After the meeting, as Elsez exited the room, a wing-shaped badge—symbol of the Holy Nation—was pinned to her collar.
It was the token of a hero, bestowed upon her by Dike.
With this badge, she would gain many privileges, such as free passage across national borders.
Elsez moved the badge to the inside of her clothes and looked toward Astaire.
‘Huh?’
Normally, Astaire would have been the first to approach the group and strike up a conversation, but today, he left the meeting room without even making eye contact.
It didn’t seem like he was avoiding them on purpose—more like he was so deep in thought that he wasn’t aware of anything around him.
‘Now that I think about it, he seemed out of it during the whole meeting.’
He had trouble focusing—something very unlike him.
‘Is it because of me?!’
As Elsez stared uneasily at Astaire’s retreating figure, Cassian mumbled beside her,
“Is something really up with that guy?”
Even Cassian, it seemed, noticed that Astaire was acting strange.
Seeing her chance, Elsez said slyly,
“Master, could you check on him?”
“What? Why should I be the one—wait, no. Why are you asking me instead of going yourself?”
“You’re friends, aren’t you? He might be more open with a friend than with me.”
“Friends, huh…”
Cassian grumbled, but still followed Astaire, just as Elsez had hoped.
As she watched Cassian walk away, feeling relieved, a familiar low voice spoke beside her.
“Did something happen between you and Astaire?”
Elsez flinched.
‘He’s like a mind reader.’
Cassian had only sensed something was off with Astaire, but Rashiel had immediately seen that something had happened between the two of them.
‘But… I can’t tell Rashiel about this.’
She always turned to Rashiel when something was troubling her, but this time, she had a gut feeling she shouldn’t.
Elsez quickly composed her expression and looked up at him, speaking calmly.
“No? Nothing happened.”
“Really?”
Rashiel narrowed his eyes at her.
Knowing Elsez’s personality, if she were worried, she would’ve gone to talk to Astaire directly.
But the fact that she sent Cassian instead, and was now brushing it off—clearly, something had happened.
Astaire had been acting strange for a few days, but Elsez hadn’t seemed to be affected until just yesterday. That meant something must have happened last night.
‘…Annoying.’
Rashiel’s gaze turned cold as he remembered seeing Astaire trying to enter Elsez’s tent a few nights ago.
He had always known that Astaire liked Ruel.
Astaire had been more perceptive than anyone when it came to Ruel.
And he had expected that Astaire would eventually fall for Elsez, who—though she was him—looked like Ruel.
But the Astaire he knew wouldn’t barge into someone’s tent while they were sleeping, no matter how he felt about them.
‘He’s the type who wouldn’t even touch a hair on her head, even if she was sleeping right in front of him.’
So what reason did he have to go into Elsez’s tent while she slept?
‘Don’t tell me…’
Just as Rashiel arrived at a troubling possibility, Elsez changed the subject.
“Oh, Rashiel. I have a favor to ask.”
Rashiel, drawn out of his thoughts, turned his attention back to her.
“Can you look into a way to separate the Demon Lord’s power from me? I’m planning to track down the Demon Lord’s cult in the meantime.”
In the meeting earlier, Dike had reported that dimensional rifts were appearing in villages across the continent.
Villages are always founded in areas where mana flows are stable, so the fact that rifts were appearing in peaceful towns strongly suggested artificial interference.
The other heroes were rushing to close the rifts, but with no way of knowing when or where they might appear, there were limits to how much they could do.
‘The fastest way to resolve this is to find and eliminate the person behind it.’
And that person was likely the woman known as the “Saintess.”
“Before the temple finds her, I want to get to her first. There are things I want to ask her.”
Elsez intended to uncover why the Saintess had summoned her to this world, and why the Demon Lord was resurrected again.
“And also, can you look into the dimensional rifts?”
“…Why the rifts?”
“I heard they’re pathways to other worlds. I want to know if that’s true.”
As she spoke about the rifts, a memory resurfaced in Elsez’s mind.
‘Wait… now that I think about it, back then…’
When she had encountered the masked Rashiel in the imperial palace—
“Don’t go. If you go in there, you might never find your way back.”
She remembered how he had stopped her as she hesitated at the edge of a dimensional rift.
Elsez turned to him and asked,
“Rashiel. You knew the rift led to another world, didn’t you?”
At her question, Rashiel paused.
He hadn’t told her that he had studied dimensional rifts in hopes of following her into another world.
Even he knew how reckless—how insane—that was.
Hiding his true motives, Rashiel replied with what little truth he could offer.
“…I learned a bit while digging into Cedric’s past. I’m not sure if one can really cross into another world.”
“Then, could you find out more for me?”
“You planning to go back to the world you came from?”
Her question made Elsez fall silent.
Back in the imperial palace, she had stopped at the rift because of Rashiel’s situation.
That issue was resolved now. Nothing was holding her back anymore.
‘Then… if everything goes wrong, should I just go back?’
That would make things simple.
This world would no longer need to fear the Demon Lord. She wouldn’t have to be the source of evil. And Reti could live peacefully among people who didn’t know a thing.
‘If that’s possible… can I really walk away from everything in this world without regret?’
As she asked herself that, she lifted her gaze— And met Rashiel’s eyes, already fixed on her.
In that instant, something heavy and tight filled her chest.
Bewildered by the sudden feeling, Elsez responded,
“I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. But I want to know. Just knowing there’s a last resort out there… would make me feel a little more at ease.”
A shadow briefly crossed Rashiel’s crimson eyes as he looked at her.
But Elsez didn’t see it.
****
Bang—!
A thunderous crash echoed through the empty indoor training hall.
Tezette stood among the shattered remains of countless training magic dummies, soaked in sweat and holding his sword.
As he turned, a magic circle activated across the entire room. The wreckage began to pull itself together, reconstructing the dummies.
Tezette returned his sword to his inventory, pulled out a bottle of water, and took a long drink as he exited the training hall.
Right outside, a fountain gushed cool, clear water.
He sat on the edge of the fountain and began eating a cookie.
That was when he sensed something—an odd gaze from nearby.
Following the feeling, Tezette spotted Reti peering at him from behind a bush.
Gasp.
Their eyes met, and Reti quickly ducked back out of sight.
Here’s how Reti had ended up there at that hour:
Last night, overwhelmed by an ominous presence pressing in from all sides, Reti couldn’t fall asleep. Elsez had taken her outside for a while to calm her.
But even after playing with Noel and coming back in, Reti tossed and turned for hours. She finally drifted off to sleep just before dawn.
Elsez, hoping to let Reti sleep in, had left her in the room while she went out for breakfast.
However, instead of returning shortly as planned, Elsez was suddenly called into a meeting with Dike.
As a result, she never made it back before Reti woke up.
When Reti awoke to an empty room, she was struck by a suffocating fear—
(Of course, being a stuffed rabbit, she couldn’t literally suffocate.)
In a place where everyone else felt like an enemy, the only human Reti trusted was Elsez.
“Where did you go, human?!”
Panicked, Reti completely forgot she could use teleportation magic to find Elsez instantly, and instead ran around the temple in a frantic search.
What if the bad humans hurt her?!
She wandered anxiously for a long time until, at last, she spotted a familiar face—Tezette.
“……”
Tezette munched on his cookie as he blankly stared at the fuzzy ball of fluff that could barely be called a living creature.
Reti eyed him warily in return.
“……”
As the two silently sized each other up, the only sound was the quiet crunch of a breaking cookie.
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