Paladin Of The End Vol 3.1 Prologue

 

Paladin Of The End Vol 3.1 Chapter Prologue

Deep in Beast Woods, the domain of its great lord—the Lord of Holly—had been transformed into a hell of swirling miasma, rotten leaves, and withered trees. Misshapen figures spilled out in droves from the paths ahead leading into the center of the lord’s domain. They were low-ranked demons called Spawn.

Under refreshing early summer sunshine ill-suited to this place, we sprinted through dead trees that reminded me of the ribs of a rotten corpse.

“Menel!”

“On it!”

Silver hair fluttered. Menel came to a halt, spread his arms, and called out to the fae in a clear voice.

“‘Fairies of all kinds, faint spirits, those who play in the twilight and the morning mist—’”

As I listened to him incant behind me, I moved forward with my favorite spear, Pale Moon.

“‘Awaken! Your gentle guardian, the lord of the woods, is in crisis! Now is the time to repay the kindness you have been shown!’”

Nature’s power had been weakened in this place swirling with noxious gas. The fairies here had lost their power, and their sense of self had begun to dissipate, but Menel’s strong call began to restore it. Even I could feel the fairies beginning to congregate around him, as if drawn to his clear voice.

A natural power great enough to send shivers down my spine was beginning to gather where he stood.

“‘Grip your blades, nock your bows! Arrow of Salamander, Hammer of Gnome, Spear of Undine, Blade of Sylph...’”

Knowing I could count on him, I focused all my attention on the approaching Spawn, which were shaped like vaguely person-shaped clay figures made by children. Brandishing my spear, I impaled them and swept them away one after another.

“‘Now the horns of war hath sounded! These arrogant invaders—’”

His incantation had come to its final line. With a powerful yell, I tackled one of the Spawn with my shield, sent it flying into the incoming horde, and then took a huge leap backwards to the side.

“‘—May the Great Four damn them all!’”

The instant he finished, a storm of death erupted before my eyes. Flaming arrows, suddenly fired, struck the enemies like a volley from a team of professional archers. Huge hammers of rock rose, blowing away miasma as they lifted into the air, then smashed down upon the demons. Clear water spurted out of lakes of sludge, drew helices in the air, and bored through the demons’ chests. And in the distance, blades of raging wind scattered the miasma and sent head after enemy head flying. It was a full-scale attack by the elementals who had responded to Menel’s call with furious cries of their own.

“Will! Let’s go!”

“Got it!”

We rushed onward, stepping over the fallen corpses of the Spawn. Whatever had poisoned the Lord of Holly’s domain and corrupted the natural cycle of these woods was just ahead. We ran, kicking up the sickly, fallen leaves.

Just in front of the old stone arch that formed the entrance to the center of the lord’s domain were two demons, both of which looked like a cross between a person and a crocodile. One had a hooked spear in hand, and the other a long, sharp sword. I guessed they were about two meters in height. Their heads brought dinosaurs to mind, and they had tough scales, rubbery skin, and thick muscles. There were sharp spikes on the ends of their peculiarly long tails. They were Commander-ranked demons called vraskuses.

“Watch out for the tail spikes!”

“Ya. You take the spear one!”

We kept it brief and split to the left and right. The vraskuses followed suit and headed towards us, each aiming for its own opponent.

I took a single breath and slowed down before finally stopping in a defensive stance and pointing the blade of my spear directly at the vraskus as it closed in at a speed halfway between a walk and a run.

We were almost within a spear’s distance of each other when it abruptly stopped in its tracks, as if it was unsure of itself. Its reptilian eyes rolled unblinkingly over me, and the vraskus tried circling around to my right and then my left, thrusting its hooked spear in my direction several times. With slight foot movements, I kept myself facing the demon and my blade pointed towards it. The vraskus growled, seemingly frustrated. It couldn’t find an opening to attack.

While keeping that distance between us, I very slowly relaxed my stance in a way almost too subtle to notice and created an opportunity for the vraskus to exploit. Sure enough, it lunged out with its hooked spear, trying to take that advantage. With a grunt, I slammed my own spear against it so that it caught and forced the hooked spear downwards. Refusing the vraskus any time to react, I thrust Pale Moon forward in retaliation and penetrated straight through the vraskus’s hard scales and then its heart.

The demon let out a choked cry of pain. I drew my spear back swiftly and stabbed twice more for good measure, still not allowing a counterattack.

When it came to demons of this rank, it often took a lot more for an injury to be fatal than it would for a human. If I didn’t make sure the vraskus was dead, it wouldn’t be surprising if it continued to fight me like mad, even with a hole punched through its heart.

I pulled the blade out once more and watched. The vraskus collapsed, its large body hitting the ground knees first. The corpse turned to ash and crumbled away. I breathed out, and a nostalgic voice revived at the back of my mind.

— I could just charge straight in there and lop its head off.

I chuckled to myself. That was what my dad, Blood, had said when he’d once rated the strength of a vraskus. Unfortunately, I had yet to reach his level. I didn’t know how much more training I’d need to catch up with Blood, but I felt as though I was at least close enough now to see his back in the distance.

An energetic shout from beside me told me that Menel’s battle was also finished.

After the two sized each other up for a while, Menel’s vraskus had shielded itself with one of its arms, which it was obviously prepared to lose, and charged at him. However, gnomes had grabbed its ankles from behind, causing it to lose its balance. Menel hadn’t cast a spell to do that; he was in perfect communion with the fairies, and they were carrying out his will. It was something only an expert could have pulled off.

Menel stepped forward decisively and forced his dagger into the demon, then channeled some kind of spell down the blade, causing an explosion in the vraskus’s torso. The creature twitched and convulsed, expelled some kind of white smoke, and collapsed. It was over.

“Sweet. And I’ll take this, too.” Menel showed no hesitation in snatching the longsword from the body as it crumbled to ashes. It looked like quite a fine weapon, with a shiny, metallic gleam to the steel of its straight blade.

“The altar for the lord of the forest should be... through here,” I said.

“If Commander demons are the gatekeepers, then...”

“Yeah.”

Whatever had come here was a force to be reckoned with. We exchanged looks, renewed our sense of caution, and stepped through the stone arch into the true heart of the Lord of Holly’s domain.

◆

The domain had been turned into a stinking, toxic bog. While Menel was busily casting Waterwalk on the two of us, I increased our resistance to the toxic air with the prayer of Anti-Poison.

I took a good look at our surroundings and saw that beyond the withered forest’s curtain of broken branches and discolored leaves, there was a huge old tree. Its height wasn’t so different from the trees surrounding it, but it was obviously thicker. In fact, its trunk was so big and so thick that when I attempted to estimate its circumference by imagining my arms wrapped around it, I immediately felt foolish for even trying. Once we got closer, it would probably look like nothing more or less than a sheer wall of rock.

“Menel.”

“Yeah. That’s the Lord of Holly. He rules over this region of forest in winter.”

Around the old tree, roots as thick as bridges undulated like waves on the ocean’s surface. They were stained black half along their length, probably affected by the poisonous swamp that was covering the ground. Surrounded by those enormous, heaving black roots, there was a stone altar.

“That’s gotta be it,” Menel said.

As we approached, I could hear a Word of Creation booming out. I could tell just by the way it resonated: this was a hex. It was blasphemy. It sounded like a pot boiling and bubbling with all the world’s negative emotions—hatred, resentment, anger, contempt, mockery...

It was a Taboo Word, a type of Word which good sorcerers kept sealed away in the recesses of libraries, concealed from the eyes, and which they treated as strictly outside their fields of study. They were cursed Words that could make air and water go bad, earth parch, and fire weaken and die.

Something was there, speaking that which should never be spoken.

I approached it slowly, remaining alert to my surroundings. With the art of Waterwalk, my feet floated above the poisonous bog and created ripples on its surface as I moved.

The demon standing atop the enormous altar, its arms spread wide as it recited Words, looked like a person, for the most part. It had a burly, muscular body that was covered with hair, and a rugged face that looked as though it had been roughly chiseled out of a rock wall. The strangest thing about it, however, was the huge pair of antlers that were growing from its head; they reminded me of a moose. The demon looked at us, and its recitation slowed to a stop.

“What happened to the gatekeepers?” it asked in fluent Western Common Speech.

“What do you think?” Menel asked back.

Seeing the longsword in Menel’s hands, the horned demon nodded and hummed in understanding.

I was growing increasingly tense.

“I see. If I’m not mistaken... you are Sir William, the Faraway Paladin. And you are Meneldor, of Swift Wings.”

He had intelligence and the ability to gather and process information. This demon was in a completely different class than those that were ranked Soldier or Commander.

“A General...” I muttered. “It’s a horned wilderdemon... a cernunnos.”

The wilderdemon heard me and grinned. “So two noble warriors are here... This will speed things along.”

The moment he said it, I sensed things rising all around us. Menel and I had both been roughly aware of their presence, but all the same, this was an ambush. Bizarrely shaped demons appeared from the shadows of the tree’s enormous roots. Some were a cross between a buck and a bull, while others were snake-lizard hybrids.

“They must die here,” the wilderdemon said. Following his words, the other demons prepared to attack.

“Menel, is this distance okay?”

“More than enough. Back me up.”

Menel slowly touched one of the Lord of Holly’s blackened roots. “Lord of Holly, half of the Twins and he who rules the woods from the summer to the winter solstice...”

An oak-leaf pattern had formed on the back of Menel’s pale white hand. With both his hands on the root and his eyes closed, Menel looked almost like a priest in the middle of prayer. Realizing something, the cernunnos tried to give an order to the demons, but it was too late.

“Thy Twin, the Lord of Oak, entrusted me with this...”

A mysterious power flowed from his hand into the root. Although it had blackened and lost its strength, the root now began to hear a pulse, almost like a heartbeat, from the trunk of the old tree.

“The power that makes a lord a lord. I bestow it now upon thee.”

The ground shook and slowly, the roots of the old tree began to move. They ensnared the terrible demons and dragged them into the bog. Squelching sounds and the screams of demons echoed for a while, and then there was silence.

“You pests... So the Lord of Oak was already yours...” The cernunnos had been watching over this from atop the altar. He was quick at regaining his composure; he’d already contained the anger and unease I’d seen on his face for just an instant. “But unless you defeat me, it all amounts to the same.”

The cernunnos muttered a Word, and a halberd formed in his hands. He stood ready for battle.

“I will,” I replied. “For the sake of these woods—” I drew a breath, then held my spear at the ready as I spoke the next words. “—I swear it on the flame of Gracefeel, goddess of eternal flux!”

I charged headlong towards him.

◆

A roar filled the air. The halberd smashed against a corner of the altar, sending countless shards of stone flying towards me. I knocked them away with my shield by reflex, defending myself and Menel, who was behind me.

Right now, Menel was in the middle of transferring the sovereignty of the woods to the Lord of Holly after having received it from the Lord of Oak. He wasn’t completely defenseless, but he was very vulnerable, and there was nothing he could do about it.

“Flame, repel the darkness!” I offered a prayer, constructing a shining barrier around Menel. This cernunnos was a strong enemy. If he suddenly turned his attacks on Menel during the battle, it was possible that I might not be able to fully protect him.

I’d given up the initiative to erect that shield. Intending to take advantage, the cernunnos’s decision was to incant a Word.

“De fumo ad fla—”

But that was a bad move.

“Tacere, os!!”

My words, uttered with the best timing I could manage, shut the cernunnos’s mouth tight. The next moment, there was a deep boom, and an angry storm of toxic smoke and furious fire erupted around the cernunnos with a force that could have been mistaken for an explosion. Its Word had misfired, just as I’d intended it to.

— The single best opportunity to kill a powerful sorcerer is when that sorcerer casts a large spell.

That was what Gus had taught me. Long incantations were not something to do unless you were confident you could recite them in their entirety.

But it seemed that my opponent had been anticipating this move as well.

As the smoke spread to the left and right, I chose the right and ran towards the cernunnos, thrusting my spear into the fog. There was the high-pitched squeal of metal grating on metal. The halberd and the spear caught on each other, and groaned under each other’s pressure.

“Hmm. You switched instantly from concentrating on prayer to discerning the nature of my Word and interrupting. Very good, very good.”

There was a gust of wind, and the smoke dissipated. I frowned; I couldn’t see any obvious wounds on the cernunnos at all.

He probably had an almost complete resistance to poison and fire, or maybe all magical phenomena. I guessed that the reason he’d been able to incant without hesitation was because he knew there would be no problem even if it backfired on him. If he could speak the whole thing, so much the better; but it would serve as a smokescreen even if he couldn’t. It was a no-lose decision, and he had ended up using the smoke to draw even closer.

He knew he had an extremely powerful resistance, and he knew that I was a user of blessings and magic. He had read the situation well; it was no wonder he was so composed. It was probably fair to call him a strong opponent. But I had ways to deal with strong opponents, too.

With an aggressive shout, I put strength into my arms, trying to force the halberd down. Taken by surprise, the cernunnos grunted and resisted with his own strength.

If he had a resistance to magic, I merely needed to settle this in close combat. The strike of a blade had proven effective even against the demons’ High King that Blood and his allies had once fought. I couldn’t imagine that there was any demon with greater defense than that. This demon had a physical body like any other, and that meant that some kind of physical attack would probably work on him, whether that was cutting, thrusting, or striking.

Our clashing weapons came violently apart, we both leaped backwards, and then a furious battle started, the two of us running along the tops of roots as wide as roads as we exchanged attacks. Our positions swapped and shifted at dizzying speed and attacks came from all directions, sometimes even from above or below, before we collided face-to-face once more with a crash of metal on metal louder than anything before it.

The spear and the halberd interlocked, twisted, and groaned as both of us tried to force the other’s weapon down. Veins stood out on the cernunnos’s thick arms, and its muscles bulged. I got myself into a solid stance, grit my teeth, pressed down with greater force, and gradually, my spear began to overpower the halberd.

“A-Are you human?!” The color was draining from the cernunnos’s face.

I thought that was a horrible question. These were nothing more than the results of my training.

Breathing out slowly, I pushed even harder. The cernunnos let out a desperate roar, and tried suddenly applying his strength in another direction and using footwork to shift his body around. As he tried to mask his inadequacy in strength with these moves, I pushed ever harder, relying only on my muscles.

He probably didn’t have much experience with being overpowered in a straight-out contest of strength, and I wasn’t going to be beaten by little gimmicks like this from someone whose inexperience and uncertainty was plain to see. I used my trained muscles to push and push until I was totally in control.

Now was the time to use technique.

I shouted and yanked the spear in a different direction. The spear sprang upwards, and its blade connected directly with the wilderdemon’s enormous antlers, exactly as I’d intended. A look of shock spread over its face. I deliberately didn’t apply enough power to crush them; instead, I smacked the end of its long, moose-like antlers upwards.

Now then... if there were a pair of long antlers growing out of the head of a humanoid creature, and the end of those antlers were to be violently forced upwards, what would happen to the creature’s neck?

“Ghk—”

The answer: it would bend and twist very easily. It was simple physics, and there was very little the cernunnos could do about it.

I caught the blade in its antlers and tugged the wilderdemon towards me. It stumbled wildly. Because it was being dragged around by the antlers, its neck was being wrenched about, and it couldn’t keep its balance.

There is a close connection between your sense of balance and the angle of your neck, which is why it suddenly becomes difficult to balance on one foot when you’re looking directly upwards. All that considered, no experiments would be necessary to answer whether a person could keep their balance while having their neck forcibly twisted.

I dragged the demon to the ground and flowed into a downward swing of the spear. A spear wasn’t just a stabbing weapon; the handle I held in my hand was over two meters long and made to withstand full-force collisions. If I swung it down with all my might, that strength and its centrifugal force would come together to make my spear nothing less than an absolutely brutal blunt instrument.

I slammed it down. I heard, and felt, the demon’s antlers and skull break. A roar of pain rang through the forest.

Even then, the cernunnos made a frenzied attempt to fight back—it was a General, after all—but that resistance was very short-lived.

◆

By the time I’d made sure the wilderdemon had turned to ash, and claimed the halberd left behind, Menel had already completed his work.

“Phew.”

I hadn’t noticed because I’d been incredibly preoccupied, but he looked exhausted. His silver hair was dull with dirt, and unless I was seeing things, even his cheeks looked a little sunken. Menel had been the one with the most exhausting job this time around, so it was probably only natural.

All this had started on the day of the summer solstice, when snowdrops had blossomed out of season. By the time a few days had passed, a completely peculiar situation had developed, where all the fruit was overripe and falling rotten off the trees, and the trees were growing rapidly and dying at random, and eventually, even the wild animals and the fairies were going mad and wreaking havoc.

Menel was quick to notice something was wrong, and told me with a sour look on his face that the woods were being thrown out of kilter. Since we happened to be stopping in Whitesails at the time, His Excellency Ethel asked us to resolve the situation, and we accepted. And where we headed was the domain of the Lord of Oak.

According to Menel, the woods in the area were ruled from the winter solstice to the summer solstice by the Lord of Oak, and from the summer to the winter by the Lord of Holly.

He told me that on the winter solstice, the day that marks the return to spring when the sun recovers its shine, the Lord of Oak takes over sovereignty from the Lord of Holly. Then the sun rises and sets, and when it reaches the summer solstice, when all its best days are over, the Lord of Oak hands its sovereignty back to the Lord of Holly once more.

As he described it, it was the relationship between the two great and ancient Twins, also referred to as the Fraternal Kings, that maintained the cycle of nature in these woods. That was why we’d headed to see the Lord of Oak. The natural order of the woods had gone wrong the moment the summer solstice passed, so Menel had reasoned that the Lord of Oak must not have handed over the sovereignty for some reason, or perhaps was in a state where he couldn’t hand it over.

But that turned out not to be the case. In the woods’ other domain, the incarnation of the Lord of Oak appeared before us and told us that the problem was the Lord of Holly, who was in a state where he couldn’t accept sovereignty over the woods. Because of this, the Lord of Oak said, the sovereignty had remained with him for too many cycles of the sun and moon, and many abnormalities were starting to occur in the woods.

The sovereignty the Twins possessed was a powerful thing and would bring only harm unless it was passed into the proper hands at the proper time. It would not be long before the forest suffered a critical failure that would damage it so badly that it would be unable to fully recover for a good many years.

I asked if there was any way to surrender the sovereignty, and the Lord of Oak answered that it could not be relinquished unless someone showed himself strong enough to be fit to receive it, as the Lord of Holly had for him and as he had for the Lord of Holly. His voice sounded as if he had given up on everything and accepted his doom.

“Then leave it to me,” Menel said vehemently. “Great Lord of Oak, please, entrust your sovereignty to me.”

But the incarnation of the Lord of Oak told him it was impossible. Perhaps it could have been done, he said, if Menel was one of the earliest generation of elves created by the god of the fae Rhea Silvia herself; but as he was, with his half-human blood, he wouldn’t last more than a month bearing the burden of the sovereignty of the woods.

“If I can last a whole entire month, we’re good. We two’ll solve the rest.”

The Lord of Oak was silent for a while, and then said, “But if the Lord of Holly is already lost, your soul will come to ruin after a month.”

“Ya, I guess it will.”

“Why would you go so far?”

“Because I swore to atone for my sins and live a positive, forward-looking life.” There wasn’t a hint of embarrassment in Menel’s voice as he told this to the lord of the woods. “That was the vow I made to a great god through my friend, who rescued the soul of someone I owed a lot to. That’s it, no other reason.”

The Lord of Oak fell quiet again. After a long silence, Menel’s self-imposed challenge earned his approval, and he declared that he would set a trial for Menel.

“This trial is a secret rite of the woods. You—strong warrior, wielder of magic, agent of the god of the flame—you have no right to join him.”

“I understand that,” I said. Menel and I looked at each other; I nodded to him, then turned back to the Lord of Oak and said, “I’ll wait. Right here, for as many days as it takes.”

“I’m not gonna take that long, brother.” Menel laughed and told me to quit worrying. Then he and the incarnation of the Lord of Oak left me behind and headed into the depths of the lord’s domain.

I never found out what happened in there, how much hardship Menel had to endure, or what he had to overcome. But after I had waited patiently for one night, he came back the following morning with a face full of fatigue, but smiling proudly in spite of it.

After that, we immediately headed for the domain of the Lord of Holly.

The rest of the journey proceeded wonderfully swiftly. Now that Menel had received sovereignty over the woods, not a single tree or bush obstructed his path. We discovered demons in the Lord of Holly’s domain, destroyed them, and that was everything up to the present moment.

“...”

I was kind of getting the feeling that problems caused by demons were on the rise again around here recently.

There were some that we’d handled ourselves, and others that we’d just heard reports of from other adventurers after they’d solved the issue independently. They were all kinds of different incidents, really, but... now that things had escalated to demons capable of breaching the domain of a forest lord and laying a curse upon it, I felt that things were getting a little bit serious.

As I wondered what was behind all of this, my mind was filled with a hazy sense of anxiety difficult to put into words. It was like I was overlooking something, but I had no idea what.

My thoughts were interrupted by a voice.

“You, children of men.”

◆

I looked to see another person’s figure at the altar. Wait, was it actually a person? People didn’t have skin like bark, and they certainly didn’t have plant leaves and ivy in place of scalp and facial hair. But both Menel and I had a familiarity with this figure’s appearance; the incarnation of the Lord of Oak had looked very similar.

“I am the Lord of Holly,” said the incarnation in a gentle tone. “Truly I thank you and commend you for your valor in removing those brazen invaders, and for your bravery in traveling to this domain to transfer the sovereignty. But first, I must restore order to these woods. A moment, if you will.”

The lord’s incarnation spread his arms. A recitation I couldn’t understand spun fluidly from his mouth. This Word was probably another of the woods’ secrets, and might even have been completely unknown to humans.

A short while after he began reciting, the ground gradually began to rumble. Tremors emanating from the old tree known as the Lord of Holly could be felt through the whole domain. They continued for a while, and then gradually settled. The moment they could no longer be felt, the change occurred.

Jets of clean water spurted one after another from the toxic bog that surrounded us. Menel could have done something similar when he had been in possession of the sovereignty, but not on anywhere near this scale. The poison was washed away with the force of a tsunami, and in no time at all, it had been diluted to nothing.

Many trees had succumbed to the cursed poison and withered, some falling down tragically and others dying upright; but now, life sprouted from them and grew before my eyes, becoming seedlings, then saplings, then adult trees, and blossoming with all the flowers of summer. A fresh scent drove out the foul odor. Plants, flowers, and mushrooms began to spring up around the trees. The life of the woods returned to the poison-damaged earth. Leaves grew, the wind danced, and glittering beams of sunlight shone through the trees.

“Wow...” Like watching a film being played in reverse, it was a sight of rebirth that shook the soul. Even Menel was captivated by it. “Lord of the Woods, huh. He’s using that crazy power like it’s a natural extension of his body...”

Menel had groaned with pain every night while the sovereignty had been with him. Even though he hardly even used its power, the simple act of holding it within his body had caused him such great pain that even my benediction couldn’t ease it.

Menel shrugged a little, accepting this as the difference between a person and a Lord of the Woods. But then the Lord of Holly spoke, having now completed his recitation in its entirety. “This is thy future also, child of man and fae.”

Those words seemed to stun Menel. Finally, he said, “What?”

“The sovereignty of the woods dwelt in thy body for a time. Gone though it now may be, the blood and power of man and fae already flowing in thee have begun to incline to the fae and steadily become more fit for a Lord of the Woods.”

“Huh?” I froze in surprise as well.

“Worry not. The change is not immediate.”

Easier said than done, I thought... and Menel still looked frozen.

“Umm... What’s going to happen to him?” I asked.

The Lord of Holly answered, but to Menel. “If thou dost not neglect thy training, thou wilt live far longer than a century, and thereafter become a new Lord of the Woods.”

At about that point, Menel finally started working again. “Ohh... ohh, uh...” Menel clapped a hand to his forehead as if he were fishing up some old memory. “Now that you mention it, back in my old home, I heard the oldest of the elves talking about this once. Elves acknowledged by a forest lord form a contract with him, and when their life draws to an end, they go into the forest before passing away. Their body becomes a wild animal, or a boulder, or a tree...”

And their soul became a lord who ruled over the forest.

“Yes. Thou madest such a contract with my brother, the Lord of Oak.”

“That’s not what I thought I was doing.”

“Be that as it may, such is signified by thy acceptance of the woods’ sovereignty, sapling.”

“Can I refuse?”

“It is possible. Thou could die as a human, were that thy desire.”

“I see...”

“Think not of it now, but the time shall come.”

Menel nodded, his jade eyes remaining firmly fixed on the Lord of the Woods. His expression was serious.

“And to thou, human child, disciple of the flame. There is something I must tell thee.” The Lord of Holly turned his gaze to me. “Thou surely knowest of the mountain range to the west, rich in reddish-brown stone.”

“Do you mean... the Rust Mountains?”

Their color was said to come from large deposits of red iron ore.

“Indeed.”

The lord’s incarnation nodded and opened its mouth. What followed was a fluid and foreboding stream of words.

“In a future not far off for you men, the fire of dark disaster shall catch in the mountains of rust. That fire shall spread, and this land may all be consumed.”

“Uh...”

“The wilderdemon also came from those mountains of rust. That land is now a den of demons, wherein the great lord of miasma and wicked flame slumbereth upon the mountain people’s gold. Fightest or acceptest thou this future, be thou ready, for that day shall not be long in coming.” The words spoken from the mouth of the Lord of Holly echoed with the weight of a prophecy around the forest domain.

“Aren’t you gonna do anything about it?” Menel asked him pointedly.

However, the Lord of Holly’s reply was blunt. “If I am to perish, that too is fate.”

He seemed to be passive by nature. The Lord of Oak had been the same.

“To us, the fire of destruction leads to rebirth. Humans may again disappear from this continent, demons may flourish, the lord of wicked fire may roar as he will. It is no matter; the woods will live on.”

All around, newly grown trees that had sprouted from those that had fallen waved in the breeze. Nothing more needed to be said.

“Therefore, child of man, sapling: this is a warning, and also my duty.”

It was his duty to us, who had righted the problems with the sovereignty and fought for no reward.

“I promise you a bountiful harvest this autumn.”

With that, the incarnation of the Lord of Holly disappeared.

◆

“Lord of the Woods. God...”

The two of us talked as we walked back.

When we traveled through the forest, Menel would normally use his elementalist techniques to get the trees to open a path for us, but the routes he took now were... more than that. He ducked behind trees and between large boulders, taking me along trails with unreal scenery and cavorting fairies glittering gold.

“This way.”

“A-Are you sure?”

“No sweat. I can tell. Uh, I’ve become able to tell.”

On the boundary between the invisible world inhabited by those not human and the transient world in which we spent our lives were the fairy trails. They were a mystery of the woods, and any ordinary person who became lost and wandered into them would face the consequences. Menel passed through these trails one after another as if they were simple shortcuts.

The air was cool, and it felt like the wind itself was sparkling. Night and day traded places at a dizzying pace. The leaves of the trees, wriggling like living creatures, were even more vibrant and richer in color than during the season of new green leaves. And when darkness fell, it was deeper than any night in the transient world. The glittering fairies blinked on and off in the jet-blackness as they laughed together and fluttered from place to place.

I couldn’t deny that the sight was fantastic, but...

“If I lose sight of you, I’m going to be in big trouble...”

From all over, I could hear the sweet yet ominous laughter of the fairies. Not all of the laughs I could hear were welcoming; some were laughs intended to threaten the foreign humans, others the kind of insulting and mocking laughs that might feature in disturbing fairy tales. It was scary.

An unusually powerful concentration of mana was swirling around. My skin was tingling the same way it did when I used a powerful Word. I swallowed.

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna lose sight of you. Even if you do get lost, I can search you out and pull you back in.”

“I didn’t know you could do that...”

“Can now, yeah. Not too happy about it, to be honest.”

It seemed that having once had the sovereignty dwelling inside him, its effects were still lingering. He’d been a talented elementalist in the first place, and now he had climbed a few rungs higher still—or maybe I should say he had been forcibly pulled up.

“I was planning on getting there on my own,” Menel muttered. It sounded like things were complicated. “Eh, whatever. Power’s power, whether it’s handed to me or not. I’ve just gotta get used to it and make it my own. Same thing in the end.”

As always, Menel was very swift to accept and adapt. He must have been thinking that power was power, whether you were given it or developed it yourself, and the only question was whether you could wield it effectively when you wanted to.

“Well, stuff like powers, I can go through and test out one by one. The real question is the whole ‘becoming a forest lord’ thing. What’s your view on that, Will?”

“It’s pretty incredible, but it’s such an overwhelming thing to imagine I don’t really know what to think, I guess.”

“I know what you mean.”

I couldn’t see anything particularly different about Menel’s profile as he walked alongside me. Just like usual, he was walking at a fixed pace while occasionally glancing around to make sure nothing was out of the ordinary. “Longer than a century, as the Lord of Holly put it... We’re talking about after my life runs out in two, three hundred years, maybe even further in the future than that... a world that far in the future.”

I found it very hard to imagine. “I’ll be dead by then.”

“Yeah.” Menel nodded. “I’ll keep watch over your grave, see how the lives of your kids and your grandkids play out... Well, I guess I’ll be pretty settled by then, come to think of it.”

“You were planning to do all that...”

“Damn right I was. You’ve done way too much for me.” He didn’t even hesitate.

I had no idea how to respond to something like that. But I could tell he was serious, so I just nodded solemnly and didn’t make a joke out of it.

“But yeah... After all that’s over, maybe becoming one with the mountains and the woods wouldn’t be a bad way to live.”

I kept quiet and listened to him muse.

“Half-elves have to choose one or the other eventually. The elves’ way of life, existing in the woods, living eternally with the water and the soil as something like the fae; or the humans’ way of life, burning bright as a roaring fire, and vanishing with the wind.”

Menel said that choosing was the fate of all who were born between two races like that.

“I’ll disappear into the forest, become an old tree like those ones, see where the things you’re gonna have achieved end up. Then, I’ll slowly wither and fall, and return to the great circle. Sounds good to me.” He laughed. “You said ‘only in dying is there life’ before, right, in one of your sermon things? You know, that one where you were really uncomfortable and awkward.”

“What?! That’s so mean, I did my best! But yes, I did say that.”

“Life’s long, so the way I was thinking of it, I’d just collapse and die someday and that’d be that. I didn’t really feel it before, but I’m finally sort of getting what you meant.”

Life always comes back to death in the end. So starting to think about “how you want to die” inevitably comes back to “how you want to live.”

“I want to see where your achievements end up. And to do that, I’ll even change the way I live my life if I have to.” He gave me an awkward smile. It made my chest tighten.

“I might not be able to do anything that big, you know.”

“You kidding?” Menel couldn’t help a small laugh and a shrug. “What do you think you’ve done since you met me? You killed a wyvern barehanded, you killed a chimera, you’re all the rage with the troubadours, with several adventure stories to your name, and just now you hunted down a General-class demon and beat it one on one. You’ve made legends already. And I’ll bet you’re gonna have that same vacant look on your face when you make some more.”

He slapped my back roughly.

“I’ll fight beside you, and if I survive all the way to the end, I’ll wrap things up by vanishing into the depths of the woods. Of course, I’ll make sure to say something awesome and memorable before I disappear.”

“You’ll become legend.”

“Both of us will. Not bad, huh?”

“Yeah.”

That sounded like it might be a fun blueprint for the future. It was, of course, always possible that one of us would die in battle, and if it came to that, I didn’t know which of us would pass away first; but if we survived, I would definitely pass away before Menel. There was no way around that.

The thought felt kind of lonely, and I started to feel sorry for having to leave him. But if he could smile like that as he imagined the future, as things went, that had to be “not bad.”

“Say, Will. How do you wanna go?”

“Well, I’m not as decided on that as you.”

Menel’s eyes went a little wide as if he found that surprising. “Knowing you, I thought you’d have it all planned out.”

“The thing is...” I sighed heavily. “I do think about it, but everything just changes so fast!” I shouted it out in frustration. “I left my home, right, and the next thing I know I’m a paladin! And I blink again and I’m a feudal lord with everyone supporting me! And apparently Bee’s songs have reached the continent to the north too now... At this pace, there’s no way I can imagine where I’m gonna be in ten years’ time!”

Menel burst out laughing. “Human lives are short and intense, but you really take that to an extreme. I guess that’s a hero’s fate.”

“I’ll take being a hero if I have to. I just wish I could draw up a proper plan for my life...”

“A hero who plans out his life? That’s so unfitting it’s kind of funny.”

“So mean!”

We made jabs at each other for a while and laughed together. Then, unexpectedly, Menel stopped walking. As if checking something, he stared at the space between two trees, where there was nothing except total darkness.

“Here it is.” The silver-haired half-elf reached between the trees. When he did, they receded, as if giving way to him. Then the space shimmered, like the surface of water, or the air in scorching heat, and wind blew through.

Led by Menel, I took a single step forward into the shimmering space. For an instant, I felt a strange sensation similar to resurfacing after being underwater, and then, all at once, my field of vision widened.

“Huh...?”

There were no trees around me in either direction, and there was no gloom or darkness. I looked up and saw that bright sunlight was pouring down from the summer sun hanging in the middle of the sky. The summer sky was clear overhead, with cumulonimbus clouds far in the distance. I lowered my gaze. The road snaked gently off to the horizon, and on both sides was a series of partitioned fields, creating a patchwork of beautiful, natural colors. A gust of wind blew, and the vast fields of wheat swayed.

“Wait. This... is...”

No way.

“We’re out of Beast Woods. This is Wheat Road.”

“In one day?!”

I looked around as I said it, but this was definitely the Wheat Road I was familiar with. But that domain was in the deepest part of the woods. It was dozens of kilometers through the woods as the crow flies—maybe hundreds, I had no idea—and we’d traveled that rough road in a single day?

“That’s what a Fairy Trail is. It’s not like we can go anywhere with it, though. Just the places I know.”

“If you could, you’d be a weapon of war. Wow... the woods’ secrets are scary.”

I remembered what Blood had taught me: Never get in a fight with an elf in a forest.

Then, after taking one more step forward, I suddenly realized. “Isn’t this where I met you, and where we came out of the woods with Bee and Tonio, too?”

“Yeah, it is.”

There was a rush of wind. I heard the ears of wheat rustling in the field.

“It’s already been two years since we met, huh...”

I’d set off from the city of the dead, made friends, toppled a wyvern, become a paladin, and defeated demons and a chimera, and my efforts hadn’t ended there, either. Long and yet short, it had been a whirlwind period of my life.
By the solstice system, I was seventeen.