RTTFW CH 3.19

Rumble!

A fierce rumbling sound echoed throughout the entire space above the fallen Ent’s head.

“E-earthquake…?”

Just as it seemed the ground would shake, the stone fragments scattered on the floor began to tremble. And from above Ent’s head, a laugh filled with joy and delight could be heard.

“Ah, finally…”

The voice that had sounded like death itself moments ago was gone. His appearance was still unrecognizable – a tangled mess of blood-crusted hair, impossible to tell if he was human or corpse – but his aura was strikingly different from before.

Ent lifted his head and looked at Abril, and Abril met his gaze and smiled, as if responding.

“Ent Harbilta.” “Uh…”

Abril repeated the name, gazing at Ent as if trying to memorize it. The ground shook, and something was clearly happening, but seeing Abril still bound by chains, Ent barely regained his balance and rose from the ground.

“Are you okay? Shouldn’t we break the other restraints too?” “… No.”

Abril held back the words ‘It’s enough,’ unwilling to express it verbally.

Familiar, longed-for power was returning from the shattered restraints on his legs. Magic power was surging back. Compared to his original amount, it might be pitifully small, but what did it matter?

“It feels… good.”

Simply having his magic return was restoring his body, which had been reduced to rags. Abril gathered his magic together, concentrating it into the space still occupied by the magic restraints that Ent hadn’t yet released.

Boom!

Startled by the sudden explosion, Ent jumped back a step. The restraints binding Abril’s waist shattered with a loud crack, scattering into fragments across the floor.

Then came the right arm, the left arm. Then the forehead. Finally, the neck. Ent couldn’t even begin to imagine how Abril had managed to break them without even touching them.

Having shattered all the restraints, Abril quietly opened his eyes.

His appearance was corpse-like. Yet, as if intoxicated by his own power, his expression was hazy, and a strange light shimmered in his violet eyes.

“Is there anything you need?”
“What? What…?”
“Is that person your comrade?”

Abril snapped the shackles binding his limbs with a motion as effortless as breaking wooden chopsticks. The pieces that clattered to the floor looked like worthless scraps of paper, as if he hadn’t even used his hands.

Ent swallowed hard without thinking.

Even Ent, who had little experience sensing magic, could feel the overwhelming power before him.

Where Abril pointed stood an Izel that seemed desperate to dash over here if he could. Ent, overcome by an inexplicable unease, quickly nodded.

With his entire body now free, Abril wiggled his legs and arms for a moment. It had been so long since he’d moved his body of his own volition. Moving himself felt utterly unnatural. But what did it matter? If walking was difficult, he could just fly around until he got used to it.

As Abril’s body rose into the air, Ent hesitantly stepped back from his side. The moment Abril flicked his finger, the thick layers of barrier surrounding him vanished instantly.

Of course, Ent saw no visible change, so he looked around before spotting Izel running towards him, allowing him to deduce what Abril had done.

‘… He didn’t even chant the incantation.’

Normally, a mage casting a spell would naturally recite the incantation required for the spell. However, Ent didn’t bother to question it aloud. What was the point? Standing before him was the King of Mages, Abril.

“Lord Ent!”
“Oh, Izel…”
“What on earth were you thinking, going off alone like that!”

Ent scratched his cheek awkwardly, as if caught off guard by the barrage of nagging that poured out as if he’d been waiting for it. Even he thought it was a pretty reckless move.

Izel pulled him into his arms, as if shielding Ent from the floating Abril.

Izel’s voice was slightly louder than usual. The barrier kept rippling, making it hard to see what Ent had been doing beyond it. Then suddenly, the barrier vanished, revealing a man hanging there like a corpse, suspended in midair. Unable to grasp the situation yet, Izel knew he had to protect Ent, whether the man was friend or foe.

“Who… exactly are you?”

Izel swallowed hard without realizing it. This man was clearly no ordinary person. Though invisible to Ent’s eyes, the magical energy pulsing around his entire body felt unnervingly ominous. Izel sensed it wouldn’t harm Ent or himself, but he couldn’t afford to let his guard down.

“Are you a companion of Lord Ent Harbilta?”

‘Lord Ent Harbilta’? What’s that supposed to mean?’

At Abril’s words, Ent flinched and shuddered. Wait, why the sudden honorific? Especially from a terrifying being like Abril.

Izel silently looked at Abril and nodded. Abril, as if protecting Ent, stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Izel, who was shielding Ent, and gave a faint smile.

“Hold on tight.”

Ent sensed a peculiar atmosphere around Abril that made it difficult to speak to him. For Izel, who could feel Abril’s magic, the situation was even more agonizing. It was a pressure of a completely different magnitude than the suffocating weight of the corpse pile earlier.

Izel, seemingly swept up in Abril’s surging magic, struggled just to stand properly.

As Abril gazed up at the small opening in the ceiling, Izel, clutching Ent, rose up alongside him. Startled by the sensation of floating, as if his feet were off the ground, Ent gripped Izel even tighter.

‘Huh, flying through the sky.’

Ent couldn’t believe the ground beneath his feet had vanished and kicked out weakly. When he truly felt himself suspended in midair with nothing beneath him, his entire body tensed up. What on earth was the point of lifting someone up like this?

“It’s been a while, this feeling.”

Abril carried Ent and Izel, who were clinging tightly to each other, upward toward the ceiling. The closer they got to the hole glaring defiantly in the ceiling, the more his heart pounded as if his blood were boiling.

It was a sky that would later become invisible to him, yet it had once been the very existence that plunged him into a pit more hellish than hell itself. When the experiments and tortures – the kind that left him unable to even scream – finally ended, he would be suspended by iron shackles that made it impossible for his body to even collapse. Forced to hold his head up, his gaze would inevitably drift to the sky peering through that narrow opening.

‘It was this easy.’

With every limb bound and his magical power restrained to its absolute limit, Abril had spent countless days and nights alone like that. From the time he hung there alone, until the moment a mountain of corpses piled beside him. Abril had measured the passage of time by gazing at this sky throughout those long days.

It wasn’t that he had no thoughts at all. For quite some time, he had been squeezing out the faint remnants of magic barely enough to sustain life, plotting an escape from this hellish place by sealing it away as if his power had been completely extinguished. Only recently had the plan finally begun to take shape.

‘Though it’s all useless now.’

Abril smiled slightly, watching Ent whose face had turned deathly pale, likely terrified of floating in the air. The bodies of the three people, lifted by Abril’s magic, slipped out through the hole in the ceiling.

“Finally, I can breathe a little.”

Though Izel still struggled to breathe due to Abril’s overwhelming magic, Ent, who couldn’t sense anyone else’s magic at all, muttered something about ‘fresh air’ and took a deep, gasping breath.

“Lord Ent Harbilta.”
“Huh? What?”

Still unaccustomed to the title, Ent answered reluctantly. Abril quietly pointed into the cave they had just escaped.

“Look closely.”

As if floating in the air wasn’t terrifying enough, now he was being told to look down? Grumbling inwardly, Ent still lowered his head as Abril instructed. In that instant, he felt his vision sway.

“… Huh?”

No, it wasn’t Ent’s vision swaying. It wasn’t him. The entire mountain they had just been standing in was shaking.

“Wait, hold on. What are you planning to do?”
“I intend to bury the beings who closed their eyes here, filled with agony, and give them a proper burial.”
“What?”
“So that those creatures can never enter this space again. Not even a single ant can get in.”

Gurrrr…

A massive sound, like the ground itself collapsing, echoed at a single gesture from Abril. No matter how much he tried to calm his own startled mind by thinking, ‘Well, it is Abril,’ he simply couldn’t close his gaping mouth.

Its size wasn’t small either. It was a massive mountain. It was astonishing enough to levitate people or shake the ground without any preparation or incantation. How much more astonishment was there to come?

Ent truly believed that with just one more gesture, Abril could instantly fill this entire cave.