Saki stroked the blue crystal in his hand with his wrinkled fingers, speaking slowly with a hint of nostalgia.
At that moment, as if the cone-shaped crystal understood his words, it emitted faint starlight and floated up on its own, spinning slowly in the air as it drifted toward Midir.
Midir instinctively reached out and grasped it. He felt a sense of perfect harmony, an instinctive familiarity that resonated deep within him.
The crystal seemed to sense his feelings and emitted an even more dazzling blue light. With a series of shifts and extensions, the crystal transformed into an exquisite, double-edged azure longsword.
The village chief, Saki, was stunned by the sight. He murmured under his breath.
“A Spirit Weapon... No wonder no one ever discovered its power. It was waiting for its true master all along.”
Midir looked at the blue longsword in his hand. The crystalline blade was completely transparent, with a faint, flowing golden light shimmering within. The crossguard stretched out to both sides like a bird's wings. It felt perfectly balanced in his grip, as if it were an extension of his own body.
With a light flick of his hand, the longsword dissolved into specks of starlight and vanished. In its place, a blue sword-shaped mark appeared on the back of his hand. With a single thought, the longsword materialized in his hand once again.
“Have I really let a Spirit Weapon gather dust all this time? It seems this truly was an arrangement of fate!”
Saki suddenly began to laugh, looking as if he had aged backward by several decades in an instant.
“Good, good. To see it choose a master in the final years of my life... I have no regrets.”
“Chief, don't talk as if you're about to pass away. You look quite healthy to me; living another ten or twenty years shouldn't be a problem,” Midir said earnestly, looking at Saki’s deeply wrinkled face.
“But I must thank you for this gift. I have a feeling that this will be very important to me!”
“Hahaha... then why don't you give it a name? From now on, it is a partner that will accompany you on your adventures.”
“Since you named the memoryless me ‘Midir,’ and this blade flickers with starlight like a spark of fire, I shall call it Starflame.”
Midir thought for a moment before quickly deciding on a name for the blue longsword.
“Excellent, excellent! Now that you have a proper weapon, you should prepare to set out. The merchant caravan should be arriving in the next day or two...”
Saki was halfway through his sentence when he was interrupted by a violent pounding on the door.
“Chief! Sir Midir! Come out, quickly! Something... something happened to the caravan!” Shaq’s frantic voice drifted in from outside.
“Something happened? What's the situation?” The two exchanged a look and quickly rose to open the door. Hearing the commotion outside, they rushed out.
As Shaq led the way, he spoke to them in a disjointed, frantic manner.
“I was just about to head out of the village to find some good wood for a knife hilt. Near the village entrance, I saw the birds on the main road acting like they’d been spooked, so I ran over to check. Then I... I found the caravan that was supposed to arrive... Everyone was lying on the ground, even the pack beasts and the Bicornes! I don't know how to describe it, but the state they’re in... it’s terrifying!”
Before long, the three arrived at the spot Shaq had described. Quite a few villagers had already discovered the scene and were gathered by the roadside, watching from a distance.
Midir gently pushed through the crowd and walked with Saki toward the area Shaq was pointing to, an ominous premonition rising in his heart.
The caravan, which should have consisted of dozens of people and animals, now lay lifeless on the ground. There were no wounds on their bodies, but they had all become like skeletons, as if every drop of moisture had been sucked dry.
They still held the poses they had in their final moments. Most of the corpses were facing the same direction, their mouths agape as if trying to scream about the horrific thing they had seen at the end of their lives.
A few brave villagers were moving the mummified remains to the side and covering them with tarps from the wagons. Midir stepped closer, carefully examining the state of the goods and the pack beasts.
Almost all the food and fruit in the wagons looked as if they had been scorched from the inside by fire; they turned to black ash at the slightest touch.
However, their clothing and items like paper remained perfectly intact. It was like a demonic flame that only consumed life force.
Looking at the tragic scene before him, Midir’s heart trembled, and he felt as if he were remembering something.
An uncontrollable surge of rage suddenly welled up within him. He slammed a fist into a wooden wagon parked nearby.
Under the force of his blow, the already precarious frame of the wagon instantly shattered into fragments that scattered across the ground.
“A Flame Demon! Why would a Flame Demon appear here!?” Midir turned to look at Saki, a trace of ferocity appearing on his handsome face.
“A Flame Demon...?!”
Saki had never seen Midir display such intense emotion. His body shuddered as he suddenly recalled the battle he had personally experienced a hundred years ago. The terror that should have been forgotten long ago surged back to the surface.
“Could it be... like the war back then!?”
“But that shouldn't be possible. Don't the Demon Race usually appear in the west of the continent? They haven't been seen for nearly a hundred years! How could they appear here? Impossible, absolutely impossible! Shaq, did you see anything else?”
Suppreessing the fear in his heart, Saki looked at the bewildered Shaq.
“N-no, I didn't find anything. As soon as I saw the commotion, I ran back here. Aside from the bodies everywhere, nothing unusual happened! Chief, what is a Flame Demon?”
Shaq felt a deep sense of dread as he watched the expressions of the two men suddenly shift.
As a hunter, he was actually quite accustomed to death, but the eerie nature of these deaths filled him with an instinctive terror.
“I'm going to search the area. Chief, Shaq, quickly direct the people here to handle the remains. Tell everyone to go hide and not to leave their homes! Move!”
Midir scanned the surroundings warily. After confirming there were no other immediate threats, he suppressed the sudden, inexplicable rage in his heart. He quickly issued orders to Saki and Shaq before vanishing from everyone's sight.
...
Rate on N.U.
