemed to ride the wind from the crevices between, drifting out like a ghostly wail.
If the exterior was like this, there was no telling what waited inside.
"Then I'll bring it out."
So rather than playing to their tune, they'd set their own.
"World Eater. Ice Wall. If you would."
He had Fantasies perfectly suited to reshaping terrain at will.
Sword Intent rose, and at his will, the earth trembled.
KUGURUNG!
The cave expanded, and the mountain pulled back.
A vast space surged upward from below. Every light fixture in the tunnels shattered.
Traps detonated. People in hiding screamed.
Demons and monsters laced with Demonic Energy, along with the humans among them, were buried under rock and earth, howling.
Innocent people lost consciousness and were ejected to the surface.
One criterion.
Whether they were emitting Demonic Energy.
And at last.
"Bingo."
Rozalin grinned.
The Aislard market had been pulled whole onto the surface.