What Alfia cared about lined up almost exactly with what concerned Isagi.
Toward the Magic Kingdom ruled by the great god Odin, she held a strong and particular distrust — earned, naturally, by the centuries of assorted messes that nation had made.
Take, for instance:
The "witches" now scattered across the world, seemingly turning up wherever you went, were in truth people the Magic Kingdom had once put on its wanted lists — fugitives who had managed to escape.
It had been an inhumanly brutal "hunt."
Witches, mages born with exceptional aptitude, and all manner of "rare specimens."
In the Magic Kingdom, every one of them would be seized, and then subjected in secret to some kind of experiment—
Listening to Alfia lay all this out, Isagi remembered something. The goddesses, and Riveria too, had once warned him to watch out for the Magic Kingdom's eyes on Lefiya.
That outrageous talent of hers had already drawn their notice.
Still.
Lefiya was a Lv.7 adventurer now. Even the Magic Kingdom would find laying a hand on her all but impossible.
It was the first time Isagi had ever heard Alfia talk at such length.
After they left the witch's shop, she went on in fits and starts the whole way, and later they stopped at a café to rest for a while. Only once night had fallen did the group make it back to their hotel.
Isagi and Cecil had no intention of staying at the "old house" outside the city, of course, so they simply took two more rooms at the hotel where Alfia was staying.
"We'll head back to the city tomorrow."
That was the last thing she said to them before she went inside.
Then.
Alfia shut the door, found her way to the sofa in the dark without bothering with anything else, and let her whole body drop into the cushions.
For some reason, everything in front of her felt faintly "unfamiliar."
Cold autumn moonlight spilled through the window and into the room.
Alfia still didn't turn on a light. She simply let the night spread through the room as it pleased.
Honestly, those Magic Stones she'd brought back from the Desert of Death were unusual, but hardly the sort of thing to keep her up at night. Calling Isagi and Cecil out here had mostly been about handing the stones off so the two of them could carry them home and let the Guild take a look — she was going back to the city herself as well, but she would rather not deal with the Guild directly.
[Stillness] Alfia had come back from the dead.
If news like that spread across the continent, it would only make trouble for her, wouldn't it?
And besides that…
What did she intend to do with the rest of her life?
Subjugating the Black Dragon was already settled. But after that?
High-level adventurers lived a good long while. She probably had at least another hundred years in her… no, likely a great deal more.
So long—
Her old life — short, brilliant, barely twenty-odd years of it — had suddenly been stretched out many, many times over, and the thought left Alfia adrift in a kind of confusion.
She felt she ought to be doing something.
She just didn't know what.
Which was probably why those Magic Stones from the Desert of Death had caught her interest in the first place. Like finding herself something to keep busy with.
She shook her head. It still refused to come clear.
It was something she had never once thought about before; expecting the answer to fall into place all at once was asking far too much.
Take it slowly, then.
Alfia was thinking that when she remembered — hadn't Isagi had something he wanted to ask her today?
What was it?
She'd forgotten.
Never mind. She'd just go and ask him.
With no interest in dragging it out, Alfia got straight up, left her room, and set off to knock on the boy's door—
At that very moment, Isagi wasn't in his own room at all. He was over in Cecil's.
The reason being this:
The girl was sitting down to work out her plans for the next round of weapon forging, along with the upgrade scheme for the Wolf's Feast.
She meant to turn it into equipment stronger even than a first-tier armament.
With that as her goal, Cecil was in dead earnest — and somewhere in the haze, she had already brushed up against that higher understanding. A weapon, in the end, is a thing made for defeating enemies.
The stronger the enemy you faced, the stronger the weapons and armor you needed.
"In ancient times, the strongest weapon was, without any question, the Spirit."
Cecil had just come out of the bath.
Her long sky-blue hair hung loose around her shoulders, and only now did Isagi notice how much longer it had grown.
Back at the very start, he remembered, it had only reached a little below the nape of her neck. Now it nearly touched her waist.
The girl was wearing a nightdress.
Autumn days ran cold, but the fireplace in the room was still burning, so it was warm enough inside to feel almost stifling.
Whether it was because she'd shot up these past two years, the nightdress no longer fit her properly — it hung on her like something a full size too small.
Every time she raised an arm or shifted her weight,
the fabric cinched tight into pale, soft flesh. It was soft enough that she herself clearly thought nothing of it, but the effect was strange to look at.
"Mm!"
Beyond the smell of burning wood, the room carried the sweet, milky scent that hung about her.
"A Spirit can turn itself into a weapon — so in a sense, doesn't that make it what people call a [Divine Artifact]?"
She tilted her small head to one side.
Cecil was still following the same thread as before.
"Divine Artifacts really are fascinating things. Isagi, that godslaying weapon Goddess Artemis handed you a while back — you remember it, right?"
"Yeah."
"I studied it for the longest time, and I couldn't make the slightest sense of it."
The serious look never left her round little face as Cecil cast her mind back to the [Godslaying Weapon] known as the "Arrow of the Orion." All she found there was a chaotic blur.
What she couldn't understand, she simply couldn't understand.
It was exactly as Goddess Astrea had said: no matter what they did, the children of the Lower World could never work out the affairs of the gods.
So.
"The road we're going to walk is a different one. One They can't understand either."
As things stood, forging a "Divine Artifact" wasn't especially difficult for Cecil, because Isagi could already fuse his own Divine Power into the weapons they made.
In fact.
Every weapon the boy currently used could, in a sense, be called a "Divine Artifact."
But it still wasn't enough.
Cecil felt something was missing at the core of them.
"Maybe it has something to do with greater Strength as well," Isagi said, arms folded across his chest, his tone every bit as serious as hers.
"First-tier armaments are generally meant for adventurers of Lv.5 and up. So what about Lv.8 and Lv.9 adventurers — are they supposed to be using first-tier armaments too?"
It was a very good question.
The same went for the [Hero]es of the ancient age. Apart from weapons that a "Spirit" had transformed into, what else did they carry?
Isagi thought of the Amazon tribe's Empress. Last time, he hadn't seen her use a weapon at all.
That woman…
What she fought with was purely her own body.
____
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