Chapter 403 - Episode Forty-Nine - The Count (7)

It was a very close call for me too, but somehow, I managed to capture James alive.

That should give us enough information to locate Mea.

If I could seal James in an Ortem, I might be able to negotiate with them.

I want you to tell me where Mea is and what youre after, James.

He was staring at me with an exhausted face, but suddenly his mouth twisted, and formed a creepy smile.

Oh, youre saying some strange things. Im not James, you know.

What do you

There was a strange magical movement nearby.

Towards the ocean, or perhaps below the surface.

I looked behind James, outside the ship.

Is the movement of the spirits just now teleportation magic?

It was only then, when I understood that much that I finally realized what had just happened.

The Bunreis substitute !

Well then, goodbye. I never imagined that the person we have to run away from so much would come from among the humans. I dont think well be seeing you again.

James, or rather the nameless newborn spirit, evaporated with a strange sound as his human form collapsed into a mere mass of green light.

It was spirit collapse.

By squeezing the magic power of the entire spirit body all at once and moving it around the body, and circulating the magic power in a concentration that exceeded the spirit bodys capacity, it voluntarily caused the spirit to collapse and commit suicide.

If he killed himself in this way, there would be no time to catch him.

Ive been had

I bite my lip.

The one who just died wasnt exactly James.

Its the spirit that was created just a few minutes ago by the alter ego as a decoy for James.

Count Julem used the spirit body in his left arm to create the alter ego Jem.

Jem is the opposite.

When he received the counter chaos from me, he took advantage of the blind spot caused by the black haze of chaos and created an alter ego using the spirit bodies of his entire body except for his arms.

I thought that he had taken the direct hit easily, even though he had sensed the counter chaos immediately before.

That was not the case.

I guess James condensed the spirit into his arms, used the counter chaos to cut it off in my blind spot, and then threw it backwards into the ocean on impact.

Even though it is the whole body, the apparent volume is not a problem for them as spirits.

Its no wonder I felt their spirit bodies were so faint.

For James, cutting off the tail of a lizard by an anthropomorphic spirit was an act of discarding not a few spirit bodies, but still less than 30% of the total at most.

I hadnt realized that the ability to use a supposedly singular phenomenon, a bunrei, at will, could be so troublesome.

Spiritual bodies are the source of power for demons.

How did he manage to do it all at once without showing any sign of hesitation?

From the very beginning, James had no intention of fighting me properly, even though he was trying to provoke me, and he was focused on escaping when the time was right.

I should be able to capture the bunrei of James, but I didnt think that he would be able to use spirit collapse to kill himself in no time.

If he can do this, its almost impossible to catch him.

Perhaps we should have given up on catching James from the start and just stood around to make sure he was taken care of.

But that would have made it impossible to track down Mea in any case.

D-Damn it!

I ran to the edge of the ship and pointed my wand at the surface of the ocean, where James had probably used his teleportation magic.

Spirit, speak

The water splashed and the hollow opened, and the light of the collapsed magic circle ran.

I thought that if I could recreate the original shape of the magic circle, I might be able to find the destination, but on top of it being incomplete, its encryption was too difficult.

It might be possible to solve it if I took the time to do so, but that would be difficult as well as partial.

It would have been impossible to follow him if he had passed through a different point in the first place, and I dont know if James would have gone straight after Count Julem.

I meditated, and pictured in my mind the magic circle of Count Julem and James teleportation that I had erased so far, and transferred it into the air through my memory, and lined it up.

They are full of holes, as it is impossible to reproduce them completely, and they all use a high level of encryption.

There was nothing I could do about it.

If I could at least get an idea of the coordinates of the destination, I might be able to work backwards, but as it is, theres nothing I can do.

My body relaxed and I fell to my knees.

Now, with Mea taken, I have completely lost all clues to tracking down Count Julem.

Its not funny because this is the result of running away from Kudor and Peter because they cannot be trusted.

It was the worst thing that could have happened.

Mea

I stayed like that for a while, in a kneeling position.

But when I looked up, even though it was still early in the evening, I could see the glowing Moon Din at the edge of the sky.

As the Moon Festival Dinmei is approaching, it have already grown quite large.

I had heard rumors about it, but it was much bigger than I had imagined.

The original size of the Moon Din should not have been much larger than the moon I had seen in my previous life, but I wondered if that was the reason why the Moon Din was approaching.

It already looks five times larger than usual.

At that moment, a word caught my attention.

The day after tomorrow, the Moon Festival Dinmei, will be here. Youve already done your part.

Thats what Sim, the spirit who had incited Gizel to attack me in the port town, had said.

I was too busy to listen to them at the time, but Ive never heard of the importance of the Moon Festival Dinmei to them.

I thought it was just a coincidence that they moved so close to the Moon Festival Dinmei, but it wasnt, huh.

Dont tell me