The Imperial Supreme Commander Has Returned - Chapter 33

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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The Imperial Commander Returns — Episode 33

Delram, having seen to Tarbing’s comfort, posed a question.

“But Commander, what should we do now?”
“The war is over. We return to the capital.”
“The Royal Capital, sir?”
“Yes. We’ll hold a Triumph Ceremony, discharge the conscripted soldiers, and then present ourselves before His Majesty.”
“We’ll move with the troops, then.”
“Of course.”

It wasn’t a bad prospect, but the timeline would be tight.
With so many soldiers, organizing the camp alone would take at least three days.
The march itself, no matter how swift, would require a minimum of two months.
Delram deliberated briefly before asking.

“Is it possible to move separately, sir?”
“There’s nothing against it. Though you need not attend the Triumph Ceremony, you must be in the Royal Capital within two months without fail.”
“For the Meritorious Service Ceremony under His Majesty’s supervision, I understand. I’d attend that even with both legs broken.”
“Then by the Commander’s authority, I grant you, Special Task Force Captain Delram, a sixty-day leave of absence.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“You’ve earned your rest. Become someone the sword can be proud of.”

The Commander gave his shoulder an approving pat.
Yet even as he did, unable to quite let go until the last moment,
it seemed those final words carried his true heart.

In any case, the time allotted to him now was two months.
Short if you squinted, long if you didn’t.

But there was no room for idling.
A mountain of tasks awaited.

‘First, I need to make my rounds and say I’m leaving. After that… hmm?’

As he turned to enter his quarters, he sensed a surge of mana.
Turning his head toward it, he saw—oddly enough—a butterfly.
Early spring, and far too soon for one to appear.

‘A Rune?’

It bore only the flutter of genuine wings; it was no living thing.
It was a creature woven from luminous Rune Letters.

No grand Sorcery, this.
Merely something to illuminate the surrounding darkness.
If it struck his body, it would scatter as light and vanish.
So he simply watched it drift past—

—when a sharp cry split the air.

The Owl, it seemed, took displeasure in the sight.
From his shoulder, it lunged forward and struck the butterfly Rune repeatedly with its beak.
The butterfly shuddered briefly, then dissolved into nothing.

“Wait—what did you just do?”

A startled voice called from behind him.
It was unmistakably the Rune Master’s.
He came accompanied by two Knights assigned to monitor him.

“Oh! Rune Master.”

Delram’s face brightened.
He’d been meaning to ask something anyway, and here the man had walked right to him.
He needed to know the true nature of the Mysterious Fruit.

“If you’re not too busy, would you care for a cup of tea before you go?”
“…That’s a frightening proposition.”

Delram had come asking for tea just a few days ago.
And what had happened immediately after?
Looking back now, he was relieved—and yet appalled.

But the Rune Master didn’t refuse.
He had questions of his own, after all.

“Then I’ll intrude.”

* * *

Trickle.

Delram poured out the tea he’d brewed from herbs.
The wise Rune Master let it cool slightly before sipping it with deliberate grace.
Such refinement stood in sharp contrast to Delram’s crude habit of dumping in cold water and gulping it all down at once, careless of the heat.

The sight filled him with expectation.
A sorcerer who had wandered the continent for decades, practicing his art.
Unlike the Sambala, whom people called savages, someone who could sip tea with such grace surely possessed vast knowledge.
Not merely about the Mysterious Fruit, but also the Leaf and the Owl.
Might he know the truth about all of them?

“Actually, I came with a question to ask you.”
“…Aren’t you curious about the negotiations?”
“If they’d gone poorly, we wouldn’t be sitting across from each other now, would we? Besides, my rank is far too low to involve myself in such matters.”
“That doesn’t seem to be the case at all…….”

The Rune Master sipped his tea with a grumble.
The surrendered Sambala tribal confederation had now become an Autonomous Region.
The nation had effectively passed into new hands, yet his expression seemed almost relieved.
Watching him, Delram could almost sense how much the tribal chiefs had pressed him, how exhausted he must have been mediating between them.

‘It was bound to fall apart anyway, in the end.’

Had Sambala managed to defeat Peyour instead?
The outcome would have been little different.
Weakened by the long war, some tribe or other would have become prey, sparking fresh conflict within Sambala to determine who would devour it.

“So, what troubles your mind?”
“Do you happen to know what demons are?”
“I know them well.”
“You do?”
“Isn’t there one standing right in front of me?”
“Sigh.”

Delram let out a breath.
The way he joked suggested he genuinely didn’t know.
Yet would someone who understood the true nature of demons jest about it?
No human could have done that.

But it was never something he’d expected anyway.
No matter how clever the Rune Master was, that brilliance belonged only to the Sambala tribe itself.
The true sages Delram knew of pierced through the very principles of the world and, on that foundation, interfered even with natural phenomena.

“Then let me ask differently… the altar you built to invoke the Grand Ritual. Why did you use a Mysterious Fruit as its medium?”
“Now that you mention it, I once received a report—completely insane—that some madman had actually consumed it. Surely not?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Ancestors preserve us!”
“It was tasty enough. But after eating it, my stomach’s felt rather off. What exactly was that Fruit?”

The Rune Master stared at Delram in disbelief.
Well, only someone this mad could have forced them to surrender.
Once satisfied with this logic, the Rune Master answered readily enough.

“I myself don’t know. It’s been passed down through generations of sorcerers, that’s all. But there is one thing I do know…”
“What’s that?”
“That it contains a strange power within it. But since I don’t know its precise nature, I couldn’t use it directly—I employed it as a medium instead.”
“Hmm, do you have any more of them?”
“Unfortunately not. In ancient times, there were also a Leaf and a Twig, or so the legends say, but that was so long ago as to be beyond counting. Someone took them away, one by one, and nothing remains now.”
A Leaf.

Delram thought of the Socket.
The Socket containing the Leaf—passed down through his mother’s mother’s mother….
A family heirloom inherited across endless generations.
Then was his distant maternal bloodline Sambalan?

Yet there was something that puzzled him about that conclusion.
First, there was his appearance.
Delram bore no resemblance whatsoever to the Sambalan people in his physical features.
Nor did he feel any blood connection—no pull at all.
He’d been cleaving Sambalan necks freely enough, after all.

“But your stomach’s been troubling you? It’s been quite some time since you ate the Fruit, hasn’t it?”
“Well… something peculiar has developed inside me, you might say. It was that power that eliminated those flying Rune Letters earlier.”

Delram called for Owl.
Once it alighted on the table, he cradled its hindquarters carefully in both hands and held it toward the Rune Master.

—Hoot?
“Mm?”
—Hoot-hoot?
“Mmm?”

The Rune Master, of course, saw nothing.
He thought Delram was suddenly thrusting empty hands at him.

But the expression on his face was unmistakably confused.
Seeing his ears twitch at the hoots, Delram understood.
He couldn’t see it, but he could certainly hear it.

“Can you hear the Owl’s cry?”
“You can too?”
“Yes.”
“Thank the heavens I’m not losing my mind. I thought my time to join my ancestors had finally come, truly.”
“You’ll easily live past a hundred with your Runes, yet you’re all dramatics.”
“In any case, seeing you suddenly thrust your hand out like that—there must be something making the Owl’s sound positioned there.”
“Exactly. An Owl made of wind.”
A Wind Owl!

The Rune Master marveled at the revelation.
It was the first time he’d heard such a thing, but there was no reason to doubt it.
He had heard it himself, and there before his eyes stood Delram as living proof.

So the Rune Master fell into deep thought.
He furrowed his brow, closed his eyes, and tapped the table.
After a long moment of this, the Rune Master spoke hesitantly.

“I can’t claim certainty, mind you.”
“That’s perfectly fine.”
“There’s one part of what you said that strikes a chord—the part about it being composed of wind.”
“To be precise, it’s not quite wind. It’s more like thin threads of cyan, bundled together in the manner of an air current—if that makes sense?”
“Well, I can’t see it myself, so I’m at a loss. But I do recall hearing something similar once, long ago, when I was traveling through a region—”

The Rune Master spoke of his youth.
He had once visited a certain Volcanic Region.
Not a place like Sambala, with ancient ancestors, but rather a land where people tended to something else.

“They said they revered a Spirit there.”
“A Spirit?”
“According to them, whenever that Spirit awoke, the volcano would erupt and reduce the surrounding land to rubble. So the people of that region performed regular rituals and made offerings to prevent such catastrophe.”
“Sounds like a troublemaker if I ever heard of one.”
“Perhaps, but there was more to it, or so they claimed. They said the immense heat from the volcano allowed them to forge weapons of their own unique design.”
“Interesting.”
“Still, I dismissed it as superstition at the time. I made my way to the crater myself and found nothing. But now, seeing your Owl—”
“You think there might be something to it after all?”

Delram scratched his chin thoughtfully.
The soft stubble that had just begun to grow felt pleasant beneath his fingertips.
Perhaps because of this small comfort, his thoughts began to flow naturally.

The Owl was a peculiar creature.
It passed through solid objects and flew without weight.

And that was only the beginning.
It could conjure formless blades or summon a Whirlwind at will.
Even a casual listener would think of Wind in connection with such abilities.

If that were true, then the possibility of a Fire Owl existing was entirely reasonable.
Or perhaps an Earth Owl, a Water Owl, a Lightning Owl.

‘Though perhaps they wouldn’t be Owls at all, come to think of it.’

Delram felt a surge of anticipation.
He still didn’t fully understand how he had obtained the Owl in the first place.
But through mastering Wind, he had already gained so much.
The Silent-Speed Thrust, the Whirlwind, the Wind Blade, the Air Foothold.

If he could combine these creatively—
A Middle-Ranked Knight would not be difficult to defeat at all.
His combat strength would rise vertically, incomparably.

‘This is insane!’

Delram was currently a Lower-Ranked Knight.
According to common knowledge, it took five Lower-Ranked Knights to kill a single Middle-Ranked Knight without casualties.
Even with Delram’s Weapon Master ability, closing such a gap in rank was extraordinarily difficult.
That’s precisely why during the altar assault he hadn’t dared to face the War Leader head-on, but instead seized his chances by retreating whenever death seemed near.

That was why, before the regression, he had always felt the sting of incompleteness.
The realm of Upper-Ranked Knight.
Though praised as extraordinary in itself, the truth was that whenever a Supreme Master or Sword Master emerged, one could only fall behind.

But if he could obtain even a Fire Spirit?
What if he could claim other spirits as well, should they exist?

‘Middle-Ranked, nonsense—all of it pales into insignificance.’

Delram’s eyes gleamed as he posed his question.

“Where is this Volcanic Region?”
“It’s Hwayan Sel, one of the archipelagos in the southern continent. Though it’s been forty years since then, I can’t say for certain whether it remains unchanged.”
“That’s been tremendously helpful.”
“Is that so.”

The conversation ended there.
Delram extended his hand without warning.
The Rune Master regarded it for a moment before clasping it firmly.

“You’ve endured much as well, Rune Master. I hope your remaining years will be spent in peace with your grandson.”
“I appreciate that. Though I confess I have a curiosity of my own.”
“Please, speak.”
“Why did you wish to save us? I gathered from the negotiations that your original intent was to annihilate the Sambala bloodline entirely.”
……
“And yet you asked for a chance to persuade us, did you not? Even wagering the position you had fought so hard to obtain.”

Delram paused in thought.
Should he claim it was to maximize his achievement?

But he did not wish to lie.
Though it belonged to a past life, he remembered the Rune Master’s final hour.
The man had been vengeance incarnate, yet possessed the strength to abandon even that for his grandson’s sake.

“Because you are exceptional warriors. And the future I envision cannot be completed without such warriors.”
“…Conquest of the continent, then.”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“The survival of mankind.”
……?

Words beyond all expectation.
The Rune Master gazed at him in bewilderment.
Yet Delram offered nothing further.
Still, what he had said was sufficient—because of his eyes.

Eyes that gleamed with a lustre no human should possess.
Pupils brilliant as the moon on a darkened night.
Within them lay neither calculated intellect nor ambition to burn the world.
Only one thing dwelled there in absolute clarity.

It was, quite simply… madness.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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