The Imperial Supreme Commander Has Returned - Chapter 70

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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 Supreme Commander of the Empire Returns — Episode 70

Evening had fallen, and dusk settled over the land.
Delram moved swiftly through the night, cloaked by cloud-covered darkness.

The night is a time when every sound amplifies.
A fallen leaf crushed underfoot, a brush against a branch, birds startled from their slumber.
All manner of acoustic information announces the intruder’s presence to all who listen.

But not Delram.
He had become one with the forest itself, dissolving into its rhythm as naturally as breath.
Thus even a great beast, a man in full flight through the woods, moved in silence.
Insects continued their chorus; mountain birds cocked their heads in indifference.

This was the true gift of Spirit Power.
Any ordinary assassin who witnessed it would have collapsed in awe.
The pinnacle they had spent lifetimes chasing—it was here.

‘That must be the nest.’

After hours of travel, Delram came to a halt.
Between the trees, one peak among many gleamed with unusual brightness.
Moonlight reflected sharply off its jagged summit.
The highest point for leagues around—perfect terrain for harpies to make their roost.

It lay nearly twenty kilometers from the village.
Little wonder Owl had struggled to locate it.

‘Well? Are they asleep?’
Coo.

Owl answered Delram’s question.
Perhaps the bond between them had deepened further.
Or perhaps it was the effect of feeding him the Demon Heart.
Now he could do more than just Integration—
They could converse across great distances, their minds linked as one.

Of course, there were limits.
Owl’s vocabulary remained restricted to only two sounds.
Coo and Hoot.
Yet even this narrow exchange conveyed meaning, and meaning was enough to communicate.

‘Any awake? If so, hoot once for each one.’
Coo, coo.
‘Two standing watch, then.’
Coo.

In this fashion they communicated.
From what Owl reported, the harpies were not acting alone—there were humans behind them.
Six people were currently sheltering in the Harpy Nest, according to the report.

Learning the truth of their human orchestration struck him as absurd.
Yet it also promised swift resolution—that much was fortune.

‘A mountainside jaunt in the dead of night. Splendid.’

Delram grumbled as he began scaling the slope.
Before he’d climbed half the distance, the first light of dawn was already breaking.

Yet he did not rush.
The nest was now mere paces away—one careless sound and he’d be discovered.
As a monster, the harpies would be far more sensitive than any ordinary knight.

But caution proved worthless. The plan fell apart regardless.
It wasn’t carelessness that gave him away.
The Owl had sent him an urgent message.

—Hoot! Hoot-hoot!
‘What is it? Why?’
—Hoot-hoot-hoot!
‘Are they trying to leave?’
—Hoot!’
‘Damn it. We’re almost there.’

Delram cursed under his breath, directing Mana toward his ears.
Human voices mixed with harpy shrieks.
That cacophony carried on the wind, reaching him clearly.

The sheer volume told him they weren’t concerned with secrecy.
Which meant one thing: they were about to withdraw.
If that was the case, Delram no longer needed to move quietly.

Whoosh!

Delram sprinted the remaining distance like wind itself.
Steep inclines and rock faces barred his path—meaningless obstacles.
He simply leapt over them, moving like a bird in flight.

“Wait—the alarm spell! Someone’s approaching!”
“Damn it, a pursuer! Someone’s been tracking the harpies!”
“Hurry! Move out now!”

They noticed too late.
He was already pushing off the final boulder leading to the peak.

Crack!

The Leg Strength Technique, saturated with Mana, shattered the rock.
His body, made weightless by Spirit Power, exploded upward from the recoil.
In mere moments, Delram soared nearly twenty meters into the air.
The peak of the mountain unfurled before his eyes.

Whoooooosh—
‘. . .’

A commander’s gift began in the eyes.
To perceive the battlefield at a glance.
In that single moment of sight, one had to comprehend how many enemies stood before you, where your allies were positioned, and how the tide of battle was shifting.

Delram, after all, had spent thirty years wielding command.
Experience accumulated over decades did not fail him now.
His eyes swept across the battlefield even as his thoughts decelerated, sharpening into clarity.
In that brief moment suspended in air, every detail was analyzed.

‘These creatures . . . ?’

The first thing he saw was the harpies.
What struck him was peculiar: each harpy was paired with a human.
More precisely, each harpy had its talons locked firmly around a human’s shoulders.

It looked like an attack, but it wasn’t.
The fabric of the shoulder where claws had dug in was different from the rest.
Multiple layers of cloth and leather were clearly sewn beneath.
From this, one could infer a simple truth—

‘So they really do plan to fly away with the harpies?’

Six people in total.
It matched exactly the number Owl had reported.

But four of them had just separated from the harpies.
Probably a combat unit sent to eliminate Delram, the witness.
Judging by their attire: three knights and a mage.

‘How interesting.’

By the time Delram had processed this much,
his body, which had reached the apex of its ascent, began to fall.
His instincts told him he had roughly two seconds of air time left.

But there was no cause for concern.
For Delram, that time was more than enough.

Snap-crack!

In a heartbeat, Delram had drawn his bowstring taut.
Not just one arrow, but two.
In the next instant, steel-forged arrows flew without hesitation.

Whee-sing!

* * *

The knights and mage were flabbergasted.
Despite maintaining such tight security, this place had been discovered.
And who was this man, soaring to such heights?

All eyes—those of the knights and the mage—fell upon him.
He’d leaped up so conspicuously that they couldn’t help but notice.

Naturally, they also saw him draw his bowstring.
The motion of nocking the arrow flowed as smoothly as water.
The whole sequence took barely a second.

Yet the knights were not alarmed.
If anything, a sneer crossed their faces in that brief moment.

Nocking two arrows? Two?
And he meant to fire them while plummeting and actually hit something?
Unless this man was some legendary archer, that was impossible!

“Wait—!”

But the mage, who possessed sharper wit, thought differently.
If he weren’t confident of hitting, he’d have nocked only one arrow!
Without delay, the mage cast a spell.

“Fire Arrow!”

The Third Circle spell erupted without incantation.
Blooming alongside the verbal trigger came arrows wrought from flame itself.
Three Fire Arrows shot forth in unison.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!

The arrows burned a searing crimson, terrible to behold.
What made it worse was that Fire Arrow was an explosive spell.
On impact, they detonated—burns would be the least of the damage.

But speed was the problem.
No matter how fast magic traveled, arrows moved faster still.
These arrows had already left the bowstring long before the spell completed.

Shriek!

Two of the arrows writhed like salmon, cutting through the air with sinuous grace.
Their calculated trajectory led straight to the harpies.
Screams erupted from the creatures just as they cleared the peak.

“Ahhhhh!”
“Help—somebody help!”

But those cries did not belong to the harpies.
Both creatures had their heads pierced clean through—no breath left for screams.
Instead, the wingless humans astride them shrieked as they plummeted over the cliff.

At that same moment, Delram hit the ground.
He rolled through the impact to absorb the shock, then drew a fresh weapon.
Without pause, he wielded it.

Crack!

What emerged from the Subspace was a whip.
The moment Delram flicked his wrist, it lashed out like lightning.

No crude, straight line this.
Despite the subtle curve it traced, it moved far faster than any rigid path.
And it caught the Fire Arrow mid-flight.

Snap!
“What!?”

The Mage’s breath caught audibly.
Delram paid it no mind. His wrist flicked again.
The subtle movement transformed into a non-linear pulse.
The tip of the whip thrashed with violent force.

Boom-boom-boom-crack!

In the next instant, a cascade of detonations filled Delram’s vision.
The Fire Arrow caught by the whip had collided with the others.

The explosions erupted far too close.
A scorching wind grazed his face.
The acrid stench of smoke coiled past his nostrils.

And yet that was all.
The Mage’s desperate gambit, a strike poured full of Mana, had burned no more than the tips of Delram’s hair before it expired.

The hall fell into stunned silence at the unexpected display of skill.
The Mage was the first to break it.

“This is no ordinary opponent, Sir Strent!”
“Don’t be so excitable. He’s just a whip user, nothing more.”
“But the arrows too……!”
“Bows and whips are both cowardly weapons favored by the weak. Besides, that fool is merely Lower Rank.”
“Ah! Is that so?”

The Mage finally relaxed at the knight’s bold proclamation.
Though brief, their exchange had given Delram considerable intelligence.

That orthodox knights disdained bows and whips.
That they’d noticed his rank was Lower.
That the Mage had taken comfort in that assessment.

‘An Intermediate-rank Knight, then.’

The one at the front, this Strent, was definitely Intermediate Rank.
The other one, equally at ease, was likely the same.
The last knight, visibly tense, was plainly Lower Rank.

Click.

Delram opened the Vial as he gathered his thoughts.
As always, its fresh fragrance settled his mind.
Strent, the knight watching him with suspicion, spoke.

“A Ranger with whip and bow? Your skill is impressive.”
“Thanks for the compliment. And I’m sorry I killed your children.”
“…What did you say?”
“The harpies. The offspring you’ve been producing with the mother harpies through your… productive activities? Wait, don’t tell me you were the mother?”
“No!”

Woosh—

An Aura blazed forth from the enraged knight’s blade.
The unusually brilliant Aura was indeed, as expected, of Intermediate Rank.
Seeing it, Delram let out a hollow laugh.

‘Why are there so many Intermediate Rank everywhere?’

Intermediate Rank was far from easy to attain.
Even a talented knight needed at least ten years of rigorous training to barely reach it.
In wars between nations, they were treated as key military assets, and in smaller domains, the captain of the knightly order was usually of Intermediate Rank at best.

Yet lately he kept encountering such warriors far too often.
The one at the slave market was Intermediate, this one too.
Was it just bad luck, or did the kingdom simply harbor that much talent……?
Delram drew Tarbing and spoke with grim resolve.

“I am Ye Baek-seu, a knight of the Fiyor Kingdom and a Ranger of the Great Mountain Range! As fellow knights, let us settle this with an honorable duel, no cheap words between us.”
“An honorable duel? Do you truly believe you can win?”
“Sounds like you’re afraid.”
“A mere Lower Rank!”

Strent, the knight, stepped forward.
The other knights and the Mage retreated, clearing space.
None of them seemed to believe he could possibly lose to Delram.

In truth, it was a natural reaction.
The gulf between Lower Rank and Intermediate Rank was simply that vast.

And so a one-on-one duel materialized in the blink of an eye.
Delram, who had urged them both to hold their tongues, promptly broke that truce.

“Come on then, Harpy’s husband!”
“…I’ll split that mouth of yours!”

* * *

Clang-clang-clang-bang!

The duel was nothing short of brilliant.
Their swordplay wove densely across the Peak, and the blade-flashes that bloomed there clashed against one another, sending sparks spiraling upward.
Their footwork never ceased.
Steps advancing and retreating in rhythm kicked up clouds of dust without pause.

To an ordinary person, it would have been a battle worthy of breathless awe.
But had another Knight witnessed it, they would have said something different.
They would have said it looked exactly like an instructional sparring match.

The fight was that hollow, that tedious.
Abundant sparks meant every strike was being fully blocked; thick dust clouds meant footwork was clumsy and crude.
You could read it in their faces alone.
Delram threw himself at his swordwork with all his might, yet Strent parried every attack with ease, even flinging mockery as he did.

“Your strength is already flagging, I see. You young folks these days are all show—nothing but Mana gathering and neglecting your stamina!”
“….”
“And yet you strutted about with a sword like this? Ha!”

Boom!

Strent bellowed and swept his Two-Handed Sword in a wide arc.
Though the opening was glaring, Delram barely managed to intercept it.
But he couldn’t dissipate the power behind the blow and was driven back, his boots scraping.

Twin grooves, deep as furrows in a field, marked where he had skidded across the stone.
Strent leveled his blade at them, offering mercy.

“Boy, if you’ve any final words, speak them now.”

The reply that came in moments like this was always the same.
The match isn’t over yet, don’t sully my honor….
But what Delram said was entirely different.

“I understand now.”
“Understand what?”
“This… you’re from the Billerun Kingdom? What are soldiers from a neighboring realm doing prowling Fiyor soil?”
“…!”

Strent’s eyes snapped wide open.

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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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