Log Horizon - Volume 11 - Chapter 2.4

4 
Following Enchantress Youren, who skimmed up the rock face as lightly as a feather riding the wind, Elias ran up the same cliff. He was using a fairy martial art technique that used the air as footholds. It wasn’t on the level of a flight spell, but with Elias’s skill, it was easy to keep his balance in midair. 
The scenery that spread above him was breathtaking. 
The enormous gray rock face was as perpendicular and sheer as a standing screen. Dense green shrubs grew here and there, like ornaments, and trees with slim branches stretched out of them, as though seeking the air. Elias didn’t know it, but the odd landscape bore a strong resemblance to a shan shui brush-and-ink painting. 
It looked as if they still had quite a ways to go, but Youren turned back, tilting her head, and Elias called to her. 
“I never imagined that a route like this existed.” 
“It isn’t grand enough to call a ‘route,’ but…” 
The two of them were currently scaling the side of Mount Lang Jun. This was the way Enchantress Youren had spoken of, the only way to reach the peak without going through Sirius Grotto. 
It seemed like the sort of thing that would have occurred to them easily if they’d given it a little thought, but neither Elias nor Leonardo, Kanami, or any of the others had thought of it, simply because of the “understanding” peculiar to Theldesia: Dungeons were routes, so there was probably no other way. 
In fact, once they’d started, climbing the mountain this way wasn’t impossible. 
The journey was extremely difficult, of course. At first, the two of them had traveled through a forest with precipitous slopes, but by the time the moon was beginning its trip down the sky, they were through that area and were looking at a hard, stony mountain, studded with sheer rock cliffs. 
Now, in the stillness before dawn, they were gradually working their way up that rock face. Unless you were an Ancient or an Adventurer, and a very high-level one at that, it probably wouldn’t have been possible to choose this route. 
The two of them strained their ears for a little while, listening to an owl’s distant cry, but once they were sure they couldn’t sense any monsters that would pose a threat, they tackled the rock face again. 
Elias could run through midair, but he couldn’t float, and he couldn’t fly. Enchantress Youren seemed to be using a spell that canceled out her weight, or a unique ability that immobilized space. 
Neither of them could stay in midair for long periods of time, so they ended up moving over the cliff face, from foothold to foothold. Of course, their speed and freedom of movement far surpassed that of the People of the Earth, but if they chose a fragile foothold, they wouldn’t be able to avoid losing their purchase and falling. They were managing without much trouble, even with the disadvantage of working by moonlight, simply because their skills were outstanding. 
With a sudden, piercing shriek, a monstrous two-headed bird flew at them. Elias repelled it with his sword, and the weight of the feedback told him eloquently that the monster had been strong. However, Crystal Stream had been born from fairy magic, and its effect on flying enemies was enormous. A jet of water pursued the bird, slashing at it and hampering its movements. 
Youren, who’d been holding her breath, gave a sigh of relief. “That was a Rui,” she explained. “They are magical, flame-attribute beasts that attack their prey with four legs.” 
Elias nodded in understanding. That was why the monster had fled in a panic: Water with ice mixed into it must have been pretty rough on its flame-attribute wings. 
“You are truly a warrior without equal under heaven, Lord Elias.” 
“No, that’s not true.” 
Elias, who’d returned his great sword to the sheath on his back, smiled with a bitterness it would have been impossible to imagine from his normal expression. The attack he’d just launched at the bird had worked because his weapon’s attribute and the monster’s weakness had matched up. He had too much experience in combat to assume that it had been a product of his skill. 
More than anything, that had been a nearly perfect opponent in terms of attribute, and even then, chasing it away had been all he could do. 
Even now, the fairy curse trammeled Elias. That was why he wanted to fight the Geniuses. When he’d defeated Papus, the Genius of Healing, while he’d felt the usual impatience of not being able to end things, he actually had blown the thing’s slimy body away. 
Just maybe… 
Elias bit his lip. 
A new strength might be waiting for him on the other side of this fight with the Geniuses. No, it had to be there. When faced with enemies from another world who’d stolen the lives of his comrades, even the fairy king—who hated fighting—would surely loosen his bonds. 
“Lord Elias, where is your party bound, and for what do you travel?” 
The voice spoke to Elias after they’d watched the monstrous bird go. He stood absorbed in his thoughts; he blinked two or three times before responding to the Enchantress. 
“Now that you mention it, I suppose I hadn’t told you. Kanami invited us to Yamato, an island nation far in the east, and that’s where we’re headed.” 
“Yamato…? Why?” 
“It sounds as if the land is flooded with a magic power known as ‘Homesteading the Noosphere.’ It’s an ability that allows Adventurers to break through the upper limits of their combat rank. Not only that, but new spells, skills, and enemies await us there. An anomaly on that scale is occurring in that region. It may also hold a hint regarding a solution to this disaster.” 
He was echoing the reasons Kanami had given him, verbatim, just after they’d met. 
As a matter of fact, you could have called them a flight from a situation in which he was likely to despair, the straw that he’d clung to. However, through their adventures in Thekkek and at Ruined Colonnade Tonnesgrave, Elias had felt it clearly. 
A great disaster, unparalleled in history, was about to occur in this world. It was a storm that seemed likely to rewrite the principles of the world he’d believed to be unchangeable. 
Elias was convinced that what KR and the others called “the Catastrophe” was no more than the beginning. After all, the defensive operation that Elias and his companions had attempted to execute that night had failed, and terrible beings had invaded the world. 

“Yamato has all these new powers. They say many Adventurers there have raised their combat ranks as well.” 
“Is that so…? I must relay that tale to the Queen Mother of the West,” the Enchantress murmured. 
The night at her back, she then turned and asked Elias, “What are your thoughts on this disturbance, Lord Elias?” 
“The Geniuses are the cause,” Elias spit. 
Belatedly, Elias realized that that hadn’t been the sort of tone one should use when speaking to women. He was a knight, after all, if an imperfect one. Elias bowed his head. “My apologies. I was irritated.” 
However, the Enchantress smiled thinly in the light of the moon, which was now low in the sky. “No, it doesn’t bother me,” she responded generously. 
In the midst of an awkward atmosphere, the two resumed their journey through the rocks. 
He hadn’t paid any attention to it when he was at the foot of the mountain, but a strong, irregular wind had begun to blow. 
Under weather conditions like this, even an Ancient couldn’t afford to leap up carelessly. Both when jumping down and leaping up, he restricted his jumps to his own height. 
Dyed with shadow in the cold moonlight, Elias asked, “The Ancients of Zhongyuan… Erm, what happened to them?” 
“I wonder. Some fell; some were wounded; some fell asleep.” 
The Enchantress’s response was brusquer than he’d expected. 
The words had seemed to push him away, and Elias was rather embarrassed, but he thought they might be the woman’s way of setting her feelings in order. She’d probably lost most of her companions. 
“I expect we shall meet someday, at the end of an unchanging mission.” 
“I see…” 
At the word mission, he had no way to respond. 
For the Ancients, mission meant a job where they were tasked with orders to use up their lives. These were duties that must be carried out, and they had been engraved on their souls at birth. In a broad sense, all Ancients existed to protect this world and the People of the Earth. Their methods and ways of being differed, but ultimately, that was their objective. 
The Ancients occasionally came into conflict with one another, but those situations broke out because their positions and approaches to problem resolution were different, and they were never so bad that they couldn’t talk it out. It allowed Elias to respect and sympathize with Enchantress Youren, who belonged to a chivalric order in a different region. 
“~~~~!!” 
A few meters above them, they heard a hoarse scream. It seemed to belong to a girl; the dawn wind nearly shredded it, but it echoed clearly in Elias’s ears. 
Reflexively, he glanced at Youren. He couldn’t read her expression, shrouded as it was by her veil, but she nodded once, tensely. 
“It may be the magus. Take care.” 
“Of course!” 
Reluctant to spare even the time it would take to respond, Elias sprang into motion like an arrow shot from a bow. Using the branches of a pine as footholds, he mobilized all his muscles, tearing gravity away. Up until a moment ago, he’d been moving at an efficient pace that was considerate toward his partner, but now he threw that consideration to the winds. 
There were no subsequent screams, but he knew which way to go. 
Behind him, he could sense that the Enchantress was moving as well, and that her speed was several notches higher than it had been before. Apparently, she really couldn’t keep up with Elias’s top speed. 
Until just a short while ago, the world had been lit only by stars, but at some point, the darkness had begun separating into jet-black and a subdued indigo. The towering shapes of the mountains were deep-black silhouettes, and the space above them was no longer perfectly dark but instead was shifting into a hue that had a sense of transparency about it. 
Here on the Eured continent, the sunlight was golden. It was one thing when it was in the noon sky, but at this hour, as dawn approached, the ridgeline was colored with gold inlay. It was a sight that was utterly different from the sunrise in the mist-covered land of the Ulster Knights Sword Alliance. The plateaus of central Eured may have been desolate, but precisely because of their desolation, they had a bleak beauty. 
Elias slashed through that thin, sharp dawn light and leapt over an area where a giant boulder formed a peak. The lone figure of a knight flew into the sight of his strengthened Fairy Eyes. 
He looked aristocratic, and he was wearing dark-blue armor. 
Even though he stood casually, his incomparable might was palpable. 
The magus’s spectacles gleamed in an abnormal way, and he shook the young girl who hung suspended from his hand. Faced with the steely strength of his arm, the petite person’s scream rang out with abject helplessness. The idea that he might be one of the Ancient companions the Enchantress had mentioned vanished from Elias’s mind in an instant. 
A magus threatening a girl. 
“—D-don’t eaaaaaat meeeeee!” 
The moment he heard that scream, Elias ran through space toward the wicked Genius. In response to the excess of mana, his beloved Crystal Stream began to vibrate, resonating, and he gripped it tightly, swinging it down on the evil. 
Elias was thinking only of smiting his friends’ enemy, and freeing them.