By Zephyria As soon as Squad Leader 8 opened her eyes, she saw the hexagonal roof of a large tent and the sunset that had fallen before darkness arrived. Needing time to adjust to the reddish and intense light, she frowned and placed the back of her hand on it. Then the gauze attached to her forehead touched the back of her hand.
As she fumbled with the unfamiliar sensation, her head throbbed. Forced to open her eyes by the discomfort, she tossed and turned, and felt a slight dizziness, but it was bearable.
“Squad Leader!”
As she raised herself halfway, a squad member who had been waiting beside her called her with a moved face.
“Are you alright?”
Looking over the worried face, Squad Leader 8 tried to ease her frowning expression from the glare and said.
“…I’m fine. How long have I been lying down?”
“It seems like about three or four hours have passed. Ah, please wait a moment. I’ll call the medical team.”
The squad member immediately left the tent to deliver the news that the squad leader had woken up and ran to where the medical team was. Squad Leader 8 watched him and touched the gauze on her forehead once again. It seemed that she had been unconscious for quite a long time than she had thought.
As her gaze was directed at the back of the squad member, the Southern Branch commanders were seen passing by outside the tent with serious expressions and busy steps. After staring blankly at them for a while, she suddenly had a question.
‘…Why the Southern Branch?’
Seeing the commanders and not a messenger, she immediately began to look around and assess the situation.
Come to think of it, this large tent she was in was only used when there were many people to accommodate, and it was no longer seen in the 1st Battalion’s base camp, which moved in small numbers after the column was divided.
The Southern Branch’s armbands were seen here and there outside, and most of the passing members had badges indicating their affiliation with the Southern Branch on their combat uniforms. It seemed that this was the Southern Branch’s camp.
Now that her question had changed to why she was here, Squad Leader 8 fully raised her half-raised body and placed her feet on the ground from the cot she had been lying on. Then the outside situation came into view at a glance, and the late afternoon sunset wind passed through the open tent door.
She could have just brushed it off, but the wind made her feel a sense of incongruity somewhere.
It was something that couldn’t be felt in the dry and arid plains, and the feeling was excessively empty and familiar. The wind also had a mixture of wet soil and an unknown fishy smell, so she got up from her seat as if possessed. Then she stepped out of the tent following the wind.
“Squad Leader?”
Other 1st Battalion members who had been waiting near the tent discovered her sudden appearance and gathered around her. They were happy to see the squad leader awake, but they quickly stopped her when she tried to head somewhere. She had just woken up and her physical condition wouldn’t be very good, and her appearance of moving as if possessed seemed quite unstable.
But Squad Leader 8 pushed away the arms that were blocking her and followed the empty wind swirling around her. As she slowly moved her steps, she was already running at full speed.
The Southern Branch members who were moving things and materials also looked at her running around in confusion. Squad Leader 8 passed by those members and the site where the camp was located, aimlessly led by the flow of air.
After running for a while until she was out of breath, the energy of the wind she was following stopped in place and hovered in the air not far away. As she took another step forward, she heard a cracking sound and the ground crumbled. At that, Squad Leader 8 looked down and took two steps back. Then she stood there and stared blankly at the scene before her.
“…….”
Under her feet was a cliff.
Following the cliff down, she saw a huge wasteland where everything was mixed up and now there was no trace of what had been there. Rocks and dry roots were buried in piles of dirt, and occasionally the corpses of demon beast that had failed to escape were grotesquely bent. Southern Branch members were seen searching for something in the wasteland over there, and the wind that had passed through that distant place swept over her black hair standing on the cliff.
“Squad Leader, where are you going!”
The squad members who had followed her grabbed the squad leader who was standing precariously in front of the cliff. Because of that, she was dragged back a few steps, and she slightly frowned at the sensation of the area near the arm that one squad member was holding throbbing.
When she looked down to see why, the area near her wrist was slightly swollen, and a red handprint was visible there. And the moment she saw it, a part of her memory from before she lost consciousness suddenly came to mind.
The unknown mineral thrown by the outsider she thought was unconscious. And the golden barrier that had unfolded before her eyes before she could even recognize that it was flying. Even the voice shouting to avoid it.
As she retraced her memories, she suddenly realized that the two people who had been with her at the time were not visible.
She turned around and asked the squad members who had followed her.
“Where are Leonardo Blaine and Kenneth Weaver?”
At the squad leader’s question, the squad members’ expressions became embarrassed and then rapidly darkened. They looked at each other’s faces and held back their words. As the squad leader, feeling strange, urged them to answer, they opened their mouths with difficulty after hesitating.
“Currently, both of them are missing. We are searching with the help of other battalions.”
“…Missing?”
It took quite a while to accept the word missing. Soon her face was gradually stained with a deep sense of futility. She repeated the word as if she couldn’t believe it, even chewing on it, and then touched her forehead with the gauze attached to it again.
The squad members who saw the squad leader’s appearance had complicated expressions. That was because there was even worse news left.
“Why? Is there another problem?”
When Squad Leader 8, seeing their expressions, sensed that there was something more, one of the members looked at her and barely opened his mouth.
“…Squad Leader, the Supreme Commander is also currently missing.”
“…What?”
To the squad leader who asked back with a shocked face as if she had heard something she shouldn’t have, the squad members told her what had happened while she was unconscious. As she listened to the story, the color gradually drained from her face.
Squad Leader 8 tightly closed her trembling eyelids.
Confusion came and suddenly the headache became severe.
According to the squad members, the camp where she had opened her eyes earlier was a temporary base camp set up by some of the Southern Branch’s 9th Battalion after moving near the collapse site. And the reason why they were so enthusiastic about the search operation was that their battalion commander had also been caught up in the collapse.
When the 1st Battalion arrived at the canyon just before the collapse, Kenneth and Leonardo were nowhere to be seen, and the Supreme Commander and the 9th Battalion Commander of the Southern Branch had jumped under the cliff to find them and had gone missing. In the meantime, she had lost consciousness, been rescued, and was standing here safe and sound.
As she became aware of each of those facts one by one, she had no face to show her colleagues, and no face to lead the squad members as a squad leader.
Her head felt like it was going to break.
In the meantime, what tormented her even more was the last scene in her memory from the moment when her consciousness briefly returned.
She had opened her eyes, exhaling as the belt strap pressed against her abdomen due to the recoil of the fall stopping, and in her blurred consciousness, she saw a figure disappearing into the darkness. And what flickered in her vision before she lost consciousness again was a clear golden light that had tied her to something and followed her fall.
He voluntarily let go and disappeared into the endless darkness along with the disappearing figure.
The reason was probably to hold onto the falling person.
After using teleportation for three people, his condition had deteriorated rapidly, and it was quite serious to the point that Squad Leader 8 could feel it. So when they were clinging to the cliff and climbing up, she had put him below and taken the lead….
No, even when she first found him under the collapsing rock wall, the energy at the time was far short of the magical power he originally possessed.
In that situation. Is it logically possible to let go and fall together to save a Council member who has nothing to do with him?
‘He could die.’
He really could die.
“Ha….”
Squad Leader 8 let out a deep sigh. The confusion hadn’t subsided at all, but with her direct superior missing, she had to make the decisions about what to do next.
She raised her head and assessed the number of 1st Battalion members who had fallen into gloom. They couldn’t just stand still. This was no time to despair.
Just then, she saw two other members hovering in the air in the distance, spotting them and flying over. One was from her squad, and the other was a member of the 6th Battalion of the Central Branch, judging by the embroidery on his combat uniform.
“Squad Leader Russell, you’re here! We’ve been looking for you for ages.”
“Squad Leader, where did you go as soon as you woke up!”
The 6th Battalion member rushed down, saying he had been looking for her. The member who came with him was the squad member who had gone to call the medical team.
With no time for deep thought, Squad Leader 8 first turned to the 6th Battalion member and asked.
“What’s the 6th Battalion doing here?”
“Ah, Battalion Commander Rivera told me to check on your situation, Squad Leader. And she said if you regained consciousness, to bring you to her immediately.”
“…Battalion Commander 6?”
Squad Leader 8 asked back with a puzzled look.
Then she suddenly remembered the ability that the 6th Battalion Commander possessed.
* * *
Dellua put her hand on Squad Leader 8’s shoulder and said.
“Emma Russell, Squad Leader 8 specializing in tracking from the 1st Battalion, the future of the Central Branch depends on you.”
Squad Leader 8 looked bewildered at those words.
“Excuse me?”
“Your main attribute is wind, and you’re B4 grade, right? The Commander spoke about you a lot. You have a head injury, and you’re probably disoriented from just waking up, but I’d like you to help me.”
Following the 6th Battalion member, they arrived in the middle of a wasteland covered in piles of dirt. There, were some members of the 6th Battalion of the Central Branch and Battalion Commander Dellua Rivera.
And behind her, a huge magic circle, which clearly required several people to cast, was drawn on the dirt.
Squad Leader 8 looked at the magic circle and asked Dellua.
“What are you trying to do?”
“I need to find the people buried in the ground. But right now, all the tracking members in the Southern Branch who can sensitively feel the flow of air are somewhere else. So, Squad Leader Russell, I need you.”
Hearing the words ‘find people,’ Squad Leader 8’s demeanor changed noticeably. Her expression even became resolute, making the urgency felt by those who saw her. She said to Dellua with a sharp look.
“What do you need me to do?”
Dellua gave a satisfied smile at her clear and determined gaze.
“Here, right where we’re standing now. Do you know where this is? When the landslide occurred and people were swept away with the dirt, this area is the most likely place they’d be buried. And it’s also relatively low-lying and has a relatively low risk of further collapse.”
Squad Leader 8 glanced down at the ground she was standing on.
“From now on, I’m going to temporarily lift up the piles of dirt around here with the help of our battalion members. Then, you need to read the flow of air underneath and determine if there are any people there. I heard that reading that flow of air requires a very high level of skill, and I heard that’s your specialty.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Dellua’s words were what Squad Leader 8 had expected.
However, with her ability, she should have been able to find the people buried in the dirt even without her help, but it was quite puzzling that they hadn’t been found until now, several hours after the collapse occurred and the search had been underway.
As if answering Squad Leader 8’s question, Dellua continued.
“But there have been a few problems with the search so far.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Well, first of all, the casting range of my magic isn’t that wide. Even if I lift the dirt with the help of our members, it’ll only be a small part compared to the scale of this vast land. So, this task will be a very patient and repetitive one.”
“…….”
“And the second thing is that the soil is wet because it’s been raining for a few days. Until you opened your eyes, we had been searching with members from our 6th Battalion who can manipulate the wind. But the members said that the air passing through the wet soil is so weak that it’s difficult to feel anything. It probably won’t be easy for you either.”
Squad Leader 8 nodded in agreement at her words.
“Lastly, the third thing. Actually, this might not be accurate, but I’ve discovered something a little strange in this peninsula.”
Dellua tapped the ground a couple of times with the toe of her boot.
“There’s an empty space under here. No, there was. Until the mountain collapsed.”
A few hours ago, when the Dermokas swarm that appeared in the plains due to Hugo and Leonardo’s collaboration was devastated, Dellua and the 6th Battalion of the Central Branch chased after the remaining ones, dealing with them and pursuing those who fled.
Due to the nature of Dermokas, they were good at digging tunnels, so they expected them to be hiding somewhere in the mountains, but they needed to identify the base of the monsters because they couldn’t imagine there would be so many.
However, perhaps because they were intelligent creatures, they quickly noticed that they were being tracked and seemed to be scattering and trying to flee to places other than their base.
So, Dellua moved some inconspicuous dry grass, attached it to their bodies, and followed them at a certain distance. As a result, she was able to capture the sight of them wandering around and entering a hidden tunnel.
And when they dug up that tunnel, a huge space hidden underneath was revealed.
“It seems that the tunnels that weren’t in the plains are mainly positioned near the big peaks. I think that place is a kind of magma chamber.”
A magma chamber was a space formed deep underground, about 1 to 10 km below the surface. And in the case of this Eldermilli Peninsula, it was a peninsula formed by the uplift of the land and the flow of magma from volcanic islands and submarine volcanoes into the mainland.
Therefore, Dellua speculated that the existing magma chamber had also risen in altitude as the tectonic plates rose, and that the unknown space that widely existed under the big peaks was the magma chamber, and that some of it had only empty space left after the volcanic eruption.
“But that place was strange. I followed them inside, but in that space, I could only use about half of the magic I could normally use. It was as if something was suppressing the magic. And the aura of the demon beasts that had entered the tunnel suddenly disappeared.”
“Is there a mineral like magic stone near there?”
“No, if there was, I wouldn’t have thought it was strange. There was nothing like that at all. As a result, we missed them.”
Squad Leader 8’s expression changed subtly.
It was definitely strange. There had to be a magic stone-type mineral, magic stone, or a device or barrier intentionally created by humans to suppress the magic power of other creatures or hide their aura. But this peninsula was just a land that had been abandoned for a long time, so it was unlikely that such things were installed.
There’s no way there would be something like that in this land where demon beasts are rampant….
“Anyway. There’s definitely a different flow in the space under here than above. That means our magic might not reach that deep underground. So, it’s even more important to feel the subtle flow of air itself that can be generated by people moving, not magic.”
Dellua once again put her hand on Squad Leader 8’s shoulder, made eye contact with her, and asked.
“What do you think, can you do it?”
At Dellua’s question, Squad Leader 8 focused on the air brushing against her fingertips as if awakening her senses. The wind flowing between her fingers was unusual.
“Of course. Leave it to me.”
At that moment, light began to emanate from the magic circle drawn behind her. Then, the 6th Battalion members moved to their designated positions and formed a formation to assist Dellua’s magic. Dellua turned around, looked at the glowing magic circle, then smiled at Squad Leader 8 and said.
“Good, let’s go.”