30. The Cause of General Saul's Death
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“I... I can try,” little Gret said nervously.
“But I may not be able to control this power completely. I might hurt someone else.”
“That’s all right. I’ll handle it.” Sol waved his hand, signaling the mages and villagers to disperse. “Let’s go to the open ground in front of the village.”
On the open ground before the village, Sol and little Gret faced each other.
The other mages and villagers watched from a distance.
Sol began chanting a spell. With a turn of his wrist, a wall of steel rose from the ground as if from nowhere, enclosing the boy.
“All right. Begin.”
“Use your strongest magic. Attack me with everything you have!”
Little Gret nodded.
“Then I’ll begin!”
Following an instinct that seemed to come from the depths of his bloodline, he spread his arms wide.
Memories from an ancient age surged up from the depths of his soul.
The boy seemed to see himself transformed into a colossal dragon, spreading wings that blotted out the sky as he swept across the heavens.
Below him, thousands upon thousands of dragons, elves, and dwarves prostrated themselves, awaiting his command.
The memories of the Age of the Ancient Dragon Empire!
Whoosh!
Scorching flames erupted around little Gret, surging outward in a violent torrent as if they meant to swallow everything in existence.
Wait. No, this power...
Sol’s pupils widened, and his heart clenched. He brought his hands together.
The iron walls that had already risen halfway around them rapidly expanded, closing into a complete ring around little Gret.
The steel barrier encircled the boy, attempting to block the surging magical force.
Rumble!
The scarlet inferno battered the iron wall, making it shudder violently and twist out of shape.
The wall quickly glowed red and grew white-hot.
A second or two later, it melted straight into molten iron!
The storm of flames broke through the barrier and surged directly toward Sol.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. That kind of power?”
Sol froze. At the very last moment, he hurriedly uttered another word of a lifesaving spell.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
The roaring flames swallowed Sol whole.
“General Sol!”
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The many mages watching nearby, Joseph among them, cried out in alarm all at once.
Joseph in particular broke into a cold sweat.
Back in the Floating City, General Sol had always been a mighty figure whom he could only look up to.
And now the one who had attacked him was Joseph’s own student. If anything happened to General Sol...
Whoosh.
The blazing inferno scattered and faded.
Crimson sparks still drifted through the air.
The air was so scorching that merely breathing it in was almost unbearable.
Where General Sol had originally been standing, nothing remained but a stretch of scorched earth.
The dry, blackened ground steamed in the heat, empty of all life.
Little Gret stared at the deserted wasteland and suddenly panicked. He waved his hands frantically, nearly bursting into tears.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry...”
“Where did General Sol go?”
The mages were equally startled, anxiously searching in every direction.
“Stop looking. I’m here.”
General Sol emerged from behind the mages.
The clothing of this Eldoren general bore several charred marks, and black soot stained his face.
He looked somewhat disheveled, but fortunately, his continuously active passive wards had kept him from suffering any serious harm.
Even the several mages who had accompanied him were seeing General Sol in such a sorry state for the first time.
Who would have thought that General Sol had emerged unscathed from the earlier campaign to purge the orcs, only to end up in such an undignified condition at the hands of one of his own people?
“A seventh-circle Firestorm, combined with some form of fire affinity enhancement, and further amplified by what should be a metamagic technique. Its power clearly exceeds that of the original spell.”
“In terms of destructive force alone, it is plainly stronger than a mage of the same level. It resembles a specialized destructive combat type more than anything else...”
“I was indeed a little overconfident.”
Sol let out a breath of relief.
The instant the flames engulfed him, he had successfully teleported away, avoiding the brunt of the attack.
Had he been caught off guard rather than prepared in advance, he would have been in far worse shape now.
What Sol did not know—but Erian knew all too well—was that in the original course of history, Sol had died beneath the surprise attack of the resistance leader, Gret.
“This child only learned magic moments ago, yet he is already this powerful?”
The mages were utterly astonished, their shock beyond words.
This surface-dwelling commoner child, who had not even mastered the most basic arcane formulae, already possessed magical attainments capable of threatening General Sol, the chief mage!
At that moment, the mages were even somewhat relieved.
Such astonishing power was now standing on the side of the empire.
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“This is unquestionably an extraordinary discovery. I must notify His Majesty Erian at once.”
“For Eldoren to make use of such power would be an unparalleled honor.”
Sol softly recited a string of spells, sending the message toward the Sky City.
A few seconds later, Erian’s figure took shape before them.
It was almost as though he had been waiting for this moment all along.
...
“That is what happened, Your Majesty Erian.”
“It is astonishing. The child seems to have comprehended and harnessed magic through a method entirely different from ours.”
“A child who has not even mastered the simplest spell model is capable of wielding such formidable magic! This completely overturns conventional understanding.”
As General Sol and the other mages delivered their astonished report, and as he watched the nervous boy Gret crouching in a corner, Erian showed not the slightest surprise.
Everything had been orchestrated by him.
The moment Haug Bloodwolf refused to leave Eldoren’s lands with his tribe, Erian had set his sights on him.
At some point long before, Erian had quietly implanted suggestions deep within the minds of the one-armed orc and his companions.
The precise time when this band of surviving orcs would attack the village, which village they would target, and the entire course of the assault—from beginning to end—had all been planned by Erian alone.
Until the moment he died in the flames, Haug had always believed that the thoughts arising in his mind, his sudden courage, his hatred and resentment toward the fleeing chieftain and high priest, his fury and pain—in short, everything—had truly sprung from his own free will.
Everything that had happened tonight was merely a move in the Arcane Emperor’s game, played deep within the palace of the Floating City.
Had little Gret failed to awaken tonight, Erian himself, watching in secret from the heights of the heavens, would have intervened personally to deal with the orcs.
“All right. I understand,” Erian said calmly after hearing everyone’s report.
He walked up to little Gret. Blue-black runes revolved within his eyes as he examined the boy for a moment. Then he turned and said:
“This commoner boy’s condition perfectly aligns with a hypothesis I proposed during my earlier research.”
“The bloodlines of present-day humans actually contain elements from quite a few other races.”
“This boy’s ancestry can probably be traced back to a powerful red-dragon noble from the Age of the Ancient Dragon Empire.”
“Moreover, a case of atavism has happened to manifest in him. Under the stimulus of extraordinary circumstances, the dragon’s magic awakened within his body.”
What...?
The mages, including Sol and Joseph, were left utterly bewildered.
All their lives, they had been taught that humans were a race without innate supernatural power. Only through study and understanding could they hope to master arcane magic.
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