Once they had more or less finished their discussion, Turan took Mago and left the nameless nomadic tribe. The tribespeople lamented the departure of the shaman who had protected them and healed all manner of wounds and illnesses.

"How can you leave us like this?"

"We haven't even repaid all your kindness yet, honored shaman. Please, stay with us."

Listening to their pleas, Mago stole a glance at Turan, apparently worried that he might slaughter these insolent commoners for daring to bar a noble's path. Turan, of course, had no intention of doing so. He simply stood there and gave Mago a slight look, signaling him to deal with it himself.

"Now, now, everyone, calm down. Once this business is over, I'll return here if I'm still alive."

"Oh! Do you mean it?"

"We knew we could trust you, Healing Hand!"

Wouldn't he have to return to Shiraf Marsh once his business here was settled? Wasn't that a promise he couldn't keep? Though Turan privately wondered, he saw no need to challenge him in front of them. They had cleared the way, after all.

As they left the tribe amid everyone's warm wishes, Turan addressed Mago, who was walking a little behind him.

"That promise you made just now—did you mean it?"

"Pardon? Ah, of course. Once this is over, I'm considering settling here for the rest of my life."

With an expression of almost serene detachment, Mago explained how he had come to stay with the tribe. While searching for Ravista's traitor, he had been caught up in a battle, lost his companions, and been left badly wounded. These tribespeople had rescued him and nursed him with the utmost care.

"That's a little different from what I've heard. A friend of mine said the grassland people indulge in murder and rape as readily as eating a meal—that they're practically other races wearing human skins."

"There are certainly people like that, but the northern continent has plenty of villains too, doesn't it? The people here simply haven't learned how to live rightly. Among them, those with good grazing land and ample wealth, like the tribe we just left, show enough kindness to tend even an unknown vagrant."

There was a curious wisdom in his quiet voice.

As they discussed the subject further, Turan learned something interesting: the small tribe he had rescued first was, in fact, a band of raiders. Not long ago, they had tried to attack the tribe the two had just left, only for Mago to teach them a lesson and send them fleeing.

"Huh..."

Turan recalled the people who had bowed and scraped before him. Those utterly helpless sheep had been acting like vicious wolves toward other sheep?

"Perhaps I should deal with them if I have time."

"You mean those people?"

"Yes. If they raid anyone else, it'll be my responsibility."

Hadn't Keorn told him long ago? Show mercy to a single highway robber, and he would repay it by killing ten innocent people. If the opportunity arose, he should kill them without hesitation.

Besides, considering how pleased they had been to see Turan in poor health, and how they had deliberately directed him toward a tribe that was practically their enemy, it was hard to imagine their intentions had been good. Given the hostility toward outsiders here, they had probably hoped to spark some sort of conflict.

Looking a little disconcerted, Mago replied,

"Surely there's no need to go to such trouble."

"It wouldn't be much trouble."

"No, I suppose it wouldn't."

Mago had no doubt that the young noble before him could wipe out a small tribe with a wave of his hand. The aftereffects of that tremendous mana he had felt earlier still left his body trembling.

It was the sort of power he might feel from his house's venerable elders, people a lower-tier noble like himself could scarcely dare look in the eye... Even thousands of weak nobles like Mago probably couldn't put a scratch on Turan. He ought to be grateful simply that Turan was treating him with the courtesy due a fellow noble.

"What I meant was that there's no reason to stain your own hands with further wickedness."

"Is removing wolves that prey on sheep really wicked?"

Those who sought to harm innocent humans were wolves, not sheep. Faced with Turan's rock-hard convictions, Mago spoke calmly.

"As I said earlier, whether a tribe in this land is good or evil comes down to whether they have food to fill their bellies, and whether they can survive without raiding. Hungry, they become wolves. Well fed, they become sheep."

He went on to explain that if they killed those driven by hunger to become wolves, the sheep would multiply until food ran short again, turning some of them into wolves. The same thing would simply repeat itself.

Turan listened quietly. It ran directly counter to the values he had developed growing up, but there was a strange resonance to Mago's words that made them difficult to dismiss as nonsense.

"... What I'm trying to say is that good and evil are more complicated and harder to distinguish than one might think. Of course, if a villain simply delights in tormenting others, we can cut them out as you suggest. But that isn't easy to judge, which is why we need to be more cautious when exercising our power."

When he finished, Mago glanced at Turan as though checking whether he had angered him. Turan smiled gently and nodded.

"It's still difficult for me to understand... but you've given me something to think about. Thank you for your wisdom."

"I only hope I haven't overstepped my bounds."

"Not at all. Oh, my name is Turan."

He revealed the real name he had concealed because he felt that the middle-aged man before him deserved his respect.

Mago was, of course, a shepherd who cherished his sheep. But his argument that one should look into the reasons people became raiders, rather than simply regard them as wolves and cut them down like weeds, held a depth Turan had never considered. Naturally, there were still several points he couldn't fully agree with.

Perhaps sensing the goodwill in Turan's words, Mago let a faint smile soften his somewhat tense face.

"So you are Lord Turan. I take it you aren't a member of Ravista..."

"I have the Zahar bloodline, though I don't belong to the house."

"Ah."

Sensing some delicate family circumstances, Mago refrained from prying further. Turan then asked what he had been wondering earlier.

"But leaving your house to settle here isn't as easy as it sounds, is it? More than anything, I doubt Ravista would ever allow it."

Even ordinary wizard houses were reluctant to let a single precious noble go, but the great houses were harsher still in this regard. They sought to prevent the theft of their rare, superior blood, which combined two bloodlines.

To put it bluntly, what if Mago stayed here and some great house came along, snatched him up, and forced him to father children, producing wizards of the Ravista bloodline? Bloodline theft of this sort was strictly forbidden, but a prohibition usually meant there were people trying to do it.

When Turan voiced that concern, Mago chuckled and replied,

"You're close enough to the house to have been entrusted with recovering its Holy Relic, Lord Turan, so I suppose there's no harm in telling you. It's common knowledge in certain circles anyway... Among Ravista's Holy Relics is one with the power to block a person's fertility. They say that until it is used to reverse the effect, nothing can enable that person to have children."

Turan's eyes widened at this truly remarkable revelation.

"Something like that exists?"

"Yes. I've never used it myself, of course, but I understand it's available to anyone who wishes it."

With a curiously mischievous air, Mago added that it didn't actually prevent one from engaging in reproductive activities.

* * *

Having already revealed his name, Turan saw no need to hide Vije. Once they reached a place with no one else in sight, he brought her out and enlarged her. Mago's eyes went round with astonishment as he climbed onto the enormous black eagle monster.

"But how in the world... Hiding a monster inside your body, then making it grow and shrink like this—I've never seen anything like it in my life."

"Please don't tell anyone about it."

Mago nodded solemnly at Turan's warning. In truth, it wasn't a secret that needed such strict guarding, since everyone from House Berg who had come to Kalamap had already seen it and spread the story.

Though not as vast as the Enril Desert, the grasslands were still enormous, and they had to fly east for almost an entire day before reaching their destination. A river unusually large for these dry plains flowed through the area, and the grass grew quite tall.

Looking around, Mago let out a faint groan.

"This is the Golden Fleece tribe's base. Though a few other clans have gathered here as well..."

His claim that they were practically at war proved no idle remark. Before long, they saw corpses that appeared to have been killed by human hands. The attackers must have been desperate for every scrap of clothing: every body was naked, and even the spears, blades, and arrows had all been pulled out.

Turan clicked his tongue. Mago's words had given him much to think about, but even taking them into account, this was a truly repulsive sight. Mago seemed to understand his discomfort and made no attempt to defend it. After looking down at the bodies for a while, Turan voiced a sudden realization.

"Most of these people were killed by ordinary people, not wizards."

There were cuts and punctures from spears, blades, and arrows. Every wound was far too shallow to have come from a knight or noble. Yet according to what he had heard earlier, only tribes with wizards—or shamans, as they called them—could enter this place.

"Yes. One of their age-old traditions holds that when tribes with shamans fight, the shamans pit their strength against one another, while those without such abilities fight among themselves. In those circumstances, a shaman with no opponent to occupy them is considered dishonorable if they harm ordinary people."

So even here they had their own notion of honor. Though it was hard to sympathize with the form it took.

When he had first arrived, Turan had regarded the grassland people as little more than another race that humans could breed with. Before he knew it, he had come to see them as people with a different culture.

After traveling all over the world, he had felt there was nothing left he didn't know. Clearly, though, there were still many things he could learn only by meeting and interacting with people himself.

After surveying the surroundings for a while, Turan subdued the mind of a wandering horse and gave it to Mago. Then he bowed his head in farewell.

"Have a safe journey back."

"And you, Lord Turan... I will pray to the Earth Mother that you complete your mission safely."

Mago's role ended here. Having been grievously wounded while trying to venture into the area after locating it, he had no further information to offer. If anything, Turan would have to go to the trouble of protecting him.

Knowing this, Mago readily agreed to return rather than insist on staying to help with the mission. On horseback, the journey they had flown in a day would take at least a week, but with the food and water he had prepared, he would have little difficulty enduring it.

Once Mago was gone, Turan immediately cast tracking magic targeting humans. Strong body odors reached him from every direction. Keeping the spell active, he took to the air with the now-invisible Vije and searched out the tribes gathered in the region, observing them one by one.

"There really are a lot of them..."

He had heard that fewer than a few hundred thousand people lived across these vast grasslands, yet every dozen or so kilometers he found another tribe or two numbering in the thousands. Considering how much grass their sheep, cattle, and other livestock ate, he wondered whether even such a fertile area would soon be stripped bare.

Whenever he spotted a tribe along the way, Turan checked the flags above their tents, whether pitched or being carried.

'Horned buffalo, wolf, snake, lion...'

Unlike the world beyond the grasslands, where the Freyan faith predominated, both ordinary people and wizards here mostly followed primitive religions based on animal worship. Some even worshipped particular monsters.

The tribe they had just passed had what looked like a black eagle on its flag. Perhaps they would worship Vije as a divine bird.

After they passed a dozen or so tribes, flags embroidered with a golden fleece finally came into view.

"Found it."

Vije, whose eyes were sharper than Turan's, spotted them first. She seemed to regard finding a flag with the right emblem as a game and was even more enthusiastic about it than he was.

Though he couldn't count them precisely, the Golden Fleece tribe numbered over ten thousand. They were the largest tribe gathered here. At that size, it was practically an entire city on the move.

Maintaining his stealth, Turan landed among the Golden Fleece tribe's tents. For a moment, the strong body odor mixed with animal smells typical of nomads overwhelmed his nose, but he soon grew accustomed to it.

Walking around with the Holy Relic's senses active, he soon detected a gathering of nobles with upper-tier mana or greater. There were eleven of them.

'Wait, I thought wizards were rare in the grasslands... This is more than you'd get by scraping together every wizard house in the Gray Zone.'

If a single tribe had this many, wouldn't they stand a chance against Baraha if they all joined forces?

But when he reached the gathering of upper-tier nobles, Turan realized his mistake. The unusually large number of high-ranking nobles were leaders of other tribes opposing the Golden Fleece. A meeting to mediate disputes with nearby tribes happened to be taking place, bringing these powerful nobles together.

"This is absurd! That son of a bitch slaughtered our tribe without sparing even the children! And the price for that is a hundred and fifty sheep?!"

"They were only ordinary children, not shamans. I'd call that generous."

At the glib reply from someone Turan presumed belonged to the Golden Fleece tribe, the man crying out about the slaughtered children trembled.

After briefly noting their conversation, Turan turned straight toward his target. Perhaps because he was an outsider, the man wasn't taking part in the meeting like everyone else, but was holding his lover in his arms.

'Moroz Ravistas... His face and bloodline confirm it.'

Moroz was a young man with a rather irritable, sensitive look. Of course, he only looked young because of his Ravista bloodline; his actual age was over two hundred and forty. The female knight nestled against him was pretty, as one might expect of a powerful noble's lover, and immense power emanated from the necklace on her chest. That was probably the Holy Relic.

Before long, the meeting ended, and Moroz entered an enormous tent that seemed to have been assigned to him. Naturally, Turan followed under stealth as though he were part of the group.

"These country bumpkins. Why must they summon me over every trivial matter? Their requests for healing are enough of a nuisance as it is."

"Surely such burdens come with an exalted position."

The knight soothed Moroz's irritation with a formal yet gentle tone. After they kissed for a while, he spoke with a more relaxed air.

"Well, I suppose it can't be helped when we're stuck in a backwater like this... All I need is you, Basha."

"Lord Moroz."

Watching the pair's tender affection, one would hardly suspect that they were criminals who had stolen their own house's Holy Relic, or that they had even plotted the murders of the pursuers their house had sent after them.

Then again, hadn't Turan learned just yesterday that evil people didn't always look evil?

Naturally, their sweet declarations of love gave way to more intimate expressions of affection. Watching from the bed at the side of the tent, Turan drew the sword he wore.

It was a magic tool that the Enchanter Melo had made for him during his recent stay in Kalamap as thanks for saving him. It fell short of Maysa's work, but unlike her, who always had to stay ready for battle, Melo could devote his entire strength to it, so its quality was quite respectable.

The assassin's sword, specialized in piercing a target's every defense, ran through the two entwined bodies.