"Turan! Dad, no, Father, Mother, because of me..."

Following the anguished cry, Turan found Asiz a mess of tears and snot. At his feet lay the mangled bodies of the Berg couple.

Turan clenched his teeth at the sight of what remained of the two people who had once welcomed him so warmly as their son's benefactor and their guest.

"I'm an idiot. Damn it, if only I hadn't overreached."

"Father and Mother fought as nobles to the very end. Don't cry! You're only dishonoring them."

It was his older brother, Melo, who sharply rebuked Asiz's rambling self-reproach. From his torn, blood-soaked clothes, he too appeared to have been badly injured and then treated.

Glancing around, Turan could roughly guess what had happened. The knights had suffered various injuries, but a fair number remained, while House Berg's nobles had suffered grievous wounds or even died...

'They fought at the front to protect the knights.'

Nobles raised knights for two main reasons. The first was to serve as their hands and feet, hunting monsters within their territory and maintaining order. The second was to act as shields, bearing the enemy's attacks in wars like this one.

Yet Berg's nobles had instead gone to the front to protect those knights, and lost their lives for it. And with the Enchanter bloodline, which was not even suited to combat.

Turan suddenly recalled the nobles of House Valtas in distant Orem City to the west, with whom he had once hunted monsters. What if Berg's nobles had fought as they had, taking it for granted that their knights would serve as shields?

The knights would likely have suffered greater losses, but the nobles would have been safe. Considering the enormous intangible value of Enchanters, that would have been the right choice for preserving their faction's strength.

Yet, paradoxically, the very reason Turan had grown fond of House Berg's people was that they were not the sort to do such a thing. It was this couple who had taught Asiz that the household members following him were precious people too.

"What happened?"

Just then, Maysa flew over, her face pale, perhaps from the side effects of soul magic. A moment later, she saw the Berg couple's bodies on the ground, and her expression froze.

"Aunt and Uncle..."

"I'm sorry."

Turan quietly apologized to her, and to Asiz, who was still weeping. Feelings he could scarcely describe seethed within him. This was the first time he had lost people he was supposed to protect.

It felt entirely different from losing his mother. This was not the loss of someone who had protected him, but the guilt and anger of failing to protect those in his care...

He remembered the pride he had felt only moments ago at being able to hold his own against Arabion's House Head, and shame washed over him.

'You idiot.'

What right had he to feel so pleased with himself when he could not even protect his own people?

Perhaps his expression had grown too dark as he berated himself, for Asiz forced a smile through his sobs and tried to comfort him.

"Don't... apologize. You did your best too."

After offering Asiz a few more words of comfort, Turan instructed the nearby knights to attend to the House Head and her husband's bodies, then went to find the other wounded. Before long, he found someone who needed his help.

"Master."

"I'm quite a sight. I'm ashamed to let you see me like this."

Haram Berg. House Berg's guest and the husband of Asiz's paternal aunt was in a horrifying state.

Burns covered the left half of his body, his crushed right arm was still healing, and the blood vessels throughout his body bore signs of having ruptured under lightning strikes. No one could have looked at him and claimed he had not fought hard enough.

"Please don't say that. I can see how much you've endured."

Haram was a guardian whose strength placed him in the upper tier even among nobles. Anyone capable of reducing him to this state had to be at least his equal.

Turan could make out more than three different kinds of wounds at a glance, which meant Haram had single-handedly kept three nobles of upper-tier strength or greater occupied. Without his efforts, Kalamap's forces would likely have been wiped out long ago.

A glance around showed Ravista's Healers busy treating others. As a high-ranking noble and a physically resilient guardian, Haram would require considerable mana to heal. His condition was not immediately critical either, so it seemed he had been pushed down the treatment order.

Turan immediately laid a hand on him and cast restorative magic. A little later, with every wound on his body completely healed, Haram rose and spoke.

"I saw a lot of unfamiliar faces in this battle."

"Unfamiliar faces?"

"I know the faces of nearly everyone of my generation in Arabion and its vassal houses, but most of these people were strangers. And the Arabion nobles among them were generally either too old or too young."

Turning Haram's words over in his mind, Turan soon realized what he meant.

"It seems they're beginning to run short too."

"I would say so."

From Maysa's escape to the recent battle in the forest, the number of Arabion nobles Turan and his companions had killed had now passed twenty. Had their losses in the war against Zahar been about that high?

They had also suffered losses during the recent Dark Elf subjugation. Even an ancient great house like Arabion was beginning to feel the strain—enough that it had to call on retired nobles, youngsters, or reinforcements brought from House Nagin.

"So take heart, House Head. The enemy is exhausted too. This is not a battle we cannot win."

Unlike his relatively informal manner moments earlier, Haram now addressed him respectfully as he offered encouragement. Turan repeated the title to himself.

House Head...

It still felt far too heavy a title to accept, but this, too, was a burden he had to bear as the leader of a group.

"Thank you for your advice, Master."

Haram waved him on and turned away.

* * *

With darkness drawing near, they first made camp close to the battlefield.

Meanwhile, Turan sent Vije, who had recovered her strength after a few hours' rest, to confirm once more that Arabion's army was truly retreating. About an hour later, she returned and reported what she had seen while eagerly gulping down the water set out for her.

-Found them! People riding in wagons pulled by giant snakes! They kept heading west!

Fortunately, Arabion's army seemed to be returning home rather than feigning a retreat. Reassured, Kalamap's forces spent the night there, then set off for their own base. Everyone was utterly exhausted by the past two days of flight and fighting, and their progress was painfully slow.

During the march, Turan talked with his companions from the middle of the column while using tracking magic to keep watch over their surroundings.

"How's Asiz doing?"

"He seems a little calmer now. But I think it'll take more time for him to accept it..."

Maysa's face was somber as she answered. Turan suddenly noticed a faint trace of guilt on Solif's face as he listened beside them.

'Because of his parents?'

Around the time they had chosen Kalamap as their base, someone had suggested bringing Solif's parents over from their refuge near Hisaril Hill. When they had first hidden the couple there, they had planned to travel without a fixed base. Now that circumstances had changed, living together seemed the better choice.

Unexpectedly, it had been Solif who opposed the idea. He argued that his parents would prefer a quiet, affectionate life together in seclusion to the bustle of the city.

As a result, the Baraha couple had remained safe because they were not in Kalamap, but Kalamap's main force had suffered greater losses for lacking their strength. It was only natural that Solif had mixed feelings.

"Anyway, why did that damned old man let us live? I heard you put up a pretty good fight... but honestly, I think we'd have lost if it had kept going."

Changing the uncomfortable subject, Solif rubbed the chest that had been caved in by a blow. Turan offered the theory he had come up with.

"I'm not certain, but I think he might not have been able to maintain that fighting strength for long."

"He couldn't maintain it?"

"Right. He looked quite exhausted toward the end. Too exhausted to explain it away as simple old age."

What Turan had seen through his spiritual sight—the spirit form seeming to wring the body dry—had already suggested he was overexerting himself. As Ymir had demonstrated before, exerting excessive power through a vessel could make the body collapse altogether.

Turan therefore believed Badal had been operating under a time limit, and had chosen to withdraw with his army intact rather than risk his own collapse by continuing the fight.

"So that's it."

"That might also be why he didn't use divine magic... what they call 'skills.'"

As he spoke, Turan recalled Badal's bizarre flight magic once more. Had that been a 'skill' too, or merely a kind of magic he did not understand?

The idea that he had moved the metal with telekinesis made no sense. Ordinary telekinesis could not produce that degree of power and dynamic movement, and if it could, moving his body directly would have been easier.

"Well, if that's the case, we'll have to try to stall him next time too. Not that it'll be easy."

"No. It was truly awful. We only held out for about two hours, I think..."

Maysa's murmur was almost a sigh.

While resting the previous night, Turan had heard a rough account of how the battle had unfolded. It had begun when Maysa, on one of her regular patrols to the west and north, discovered Arabion's main force. After disposing of the scouts pursuing her, she contacted Turan and began evacuating the city in earnest.

For roughly two days afterward, Kalamap's fleeing forces and Arabion's pursuing army had engaged in a chase. At last, the pursuers caught up, and a chaotic battle had raged for several hours. That was when Turan arrived with Ravista's wizards.

Looking back, it had been a terribly close call. What if Turan had arrived just a little later, or come alone without reinforcements? Everyone else might have been dead by now, with Maysa alone being dragged back to Arabion in chains to become a god's new body.

Shaking off the dreadful image that had surfaced in his mind, Turan mentioned another piece of information he had heard.

"Come to think of it, Badal said something at the end."

"What?"

"He complained about having to waste his strength on something so trivial at such an important time. As if someone had ordered him to do it."

"From everything we've heard, there shouldn't be much more important than taking Maysa's body."

Solif muttered in bewilderment. As he said, there was no reason to doubt that Badal had little time left to live. Maysa, who would serve as his replacement, had to be a resource they desperately needed. What could possibly be important enough to make even that a lesser priority?

"Well... that means Father isn't the leader of their faction, right?"

"If Ymir wasn't lying, Arabion–Nagin's leader is the one we're not supposed to mention. Probably Nagin's House Head."

The Biologist. The being whose traces he had first encountered in the labyrinth, and whose identity he had come to surmise through the records left in the library.

It was unlikely that Badal was the one who had freely tampered with dwarves and seemed to regard humanity as his playthings. So far, the bloodlines Badal had displayed were Storm, Enchanter, and Strongman—far removed from the power to manipulate life.

Listening, Solif stroked his chin and spoke quietly.

"Come to think of it, I've felt for a while that Arabion's response was a little halfhearted. Maybe their leader is completely preoccupied with something else."

He was right. For a house that had lost Maysa, the vessel intended for its House Head, Arabion had seemed strangely lacking in urgency. Surely the 'Biologist' could at least have appeared in person this time? If he had, the worst-case outcome Turan had imagined moments earlier might have become reality.

Discussing what scheme their enemies could possibly be plotting, Turan's party continued steadily northeast. After three days and nights, Solif gave a cheerful whistle.

"Finally home."

Just as he said, Kalamap City was visible in the distance.

* * *

Upon returning to Kalamap, Turan first had House Berg's retainers spread the outcome of the battle throughout the city: they had faced Arabion and repelled it, despite its House Head himself taking the field.

At first glance, the returning force looked like the remnants of a defeated army, so the story did not immediately spread with any conviction. Above all, was Arabion's House Head not one of the most powerful wizards in the world?

However famous Kalamap's Turan might be for possessing great strength at a young age, no one believed he had actually risen to stand alongside the exalted heads of the great houses.

A week later, however, an unexpected event lent momentum to those uncertain rumors.

"Is that really true?"

"I'm telling you! It really looked as though gods had fought there. If you ever pass that way, take a look for yourselves."

A general merchant from Bexel, a city southwest of Kalamap, talked excitedly over his beer. A mountain had caved in as though struck by a giant's hammer. A hill had a hole through it large enough for a house to pass through. A field hundreds of meters across had been burned bare of grass.

As the account of someone who had personally seen the traces of Kalamap's clash with Arabion spread, the citizens could not help recalling what they had heard a short while before.

"They really... repelled Arabion's House Head?"

"Perhaps a new great house is rising on our land."

Some felt displeasure and fear at the prospect of hostility with the great House Arabion, but many more harbored hope. The small city of Kalamap, merely one of countless trading cities scattered across the Gray Zone, without even a respectable history to its name—the capital of a great house? For its residents, was that not a prospect that filled their hearts with pride merely to imagine?

As these rumors spread through the surrounding region, the wizard House Heads of the Gray Zone naturally found themselves shaken as well. Knowledgeable about the world of wizards, they had dismissed the notion that Turan had become Arabion's House Head's equal as nonsense not worth considering. After inspecting the battlefield themselves, however, they could no longer do so.

The traces left there were nothing short of mythic, making it clear that the combatants had at least been comparable to great-house heads in strength. Needless to say, they bowed their heads before Turan's envoys when they later arrived, and pledged to provide some of their houses' nobles and knights.

Several weeks passed as Kalamap consolidated the Gray Zone as the capital of a new great house. At last, visitors arrived from the Enril Desert to the east.