After five minutes spent in awe of the statue's divine grandeur, Sora was the first to come back to his senses.
He nudged Elena to snap her out of it.
Sora began walking, with Elena leading the way.
The sand was soft and warm under their feet. With every step, fine grains filled in from the edges of his shoes, rustling faintly as they walked. Now and then, the copper-colored veils drifting through the air passed beside them, and sparks flared in front of their faces for a moment before going out.
Elena was a few steps ahead.
She stepped normally with her left foot, but she never lifted her right foot at all, dragging it along the sand behind her. With every step, her body tilted slightly to the right, and her shoulders bobbed up and down. Behind her, a deep, unbroken line stretched across the sand.
Like an injured dog.
Sora watched this sight for a while.
He had lived 282 years in fantasy worlds and 17 years in Japan, a life of 300 years in total, and he had seen a lot of things in his life. But this was the first time he had ever seen someone voluntarily imitate the pose of a dog dragging itself along.
In that moment, Sora realized something. After a few seconds of calculating, he figured out that on August 5th of this year, it would probably be exactly his 300th birthday.
By this world's calendar, it was currently June 21st. That meant he would be celebrating his 300th birthday in about a month and a half.
He had celebrated his 100th birthday with his master in the Murim world.
His 200th birthday, on the other hand, he had missed because he was too focused on learning magic.
Celebrating birthdays was a little childish, but right then, Sora decided that for his 300th birthday, he would at least eat something good, take a vacation, and play video games.
Then he looked at the injured dog in front of him once more.
What a dishonorable way to walk.
Sora didn't say anything. He just placed his own steps right beside the track the girl was leaving and kept walking.
...
They walked.
The sea of sand didn't change. The dunes were the same dunes, the veils were the same veils, the sky was the same amber color. After a while, Sora stopped trying to guess how much time had passed. The only thing that changed was the statue. You are reading on novelping dot com, the official source.
The statue was getting closer.
Elena's steps sped up. She was almost skipping as she dragged her right foot.
"Almost there," she muttered. "Almost there, almost there..."
They were about a hundred steps from where the statue's shadow fell across the sand when Sora noticed something.
The tip of the sword was trembling where it met the sand.
A moment later, the trembling spread upward. Along the blade, to the figure's hands, its arms, the folds of the cloth. The statue began to ripple like a landscape seen through hot air. Its edges blurred. Its colors faded. The light at the top of the hilt flickered like a candle and went out.
And the moment Sora noticed something was off, the statue scattered before his eyes like a thin wisp of smoke and vanished.
Behind it, there was only sand.
Elena stopped where she stood.
"A mirage," she said. There was disappointment in her voice, but no surprise. "I knew it. I knew it!"
On top of that, once the statue vanished, the dark fog swallowed everything again.
Without a moment's hesitation, Elena crouched down. She pressed both hands into the sand and turned toward the direction they had come from. She placed her fingers inside the line she had left and felt along the edges of the track, like a blind person reading raised letters.
Sora raised his head.
Since the girl was still crouched on the ground, she was completely inside the fog. Sora couldn't see her, but he could hear her.
She was on all fours.
Right before she started crawling back the way they had come, feeling the track with her hands and moving forward on her knees, she told Sora to hold onto the hem of her clothes so he wouldn't get lost.
An image suddenly popped into Sora's head of himself putting a leash on Elena and walking her like a dog, and his skin crawled.
He refused without hesitation and told her he would rely on the sounds to follow right behind her.
As Elena crawled, she stopped every now and then and muttered to herself, "Here... this is... okay, here..."
Then he couldn't take it anymore.
He bent down, plunged his hand into the fog, and grabbed the girl by the collar of her pajamas. He pulled her up off the ground and lifted her into the air, like picking up a cat by the scruff of its neck.
Elena having lost her sense of shame didn't change the personality that had hardened over his long years.
Sora couldn't stand this nonsense.
"Ah! W-what are you doing?!"
Elena's feet dangled in the air. Sora lifted her up to his chest level and looked at her face.
The girl's cheeks were smeared with sand. There were even a few grains on the tip of her nose. Her hair was a mess, and her bunny hairpin was crooked.
Sora set her down on the ground.
Then he took off one of his shoes, then the other, and held them out toward her chest.
Elena looked at the shoes. Then at Sora.
"These are..."
"Just hold them and follow me."
Elena clutched the shoes to her chest with both hands.
Sora pressed his bare feet into the sand. The sand was warm and fine, and every single grain touched the soles of his feet on its own. He took a step. Then another step. On the third step, he felt the surface of the sand change under his foot. A slight dip. A long line, packed a little tighter, its edges slightly raised.
Elena's track.
Without a word, Sora started walking along that line.
Elena stood there behind him for a few seconds, then hurriedly ran after him. Holding the shoes in one hand, she grabbed the hem of Sora's jacket again with the other.
Following the track wasn't hard. They had walked in a dead-straight line toward the statue, and the track never curved. Sora only paid attention to not losing that line under the soles of his feet and left the rest to his body. Because of the fog, he couldn't see what was ahead of him or behind him, but he didn't need to.