3 bar menu

Volume 6 Chapter 1 Part 8

「There! I can see it! 」

Siluca raised her voice and raced to the broom at full speed.

Almost at the same time, the vortex disappeared and the bottom of the sea rushed up towards her, almost as if it wanted to chase Siluca down and crash Siluca.

The wall of water around her was also crumbling down, so Siluca rose up in a straight line while enduring the splashing of water all around her.

She did that at the last possible minute, but she finally emerged back above the sea level. It was rather strange that there was no seawater around her.

Even now, her whole body trembled at the memory of what she just went through. Theo’s worried face also popped into her mind.

She was prepared for this mission to be dangerous, but it was more than she had ever imagined. But all in all, it can probably be said that it all went well in the end.

Siluca put her hand on her chest. Even through her wet robe, she could clearly feel her heart beating wildly. Thankfully, she’s probably going to be able to come back to Theo in one piece, but before she could celebrate that, she still needed to fly her broom back to the dry land.

Looking back, the land was quite far away from her current position.

「Will I have enough energy left to get me there? Yes, I should manage…」

Siluca sighed a sigh of relief, then summoned what remained of her strength and let her broom fly back to the shore.

* * *

By the time Siluca returned to Theo, it was already midnight.

「I’m so glad you are safe! 」

Theo greeted her with a look of relief on his face.

As if she had exhausted all of her strength at that moment, Siluca slumped into Theo’s arms and pressed her forehead against his chest.

「I have seen the identity of the monsters that’s causing the Chaos Vortex… 」

After holding her breath for a while, Siluca raised her face and reported as such.

「That’s marvelous! So, what is it? 」

「The thing that is causing the Chaos Vortex is the Charybdis from the World of Tartarus. 」

Siluca said slowly.

「Charyb… dis? 」

Theo tilted his head in puzzlement, so Siluca repeated the monster’s name for him again.

「While I specialize in summoning the beings from the World of Tir na Nog with my Summoning Magic, I also researched the worlds of Tartarus and Olympus… 」

Siluca entered the Blue Summoning Magic Faculty specifically so that she could reunite with His Highness Balgary.

However, since it was impossible to complete the Faculty’s curriculum just by being knowledgeable about one other world in particular, she’s chosen to also study the worlds of Olympus and Tartarus, since they were the most famous ones, but also the most similar to the world of Tir na Nog.

「Ah, so that’s why you were capable of summoning that Orthros that day back then! 」

「Please forget about it. 」

Siluca interrupted Theo’s words.

When she met Theo, she summoned Orthros, a two-headed demon dog from the world of Tartarus, to test his strength and give him the chance to raise his title to that of Knight, and had Theo fight it.

At that time, she didn’t want to sign a contract with Villar, who was called The Lustful Earl, so that was the only solution she could think of at that time. Thinking about it now, it was a pretty terrible thing to do.

「Charybdis lurks at the bottom of the sea where it creates maelstroms and swallows all the ships that come anywhere close to it. I have no doubt that it is the cause of the chaotic vortex. 」

According to the rumors, everyone thought that the creature at the bottom of the ocean was a Kraken, but she should have suspected the possibility of it being Charybdis from the beginning.

「So what can we do about it? 」

「If it was a small monster, the we could’ve gone and disperse it by lowering the density of the Chaos around it, but from what I’ve seen back there, it was a pretty big one. As things stand, we might have no choice but to actually kill it, and in order to do that, we’d have to drag it out of the bottom of the ocean and into the shallow waters.

「And how are we going to do that? 」

「I think our best bet is to try fishing it out, just like Lord Theo said. However, if we decide to do that, the every possible bait that we’re going to be throwing at it is simply going to be swallowed up by the ocean. 」

「In other words, we need to use a bait other than the ship? 」

「Yes, I think we’ll have to prepare something else.

prepare it. There’s a monster called Cetus, a monster whale that lives in the world of Tartarus. It’s said that it’s so big that it creates tsunami’s simply by existing… 」

「Tsunamis? 」

Theo frowned, not knowing what Siluca was talking about.

「Don’t worry about it. What I’m trying to get at is that the sea around Sistina with its Chaos Vortex is enough of a Demonic Realm as it is already. If we added frequently ocurrying tsunamis to it as well, then that would make Sistina a truly hellish place… but I can only summon and control small creatures, I’d have no control over it… Besides, we’d have to assume that even Charybdis won’t be able to feed on something as big as Cetus in no time flat… 」

「The problem is whether or not it will bite the bait in the first place. 」

「Charybdis is quite greedy in nature, and the bait, Cetus, is also going to be a monster from the world of Tartarus, so I think that the chances of these two monsters being compatible with one another are going to be pretty high. 」

「It’s true that the type of fish you can catch often varies depending on the bait that you’re using. 」

Theo nodded in agreement.

「I guess we won’t know how it’s going to be unless we actually try it. And if Charybdis doesn’t react to Cetus, then so be it, we’ll just find another way to lure it out. 」

After that, Siluca slept like a dead person until noon the next day, but she sprung back into action as soon as she woke up.

Since she wanted the people of the Marza village to witness the battle against Charybdis, she informed them about the whole situation and asked them to go with her to the abandoned village by the sea. She also warned them that should anything at all go wrong, they were to run away and evacuate from the village immediately.

The plan was to lure Charybdis into a small cove that was located near the abandoned fishing village. Based in Theo’s initial suggestion, of using ships as bait, they decided to throw all of the ships that remained in the village offshore to see if the monster would follow them.

Siluca then asked Aishela to help her with the ritual, and began the summoning of the monster Cetus of from the world of Tartarus.

「The chaos that fills the world is constantly swaying… Shadows from other worlds that should never cross are cast upon themselves… 」

Siluca started the incantation for the summoning spell while adding a song-like intonation.

In order for the summoning to succeed, she had to raise the density of Chaos in the area, blurring the boundary between this world and the other world.

She chose the world of Tartarus from among the many illusions of other worlds, and drew the image of Cetus in her mind. Cetus’s vague silhouette then appeared from the many shadows of other worlds as it began to manifest itself in their world. She gradually made the image clearer, and when it was the clearest, she turned the possibility of it existing in their world here and now into reality.

It is said that before the Chaos Explosion occurred, the density of Chaos in the world was being kept at minimal levels, but after the Chaos Explosion occurred, that state of being changed, and the levels of Chaos in different areas of the world began to fluctuate heavily, eventually leading to the breakdown and collapse of the natural order of the world.

One of the consequences of that happening were the monsters from another world that started to appear in this world at an ever-increasing rate.

And monsters from another world appeared one after another in this world.

That was the beginning of the arrival of the Age of Extreme Chaos.

「…converge, the beast from the world of Tartarus, Cetus! 」