The Imperial Supreme Commander Has Returned - Chapter 38

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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 — Chapter 38

To put it plainly: I found nothing.
Not a single line mentioned spirits or leaves.
Instead, most of the diary was filled with
the tale of Delram’s birth and early years — a novice mother’s account, brimming with detail.

“Ha, was I really like this?”

Even by his own estimation, he’d been remarkably eccentric as a child.
And his mother had been no ordinary woman either.
Frail in body though she was, her temperament had been utterly unconventional.

A pair of reckless spirits — child and mother alike.
He couldn’t help but laugh as he read.

And so, to the final page. The end.
Though the story he’d sought wasn’t there, Delram set down the diary after a long while, suffused with a profound sense of completeness.

Thank you for giving birth to me.
Even if you were the primary architect of mankind’s destruction.

Hoot-hoot.
“Mm?”

In the midst of his candid reflection, Owl let out a cry.
Usually he’d call a few times, and if Delram didn’t pay attention, he’d pout and snap his beak shut — but today he was being remarkably persistent.
Glancing over, Delram saw him perched in one corner of the floor.

“What are you doing over there?”
Hoot!
“…Is there something down there?”
Hoot-hoot-hoot!

As if to confirm, Owl began scratching frantically at the floorboards.
Delram picked him up and examined the spot.
But it looked no different from anywhere else.

Fortunately, the way to check was simple enough.
Delram drove his fist down against the floor.

Crack!

His Mana-saturated fist sank deep into the wood.
When he pulled it back, a hollow space revealed itself between the splintered planks.
Clearly, this had been constructed with deliberate intent.

“How is this here? I never knew?”

Delram muttered in disbelief at the discovery.
He’d spent his childhood in this very cottage, yet it had escaped his notice entirely.
And not just once — he’d lived here twice over.

From the hidden space came a long wooden box.
Though when he’d shattered the floor, he’d destroyed the lid along with it.
Inside was……

“A twig?”

It was just a twig, utterly withered and brittle.
Not a single leaf clung to it, as if it had been dead for years.

At first, it seemed so ordinary that he’d taken it for packing material.
But no matter how carefully he examined the box, this was all that lay inside.

[Ymir]

It even had a name, apparently.
The name that emerged when he fitted the shattered lid back together.
Which made it all the more bewildering.

“What in the world is this supposed to be?”

Even granting it might be some precious timber.
But it looked far too thin to be of any use.
Whether for furniture or decoration.
It needed to have at least some decent thickness to be worth anything.
Yet this was thinner than Delram’s wrist.

“This is ridiculous.”

Delram’s hollow laugh was inevitable.
Had his mother been playing some sort of joke?
Reading through the diary, she’d certainly seemed to have an unusual character…….

With that thought, he reached down and picked up the twig―
and in the next instant, Delram’s eyes snapped wide open.

“……!?”

[The world had lurched to a halt.]

There was no other way to describe it.
That was the magnitude of the shock.

His vision darkened to black, and his hands began to tremble violently.
The tremors spread through his entire body.
Every pore opened, and cold sweat drenched him from head to toe.

It was, in truth, impossible.
Who was Delram?
A veteran of countless hells, a true survivor of countless wars.
Indeed, just before the regression, he had fought like a dog against demon legion commanders whose strength seemed beyond anything the mortal world could muster.

A single gesture would topple mountains.
A single roar would kill thousands, their blood spraying as they fell.
In the thick of such battles,
Delram had cast aside even his title of supreme commander and charged alongside the Sword Masters against those legion commanders, only to fall.

‘How pathetic.’
Crunch.

Delram ground his teeth together, his eyes blazing.
What he felt now was not fear, nor terror.
Such things could never touch him.

It was something else―a presence.
An existence so vastly superior to himself, descending from that distant Heavenly Realm.
Or from Hell itself, now standing face to face with him.
An overwhelming pressure born of an innate gap!

‘But what does it matter?’

It was literally true.
Fear or presence—neither changed anything.
He was a man who could never be swayed by another’s hand.
What that branch was or wasn’t—that remained unchanged.
It was the pride of an accomplice to mankind’s extinction, of a man with cold blood on his hands who had driven countless soldiers to their deaths.

Whoooosh—

An intangible force rose from Delram.
It was neither Aura nor Mana.
Neither bloodlust nor fighting spirit.

The bearing of a human!
Without a shred of regret, living with full strength in every moment.
And thus the bearing of a man standing alone in the midst of the world.

It was around then that the trembling ceased.
His darkened vision returned, his muddied senses cleared.
He had overcome and proven himself.

Now Delram could finally see through it.
The true nature of the branch he held in his hand.

‘Remains of something transcendent.’

This was the corpse of a being beyond his comprehension.
Of some tree so numinous he could scarcely fathom it.
If Delram were to name that tree—

“The Mother of All Trees.”

He murmured this and raised his hand.
The branch climbed his arm like a vine.

Slide.

Soon it had wound around his forearm below the elbow.
From a distance, it looked rather like a gauntlet.

It was strange.
Yet Delram was not alarmed.
He knew instinctively.
That he had become the master of this branch.

The only problem, though.
Delram flexed and unfurled the gauntlet’s fingers, muttering to himself.

“How am I supposed to wash my left hand now?”
Caw!

Owl gave a short cry that seemed to say he was exasperated.

* * *

Delram poured Spirit Power into his left arm.
More precisely, he directed it toward the branch that covered his arm.

Tss, tss, tss, tss―

The branch stirred.
It vanished with a sound like a snake slithering away.
Or more precisely, it burrowed beneath the skin.

Yet there was no pain.
Only a peculiar marking carved into the arm.

‘To reverse it―’

It was simple.
He only had to withdraw the Spirit Power he’d poured in.
Then the marking would become a gauntlet again, and if he drew out more, it would shift back into an elongated branch and settle into Delram’s grip.

So there it was: a branch, a gauntlet, a tattoo.
Three forms it could transform between.

‘It doesn’t respond to Mana at all…….’

That was the most significant part.
Mana was the fundamental unit that composed the world.
Because of this, all mysteries of this land―Magic, Aura, sorcery, divine power, and the like―were rooted in Mana.

Yet the branch was an exception.
It responded only to Spirit Power.

By this point, anyone with a grain of sense would have understood.
What Owl had found, where it had been found…….
It had to be something deeply connected to Spirits.

“Mother… what in the world were you doing?”

Delram found himself bewildered anew, muttering the words.
He’d lost count of how many times he’d been stunned today.

There was reason enough for it, really.
The first ten years of his life―short by some measure, long by others.
Mother and son had been inseparable.
He thought he knew everything about her.
And yet she’d kept secrets like this!

‘I should search the house more thoroughly.’

Who knew?
Perhaps there were other hidden spaces elsewhere.

Delram combed through the surroundings methodically.
Floor, ceiling, walls, and the front and back yards besides.
He’d taken up a shovel and overturned everything, but found nothing.

All he discovered was one bewildered mole.
The mole, having realized its dream of homeownership, stood dazed after its dwelling was obliterated by Delram’s spade, staring at him in a daze before shuffling away.

And only then did he realize.
It would be simple if he asked Owl.
Since she was transparent and could pass through any object, she could simply glide through the soil or inside walls and find anything worth finding.

“Ah! Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
-Hoot, hoot!

Owl fluttered excitedly.
He must have been deliberately keeping quiet until now.

In any case, the search for a hidden chamber had failed.
Next, Delram sought out the village headman.
He asked what he could about his mother, but from the start she’d been nothing more than a simple village girl born and raised in this remote corner of the countryside.
There was no reason to expect any particularly useful information.

His father was much the same.
To begin with, Delram had never known his name or face.
He’d been some wandering scholar who happened to pass through the village.

“So it all comes back to this, then.”

Delram stared down at his left hand.
A branch transformed into a gauntlet.

Originally, he’d planned to leave his hometown tomorrow.
The families of the soldiers who’d told Delram they’d fallen in battle.
How much suffering would they endure if they saw him?
Some might even curse him for being the sole survivor.

Of course, he couldn’t fault them for it.
It was only natural that people driven into a corner and drowning in grief would search for a target for their resentment.

Yet it still weighed on him.
He could endure being hated and condemned by tens of thousands.
Even hundreds of thousands wouldn’t faze him.

But the families of the fallen soldiers—
Their gazes alone, he simply couldn’t bear.
It was a sin he could never wash clean… an original sin that belonged to Delram alone.

“…I just won’t leave the house, then.”

Delram pretended nothing was wrong and locked the door.
What he set about doing next was examining the branch.

* * *

After tinkering with it all day, he was beginning to understand.
The branch was absurdly hard.
Delram struck his left hand with a short blade.

Clink, clink!

The wooden gauntlet emerged without so much as a scratch.
It even rang out like metal.

The startling thing was that Aura had no effect on it either.
Even when he coated the short blade in Aura and scraped at it, the gauntlet remained unscathed.
It only left a slight groove when he brought down Tarbing on it.
And even that was already filling in.

‘Self-healing? I’ve obtained quite the extraordinary gauntlet.’

Armor that could withstand Aura was extraordinarily expensive.
No—expensive wasn’t the right word. Even money couldn’t buy it.
So I’ve actually managed to get something useful after all.
If it comes to dying later, I can just reach out my hand.

‘But then why does it have this branch form?’

Delram withdrew his Spirit Power.
The gauntlet shifted back into a branch and settled into his hand.

The branch itself was unremarkable.
Not smooth at all—it was covered with small twigs branching off in all directions.
About 1.2 meters long, it was so thin that it barely matched the thickness of two of young Delram’s fingers.
It was hard but flexible, bending with a subtle give.

“The end isn’t sharp, so it doesn’t seem like a weapon… and it’s not straight, so it’s not a measuring tool either.”
—…….
“Is it meant to be planted in the ground?”
—Huuuuh.

The Owl let out a long cry from above his head.
Why did it sound exactly like a sigh?

Unable to bear it any longer, the Owl moved.
Apparently exasperated enough not even to bother spreading its wings, it waddled down.
It climbed down Delram’s shoulder toward his left arm.

Then it tapped one end of the branch with its beak. Tap.
And the opposite end too. Tap-tap.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

Delram asked irritably.
So the Owl was actually capable of something—and that’s all?
No matter what kind of Spirit it was, being a bird meant—

Peck-peck-peck-peck!
“Ow, damn it!”

Either it had read his thoughts or the Owl attacked his hand viciously.
As Delram was shooing it away, something suddenly clicked.

Both ends of the branch.
And that left hand to draw it?

“Could it be…”

Delram gripped the middle section of the branch experimentally.
Then he traced an imaginary line in his mind.
He pulled his right arm back, imagining he was grasping that center point.

Nothing happened, of course.
It was just a useless gesture.
But Delram tried again calmly.
This time, his right hand was saturated with Spirit Power.

Crrreak—

The imaginary line became real.
The branch bent elastically along that line.

“It’s a bow!”

Delram’s cry proved true.
A length of green thread hung draped across the curved branch.
Delram’s right hand pulled at it.

What came next was obvious.
Instead of searching for an arrow, Delram channeled Spirit Power into the bow.
The Spirit Power flowed through his right hand, drenching the entire branch, and soon coalesced into an arrow that glowed an ethereal green.

Creak-creak-creak.

The arrow nocked against the bowstring.
His hand trembled under the tremendous tension.
For someone of Delram’s ordinary strength, it was a feat in itself.

But the Spirit Power proved even harder to endure than the tension.
Was it a lack of refinement?
What was meant to be a modest infusion had drained every last shred of Spirit Power from his body into the arrow.
The shaft had transformed into something like emerald itself.

“I can’t hold it any longer…!”

Delram pivoted his upper body, aiming the bow toward the window.
Fortunately, the cliff face lay beyond it.
No one would be struck—he could fire freely.

At last, Delram released the string.
The green arrow shot through the window and outward—

CRASH!
“…Huh.”

It never made it out.

The Cottage held precious memories with his mother.
Today marked its final hour.

—————
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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