Ch.262262. The Wolf Has Appeared!

“Hoo.”

I was taken away while eating a late dinner, but I ended up coming out the next morning.

Unlike when I entered, most of the security forces were now outside the building, bowing deeply to me.

“We’re sorry!”

“Please get home safely!”

Since Unyeop, both witness and inspector, confessed his misjudgment and declared me innocent, I became someone who was wrongfully detained.

I never expected that the moment I took his hand, he would so cleanly admit his mistake and apologize to the security forces.

Naturally, this would raise doubts about his evaluation and abilities within the organization.

‘I guess he doesn’t have that level of loyalty.’

For Unyeop, the title of imperial inspector didn’t seem particularly important.

Anyway, my destination was Lanlan Restaurant.

Unyeop said he would depart in a few hours, so I planned to meet Soho before traveling with him.

Creeeeak.

“Hmmmm, what should I do?”

When I opened the door and entered Lanlan Restaurant, Soho was sitting there, clutching her head and groaning.

The girl seemed to have many worries.

When I entered, she flinched, opened her mouth wide, and reacted dramatically.

“H-how did you come back?! You were arrested!”

“I got lucky.”

“C-can such matters be resolved by luck?!”

Soho kept trying to ask something with an expression of complete incomprehension, but I cut her off.

“From now on, I’ll be traveling with someone. And that person is the man who killed the ancient dragon.”

“…What?”

She asked again, clearly not understanding what I was saying, but I ignored her and continued stubbornly.

“If you want revenge against the monsters and the ancient dragon, follow me. I’ll give you a chance.”

However.

“I’d prefer if you just stayed here.”

I presented various options in my own way. She had lost her monster family and her secure home.

The girl was placed in a harsh environment where she would have to fight alone from now on.

Despite what I said, it was too obvious what choice she would make.

“Th-there’s nothing left for me here. I’ll follow you!”

A girl who thinks she’s lost everything would choose revenge even if it meant burning herself up.

I nodded with somewhat bitter emotions.

“Then get ready.”

Ironically.

Unyeop and the hunters who want to kill Deus Verdi.

Soho who wants to kill Shinwoo Kim.

The uncomfortable journey with those who want to kill me had just begun.

* * *

Unyeop arrived about three hours after I was released. He made an ambiguous expression when he saw Soho with luggage bigger than herself, but he didn’t refuse.

And so we were leaving this city, which had left a rather intense impression despite our short stay.

“Heeng.”

Soho let out a whimper, apparently quite sad about leaving the city where she had lived for so long.

Yet there was no hesitation in her steps. It meant she didn’t regret her choice.

Unyeop, who was leading the way, wore a straw hat and had a slight smile on his face.

His overall mood seemed to have softened, apparently quite satisfied with acquiring me as an asset.

‘Is that a staff on his back?’

It was a weapon rarely seen in the Griffin Kingdom, but in the Han Empire, staff techniques were highly developed, so they were common.

Even Han So, whom I saw at Mongma Battle, fought using the Maengcheonmu Staff.

His movements were so exquisite and clean that they still remained vivid in my memory.

“S-so where are we going?”

Soho asked, voicing a somewhat delayed question.

Unyeop answered her question with a bright smile.

“We’re going to Ohwa, the capital of the Empire. We’ll stop there briefly, then meet up with our comrades and head straight to Griffin.”

“G-Griffin…!”

I heard her gulp.

The thought of traveling to a distant foreign land that she’d only heard rumors about seemed quite nerve-wracking for the girl.

For me, however, it was quite familiar.

‘That works out well.’

As I mentioned during the interrogation, if the goal was to kill Deus, we would inevitably head to the Griffin Kingdom.

I had been silently walking toward Griffin without money, but traveling with them would allow me to move much faster.

Ironically, I had chosen the most dangerous but fastest way to Griffin.

“…”

Was this really for the best?

The thought suddenly crossed my mind.

Deus Verdi’s body hadn’t stabilized yet. Even if the Land of Rest had formed inside his body, it would still take time for the body to adjust.

I hoped Deus’s body would stabilize before we reached Griffin.

I felt a strange reluctance to show my current form to people I knew.

‘Why?’

When it came to why I felt this reluctance, I couldn’t find a clear answer.

On the journey back, I had gained another puzzle to solve.

“H-how long will it take? At least a few months, right?”

Unyeop continued to answer Soho’s questions with a bright smile.

He seemed to find the small girl quite cute and treated her with unusual friendliness for someone he had just met.

It was a side of Unyeop that differed from my first impression of him.

“Normally it would, but if we just take care of some simple business in Ohwa and meet up with our comrades right away, it won’t take long. We have some excellent horses.”

No matter how good the breed of horse, the distance from the Han Empire to Griffin couldn’t be described as “not long.”

But the confidence in his voice somehow made me believe him.

Soho seemed to have finished her questions, nodding with an “I see,” so I took over.

“What about your other comrades? You couldn’t have killed the ancient dragon alone.”

The mana presence I had felt at that time wasn’t from just one person. It was a question I asked with certainty, but I deliberately probed.

“They stayed behind because they had other things to do. They need to handle the aftermath of killing the ancient dragon.”

Soho’s expression darkened rapidly. To hide this, I quickened my pace slightly to walk between Soho and Unyeop.

“Aftermath?”

“We need to clean up what we prepared to kill the ancient dragon. I’ll tell you more later.”

Unyeop shrugged and pulled his straw hat down.

Silence flowed.

Soho’s mood became somewhat heavy when the topic of the ancient dragon came up. But she knew well that this was a time to keep her mouth shut and hide her teeth.

With her pursed lips and puffed cheeks, she hardly looked like a girl intent on assassination.

“Despite appearances, we’re a fairly large organization. We just call ourselves hunters and hide our presence.”

“…”

“We have people in the Valestan Duchy right next to the Han Empire, and our squad leader is already heading to the Griffin Kingdom.”

My gaze suddenly fixed on him.

The information that the hunters’ squad leader was heading to Griffin was not something I could easily dismiss.

“You’re targeting the Mountain Lord of the Norsweden Mountains, aren’t you?”

I interjected cautiously. As far as I knew, the Mountain Lord was the only guardian deity in the Griffin Kingdom.

Whatever their aim was, I thought their primary target would be the guardian deity.

“Hmm? You know about the Mountain Lord?”

Unyeop turned to me with a genuinely surprised expression. He clearly hadn’t imagined I would know about the guardian deity in the Griffin Kingdom.

Soho also let out an “Wow” in amazement.

Guardian deities were such secretive and mysterious beings that few people knew about them.

Unyeop seemed to want an explanation of how I knew, but I didn’t answer and instead demanded an answer from him.

He sighed in disbelief but nodded with satisfaction.

“Seems I’ve recruited quite a valuable asset.”

…I suppose that’s one way to look at it.

“That’s right, they went to target the Mountain Lord of the Norsweden Mountains. Norsweden is Deus Verdi’s homeland and the territory of the Verdi family.”

There must be clues to find me, who is missing.

I added bitterly to Unyeop’s words.

“It won’t be easy.”

“The Mountain Lord is certainly a threatening being. And I’ve heard that Darius, the Margrave of Norsweden, is quite an exceptional warrior…”

Unyeop didn’t seem particularly worried as he smiled meaningfully.

“We are hunters. Our fights aren’t battles, but one-sided hunts.”

So they had a way to hunt the Mountain Lord of Norsweden. I could roughly guess that it was a very intuitive but destructive strategy.

Since the Mountain Lord couldn’t use its power without mountains, they would probably attack the mountain itself, perhaps by setting it on fire.

It wouldn’t be done in a day or two, but by slowly burning the mountain and narrowing the Mountain Lord’s territory.

‘I wonder if that’s why the ancient dragon was in the sewers.’

Perhaps they used a similar approach to drive the ancient dragon into the sewers.

It could certainly be threatening.

Being fixed in one location was indeed a significant weakness for guardian deities.

But I wasn’t particularly worried.

Because.

“From what I know, that mountain.”

I believed in it.

“Has some very fierce wolves.”

* * *

The Norsweden Mountains served as a kind of border.

A natural boundary separating the northern part of the Griffin Kingdom from the Republic of Clark.

Since ownership belonged to the Griffin Kingdom, the private soldiers of the Margrave of Norsweden had built outposts and guarded it.

However, there were plenty of ways for the Republic of Clark on the other side to access the Norsweden Mountains.

Whoosh!

Weilbelter, the squad leader of the hunters, smiled grimly as he watched the flames attached to the arrows his subordinates were drawing.

To strike at the Norsweden Mountains and hunt the Mountain Lord, there was no need to enter the mountains.

The attack itself was easy if they struck the mountain from the outside.

Moreover, the Republic of Clark was currently in a period of war.

With different countries grabbing territory, their citizens were experiencing chaos that was almost a necessary evil.

Since this was happening in the Republic of Clark, not the Griffin Kingdom, there was no one who could stop them.

If Margrave Darius led his forces across, that would create its own problems.

“Easy.”

Fire arrows, fire bombs, fireballs, and more.

Even with simple methods, they could easily harm the Mountain Lord.

Was it morally problematic and harmful to people in the surrounding area?

They weren’t morally upright enough to care about such things.

The mountain was burning.

Black smoke billowed high, polluting the white sky that had looked like it might snow.

“I wonder if it should be this simple.”

They would cause this havoc for about 30 minutes and then withdraw. Repeating this again tomorrow would inevitably weaken the Mountain Lord’s power.

That’s when they would hunt.

A hunter is not a fighting entity.

Only the incompetent, those unworthy of the name “hunter,” engage in life-or-death battles with beasts.

Yes, that’s what he thought, but.

At the entrance to the mountain.

Another gray smoke was rising from there.

A woman walking steadily with a cigarette in her mouth, her back to the burning mountain.

Her white hair fluttered in the wind, and the flaps of her yellow coat flapped, asserting their presence.

The silver halberd she gripped with her black-gloved hand was emitting a chill different from the winter cold.

“Hoo.”

The blood-red eyes of Findenai, the wolf of the mountains, captured her prey as she exhaled cigarette smoke.

“There’s a story in Griffin.”

The battle-hardened hunters recognized her as an enemy and immediately aimed their arrows at her instead of the mountain.

Weilbelter also sensed that she was no ordinary being and slung his massive axe over his shoulder.

“The story of the shepherd boy. A very boring tale of a shepherd who lied out of boredom and got screwed.”

A fairy tale?

It seemed like a strange thing to bring up, but.

“Still, they say the villagers were fooled twice.”

Grin.

Findenai’s lips curved into a smile. Her sharp teeth were ready to bite into the enemy’s nape.

“Why don’t you cry out too? It’s your first time, so who knows who might come to help?”

A chill rose.

What guarded the Norsweden Mountains wasn’t a tiger, but.

“Shit! A wolf has appeared!”

A wolf.