CH 213

Three days have passed since they made their way to Lekrea, Inglis and her platoon’s progress was smooth. However, not for good reasons. Every single village and town they passed along the way were all leveled to the ground, so there was no need for them to distribute their food to the townspeople, saving them both the effort and the time needed from doing so.

And since all the houses were empty, they had no problem finding a place to rest, which was definitely easier for their bodies than camping out. That was why they could make so much progress.

The last three days were quite a downtime of sorts, with the platoon not encountering any Highlanders under Tiffany’s order so far, but the sight of destroyed villages and towns everywhere they went seemed to be more painful for Rafinha and the others. As the group was under the spell of such an atmosphere, Lahti pointed to the cloudy sky which was visible from the Flygear Carrier.

「If it weren’t for the weather, we should’ve been able to see Lekrea on the horizon by now.」

Due to all the clouds, the view ahead was poor even from the deck of the Carrier.

「I hope we reach there soon…I hate to keep seeing the ruins of a town time and time again.」

Rafinha bit her lip and tightened her grip on the railings of the deck.

「Rani. If you strain too much strength now you won’t have enough for when the time comes, okay? It’s all right, I’m sure there’s a lot of people who are still safe in Lekrea!」

When Inglis placidly observed the towns and the villages they passed, she judged that the number of the corpses they found was too low given the amount of structural damage those places suffered. Which meant the majority of the people were being taken away instead of being killed on the spot, and they all should have gone to the supposed prison in Lekrea.

It was a little hard to determine what was their purpose of taking so many people with them was, but…if foodstuff was all they wanted, they would have just ransacked the foodstuff alone and left the people be.

But if those people were taken away with a goal in mind, then those people should be kept until that goal is fulfilled. Therefore, it should be safe to assume that they are all still safe.

「But…」

Right when Rafinha was opening her mouth, the sound of some trembles could be heard from a distance.

「Wh-, what was that sound? Thunder?」

「That’s quite loud, wasn’t it?」

「No, isn’t it an earthquake? Kinda look like something’s trembling down there, you know?」

「We are in the air after all, so it’s hard to tell if it’s an earthquake or not…」

As everyone else was making comments…

「No……There! Over where Lekrea is, something is rising up!」

Inglis pointed straight ahead to the direction where they were heading. She felt a gargantuan swell of mana coming from that direction, something that was clearly different from the natural flows of mana. Its scale was so enormous that Inglis could feel it even from so far away.

「Something? What something, Glis?」

「I don’t know! But it can’t be something small, this is an entire situation by itself!」

「……Even if Inglis said that… It must be something really substantial.」

「However, we cannot see anything in this weather……」

「Hold on! There’s some open patch in the clouds!」

Just as Lahti said, the clouds that had been covering Lekrea temporarily dispersed as though to unveil the scenery ahead to Inglis and her platoons, and it was…

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「……!」

「Wh-, what is that?!」

「I-, is that Lekrea, the whole town?!」

「Is that even remotely possible?!」

「U-, unbelievable!! So this is what they’ve been aiming?!」

The scenery ahead of them was… the town of Lekrea in a state which it shouldn’t be. Or, to be more precise, in a place it shouldn’t have been. It had left the crust of the earth and was floating in the sky together with the ground around it. Right now, something akin to a huge chain stretched all the way to the earth was holding the huge mass from going further up.

「It has to be the work of the Levitation Magic Formation!」

「That’s the thing Cyrene was talking about in Nova town, isn’t it?! So if that thing succeeded, Nova would have become like this too?!」

In Nova, the Ironblood Chain Brigade turned Cyrene into a Magic Stone Beast while the Levitation Magic Formation was supposedly destroyed by Black Mask afterward. If it weren’t destroyed, the same thing that happened to Lekrea would have happened to Nova.

Rafinha was correct so far. However, in order for the Levitation Magic Formation to be activated, it needed to consume a colossal amount of mana. Even so, it would still take a long period of time for the formation in Nova to activate under Cyrene’s reign.

In her case, she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to bring the whole town into the sky, and she even planned to give the townspeople a preferable treatment of a Highlander once the town was in the sky.

Compared to that, the activation of the Levitation Magic Formation in Lekrea was way too fast.

Just how did they gather so much mana in such a short period of time. Once Inglis’ thoughts wandered there, she knew that she should never say what’s in her mind from here on.

The Levitation Magic Formation collects mana from Midland people, and once the required amount of mana was gathered, the whole land would be lifted into the air and become a new Highland soil. Then, while humans were indeed beings that generated mana just by being alive, they emitted the most amount of mana when their body could no longer contain the mana inside of them, in other words, when they died.

Therefore, if someone wanted to activate Levitation Magic Formation in such a short period of time, the most efficient way was to gather a large number of people and kill them on that land. With the sight of Lekrea floating in the air, Inglis couldn’t help but think that it could only happen because of the massacre that took place on it.

She was hesitant to tell Rafinha and the other three.