[V7V24] Silver Eyes
Translated by Jodas 7: To the NorthFive days had passed since Tia and the others set out for Darwock.
The only major trouble they’d ran into so far was when Rukiye’s father came after them. Aside from that, there weren’t any major incidents and they kept moving at a steady pace.
The weather was favorable and there had been no sightings of Monsters — The mages of the Wedge Tower were especially on guard for Monster attacks as they proceeded.
After all, Monsters had appeared in the Darwock Royal Palace, somewhere they weren’t ever supposed to reach.
That being the case, it wouldn’t be strange to expect Monsters to appear in parts of the Empire where they normally didn’t as well.
Had the Monsters found somewhere with high enough mana density in Darwock, or had they found some way to operate even in areas where the mana density was too low?
The full force of the Investigation Office was hard at work finding an answer to this question.
If it was the latter, then the situation was quite dire indeed. There was a possibility that Monsters whose activities had until now been constrained to the Crystal Territory could now make their way into human settlements.
As a consequence, almost all of the mages in the Extermination and Investigation Offices had been mobilized and deployed nearer to the Crystal Territory on high alert.
“I see the next town has come into view. Wren, wake up.”
Sevil, sitting next to Tia, spoke to Wren as he laid groggily on her shoulder.
As usual, Wren was horribly motion-sick. Lately, he’d been experimenting on ‘How should a pretty boy deal with motion sickness?’ and putting his theories into practice. He was no longer groaning “Eugh…” all the time.
He pushed his golden hair away from his cheeks to behind his ears and spoke with a frail and delicate face.
“How many more days did you say…?”
“At the rate we are going, we should arrive at the border in two or three days. From there, it should be roughly two days to the Palace.”
“So long… Hey, I’ve been thinking, wouldn’t it be more pretty-boy like if you laid me down in a box full of flowers in the back of the carriage?”
Wasn’t that something humans did during funerals?
Tia hadn’t seen one directly herself, but she’d read a book with one in it.
“Cut that out.” Sevil shot down Wren’s suggestion.
“I can’t recommend riding in a carriage laying down.”
“Piroro… You’d feel the shaking with your whole body, right?”
“Indeed. The trick is your butt. Train your butt, Wren.”
Upon hearing the phrase ‘Train your butt’ come from the mouth of the Emperor’s sister, a few of the mages riding in their carriage started to chuckle.
Wren was long since used to this, and he pouted.
“A muscular butt isn’t pretty-boy-like at all…”
The adults in the carriage watched their exchange in either awe or bemusement. Generally speaking, the mages of the Wedge Tower were always kind to the Apprentices.
Hütter seemed not to mind the rocking as he closed his eyes and napped in his seat. Meanwhile Rukiye wordlessly cast her gaze outside of the carriage.
Said Rukiye raised her voice all of a sudden, having noticed something.
“Someone’s flying towards us.”
“Piyo!”
Tia followed her gaze and turned her eyes to the sky.
She saw a long, thin silhouette holding a spear — Must be one of the Lange brothers. That said, Tia immediately guessed which one it was.
“It’s Oliver!”
His way of flying in a perfectly straight line, heedless of the wind, was a flying technique that Oliver had recently developed. He would fly straight up, change direction, then zoom off in a perfectly horizontal line. Even when trying to fly in a straight line, Frederik would have paid a little more attention to the wind currents.
Flying roughly parallel to the ground, Oliver eventually caught up to the carriage Tia was on… then sped past them without any sign of slowing down until he flew straight into the town they were headed to.
Oliver Lange, having made direct impact with the roof of someone’s house, was collected by one of the Wedge Tower mages and brought to the inn.
It seemed like, just as he wished, Oliver was given a message-relaying mission. While the Wedge Tower generally had a policy of not sending Apprentices to the field, they were just that shorthanded at the moment.
As Tia, along with Wren and Sevil, enjoyed a somewhat late lunch in the dining room, she caught sight of Oliver descending from the upper floor. He must have just finished his report to Hütter and the others.
“It’s Oliver! Piyopp!”
“It is I, piyopp.”
When Oliver returned her piyopp with a straight face, Wren gave him an exhausted look.
Sevil had been stuffing her cheeks with boiled meats, but once she swallowed her food, she started to speak.
“I’ve heard you came as a messenger, but do you intend to accompany us to Darwock?”
“No. I’m handling messages back and forth with the Lange Hamlet.”
The Lange Hamlet — In short, Oliver’s hometown and the residence of a prominent Monster-Hunting Family.
Now that Monsters had shown themselves in Darwock, the Wedge Tower was on high alert of Monsters leaving the Crystal Territory.
The Crystal Territory occupied the Easternmost reaches of the Empire and the Wedge Tower was located to its Southwest.
Then, between the Crystal Territory and the Wedge Tower, lied a number of human settlements.
Among them, the closest to the Crystal Territory were a couple small villages that were home to families of Monster Hunters.
Home to the Extermination Office’s Frederik Lange and his brother, Oliver Lange: the Lange Hamlet.
Home to the Extermination Office’s Rikard Oks: the Oks Hamlet.
These villages sat on the front lines should Monsters ever emerge from the Crystal Territory. As a result, the Wedge Tower dispatched mages from the Extermination Office to them.
At first, they decided to have Frederik head to the Lange Hamlet and stay on standby there.
However, that left them without a capable messenger, so they sent Oliver afterwards to fill that role.
“Then, Oliver, you went to the Lange Hamlet, then came to where we were?”
Tia was a little surprised. She’d assumed that Oliver had flown straight from the Wedge Tower.
If he stopped by the Lange Hamlet first, then flew to their location, that meant he must have flown quite a long way.
“Yes. It was necessary to keep the Darwock-bound party informed of the details of Monster movements in the area.”
What Oliver said made Wren curious, so he asked in a whisper:
“…Were there Monsters around the Lange Hamlet?”
“No, the residents of the Village went out and checked, but there have apparently been no Monster sightings in the past few weeks.”
Tia thought back to the map she’d been shown earlier.
The Lange Hamlet should have been one of the closest human settlements to the Crystal Territory.
(…Oliver and Frederik’s home village is actually pretty close to the Witch’s house, huh.)
On the dividing line between the Crystal Territory and the human realm, there was a forest known as the Forest of the Boundary.
Mana density varied wildly within the Forest of the Boundary, and the Witch’s house was in an area with quite high density compared to the rest of the forest.
Then, if you left that forest and proceeded just a little bit, there you would find the Lange Hamlet.
As far as a flying Harpy’s perception went, it was ‘right over there.’
But she doubted that either Monsters or the Monster-Hunting Lange Family would ever approach the immediate surroundings of the Witch’s house.
“Hey, Oliver. How often do Monsters usually show up at the Lange Hamlet?”
Wren asked with a grim face.
Oliver placed a finger on his slender chin and thought about it.
“When I was living at home, it was usually about once or twice a month. There were some months when we wouldn’t see one at all. But… In these past few weeks, we haven’t even seen any tracks to suggest there were any Monsters present.”
Even if they didn’t spot any monsters, they would still often find footprints or claw marks — traces that a Monster had been nearby.
The Lange Family was always on the lookout for such things, tracing the movement of Monsters.
But lately they hadn’t even been able to find any of those.
Detecting Wren’s concerns, Sevil creased her brow.
“…I see. Perhaps all of the Monsters have moved at once towards Darwock. The King of Darwock is already colluding with the Monsters. That being the case, perhaps he envisions assembling the Monsters to form an army.”
Assembling the Monsters to form an army.
Tia wondered if such a thing was even possible.
Monsters were creatures that were far less keen to coordinate than Wren or Sevil assumed.
While they were all born from the same Abyss, their obsessions towards humans took wildly different forms. Since they all wanted different things, there was no chance of them joining forces. To put it bluntly, they would just end up fighting over the same prey.
However, if there was an unnatural decrease in Monster activity around the Crystal Territory, it was true that the odds were high that they were gathering near Darwock.
That was why Headmaster Möbius, the most powerful asset of the Wedge Tower, was headed for Darwock.
(…I wonder if my sister is with humans in Darwock too.)
“Pirorororo…” Tia trilled with her throat.
At that point, something seemed to be bothering Oliver as he looked around the room.
“By the way, I don’t see Rukiye anywhere. I thought there were supposed to be four Apprentices, including Rukiye, heading to Darwock.”
As Oliver said, Rukiye had finished her meal in a heartbeat and left the inn a while ago.
But Tia knew that it wasn’t because she disliked having meals with everyone else.
“Rukiye went on a walk! She said that walking makes it easier for her to come up with ideas for new things to make!”
Then, chuckling “Pefufun,” Tia leaned in and whispered like she was sharing a secret.
“You know, Rukiye said that Wren was rubbing off on her.”
“Huh? Me? …Has my pretty boy appearance inspired her creative spirit?”
“Rukiye said that she wants to try all kinds of new things like you, Wren! That was why she wanted to come to Darwock with us!”
“…??”
It seemed that what Tia was trying to say had come across weirdly to Wren.
As Tia wondered how to put it another way, Sevil laughed. “So that’s how it is,” she said as she looked towards Wren and winked.
“Rukiye has been infected with your courageous spirit, Wren.”
Rukiye walked about the town, found a suitable tree, and sat beneath it, pulling out her sketchbook. This sketchbook was Rukiye’s place to record her ideas. Every time she came up with a new idea for a magical device or an accessory she wanted to make, she’d jot it down here just as she envisioned it.
Among the items she’d detailed up to this point, most were either to be made of metal or were accessories woven from fabric.
Whether it was forged metal or woven cloth, part of her felt it would be better if she focused on one of them, while another part wanted to keep trying out both.
Since coming to the Wedge Tower, she’d felt a little bit of pressure in her mind, telling her that she wouldn’t be able to measure up to the other artisans unless she decided to settle on a specific trade.
(…But, if I haven’t made up my mind yet, there’s no need to force myself to pick one.)
She could just keep doing both. She could choose something else entirely. She could try doing all kinds of new techniques.
It would be a waste to force herself into the mindset that this one thing was all she had; that this one thing was the only choice for her. — She’d been influenced by Wren as she helped him prepare for the magic battle against the Extermination Office.
(If I want new ideas, I can’t just stay cooped up in the workshop all the time.)
The town she was in now provided just that inspiration. For Rukiye, who grew up in the South of the Empire, she’d never been to the areas North of the Wedge Tower.
Since the Empire was formed from a collection of small countries, different regions had different cultures. Buildings and clothing naturally differed as well.
In this region, much colder than her home, there was lots of densely-woven cloth. Rukiye also found the intricacy of their patterns intriguing.
(If I could make patterns this intricate, then I could make something with all one color of thread, or maybe I could slowly change the color as I went, making a gradient… But it might be fun to throw a bold design in there.)
Once she got to a certain point in her design, she looked up to catch a glimpse of the scenery of the town.
The first thing that caught Rukiye’s attention was a head of white hair. Someone was squatting in front of her and peeking into her sketchbook.
At first, she assumed that this head of starch-white hair was Tia’s. But on further inspection, it wasn’t. This was someone else.
They looked to be about Rukiye’s age, with neatly-cut white hair stretching to around their chin. Their face was well-proportioned and androgynous; she could convince herself that this could be either a man or a woman.
As Rukiye sat in stunned silence, the person moved their attention up from the sketchbook and towards Rukiye.
“What are you drawing here?”
Their gorgeous silver eyes, deep enough she felt like she could drown in them, looked straight at Rukiye.