Chapter 258
Side Story 8 - Turan Zahar (3)
The first real upheaval in Turan's otherwise smoothly flowing life came in the summer of the year he turned eighteen.
The catalyst was his meeting with a certain heir who had come all the way from House Varaha, far to the east.
"My name is Solif Varaha."
With his close-cropped silver hair, a somewhat short stature, and a well-trained, muscular build, the heir of House Varaha was a young man who was courteous yet hearty.
He had sailed to the northern city of Comad and then worked his way down south, roaming back and forth across the Enril Desert, and along the way he had stopped by the Red Fortress to mingle with the young nobles of House Zahar. Turan, too, in the midst of all this, ended up seated next to Solif at one of the banquets.
"I hear you've got quite the talent for magic, Turan."
"I'm afraid I'm not nearly that good. You flatter me."
"Don't be modest! Word of it spread all the way out here, so I came to see it for myself."
At Solif's manner, his eyes gleaming as he murmured that he had never originally intended to drop by the Zahar main house at all and had come only because of him, Turan had little choice but to set aside some time and test his magic against Solif's in a light contest.
House Varaha's vaunted Light of Judgement was indeed troublesome in the extreme, but Turan, who had already mastered countermeasures for it through House Zahar's secret arts, dealt with it by creating a Water Mirror to refract it, among other techniques.
In the process, he was able to confirm that his own skill in magic was several cuts above that of House Varaha's heir.
'I had a feeling it would be like this......'
After all, even the other candidates for House Zahar's succession had been no match for Turan when it came to magical skill, whatever the case might have been with their raw quantity of Magic Power, so this was only natural.
Becoming conscious of that fact made his blood boil all over again.
His own skill in magic was the greater; if only he had been born with enough Magic Power, he would have been the one to succeed his father.
Whenever that kind of inferiority crept up on him, he donned the mask of a faint smile, just as his uncle had taught him.
"But is it really all right for the heir of House Varaha to be visiting a place like this? Allies though House Zahar and yours may be......"
"Of course it isn't. It's a secret, but the truth is I've run away from home!"
At that hearty burst of laughter, Turan was momentarily at a loss for words.
An heir, of all people, running off from home?
In House Zahar, governed by strict discipline, it was something one would never even dare to contemplate.
On top of that, they even had a ritual in which they periodically had to submit a lock of their hair, a sign that they could be brought under the main house's control at any time.
Thrown off for a moment by the unexpected remark, Turan soon shrugged it off and laughed along, keeping company with Solif.
It was someone else's family business, after all.
After they had matched their magic for a while, Solif spun out, with no small gift for storytelling, all the things he had encountered traveling on his own, and in the course of it Turan got to hear several rather intriguing tales.
"An old god of the sea......"
"I'm going to look around the desert a bit more, then head down toward the southern sea later and search for it. Any interest in coming along?"
"The Family Head would never permit it."
He was no longer confined to the Family Head's quarters as he had been in the old days, but Haroon Zahar still overprotected Turan.
He had never once been allowed beyond the city of Axum; a Pilgrimage was out of the question.
"No harm in at least asking. And if he turns you down, well, you can just run off, can't you?"
"What an irresponsible thing to say."
At the sight of Solif laughing heartily, Turan stared at him as if dumbfounded, then ended up laughing right along with him.
Having lived his whole life among Zahar nobles who forever harbored venom-fangs within, he found that meeting a different breed of person like this wasn't half bad.
*
Not long after Solif left, Turan brought it up with Haroon as if in passing.
Whether he might be allowed to go on a Pilgrimage.
As he had expected, the answer that came back was no.
"There's no reason for you to set out on a Pilgrimage in the first place."
Normally a Pilgrimage was something undertaken by nobles who had fallen behind in the rankings within the family's territory, or who, because Magical Beasts happened not to appear, could not be supplied with enough Magic Power.
For Turan, who as the Family Head's Adopted Son could grow by leaps and bounds on the Magic Power inherited from family elders who had reached the end of their lifespans, it was something he simply did not need.
Having failed to persuade his father, Turan soon gave up and decided to remain within the family.
Yet before long, a chance to venture outside the family came along, truly out of nowhere.
"A Dark Elf army annihilated an entire territory?"
"So the rumors say. Because of it, the other side is said to have committed in earnest, sending out even their heir and launching a large-scale subjugation."
"Hah, what's the world coming to......"
Ever since the Preah God Tribe, in the distant past, had subjugated all the mighty lords of the other races, most of those who survived had acknowledged humanity's supremacy and slipped away into out-of-the-way places.
The Dwarves into the canyons, the Dark Elves underground, the Mermaids into the sea.
And now the Dark Elves, one of those surviving races, had suddenly raised a tremendous army?
Distant though the affair was, it was not something that a wizard, a protector of humankind, could let slide.
"And House Aravion is the one cleaning it up?"
"Yes."
"Then we'll have to dispatch a few nobles to confirm the situation."
In accordance with the Family Head's order, a meeting was convened to select those who would secretly scout the Aravion army as it subjugated the Dark Elves.
Naturally, no one volunteered to go.
It was far too trivial a scouting mission to win anyone real glory, and it meant crossing no fewer than two whole territories, so wasn't it a tedious, exhausting affair?
It was only natural that the other Zahar nobles were taken aback when Turan said he would volunteer for the mission.
"You want to go?"
"Yes. As I am now, I'm surely good enough to be entrusted with a single mission, am I not?"
"That's true, but......"
Would the Family Head, who doted on Turan, really permit it, though?
Half in doubt, they took the matter up the chain, and of course the answer that came back was an absolute no.
But unlike before, this time Turan did not back down.
Using the privilege of an Adopted Son, he secured a private audience with Haroon and forcefully made the case that he was the one who should go.
"There's no one else volunteering anyway, is there? You'll need at least one capable representative, and rather than dragging some busy person away from their work for no good reason, I'm the better choice."
"You are my son, the Family Head's son. Be mindful of your position."
"Being the Family Head's son is no reason to get special treatment. It's not as though I'm the Heir, either."
If the Family Head forcibly kept Turan from going here, it would amount to foisting a hard, dangerous task onto someone else simply because he disliked the idea of his favored Adopted Son doing it.
Naturally, whoever ended up saddled with it would resent Turan.
At Turan's manner, arguing back logically rather than throwing a tantrum as he had in childhood, Haroon let out a sigh.
The answer here would be to bark at the boy to shut up and do as he was told, leaning on his authority as Family Head, but he had no desire to do that.
For to his mind, raising his voice at the boy he took to be the reincarnation of Otas, the only person he had ever loved, was simply too painful a thing.
After a long stretch of persuasion, in the end he gave in to his beloved Adopted Son.
"Fine. But you are never to do anything reckless. Above all, you are absolutely not to do something like attacking those Aravion wretches. Understood?"
"Yes."
Meisa, the Heir of House Aravion, was a body that Monarch, the head of their pack, had painstakingly crafted.
What exactly he meant to do by creating so powerful an individual, no one knew, but if such a being were to die at Turan's hands, everything would truly be thrown into chaos.
For that very reason, Haroon brought up again and again that Turan was on no account to pull any foolish stunt like attacking the Aravion army.
*
With Turan as their captain, the Zahar nobles rode their Magical Beasts and swiftly crossed the Enril Desert.
Passing through the Gray Zone, once a battlefield, they reached the forested region and beheld the ruins of numerous cities and villages butchered by the Dark Elves.
"Wow, this is no joke......"
"I didn't think it'd be this bad."
After frowning at the sight for a moment, they took turns casting Tracking Magic and followed the traces of humans.
Before long, they managed to find a place where a fairly large number of humans were gathered.
"That banner?"
"It's those Aravion bastards."
The Aravion army was subjugating the Dark Elves without a hitch.
From a good distance away, the Zahar nobles kept Concealment active and secretly observed the scene.
"Hmm."
Standing at the highest and most distant vantage of them all, Turan refracted water to magnify his vision and watched the Aravion army's battle.
What drew his attention was a red-haired woman wielding overwhelming power at the very front.
'So that's Meisa Aravion, the sparrows' Heir.'
They called her the Skeleton Princess of House Aravion, and sure enough, she was hideous enough to deserve the name.
A wretched figure that looked, quite literally, like nothing but skin smeared over bone.
Yet, in contrast to her dreadful looks, her skill in magic alone was staggering.
It was thanks to her bloodline power over wind and Lightning, of course, but her flight and attack magic that put the two to use were such that even if Turan had possessed the same quantity of Magic Power, he would have found them hard to approach.
For Turan, who from birth until now had been able to crush anyone at all in magical skill, it felt like meeting a worthy rival for the first time.
'Well, still, if I wanted her dead, I could kill her easily enough.'
However tremendous the amount of Magic Power she held, with a body like that her ability in close combat had to be pitiful.
If only he could approach under Concealment, he was confident he could win easily with a surprise attack.
Failure, of course, would mean death.
'Shall I give it a try?'
While she stayed in camp it was naturally out of the question, but during a raid on the burrows where the Dark Elves hid, there was a chance.
If he crept up close and, with the Sacred Relic dagger that had once slashed open Berit's face, severed her neck in a single stroke......
But the temptation lasted only a moment; clicking his tongue, Turan soon abandoned the plan he had conceived.
Since there was a limit to the amount of Magic Power he had been born with anyway, even killing Meisa would make it hard to take her power in full, and an enraged House Aravion might well start a second war.
And above all, had not his father urged him to refrain from any dangerous attempt?
It was obvious that, even if he gained power by defying that, his father would take no pleasure in it.
In the end, at the very top of all the principles governing Turan's actions stood this: pleasing his father, Haroon.
After that, Turan and the Zahar nobles continued to follow and observe as Meisa led the Aravion army in subjugating the Dark Elves.
Working their way down from the north to the south of the western forest region, raiding the various burrows where the Dark Elves had originally dwelt, they soon gave chase when the last survivors fled toward the Gray Zone, and the Zahar nobles likewise tailed them in secret.
Thanks to their constant use of Tracking Magic to read the surrounding situation, they were able to learn even faster than the Aravion army that the fleeing Dark Elves were joining forces with a faction of Dwarves.
"Looks like they've joined forces with the Dwarves."
"One wrong move and they'll take quite a beating."
"All the better for us."
For a Zahar noble, the death of Aravion's wizards was something to welcome.
Had there been no order to merely scout and keep their hands off, they would probably have intervened in secret among the Dwarves.
Around the time the Aravion army entered the canyon where the Dwarves were hiding to subjugate the last of the Dark Elves, Turan announced that he would have the other Zahar nobles wait outside while he alone followed the army and infiltrated deeper in.
"It's dangerous, Turan."
"Do we really need to go that far? Can't we just watch them fight it out and come back on their own?"
"You haven't forgotten why we came to scout, have you? If those things have some hidden Magic Artifact, we have to confirm it, don't we. And since the rest of you aren't skilled enough to follow me in, I'm saying I'll go alone."
In the end, since Turan was the captain of their investigative party, once he gave the order firmly there was nothing the other Zahar nobles could do.
Hugging the upper edge of the canyon and slipping in quietly while avoiding the orbs of light, Turan let out a gasp of admiration at the battle that soon broke out.
'Wow......'
The unidentified Magic Artifacts the Dwarves wielded all but literally butchered the Aravion army.
For how long did he watch, half-dazed, the feast of steam and gunfire spewing in every direction?
Soon he realized the fight was over, and he cautiously drew nearer to take in the details of the situation.
'Nearly wiped out. I never imagined it would be this bad.'
The victors of the battle were the Aravions, yet Turan could not easily judge whether it was right to call them winners at all.
Of the more than several hundred who had entered the canyon, the survivors numbered a mere twenty or thirty, and even they, for the most part, were groaning from grievous wounds.
And even this had been achieved only because one of the cornered Aravion nobles had suddenly unleashed a bizarre ability.
Without his power, which had abruptly bent the trajectories of the bullets at will, it would have been the Aravion army that was annihilated.
And as for Meisa, the head of the Aravion army, the defensive Magic Artifact that had covered her skeleton-like body seemed to have run out of power, for it had been torn to shreds, and she herself appeared to have fainted from the exhaustion of spent Magic Power.
Without meaning to, Turan glanced around to see whether anyone would come to tend to Meisa, but the surviving Aravion wizards were too busy looking after themselves.
It also helped that, because Meisa had fought in the deepest part, the remains of Undead Spirits and the corpses of Dark Elves were piled high, blocking the line of sight.
'This is my chance.'
If he reached out quietly here, broke that slender neck with one twist, dropped her into a Large-Capacity Pouch, and fled, it would all be over.
As long as he absorbed the Magic Power somewhere safe, he could make a portion of the Aravion Heir's enormous power his own.
His father had told him not to do anything foolish because it was dangerous, but right now, by anyone's reckoning, this was a situation where he could reap nothing but profit with no risk at all.
No, now that he thought about it, there was a better method than killing her.
In a situation like this, surely abduction was worth attempting?
Killing her to absorb her Magic Power would be no different from bagging a single powerful Magical Beast, but abducting her would let him use her to far greater political advantage.
At the very least, his father would prefer abducting her, leaving the choice of killing or sparing her open, over simply killing her outright.
Turan stripped the outer garment off an Aravion Knight of similar build to his own from among those sprawled nearby, put it on, then took out a necklace that sealed Magic Power and fastened it around Meisa's neck.
Hoisting her over his shoulder, Turan, his Concealment now dropped, tore through the Dark Elf corpses and ran out of the canyon.
The few survivors of the Aravion army saw this and their eyes went wide.
"That's......"
"Lady Meisa?"
"Hey, bring Lady Meisa over here! I'm a Healer!"
They assumed that Turan, dressed in the bloodstained clothes of an Aravion Knight, was trying to tend to the ailing Meisa, but when he ignored the Healer's call and kept running, only then did they realize something was wrong.
"Stop-!"
"Get lost. Quit being a pest."
Bang, a noble who tried to block his path was run through and left dangling on a spike of rock that surged up from the ground.
There was no way that men who had nearly drained their Magic Power in a grueling fight, their bodies left ragged, could stop him.
Turan dispatched those in his way with ease and stepped out of the canyon.
An Aravion Knight who had not gone inside saw him and his eyes went wide.
"Wait, what is this......?"
"The enemy is too strong! I barely managed to rescue Lady Meisa, but there are still survivors inside, so send reinforcements!"
At the call for reinforcements delivered with flawless acting, the Aravion Knights in front of him scrambled toward the camp.
Not missing the opening thus created, Turan dashed straight off to the southeast.
Before long, the Zahar nobles who had been watching the canyon's entrance under Concealment fell in alongside him.
"Don't tell me, that's the Skeleton Princess?"
"That's right. I've got a Magic Suppression Necklace on her, so there's nothing to worry about."
"Whoa, abducting the sparrows' Heir...... just how big are your guts, anyway?"
"She was so worn out she couldn't even put up a fight."
Even as they talked, they did not stop moving.
Before long they reached the spot where their riding Magical Beasts were, and from there they mounted up at once and raced off to the southeast.
By now the Aravion lot had probably realized their Heir was gone, but there was no need to worry about pursuit in any case.
Most of their main force had been wiped out inside the canyon, and the ones left outside were second-rate riffraff outmatched in skill.
"This is fantastic. I wonder what kind of reward we'll get for this......"
"You said it."
After joking around for a while, Turan, who had seated Meisa in front of him, noticed something off.
The unconscious woman's body had suddenly begun to tremble and shiver, of all things.
"Wait, stop."
"What is it?"
"This woman, something's wrong with her."
Quickly coming to a halt nearby, they checked Meisa's condition.
One among them with a fair depth of medical knowledge spotted the problem.
"It's because her Magic Power's been sealed."
"And why's that a problem?"
"From the look of it, she's in a state where an ordinary person would have starved to death, but she's been kept alive by Magic Power, so with that Magic Power sealed......"
"She'll die? No, this is just...... unbelievable."
The Zahar nobles, faced with such an absurd situation, could not go on speaking.
It was because they could not accept the preposterous notion that a noble as formidable as her would starve to death without Magic Power.
And yet, if they released the seal on her Magic Power, wasn't she a woman more than capable of slaughtering every last one of them?
After only a moment's deliberation, Turan clicked his tongue, tch, and undid the necklace Meisa was wearing.
"She won't fully recover right away anyway, so I suppose we ought to at least keep her alive. So, the problem is that she's too starved, is that it?"
"Right. There might be other issues, but that's beyond what I can tell......"
"Then feeding her should solve it."
Turan took out of the Large-Capacity Pouch the dried jerky and hardtack they had been using as rations on the way here.
Then, after chewing it up noisily, he pushed the now-porridge-like mush in past Meisa's parched lips.
Pressing his mouth to this horrendously ugly woman was an ordeal, but since she was about to die, there was no choice but to keep her alive even this way.
How many times had he pushed food in like that?
Perhaps because her Magic Power had returned, the unconscious Meisa opened her eyes.
Eyes as blue as the sea, ill-matched with her skeletal appearance.
Turan, who had stared blankly at them for a moment, slowly drew back the mouth he had pressed tight against hers.
"All right, hey. Now you can eat on your ow-"
"Blergh-!"
The food he had so diligently chewed and pushed in just moments before came spewing right back out and soaked his clothes.
*****
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