Forget That

What was there was burned remains.

The forest that should have been there had burned down.

The remains of trees like charcoal stood in rows.

“…Orphe.”

“I’m fine. I’m calm.”

With her former home reduced to this, Orphe’s feelings could not possibly be calm either.

Even on that day, she had been that distraught.

Together with what happened yesterday, it was clear that Orphe’s anger had not cooled at all.

“Are the wyverns… not here?”

“Seems that way.”

Well, thinking about it, wyverns had lives too.

Looking at Orphe, it was clear that monsters ate as well, and he could not imagine there was food in this burned-out forest.

But… if so, where had the wyverns gone?

“We’re going, Kikori.”

“You’re chasing them, aren’t you?”

“Of course. We didn’t come this far just to say, ‘Never mind.’”

“I won’t say that.”

Either way, the story that the wyverns had disappeared from here would spread before long.

If that happened, everyone would start heading “ahead,” just as they had hunted the Kobold Plains dry.

Precisely because he understood that, Kikori did not oppose Orphe.

There was also a promise. The fairies… though their meeting had been bad, he owed them a debt too.

Those wyverns… the Flame Wyverns, were Kikori’s enemies as well.

That was why the two of them took a step toward the burned-down gate.

“That said, charging ahead blindly is… I wonder which direction the wyverns came from.”

“Probably from ‘deeper in.’ My comrades were attacked too.”

“Well, that makes sense.”

Then they should keep going straight ahead.

Kikori and Orphe advanced through the burned-down forest.

Along the way, they also found the remains of a burned-down house.

He did not know which fairy it had belonged to, but… it was a terribly cruel sight.

As they continued onward, they occasionally saw goblins, but they were instantly blown to pieces by Orphe’s magic.

“There really are a lot of goblins.”

“They only have numbers. But even if they have numbers, it’s useless.”

“Is that so?”

“It is. If there were, say, one million… even one hundred million goblins, that dragon would take less than a minute to deal with them.”

Orphe said that individual strength was that important… but in Kikori’s case, if there were even one million goblins, he felt he would definitely die, so he could not honestly nod along.

Still, he understood what she wanted to say.

“Volcanion really is that strong, huh.”

“Of course. Even when he was burning the goblins back then, if he’d felt like it, he could have blown away everything around him in an instant.”

“…Well, he did call himself ‘Blazing Inferno.’ I did think he was playing around.”

“He probably wanted to kill them after making them feel fear and regret. What terrible taste.”

“You fairies came at me trying to kill me in one blow, though.”

“Forget that. I mean, if that had been serious too, you’d be dead.”

“Even if you brag about that…”

Beyond the Transfer Gate that a wryly smiling Kikori and an apparently dissatisfied Orphe passed through next…

There was… a canyon, with a large river flowing close by.