Chapter 122

“Wow! It's Sirka!”

Just then, lively voices rang out from all around.

“Sirka!”

“Sirka's back!”

At the safe return of Sirka, who had suddenly gone missing, ice elves rushed out from all over the village to welcome her.

But that lasted only a moment. The instant they spotted the unfamiliar outsider standing beside her, their expressions turned fierce, and they readied themselves for battle.

“An intruder!”

“It's an intruder!”

“An intruder's entered the village!”

SHING!

In an instant, bows, arrows, and keenly honed daggers were trained on Suho. Sirka jumped between them, frantically waving her hands.

“Everyone, stop! Don't fight! He's not an intruder! Look closely! He's Chacha's son!”

“What?”

“Chacha?”

“What do you mean, Chacha's son?”

They all stared at Suho's face in bewilderment.

“Huh?”

Then, one by one, their eyes began to widen in realization.

“Oh?”

“Whaaat? R-really?”

The ice elves who had been eyeing Suho warily hurriedly turned their heads. Their mouths fell open as they looked back and forth between his face and that of the ice sculpture standing in front of the village.

“Wow! He really does look like Chacha!”

“Now that you mention it, his eyes look a bit like hers!”

“His nose, too!”

“And his smell!”

“What was her son's name again? Sung-Sung?”

“You idiot! Chacha's son's name is Sung Suho!”

“Wait, Sirka! Is he really Chacha's son? Where did you find him?”

The murderous tension, which had threatened to erupt at any moment, abruptly dissolved into a lively hubbub. The atmosphere was so friendly that all the painstaking preparations Suho had made to face the ice elves before entering the Glacier Dungeon felt almost pointless.

Sirka puffed herself up before the others as though she had been the one to find Suho. Standing in the midst of it all, he calmly examined each of the ice elves.

'... They're all young.'

Ice elves might not have the same lifespan as humans, but judging by appearances alone, the ones chattering in front of him all looked to be in their early to late teens. Hardly any looked twenty or older.

'There are no adults.'

There was something else strange about them, too.

'They're weaker than I expected.'

Beru, too, wore a peculiar expression as he whispered to Suho.

[“Most ice elf warriors I knew were A-rank magic beasts. Even the weakest were at least B-rank. But these ones...”]

“B-rank at best, down to D-rank. Not a single A-rank among them.”

[“They are far too weak.”]

Overhearing their exchange, Sirka nodded.

“They can't help it. All our tribe's capable warriors were called away to war and died. The only people in this village now are those who were too young or too weak back then.”

In the war between the Rulers and the Monarchs that had raged since the dawn of time, the King of the Snow Folk, the Monarch of Frost who ruled this land, would seize every new generation of ice elves and drag them off to the battlefield as soon as he deemed them useful.

Of course, to the ice elves, becoming a Monarch's soldier was a tremendous honor. Even the chance to die gloriously on the battlefield was a source of pride as a warrior.

That did not mean those left in the village had no role to play. They, too, had a vital mission, no less important than the warriors': raising the newborn children and nurturing the next generation. They had to raise those children into warriors skilled enough to be sent straight into the next battle, so that the war against the Rulers could continue as it had since the dawn of time.

“... That's us. The children born during the war.”

Those infants had now grown enough to wield bows and arrows and clutch daggers in their hands, striving to become proper warriors like their parents before them.

Suho found a contradiction in her words.

“But if everyone weak was left behind, not all the adults could have been strong. Why do I only see children?”

“... It wasn't always like this. On the day the spirits of the Echo Forest went berserk, most of the adults in our tribe died. Only one is still alive today.”

The Echo Forest.

At those words, Suho's gaze naturally turned toward the ice sculpture of his mother.

There...

Cha Haein had been carved in a dynamic battle pose, a dagger in each hand and her hair streaming behind her, as though performing a sword dance. Directly behind her, an enormous wyvern spread its wings as if shielding her.

As an art student, Suho could only marvel at how anyone had carved such an intricate, masterful sculpture out of ice.

“Looks like my mother uses daggers.”

“Yes. She said she didn't have a weapon, so we lent her the daggers our tribe uses. And that was when it began—when Chacha became our savior.”

One day, Cha Haein had suddenly descended from the sky through the blizzard on a black wyvern. At the time she arrived in this frozen forest, the ice elves living there were facing a terrible danger.

“For some reason, the spirits of the Echo Forest all burst out of the forest at once and poured into our village.”

* * *

[Echo Forest]

This forest was a sacred place to the ice elves, one from which anyone who entered could never return alive.

Once, it had also been known by another name: the Forest of Trials.

The Echo Forest was where ice elves who had come of age underwent the Warrior's Trial to earn recognition as valiant warriors.

Even that trial, however, was held only on the outskirts. None dared venture deep into the Echo Forest, for those who did risked being bewitched by its spirits and driven mad.

“Bewitched by spirits?”

“Yes. The spirits of the Echo Forest have no physical form. That's what makes them even scarier. They can take any shape. And it's hard to tell whether that's even their true form.”

“... That explanation doesn't help me understand at all.”

As Suho listened to Sirka tell him the legends of the Echo Forest, his surroundings remained boisterous. The ice elves were preparing a small welcoming party for him.

“We're having a party today!”

“A welcoming party for Sung-Sung!”

“Who keeps calling him Sung-Sung? It's Sung Suho!”

Their initial ferocity had vanished without a trace, leaving their youthful faces full of life. In one corner, an elf was already creating an ice sculpture for Suho. Another had brought out some fruit they had been saving for a special occasion. And yet another elf...

[“Now, now! The Young Monarch likes meat! And do you happen to have any mana crystals I could eat?”]

Beru had casually slipped into the preparations for Suho's welcoming party and was busily offering his unsolicited advice.

Regardless of that commotion, Sirka continued her story.

“But the spirits of the Echo Forest never used to leave the forest.”

The forest where the ice elves lived bordered the Echo Forest. Even so, the spirits posed no danger at all as long as the elves did not trespass on their territory first.

“At least, that's what we all believed until 'that day.'”

That day, the sky above the frozen forest had suddenly been torn to shreds as dimensional rifts opened. Perhaps affected by that, the spirits of the Echo Forest had abruptly gone berserk. They burst out of the forest and began attacking every ice elf in sight indiscriminately.

With the skilled warriors already gone, it was nothing short of a catastrophe for the young ice elves left in the village.

“That was years ago already, so we were much weaker than we are now.”

“And my mother saved you then?”

“Yes. Chacha was incredible.”

Cha Haein had suddenly appeared riding a wyvern and asked the ice elves to lend her some swords. The moment she held a dagger in each hand...

“Skill: Sword Dance.”

Sirka murmured the name of the skill Cha Haein had told her about.

Cha Haein's movements had quickened as though she were dancing, the daggers in her hands tracing magnificent arcs.

SWISH! SWISH! SWISH!

It was a wondrous, overwhelming display of combat, her blades nimbly cutting down spirits as though she were dancing to a rapid beat.

The sight was so beautiful that the ice elves had initially wanted to nickname her the Dancer. But she had forbidden it out of embarrassment, so they came up with another nickname.

“The new nickname we gave her was the Dragon Priestess.”

“... And she wasn't embarrassed by that?”

“Kaisel liked that nickname. So she reluctantly let us call her that.”

And true to that nickname, the black wyvern Kaisel always accompanied Cha Haein in battle.

When Suho looked puzzled at the mention of Kaisel, Beru quickly appeared to explain.

[“Kaisel was once known as the wyvern Kaisellin, a beast so formidable that Baran, the Monarch of White Flames, rode him. He was an S-rank magic beast, incidentally.”]

“An S-rank magic beast?”

Suho's eyes widened.

First he had learned that his mother had suddenly awakened the power of an S-rank hunter, and now that she rode an S-rank magic beast. It was an image utterly unlike the mother he knew, living her peaceful everyday life at home.

“Anyway, thanks to Chacha and Kaisel, the spirits attacking us fled back into the Echo Forest. After that, Chacha stayed with us for a while and taught us swordsmanship.”

“You learned swordsmanship from my mother?”

“Yes. The adults in the village who had raised us up to then had all been killed by the spirits. We never knew when the spirits of the Echo Forest might attack again, so Chacha protected us.”

This was why Cha Haein was called the ice elves' savior. She had taken responsibility for the surviving children's safety, even teaching them how to fight herself...

“Chacha is a mother to all of us.”

Suho sensed longing in Sirka's bright smile as she said it.

“So after that, where is my mother now...?”

“Yes. As I told you on our way here, she suddenly rode Kaisel into the Echo Forest a little while ago. She said there was a strange smell coming from it. And she still hasn't come back.”

“A strange smell?”

“Hmm. How should I explain it? Chacha has a keen nose for mana, just like us ice elves.”

As she spoke, Sirka sniffed at Suho.

“You smell really nice, Suho. That's how I knew right away that you were Cha Haein's son.”

During her time with the ice elves, Cha Haein had told them a great deal about her family.

“Chacha told us her son smelled really nice, just like his father. So she said that if her husband came looking for her while she was in the Echo Forest, we shouldn't attack him for no reason. We were to give him this message instead.”

“What message?”

At Suho's question, Sirka spoke with a solemn expression.

“... That she'd found the place where 'gray snow' falls.”