Chapter 497
Having received Krul’s fang, Kal Kansi must have thought it was a moment when action was needed more than words, so he packed up and left the city.
There was no need to mention the question of when to join, and I didn’t even worry that he might jump out with his fangs. He will come back on his own, and as Krul said, he is a prisoner who has recognized the sign, so he will do his best to help.
It wasn’t the directing I was aiming for this time, but it worked just as well as my first appearance. The expressions and actions of those who were conducting the meeting began to become lively, and the atmosphere was not temporary, but began to materialize in the form of a lifelong path.
“If you can cross the land of beastmen, as Sir Carl Kansi was sure, then this too…”
Opinions coming out of a situation where only negative and tangibly realistic proposals and situations can be presented will eventually be limited in number. Not only that, but it’s getting more and more timid. Naturally, thinking becomes standardized, and a situation may arise in which even possible things are excluded.
In that sense, the meeting following Carl Kansi’s departure was really lively. It was to the point where I could feel that the perception of the people gathered had changed from ‘run away’ to ‘counterattack’.
While the people who lost their party from using their brains so hard sat in their seats and took a break to drink tea with tired but satisfied faces, while thinking about the meeting alone and secretly studying the opinions they came up with, I somehow glanced at them. Count Timsive, who had been watching me, cautiously opened his mouth.
“That… I’m sorry, but can I ask the hero one thing while I’m taking a short break?”
The fact that you didn’t ask during the meeting means that it’s a separate story from the meeting. Still, I wondered if he was going to ask me something private, so instead of answering by looking into his eyes, he continued with a smile on his heart.
“I always wondered whenever I heard of the feat of the Flute Knight, which was considered only infamous. Levien was a city that served as a shield for many years, located on the border between the Asmodians and the Humans, but how did it fall in one day? I mean.”
As if those words were a signal, the others quietly lit up their eyes.
However, what I feel there is more of a movement to find tactical value than simple interest. I could feel the anticipation that maybe others would follow suit or get a hint to open a new paradigm, so I couldn’t help but laugh.
“No big deal. I just ran on the wall.”
So, after giving a simple answer, I lowered my gaze again and began to cram the information contained in the maps and documents in front of me into my head.
No one asked a question through my demeanor, full of intent to say nothing more, and the meeting resumed shortly thereafter.
After the meeting, which lasted almost half a day, was over.
Resisting the urge to throw myself into a luxurious bed in a luxurious bedroom that I was shown to be my room, I took off my equipment, washed, and finished maintenance before collapsing as if collapsing.
“Politics and war are not to be approached.”
Just following and understanding the story was exhausting. It was all the more so because it was truly a life-and-death operation.
It doesn’t end with one battle, but after that, the full-scale war between the Demonic Church and the Demon King’s army begins. In the midst of what felt like dozens of Cheryls gathering and discussing the direction of the war, all she could do was do her best not to be left alone.
Still, it was worth the effort. Through such actions, I was able to give people the perception that I was a ‘warrior who listens well to the opinions of people around me’, and I knew that the operation was only three days later, and I had work to do tomorrow.
I felt a little sorry for Carl Kansi, who packed up and set off without a break, but I decided to go to sleep, feeling relieved that I could rest well today.
◈
The day after spending the night enjoying the gratitude of civilization, the saintess and I moved early in the morning to patrol the city with a very small number of heretic judges.
The purpose is to find the cause of the weakening of divine power. It was the result of talking to the saintess about the decrease in needle performance she had experienced on the battlefield.
“I think it’s worth trying just to know that a magic tool made from the remnants of an evil god might have the power to suppress the divinity.”
In fact, it was also one of the biggest reasons for the late meeting yesterday.
Relying on intuition and uncertain memories, recalling the fight with the illusion wizards at the time, roughly estimating the scope of the magic tool, and based on that, predicting the place where the magic tool would be located on the city map was quite tricky.
To be precise, our purpose was not to destroy the magic tool, but to verify it after discovery, so it was close to tricky to guess where the magic tool must be.
There is no reason to normalize the city while poking around in the yard that leaves tomorrow. Anyway, when we have to fight again later, the enemies will plant magic tools again, but if we find and destroy them in advance, it will only wake us up.
In that case, just check. The place I culled over and over again was near an armory in an unpopulated and inconspicuous city. Even this was a place chosen with a possible watcher or spy in mind.
“Hero.”
After arriving at the armory and biting as many people around as possible, I nodded to the saintess who called me and whistled to take out the needle. It wouldn’t be a problem if it was known that we didn’t need to whistle because we were allies anyway.
As I rotated the needle like that, I felt resistance. When I moved it around, there was a clear difference. From now on, it was entirely a matter of my concentration, so I walked around the area with the utmost care.
It was like a living, breathing mine detector, but unlike a machine that finds it on its own, it was difficult to feel the subtle difference in resistance felt by the needle. Unlike the battle where it was close to just plunging in mana and ending it all at once, now I had to pay attention to mana so that the same speed was always maintained and check that the speed was different.
I feel the illusion that my speed has slowed down because I was too focused. They won’t know if I’m failing or if I’m just focusing hard.
Fortunately, the difference in influence according to distance was clear.
“I think so.”
For about 30 minutes, I walked carefully step by step, forgetting even to blink in the eyes looking at me, even with the sound of breathing dead. My senses, which had been so focused on the needle that I couldn’t see what was around me, were finally bitten.
To be honest, I was surprised. I didn’t know that the word ‘here’ would definitely come out, not ‘it seems to be here’. But it was so certain, and I even smiled at the feeling that I had done it myself.
It was clear that the magic tools of courtesy were embedded in the structure, which was neat enough to make one wonder if it was carved out of obsidian.
“Here are the magic tools…”
I raised my voice a little to let everyone know and touched the structure, only then did I properly perceive what I was looking at.
And involuntarily, I stopped talking.
“…damn apostates.”
“Demon God…”
The saintess approached with light steps, amidst the voices of the heretic judges gnashing their teeth from behind.
“…are you in this?”
Unlike the steps, the voice is heavy. He must have been angry when he suddenly remembered the image of him banging his head against the wall in a fit of rage at a temple near his house.
“…yes.”
It was no different for me.
It was very different from the Epaga-sama I saw, but anyway, it was so obvious what the intention was to embed the magic tools containing the remnants of the evil god into the symbolic stone statue called the Demon Statue.
“Stand up, saintess!”
With a sudden shout, the heresy judges rushed at the saintess in an instant.
It wasn’t that the shocked saintess grabbed the back of her neck and collapsed. Again, it was the opposite.
“Oh, no! Destroying that will ruin the plan!”
“Saintess! Please fix it!”
It was to prevent the saintess, who couldn’t hold back her anger, from crashing into the stone statue with her head.
“Aww!!”
Even though the five bindings clung to each other, they dragged on. Thanks to that, I could feel how angry the saintess was, but I quickly joined in because I couldn’t just watch.
After a while, we managed to calm down the angry saintess and put her back. After taking a short break, we started experimenting with how the output of the divine power changes while keeping our distance from the stone statue.
“It’s pretty… spacious.”
Since there were six people, the experiment itself didn’t take too long, but the results were not very satisfactory.
The magic tool’s influence is about 400m in radius. Even if it was only 100m away, the restriction was drastically reduced, but that wasn’t the point.
The problem was that the magic tool steadily absorbed the divine power within its range. With something like this embedded in the headquarters of the Demonic Church, the possibility of it running out of fuel and failing could have been infinitely close to zero. Perhaps it was because of the divine power that had been consumed like that.
“…is it really right to leave this thing as it is?”
The real saintess asked, unable to hide her exhaustion, but it was difficult to answer prematurely.
Do you leave it alone for now and then definitely search for and destroy it later when a full-scale battle occurs, or do you destroy everything you find hoping that there will be no way for them to further improve this magic tool?
Looking at it simply, it seemed that the former was an unconditional benefit, but after seeing the tail that endlessly tried to absorb divine power, even that was uneasy. What if it has a higher chance of consuming divine power and evolving itself than the possibility of the Demon Lord Army improving it? And what if it’s more dangerous?
“Can I turn…?”
In the midst of everyone drooling in a situation where a sigh came out spontaneously, the sword that was wearing at the waist suddenly jumped out arbitrarily.
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