It wasn’t the first time he’d seen the lake empty, but back then he hadn’t been able to make sense of it.
After all, it had been an urgent moment when they had to flee Root immediately.
He’d gotten out of there with only Brownie and hadn’t taken in anything beyond the fact that the lake was empty.
At the time, he’d simply assumed the knights of House West had torn up the lake in a fit of spite.
‘No.’
This wasn’t something the knights could do.
It didn’t even feel like an act done out of spite.
Reinhild studied the lake with a grave expression.
Staring like this wouldn’t reveal anything. But even without thinking too hard, he knew there weren’t many humans who could pull off something of this scale without batting an eye.
Simply getting rid of the water in a lake… something like that could be done easily enough with a bit of power.
But erasing it the way this place was now, as if the very basin where the lake was had been ripped out wholesale. That wasn’t something just anyone could do.
The ripple of mana was so strong that, despite all that rain, not a single drop of water had pooled where the lake had been.
That all but meant the power that made the lake vanish was still affecting this place long after the fact.
Did someone want to get rid of the lake?
Did they hold a grudge against it?
Or else…
‘They didn’t want anyone coming here.’
Reinhild, almost by accident, hit upon the answer.
‘It was definitely that crazy human’s doing!’
Unfortunately, he failed to hit the next answer in a row.
‘He didn’t like that I came here, so he erased the lake. Crazy human… Is he even human?’
The incidents the brazen human had just mentioned might all be that crazy one’s work.
The lake disappearing. The knights of House West coming. Even the torrential rain—every last bit of it!
Reinhild wiped from his memory that the knights had come because Xion had pitched the hero and shoved the blame onto the crazy human.
‘Root isn’t safe.’
He didn’t know who the crazy human really was.
But the odds were high that Reinhild was his target.
All those incidents had started right after Reinhild came here, and until then Rute had been peaceful so they said.
‘A companion of the hero?’
If so, the claim that the lake vanished by God’s will made sense too.
If the hero had done it, of course he’d call it the will of the High God.
In truth, the incident had gone a little differently than Reinhild imagined.
When the forest fire exposed that the lake had been destroyed, the villagers found out, and the headman had no choice but to reveal the cause.
But as a noble and a hero, Jake’s actions couldn’t be reported truthfully, so the headman, in a mood of resignation, spoke around it instead.
That it was all God’s will.
Reinhild couldn’t know that.
So he ended up firmly believing the whole thing was the work of the hero and his companions.
‘When did he gather all his companions?’
The hero had pretended he hadn’t found any yet, but clearly he’d hidden the others right around this lake.
Reinhild had dropped by the lake and happened to run into one of the hero’s companions. He’d almost been attacked and had barely escaped with his life.
If Reinhild ever came back to the lake, that companion’s identity might be exposed, so to eliminate Reinhild’s reason to come here, they erased the lake itself.
To carry out his plan, he’d destroyed the lake, the precious treasure of the innocent villagers.
Truly impressive.
If there were a way to change species, Reinhild would have wanted to recruit him to the demonfolk. The resolve was that good.
‘Looks like this era’s hero has secured an incredible companion.’
While spinning a shamble of a deduction from start to finish, Reinhild stoked his anger toward the hero.
Getting angry didn’t mean there was anything he could do.
Now that he knew the hero had such a formidable companion, he couldn’t sleep easy.
‘He’s not… nearby right now, is he?’
With tension sweeping over him, Reinhild swallowed dryly.
Thinking the enemy might be watching made his hands tremble.
What should he do?
Run?
But what if he was struck from behind as he fled?
If someone with this level of power attacked, Reinhild would be erased in an instant.
Xion had told him not to get hurt. This would go beyond getting hurt, to dying.
Squelch.
At the sound of a footfall in the sodden ground, Reinhild froze where he stood.
Someone was approaching.
He felt eyes on him. He was certain.
The tension felt like it was constricting his windpipe.
Reinhild could hardly breathe; he did his best to calm the thundering of his heart.
‘Stay calm.’
He drew a deep breath and slowly turned his head.
Praying that whatever met his gaze when he turned wouldn’t be the last living thing he ever saw.
“Gah!”
When he turned, a horse trotted up to him happily and nuzzled its head against him.
“…Haaaa…”
Reinhild let out a long breath he’d been holding.
The gaze had belonged to one of the horses at the stable beside the lake.
“You scared me.”
He’d thought his heart would leap out of his chest.
Still, it was a relief that what popped out behind him wasn’t an enemy.
‘If he hasn’t shown up by now, he’s probably not nearby.’
If the crazy human were here, he would have attacked Reinhild already.
The absence of any sign of life after all this time meant he’d moved on long ago.
He’d surely stepped away to get out of the rain for a bit.
Reinhild gave a perfunctory pat to a horse he assumed was one of Brownie’s friends and looked toward the stables.
Perhaps swept by the downpour, the stable was half-collapsed.
Around it, the horses milled without anywhere to go. They were all soaked to the skin, but none seemed injured.
“…It’s strange to have horses in Gray Owlbear territory.”
Suddenly, a question he’d never once considered occurred to him.
Large animals like horses were staple prey for Gray Owlbears.
Say there’d been some thoughtless human who built a stable within the owlbears’ range—humans were short-sighted, after all.
Even so, the horses here should’ve long since become a meal for the Gray Owlbears.
Unless this place had been set up as a kind of emergency pantry for the owlbears, it didn’t make sense.
‘I don’t see a single trace of monsters.’
Not just Gray Owlbears. There were no monster traces here at all.
With a downpour like this, it wouldn’t be strange to see a stray monster or two that had lost its den.
Could that also be the crazy human’s influence?
“…”
The humans’ refrain that there were no monsters around Root echoed in his head.
But… he’d definitely seen an owlbear.
There were too many contradictions. Reinhild no longer knew what to think.
He felt like his head might burst.
“Who is that crazy human, really?”
In the end, Reinhild decided to chalk it all up to the hero and his mysterious companion. That way, everything could be explained neatly.
His enemy was stronger than he’d thought. Better to learn that now.
With the crazy one absent from the area, he needed to search this place and gather information about the enemy.
Reinhild crouched beside the lake and pressed his hand to the ground.
The sting in his palm told him the mana here was harmful to him. Clean, pure mana imbued with the High God’s power like that of a hero or a priest.
It was now certain the crazy human was a companion of the hero.
“He detonated his mana all at once and swallowed only the lake cleanly.”
It was a tremendous ability.
Because the mana hadn’t spread outward at all, the trees and surrounding ecosystem remained intact.
So the village and forest wouldn’t be swept away, he had focused his mana precisely on the single target of “the lake” and triggered the explosion.
It was nothing short of awe-inspiring.
From the sheer amount of mana to the control, even if humans had grown stronger over the last five hundred years, this wasn’t something you saw every day.
Just what kind of incredible companion had the hero recruited?
This wasn’t the time to lean on Xion for everything. If anything, he needed to evacuate Xion so he wouldn’t get dragged into these monsters’ mess.
Nothing about this failed to unsettle Reinhild.
That overwhelming capability.
That tremendous aura.
And above all…
“…What is this mana?”
A mana that felt strangely familiar.
As if he’d experienced it somewhere before.
“What is happening?”
He was confused.
He had no idea how to interpret any of this.
Reinhild brought a hand to his racing heart.
It was only to calm himself.
But at that very moment, he could feel it.
The mana circulating around his heart was the same kind as what pooled at the lake.
“…Hah!”
Reinhild sprang to his feet like a coiled spring.
Thud, thud, thud—his heart began pounding even harder than before.
He was only so startled that his heart raced, yet the mana inside him roiled, throwing him into deeper confusion.
“What… what is this…?”
The powerful force that had evaporated the lake.
And the mana beaded within Reinhild’s body.
The instant he became certain those two were the same, Reinhild understood.
Why this mana had felt familiar.
Because it was the very thing he never let leave his body for even a moment.
The “impurity” caught in the mana stone necklace Xion had given him was the very same unidentified mana that had erased the lake.
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