Chapter 42

Chapter 42

Cadel was completely out of his mind. Lumen froze for a moment at the sight of Cadel's murderous face, which he had seen for the first time, but quickly regained his composure. He couldn't let him go back there. It was hard to comprehend the situation, but it was clear what he had to do now.

Lumen spoke in a calm voice to the furious Cadel.

“Leader. Get a grip.”

“If you're not going to help, get the hell out of my sight.”

“Van wasn’t there.”

“......What?”

Cadel asked, not sure what the hell was going on.

“All that was there was ice magic pouring down like rain, and Leader was running into its range.”

“Magic......? What do you mean.......”

He was sure that Cadel was hallucinating. So what he had to do now was pull his leader out of the hallucination.

“Open your eyes, Cadel.”

Lumen slowly approached Cadel. He looked confused, his lips pursed as if he were about to say something, but he couldn't. The back of the hand that had been wiping his nose slowly drooped.

“This is the ‘Forest of Enchantment’, Leader. Everything Leader was seeing must have been an illusion. So calm down and don't run away.”

Lumen approached cautiously, the current Cadel looked so fragile, like he could break at the slightest mishandling. Had he hallucinated Van was dead? Had he thought he was dead, and because of that, Cadel, who was never one to lose his composure under any circumstances, was this broken?

A strange feeling came over him.

It felt like anger, or something muggier. He couldn't easily define it but it didn't matter what he felt. What mattered was that Cadel regained his senses as quickly as possible.

As Lumen approached right in front of him, Cadel's eyes, which had been staring blankly into space, moved.

“That was...... illusion? All of......?”

“Yes. Leader is just caught in a trap.” all new stories at n0ve/lbi/n(.)com

“Then.......”

Cadel reached out slowly, clutching Lumen's collar tightly. A slight tremor ran through his fingertips. Cadel hesitated, looking up at Lumen. His eyes, once filled with hostility and confusion, were now watery as he asked, his voice so deep he could have cried at any moment.

“Van, Van didn’t die......?”

“Van is still in the forest, right?”

“I guess so. Either he was attacked by the fairies, or he's wandering around looking for Leader like me. Now that the fireball has been launched, let's wait a little longer.”

It was the most agonizing wait he'd felt in a long time. Cadel decided to try to assemble as many pieces of information as possible in the given amount of time. If they entered the forest again, they would inevitably have to deal with the fairies again.

‘That fly. If I'm not mistaken, it must have been Lydon.’

Lydon. A born S-grade knight who was considered to have the best performance among the fairies from the ‘Forest of Enchantment’.

......The one who killed Van he created with his illusion.

Just thinking back to the situation where that guy played with him made his fever run high. Cadel exhaled, opening and closing his fists repeatedly.

“Is there any way not to fall under the illusion spell?”

“Usually, warriors injure themselves directly. By feeling the pain, you come back to reality.”

“Not bad. But even that can be done only if you can judge that you are hallucinating. What if you are in a situation where you don’t recognize it like I did a moment ago?”

“Well.......”

If there was an item with a special effect that only they knew about, such as the [Queen's Bandage], it would be relatively easy to distinguish between reality and hallucination. Unfortunately, the current Cadel did not have such a thing. If he had to look for it, would it be the [Scroll of Fate] that Mamil gave him? It was expensive, but it was a common enough item. There was no guarantee that the fairies would not know.

As his legs trembled in nervousness, Lumen, who had been watching him, replied lightly.

“But we have two people on this side. At least one of us can tell the difference, right?”

“......I suppose so.”

“We can't think of all the possibilities in such a short time, even if we tried, so let's not overthink it and keep the goal simple for now. You want to save Van Herdos, Leader.”

“Yeah.”

“Then that's all you need to think about. I'm confident in my ability to detect strange auras, so leave it to me.”

Cadel stared at Lumen across from him wordlessly. Lumen's attitude remained the same even though Cadel had been making a fuss and had been attacking with the intention of killing a while ago. Rather, Lumen was even trying to soothe him who was anxious.

‘It's hard to show the cool side of me. His favorability must have been cut by 10.’

He felt a little better when he had such a silly idea. Cadel nodded and decided to leave the reality distinguishment to Lumen.

What he needed to do now was figure out a way to take on the most difficult existence, ‘Lydon’, and come up with a plan to find Van.