Chapter 683
Epilogue - The Red Thread
There were words that can only be written in blood.
There were pictures that can only be drawn in blood.
Such was the empire of the Demon King.
After the Gate incident, the Demon King proclaimed a new empire.
There were those who believed in the Demon King, and those who did not.
Thus, division arose.
The division scattered, and each seed began to sprout.
There were several wars.
The seeds of division did not disappear, but were scattered somewhere once again.
What was important was that the Demon King's empire never lost a single time.
If asked whether there was no prosperity or reconstruction, that was not the case.
Even as division and conflict continued, the world was recovering its civilization.
Thus, sometimes staggering, but eventually moving forward in the flow of history, the fifth year of the new imperial era arrived.
-Desolation
In a forest that had become a sea of blood.
Ellen was surveying the scattered corpses.
She stared quietly at the pieces of monsters, neither human nor beast.
As if deep in thought.
As if trying to guess their original form.
Ellen took out a notebook and started writing.
She wrote, and although it was simple, she also drew.
She had no need to draw in her lifetime, but Ellen had grown accustomed to even this.
But why did she need to draw?
Monsters sometimes mirrored each other, but ultimately, each looked different. Many had appearances that could only be described as bizarre, grotesque, and unfamiliar.
Recording each individual monster by drawing them was, in truth, a meaningless task during the Gate incident.
Despite that, Ellen did it.
Ellen, who had spent a while in the blood-stinking forest, closed her notebook, put it in her backpack, and walked somewhere.
The sun was setting.
Ellen knew that the night of the forest and the mountain was approaching unusually fast.
-Tap, thump
The night had fallen, and Ellen sat in front of a bonfire.
The fire drove away the beasts and sometimes drove away the monsters.
But in truth, that didn't mean much either.
Just as there were monsters that feared fire, there were monsters that were fascinated by fire.
The fire at night might be dangerous because of its light, but in reality, there were monsters whose vision was not dependent on light.
Therefore, having a bonfire at night in a no-man's-land could be dangerous or not.
It could be meaningless, or it could have meaning.
So, the conclusion was simple.
Since a bonfire has the clear advantage of warding off the cold, it's better to keep it lit.
That was one of the insights Ellen had gained during her long wandering life.
In the end, staying alert and falling asleep was all the effort she could make.
Living a life of killing monsters in the no-man's-land.
Ellen could kill the monsters but couldn't exterminate them.
The days when monsters poured out of warp gates were over.
But that didn't mean there hadn't been dangerous days over the past five years.
Many monsters had dangerous attack methods, and these were sometimes fatal to Ellen.
She was more often lost after the Gate incident.
It was hard to say it was just because of the monsters.
There were more times when she was lost because she was starving, or she ate something wrong.
So now, Ellen realized that she had a body that wouldn't die even if she ate something fairly toxic.
Of course, even so, she never once did something as foolish as roasting and eating the meat of an unknown monster.
Ellen pulled out a notebook from her backpack.
Naturally, it wasn't just one but several.
She flipped through the pages under the light of the campfire.
She pondered over some pages for quite a while, while she dismissed others as meaningless.
Occasionally, she would add annotations to the contents she recalled.
Could it be called a journal?
Ellen had been writing this since a certain point in time.
She had a strong intuition that it was something she needed to do.
Hence, she occasionally visited places where people lived, to acquire notebooks and pens.
Of course, due to her rugged lifestyle, the edges of the notebook had become frayed.
After checking the notebooks for a while, Ellen neatly packed them back into her backpack.
"Phew..."
Ellen pulled out some kind of root from her bosom and chewed on it thoroughly.
She had no idea what it was.
She simply ate it because she knew it wouldn't harm her.
Somehow, Ellen had come to know a good deal about things she didn't even realize could be eaten.
She couldn't even remember the last time she had a proper sleep.
She didn't know when she last had a proper meal.
Minimal food, minimal sleep, minimal water.
She was surviving with just that.
There were times when she got lost for days when she ran out of all her food upon entering a place where she couldn't find any.
It wasn't a fight against monsters, but a fight against hunger.
If she hadn't been surprisingly robust, any ordinary person would have died of starvation long ago.
What about going back to where people lived and taking a few days off?
Even though she was completely disconnected from civilization, Ellen occasionally visited towns or cities where people lived.
Obviously, she had to conceal her identity.
Her food supply was running low, that was true.
But for now, there was a task that needed to be done.
And even if she were to return, there was no real solution.
First and foremost, the most critical problem.
She had no money.
Living in the uninhabited wilderness was primarily about killing monsters.
So, there was absolutely no room for making money.
She knew well that if she spent enough time in human cities, there were countless ways to earn money, but that in itself was risky.
Ex-emperor Bertus de Gardias and the hero, Ellen Artorius, were the empire's most wanted. Whether willingly or not, the emperor had no choice but to designate the hero and the ex-emperor as the empire's greatest enemies.
Regardless of the emperor's will, those who supported the emperor despised the runaway ex-emperor and Ellen Artorius.
So, she could not afford to do anything while staying in human cities for more than a brief visit.
Even anti-imperial forces were no different.
These were places that would certainly try to apprehend Ellen for various reasons.
In some places to arrest him, in others to plead for the salvation of humanity.
No matter where she went, Ellen was in a precarious position.
Of course, there was no issue of her identity being exposed by just passing through. As long as she reasonably hid her identity and appearance, she just couldn't stay for long.
Although she couldn't always observe, Ellen occasionally saw signs of civilization gradually reviving.
The adventurers' guild that Ellen once briefly experienced still existed.
But instead of exploring the vast darklands as before, it had shifted to a form similar to mercenary work: slaying monsters and getting paid for it.
It was a fact that security was unstable everywhere, and there couldn't possibly be enough forces to clean up the entire continent.
Therefore, individuals undertook the task of killing monsters and received compensation from the empire.
That was the current changed form of the adventurers' guild.
If Ellen had been paid for killing monsters, she might have been buried in money. No, one should first doubt whether the empire even had the ability to pay her that much money.
However, living in the wilderness to avoid the empire's eye, it would be absurd if she suddenly registered as a new adventurer because she needed money.
Since her face was too well-known, it was impossible to create a false identity.
So, while there were ways to earn money, they involved taking great risks.
In truly desperate times, she had disguised herself as an anonymous adventurer, brought in heaps of proof of monster extermination, and collected money.
Given the nature of the adventurers' guild that paid for monster extermination, they had no choice but to give money if there was an overwhelming amount of proof of monster kills.
Of course, when she did that, the guild would be in an uproar, wondering who that person was.
She had often fled with the money before the commotion grew too large, and it was genuinely dangerous.
In the end, wandering through the wilderness was a perilous and harsh ordeal.
Returning to human habitation was just as dangerous, if not more so, as wandering in the wilderness.
There were still villages friendly to wanderers, who didn't care about the Demon King or the empire.
In such places, she sometimes received a little food and a place to sleep in return for helping with minor tasks.
Leaving aside what Ellen looked like, there were people who didn't know who Ellen Artorius was. Places cut off from the world still existed, after all.
Having finished chewing the root she had been gnawing on, Ellen leaned back against the tree stump, drained, and looked up at the sky.
In her days at the Temple, she had food aplenty.
She could survive on so little now, she wondered if it hadn't been wasteful to eat so much back then.
"..."
Finding her thoughts amusing, Ellen faintly smiled.
There was someone who used to chide her for eating so much, yet always cooked for her when she expressed a desire to eat something.
With her head bowed, Ellen took a moment to catch her breath.
She found it hard to stave off the intrusive thoughts about the life she had abandoned of her own accord.
What if she had stayed?
But her present reality told her otherwise.
Bounty hunters lurked around every corner, hoping to capture Ellen and Bertus, while on the other side, there were still those who hailed Ellen as a hero, praying she would one day save humanity.
Her mere existence was the spark of war.
Even in her absence, wars had erupted several times. Had she remained, larger wars might have ensued.
The empire might have crumbled even before it could be fully established.
There should only be one sun.
The existence of two suns would set the world aflame.
And in truth, the past held no meaning.
Her status as a wanted person held no meaning either.
Reality existed regardless.
The Demon King was married.
And a lot of time had passed.
"..."
She had never entertained the thought of interfering with that.
She couldn't reclaim the time that had flowed on since her departure, clutching at fragments of past memories.
Their story would have filled up and overflowed by now.
She was merely imagining.
What if everything had been fine?
She was merely reminiscing.
Back then, she should have eaten more.
The food that Reinhardt had made for her.
The moments when they could touch each other.
That time.
A bit more.
Even a little bit more.
"..."
Finally breaking off her thoughts forcefully, Ellen closed her eyes.
The wind was cold.
The next day.
Ellen rose from her spot by the dying fire she had kindled, and slung her backpack over her shoulder.
The confusion of the night faded with the morning.
In a situation where there were things to be done, distractions did not find her.
The creeping sadness and self-ridicule always found her just before sleep.
She did what needed to be done, as she always had.
She had decided to kill monsters in the wilderness.
Unable to live in any place where civilization existed due to her condition, she roamed only where it did not.
It was hard and painful, but it was a path she had chosen for herself.
So Ellen walked through the forest.
Reaching the signs she had found last night was not difficult.
Ellen had learned to do things she had never known how to do before.
Not only drawing pictures but also tracking.
The shape and position of broken branches.
Footprints.
Excrement.
Signs of predation.
All these allowed her to estimate things like the size of the absent monsters, their range of movement, and their location.
If Ellen had been an adventurer, she might have been the most outstanding adventurer of her time.
Ellen had been doing this job since before the Adventurer's Guild changed its policy to reward monster hunting.
Sometimes, Ellen found it amusing.
Her older brother, Ragan Artorius, had been a legendary adventurer.
He had become famous as a legendary adventurer, then a hero.
But the sequence was different for Ellen.
She was first known as a hero, then became an adventurer.
Ellen examined the traces, gauging which direction the missed group had headed.
She checked the faintly pressed bushes and footprints, then consulted her notebook.
The contents of the notebook matched.
And so she walked, tracing the remnants.
The traces sometimes disappeared, but once she had the overall direction, they could be found.
There were times when she would just mindlessly kill monsters.
Wherever she went in the continent, monsters were there, so she just had to kill, kill, and kill.
Because then, someday, she would be able to hunt the final monster.
She saved people from monsters.
That goal, at least, she could accomplish.
But the process was not easy, and eradicating each hidden monster was an extremely difficult task.
Therefore, the number of monsters would gradually decrease and become harder to find.
That's why Ellen gradually realized how to track the monsters.
Overall, it wasn't much different from hunting.
But it was just hunting with a different prey each time.
For giant monsters, they were easy to spot from afar.
Regardless of size, however, every monster was lethal. So, if she saw a giant monster, she would rush in and kill it, and certainly deal with smaller and medium-sized monsters too.
She would find and kill hidden monsters.
In those days, for the past few months.
Ellen had been feeling a constricting fear.
Despite the extreme shortage of food, she was prioritizing searching for monsters over finding food.
That's why she was pulling out her notebook more often than usual.
Ellen moved cautiously, but quickly.
Passing by footprints and broken branches.
Footprints.
Footprints that matched the drawings in her notebook.
She followed them.
Monsters usually looked different from each other.
There were even many monsters that could not be recognized as living creatures.
Of course, there were similar ones.
Those with wings, or giant monsters.
There were many similar ones.
But it was very rare for them to match perfectly.
Not that there weren't any, but the colors, or the horns, were slightly different.
But a few months ago.
Ellen had come face-to-face with monsters that had identical forms.
Of course, they weren't strong monsters. They all fell scattering blood, double-sided by her lament.
But at that moment, Ellen had dry heaved in fear.
Since then, Ellen has been continually searching.
Comparing the traces, wandering and scouring the vicinity.
Looking for something.
Hoping that it didn't exist.
Hoping it was just a delusion.
Drawing, collecting traces, searching.
Searching and searching again.
Hoping it was just one of those occasional things.
Hoping there were monsters of that form too.
How much time had passed?
When she had been wandering the forest for over five hours.
From a crack in a certain hill.
-Grrrr!
Ellen heard the low, gruff cry of a monster.
"......"
-Srrrr!
Pulling out her Lament, Ellen kept her eyes on the cave.
The monster was silently glaring at Ellen with its red eyes from the crack in the hill.
A threat.
A threat that meant it would kill if she approached.
But Ellen did not retreat.
She slowly approached the monster.
-Grr!
As Ellen approached, the monster extended its clawed front paw out of the crevice.
The warnings and threats grew more intense.
Yet, Ellen advanced further, her eyes wide open.
Please, no.
Please, let it not be.
She hoped.
And with another step forward.
"Rawwwwr!"
The creature that lunged at Ellen, its massive mouth lined with hundreds of teeth, charged at her.
"Swish!"
The monster, charging at her, was sliced in half from mouth to tail by a stroke of the Void Sword, its momentum burying it deep into the forest.
Instant death.
The monster was exactly the same as the ones she had been chasing.
It wasn't the first time she had killed such a beast.
She had slain this type of monster countless times.
And yet, she kept encountering the same kind of creatures.
She had no interest in the slain monster.
Ellen had not been chasing it.
She had been searching for this monster, but it wasn't truly what Ellen was after.
Why had it threatened her?
Monsters typically exhibit indiscriminate aggression towards everything except their own kind.
But just a while ago, it had been growling, hidden in its cave.
As if warning her to stay away.
Ellen cautiously approached the cave from which the monster had emerged.
It couldn't be.
It must be a delusion.
Such a thing shouldn't exist.
With these thoughts, she had roamed this area for months.
Obsessively.
Because there were monsters that replicated by dividing and multiplying.
She kept telling herself that it must be something like that.
But even before entering the cave, Ellen had already sunk into despair.
"Squeak."
"Squeal."
From inside, faint whimpering sounds could be heard.
“Ah…”
Entering the cave, Ellen was left speechless.
Six or so little things, each about the size of a grown man's arm.
Something that looked like miniature versions of the monster she had just killed, squirming around, their eyes barely open.
“Ah, ah… ah…”
Thump.
Ellen sank to her knees before their feeble wriggling.
Something she had never encountered in any other creature.
Ellen had found the monster, but the monster wasn't her true target.
She had been searching for the monster's offspring.
The offspring were, in and of themselves, evidence of reproduction.
Not duplication or division, but the most ordinary form of reproduction.
The existence of multiple monsters with exactly the same form suggested this possibility.
Monsters that reproduce had appeared.
Whether they were originally present or emerged as an adaptation, she couldn't tell.
Therefore, there must be other creatures among them that reproduce.
Of course, there could even be monsters that crossbreed with entirely different species.
She had left this as a mere possibility as she had never seen such a case with her own eyes.
If one was possible, there was no reason why two would not be.
Not only this species in front of her, but other species could also be capable of reproduction.
She didn't know when this had started.
But one thing was certain: the number of monsters wasn't decreasing, it was still increasing.
Somewhere in the world.
They weren't just appearing from gates, they were increasing through reproduction.
This implied only one thing.
The monsters would never disappear from the world.
The moment of killing the last monster would never come.
“No…”
Ellen could see nothing but despair.
