Valkyrie's Shadow

Chapter 17

“Your vassal is quite intimidating, in more ways than one.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen her like this, Ainz-sama,” Shalltear replied. “Not even back when she was pursuing the matter in Fassett County. Then again, she did have time to digest things before she requested an audience – everything here is a fresh realization for her, arinsu.”

Ainz and Shalltear strolled through the spacious corridors just slightly further back from Baroness Zahradnik than before. He could almost imagine ominous storm clouds roiling in her wake. She didn’t say anything, nor did she make any sort of noise. Her posture was unchanged and her steps were no less silent than before.

Yet, he could still sense the sheer weight of the atmosphere around her. It was so tangible that he wondered if it was some sort of Skill: an aura of dread where Ainz felt as if he were a convicted felon awaiting a judge’s sentence. Rationally speaking, the Baroness was nowhere remotely close to a threat to Ainz, but he thought if she were to turn her cool gaze upon him he would have thrown his hands up into the air screaming “I’m sorry!” despite her being one of his subjects.

It shouldn’t be a Skill – Undead are immune to mind-affecting spells and abilities. This sort of thing would fall in that category…

“And she wonders why her fellow nobles are so afraid of her,” Shalltear said. “It feels like I just spilt some blood on a carpet and Yuri walked into the room.”

Yes – it was just like that. A sense of helpless acceptance, knowing one was in the wrong. All one could do was throw themselves at the mercy of the powers that be.

On a basic level, he thought he understood the root of her fury. Even as a ruin, it was clear how wealthy and advanced the builders of this civilization were. As far as the nearby region went, the Baharuth Empire was often held up as the most progressive and advanced nation in terms of magical integration. This place, however, made Arwintar look like a farming village in Re-Estize by comparison.

Putting concrete examples side by side was as far as his attempts at understanding went, however. Everyone held him up as some infinitely sagacious ruler and the bearer of an unfathomable intellect, but his desires for the Sorcerous Kingdom were simple. It was to be a place where the spirit and legacy of his guild could grow and thrive. He could not envision what the Baroness had described: what the reality of the locals might be if not for the destruction of the Katze Plains.

Such things were beyond him. Suzuki Satoru was a salaryman from a dead world where all humanities and other superfluous subjects had been scrubbed out of an elementary education designed to cram in the skills and knowledge needed to survive life as a corporate drone. It was even worse in this world: here, he was even more ignorant than a peasant on matters of history and culture. He only knew what he knew, and he could only base decisions on what he felt might be good, tossing in various things he had heard from his friends and the idle browsing that he had done in his spare time.

A forest-green mantle came into Ainz’s field of view, drawing him out of his thoughts. He had unknowingly caught up to the Baroness, who had stopped to look at something. He followed her gaze to four long gashes in the otherwise smooth stone wall.

“Claw marks?”

“I believe so, Your Majesty,” Baroness Zahradnik nodded. “If it was from a natural monster or magical beast, what made this was bigger than any of our Frost Dragons.”

Similar damage could be seen at random intervals down the corridor. The oldest of their Frost Dragons was nearly twenty metres long, while the Ancient Dragon he had killed was just under twenty-five metres in length. Ainz tried to imagine such a creature rampaging over the stone.

They followed the markings until the Baroness stopped to look at a particular set of them.

“I think these are all from a battle,” she said. “They retreated from whatever they were fighting, then stopped here.”

“What makes you say that, Zahradnik-dono?”

In response, she walked over to a set of gashes in the wall, stopping to stand where they abruptly stopped. She held her glaive out to the side. Ainz and Shalltear walked around her until they saw how she lined up with the damage.

“A parry.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. Someone used Invulnerable Fortress or a similar Martial Art to stop this strike. If this entire structure was made from the magically reinforced stone, whatever made these marks was stupendously powerful. The people fighting here knew this, yet they still stood their ground.”

At least Level 50…no, 60? Somewhere around there, at least.

In Yggdrasil, countless beings would have been strong enough to rend the enchanted stone around them. There were many claims and accounts of extraordinarily – by local standards – powerful beings that existed in this world, but Ainz had personally encountered only one. It was a plant-type creature, however, and would not leave marks like these. Certain Ancient Dragons might also fall into that category of strength, but he hadn’t allowed the one he had come across to demonstrate any of his capabilities.

He looked around.

“Why hold here?” Ainz asked.

The rooms they passed had appeared no different than the ones that came before. His gaze followed the curve of the corridor…

“It should be this junction,” the Baroness went over to another corridor that led deeper into the tower. “I think they had to stop because someone was coming through…an evacuation, perhaps? If there was no one here, they could have just led whatever it was wherever they wanted.”

She looked back and forth between the two ways forward before turning to follow the one with no claw marks. Puzzled, he followed her until they came to another intersection. Around the corner, a huge chunk of the wall had been torn out. He looked over his shoulder at the hundred metres or so they had traversed: there was no way she should have noticed that.

“How did you know this was the right direction?”

Baroness Zahradnik turned back to kneel before him, pointing out a set of marks on the floor. They couldn’t have been more than a millimetre or two across – tiny chips in the stone half obscured by a thin layer of dust.

“Tracks in stone are easy to follow,” she answered. “At least if you possess a Class with tracking abilities. My apologies for not keeping Your Majesty informed – everyone around me when I grew up had Ranger training, so it was something I took for granted until recently.”

Ainz nodded. Arcane casters and Clerics usually did not have tracking abilities, though Vampires did have an enhanced sense of smell and hearing that aided in detecting their prey. That didn’t help here, however.

The Baroness advanced at a steady pace, following the traces of damage. They turned at each junction of corridors along a zigzagging route. Occasionally, one of the narrow door frames along the way was smashed in. Stopping at several, the Baroness could only shake her head.

“These people fought so hard,” she murmured. “The way some of these entrances were damaged was as if the creature they were fighting doubled back to retaliate against an attack from the rear. They set up ambushes along the hallways, hiding in the rooms.”

“If this is, as you speculate, a university,” Ainz said, “would they have so many combatants? The ratio of people in combat vocations is reportedly just under 1 in 100 in the Empire, and this was before two legions were dissolved. Re-Estize is close to 1 in 500. This includes Adventurers and Workers.”

“They probably weren’t combatants,” the Baroness replied. “They didn’t have to be to contribute. Of the arcane casters in my demesne – those that aren’t Elder Liches – none of them are what one would consider combatants: they’re all artisans. They aren’t as adept at combat and they probably don’t even have all of the proper defensive spells, but a Fireball from an Alchemist still hits as hard as one from an unspecialized Platinum-rank Adventurer. The ones that fought here were probably students, teachers and researchers. They hid themselves out of harm’s way, which put them in a position to unleash at least one or two spells before they died.”

“Was there any point to that?” Shalltear asked, “They were clearly outmatched. If they were the same level as the average crafter in your demesne, whatever this thing was would have swatted them like flies.”

Baroness Zahradnik turned to answer, then fell silent as she seemed to struggle with something.

“As I said, my lady,” she answered. “This place was a bastion of civilization. Keeping the flame of that civilization alive was worth more to them than their lives. I’m sure that they were well aware of the stakes, understanding what would follow if they did not stand their ground.”

“They could have fled with their knowledge,” Ainz pointed out. “Escaped to someplace safe where they could rebuild and recover.”

“Escape to where?” The Baroness laughed helplessly, “The Theocracy and its immediate area was the sole refuge of humanity. I can only think that this place was ruined before The Six descended to offer our kind sanctuary, or they would have surely extended their protection over the area. A great nation brought to ruin by the cruel realities of our world.”

Our kind. Despite no longer being one, Baroness Zahradnik still strongly identified as a Human.

They continued on their way, eventually arriving at a balcony overlooking the ground floor. The layout below was spacious: a central plaza reminiscent of the commercial spaces of Earth’s arcologies. Though bare of decoration and detail, the offices bordering the plaza even resembled storefronts. A large, circular area in the centre was raised about a metre over the surrounding floor.

The two Shadow Demon ‘scouts’ popped out of the floor beside the Baroness. Throughout their investigation of the tower, the Shadow Demons had been covering the areas that they had not, though the place was so vast that they did not have the time to perform thorough searches. After relaying their reports, they flickered away to continue their work.

Baroness Zahradnik walked over to Ainz and Shalltear, silently shaking her head.

“The rampage that we followed appears to be the only evidence of this level of violence being employed on the floors we’ve covered so far.”

“Something like a powerful monster, then?” Ainz offered.

“After a certain threshold of power,” the Baroness replied, “any being doing this would be considered a monster. The lack of these markings everywhere else makes it appear as if it came first, then someone followed up to remove or destroy any trace of who lived here.”

“So a powerful ally,” Ainz mused, “…or a summon.”

A summon would explain some of the strangeness with the ruins, such as the fact that every ‘tower’ in the region had exactly three surviving floors. The summoner might have just issued broad instructions, and the summon followed its orders to the letter.

There existed a wide variety of summons capable of what they had seen. It didn’t have to be any specific caster Job Class doing the summoning, either. Even Shalltear or Mare – who did not have any pet-centric Job Classes – could still cast a Summon Monster VIII spell to bring one forth. The issue was that they had not encountered any magic casters native to this world who could do so.

The closest that might be construed as evidence of their existence was an event that happened shortly after Nazarick’s arrival. He had encountered a man that used a Sealing Crystal to summon Dominion Authority, a mid-tier Angel. Since Sealing Crystals were used by magic casters to store a spell for later use, a conjecture could be made that these tiers of magic were accessible in some form. That, or it was an item left by a Player from the past. Either way, it was the strongest spell that Ainz or anyone from Nazarick had observed of the natives.

Even if a Seventh-tier summon could easily destroy a regular city and an Eighth-tier summon could destroy a country, it would still take a very long time to flatten everything. The summoner would have to maintain their summon throughout that timeframe. Ainz figured that a theoretical Seventh-tier magic caster would run out of mana within two or three hours. This would make destroying an area the size of the Katze Plains a months-long endeavour.

Or it could have been a Player…

Ainz left the final possibility unspoken. Yggdrasil had all sorts of Players, and it was easy to imagine some of them using their power to destroy a nation just because they could. There was even a group of entities in local legends that supposedly conquered the world in a very short span of time. He suspected that they were also Players, though the only solid evidence of their existence was a flying citadel that may have been their guild base far to the south.

Baroness Zahradnik activated her flight item, drifting down towards the circular structure in the middle of the area. It was roughly fifty metres in radius, occupying all but a wide promenade that encircled it. She alighted on the edge and knelt to brush the surface with her fingers. After several moments, her brow furrowed and she walked further in.

“Did you see something, Zahradnik-dono?”

“The edge is ringed in stone,” she replied, “so I thought this was a fountain or a pool at first. There is soil under this layer of dust, however.”

Ainz and Shalltear came closer. What immediately came to mind was a memory of Earth, where the arcologies reserved for the elite had indoor gardens and other green spaces. It was something unexpected in this world with its still-intact natural state.

The Baroness continued to brush away the dust until it appeared that she found what she was looking for. She withdrew a hatchet from her Infinite Haversack, as well as a chisel. Metallic tapping filled the air as she broke up the hardened ground.

“I must wonder how many odds and ends you carry around with you,” Ainz said lightly. “It feels like you have a tool for every occasion.”

The tapping paused.

“It’s from my activities with the Adventurer Guild,” she replied. “I still have some things from the Azerlisia Expedition.”

“I see…mountaineering gear?”

“I have that as well, but this is a tent peg, Your Majesty.”

The tapping resumed. Not long after, chips of wood started to fly from the hole in the ground. The Baroness reached down to pull up a gnarled object.

“A tree root,” Ainz leaned forward to examine the piece of desiccated wood. “I thought this might have been a green space of some sort.”

“I’ve not seen the like before, Your Majesty,” Baroness Zahradnik replied. “We have open-roofed courtyards, but how would anything grow indoors like this?”

“With sufficient artificial lightning,” Ainz told her, “one can grow plants indoors. I’ve even seen entire farms inside buildings with multiple floors. I understand that Re-Estize does not have a high degree of magical integration, but surely this must exist somewhere?”

To Ainz, this was the normal way of growing food. In an unpolluted world like this one, such a concept might not exist.

“Something like the underground section of the Demihuman Quarter, then,” she said. “They use the city’s sewage to grow vast amounts of mushrooms in the artificial caverns created there.”

We had something like that?

Now that the topic had stirred his memory, he recalled that the Dwarves and Quagoa farmed mushrooms and raised lizards underground. It must have been an idea from there.

“Umu,” he nodded. “If one can create a place where life can thrive, it will do just that.”

“I see. Thank you for sharing this with me, Your Majesty. I think I’ll try it out when I have the chance.”

The Baroness returned to her digging until she marked out a perfect circle of trees. In the centre of the ‘garden’, she uncovered a circle of stone roughly three metres in diameter. A column or stand had once stood upon it, but all that was left was a broken base.

“It’s a grove,” she said after taking one last, long look around. “Whether it’s for relaxation, Druids or a place of worship, I cannot tell.”

“Hmm…yes, I can imagine that from what we’ve uncovered. It must have been a nice location for…”

Ainz frowned as the Baroness’ stormy mood returned. He exchanged glances with Shalltear.

“Your Majesty.”

Hiiieee!

He nearly jumped when the Baroness addressed him.

“…w-what is it, Zahradnik-dono?”

“You said that this place is not a part of the Sorcerous Kingdom’s history, yes?”

“That’s right. Why do you ask?”

“Because I can’t help but think that this is the Sorcerous Kingdom. Not literally the one of the present-day, but a point where your policies for our nation will eventually lead us. This prosperous state and its high degree of magical integration is what awaits us in our future. It has already been accomplished in the past…and someone or something came to purposely annihilate it.”

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