Antelme walked through the darkness of the forest.
The Treant Forest was dense with trees, their branches woven tightly enough to block most of the soft moonlight filtering down from above. Heavy clouds drifted across the night sky, periodically swallowing the moon altogether. Under these conditions, barely any light penetrated the forest's depths.
Yet Antelme pressed forward without so much as flinching at the darkness.
"To think that I, of all people, would have to trudge through a forest in the middle of the night. Damn you, Rei."
The venom in his voice made clear that his irritation was directed not at the dark, but at the man who had driven him into this situation.
In truth, the darkness was no hindrance to Antelme, who possessed Night Vision. Having climbed to A-Rank through solo work, he was no stranger to operating in conditions like these.
...Not that this stopped him from seething over why someone of noble blood such as himself should have to labor outdoors at night.
So why was Antelme deliberately wandering through such a place?
There were several reasons, but the foremost was undoubtedly the wolf he had seen acting so friendly with Rei during the day.
At this point, Antelme had abandoned any thought of doing something about Gryphon Seto. His mind was consumed entirely with revenge against the man who had driven him into this predicament.
In reality, the entire affair had begun with his own selfish attempt to steal Set from Rei, and his current situation was nothing but his own just deserts. Even so, Antelme laid the blame entirely at Rei's feet.
The existence of the wolf Rei had been doting on was the reason Antelme now found himself in the Treant Forest.
Currently, entry into the Treant Forest without permission from the Guild or Daskar was prohibited, owing to the Birth Tower, the lake, the Underground Space connected to another world, and the fairy situation. Knights and soldiers stood watch to enforce the restriction, but given the sheer vastness of the forest, their security net was far from airtight.
Still, if amateurs tried to trespass, the knights and soldiers would likely catch them. Over a hundred people had already been arrested attempting to enter the Treant Forest without authorization.
But whatever his personality, Antelme's abilities were those of an A-Rank adventurer. He was beyond comparison with amateurs. Furthermore, a large number of people had been recalled to Gilm to search for him, and with them working desperately on that task, Antelme had slipped into the Treant Forest with ease.
"Still, to think a forest this dense could form in such a short period. I suppose that's the frontier for you."
His irritation toward Rei still simmered, but he decided it would be wiser to focus on exploring the forest for now. Pushing his frustration aside, he muttered to himself as he surveyed his surroundings.
In the frontier city of Gilm, venturing outside at night was considerably dangerous. But what knights and soldiers could do, there was no reason Antelme could not.
As he pushed through the nighttime forest, monsters naturally emerged from the shadows to target him...
"Don't get in my way."
With that single, curt utterance, the owl-like monster that lunged at him was effortlessly cleaved apart by his longsword. The strike was razor-sharp; ending its life required no effort at all.
Such barely-qualifying skirmishes repeated themselves several times over, and yet Antelme continued onward without sustaining a single scratch...
"Again? Quit wasting my time... hm?"
Assuming another monster had appeared, Antelme raised his longsword to strike, but something made him halt mid-swing.
What had emerged was a semi-transparent, spherical object.
At first, he thought it might be a Ghost or something similar, but Antelme's adventurer instincts told him it was no monster. There was an absence of hostility, of malice. No—"absence" was not quite right. It was more accurate to say such things did not exist within the entity at all.
"What is this...? An enemy? No, but..."
In all his years completing various requests, Antelme had never encountered anything like this. Had it attacked him, he would have countered without hesitation. But as the utter lack of hostility made clear, the thing before him was not an enemy. Not an enemy... yet he had absolutely no idea what it was.
"Hey. What the hell are you? Are you my enemy? If not, then vanish. I don't have the time to entertain you right now."
He delivered the ultimatum, but the object floating before him simply drifted through the air, utterly unconcerned.
Initially, he had assumed it was some phenomenon with no hostile intent—perhaps something unique to the frontier. But the way the object moved before him almost seemed like it was toying with him.
And the moment that realization sparked irritation—why should he be mocked by some unknown entity?—Antelme's longsword flashed through it in a single instant.
"Who do you think I am!"
It was a slash born of pure irritation, yet the fact that it struck true was a testament to Antelme's reliable skill. The bisected substance dissolved into the night as if it had been an illusion.
But Antelme, who had cut it himself, understood better than anyone that it was no illusion.
"Hmph. Don't know what that was, but it was unlucky for it to show its face before me. ...More importantly, where's the wolf? I came to this forest for the wolf, yet it hasn't shown itself. ...Hm?"
Antelme had been hacking his way through the forest in a foul mood when he finally noticed something wrong. The trees surrounding him looked exactly like the ones he had passed just moments ago.
"No way."
Muttering to himself, he lightly slashed a tree trunk to mark it. Then he pressed on... and in less than ten minutes, he found himself standing before a trunk bearing that same familiar mark.
"Tch. Who's responsible for this?"
He immediately understood he had been caught in some kind of barrier and spat out a curse. Such a barrier could not exist naturally. Which meant someone had deliberately trapped him inside it. And that meant someone with hostile intent toward him was out there.
"Who's there?! Come out! Show yourself before me!"
Antelme bellowed into the dark, but whoever had laid the barrier was not about to reveal themselves on command.
Seething, Antelme withdrew a dagger from his coat.
"Damn it. Making me use this... I'll kill them. I swear I'll kill them."
Channeling magic power into the dagger with an angry shout, he swung it in a sharp arc.
In that instant, space itself split apart. No—more precisely, the barrier that had ensnared Antelme had been severed.
The dagger snapped at the midpoint of its blade, its purpose fulfilled. It was a Magic Item designed to destroy barriers, but it was disposable. And like all Magic Items, it was extraordinarily expensive. Being forced to waste it in a place like this only added fuel to the fire of Antelme's rage.
As a man of noble birth, Antelme had access to several Magic Items from his family's estate. He had taken them when he set out as an adventurer, and by wielding multiple Magic Items in concert, he had climbed his way to A-Rank. Losing them was painfully costly.
And in this affair alone, he had already burned through several consumable Magic Items.
Rei, you bastard. If you'd just handed over the gryphon quietly...
A gryphon was an A-Rank Monster. How many Magic Items its materials could yield was easy enough to imagine. That was precisely why his current predicament was so intolerable.
Fueled by that irritation, Antelme hurled the bladeless dagger toward the presence he had sensed. Though it had lost its blade, the handle was solid metal. Thrown with the strength of an A-Rank adventurer, it still carried considerable lethal force.
Antelme was certain the owner of that presence was the one who had trapped him in the barrier, and he hurled the makeshift projectile with the full intent to kill...
"Kyaa!"
"What—!?"
It was not the voice from the bushes that shocked him, but the figure he glimpsed for just an instant between the leaves. And for good reason—that faint silhouette had been a fairy.
Only because Antelme possessed Night Vision had he caught it at all.
That phantom-like entity seemed to realize from Antelme's reaction that it had been seen. It panicked and teleported away on the spot, leaving behind nothing but a ring of light suspended in the air—a Fairy Ring.
"That was definitely a fairy."
Antelme muttered the words to confirm them, to convince himself that what he had seen was real.
And it was true.
"A fairy? Was it just here by chance? ...No. That's not it."
He immediately rejected his own assumption.
The Treant Forest had appeared seemingly out of nowhere. It was guarded, with only a select few like Rei permitted entry. Given those circumstances, it was easy to surmise that a fairy habitat existed somewhere within.
...In reality, it was nothing more than a chain of coincidences that had led to this, but that was not how it appeared to Antelme. From his perspective, the only logical conclusion was that fairies had been here all along, and the people of Gilm had been hiding the fact.
Rei... or more precisely, Daskar, kept various secrets about the Treant Forest. It was only natural that Antelme would suspect as much.
"A fairy... a fairy."
For Antelme, a fairy held far greater significance than it would for an ordinary person. His fighting style relied heavily on the frequent use of Magic Items, which made fairies—beings capable of crafting powerful Magic Items—the one thing he desired above all else. So much so that he would gladly abandon his pursuit of Set if it meant obtaining fairy-made Magic Items.
"The question is where they've settled. They would never hide somewhere humans could stumble upon them."
If that was the case, they had to be somewhere deep in the Treant Forest, in an area untouched by logging.
"Hmph. Things may have gone as badly as they could have... but it seems not everything was bad news for me after all."
Half convincing himself, he muttered—then in the next moment scowled at the sweat trickling down his forehead. It was undeniably cooler than daytime, but a summer night in this forest was still sweltering enough to be called tropical.
Unlike Rei's Dragon Robe, Antelme's gear had no Simplified air conditioner function, and the heat gnawed at his patience.
"Come out, fairy! I have business with you!"
No fairy appeared. Antelme roared his frustration into the dark, and the only reply was the drone of insects. His voice echoed through the trees, sharp with growing irritation.
"If you won't come out... I'll burn this forest to the ground."
There was nothing empty about the threat. The words carried a sincerity that made it entirely plausible he would follow through.
Of course, given his current situation, Antelme was not genuinely prepared to set the forest ablaze. But if the fairies absolutely refused to show themselves, he was fully prepared to smoke them out of their hiding place.
Naturally, doing so would earn him the hatred of Daskar, the lord of Gilm. In truth, he would make enemies of several others besides—but Antelme failed to grasp that much.
Even so, the moment he mentioned fire, he unmistakably sensed a ripple of agitation.
Detecting such a faint reaction was normally near impossible, but Antelme was an A-Rank adventurer. Sensing subtle shifts in emotion was well within his capability.
"What will it be? If you surrender quietly, I won't light the fire."
Even as he spoke, Antelme suddenly swept his longsword through the air. In that same instant, he slashed apart a volley of Wind Arrows that had come hurtling toward him from nowhere.
Intercepting incoming magic mid-flight was normally an impossible feat, but Antelme wielded a Magic Sword. Not some cheap knockoff, but a suitably expensive blade—in other words, one with potent effects. Cutting down spells flying at him was effortless.
...Naturally, that was only possible because of Antelme's own skill.
"I see. So that's your answer."
"Grrrrrrr."
As if in response to his words, a pack of wolves emerged from the darkness between the trees.
Facing clearly hostile opponents—and above all, the same individual he had seen at Rei's side—a grin that could only be called mad spread across Antelme's face.