By Zephyria After taking a few steps, Nero soon withdrew his menacing gaze toward Felix. Then, shaking his head, he quickly changed his thinking.
Of course, eliminating potential problems… was the cleanest and best method. But he couldn’t just eliminate some innocent person who had merely lent him their face just to cover up his own carelessness.
Moreover, there were already a few people who harbored doubts about him wearing Felix Montero’s face. If the original suddenly died in such a situation, it would invite unnecessary suspicion and could easily cause problems to resurface later.
Also, according to what Felix said earlier, hadn’t he been the one to move Nero while he was unconscious? Although the location he’d moved him to wasn’t exactly ideal… objectively speaking, this guy was someone who had done him a good deed. He didn’t want to become such a heartless person who could easily harm someone like that.
After thinking this and that, Nero decided to let him be for now.
The problem was that the thought that followed this decision was, ‘What do I do now?’
‘…What do I do now?’
Having remained silent without any plan, Nero followed the person in front while racking his brains. The Captain always said that anything that could become a future obstacle must be uprooted, so even if he wanted to rely on luck and let it pass quietly, he knew he shouldn’t.
As he kept scanning the other person out of the corner of his eye, his head gradually began to ache. Entertaining absurd thoughts like, ‘What if I just hit the back of his head really hard? Would he lose his memory?’, Nero anxiously kept grinding his teeth.
That’s when it happened.
BOOOOM—
As if urging him that this was no time to be like this, an ominous roar suddenly echoed from far away. Along with it, a fierce gust of wind strong enough to churn up the rugged terrain rushed in at high speed.
As the familiar Magic Power that had woken him when he was unconscious spread mixed within that wind, Nero, his hair instantly disheveled by the blast, instinctively looked back toward the source.
‘Captain?’
In that instant, Felix pulled Nero down and shouted urgently in a hushed voice.
“Duck!”
The shockwave approaching from the distant location finally reached them, bringing with it vast clouds of dust. The debris filling the area violently collided with the low ice wall the two were pressed against the moment they bent their upper bodies.
BOOOOM— CRRRAAASH—!
The ground they stood on shook threateningly violently from the aftermath, and a deafening explosive sound descended upon their heads.
Nero, who had reflexively deployed an Aura to block the sweeping soil, felt a tingling sensation in that moment that seemed to flow deep into his bones.
‘This energy…’
His eyes flew wide open, and keeping his body low, he lifted his chin to look up at the sky. There, beyond the swirling, hazy floating debris, the massive shadow of a roaring monster was cast.
Despite the considerable distance, the creature’s size delivered an incredible sense of pressure, causing his red pupils to momentarily expand greatly. But it wasn’t the monster that surprised Nero. The powerful pulse he felt, one he seemed to have forgotten over the past few years, delivered a pounding, overwhelming heartbeat as if he had returned to that moment three years ago.
Shortly after, the core, having completely crossed the boundary of the ice wall, flew across the golden sky as if fleeing toward the southern peak. Watching the creature’s bizarre act of crawling back into the place it had just escaped from, Nero followed its trajectory with questioning eyes.
And a few seconds later, he saw three or four small shadows, so tiny they were barely noticeable, chasing after it at incredible speed. One of them was flying at the forefront, emitting a powerful energy and maintaining an overwhelming distance from the others. The moment Nero saw that form, he knew instantly who it was.
“Capt—!”
Nero, reflexively pushing off the ground and about to shout ‘Captain!’, was startled and covered his mouth, glancing sideways.
Fortunately, Felix was lying flat with his eyes tightly shut, so he seemed completely unaware. He was just muttering “I just want to live…” over and over.
Staring at him intently, Nero closed his mouth firmly with a tense expression and turned his eyes back to the sky above.
He didn’t know the exact details of what was happening, but the energy now emanating from the Captain was on a completely different level from what he had felt when he encountered him earlier. It felt like seeing him again from that time, the last era they had gone to battle together.
While that was immensely welcome and joyful, at the same time, he couldn’t grasp what was going on, and a sense of unease swept over him. At first, he wondered if perhaps the Captain had been freed from his restraints, but Nero knew well that wasn’t something that could be resolved so simply.
Therefore, gazing at the fading figures with a complicated look, Nero quickly organized in his mind what he needed to do during this brief interval. Soon after, he shifted his gaze from the southern sky and looked down again at Felix, who was trembling beside him.
“……”
Nero clenched and unclenched his hand a few times, lightly cracking his knuckles with a pop pop sound. Then, with a reluctant expression, he briefly looked away elsewhere before, after a short hesitation, striking Felix hard on the back of the head.
THUD—
“Urk—.”
Felix’s body, which had been lying prone, slumped limply onto the soggy ground with a cut-off groan.
Nero felt his neck to check his pulse, then flipped him over so his dirt-stained face was looking up at the sky. Then, just as Felix had moved him earlier, he slid his hands under Felix’s armpits and dragged him off somewhere nearby.
The place he took him was right at the base of a wall that could minimize the impact even if gusts or shockwaves swept through. It was also a suitable spot for hiding one’s body, with plenty of dry grass nearby.
After propping Felix’s back against the wall and seating him properly, Nero knelt in front of him, took out an Artifact he had kept in his pocket, and pulled it out. Then, busily rummaging through the inside of the Artifact, he looked down at the unconscious Felix with impassive eyes.
“Sorry, but sleep soundly here until this is over.”
Not long after, Nero pulled out a single mysterious slip of paper from inside the Artifact. The small paper, less than half the size of a palm, had red characters scrawled on a black background, giving off a sinister aura just by its appearance.
Nero hesitated until the end about whether to use it or not, but soon held the paper up to Felix’s face. Then, staring intently at his closed eyes, he muttered softly, as if to himself.
“But when you wake up later, you’ll be an amazing hero.”
Leonardo, his eyes shining like flashes of light, gripped his Flame Sword and mercilessly swung it toward the peak before him. The golden current, swiftly flying forward, cleanly sliced through the sheer, bizarre rock formations. When the crater of the peak behind it also flew off as if cleanly cut by a blade, the core hiding nearby flew up, spewing breath and hiding its body within the gaps in the clouds.
Toward the flames rushing to cover his field of vision, Leonardo indifferently stretched out his hand. In that instant, the flames, which had been raging uncontrollably, calmed down as if recognizing their master, then bounced off in all directions.
The burning masses, spewing thick smoke into the empty air, ultimately vanished without leaving a single spark behind. But seeing the clouds, whose volume had increased further due to the heat, Leonardo frowned as if annoyed.
“What a nuisance.”
When the creature saw the tide of humans filling the plain surging toward it, it immediately abandoned its northern course and headed solely south.
Its intention was simple. The southern peaks, with their many sheer, bizarre rocks and dense forests, offered plenty of space for its large body to hide. Furthermore, the south was close to the sea, a place where clouds condensed relatively quickly.
If clouds settled between the mountain ranges, the radius of visibility would narrow significantly, inevitably reducing the accuracy of Teleports and attacks.
In such a situation, as he chased the creature closely, Leonardo was currently traversing the winding ridges on a scale of seconds. It was probably the creature’s ploy to exhaust his Magic Power and stamina, but he had no intention of playing along any longer.
Leonardo spread his palm toward the massive peak blocking his view and the clouds caught in its gaps, aiming at the area. Then, gathering Magic Power into his hand, he tried to trigger an explosion in one go, aiming for the right timing. He intended to blow away all the annoying obstacles at once.
But at that moment, whether by coincidence or not, something reddish caught Leonardo’s eye.
It was the seething magma, spewing smoke and oozing sluggishly in the far distance.
“……”
Leonardo’s gaze lingered there for a moment.
And then, just in time, he remembered the overly radical ‘Plan 5’ that he had pointed to with his own hand during the Council’s final meeting just before entering Peak 118, which had been outright dismissed.