"Ah~ far. So very far. We had to arrive by today, and we only just made it."
A forest in the easternmost reaches of the Laican Domain, in the empire's northeast.
They had reached their destination after a long stretch aboard a train out of Hayden. Moor stretched, his body stiff and complaining. The sun still sat high, but after more than twenty hours in transit, it felt as though he could lie down anywhere and be asleep in a breath.
Within a single zone — a city, say, or anything inside one set of walls — teleportation could reach as far as the user's ability allowed. But teleporting from zone to zone, or across a city wall, was impossible. There were many reasons, and the chief one was defending cities against crime: criminal organizations had to be prevented from crossing into a city, and from fleeing out of it.
In the imperial demesne especially, wards against teleportation were inscribed throughout the territory, making the sorcery entirely unusable within its bounds — all for the sake of public order.
"Why so sullen? Something wrong?"
Moor, setting a cigarette between his lips, took a look at Ran and found his face far from good.
Ran only kept scowling and didn't answer.
With no idea what had brought this on, Moor lit up and turned his eyes forward. Ahead of them stood barracks and buildings built like a sprawling mountain lodge, and people packing every inch of them.
Moor found it rather impressive.
"Hard to believe. The report said this was plain forest as recently as a week ago — and now it's practically a small village. Is that how far alchemy has come?"
Alchemy.
At its foundation, the sorcery of converting mana into matter, or of using mana to change one substance into another.
If magic is a foundational discipline devoted to seeking truth and essence, and the Way-arts a study closer to probing the truths of nature, then alchemy is the sorcery bound most tightly to industry, engineering, and daily life — and architectural engineering, too, owes much of its progress to alchemy's advance.
"Yeah... you said exactly what I wanted to say."
"Hm?"
Ran, who hadn't reacted at all to the question actually asked of him, now spoke out of nowhere; Moor turned to look at him in surprise.
"The Order's intelligence, I mean. Isn't it complete garbage? There's no way a Sage is out here."
It had nothing to do with what Moor had meant, but he understood well enough what Ran was getting at.
"Well... I can't claim the intelligence and analysis teams are right a hundred percent of the time. Not everyone has your sense for sniffing out Sages and remains."
"Oh, that's how you're going to put it."
The moment he saw Ran's reaction, Moor knew he'd misspoken.
A large part of why they had been able to bring Ran into the Order three years ago was the argument that the Order's intelligence beat searching for Sages alone.
"Even so, Ran — it's a great deal better than when you were searching on your own."
"Better, my foot... I can't even remember the last time I actually ran into a Sage."
"It was only three months ago. A Sage isn't a pebble in the road — this counts as running into them often."
Ran, thoroughly sulking, didn't listen to a word of it and pushed past him into the crowd.
"Hey, Ran! Don't be in such a rush to... hm..."
Moor swallowed the rest of what he'd been about to say in a hurry.
He couldn't finish telling a boy who might not live past twenty, because of a curse, not to be in a rush.
Moor let the answer die and went after him.
The crowd was made up of a small number of imperial troops controlling the situation, and adventurer guilds, each arrived under its own separate mark.
This was one front in the war between the Goldilocks Empire and the cultists — the conflict commonly called the Far East War.
Ran wandered among the barracks and buildings that had been raised here.
Moor followed at an unhurried distance.
"Looking for an old outfit of yours, maybe?"
"Hardly. Every guild I was ever with got wiped out."
Ran answered Moor's question flatly. Once again Moor felt the weight of it: the teenage boy at his side was about as far from ordinary as a person could get.
Ran and Moor had been dispatched here because the empire's opponent was the cultists, which had prompted a request for help at the imperial court's level.
But what the Imperial Army had asked for was not that they fight the cultists directly.
"Monsters, is it... Never once faced one myself."
While one imperial company was engaging the cultists' army, a monster unit had appeared without warning, cutting off their line of retreat. To rescue them — to clear the monster unit blocking that retreat — every adventurer guild available had gathered, Ran and Moor among them.
When Moor and Ran showed their invitation to an imperial soldier posted before a tent, they were assigned a barrack of their own. Moor settled in there and went through the materials the Order had sent, along with the newspapers.
"So? You're saying one of the people here is a Sage?"
The long journey had worn Ran out; he flopped straight onto one of the prepared beds and asked Moor, who was sorting documents as he read.
"Strictly speaking, no."
Moor answered briefly and immediately looked around.
Then he raised a ward, so that nothing said inside would leave the barrack.
"According to the Order's intelligence, someone is controlling these monsters."
Hearing it, Ran shot upright on the bed. Moor smiled at the sight.
"Yes — you remember, don't you? Two years ago."
Ran nodded without a word.
Then he sat thinking for a long while, saying nothing.
"So those monsters are being controlled by someone, like last time? By a Sage?"
Moor nodded this time, wearing a look of real satisfaction.
Then he drew a cigarette from his coat and set it in his mouth.
"I can't be certain that one and this one are the same, but the odds are good. Which means: on the surface, we've come here to kill monsters. In practice, we're here to catch the Sage controlling them."
Cigarette between his lips, Moor waved a few sheets of the documents in Ran's direction to show him.
"And if we get to beat down some cultists in the bargain, so much the better."
The Church of Radiant Light's intelligence officers had judged this whole affair to be a cultist operation — hiring an unidentified Sage to steer the war their way.
"So what's the deal with these cultists, anyway?"
Cultists.
Everyone who holds to a religion other than the Church of Radiant Light.
It is a blanket term used by the Church's faithful.
Among them, the believers of the Full Moon Faith crossed the border early on, driven out by the Church of Radiant Light's persecution, and built an independent administrative territory of their own.
Both under the empire and under the kingdom that preceded it, the east was so barren, and monster appearances so frequent, that everyone naturally assumed they could not survive there. But survive they did — and today they are a threat to the empire.
Because the region they settled lies at the empire's eastern edge, the war against them is called the Far East War.
"Heretics who don't believe in the Radiant God or the Radiant Saintess. I don't imagine there's any other explanation needed."
Moor answered evenly, pushing aside the documents he judged unnecessary.
"Get some proper rest for now. Tomorrow is when we really start moving."
"Got it."
And so, for a while, Moor went on reviewing documents while Ran lay on the bed.
A little time passed, and Ran got up and started for the barrack door.
"Hm? Going out?"
"Yeah. It's noisy out there, and I'm sick of lying around."
"Hm?"
Between the soundproofing ward and the papers from Order headquarters, Moor hadn't noticed a thing about any commotion outside.
"All right, be careful. We're on assignment, so don't cause trouble — and call me if anything happens."
Still seated, Moor stretched a hand toward Ran.
Black fog curled up faintly from his fingers and formed a small black bird.
The bird flitted over and settled lightly on Ran's head.
Ran tipped his head back for a moment to look at it.
"Am I a kid? Going around causing trouble."
Ran grumbled his answer, then left the barrack with his back to Moor.
Moor saw him off with a smile and turned straight back to his papers.
Darkness had already begun swallowing the sky. Not much time had passed since their arrival, but here in the middle of a forest ringed by mountains, the sun seemed to set faster.
The moment Ran was out, he looked around and walked toward the source of the noise.
A short walk brought him to a place packed with people. Most of them were clustered in little knots by guild.
'Quite a turnout. Going by the clothes and the marks stitched on them... ten guilds, easily.'
Among them he spotted guilds he had seen back when he worked as an adventurer. Some carried considerable fame; others he had never seen before.
CRASH—!
"Ohhh~!"
"That's insane!"
They stood scattered in every direction, but nearly every gaze was fixed on one spot. Ran turned his own toward the center of the commotion.
There, two well-built men were tangling with a woman.
These were not merely sturdy, hot-blooded men — they were people who counted for something in their own regions, gathered in one place.
Pile that sort together with no chain of command, and it would have been stranger if fights didn't break out.
From the Imperial Army's side, as long as there was no serious bloodshed, they seemed content to watch from a distance and let the pecking order sort itself out.
'She's not bad at all.'
The woman was small-framed, with long, straight red hair and twin swords at her waist — and she was handling men four times her size without the slightest difficulty.
'Viper... and the other side would be Loud.'
Ran had noticed the viper's-head emblem stitched at her shoulder and chest. The mark of Viper, the strongest adventurer guild in the Arlelia Domain.
The guild itself wasn't large, but the word on it was that any single member could hold down another guild's ace slot. It had even produced one of the empire's four officially recognized Sages. And rumor had it that Marcel the hero had run with Viper as well.
"Unless you want to croak before you've even been paid, get lost!"
Having thoroughly introduced both men to the ground, the red-haired woman shouted it at them.
"Ohhhh~~~!!"
"Whoa!"
At that, the onlookers all around broke into cheers.
Four men who appeared to be their comrades ran out, propped the sprawled pair up, and got them to their feet.
They glared at the red-haired woman, but none of them said a word as they hauled their people away.
'Loud Guild... they shouldn't be a bunch of nobodies, either...'
Watching a woman who looked about his own age, Ran caught himself smiling without meaning to.
"Move it, squirt!"
One of the Loud members, helping his unconscious comrade along, bumped into Ran.
"What?"
Ran's hackles went up at the sharpness of it. In that instant he felt every eye in the place land on him. His fist had already tightened with the flare of temper when Moor's words flashed through his head.
'Right. No causing trouble... Let it go.'
And he registered, too, that he was the only person here standing alone. Judging there was nothing to gain from a scene, Ran opened his fist and clamped his mouth shut.
"Hey! You lot! Quit picking on a kid and just go!"
The red-haired woman shouted it, looking Ran's way.
"Hey! Who are you calling a kid?!"
"'Hey'?"
Ran had swallowed it once, but 'kid' finally blew the lid off. The red-haired woman's face went startled at having the arrow suddenly turned on her.
And she didn't much care for a boy so much younger than her answering back with that kind of attitude, either.
Her temper hadn't finished cooling from the business with Loud Guild. Head already hot, the red-haired woman set her right hand on a sword hilt and started toward Ran.
The tension in the yard climbed again. The onlookers settled in to watch, expectations high all over again.
"Oh dear. A paladin, no less. Our apologies."
Just then, a brown-haired middle-aged man appeared between Ran and the woman.
He had arrived in an instant; he pinned the woman's hand so she couldn't draw, and bowed his head toward Ran.
'Who's this guy?'
Only one thing threw Ran: the man had come within arm's reach, and he hadn't sensed him at all.
When Ran stood there saying nothing, the man finished with a parting nod to him and led the woman away.
The Viper Guild's emblem was on his shoulder too.
"Why did you stop me? Cocky little brat."
The woman grumbled, and the man smiled. Then he patted her back as if to settle her.
"He's a paladin. Word is that the paladin assigned to this operation is one of the strongest assets they have. Nothing good comes of picking a fight for no reason."
"You can't mean that kid? Ridiculous."
"No. Not the kid. The kid's partner."