As they reached the edge of the forest, Shrekheimer gave a warning.
“Be careful. Orc hunters may be lying in ambush.”
Mitchell asked back, puzzled.
“Orc hunters in the Elven Forest?”
“This is not the Elven Forest. Think of it merely as a forest established as a buffer zone.
The true Elven Forest lies much farther in.”
“Is that so?”
Seeing Mitchell nod as if he understood, Shrekheimer continued his explanation.
“Once we pass through the buffer zone, a wide plain will appear. Only after crossing it will the Elven Forest come into view.”
Shrekheimer paused, then seemed to remember something and continued once more.
“And in this forest, besides orc hunters, elves known as Sentinels—watchmen—will likely be hiding as well. If by any chance you discover them, you must not harm them under any circumstances.
Bring them to me as politely as possible. Elves never behave rudely toward those who approach them with courtesy.”
The men nodded in unison.
“Understood.”
The party spread out widely and began searching through the buffer forest the elves had created.
Various kinds of monsters lived within the forest. Not long after entering, they were attacked by goblins, but no one was hurt.
Only the goblins that had launched the attack were annihilated in vain. That was how outstanding each member of the group’s abilities were. However, the elves, called the race of the forest, did not easily show themselves.
Deep in the forest. It was a dense woodland so thick that even sunlight could not enter, leaving it dim and gloomy.
Fallen leaves were piled knee-deep, and all around them stood massive trees thick enough to fill one’s arms.
Sararak.
Perhaps the wind had blown, for the trees stirred for a moment. A single ray of light slipped through the gap and faintly illuminated the space between the trees, revealing silhouettes in the darkness. Astonishingly,
several shadows were hiding beneath the shade of the trees. They were concealed so perfectly that anyone who did not look closely would have passed them by.
They were elves, the very race known as the people of the forest.
Five elves were hiding beneath the shade of the trees.
Judging by the faintly revealed curves of their bodies, they all seemed to be women.
Illumina, a fourth-rank warrior of the Luminous clan who had been dispatched to serve as a Sentinel watching over the forest, looked around and gently closed her eyes.
As an experienced Sentinel, she had no need to roam the forest in order to scout.
The whispers of the trees would inform her of intruders.
A moment later, she opened her eyes.
Astonishingly, anger began to blaze in Illumina’s beautiful eyes.
“There are intruders.”
At those words, the Sentinel Archers under her command silently unshouldered their bows and took them in hand.
Now that they knew there were intruders, they had a duty to determine their numbers and identities.
The whispers of the trees told them only whether intruders were present.
The rest was solely the Sentinels’ responsibility. The women waited silently for Illumina’s orders.
“Sisters. Let us go.”
At Illumina’s command, the Sentinels under her began moving cautiously in the direction the trees had indicated.
As Illumina ran beneath the trees like the wind, tension surfaced on her face.
“Who could the intruders be? Orcs of the Patar tribe again?”
Suddenly, anger settled over her face. It was only natural, for the Luminous clan to which she belonged had been locked in a long, tedious struggle with the nearby orc tribe. The enmity between elves and orcs ran rather deep.
The conflict between the two races had begun around the time the First War of the Races ended.
Between the defeated remnants of the orc army, who had fled beyond the Pelusia Mountains, and the elves determined to defend their territory, conflict was inevitable.
Countless orc warriors invaded the forest in search of food.
But the elves had no intention of forgiving them.
As a result, many orc warriors became cold corpses beneath elven arrows.
The orc warriors, too, had to fight desperately against the elves’ attacks in order to fill their starving bellies.
The conflict continued for a very long time, and many orcs and elves lost their lives to one another’s hands.
Perhaps because of that, relations between the two races were extremely poor. Though the elves had not sided with the humans in the Second War of the Races, the orcs never felt grateful for it.
On the contrary, after winning the war, the orcs began taking revenge on the elves in earnest.
Using the fact that their number of warriors had increased explosively thanks to the abundant food they had seized from humans,
the orcs constantly invaded the Elven Forest.
The tribe that served as the vanguard was none other than the Patar tribe. Based in the former territory of the orc race,
the Patar were an extremely warlike tribe. They did not enslave humans, but made their living solely by hunting, and they continually sent warriors into the Elven Forest.
As a result, many warriors met their end in the forest, but their counterattacks also caused great sacrifices among the elven Sentinels. Almost every day, one or two Sentinels were killed.
Recalling that fact, Illumina trembled faintly.
“My dear friends Seiren and Resimona, too, eventually returned to the gods’ embrace.”
The Patar tribe did not even leave the corpses of slain elves alone. In their eyes,
humans and elves alike were nothing more than food to fill their bellies. Illumina herself had more than once had to gather the bones of comrades who had been eaten by orcs until nothing but skeletons remained. Perhaps because of that, the hostility Illumina felt toward orc warriors was beyond imagination. She bit down on her lip.
“Those bastards who damaged our precious forest and devoured our comrades… I will never forgive them.”
No matter how cruel and ferocious orc warriors were, within the forest they were no match for elves.
To take the life of a single elf, nearly ten orc warriors had to die.
When their losses proved greater than expected, the Patar tribe finally devised a plan to burn down the Elven Forest.
The forest that protected and concealed the elves was the greatest obstacle to the Patar tribe.
Once they put their plan into action, they unfailingly set fire to the forest whenever the dry season arrived. To the elves, who considered the forest more precious than their own lives, it was nothing short of a bolt from the blue.
They fought the flames with all their might, but because it happened during the dry season, there was not enough water to extinguish the fire.
In the end, the elves had to lose a vast area of forest. Needless to say,
many elves lost their lives in the process. From that day on, losing the forest and their comrades to fire became practically an annual event for the elven clan.
The Patar tribe repeated the same atrocity every year.
“Vile orc bastards.”
Silently swallowing her rage, Illumina ran soundlessly toward the place where the intruders had been sensed.
When Illumina arrived at the place indicated by the whispers of the trees, she was startled.
“They aren’t orcs?”
Those searching through the forest in a wide formation were not orcs. A race whose appearance was not very different from elves was walking cautiously through the forest, clad in gleaming armor.
But the fact that they were humans did not make them welcome to Illumina. Humans, too, were enemies to the elves.
“They are no different from orcs.”
Illumina silently recalled what had happened several years before. The humans of Truvenia almost never approached the Elven Forest.
Any slave who left a village was killed without mercy.
Thus, the humans who had entered the Elven Forest several years earlier had been knights of Arcadia.
Arcadians who had crossed the sea to hunt monsters had appeared in the Elven Forest.
Not long after entering the forest, they encountered elven Sentinels. Since it had been a long time since the Sentinels had dealt with humans,
they received them with courtesy. But the Arcadian knights, their eyes wide at the beauty of the elves, threw courtesy away in vain. Harboring dark intentions, they subdued the elven Sentinels without hesitation and violated them.
Illumina’s dear friend Iris had been among those who suffered then. After satisfying their desires, the Arcadian knights took the captured elves and left that place. But in the end, they never escaped the forest.
Enraged elven warriors had begun pursuing them to rescue their comrades. The Elven Forest blocked the path by which they had entered, and the Arcadian knights were forced to wander endlessly through a forest that had turned into a maze.
In the end, not a single one of them escaped the forest before meeting his death.
The elves’ wrath was terrifying. They executed even the knights who surrendered without mercy. But even after their revenge, the misfortune did not entirely end.
It was because several Sentinels who had been violated had conceived.
When the months passed, they gave birth to children.
Sadly, however, they could not raise them. Half-elves could never be acknowledged as members of the elves.
Human blood was decisively dominant over elven blood. Judging that there was a danger the identity of their race would become blurred,
the elders ordered the children to be abandoned. Thus, with tears in their eyes, the women had no choice but to send away the children they had just borne.
At the time, Illumina had spent an entire night comforting Iris, who wept as though her soul had left her. How could the heart of a mother who had to part with the newborn blood of her own flesh be anything but shattered?
Perhaps because of that, the humans who had invaded the forest did not look at all favorable to Illumina. She carefully counted their number.
“There are more than ten. We cannot handle them ourselves.”
Illumina immediately called two Sentinels under her command.
“Sisters, return to the village at once. Report this to the village.”
“Understood.”
After the two Sentinels left without a sound, Illumina began observing the intruders.
She had a duty to watch the intruders’ movements until reinforcements arrived.
“Damn it. Now even the monsters have stopped appearing.”
Mitchell kept grumbling as he walked. No matter how he looked around, the forest seemed identical in every direction, and the search had evidently become tedious.
Even so, he kept his nerves taut and watched his surroundings carefully.
In order to enter the Elven Forest, they absolutely had to be guided by an elf.
“If an elven Sentinel is hiding here, then they must possess extraordinary concealment skills.
Otherwise, I should have at least sensed their presence…”
Mitchell’s expression suddenly stiffened. He had felt something strange.
It was as though someone were examining him from head to toe. Mitchell gathered mana in his eyes and scrutinized his surroundings closely. But he saw nothing.
“This is enough to make a ghost wail. I definitely felt something.”
Shaking his head as though he could not understand it, Mitchell abruptly closed his eyes. He had decided to trust his well-trained hearing.
As he listened with his eyes gently shut, something caught in Mitchell’s senses. He concentrated and tried to determine the identity of the sound.
“A faint breath. Is it in front of me? Or to the side?”
The intermittent sound of breathing was so faint that it was difficult to pinpoint its location.
But it was clear that someone was hiding there, so Mitchell focused as hard as he could.
“To the right.”
Having somehow caught that faint presence, Mitchell turned his head. In that instant, he discovered a pair of eyes staring intently at him.
The eyes in the darkness vanished at once.
But Mitchell had already thrown himself toward that place. Since he could only enter the Elven Forest with an elf’s guidance, Mitchell was desperate.
“Damn.”
Illumina was taken aback. She had approached one of the scattered humans, but she had been confident she would not be discovered.
With her concealment skills, even those with excellent eyesight could not easily find her. She had firmly believed in that and was observing the human from close by, only to be unexpectedly exposed. Biting down on her lip, Illumina gave the order to withdraw.
“Return to the village and report what has happened. I will take care of him.”
The Sentinels she had brought with her were all inexperienced novices. Not only would they be of little help, but if something went wrong, they might be taken prisoner, so she deliberately ordered them to return.
At her command, the two Sentinels turned away without hesitation. Without even looking at them, Illumina drew an arrow from her quiver and set it to her bow.
From now on, she had to open a path for the Sentinels to escape. Drawing the bowstring with practiced movements,
Illumina aimed at the neck of the human knight closing in on her. Having fought armored orcs for a long time,
she knew very well which part of an enemy to aim for.
Swaaaek.
The sharp arrow left the string. At the same time, a gasp burst from the human knight.
“Ugh!”
The human knight hastily twisted his body. Despite wearing heavy armor, his movements were remarkably agile.
It was movement that could not even be compared to that of an orc. Because of that, the arrow struck the human knight’s neck guard and bounced off uselessly.
Clang.
At the sight, Illumina was startled. The arrowheads she used were forged from mithril,
so they had enough power to pierce ordinary steel armor with ease. Though it had only glanced off,
for it to bounce away so feebly… Illumina pushed aside her surprise and nocked another arrow.
Shuk.
The arrow tipped with mithril cut through the air and flew toward the human knight’s chest.
But this attack of hers also came to nothing.
The human knight swung his scabbard, easily knocked the arrow aside, and continued to approach.