Ch. 114: Speculating While Moving
Eventually, Loren and Lapis gave up on trying to clean everything.
There were just too many bodies, and the dragon zombie was too large to move.
Although they knew they couldn’t do anything, it didn’t help the stench at all, so they were walking towards their destination under the night sky.
“There’s no way we could spend the night there.”
Loren and Lapis had decimated a great number of undead, a True, and a dragon zombie at the place where they planned to camp for the night.
Although it wouldn’t be the last, Loren hoped that they had done enough damage so that their enemy wouldn’t be able to mass a similar force and attack anytime soon.
“Are you okay Loren? Humans die so easily unless they sleep, so I’m worried.”
Lapis was carrying a silent Dia on her back.
After the attack, Dia, who had been stunned and unmoving, didn’t seem to budge where she was kneeling even after they had finished packing up and were ready to move on.
They couldn’t leave her there, but they couldn’t stay there either, so Loren suggested that he carry Dia, but Lapis refused and said that she would carry her.
Loren was used to carrying heavy things on his back, so he thought that he should be the one to do it, but Lapis seemed to have her own thoughts.
She was being wary of Dia’s fangs being so close to Loren’s neck, as he was only a human.
“It would be a disaster if you were bitten.”
“Wouldn’t that be the same for you?”
“I mean, I can manage, so.”
Lapis smiled as she picked up Dia, but the fact that she said she could do something about being bitten, when normally if vampires sucked blood from living beings, they would end similarly, made Loren think about how powerful demon kind were.
“Anyways, we’re such an efficient party, don’t you think?”
When Loren looked at Lapis’ face, wondering what she meant, she looked back with a serious expression.
“Well, we’re walking in the plains at night without a light.”
Now that she mentioned it, Loren remembered that his sight was still linked with the no life king Shayna.
A normal party would use torches or lanterns, and move in the darkness of the night.
But the two of them had no need for such things, and were walking as if it were daytime.
The only one that was shaking in fear was the donkey, since it was the only one that was walking in pure darkness.
“Can you do this with your real eyes too?”
When Loren asked Lapis out of curiosity, Lapis answered with a proud look.
“Whatever I can do now, I can do with my real body.”
“Even beating up a True with just your hands?”
“Easily. It’s actually more difficult right now. I can fight a lot better since I can allocate the mana I used for my arms down to my legs, but I still can’t move how I want to since I’m worried that the joints would fall apart.”
“Priestess…”
“Should I eventually introduce myself as a monk soldier?”
Loren wondered if that would be fine with her, it didn’t seem like she cared, so he thought that it wasn’t something he could say about it.
“Is Dia still down?”
“Hmm. I wonder.”
When Lapis turned over her shoulder to look at Dia’s face, Dia saw that she was being looked at, and raised her head slightly from Lapis’ back.
Her face was quite shaken, which was unlike the calm self she had been showing, and made her seem like the young girl she looked like.
“She’s supposed to be over 500 years old, though…”
“Wouldn’t not hinting at that be an act of kindness?”
“Why was she suddenly not able to fight in the first place?”
Loren thought that if there was a reason, he needed to know.
He hadn’t asked until now since Dia wasn’t in a state to talk, but since she was able to respond, he immediately asked her, and when Dia heard him, she looked down, still clinging to Lapis’ back.
Loren regretted asking, as it seemed like she couldn’t speak yet, but after a moment of silence, Dia managed to form words.
“We Elders…don’t speak our true names.”
“Seems so.”
Loren recalled when Dia had introduced herself to them for the first time, she had said she couldn’t tell them her family name, and to call her Dia.
Loren thought that there was a good reason for it, so he hadn’t asked her about it, but it seemed that it was the same for them as a race.
“For us Elders, our real names are connected to our very existences.”
“Hmm?”
Although it seemed that she had come out with something very important, but Loren couldn’t understand what she meant.
When he looked at Lapis for help, since Lapis was more versed in magic and divine arts, she thought about Dia’s words for a moment, as if she was letting the words sink in, and asked her.
“Is that like a so-called True Name?”
“That’s exactly what it is.”
“I see.”
Lapis seemed to understand, but Loren was still in the dark.
“Would you like to hear about it Loren? If you ask, I could explain it…”
As Lapis showed a sense of superiority of knowing something he didn’t, Loren felt slightly annoyed, he didn’t show it, but instead replied in an uninterested voice.
“You don’t have to. Shayna probably knows, anyway.”
“What!? O-okay, I’ll tell you, I mean, please let me explain.”
Shayna possessed the knowledge that a no life king would have.
Loren guessed that she would know about the “True Name” that Lapis had mentioned, but since Lapis seemed to want to explain it to him very badly, he decided that there was no need to ask Shayna and silently motioned for Lapis to go on.
“Shayna is quite troublesome…Even more so because only Loren can see her. Umm, True Names. It is said to be something that anyone can have, and it’s a name that is used to indicate one’s own existence.”
“Could you explain it simpler?”
Although Loren seemed to be quite educated for a mercenary, when it came to practical matter such as magic, it wasn’t an exaggeration to say that he couldn’t understand the theoretical things Lapis told him at all.
Which is why he asked Lapis for an easier explanation, but Lapis went silent with a troubled look on her face.
“Umm. How would I explain this…This was the only explanation when I learned about it…”
“What if I tell you that it’s like a magic name that if someone says it, he has every part of that being in his hands?”
Dia explained from Lapis’ back, helping her.
As Lapis looked at him to see if the explanation was good enough, even though she wasn’t the one who came up with it, Loren seemed to get a vague image of what it meant, and nodded slowly.
“So your magic name was used against you?”
“Yes, exactly.”
Dia’s face turned sullen again.
Loren had a good idea where the conversation was going, but until it was said clearly, he couldn’t use it as solid intel, so even though he didn’t feel like it, he needed to hear it from Dia, so as he rubbed the back of his neck, he continued to ask her.
“Who else knows your True Name other than you?”
There was no answer.
That itself was an answer in a sense, but Loren pressed on.
“I have my own guess. Want to hear it?”
“…Tell me.”
“It’s most likely her master Sierra that knows Dia’s True Name other than herself. It’s such an important name, so it’s not something you can just tell anyone.”
“Based on your assumptions Loren, wouldn’t it be Sierra who is getting in our way, not Stoos?”
It was unlikely that the True who called himself First was able to force that information out of Sierra, who was an Elder.
Instead, Dia’s True Name was something that couldn’t have gotten into anyone else’s hands unless Sierra had leaked it.
But if was leaked, the one who did it couldn’t be anyone other than Sierra herself.
“I think it’s Sierra who did it.”
“Can I ask why?”
The feeling that she didn’t want to believe and the fact that there could be no other explanation seemed to be fighting each other inside, as Dia’s voice was trembling.
Pretending not to notice it, Loren continued his thought.
“The dragon zombie. If something like that’s walking around, there’s no way no one wouldn’t notice it. And being what it is, if found, it would definitely cause an uproar.”
“But there was nothing like such, and it was able to attack our camp, which means there’s a high possibility that someone sent it our way.”
“Even though we slowed down to screw our enemy’s plans. But they still knew our location, which means someone had to confirm where we were.”
“I see. So you think that Dia’s master is suspicious since she came to us earlier. But why?”
“I don’t know about motives. More so if it’s something within the confinements of Elders themselves.”
“Would you understand if I told you that Elders take pride in things that they excel in?”
Loren thought about what Dia said in almost a whisper, eventually recalled a certain conversation.
It was something Sierra had said when she had come to check on Dia.
“Does your master excel in magic?”
“Loren, are you saying…”
“She said it herself. The reason why Dia was considered capable of leaving her master’s care was because her skills in magic surpassed Sierra’s.”
Loren thought that a student surpassing her master was proof that the master had taught he rwell, but apparently Elders couldn’t think of it that way.
It was easy to dismiss it as silly, but as long as Dia didn’t say so, it could be said that Loren was correct.
“I guess, that would be so.”
As Dia muttered, not able to object Loren’s reasoning, buried her face in Lapis’ back, not letting the two of them see her face.