121

I devoted myself to honing my magic while staying alert to my surroundings.

Given that I now trained whenever I had a spare moment, I could not help thinking that, if I had been this diligent back when I was human, my life might have turned out very differently.

I had finally managed to light flames on the tips of three fingers at once, and I stared at the fruits of my efforts with the same stupid grin plastered on my face.

“What I’m aiming for is efficient use. What I want is a practical single shot.”

I had gone over it in my head countless times since then, but my conclusion never changed; all I learned was that there was a strict limit to what I could do with such a meager amount of mana.

People loved to say that “hard work always pays off,” but what was impossible was still impossible.

With that in mind, I cut my morning training short and started moving to secure breakfast.

Yesterday I had driven off a human, but that also meant I had effectively confirmed for them that “something is out here.”

In that case, it was inevitable that people would be sent either to investigate or to exterminate.

Dutifully going out to hunt for breakfast also served as a way to look for a better location.

I praised myself for my efficient routine, but I had to admit it was simply “bad luck” that I still had not found terrain that met my key conditions.

After finishing breakfast, I let out a satisfied “burp” and took a breath.

Bad manners were hardly a problem out here.

While practicing my mana control, I cleaned up and then headed further east toward the mountains.

A great mountain separated Canaan and Seizeria—back in the Empire, it had been called the Hedai Mountains, though I could no longer remember what name the two nations themselves used.

It would have been ideal to find a spot from which I could look down on the key routes, but from where I was, no such vantage point was in sight.

I hoped that getting closer might reveal something, but aside from a huge bear—one I felt I had seen somewhere before—blocking my path, nothing worth mentioning happened.

After one slap sent the bear running, I continued deeper in the direction it had fled and stumbled upon an unexpected encounter.

“…Another corpse, huh.”

This time it had already turned to bare bone, and from its eye sockets, encroaching plants were sprouting straight out.

It went without saying that a great deal of time had passed, and for the moment I searched the area around the sprawled skeleton for anything it might have owned.

I yanked a vine-covered bag out by brute force, and when I checked inside, I found a discolored potion and a ring set with a gemstone.

And then—

“A dagger with a crest…”

Muttering that, I carefully searched a little more around the skeleton.

From the remaining scraps of clothing, I concluded the bones most likely belonged to a woman, and from the belongings left behind, that she had very likely been a noble.

Lastly, I found another, much smaller set of bones beside the woman.

In other words, the woman had had a child, and the two of them had died here together.

It was only natural to think, “This clearly has some kind of backstory,” and that gave rise to hesitation—if I took anything from here, would I raise some weird flag?

(Ugh, even back in Imperial days I never wanted anything to do with nobles. And that crest with a butterfly and flames…)

At that moment, something came back to me.

“Butterfly and flames?”

Something snagged at my memory.

I was certain it was sitting in one of the drawers of my mind.

A particular memory from my student days slowly took shape.

“I remember now.”

Butterfly and flames—that was the crest of a count’s house belonging to the Kingdom of Seizeria.

The fact that it was here suggested that the House Orselem still existed.

Back in my student days, there had been an image of a nude woman in an art reference book.

In my mid-teens, when getting my hands on an actual dirty magazine had been a real struggle, I had stumbled across that erotic material in the library by chance.

It had started from something that trivial, but I still vividly remembered the results of the “research” my friend and I did together.

(The House Orselem! An old noble family in Seizeria, famous for producing beauties generation after generation. To flaunt that, every daughter was said to have a nude portrait painted once she came of age!)

I remembered my friend and me excitedly talking about that whole setup, asking each other, “Isn’t this ridiculously sexy?”

Overcome by nostalgia, I found my hand reaching for the crested dagger.

It was not that I wanted some connection to a beautiful woman.

It was the nostalgia for that time and the memories of talking with my friend that moved me.

Incidentally, after much discussion, my friend and I had concluded that the model, Lady Silserim Orselem, ranked as a solid “Number Five” in our private system.

As for her herself, in keeping with a magic nation, she had apparently been a very research-minded, scholarly woman, and by the time I joined the military she was supposed to have become the mother of a son and a daughter.

I wrapped the dagger in cloth and carefully stowed it in my pack.

The sense that I was setting up a whole tangle of new flags somehow filled me with excitement.

Just in case, I checked for anything else, but the only items of note were that dagger and the ring.

Part of me wondered if there might have been a diary or something, but unfortunately I was utterly ignorant of the Seizeria language.

Still, for someone who wanted to know the details, items like these would be things they absolutely had to have.

If even one such item had been lying around, then collecting those flags would probably have been unavoidable.

“Well then, I wonder just what these are going to call down on me.”

I reassured myself that, as long as they were connected to a beautiful woman, things could not turn out that badly, and I looked back on my dealings with the various beauties I had met so far.

Probably fine—coming to that vague conclusion while staring off into the distance, I left the spot behind.

In the end, I spent the rest of the day just wandering around the foot of the mountain.

Thanks to that, after the sun went down I became a bit unsure of my bearings and wasted a lot of time before I finally emerged onto the grasslands.

And once again, I had nothing to show for the day.

It was possible this route simply was not being used anymore.

Just as I was thinking that, I thought I saw something faintly flash.

I straightened up to get a bit more height.

Then I confirmed that there was a light some distance away.

It flickered on and off like a signal—no sooner had I thought that than, when I looked around, I saw another light near the stand of trees I had just come out of.

(…They’re definitely using those to communicate.)

It was certainly unrelated to the earlier skeleton.

If it was connected to anything, it would be yesterday’s corpse.

If you asked whether I should get involved… honestly, I did not see much profit in it.

But I did at least want to know what they were doing.

So I used my mimicry ability and melted into the night.

If the people exchanging signals decided to meet up, I did not want to miss a word of their conversation.

I lay flat on the ground and focused my senses on my hearing.

The lights went out, leaving only silence and darkness.

I stayed like that for a while… but nothing happened.

(Was it just the signal?)

No sooner had that thought crossed my mind than another flickering light appeared from the same spot.

As I watched, I realized the timing of the flashes was different from before.

In other words, they were sending coded signals with light.

“Great, what a waste of effort,” I cursed inwardly, but there was one thing I had learned.

This was a place those people used, which meant it would be difficult for me to accomplish my own objectives here.

If it was ill-suited for ambushing a caravan, then I had no reason to linger.

Letting that hunter escape had put me on a time limit anyway, so in a sense this might actually have been for the best, and I gave up on the spot without much regret.

So I deactivated my mimicry.

I lumbered to my feet—and heard a sound.

I spun around on reflex, and there was a person standing where I looked.

It was not as though I had dropped my guard.

I had been focused on my hearing, true, but I had not neglected to keep track of my surroundings with my sense of smell either.

Which meant the human now in my field of vision had managed to get this close without making a sound or giving off a scent.

I had never even imagined there could be a human capable of that.

But I did know of a means that could make such a thing possible.

(Magic is way too convenient, damn it!)

I moved at the exact same moment the person who had spotted me did.

Which side they belonged to did not matter right now.

But if there was even a chance they had seen my mimicry ability, I had no reason to let them live.

From their perspective, they would think not “I failed to notice him,” but rather “He appeared out of nowhere.”

And what they would think next went without saying.

The distance between us was about fifteen meters—in other words, there was no way they could outrun me.

(Judging from the small build, I could not help wondering about their sex… Ah, if it was a woman—no, what if she turned out to be a total beauty!?)

And so our nighttime game of chase began.