Chapter 40 – Seollang (2)

===================

Translated by Jinmu

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

===================

The Bloodsand Bandits were a massive organization that had operated in the southern desert for a very long time.

They numbered in the hundreds, and most of the fighters among them were strong enough to channel mana through their blades.

Calling them a mere bandit group almost felt inaccurate.

Naturally, such a group could not avoid the attention of Colony, the city-state that ruled the surrounding desert.

Their operating grounds were near the capital itself.

Under normal circumstances, a nation should have wiped out a criminal organization that large long ago.

Any large bandit presence inevitably harmed the state.

And yet Bloodsand continued to operate openly near the capital.

The reason was simple.

They had backing.

Not just any backing, but that of one of Colony’s most long-standing Baba Yaga.

Kalman Arentz.

Because Kalman sheltered them, a group that should have been exterminated years ago had grown from a few dozen men into a force of several hundred over the course of ten years.

Their leader, Draco, who also served as one of Kalman’s trusted subordinates, was in a terrible mood that day.

“Jack is dead?”

“Yes.”

One of his men had gone out to raid a caravan and failed to return.

Draco clicked his tongue.

His irritation had little to do with grief.

He was annoyed because one of the laborers he had painstakingly raised had been wasted.

He had talent too.

I was going to raise him a bit more and use him for assassination work.

“Who killed him?”

“We heard he died while targeting a mage.

A noble killed him.”

“A noble? Jack?”

“Yes.

The report says the moment that noble used magic, the middle of the desert froze over.”

“Name?”

“We’re already asking our people in Colony, but we probably won’t have the answer until tomorrow.”

Draco thought briefly.

“Tell me the instant you know.”

He had no intention of letting Jack’s killer walk away.

It might have been politically troublesome to kill a foreign noble, but Draco did not care much.

People died in the desert all the time.

Without witnesses, most deaths became disappearances.

And Draco had caused enough such disappearances himself to know exactly how to do it.

He planned to learn the noble’s identity, wait until the man left the city, and bury him in the sand.

That plan would never be carried out.

“Kgh…!”

Draco coughed up dark blood and stared vacantly at his ruined hideout.

Ten minutes earlier, the Bloodsand stronghold had stood in all its brutal pride.

Now it had been reduced to wreckage.

The men he had spent more than a decade building up were all dead, buried in sand or smashed into broken walls.

And in the middle of that ruin stood a girl with golden eyes.

“Hm. None left?”

Her gaze swept the area.

Then she vanished.

Golden lightning snapped through the darkness.

When she reappeared, two severed heads dangled from her hands.

Their faces still held the tense expressions of men who had hidden themselves near the destroyed base for an ambush.

Seollang tossed them away with complete disinterest.

Draco could not understand any of it.

From beginning to end.

What is this?

The reaper walked toward him.

Each step was casual.

When she had first appeared, a single strike had broken his kingdom apart.

In the moments after that, she had slaughtered the hundreds of bandits he had built over ten long years.

Now she stood before him, bathed in moonlit blue shadow, golden eyes burning in the dark.

His whole body shook with instinctive terror.

Still, he forced words out.

He had to live.

“Seollang, do you even understand what you’ve done?”

She showed no emotional reaction whatsoever.

All she did was raise her blood-covered right hand and grip his head.

“If you kill me, you’ll be making an enemy of Kalman Arentz.

I’m under his protection!”

The pressure on his skull only grew.

“Do you want money?

Take it.

Take all of it.

Or do you want tribute?

Fine, I’ll pay tribute!”

As death closed in, Draco finally screamed.

“Why?

Why are you doing this to me?”

Seollang answered in a voice that was neither loud nor soft.

“Because you touched my benefactor.

And…”

She thought of a pair of red eyes.

“I don’t want to get scolded.”

Then she crushed his head.

By the time Seollang vanished after completing her task, nothing remained there.

The Bloodsand Bandits, who had rampaged across the desert for more than a decade under Kalman’s name, were erased from history.

It had taken ten minutes.

* * *

The next day, after finally sleeping off the fatigue of long travel, Alon received two pieces of news.

First, entry into the forgotten city would not be possible until three days later.

Second, the Bloodsand Bandits had been wiped out completely.

“My lord, they say the bandits who attacked us were annihilated,” Evan said.

“…Bloodsand?”

“Yes. Completely.”

“When?”

“Yesterday, apparently.”

Alon stared.

“And the rumor spread across the city in one day?”

Evan nodded.

“Everyone’s talking about it already.

Sounds like a caravan that arrived today confirmed it.”

Alon felt as though question marks were multiplying over his head.

In the original story, the Bloodsand Bandits survived for another three years unless Elivan personally dealt with them.

Why would they suddenly disappear now?

His confusion lasted only until Seollang arrived.

“I took care of them!”

“You did?”

“Mm.

I did well, right?”

She beamed.

Alon and Evan both looked at her.

“…You wiped out Bloodsand?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He asked the question before he could stop himself.

Seollang tilted her head as though the answer were obvious.

“Because you said you didn’t want to meet them again.”

Alon turned to Evan as if to ask whether he had somehow hallucinated that conversation.

Evan looked just as blank.

“You did say that,” Seollang continued.

“So if they disappear, you won’t have to meet them again.”

She nodded to herself with the innocent expression of someone pleased by an elegant solution.

The feeling Alon had experienced when he first met Deus returned at once.

Isn’t this a little too much?

That thought rose again.

Then another occurred to him.

“…Did you do it alone?”

“Of course.”

Alon fell silent.

The Bloodsand Bandits numbered in the hundreds, and most of their fighters were strong enough to empower their weapons with mana.

They were not rabble.

And Draco, if Alon’s memory of the future was correct, possessed enough talent to wield an aura blade three years later.

Seollang had killed that man and the rest of the organization by herself.

He already knew the title Baba Yaga was not handed out cheaply.

Still, this was more than he had expected.

He looked at Seollang, who was smiling as brightly as ever, and remembered once again what she would become in the future.

The Sin of Pride.

His posture unconsciously grew more solemn.

That was what happened three days before they were due to depart for the forgotten city.

* * *

Around the same time that Alon had left for Colony, a very secret meeting was taking place in a shabby tavern in eastern Theria.

“Why did you call me here, Duke?” Marquis Philvoid asked.

Duke Rimgrave, head of the Royalist faction, answered without hesitation.

“I doubt your instincts have dulled enough to need that explained, Marquis.”

Philvoid sat down.

“I assume this is about Count Palladio.”

“You assume correctly.

More precisely, it is about Kalpa, the little faction those fools built around him.”

That was enough.

Both men had survived politics for decades.

A few short lines were all they needed to understand one another.

Rimgrave had called him here to propose an alliance aimed at crushing Kalpa.

For both the Royalists and the Aristocrats, Kalpa was an irritating organization that threatened their interests.

They had seen often enough how yesterday’s enemy could become today’s ally when interests aligned.

“So what is your plan?” Philvoid asked.

“I intend to draw Rosaria in.”

“…Rosaria?”

“More precisely, one of its cardinals.”

Rimgrave laid out his design in detail.

After listening for a time, Philvoid asked the only question that mattered.

“And my share?”

“Half the bribe required to stuff the cardinal’s mouth shut.”

“Not bad.”

The two nobles smiled in satisfaction.

If the plan proceeded as intended, Kalpa, the faction raised by a pack of underworld upstarts, would collapse like a sandcastle.

“It won’t take long,” Rimgrave said.

“I’ve already made contact.”