'It's just like then.'
Roberta thought of Rashid.
The old knight Rashid; it was just like when the demon he believed to be his son attacked Ulrich. Back then, Ulrich was also unharmed. No, he *had* been injured, but the injuries disappeared. As if they had never existed in the first place.
It was an astonishing recovery. Even seeing it again, it was hard to believe she wasn't seeing things. Could his endless stamina and seemingly infinite lifespan be related to this? She narrowed her eyes.
"I'm sorry. I couldn't save him."
Ulrich carried the corpse out of the pit. Only the upper half of the body remained, soaked in gastric juices. He had rummaged through the demon's stomach in the dirt where he couldn't even open his eyes to drag it out.
"...It's alright. Rather, we should be thanking you."
Duke Bailen seemed shaken, but he soon controlled his emotions and spoke. He shifted his gaze and said,
"Still, if it weren't for Lord Ditmarsken stepping in, Velido wouldn't have survived."
Velido, receiving Bailen's gaze, examined his own body and nodded to indicate he was alright. The wound from the pincer jaws had healed considerably thanks to Roberta's first aid. With a little more time, only a scar would remain.
"More importantly... are you alright, sir?"
"I'm fine. Just a little sore."
Ulrich let out a short sigh.
"Don't worry about me. This much is not a problem."
Roberta, who was treating Velido's injuries, looked up. She suddenly felt a strong sense of fatigue in his voice. But was it just her imagination? He quickly regained his usual composure.
"The problem is you all. You'll be encountering even more dangerous creatures than this from now on, but you're far too unguarded."
Roberta nodded, looking at the pit.
Looking back, they had been too careless. Wasn't the reason the two of them fell into the pit because they had wandered off the path on their own?
Spending several days in the snowy mountains and becoming accustomed to their ruggedness, coupled with the fact that no one had died so far, had created a sense of complacency that 'it's tough, but manageable'.
According to the demon bestiary Ulrich had written, the demons they had encountered in the mountains were only a small fraction, and there were far more dangerous demons than those, yet they had been so careless.
"Don't rely on me. I can't protect all of you."
"We will keep that in mind. And... could you give us a moment?"
When Ulrich nodded, Bailen approached Roberta.
"He spent a long time with him. If the Priest is able, I would like you to offer a prayer for him."
Roberta silently agreed. That was her job. She put her hands together, formed a mudra, and performed a brief ritual for his spirit.
After the ritual was over, Ulrich said,
"I'm sorry to say this, but we won't be able to stay here for long. This is the Ice Peninsula, and when night falls, it will be swarming with demons. We need to move to the next location before that."
"Understood."
They buried the body and left.
As Ulrich had warned, the crisis was just beginning.
A day later, another person died. While Ulrich and Roberta were out hunting, he had left the cave alone to relieve himself and never returned. In the morning, parts of his body were found nearby.
Three days later, they were attacked by a monstrous bird. It was larger than an adult yet moved swiftly, and there was even a moment when she was in danger. If Ulrich hadn't tripped her, she would have been pierced in the neck by its beak.
And the day after that, another person was injured. Fortunately, he survived, but he lost one of his legs and was unable to walk. Bailen carried him on his back.
#
"Lord Ditmarsken, is that the place we're looking for?"
Duke Bailen asked.
Ten days plus four since leaving Ditmarsken, a mountain began to appear on the horizon. It was one of the unnamed mountains of the Kaldorekai mountain range that bisected the Ice Peninsula, and its peak was high enough to pierce the clouds.
Why had they only seen such a high mountain now? Ulrich said that they had been able to see it since they came down from the mountains, but it had been indistinguishable from the sky due to the fog.
"Yes, Narvakayani has made its home somewhere around there."
Roberta flinched at the word 'somewhere'.
"You don't mean we have to go and find it, do you?"
"Don't worry. Nothing like that will happen."
"...That's a relief."
She sighed in relief and stroked her chest. Climbing the mountain again was terrible enough, but the thought of having to search for a nest made her head spin.
"Why do they live in such a place?"
"Because it's such a place, they think it's suitable for them to live in."
Suitable to live in? Because it's such a place?
"The environment of the Ice Peninsula is terrible from our human perspective, but it's nothing to a dragon. Rather, it's good. If they make their home in such a place, they can naturally prevent the intrusion of higher predators, can't they?"
Indeed, that makes sense, Roberta murmured.
Wasn't it said that the dragons she had encountered in literature were more powerful than any other race and familiar with mana? The trials that Roberta and her party had experienced would be nothing to a dragon.
"It feels strange that humans are the higher predators."
"It's true if you look at humans not as individuals but as a group."
Roberta stared at the mountain for a moment before chasing after Ulrich.
As the sun began to descend from the center of the sky, he led the group to the next base. It was a tower. Judging from the way the collapsed ramparts formed a snow-covered hill around it, it must have been a watchtower.
The first artificial structure she had seen since entering the Ice Peninsula looked like a square, single-story house because the upper part had fallen off.
Could it have been built by the dwarves or fairies who lived here long ago? Or was it built by the army of Emperor Taiwyn, who launched a failed expedition?
While she was examining the tower from the outside, the group lit a bonfire, and Ulrich took out the meat of the prey he had caught in the past and grilled it.
He euphemistically called it prey, but it was a demon. He didn't bring the entire demon he caught each time. He only took a portion of the flesh, and when asked why, he would only smile silently.
She had no intention of complaining about what they ate in a place like this, but she couldn't help but feel uneasy. She looked at Ulrich, who was cutting the lump of meat and hanging it over the bonfire, and asked,
"Why are there such demons here?"
"Isn't it because of the evil gods?"
The answer came not from Ulrich but from Duke Bailen.
"Kungkan, Takna, and Galpa, didn't they rebel against the creation of the main gods and sow seeds wantonly, filling the whole world with demons?"
"No, that's not what I'm talking about."
"Then what?"
"I also received education at the Theology Department before being ordained as a Priest. So I know more about demons and evil gods than most Priests. But... I have never seen or heard of the demons here anywhere else."
Each Demon Realm was bound to have one or two demons that could not be seen in other Demon Realms, but the Ice Peninsula was too much. Most of the demons they had encountered so far were new species that neither she nor the Pantheon knew. That was why she had been skeptical even after seeing Ulrich's demon bestiary in the first place.
"That's right."
Ulrich nodded.
"The mana here has a higher concentration than elsewhere, the flow is greater, and it's more irregular. So the evolution of life is bound to be accelerated."
Mana is the element that the gods shed into the world to create life. Therefore, if the concentration of mana is high and the movement is large, the impact on life is bound to be greater.
"Then why has the movement become so large and the concentration so high?"
"Because there was a major incident that disrupted the balance."
He took out a teacup filled with brewed Songhwa tea from the bonfire.
"The land we call the Ice Peninsula today was originally divided into an island and the mainland. Near the end of the dwarf era, when they used the island as a base to resist, the fairies dragged the island to the mainland and merged it."
"...They dragged the island?"
She asked in an absurd tone.
Glancing at the others, they had the same reaction. Ulrich looked at everyone and answered yes, then drew a map on the floor with his index finger. It was a simple map, showing Osnover and the Ice Peninsula to its north.
Then he drew a line across the Ice Peninsula.
"Look. The line I've drawn in half now is the main body of the mountains we've been climbing for days, Kaldorekai. The west of this mountain range was all islands."
Roberta pursed her lips.
The peninsula was about the same size as the entire Osnober Kingdom, and the west of the mountain range was half of the peninsula. If Ulrich's claim was true?
The fairies of the old era meant that they had dragged a huge island, equivalent to half the territory of a country, with their own power and collided it with the mainland.
"If you cause such a feat, think about how distorted nature will be. If there is something that rises, there must be something that falls, but will the flow of mana be the same as before?"
After saying that, he added that there were many places besides the Ice Peninsula where the flow of mana had become unbalanced for the same reason.
"A race that loves nature caused pollution that no one else could, saying they would protect nature. It was too late to realize their mistake and regret it. Regret is always too late, no matter how early it is. I opposed it so much."
Roberta didn't hear his mutterings properly.
Dragging an island and colliding it with the mainland? All she could say was that it was absurd. She had heard all sorts of claims from the lord, but as always, it was hard to believe this time.
"But as you know, Lord—"
"Hmm. It's a story that has no literature or oral tradition left."
He cut her off as if he had read her mind.
"...Yes. I think there should be some mention somewhere if the fairies really did such a great feat. For example, in the scriptures."
"The scriptures were not compiled to simply list historical facts. Their purpose is to arouse faith. But would they write about the achievements of a race that humans once ruled, not humans?"
Roberta felt several gazes. The group, including Duke Bailen, carefully watched her reaction. They had said something critical of the scriptures in front of a Priest, so they must have been worried. But Roberta only frowned slightly and said nothing.
"That's not all. The result that this tower has faced is also one of the reasons."
Ulrich got up from his seat and stood near the wall. Then he poured Songhwa tea to melt the frost on the wall. An engraved inscription was revealed. He pointed to it and asked Roberta,
"Can you read it?"
It was a crude inscription. Anyone could see that it was not a text carved by a stonemason. Roberta narrowed her eyes and looked at it, and it looked like ancient characters.
After the gods left, the languages and characters they propagated changed little by little over time. The characters engraved on the wall in front of her were one of those processes.
"No... I can't read it."
Roberta vaguely remembered seeing similar characters, but she didn't know how to read them. She could only guess that it was a character used before the human era, that is, in the era of dwarves and fairies.
Ulrich pointed to the characters and slowly read their meaning.
"We, here, die. That's what it means."
It was an ominous word.
"What does that mean?"
"It's just as it says. It's like a will."
"Yes? A will?"
Roberta blinked.
The Ice Peninsula was once a battlefield between two races, dwarves and fairies, and the fairies finally won and opened their era. Perhaps, was this inscription carved by a dwarf facing defeat?
"It's something left by a civilization before our history."
Ulrich listened to her reasoning and answered.
"The owner of the tower is neither a dwarf nor a fairy. It was built by a civilization that does not belong to the two civilizations, and it is what they left behind in the end."
"Neither dwarves nor fairies..."
Roberta looked at the inscription again.
'We die here.'
It felt strange to think that it was a will left by someone nearly ten thousand years in the past. Who were they, why were they here, and how did they perish?
"Think about it. Did history suddenly appear at some point? It becomes history when it survives after repeating all sorts of failures and collapses."
He put his hand on the inscription.
"This place is a trace of a civilization that collapsed and did not survive."