Lord of The Mysterious Realms Chapter 1044

Jenkins gazed at the distant night sky and the mountains veiled in shadow. After explaining his unique adaptability to such enchantments, he turned to the slightly surprised sixteen-year-old girl, took her hand, and placed the chess piece back into her palm.

Dolores's hand was small—noticeably smaller than Hathaway's or Briny's—but soft and pleasant to the touch.

"The Ice Bowman this piece summons is linked to the user's own power," Jenkins explained. "I imagine you saw what happened when I used it. It proves that the summon grows stronger as its master does."

Dolores's face was flushed, but not from the night wind or the touch of his hand. She was embarrassed for having mistakenly believed they were actually related.

Seeing that she couldn't refuse, the young woman finally accepted the chess piece that was rightfully hers. They spoke for a little while longer, and Dolores gradually shifted closer to Jenkins until their arms were nearly touching, a contented smile gracing her lips.

Then, as if remembering something, she suddenly asked:

"Mr. Williams, what brings you out here tonight?"

He gave her a brief account of the situation, and before he could even ask for her help, Dolores was already holding the chess piece out to him again.

"Oh, of course. This way, Dolores won't have to go to Nolan, and I can still use the piece!"

With that thought, Jenkins accepted the piece and instantly returned to his body near Nolan. He had barely sat up from his prone position when the cat lunged, crashing right into his face.

"I know, I know, I'm sorry!" he exclaimed. "I shouldn't have left you two here for an hour!"

He apologized profusely. The unicorn, good-tempered as ever, didn't seem to mind, but the willful, black-and-white Chocolate was not such a forgiving feline.

After finally managing to placate the cat, Jenkins took to the sky once more. From a safe distance at the edge of the inferno, he looked out over the crimson forest burning under the moonlight.

Forest fires weren't unheard of near Nolan, though they were less common at this time of year. If left to its own devices, the blaze would eventually be dealt with by the city authorities or a timely downpour, but now that Jenkins had stumbled upon it, he couldn't simply walk away.

He channeled the spirit within him, letting it flow into the ice-blue chess piece. In an instant, a young female archer clad in shining armor materialized beside him.

She didn't appear on the unicorn's back but stood unsupported in mid-air. Clearly, this archer could fly.

"Can you put out that fire?"

Jenkins inquired. The young archer responded by kneeling on one knee before him in mid-air, as if on an invisible platform. She lowered her head slightly, her right hand—clad in an ice-blue glove as thin as gossamer—resting upon her left shoulder in a gesture of assent.

"Looks like she can."

With a silent confirmation, Jenkins urged the unicorn a little farther from the blaze, then summoned all the spirit he could muster, channeling it into the chess piece.

The young archer remained suspended in the air. In one hand, she raised a longbow intricately crafted from gears, vines, and slivers of bone. In the other, she conjured an arrow of shimmering, ice-blue light.

She angled the bow and arrow seventy-five degrees toward the moon, then drew the string taut with a high-pitched, grating creak.

The next moment, the magical arrow streaked across the sky, tracing a dazzling, pale-blue arc. As gravity pulled it downward over the inferno, the single shaft of light fractured into a thousand falling streams, raining down upon the sea of fire. Jenkins felt a sudden chill in the air.

The instant those thousands of blue arcs plunged into the inferno, a shockwave of cold erupted from the heart of the blaze and spread outward. The dancing flames seemed to freeze in place, then they sputtered and shrank. Within a couple of breaths, every visible flame had been extinguished, leaving behind only blackened husks of trees and a forest floor blanketed in thick frost.

"That might have been a bit of overkill..."

Hunching his shoulders against the biting cold, Jenkins summoned his monocle to scan the ground below, wanting to be sure no embers remained before he left.

He'd barely focused, however, when he spotted a dazzling blue, humanoid aura lying prone in the very center of the burn zone. It didn't look as if it had just appeared, but the light it emitted was fading rapidly.

"Huh? Why didn't I see that before?"

Then again, he reasoned, the glare from the fire had been as intense as the midday sun. Strong as the blue aura was, spotting it amidst that inferno would have been difficult.

"Another aberration?"

Jenkins wondered, keeping the spectral archer by his side as he guided the unicorn down toward the chilly, scorched earth.

The monocle granted Jenkins something akin to dark vision, revealing that the source of the blue aura was indeed a humanoid creature. It wasn't dead, but lay twitching spasmodically on the frozen ground.

Its body was riddled with dozens of small, piercing wounds. If he had to guess, it had been caught in the volley of icy arrows meant to douse the fire.

The figure looked human enough—a boy of about ten, dressed in common clothes. The fabric was shredded from the fire and the icy barrage, leaving most of his back exposed. This allowed Jenkins to see the strange tattoos covering his skin.

Clutching a handful of the unicorn's mane, Jenkins leaned in for a closer look at the markings. It took him a moment to place them, but then it hit him: the style was strikingly similar to the markings for the Exotic Tide he had seen on the Balrog.

Jenkins stroked his chin. After a moment's thought, he told the cat and the unicorn to wait, then promptly returned to Ruen.

By now, Dolores and Julia were already on their way back to the city; they could hardly stay in a country manor filled with dead bodies.

Jenkins handed the chess piece back to Dolores, but he didn't leave right away. Instead, he asked a question.

"Do you happen to have a map of the area around Nolan? The more detailed, the better."

The rest was simple. Once he had the map, Jenkins returned to his body and had the unicorn fly toward the nearest town. After identifying its name and location, he followed the markings on the map, heading for the river ruins.

With the map, he no longer had to worry about getting lost. By the time he spotted the manor across the grasslands in the distance, it was nearly midnight, meaning the seventeenth day of the third month was about to begin.

"I seem to recall learning from the Month's End Whisper that every year on the seventeenth day of the Month of Earth and Flowers, at the threshold between day and night, the Nameless One briefly descends to the earth in human form to inspect the spring planting."

He mulled it over, wondering whether it was a genuine piece of knowledge or just a hallucination from his trance-like state.