Chapter 369: The Story After (1) [Side Story, Part 1]

“Hm...” The Tower Master had shut himself in his study and worked through an endless stack of papers.

The door opened, and his disciple, Elian, stepped inside with another bundle held in both arms.

“Additional documents have arrived. All of these must be processed before the day ends,” Elian said.

The pile touched the ceiling. There were dozens more stacks just like it. The Tower Master breathed out a long, dark sigh.

“When will this ever end?” he said.

“It will not end for quite some time,” Elian said, smiling with only his eyes. “For the foreseeable future, roaming about like before will not be possible.”

“I do not roam,” the Tower Master replied, his voice coming through like a rumble of old stone. “I go in person and resolve affairs with my own hands. A great many incidents have been settled precisely because I took action.”

“I would not argue with that,” Elian said, keeping the smile and the tone mild. “Even so, the value of the thousands of mages who move when you direct them matters more.”

The Tower Master was the master of the Mage Tower. He held authority to command every mage sworn to it. As the only person able to deploy mages across the continent by a single word, he had to handle a mountain of administration. Elian spoke in that calm way of his, as if the truth needed no force to be heard.

“You know as well as I do that the world no longer resembles the world of before. For a while, we will all have to work.”

A gruff sound answered him, but no denial followed.

Two years earlier, the Demon King had appeared in the world.

The Demon King, lord of all malice, sovereign of Hell, possessed power without measure. When he descended in ancient times, he burned a tenth of the world; gods died, and Heroes broke under his hand. That same presence had set foot on the Mortal Realm once more. The world stood close to ruin.

Nor had that been all. Something else had stirred. A being from the Demon Realm—one that had existed since the dawn of creation—had awakened. It was one of the Primarchs, ancient rulers of the cosmos before gods and demons had joined forces to cast them out into the frozen seal beyond the world.

That entity devoured the Empire and revealed itself to the age, intent on returning all existence to its earliest state and erasing everything humanity had built. It held the strength to make that vision real.

Two calamities rose almost back to back, and scars were carved into the Mortal Realm that would not fade. In truth, it was good fortune that the damage stopped at scars. It would not have been strange if the star itself had failed.

Even so, they won. They survived. They celebrated survival and held long festivals. People clung to one another and cried because there was breath left in their bodies.

When the joy settled, they looked up and faced a broken world. Demonic invasions left wounds across the continent that nothing could scrub away. The Primarch toppled the largest mortal institution—the Empire—and left it in ruins.

To say the Mortal Realm had been cracked in half would not be an exaggeration. Some of those wounds would not heal in centuries. Restoration had to begin, and of course, that meant the Tower Master would not know rest.

The greatest mortal power, the Empire, had fallen to the Primarch. The gods had spent their strength and could not intervene freely. In such a landscape, there were few beings left with reach equal to the Tower Master’s. In practice, no one else bore responsibility for the whole of the continent the way he did.

For two years since the end of the crisis, he had sat in the Mage Tower and processed documents like a man fighting a tide with both hands. He let out another groan.

“This is tiresome enough to kill,” he said, and the words sounded almost literal.

He was the sort who preferred to move in person and settle problems with his own hands, yet even that habit had to bend here. Elian let the complaint pass as a servant might ignore a lord’s shifting mood and continued reading through the list.

“The West has asked for aid. They let a Dungeon lie, and the monsters have spilled over its rim. They request mage detachments. The East also—”

“That will do,” the Tower Master said. He lifted a hand and made a small motion.

Papers rustled like rain striking canvas. Tens of thousands of sheets rose into the air and fanned out to fill the study from wall to wall.

“Content analysis,” the Tower Master chanted.

Mana swept the floating sheets with a hum like strings being tuned. The Tower Master drew in the full spread at once—the nature of each problem, the seriousness, the likely time to resolution—and then snapped his fingers.

“Record and route.”

The papers settled themselves in neat boxes as if every page knew its drawer. Elian did not try to hide his admiration.

“Understood. As expected, Master of the Tower. Your speed remains astonishing.”

The Tower Master had written a new branch of spellcraft purely for administrative work. Because of that, he could reduce tasks that would have drowned a court to moments. Without him, the continent would have fallen into a chaos tenfold worse than what it endured.

“Is today’s work complete?” he began, already easing up from the chair, “because if so—”

“Regrettably, there are several hundred thousand more sheets,” Elian said, unblinking. “I will send for porters.”

The Tower Master sat down again as if his knees had abruptly remembered age. He propped his chin with one hand and stared at the ceiling.

“It never ends,” he muttered.

He watched the air in front of him for a time without seeing it, then spoke as if he had just remembered a name.

“I wonder what our Champion is doing,” he said.

Across the continent, a story had spread. The Demon King had descended, and the Primarch sealed in the Demon Realm had been loosed. These were events great enough to end the world more than once. Even so, victory had been won. All because a single Champion descended to the Mortal Realm.

With a body and talent given by heaven, he felled the Demon King. He stood against the Primarch and overcame it. The gods themselves recognized him and poured every scrap of their favor into his hands, and at last he saved the world. He was a barbarian. His name was Ketal. He was the true hero of this realm.

Elian answered. “He is at the fairy village, Pisaraphia. I believe he is assisting with restoration.”

The Tower Master nodded to himself. “Then he is enjoying himself as he likes.”

“I suspect that is the case,” Elian said, and the two of them agreed without ceremony.

***

Pisaraphia, the Fairy Village, existed like something lifted from a dream. Because fairies were small, people often imagined their holy ground would be small as well. In truth, it dwarfed most human cities. That, too, felt natural. The people who lived there had wings, moving freely through three dimensions, and they needed a realm as wide and open as the sky itself.

In that massive holy ground walked a muscular human.

Thump. Thump.

He carried five pillars at once, arms full and shoulders set, and every step sent a steady shiver through the ground. Fairies stopped in midair and hung like ornaments while they stared with open mouths.

“Will here do?” he asked, setting the sound in his tone rather than a question in his words.

“Y-yes,” said a fairy, nodding as if she had forgotten how to blink.

Ketal placed pillars one after another and secured them as easily as if he were standing up brooms. The fairies watched with a kind of reverence.

“I did not think anyone could move that so easily,” one murmured.

Pisarapia was dense with Myst, so thick that even matter carried its weight. Most objects within it felt ten times heavier than they would have beyond its borders. The pillars in Ketal’s arms were, in truth, closer in weight to houses than to simple stone. He carried not one but five and moved lightly.

“So that is the barbarian, Ketal,” another fairy whispered.

He had defeated the Demon King and pushed out the Primarch. He had saved the Mortal Realm. The last pillar set with a soft quake. Ketal exhaled and nodded, satisfied.

“That is the urgent work done,” he said.

“I think so,” the fairy answered. “Thank you.”

She was the secretary to the mercenary guildmaster and had returned to help rebuild what had been torn down. She looked at Ketal and spoke in a wondering tone as if saying it aloud would help her believe it.

“Something about you has changed.”

“What changed?” he asked her, playing the question as a note and not a request.

“Earlier... you seemed layered,” she said, searching for a word that felt like it would slip from her fingers.

Fairies saw the essence of things. The first time she had met him, fear had seized her. Within the layers of what covered him, something strange had moved. If it had not been masked by those folds, her mind would have broken. She had vowed then to avoid him.

Now he looked different. The layers had gone. He felt clear. He did not frighten her at all. He seemed like a person one could meet on any road. Ketal understood what she meant and smiled.

“It is nothing,” he said. “My thoughts simply changed.”

“I see...,” she said, and then dipped her head, a little embarrassed by her own caution.

“The Myst is thick here,” he added, glancing at the stone. “Everything weighs more than it looks.”

“You did not look as if anything weighed on you.”

“I was pretending,” he said as if admitting a small theft. “Carrying them cost me some effort.”

She laughed, dry and small, then bowed again. “Thank you, Champion. Because of you, our sanctuary is returning to itself.”

Pisarapia had collapsed under the attack of evil. By any realistic measure, restoration should have taken decades. With Ketal’s help, the work that should have taken years was becoming months. All the fairies bowed in gratitude. The secretary wore an awkward look.

“We are truly sorry,” she said. “Our circumstances are poor, and we cannot afford a proper gift in return.”

“It is natural to help when help is needed,” he said. “It is not charity without weight. I enjoy this.”

“Thank you,” she said, her voice catching a little.

The fairies believed he spoke only to spare their pride. In truth, he meant every word. He could not have been happier.

A shadow fell softly beside him as the Holy Sword touched down.

“I have returned,” Serena said.

“Ah!” the fairies cried, and bent like grasses in a wind. “Lady Serena.”

Serena bore a human shape, yet her essence was the Holy Sword, a gift the gods themselves had placed in the Mortal Realm. To beings like fairies, she was an object of reverence. She accepted their bows with a simple poise and opened her hand.

“I gathered as much of the spring’s essence as I could,” she said.

The fairy secretary’s face lit as if a lantern had been set behind her eyes.

“With this, we can revive the spring!”

Pisaraphia held a fountain in which Myst had condensed for ages. A single sip healed all disease and turned age aside. During the demonic assault, it had evaporated; its essence had scattered to the air. Serena had ranged the sky and gathered what she could.

Ketal watched the tiny globe glimmer and spoke with simple curiosity.

“To me it seems a very small measure,” he said. “How, with so little, will you bring the spring to life again?”

“It is a technical matter,” the secretary answered, anxious that the details would bore him. “It would not amuse you.”

“Do not mind me,” Ketal said. “Explain it. I may be of use.”

The fairies, moved to their core, could not see the boyish satisfaction that rose across his face. To them, the Champion had offered to learn difficult knowledge for the sake of helping them; their eyes stung with gratitude, and they blinked the blur away.

They missed the way he seemed to enjoy himself completely.