Chapter 129: The Strange Flower
The instructor had his doubts about the man, but if what he was saying was true, then maybe they had a way to stay alive longer in this place, and that would give them enough time to figure out how to get out.
He didn’t press further on the question of how the man had arrived days before them. Maybe it was true. Maybe it came down to some strange quirk of this place, after all, what hadn’t been strange since they’d gotten here?
He certainly wasn’t going to lower his guard just because of that. With that in mind, the trio decided to release the man and let him lead the way.
They had noticed that the blizzard seemed stronger at night, if you could even call it that, given that after hours of wandering they had never seen anything that genuinely resembled day or night. There was enough light to make the environment visible, but it wasn’t sunlight. It was something else that nobody could quite name.
None of them spoke. Everything that needed to be said had already been said. So in silence, carefully avoiding any unnecessary movements that might attract those strange creatures, the group moved through the city.
The man walked ahead. The three followed behind, a precaution the instructor had insisted on, in case this turned out to be a trap.
He had initially considered going alone, but then thought better of it when he remembered the two students he had with him.
’If I leave them alone, they’ll end up killing each other,’
That was ultimately why he had brought them along.
Considering how irritating Percival could be and just how little patience Lirien had whenever he was involved, it wasn’t exactly an unrealistic concern.
’Haah... I really don’t get paid enough for this,’ he thought, considering everything that had happened since arriving in this place.
Once they returned, he fully expected to receive a hefty bonus. There was absolutely no way he was burning brain cells managing these two for nothing.
’I wonder how the other three are doing,’
His thoughts drifted to the three remaining students who had been separated from them.
They were capable, he knew that. But the problem was that this place was lethal even for him. Let alone a group students who had barely begun to experience the dangers of the world.
For a long time they moved through the silent streets.
The landscape barely changed.
Buildings coated in that strange ice, snow falling without pause, and a silence that felt almost unreal.
Until...
A forest appeared ahead of them.
Enormous trees rose toward the sky, tall enough to rival the skyscrapers of the city around them. It was as though, at the very heart of this place, an ancient forest had taken root, one that belonged to an entirely different world.
The instructor’s brow furrowed slightly.
Those trees were strange.
Not in their shape, that, at least, still looked like trees.
It was their presence.
For some reason they gave him the feeling of being... dead. And yet he could clearly see branches covered in leaves, bark intact, even a faint trace of vitality emanating from within them.
A contradiction he couldn’t explain.
They kept following the man without asking questions, and a few minutes later...
Something changed.
The relentless blizzard began to lose intensity. The wind weakened. The snow thinned. Even that unsettling ice that coated everything seemed to stop at the edge of the forest, as if some invisible force was keeping it at bay.
The air itself was different. Calmer. Warmer.
Without realizing it, the instructor felt his shoulders relax.
’Maybe... we’ve actually found somewhere we can stay.’
It was a thought he didn’t dare say out loud.
After everything this place had put them through, he had already learned that dropping his guard was the fastest way to end up dead.
When they passed through the last of the trees, a wide clearing opened up before them, vast, easily several dozen meters across, perhaps close to a hundred. An unexpectedly peaceful place.
Flowers of every shape and color bloomed throughout the clearing, each one as unusual as it was beautiful.
For a moment it almost felt impossible that they were still in the same dimension.
But looking more carefully, the instructor noticed something.
Roots.
Some thick, some thin and twisted, dozens of them emerged from the soil, connecting every single flower like veins running through some enormous living organism. Following them with his eyes, he realized they all converged on the same point.
The center of the clearing.
Hm?
He spotted it immediately, a massive structure, not a building or anything man-made, but a flower. A strange, enormous flower unlike anything he had ever seen, much like most of the flora in this place.
It stood at least fifty meters tall. A towering stem wrapped in small and large vines that coiled around it all the way up, their ends hanging at various heights, some low, some reaching high, each terminating in large red fruits roughly the size of an adult’s head.
’What kind of plant is this?’ he thought, certain he’d never seen anything like it.
He had seen plenty of bizarre things in his time, beasts and plants alike, but this was in a category of its own, not just for its size but for something about its appearance that he couldn’t quite pin down. At the very top of the stem, there seemed to be a large structure resembling an open rose, though he couldn’t be sure from this angle.
He wondered if this was what kept the snow away and the air warm in this part of the forest.
He studied it carefully.
No sense of danger reached him.
But that very absence of hostility was what made him more suspicious, not less. In a place like this, nothing could be this simple.
While he stood there watching, the man walked calmly toward the flower, reached up, and pulled one of the fruits free.
"This, gentlemen, is my little paradise, or well, the one I stumbled into when I ended up here," he said, taking a bite without any hesitation.
Seeing him make the first move without anything happening, the three of them visibly relaxed. Percival, who had been starving for what felt like days, immediately lunged toward one of the lower fruits, only to be caught by the instructor’s hand before he could reach it.
"Hey! Let me go, damn it!" Percival shouted, struggling to break free.
"Can’t you see how much food we’ve got right in front of us? We can finally eat!"
At that point, he didn’t even bother watching his language anymore.
He just wanted to eat and get out of this place as fast as possible.
Besides, what was this pathetic academy instructor going to do to him out here?
The instructor genuinely wanted to throttle the little brat in front of him, but he reined in his irritation and said, calmly:
"Don’t be hasty. We don’t know what those fruits are yet."
Percival kept squirming.
"If you don’t calm down right now, I will tie you upside down to one of these trees," the instructor said, his voice dropping to something quieter and considerably more threatening.
Percival went still. He looked up, ready to tell him to go ahead and try, then caught the expression on the instructor’s face and immediately decided against it.
Lirien, standing just behind them, did her best to hide a smirk.
The instructor shook his head and turned his attention back to the clearing, and specifically to the man who had brought them here.
"So," he said. "What exactly is this place?"
