The Way To Protect The Female Lead’S Older Brother [EN]: Chapter 174

Protecting the Heroine’s Older Brother – Episode 174

“What weird thought?”

Orca looked at Pandora as if she was talking nonsense.

In fact, Pandora didn’t have any real conviction when she said that, so she just made a sullen expression and didn’t elaborate further.

“It’s just that lately, when I see you, I get a strange feeling,” Orca complained to Pandora, expressing his frustration.

“You tend to see me as a reckless person, Noona [older sister or female friend]. You know best how gentlemanly I’ve been acting in Yggdrasil, right?”

As Orca said, Pandora was watching him under the leader’s orders.

Indeed, as he claimed, Orca had been well-behaved ever since he arrived at Yggdrasil.

He only greeted Roxana once at the beginning of the social gathering, and after that, he never approached her or showed any interest in her.

Looking at him, it seemed Pandora’s uneasiness before departing from Hyperion was all for naught.

Even now, Orca’s words seemed more credible than Pandora’s vague suspicion.

So, she still looked at him with some suspicion but didn’t say anything more.

Meanwhile, Orca was inwardly thinking that Pandora’s intuition was quite sharp.

Of course, he had no intention of revealing his own suspicious activities by bringing it up himself.

Orca wore a subtle smile and looked out the window again.

It seemed Pandora couldn’t sense the stirring air that was rushing in from outside.

‘Hmph.’

Orca felt a pleasant tension and rolled his tongue inside his mouth.

It felt like being in the eye of a typhoon.

He wanted to immerse himself in the silently swirling currents immediately.

But Orca was a Beast Master.

That meant he possessed more patience than others, buried deep within him.

All Orca wanted was a single opportunity.

Especially since he was being watched by Cassis Pedelian, who had an unnecessarily keen sense, it was better not to act rashly.

Therefore, if he could seize the optimal moment he was waiting for, he could endure the waiting time as much as possible.

Orca thought so and leisurely admired the sunset outside the window.

* * *

That night, Cassis stood on the Holy Tower once again.

Swish.

The sound of the forest’s vitality rushed into his ears like waves.

Perhaps because it was closer to late spring than when he first entered Yggdrasil, the lukewarm air brushed past his cheeks even in the middle of the night.

Golden eyes, like shards of the moon, swiftly scanned the darkness.

Just like before, the air that brushed his skin felt strangely charged.

It was something that could be dismissed as just a feeling, but Cassis didn’t easily dismiss it.

As the successor of Pedelian, he had faced countless situations where he had to rely on his intuition since he first took on guard duty.

Whenever he ignored this uncomfortable feeling, troublesome things always happened.

It was around midnight now. There was still plenty of time.

Cassis left Yggdrasil alone.

Weapons were prohibited inside Yggdrasil, so they were collected separately upon entry, and it was cumbersome to retrieve them.

So, he went straight down the spire without entering the building and moved outside.

He didn’t tell anyone where he was going, but Roxana’s butterfly [a magical tracking device] was still attached to his body.

So, if she wanted to, she could find out where Cassis was at any time.

Kieek!

As soon as he stepped into the forest after some time, the cry of a monster pierced his eardrums.

Even more active movements of monsters were felt deeper inside.

This place was the closest monster habitat to Yggdrasil.

Perhaps this was also where Roxana had gone to feed the poison butterflies.

If so, it meant that the number of monsters had already increased to this extent, even though it had been swept through just a few days ago.

However, if such points were not taken into account, the monsters were not swarming to an extent that could be called particularly abnormal, so the subordinate who had been sent to investigate was likely to express ambiguity.

In any case, now that he had come this far, it was necessary to clean up once.

Cassis plunged into the middle of the forest teeming with monsters, empty-handed.

He wouldn’t have used this method at other times because it wasn’t very pleasant, but he had no choice now.

Concentrating power in his hands and striking the massive bodies in front of him, the monsters screamed and fell one after another.

Kieeeek!

In a way, it seemed similar to the power that subordinates used by risking their life force through a contract with their master.

But it was different in kind. Cassis’s power was based on taking away the life force of what he touched, rather than destroying it.

On a roll, he moved to another monster habitat a little further away and cleaned up the surroundings of Yggdrasil.

Of course, it was impossible to visit all the places because there were so many monster habitats nearby.

So, he roughly cleaned up only about three habitats that were relatively close to Yggdrasil for the time being.

By the time he finished his work, it was almost dawn.

Cassis surrounded his body, which was splattered with monster venom, with purification energy.

As the sun began to rise, nocturnal monsters disappeared one by one.

It was not necessary to eliminate all the monsters, so Cassis’s business was over when the number of individuals decreased to some extent.

But for some reason, even after that, the nagging discomfort that touched his intuition did not completely disappear.

‘Why?’

Cassis’s eyes narrowed slightly.

Was he missing something fundamental?

Cassis kicked off the ground and stepped on the branch of the strongest tree nearby to climb up. It didn’t take long to reach the top.

The sight of the sun rising over the mountain range in the distance was visible.

Cassis heightened all his senses in the twilight that spread into his vision like melting into water.

Then, at some point, the same unsettling feeling he had felt at the spire of Yggdrasil drifted past in the dawn breeze.

The face, stained with the cold dawn light, hardened slightly.

Cassis went back down and quickly moved to the habitat where he had first cleaned up the monsters.

Incredibly, the monsters that he had dealt with earlier had multiplied again and were rampaging in the forest.

He had a feeling that the other habitats Cassis had left a little while ago would be in the same state by now.

This was definitely not a normal situation.

So, was it a problem with the monsters, or a problem with the place?

Since it was already dawn, the time allowed was not long.

Cassis once again eliminated about half of the monsters in front of him. It was a much faster speed than before.

Then he climbed up a tree and checked the situation.

There was no particular change in the monsters.

They didn’t signal to call other groups, and after Cassis disappeared from sight, they began to calm down and soon became quiet.

However, after a while, when the sun completely crossed the mountain range, the number of monsters in Cassis’s sight had increased again.

But their movements were somehow strange.

The gathered monsters seemed to be circling around one point.

Whoosh!

Cassis jumped down from the tree and eliminated all the monsters nearby.

Kuaaaaak!

Now the monster cries were deafening.

Cassis even removed the corpses of the monsters and thoroughly searched the area where he had sensed the strangeness a little while ago.

And finally, he found something.

“This is…….”

After a while, Cassis held a small stone the size of a thumbnail in his hand.

However, it had a spell drawn on it, as if the surface had been scratched with something sharp.

It was perfectly mixed with other stones and leaves on the ground, so it was possible that he wouldn’t have found it if he had just roughly looked around.

Since he couldn’t say for sure what the effect was, Cassis took it and moved away from the place.

And after some time, he confirmed the spell’s effect by seeing monsters start to gather around him.

Cassis looked down with calm eyes at the monsters swarming around the trunk of the tree he was standing on.

‘Could this be Roxana’s doing?’

It was not strange that he thought of her for a moment, since Roxana had also visited this place a while ago.

And Cassis came to a conclusion.

Crack.

As he put strength into his fist, the stone cracked.

The magic circle was broken, and the power to attract monsters disappeared.

The monsters loitering under his feet began to leave one by one.

If he took this stone back to its original state, there was a possibility that he might lure monsters into Yggdrasil.

It was an uncertain hypothesis because he didn’t know how much influence the spell had, but there was no reason to take the risk.