My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero's

「さて、どうしたものか」

After offering a brief prayer, I was racking my brain over how to carry Lark when Amelia was the one who suggested a solution.

"Why not put him into your Shadow Magic?"

"Oh, so that's an option."

I clapped my hands together.

I had only recently realized that Shadow Magic had a convenient, four-dimensional-pocket-like function. It was a new discovery I made while on the ship heading from Demon Clan territory to Yamato Country, when I had been bored and tried all sorts of things.

The demonic beasts and magic that Shadow Magic swallowed seemed to be absorbed and converted into magical power, but inorganic things like the arrows shot at me in Elf territory could be taken back out as they were. In fact, as for arrows, because it had swallowed the ones that had been shot into me whole, I could even fire them back out of Shadow Magic.

In addition, I had found that if I asked Shadow Magic before putting something in, I could take out fresh food without it being altered at all. By the way, if I didn't ask, it would mercilessly digest it.

There were also all sorts of other applications, though they all fell within the scope of Shadow Magic.

You really are magic, right?

By the way, when I realized this, I was a little depressed. If I had known sooner, I could have carried so many more books, regardless of weight or volume. I wouldn't have had to sell off books at another town just because I'd finished reading them in order to lighten my load. It was truly, truly disappointing.

Come to think of it, at the Full Moon Market, I had left weapons and cutlery stored in Shadow Magic without returning them. As for the weapons, the owners were dead, so that was one thing, but I'd have to return the cutlery.

That aside, right now it was Lark's corpse.

"That's probably the safest bet. After all, this thing is huge."

Even if I could deal with the demonic beasts around here using Shadow Magic with both hands occupied, if I were carrying a monster over five meters tall, I'd stand out. It wouldn't fit in a carriage either. And if the demonic beasts that had probably been avoiding it realized it was dead, they'd swarm in to feast on the carcass.

I asked Shadow Magic not to digest or absorb it under any circumstances, then submerged Lark into it.

"...Yeah, that should do it. Now then, we can consider the request from the Kohana family fulfilled, right? Let's head down the mountain and return to base."

"Okay."

"......"

On the way back, I took the lead instead of the reverse: me in front, Amelia in the middle, and Morganaite in the rear.

Amelia kept glancing back, worried about the strangely quiet Morganaite.

After walking for a while, we made it out of the snowfield and back to the beast trail. From here, it was a straight road to the village at the foot of the mountain.

Then I suddenly stopped at a sound carried on the wind. Amelia and Morganaite, walking behind me, also stopped and looked around warily.

"...Hm?"

"Akira?"

"Someone's fighting."

"In a place like this deep in the mountains? Well, we have made it back as far as the beast trail the villagers at the foot of the mountain use."

"...No, I'm sure of it. The sound of blades clashing."

A shrill sound of iron striking iron. In a place like this, surrounded by nature where the only other sounds were the wind and the rustling grass and leaves, it stood out so much that once it reached my ears, it was all I could hear.

There was no training ground in a place like this, and if there were, I would have heard the same sounds on the way here too. Which meant someone was fighting nearby. And not against demonic beasts, but against other humans.

Following the now-intentionally expanded range of my presence detection, I found something like that right at the edge of its range. Was it the edge of the Ikari Mountain Range? If this hadn't been such a sparsely populated forest, and if I hadn't heard the sound, I would have missed it.

For some reason, with every ring of steel, a violent sense of impatience welled up in me, so intense that I wanted to claw at my own chest. I frowned.