The Imperial Supreme Commander Has Returned - Chapter 44

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

The Supreme Commander Has Returned Chapter 44

“Ugh, feeling under the weather?”

Delram shuddered as he walked down the street.
His instinct had grown tremendously sharp since gaining Spirit Power.
It seemed to have picked up on something ominous.

‘I should be careful for a while.’

Delram rummaged through his coat as he thought this.
What emerged was an Invitation Letter of fine material.

[Boy, come at once.]
—Rubian Vistaché

The message was as terse and precise as its author.
Below it was a simple map.
It seemed Rubian had assumed Delram, unfamiliar with the Royal Capital, might lose his way—a thoughtful gesture that revealed a surprisingly meticulous nature beneath his austere exterior.

“Ah, the usual place.”

Delram muttered as he studied the map.
The Western District, where the nobility gathered.
The Vistaché Family Mansion stood there as well.

Most nobles of any standing kept at least one residence in the Royal Capital.
Factions were the lifeblood of aristocratic political power, after all.
Falling behind on intelligence was synonymous with being left behind, so one had to remain constantly attuned to the pulse of the capital.
The mansion served that purpose.

‘Before the Regression, I had a house here too.’

Though I rarely visited, always hurrying from one battlefield to the next.
Thinking of it now left a bitter taste.
I’d worked so hard to gain noble status, to acquire a sprawling mansion, yet I never truly lived in it—and then I died.
I never even married.

In any case, Rubian’s reason for the invitation was simple.
Stay at the mansion instead of some shabby inn.

A shabby inn would have been more comfortable, truth be told, but he’d decided to comply gracefully.
He had to visit the Vistaché Family eventually anyway.
He’d learned their secret Mana Technique after all.
It would be smoother going forward if he gained formal recognition from the head of the house.

‘He’ll grant it… won’t he?’

Even if he didn’t, it wouldn’t be a catastrophe.
It wasn’t as though he’d learned it in secret—his daughter had taught him directly.

Besides, Delram was no longer a commoner.
One couldn’t silence him by eliminating him.
He was a talent to whom the King himself had awarded a First-Class Medal.

More than that, Delram had refined the Mana Technique.
They might even come begging him for official recognition.

Perhaps he was exaggerating a bit?
Not at all.

Sword Master!
It could become the key to that path.

‘The family head was probably a Supreme Knight, wasn’t he?’

At that level, he was genuinely formidable.
The sort of talent you’d need to search across an entire kingdom—no, across the whole continent to find.
Yet before the Regression, the family head never crossed that final threshold.
He failed to become a Sword Master and vanished into history’s shadows.
He’d been just one step short.

‘But this time, things might be different…….’

The Mana Technique that Delram had refined.
Truthfully, at this stage, even if the family head learned the revised technique now, he’d struggle to feel any dramatic shift in raw power.

But at that level of mastery, the technique itself hardly mattered.
What mattered more was a shift in perspective.
Recognizing that existing techniques alone weren’t the only truth—that other paths existed.
And understanding one’s own incompleteness; that was the real jewel.
Delram had mined it for him.

‘The family head yearned to become a Sword Master his whole life. There’s no way he won’t recognize the value of the technique I refined.’

So his determination wasn’t an overstatement at all.
Of course, the ideal outcome would be the family head reaching Sword Master rank.
If that happened, not only would the Vistaché Family gain prestige, but the kingdom would have one of its two Sword Masters backing them.

“This is perfect, but… huh?”
Thrum-thrum.

Delram, who’d been humming and walking, came to an abrupt stop.
A sudden vibration had caught his attention.

‘Could it be……?’

Delram’s heart lurched as he frantically patted his waistband.
What vibrated in his hand was something resembling a compass.
It was the Magic Detection Device that Nuak had given him.

Blink… blink…….

The detector was pulsing faintly.
Accompanied by a faint buzz.
What that meant was—

“There’s a demon in the Royal Capital?”

Delram’s face darkened with alarm.

* * *

‘Something’s been off about this.’

Delram frowned as he stared at the detector.
Wasn’t that right?
What Nuak had said.

Cardinal Nuak.
Nuak’s existence itself posed no problem.
He hadn’t regressed alongside Delram—merely received fragments of memory from the God of Light, which fell well within Delram’s calculations.

What troubled him was the Magic Detection Device.
Nuak’s memories were sparse and scattered.
Yet of all things, why did they contain knowledge about this detector?

‘It must reflect the intentions of whoever gave him the knowledge.’

The God of Light, that is.
Which raised another question entirely.

‘But there are no demons yet.’

As of now, demons didn’t exist on the continent.
Their first recorded appearance came thirty years hence.
When war had laid waste to every land, and the Empire had reduced its dominion to leaving only two nations standing before total conquest.

Could they have appeared before that? he considered.
No.

Demons’ strength varied starkly by grade.
Yet they shared certain traits.

Boundless malice toward mankind.
A sadism so profound they didn’t even simply kill.

A demon’s emergence thus meant mass slaughter—grotesque, methodical slaughter.
The very worst kind.

‘Even the first recorded Grade 3 Demon proved that.’

A creature with a goat’s head.
The moment it appeared, it cast an enchantment over the city’s inhabitants.
They built an enormous cauldron, filled it with boiling water, then walked into it one by one, becoming the demon’s meal.

Such monsters walking the world in broad daylight without word spreading? Impossible.
Unless every human alive had gone blind and mute.
So Delram concluded: demons didn’t exist yet.

‘And yet……’

The God of Light was speaking to him.
Through Nuak’s memories—specifically, the knowledge of the Magic Detection Device.

—You foolish bastard. You’re wrong.
—Don’t you understand why I arranged for the detector?
—Demons. They’re already loose in the world.
—So stop making excuses and do your damned regressions!

It sounded like an auditory hallucination from the God of Light.
Wasn’t he supposed to be a benevolent deity?

“Fuck.”

Delram cursed aloud and looked forward.
There stood an opening, its dark maw gaping wide.
The Underground Sewers of the Royal Capital itself.

Trickle, trickle, trickle…….

Filthy sewage flowed from within.
Even standing nearby for a brief moment, a sharp ache bloomed behind his eyes.
It was a stench that pushed the limits of what a human could endure.

Yet precisely because of this, it was an exceptionally safe place.
No people meant no chance of being caught doing something suspicious.
The inner sections especially had become a labyrinth through endless expansion and renovation.
Even the sewer maintenance workers occasionally vanished in there, making it ideal for drug dealers, heretics, and the like to hide away.

‘Or perhaps… demons.’

Delram exhaled and checked the detection device.
It flashed insistently, urging him onward.

“Fine! I’m going, I’m going.”

Delram cinched the boots he’d hurriedly purchased and raised the torch.
Then he took his first step.
Into the sewers, where he couldn’t see a hand’s breadth ahead.

Splash, splash!

* * *

Spirit Arts

This is the collective term for techniques that harness Spirit Power.
If it sounds unfamiliar, that’s because it is.
Delram had only named it himself recently.

Delram practiced Spirit Arts every day.
He skipped it only when absolutely unavoidable.

Spirit Arts resembled the Mana Technique in one crucial respect.
The more you practiced, the stronger you became.
So consistency mattered, even when the work grew tedious.

‘But it’s so monotonous.’

The Spirit Arts that Delram primarily employed were fixed in number.
He summoned the Gale Wind, or hurled the Wind Blade.
He treaded empty air, or erased his presence.
Four categories, all told.

Was this the entirety of Spirit Arts?
Of course not.
The things one could do with wind were truly infinite.

Or at least, they should be.
He knew it in theory, but nothing truly novel came to mind easily.
The few ideas he tried simply fell flat.

Yet when he thought about it, there was reason enough.
By now, Delram’s cumulative age had crossed sixty.

Was that why?
Though his body had grown young again, his mind felt somehow rigid.
A simple absence of imagination.
It had been that way, or so he thought—

“Ugh!”

Everything changed once he entered the Underground Sewers.
Someone once said necessity is the mother of all invention, didn’t they?
As the stench of the sewers threatened to tear his nose clean off, ideas for survival came bubbling up like spring water.

“Owl… come on…”
-Hoo-hoo.

The Owl looked at him as if to say how pathetic, then flapped its wings.
A gust of wind blew from somewhere.
The wind settled around Delram’s nose and mouth.
The difference from before was that it didn’t blow once and fade—it continued circulating around his respiratory passages.

Thanks to that, the stench of the sewers faded considerably.
Now he could actually breathe.

“Owl!”
-Hoo-hoo.

The second technique he’d mastered was walking on water.
It was nothing like the old method of simply treading on empty air.
This was a technique of wrapping wind around his boots like a thin membrane.
When he stepped on water with it, he’d rise slightly, and by tapping the surface in quick succession, he could glide forward like a water strider.
Keeping his balance was terribly difficult, though.

‘And it barely costs any Spirit Power either.’

It was especially useful in a place like this, with pools of water everywhere.
The shallow spots came up to his ankles, but the deep ones reached his waist; if he’d had to swim through them, he might have abandoned the whole pursuit, demon or no demon.
His entire body would have reeked terribly.

“Insane… the Royal Capital better not catch a plague from this.”

Delram’s brow furrowed as he continued forward.
It was because of a corpse wedged in the corner of the metal grating.

It was already half-decomposed, presumably swept down from some past flood.
The problem wasn’t that he was seeing it for the first time.

As Delram approached, insects scattered with a soft whisper.
The stubborn ones he blew away with a fierce wind; then he drew out the God of Light’s Token from his pocket and held it forward.
What followed was a simple prayer.

“Well… I don’t really know the liturgy, so… if there’s anything you’re bitter about, just forget it all and go somewhere good, alright?”

The old Delram would never have done such a thing, not in a million years.
He hadn’t believed in religion.
Beyond that, he’d despised it for deceiving the common people.
He believed the world had no gods; that Divine Power was merely one form of supernatural ability using Mana, just like an aura or magic.

Live a good life and pray, and you get Divine Power?
That’s not even a pyramid scheme—how could anyone believe that?

But things were different now.
Gods were real, and one had even granted him Regression.
If that was the case, he could surely watch over a lost soul properly enough.

“Hmm… about this far, I’d say?”

He’d been walking for roughly three hours now.
It felt like a long journey, but in a straight line, he hadn’t covered that much ground.
He’d had to rely entirely on the detection device, with no map to guide him.
He’d lost his way more than once in the maze of passages, and just as often found himself circling around to find another route past dead ends.

Flicker, flicker.

But one thing was certain.
The detection device kept working.
In fact, the intensity of its vibration was growing stronger.

What that meant was simple.
There was a demon wandering somewhere in the Underground Sewers, and the device had picked up the Demonic Magic it had left behind as it passed.
The growing vibration meant Delram was steadily moving toward the source of that Demonic Magic—toward the demon’s lair itself.

‘I suppose I have no choice but to trust it now.’

The God of Light had given him a memory fraught with meaning.
It had been suspicious, but truthfully, he’d harbored doubts all the same.
The detection device could have been defective.
But now he had to accept it.

‘Demons are real.’

As far as Delram knew, there was only one species in the world that wielded Demonic Magic.
Cursed demons and nothing else.

Splash.
“Huh?”

Delram glanced down a side passage.
He’d heard plenty of rats splashing around, their sound drifting down from the passage ceiling.
But this time the weight was different.
He parsed it instantly.

[Weight at least seventy kilos. Adult male.]
[Gait slow. About fifty meters ahead.]

Delram sent a torch spiraling down the passage, propelled by his Spirit Power.
Sure enough, a long shadow fell across the junction ahead.
It was unmistakably the silhouette of a person.

“Hey, what’s that? You there!”

This was certainly no good person.
Human trafficker, drug peddler, or one of the heretical cultists, no doubt.
Especially the last—those were the ones he couldn’t abide.
Scum of humanity who would resort even to cannibalism.

Yet this time was different.
A person in this cursed Underground Sewers?
He might even make an exception for the cult followers.

“Wait, let’s talk! I’ve got some cold beer, even!”

Delram took off running with newfound enthusiasm.
In the Underground Sewers where demons dwell…….

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