Chapter 202

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Translator: Harry Potta
Chapter: 202
Chapter Title: An Unknown World
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Ariadne hastily leaped off her white horse. The docile mare snorted in surprise, but Ariadne had no time to spare for it.

Grabbing the boy's hand, Ariadne questioned him. She tried to keep her voice low, but she couldn't hide her agitation.

“You… you can see this?”

The boy looked straight at Ariadne with sparkling eyes.

“It's shining so beautifully!”

He was a typical child of his age, eager to show off what he knew.

“I've never seen anyone like you on the Central Continent!”

And every word the boy uttered was the very information Ariadne had been desperately searching for.

“Someone like me? Are there others whose fingertips glow?”

“Back home, there aren't many, but you see them sometimes!”

She had so many questions. First, Ariadne wanted to move to a quieter place with the boy.

“Where do you live?”

But a ten-year-old was not an easy conversation partner. Instead of giving his address, the boy just said what was on his mind.

“You're really amazing! But something's a little strange.”

“What's strange?”

“You only have one 'mark'!”

“'Mark'…?”

Her ears perked up.

“This!”

The boy pointed to the spot under his left eye. Ariadne subconsciously touched the same spot on her own face. The very place where a mysterious, blood-red beauty mark had appeared the moment she regressed.

“Are you saying I'm supposed to have more than one 'mark'?”

The words the gypsy woman had cried out came back to her.

- “You're only a half-breed!”

“What does that mean? A half-breed? Is that related to this?”

Seeing Ariadne's urgent questioning, the dark-skinned boy raised a finger to his lips.

“Shh!”

The child innocently gestured toward the sky.

“They're watching from the sky!”

The gypsy woman's mummified arm. The corpse of the former head maid, Giada, turning to ash and scattering. Ariadne shuddered.

Meanwhile, the boy was greatly encouraged by the fact that an adult was listening intently to him.

“I'll tell you this much. You rejected an offer recently, didn't you?”

“An offer? What offer?”

She received a dozen offers a day, from requests to hire a relative to proposals for business ventures in the south.

“They probably asked you to make a sacrifice for your tribe.”

It wasn't a tribe but a nation, yet she understood perfectly. There was only one offer she had received that was similar to that.

But perhaps thinking the pretty lady didn't believe him, the boy offered a string of hints.

“Hmm, it's related to something that goes in your mouth. Food, but it's also like money or power…”

Ariadne was impressed. She decided to give the boy what he wanted.

“…That's amazing. How did you know?”

“I'm a direct descendant of the great Salman of the Balasa Ordo! This is a piece of cake for me!”

The boy, smiling with pride, whispered in Ariadne's ear as if sharing a secret.

“When you make important decisions, follow the halo of light. It didn't like it when you refused, did it?”

She had never explicitly asked the halo for its opinion… but thinking back, it was true.

When she had caused trouble for Camelia's father, Baron Castiglione, and prevented the Lord of Gaeta from surrendering to the Kingdom of Gallico, the halo at her fingertips had shown fervent support.

It had danced all afternoon, to the point where her eyes hurt just watching it.

But after she had flatly rejected Duke Cesare of Pisano's proposal and returned to her room, nothing had happened.

It had been so quiet, one might have believed it was a sullen teenager sulking in her room.

“Accept the halo's will.”

“Is it right to follow it?”

This was a sweet suggestion to hear. Didn't it mean there was an absolute guideline?

It was a great comfort to know there were instructions she could follow without having to think.

“They don't always tell the truth… but this time, they're right. They'll be right for a while.”

Ariadne was quite taken aback.

“What did you say?”

“Sometimes it lies. It's not a good kid. But your turning point hasn't come yet. Probably hasn't.”

The halo lies?

“Does the halo have a human-like consciousness?”

Ariadne asked desperately. Only after asking did she realize the boy might not answer her question.

Considering the examples of Giada and the gypsy woman, it would be strange if he did. That's how urgent she felt.

But the reason the boy couldn't answer was not because he didn't want to.

“You little brat!”

A wrinkled hand shot out from the crowd and smacked the back of the boy's head hard.

“Ouch!”

The boy cried out and clutched his head, but instead of getting angry, he turned around in fright.

“G-Grandma…!”

“You little brat, what are you doing here!”

The grandmother shouted in a language Ariadne couldn't understand. The old woman in the red skirt scolded her grandson in the middle of the street.

“Didn't I tell you not to get involved in things like this?”

“B-But…”

The boy protested, on the verge of tears.

“The 'Prophet's' turning point is just around the corner. Besides, this is strange. It's so fascinating, there's so much to learn, and I want to record it…”

- *Smack!*

It was the sound of the old woman rapping her grandson's head.

“Ouch!”

The boy looked up at his grandmother, his face looking as if he was about to cry.

But the old woman looked at her only flesh and blood, the apple of her eye, without a hint of guilt.

“That life is over now! It has nothing to do with us anymore!”

“But we're shamans!”

“Forget it!”

Ironically, as the old woman shouted this, she was holding a sigil staff that identified her as a Salman shamaness of the Balasa Ordo, and still wore jade earrings so heavy they stretched her earlobes, signifying her noble status.

“This old woman gave up everything to save you from that fate! Don't make my decision be in vain!”

“E-Excuse me…”

Seeing the boy being severely scolded, Ariadne cautiously addressed the furious old woman.

“My name is Ariadne de Mare. I am of Cardinal de Mare's household. If perhaps you would allow me to invite you to my home for a cup of tea…”

The old woman looked Ariadne up and down with cold eyes. The single red beauty mark under her left eye.

Without a word, the old woman in the red skirt raised her hand and swiped it across Ariadne's forehead.

She saw the pretty young woman in the face covering startle, but paid it no mind.

- *Sniff, sniff.*

After brushing her fingertips across the forehead as if wiping away dust, the old woman read the scent of the spell on her own fingerprints and clicked her tongue.

“It's the work of those Amhara bastards, just as I thought.”

Not understanding, Ariadne asked.

“Pardon?”

But the old woman did not answer.

“Hmph!”

Instead, she raised her sigil staff high and slammed it onto the ground. *Thump!*

Ariadne thought the sound of the staff striking the ground was unusually loud.

She glanced down at the ground for a moment, and when she looked back to where the old woman and the boy had been, they had vanished without a trace into the crowd.

“Ah, no!”

The secret of her regression was slipping away. A clue she had found after so long—she couldn't let it go like this.

She urgently looked for Giuseppe.

“Giuseppe, Giuseppe!”

“You called, my lady?”

“Find the grandmother and grandson!”

“Pardon?”

“A grandmother and her grandson! She was wearing a red skirt and carrying a peculiar staff. The boy is around ten! They're not Etruscan, they look foreign, but not in a typical way! She has long hair braided into three or four sections! The boy has a shaved head!”

Giuseppe nodded.

“I will have them found as soon as the distribution is finished.”

“The distribution doesn't matter!”

Ariadne shrieked. It was the first time Giuseppe had seen his ever-composed mistress in such a panic, and he was startled as well.

“Right now!”

“Understood.”

Giuseppe hurried back to the tent, pulled half the men who were managing the lines, and sent them out into the crowd.

They dispersed quickly, but Ariadne had an ominous feeling that it would be difficult to find the old woman and the boy with manpower alone.

***

The new Duke of Pisano had failed to procure a large supply of food and returned to his domain, but he did not come back empty-handed.

He had managed to acquire about fifty crossbows, a type of modern weaponry, from the capital and brought them back to his territory.

It was a remarkable achievement, accomplished by leveraging every connection he had with workshop artisans, cultivated from his time making and collecting things like horse saddles, new types of stirrups, and ornate clocks.

However, he was personally discovering just how infuriating it was to have the equipment but none of the know-how.

“A bunch of ignorant country bumpkins.”

He ground his teeth as he looked down at the training grounds.

Below, the three hundred or so private soldiers he had coaxed back to the unit by offering an exorbitant salary of gold coins instead of food were training.

He had picked out the supposedly smarter ones and handed them crossbows, but not a single one knew how to handle them properly.

- “Take your positions! Hold! The second rank just has to fire right after the first!”

There was no proper instructor. Eventually, the frustrated Duke of Pisano himself jumped in among the commoners to demonstrate, but progress remained sluggish.

- “It's just... we're not used to them.”

- “You just have to aim and hold! What's so difficult about that?”

The soldiers were like scarecrows, and the three centurions who were supposed to be encouraging them were unmotivated.

One of the centurions even went so far as to commit insubordination.

- “Can't we just use longbows? Why go through all this trouble when we have perfectly good weapons we know how to use...”

The idea that an army followed a chain of command was only true for well-disciplined forces.

The private soldiers of the Pisano domain were a disorderly mob, and Cesare was an outsider who had just rolled in.

There was a reason why the centurions and soldiers were all deliberately slacking off.

The crossbow's penetration was better than a longbow's, making it perfect for dealing with heavy cavalry, but since the massive weapon had to be fixed to the ground to be fired, a crossbowman's own mobility became abysmal.

As longbowmen, in an emergency, they could scatter and use the terrain to their advantage to escape. But as crossbowmen on the battlefield, they were prime targets for annihilation.

There could be no greater disconnect between a commander and his soldiers.

After arguing with the soldiers, Cesare finally admitted that changing their weapon specialty within a week was impossible and ended up heading to the battlefield with longbowmen.

“…”

The young Duke of Pisano was extremely displeased. He believed longbowmen couldn't penetrate the armor of heavy cavalry.

“My lord Duke, don't you worry! If we had come as crossbowmen, it would've been fifty, but as longbowmen, we have three hundred!”

The centurion who had argued for longbows chattered away beside Cesare.

“The longbowmen of Pisano are so skilled they've made a name for themselves in history!”

*Doesn't that just mean they're outdated?*

“Besides, we're planning to use the terrain, aren't we? Look at this, what a perfect location this hill is!”

The greatest advantage the Pisano soldiers had was their intimate knowledge of the local geography. They

had climbed to high ground and were lying in ambush, positioned according to the wind's direction.

“Arrows shot from high to low are always stronger. And the wind is blowing from our backs! It'll pierce through armor and everything. Just trust me.”

“…”

*If we had mixed crossbowmen and longbowmen, it wouldn't have been fifty crossbowmen, but fifty crossbowmen and 250 longbowmen.*

But now that the decision was made, it was not something the commander, of all people, should say.

Cesare kept his mouth shut and tightened his grip on the reins of his black steed. The poor horse shook its head, suffering for no reason.

“There!”

A group of about twenty Gallican heavy cavalrymen came into view. They appeared to be a small unit that had split off to plunder for food.

“They're coming! Heavy cavalry, twenty strong! Advancing at a trot, six o'clock!”

The scout quietly signaled the main force lying in ambush. In response to the signal, Cesare raised his right hand.

“All units, prepare to fire!”

Three hundred longbows aimed in unison at the figures of the cavalry visible down the mountainside.