Dream

I was walking along the road, planting my staff against the ground as I went.

The sky was clear, but all around me I could see only grass and trees blackening as they died.

And they were not the only things dying.

The earth, too, and even the snow on the distant mountaintops, had turned an ashen hue.

The planet was dying.

Clutching at the tightness in my chest, I listened.

Crunch, crunch.

I heard the footsteps of my companions walking with me.

Only when I heard their footsteps did I feel relieved.

Relieved? Companions?

I realized something was strange.

The emotions I was feeling now were not my own.

The things I was seeing were sights I had never seen before.

The companions walking with me were not my companions, either.

Fortunately, I had experienced this kind of situation before.

‘Is it a dream this time?’

Once I understood the situation, my memories came back.

I had brought the researchers through the sandstorm and into the ruins.

The researchers had gone straight underground and begun examining the shelves and the glass greenhouse, while we waited in the lobby for the investigation to end.

‘After that, I talked with Soph about magic and fell asleep. Then I opened my eyes.’

No, I had not opened my eyes. I was dreaming.

And it was not an ordinary dream. I was looking at someone else’s memories.

Memories I had seen before.

These were Soph’s memories.

I could not tell whether I was having this dream because I had fallen asleep holding the spear, or because I had fallen asleep while talking with Soph.

But I knew that this dream was part of the process of Soph recovering his memories.

I decided to watch quietly.

I—no, Soph—turned his head toward the sound of footsteps.

He spoke worriedly to the woman walking beside him.

“Are you tired?”

The woman shook her long hair.

“I’m fine. The others are having a harder time than I am.”

She was a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties.

Her face was weary, but she answered firmly.

At her words, Soph snorted.

“Who cares whether the others are having a hard time or not?”

Jeers poured in from his companions behind him.

“This ‘other’ is about to die of exhaustion.”

“If you weren’t an archmage…”

The people jeering were two men dressed as mages.

Soph ignored the jeers, and the men grumbled even more.

Just then, Soph suddenly raised a hand.

The jeering stopped.

At Soph’s signal, the young mage cast a spell.

Light flowed from the tip of his staff, and the young mage frowned.

“Akzar ahead. A scout.”

At the mage’s words, Soph clicked his tongue.

“I’m sorry. I thought I’d avoided them well…”

The young mage lowered his head.

The mage walking with him placed a hand on his head.

“It’s all right. You couldn’t have avoided them all.”

A monstrous shriek rang out from beyond the forest filled with dead trees.

Kyarararara!

It was the sound of the monster I had heard before.

The shriek of an Akzar scout.

The sound rapidly approached.

Tentacles surged up above the dead trees, and trees were smashed apart and sent soaring into the sky.

It was as if a massive chariot was charging through the forest.

It was indeed an Akzar scout.

This one seemed even stronger than the monster I had faced.

Watching through the memory, I grew tense, but Soph and his companions showed no sign of tension at all.

“Where is Gibor?”

Instead, Soph asked something else.

“He’s over there.”

The young mage raised a hand and pointed in the direction the monster was coming from.

Right where the trees were flying into the sky.

A person was falling downward.

No, he was not falling.

With his fist aimed downward, he was plunging toward the ground.

A man falling like a meteor, smashing through the surging debris.

Before he reached the monster, he shouted loudly.

“Here I go! Gravity Explorer!”

It must have originally been different words, but the translated words definitely sounded like that.

“He still hasn’t changed that activation phrase.”

“It makes him sound spirited. I like it.”

“…”

Soph grumbled after hearing the man shout, but at the woman’s words, he shut his mouth tight.

Kwaaaaang!

With a tremendous explosion, the space where the monster had been burst apart.

One side of the forest was uprooted completely, and tentacles were torn to shreds and sent flying into the sky.

Every tree in the area was blown away.

The trees in front of the group had vanished as well, leaving the view ahead wide open.

At the center of a deeply sunken clearing, as if a bomb had gone off, lay the Akzar scout that had given us so much trouble.

Its tentacles had been smashed apart and scattered everywhere, and a man-sized hole had been punched through its body, from which white blood gushed.

‘Good God…’

To think he had killed that monster with a single punch.

It was a sight that made a hollow laugh escape me.

A person stood beside the hole.

It was the man who had just driven his fist into the ground.

He seemed to be around the same age as Soph, but he was not holding a staff, and the clothes he wore were different from a mage’s.

He was not wearing the robes of a mage, but clothes that looked like armor.

And on both fists, the fists that had pierced through the scout in one blow, he wore gauntlets.

Gauntlets set with large black stones. Relics.

“Gibor is way too reckless. What are we supposed to do if they hear the noise and come swarming in?”

At the young mage’s words, the man who had killed the monster grinned.

“No need to worry about that. We’re already inside their territory.”

Before the man had even finished speaking, the monsters’ shrieks rang out again.

This time, it was not just one.

The sounds came from every direction.

The young mage sighed.

“So it wasn’t bad luck. We’ve been caught properly.”

Soph planted his staff into the ground.

“It must be the control entity, right?”

At those words, the young mage nodded.

“It’s the only one that can move scouts like an army.”

The other mage raised his staff and stepped forward.

“We’ll take care of the small fry, so deal with the control one.”

At those words, the young mage stuck out his lips.

“Small fry? Even one of those could turn an entire rear base into a wasteland.”

At the young mage’s words, the armored man swapped out the black stone in his gauntlet and said,

“They’re small fry to the Archmage. Besides, if we struggle against things like these, we’ll never even reach that demon.”

With those words, the mages and the armored man surrounded Soph and the woman.

Kurararara!

Monsters burst out from every direction.

Soph’s companions moved first.

“O wind! Cut down the enemy!”

“Water, fire, combine and explode!”

With the mages’ incantations, spells flew toward the monsters.

Tentacles were severed, and the monsters’ bodies burst apart.

The armored man flew through the air and swung his fists.

Watching his companions fight the monsters, Soph pushed energy into his staff.

The staff embedded in the ground was clearly the staff I was using.

And yet, it felt like an entirely different staff.

It looked different even from when I had first seen it in the ruins.

A more beautiful and stronger power dwelled within it.

“!$!@#!@#!”

Incomprehensible words continued to flow from Soph’s mouth.

It was undoubtedly an incantation that could not be translated.

Patterns—no, countless magic circles—rose into the air.

Black clouds began forming in the clear sky.

Flash, kurururu.

Black clouds flickering with lightning gradually filled the heavens.

Before long, an enormous shriek rang out from beyond the forest.

Kyaaaaaaaaa!

It was a terrifying shriek, powerful enough to make the dead trees burst apart.

At that shriek, the scout monsters that had been charging in shuddered, and in the end, they fell to magic and fists.

At that moment, Soph lifted the staff planted in the ground.

The black stones set in the staff lost their light, and instead, the staff was engulfed in a mighty radiance.

Kwarururu.

The sky was already filled with clouds.

Lightning ran wild through the earth and sky.

Soph raised his staff and pointed toward the place the shriek had come from.

“Target set.”

At Soph’s words, his companions, who were finishing off the monsters, were startled.

“Wait, hold on!”

“Uwaaah! Barrier!”

The woman held her staff upright in front of her chest.

Wooooong.

A translucent membrane spread outward with the woman at its center.

The translucent membrane enveloped Soph, the dead monsters, and his companions.

Soph shouted.

[Strike down! O Light of Judgment!]

At that moment, a massive light plunged down from the sky.

The world went dark.

**

When I opened my eyes, it was not a dream.

A quiet stone chamber. The sound of a sand-laden wind coming from the gaping hole.

This was inside the ruins, and it was morning.

I had fallen asleep in a corner of the ruins’ lobby, holding the spear in my arms.

The expedition members and the researchers were all asleep.

Still lying where I was, I called Soph.

[Soph, you saw it too, right?]

[Yes. I remembered.]

Perhaps because he had just recovered his memory, Soph was not using an old man’s way of speaking.

[Were those people your companions?]

[They were my comrades-in-arms.]

[They were incredible people…]

The mages were incredible, but the man who had taken down a monster with one punch seemed even more incredible.

However, Soph blew away my admiration with a single sentence.

[I was more incredible.]

I had nothing to say. The final magic Soph had cast truly had been incredible.

I had not seen the result, but the clouds gathering in the sky and the energy drifting through the air had all been astounding things I had never seen before.

[The fact that you could not watch until the end must mean it is not yet time for you to see that magic.]

True enough, unlike the other magic Soph had used, that spell was hard even to remember, let alone imitate.

I tried to ask Soph one more thing.

[Then, the woman who was with you…]

[In any case, the reason such a memory suddenly surfaced is because we tracked the control entity with magic.]

Before I could even finish my question, Soph changed the subject.

It was just as I had expected.

That beautiful woman had been Soph’s lover.

The woman Soph had chased after, even after dumping Tenia, the director of these ruins.

She had been an extremely mature and beautiful woman.

I sat up and looked around at the sleeping team members.

Sergeant Woo and Tom. Hanna and Margreta.

I compared the sleeping Margreta with the woman I had seen in the dream.

She had been unbelievably pretty too, but…

“I prefer Margreta.”

[Yes, that would be better.]

At my words, Soph clicked his tongue.

Since I was awake, I decided to get up.

As I straightened my bedding, I committed the entire contents of the dream to memory.

What I had seen and heard was not only the battle against the scouts.

The demon they had spoken of, and what had happened in the place Soph and his companions had risked their lives to reach.

There were still things I wanted to ask.

But I knew that only Soph had remained in the collapsed ruins.

It was not yet time to ask about what had happened there.

Though only a day had passed since we arrived, we decided to return to base.

That was because, after investigating the ruins for two days and one night, the researchers had thrown up their hands.

I did not have to ask why they had given up.

The nerdy researcher explained it all on his own.

“There are many locked sections, so the investigation won’t be easy. It was something we expected, so I’m not disappointed. In any case, the ruins are objects made in a way different from science, so the best we can do is understand the phenomena and reproduce them.”

It was strange to hear a scientist say something like that, but he seemed completely unconcerned.

“Because of the scale, I was hoping these ruins might use a different kind of energy instead of dark energy, but this is the same as well. Unfortunately, this cannot be used on Earth. Not that we could take the ruins with us anyway.”

Among the words he was spouting, there was something significant.

‘They wanted to use the terraforming ruins on Earth…’

It was not as if the air had only been bad for a year or two, and it could not be that air purification facilities had only now become necessary.

I needed more information.

“Since the initial results are disappointing, we’ll have to take our time and investigate slowly from now on.”

Before leaving, the two of them gathered fragments of the ruins, glass powder, and sand powder, then handed them to me.

Just in case, I asked Soph.

[It is ordinary sand and ordinary glass. If you do not know magic, it is useless.]

It seemed to be fine. Perhaps he had awakened from the dream as well, because Soph’s manner of speech had returned to normal.

I put them into a box.

Before we departed, Soph stopped the sandstorm, and we walked into the sandy desert beneath the afternoon sunlight.

Even now, the line of magic stretched long toward the west.

As I walked while looking at that line, Soph spoke.

[Thanks to recovering my memories, I have thought of a way to deal with the control entity.

In order to use that method, you must first become a little more useful. To begin with, I will have to make you capable of using that strange magic of yours.]

A new line appeared before my eyes.

A new line, veering slightly away from the line leading toward the control entity.

[If all goes well, we may also be able to fix the way you use the spear, which was ruined by your senses.]

At Soph’s words, I looked at the spear.

[It is the path to the training center Gibor came from. It is a place where energy holders who failed to become mages learn to use the power of relics.

Your magic is not a relic, but since you do not use incantations… there should not be much difference.]

Listening to Soph grumble, I stared at the newly formed line.

Right now, our next exploration target had been decided.