The Shadowed Legacy Of The Soulless Messenger [EN]: Chapter 287

Having obtained a travel permit from Prince Kalintz, Azadin first went to see Selim.

“Could I borrow a hippogriff? I have to go to Saint Mallory this time, and if I go by land, that Inquisitor is likely to target me.”

Sir Jekt, the Inquisitor who came as Prince Kalintz’s advisor, still believed that Azadin had a copy of the Divine Scripture.

‘Given what happened with Sir Sok, I shouldn’t be overconfident in my abilities. It’s better to avoid fights that can be avoided.’

So, Azadin planned to fly there on a hippogriff.

“Borrow? What do you mean by that, Sir Azadin? I’m disappointed. I’ll give you one of my fastest and most intelligent ones.”

Selim offered Azadin the best of his hippogriffs.

“It’s the best hippogriff I have. The Bishop originally wanted it, but…”

Selim thumped his chest.

“May you, who were last knighted by Sir Planck of Wisdom, bring a new wind to the old and ailing Knights Order with this one. Ah, but even for Sir Azadin, you’ll need some practice with a hippogriff, won’t you?”

“Hmm, how do you ride it? I’ve seen you ride it, but…”

Selim taught Azadin how to ride a hippogriff and gave him detailed instructions.

Azadin wrote down the information in his notebook and received the hippogriff from Selim.

It was a hippogriff with a stylish appearance, with red and blue feathers mixed on its neck.

“Its name is ‘Firewinter.’ It suits it well, doesn’t it? If you have another name in mind, you can give it a different one.”

“It suits it well. It has a mane like fire and ice. And if Pimbulbert approaches, I’ll like the name Firewinter even more.”

Azadin carefully reached out his hand to the hippogriff.

Then, the hippogriff suddenly tried to strike Azadin’s hand with its front paw.

It was as fast as a beast, too fast for a human to react, but Azadin’s reflexes were also extraordinary. Azadin lightly dodged the hippogriff’s front paw attack and gave a wry smile.

“Hey, Sir Selim. This is…”

It was fortunate that Azadin dodged it; if it had been an ordinary person, their arm would have been torn off.

“Ah, it’s just a bit playful.”

“A bit?”

“Yes, it is. I also…”

Selim showed the slight scratches all over his body.

He was a minotaur who wore leather armor and had thick fur, so he only ended up with slight scratches from the hippogriff’s front paw strikes, but for a bare-skinned human, those would have been fatal wounds.

“Haa. I understand. Well, I’ll give it a try.”

Azadin once again felt the gap between Selim and humans as he climbed onto Firewinter’s back.

Once he was on its back, it listened quietly, and there were no problems circling the Fireglyph once.

As Selim had recommended, Firewinter was indeed an intelligent and witty hippogriff. Azadin realized that the attempt to scratch his arm wasn’t out of malice but just playfulness, and he liked Firewinter.

“Then, have a pleasant journey. Show those other Holy Knights what’s what.”

“Well, I’m not really trying to show them anything… I’m just going. Don’t have any strange expectations.”

“Hahaha. Sir Azadin, you are fire, lightning, and wind. When lightning strikes a dry field, fire is bound to ignite. Even if you try to stay still, you won’t be able to stop the fire from starting, will you?”

“Your praise is excessive and might be poisonous. I’ll really go quietly. Quietly.”

Azadin felt embarrassed by Selim’s strange expectations of him.

*********

Having finished his travel preparations, Azadin flew into the sky on the hippogriff Firewinter, heading towards Saint Mallory.

Hippogriffs are strong enough to carry a minotaur like Selim, but they don’t have good stamina.

They can only fly for short periods, so the distance they can travel in a day is similar to or less than that of a horse.

However, since they fly through the sky without being restricted by terrain, they can ultimately fly much farther than a horse.

“But…”

While flying over the forest south of the Fireglyph, Azadin felt an unusual energy in the forest.

There were living creatures moving through the shadows of the forest. At first, he suspected that Sir Jekt might be lying in wait to ambush him, but it seemed that a considerable number of troops were moving.

‘What is it? Something is moving in the forest. Should I go down and check?’

But he was afraid of stirring up trouble.

Then…

“Squeak…”

Firewinter began to whine that it was hungry.

“…I had to go down anyway.”

Azadin looked for a place to land nearby and carefully began to descend.

*********

It was summer, but a cold air, unusual for summer, was blowing from the south.

Digun, a farmer from the small village of Big Well south of the Fireglyph, shivered at the unusual cold wind.

“Dad, is this enough?”

Digun’s son, Duns, brought a pile of wooden planks and showed them to his father.

They weren’t planks bought from a lumber mill but roughly made planks cut from nearby trees, so they would crack when dry, but it didn’t matter.

Digun just wanted to get through this summer without any hailstorms.

“Yes. Those carpenters charge too much just for trimming the wood.”

“Ah, but Mr. Delober from the lumber mill said that young workers have been disappearing recently. They say they saw dryads…”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“They say that beautiful women in the forest are seducing lumberjacks and loggers.”

Digun’s son, Duns, said, his eyes shining.

He thought it was an absurd story, but the passion unique to an adolescent boy made him want to believe it.

And perhaps the young workers and apprentices at the lumber mill felt the same way.

Duns had no reason to leave home since his father, Digun, was with him, but the apprentices at the lumber mill, who were little more than serfs of the Rescue Knights, had no sense of duty or family ties to hold them back.

The passion and curiosity that are common among teenage boys pushed them forward, rather than the harsh scolding of the lumber mill supervisor.

“The forest is ominous these days, and dryads? Oh, you fools. Why do you all do the same thing?”

“The same thing?”

“Yes, well, um. Anyway…”

Digun trailed off.

For young men living in forest areas, the legend of the dryads was always alluring.

It was hard to calm their passion and desire until they had wandered foolishly through the forest and trembled in fear after encountering wild beasts or monsters. Digun had already experienced it in his youth.

But these days were not good.

“Even so, why did they go into the forest when it’s so ominous? They’ll be lucky if they don’t end up as wolf food rather than dryad food.”

“Well, they say that Hunter Kal went with them, so they won’t become wolf food, right?”

“That guy only catches them with traps. You guys look at a sword and think you’re going to become a knight or something, but you say that because you’ve never even seen a proper sellsword. Huh?”

Farmer Digun suddenly felt a cold chill and flinched.

From the forest overlooking the yard where they were working, a pure white arm stretched out from between the trees.

It was the arm of a woman with dazzlingly white skin that had not been exposed to sunlight.

“Huh?”

Digun’s son, Duns, also saw it, so it wasn’t a hallucination that Digun was seeing alone.

A naked beauty who had suddenly appeared from the forest was beckoning to them with an alluring smile.

“D, dryad! Father! Did you see? A dryad…”

“R, run away.”

Digun grabbed his work axe and ordered his son.

“Huh?”

At that moment, Duns felt suspicious.

‘No way, is my father trying to monopolize the dryad?’

He even had such an absurd suspicion for a moment.

However, Digun’s face was pale, without a trace of blood, showing that he was terrified.

“That’s not a dryad! Son! There’s no way gold bars would be dropped in the middle of the market and no one would pick them up! Similarly, a naked beauty wouldn’t suddenly send us a tempting hand!”

“B, but dryads are different from humans, aren’t they?”

“Fairies also like handsome men and beautiful women! You fool! That’s not a dryad!”

With Digun’s shout, the dryad burst into laughter.

“You’re smart, human. Even though you’re an illiterate who hasn’t learned a single line of text, you have the wisdom of the uneducated…”

At that moment, beast-like monsters appeared from either side of the dryad, tearing through the fog.

The monsters were a race of beast-men called ‘Bree,’ with goat horns and legs.

They charged with axes made by tying deer antlers to clubs.

“Eek!”

Digun’s son, Duns, saw it clearly. The human heads and limbs decorated on the Bree’s horns, among them, there was an arm with a familiar bracelet.

It was Hunter Kal’s arm. He always boasted about the jade-decorated bracelet he received from his girlfriend, and the jade-decorated bracelet, which could be recognized from afar, caught his eye.

Most of the young men who had entered the forest had been torn to pieces by the Bree, and their limbs were hung like ornaments, desecrating even the dignity of their corpses.

And soon, he and his father would probably join that line.

But before the Bree’s violence could overwhelm them…

An arrow flew with the sound of tearing wind.

The arrow pierced the Bree soldier’s knee, and the force was so strong that it didn’t just pierce but rather gouged out the knee.

The knee with a gaping hole could not withstand the weight of the running Bree soldier and buckled.

The startled Bree soldiers turned to see a man wearing a bird mask on his face.

“You have a very excellent father.”

He praised Digun and shot another arrow.

He shot the Bree closest to the father and son, preventing the Bree soldiers from approaching Digun and Duns.

The Bree soldier’s barbaric armor, made of woven wood and bones, could not stop the arrow shot by the man.

“That bow?”

“Could it be a messenger from the Chadra Highlands?”