The reason Yuder opened his eyes was because he felt a chilling premonition aimed at his throat.

His head was spinning, pulled abruptly from a dream of endless falling just moments ago, but Yuder silently surveyed the darkness. There stood a black shadow by his bed, a figure with no chance of being the priest Lusan, a sword pointed at his throat.

"Who are you?" he asked in a hushed voice, only for the sword to inch closer to his neck.

"Where is the prince?"

The question came out as a raspy whisper, deliberately altered with a substance.

Yuder said nothing in response, instead, he looked around him. Even in the darkness, if he focused, he could discern some semblance of presence.

'Five people. No, Awakeners...judging from the altered voices, professional assassins perhaps.'

"Answer me. Where is the prince?"

"An assassin, are you?"

Yuder quietly countered. The masked assassin chuckled in disbelief.

"The one asking questions is me, not you. If you don't answer this time, you die. Where is the prince?"

Instead of replying, Yuder exerted his power. The assassin's sword abruptly jerked upwards just as multiple sparks sporadically lit up their surroundings. The assassins, startled by the sudden light piercing their eyes, swallowed their breaths. Seizing the moment, Yuder sprang up, drew the sword beside him, and, reversing their positions, held the assassin by his throat.

The assassin reflexively launched his power, but the projectiles were redirected to pierce his bodies and his comrades'. In the blink of an eye, everything was over, and stifled screams filled the room.

"Ah, ugh!"

"Is it my turn to ask questions now?"

Yuder lightly smirked, holding his sword close to the assassin's neck. The reflected light from the blade cast an eerie, terrifying glow on his face. The assassins, unable to believe the rapidly reversed situation, gasped for breath as they squirmed around on the floor.

"How...how is this possible?"

"Why did you target me? Answer me properly how you managed to follow me here."

The assassins, quickly overwhelmed by the young man who seemed anything but formidable, considered suicide as soon as they realized they were dealing with someone extraordinary. A decision befitting professional assassins, but Yuder didn't give them the liberty to carry it out.

"What do you think you're doing?"

"Ugh!"

Before they could retrieve their hidden poison, massive droplets of water materialized out of thin air, engulfing their heads and forcing their mouths open. The water, moving smoothly like an extension of Yuder, slipped through the cracks of their masks and into their mouths, extracting the concealed poison in mere seconds.

No matter how they struggled, the water didn't recede. Only when their consciousness was nearly clouded did the water finally disappear. After numerous coughing fits mixed with water, the assassins regained their senses to find themselves bound and unarmed.

"Cough...cough...cough!"

The water dripping from their heads and faces made them realize that the events had not been an illusion.

"What...what's happening?"

Observing the assassins' stupefied expressions, Yuder impassively lifted a finger. The water rippling above it was a clear manifestation of his will.

"Well... I ask again. Answer straight without giving me any trouble. If you don't, I'll show you something worse than death."

The speaker's eyes, darker than usual due to a particularly unpleasant dream he had awoken from, stirred an instinctive fear in the one who faced him. The assassins were terrified by the fact that, despite causing such tremendous chaos, they could not invoke even a slight surprise in the being before them - an action as insignificant as a breath.

They averted their gaze reflexively, bowing their heads in apprehension.

"We... we will answer. Therefore..."

"Answer in a respectful tone."

"...We will comply."

It didn't take long for Yuder to gather all the information he needed from them. They were trained assassins, bred to hunt their targets by scent. The scent was imparted onto one of Prince Ejain's personal belongings using the power of a deceased servant, and the original group of ten had been reduced to five due to an unexpected encounter with a monster.

The remaining five had followed Ejain all the way here, deliberating whether to pursue the thinning scent trail leading out of the base or the one still present within. Deciding it would be safer not to split their forces further, they resolved to find Ejain, who might still be hiding in the base.

And so, they had infiltrated the room of Yuder, upon whom Ejain's scent was strongest, waiting for him to fall asleep.

Their caution to operate under the assumption that Prince Ejain had already become aware of their scent and might play them after confirming the servant's corpse proved to be their downfall.

"...Did the scent cling to me because I shook hands with the prince at the end, and it transferred to my glove? We did hang around often, so it could have happened then. Either way, it doesn't matter."

Based on the information they provided, Yuder speculated, but the unconscious assassins before him could not confirm his hypothesis. With a familiar routine, he gagged them, bound their hands and feet more securely, and stowed them away separately under his bed and inside his wardrobe.

'Is it fortunate that they came to me first before the others here were harmed?'

In truth, if the assassins hadn't encountered the aberrant monsters in the dangerous wilderness, they would have left some members at the base and continued pursuing Ejain toward where Kishiar and his group had headed. The only seemingly positive outcome from the monstrous abnormalities causing widespread damage everywhere was this.

After settling everything, Yuder felt a discomfort lingering in the room. He stepped outside and stared at the swaying trees in the darkness. Inside the base, an unaware tranquility prevailed, as everyone had fallen asleep.

'The last place the assassins visited to confirm the servant's corpse must have been the safehouse where we spent the night. The ones who claimed to have fought there would be the Knights of Peletta...'

If so, Nathan Zuckerman, who was trailing Kishiar's group, and the Knights of Peletta, would likely also know this. They too would have ventured into the wilderness, but there were doubts over how smoothly they could have traveled with two servants in tow.

'I'm a bit worried they might have encountered the aberrant monsters.'

Even with Nathan Zuckerman, the Swordmaster, it was likely that there had been minimal damage, but Yuder hoped that they would find their way to him if possible.

'I'd be better off if I could go and find them.'

He longed to leave this place immediately. He suppressed this deep urge, alternately clenching and unclenching his hand, but in the end, his conclusion was clear. Sighing, Yuder reached into his pocket and pulled out two candies, then put one back in. While rolling the remaining candy in his mouth, the sweetness seemed to slightly soothe his frayed nerves.

At the same time, what came to his mind was part of a dream he had just before waking.

'The Battle of Pethuamet... that must have been it.'

Although the feeling had faded by half due to dealing with a tough issue right after waking up, one thing was certain. The largest monster he encountered during the Western subjugation mission, and the overwhelming force of Kishiar handling it.

He groped in the darkness of his memories, recalling the incident. The monster named Pethuamet looked identical to him, but was much smaller, leading a group of weaker individuals. Although there were cases of similar monsters banding together, it was the first time that a particularly large individual was seen with others.

The smaller ones could be dealt with quickly, but Pethuamet became increasingly more powerful as they attacked, causing extensive damage. What he saw in his dream was the day Kishiar stepped forward after days of siege and even a trap that collapsed a mountain failed.

He utilized the power of an Awakener, which he had not fully shown before, to kill Pethuamet. Only after killing that monster did they finally reveal that its weaknesses were its tongue and certain parts of its soft internal organs.

Even after that, many monsters appeared until the end of the campaign, but none like Pethuamet. And Kishiar, who had dealt with the creature, did not step forward again.

'I remember... when I enveloped the falling Kishiar from the cliff with the power of wind, slowing his descent for a safe landing.'

Although he fainted momentarily due to overusing his power, Kishiar, who woke up shortly after landing, told Yuder that he had acted unnecessarily.

Why didn't you retreat as I told you? You could have died doing something pointless.

The words he spat out immediately upon waking were remembered vividly in Yuder's mind after a very long time. Seeing that these buried memories surfaced so well, the stimulus received through the dream must have been significant.

To quell his unintentionally souring mood, Yuder rubbed his forehead with his hand, deciding to recall memories from a different direction. For instance...

'Pethuamet's tongue.'

The image of the cut tongue he had briefly glimpsed in his dream, and the blue light blinking on it, along with some patterns, came back to his mind. While dreaming, he felt it was familiar, but couldn't identify it. However, upon remembering it, he quickly figured out the answer.

Yuder turned his gaze toward the magic circles shining with a faint white light, or perhaps a blue light, not too far away. The patterns blinking on the severed tongue of Pethuamet he had seen in his dream were alarmingly similar to these circles, meticulously restored by the mages of the Western Mage Union.

'I seem to recall thinking they looked like magic circles in my dream, but I can't be sure whether that was a complete memory from a previous life, or if my dream just mixed things up.'

While he didn't fully understand the magic circles, he knew that the person drawing them and the pattern and ancient language used varied completely depending on the magic to be cast. Yuder roughly drew the symbols that he had seen blinking on the severed tongue in his dream, tracing them with his toe in the dirt.

'When the day breaks, I must deal with the captured assassins and ask the other mages about this pattern.'